The Muslim mentality of defensiveness and reactiveness that is observable in India, where Muslims suffer at the hands of a Hindu-dominated society, is paradoxically the mentality that is found all over the Muslim world, even where Muslims are an overwhelming majority. For this reason, the Muslim experience in India has something to tell us about broader realities.

Muslim religious life in India has been characterized by two tendencies, which are preserved in a delicate balance by the constant tension between them. On the one hand, at the level of ritual, ceremony and a broad range of other quotidian practices, there is a great deal of retention of local features that are quite continuous with many aspects of Hindu life and cultural practice. On the other, there is the scriptural, transcendental and normative element characterized by a deferential gaze that goes beyond the local toward the Arab lands in which classical doctrine originated. The tense balance created by this double movement--of form and root--has persisted in India through the centuries.

In a situation where Muslims' material life as well as self-respect is increasingly threatened by alarming majoritarian tendencies--especially since the accession to power of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party--the absolutist, doctrinal side of the double movement holds out a promise of dignity and autonomy in the name of Islam, especially among the young. The attractions are utterly illusory, of course; they are manifestly undemocratic, they are deeply reactionary on issues of gender and they are phobic in the extreme toward modernity, even a homegrown and non-Western path to modernity. They are "reactionary" in every sense of the term, even when considered as a reaction to feelings of helplessness and defeat, and the seeming lack of viable alternatives to cope with these feelings. Just to give an example: One response to the combination of poverty, lack of career opportunity and the loss of their language, Urdu (which was eliminated as a language of instruction from schools because the national leaders were not able to resist the pressure from the Hindu nationalist elements in their own midst to do this) has been the rise of the phenomenon of the madrassahs, which are religious schools peppered all over the country but especially in north India, very often financed by Saudi Arabian largesse. They offer free education in Urdu and a place for boys from poverty-stricken families to live without cost while they train in strict scriptural doctrine, providing a recruitment ground for future careers in fundamentalist movements. All of it predictably leads to more backlash from Hindu ideologues and in turn to more defensiveness, surfacing in more aggressive reactions among the Muslims.

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