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.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sometimes we would go for tea and the leisurely conversation would range over every conceivable topic. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Muslims all over the world called for Rushdie’s death.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But there was something there: a divide no less intractable for being bafflingly complex.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
And the sense that even now — after all this time — we lack the words, the language, that can help us understand our predicament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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