We’re all Mumbaians now?

In the late-1980s I lived in Malaysia, one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world. I lived alone in a slum of Penang, an island city, surrounded for the most part by young Malays fresh from the kampung villages.

It was a fantastic time: the young men were generous and funny and curious about my reasons for living in such a place. (Actually, they asked a lot of the same questions that my parents were asking.)

On the corner was a news stand that also sold used paperback novels. I would drop by every couple of days to pick up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and to see if an interesting book had turned up.

There, too, the men were open-minded, curious, complexly ironic about their Muslim faith, their moderately Islamist government, and their lives. They would chide me humorously for being clean-shaven, insisting that I would never look like a man until I had a full beard.

Sometimes we would go for tea and the leisurely conversation would range over every conceivable topic.

For the most part, they had been educated in schools established by the old British colonial administration, which meant that I often felt absurdly ignorant. They could quote Shakespeare and Tennyson as fluently as they could quote the Koran.

Then one day a scandal erupted over Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” A fatwa was issued by the top cleric in Iran condemning the book as blasphemous.

Muslims all over the world called for Rushdie’s death.

When I mentioned Rushdie at the news stand, my friends were matter-of-fact about it: Rushdie deserved to die and the person who murdered him would be doing God’s work.

I pushed back, arguing that surely a man shouldn’t be killed for writing a story. They weren’t bothered by my opinion, simply uninterested. Rushdie, they believed, was a dead man.

In the years since — especially post-9/11 — I have often remembered that moment, my bafflement, my sense that I had discovered a rift that had been obscured.

I have never been comfortable with the idea of a “war on terror.” And the conservative argument that the West is fighting a global war against “Islamic fascism” strikes me as absurd.

The men on that street corner in Penang weren’t fascists. They had no desire to destroy the West. They didn’t hate freedom. And they weren’t ignorant.

But there was something there: a divide no less intractable for being bafflingly complex.

Watching the horrible news from Mumbai the last couple of days, I felt it again, the sense that we’ve stumbled into a very dangerous situation.

And the sense that even now — after all this time — we lack the words, the language, that can help us understand our predicament.