India’s 1947 secularist founding contrasts with its communalist present.

Evidence

This strategy, however, flew in the face of reality and was doomed to fail. Had the Orientalists actually bothered to study the facts on the ground, they would have concluded, as Walter Laqueur did in 1956, that what “is decisive is that Islam has gradually ceased to be a serious competitor of Communism in the struggle for the souls of the present and potential elites in the countries of the Middle East.” If that was true of communism, it was even more so of nationalism. Shockingly, Arabs, like other people, were capable of separating religion in their private lives from politics. This is, of course, a shock only to those mired in Orientalist traditions, and in the following chapter we will see that this separation of politics and religion has a long history in the ironically misnamed “Muslim world.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 229 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Modern India’s republic was founded on equal plural belonging; Modi’s Gujarat violence foreshadowed erasing India’s secularist commitment.; Arabs in the 1950s separated private religion from public politics — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 229

Related

• Arabs in the 1950s separated private religion from public politics (similarity 0.89)
• India’s 1947 secularist founding principle aimed to unify its religious communities (similarity 0.82)
• Modi’s Gujarat violence foreshadowed erasing India’s secularist commitment. (similarity 0.82)
• India’s 1947 founding principle was integrating its vast religions (similarity 0.81)
• Islam has practiced de facto separation of religion and politics since the eighth century (similarity 0.80)
• Political Islam’s rise stems from modern politics, not seventh-century Islam (similarity 0.79)
• Political Islam is a contemporary construct, not a natural outgrowth of Muslim societies. (similarity 0.79)
• Postwar Muslim-majority nations embraced secular nationalism, contra Orientalist claims (similarity 0.78)
• Political Islam parallels other modern fundamentalisms rather than stemming from Islam’s essence (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalists reframed Islam as a political system rather than a religion. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Arabs in the 1950s separated private religion from public politics #corroborates (0.35) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 229