Is one word: awareness. In bold.

Barely six years, and the publishing world has grown richer by millions of dollars. A whole chunk of the riches flowing in is courtesy the enormous amount of literature dedicated to examining Islam/Islamic terrorism/whatchamacallit, which is being churned out almost everyday (okay, I’m exaggerating).

I know this sounds perverse but it is true: America’s first deadly brush with Islam has proved good because it can no longer afford to delude itself that Islam has a problem wherever it goes, and that problems faced by countries like India are real.

But unlike India, the US went on an Islam-deciphering-spree despite the current excuse for a President mouthing politically correct rhetoric. Amazing efforts like this (video link)–and others–is what is called for to unmask the core ideology of Islam. Something needs to be said for this sorry state: despite being one of the biggest and longest victims of Islamic terrorism, India has comparitively produced very few scholarly literature examining Islam. But it has made up for the quantitative loss by publishing some truly seminal works of first-rate scholarship by scholars like Ram Swarup, and Sita Ram Goel. Not many have heard of them much less read them. More on this later.

The video (link above) is titled What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad. Which is very significant because it shows Americans are zealous about the security of their nation. And public discourse there is not–yet–as polluted as it is in India.

Contrast that to the stifling atmosphere in India: a blanket, unwritten fatwa has been imposed against anybody examining Islam: an early, definitive evidence is a Shahbuddin getting the Prime Minister to ban Satanic Verses. One of the prominent, unofficial enforcers of this fatwa happens to be the secular media and an education system where brual Islamic rulers are hailed as forerunners of modern secularism. That should explain why the voices of Sita Ram Goel are unheard and obscure, and why even a prominent journalist and writer like Arun Shourie is abused as “communal.”

Which is why I said the crucial difference is awareness.

We fear the unknown. So we hide behind excuses for example, that Jihad is against the spirit of Islam because the reality of Jihad is pretty brutal. Is it mere coincidence that Jihad is also (historically) a battlecry?

We need to step out of the notion that a need to understand an imperial ideology like Islam does not automatically mean that we are abusing, or hurting the sentiments of Muslims. Why is it so hard for us to recall that a Christian Europe was more or less this way until successive generations rendered it powerless using mainly intellect as the weapon?

Cross-posted in Desicritics and INI Signal.