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Staff. "Old Anarkali Food Street." World for Travel. World for Travel, 2012. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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Staff. "Old Anarkali Food Street." World for Travel. World for Travel, 2012. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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This is an image of Old Anarkali Food Street in Lahore, Pakistan which serves as the setting for the narrator, Changez, and American man's tea and the majority of their out-of-story-telling interaction.

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This image of the first of the two twin towers collapsing during the terrorist attack on 9/11 was featured in an article about a 9/11 survivor. 9/11 is a significant event that occurs during the novel because it causes significant change in the Muslim and Pakistani narrator's life.

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@xxdr_zombiexx. "Islamophobia Explodes in Virginia County." Daily Kos. N.p., 18 Dec. 2015. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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@xxdr_zombiexx. "Islamophobia Explodes in Virginia County." Daily Kos. N.p., 18 Dec. 2015. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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This is a political cartoon that I found on a blogging site criticizing the change in American attitudes towards Muslims and people of Middle-Eastern descent after 9/11, a prevalent topic throughout "A Reluctant Fundamentalist"

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Kasuri, Mian Khurshid Mahmud. "Pak-India Relations: Security Dynamics and Future Scenario." Institue of Policy Studies. Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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Kasuri, Mian Khurshid Mahmud. "Pak-India Relations: Security Dynamics and Future Scenario." Institue of Policy Studies. Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

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This article presents information about foreign relations between Pakistan and India. It goes in depth on the relationship between the two nations prior to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and explains how Pakistan's allegiance with the United States post-attack impacted their relations and what has occurred moving onward including lots of focus of the Mumbai attacks. This article helps me understand the novella "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because part of what the main character and narrator of the story, Changez, struggles with post 9/11 is whether or not he should leave his corporate job in New York and return to Lahore, Pakistan where his family lives due to rising tensions between Pakistan and India.

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Seminar deliberations throwing light on ties between the arch rivals in post Mumbai attacks scenario
Policy Perspectives , Volume6 , Number1, January - June 2009
The relations between Pakistan and India have rarely been smooth throughout their history. But the situation after November 26 incidents in Mumbai has created unprecedented tension and a quite visible war hysteria.

Should it be taken as an inevitable consequence of the incident, which left 172 dead and kept the Indian agencies engaged for around three days, or there could have been a different approach to deal with the situation? Or putting it differently, did the Mumbai incident offer an opportunity to spur on Pak-India relations? And if the answer is in affirmative, does this opportunity still exist or has it been lost?

These questions are particularly important in the backdrop of a number of Confidence Building Measures taken between the two countries during the past few years. These measures, one may recall, included scores of high level meetings, Parliamentarians' visits, rounds of dialogues, exchange of friendly gestures, people-to-people contacts, sports events, media conferences and a lot of activities by non-government organisations (NGOs) along with a number of track II initiatives.

While there may be two opinions about any significant movement in many areas, the subjects which were being discussed in these interactions were not confined to one or two problems but included as many issues as one could think of. To name a few besides Kashmir, which is certainly a core issue, these included nuclear confidence building measures, conventional confidence building measures, Sir Creek, water issue including Baglihar dam, Wullar barrage and other similar projects, issues related to trade and commerce, smuggling and construction near the borders, road transport and highways, communication links between maritime security agencies, import and transport of gas, cultural exchanges, drug trafficking, intelligence sharing, terrorism and even joint mechanism to deal with the terrorism.

Many believe that these confidence building measures could be strengthened by a responsible behaviour at this extraordinary testing moment as it is a fact that the people facing the similar agonies and troubles naturally get closer to one another especially when they share this realisation that they are facing a similar threat.

It is probably why the initial reactions of the Pakistani people on Mumbai events were of shock, grief and sympathy. These feelings, expressed by the general public and the officials of Pakistan, were quite natural as on the one hand thousands of innocent people of their own country have lost their lives in similar incidents in recent years and on the other hand, many more have been indirectly affected.

In view of the fact that incidents of violence have seeped down from the far flung areas of the country to the settled areas and even to the capital, it would not be an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of people are witness to such heinous events whereas millions have seen the blood running in the streets on television.

The affected individuals of Mumbai incidents, especially those who lost their lives on railway station and hospitals, were the same ordinary people as they are and if the hostages in Taj and Oberoi Hotels were elites, Marriot Hotel incident in Islamabad a month ago make them empathise with the victims in Mumbai. Could there be a better opportunity than this for building confidence and bringing the two peoples closer? Nevertheless, these feelings remained alive only for a few hours as the reaction from Indian government and media demonstrated the tendency of losing this opportunity before it even opened up its wings.

This scenario leads to another question: did this opening go waste because of an impulsive reaction? Or was it a prearranged response?

As the aftermath of the incidents is unfolding its angles, it appears to most of the people that this reaction was not impulsive; it was rather a part of some well thought scheme and unfortunately the impression that the opportunity is slipping out of hand is getting stronger with every passing moment.

Many therefore argue that this has only proved the fragility of the whole process of CBMs and has once again exposed the lack of genuineness on the part of one or the other or both to move for a sustainable solution to the disputes and issues being confronted between the two countries, most importantly the issue of Kashmir.

It is in this context that the three speakers, with their vast experience, insightful exposure and immense expertise in Pak-India Relations, will discuss the dynamics of almost a decade long CBMs and Composite Dialogue, current Indian mindset and psyche towards peaceful coexistence, and the role and approach of external powers in the tensions arising as a result of Mumbai incidents. They will also analyze the Indian position, the role of media in difficult times, Pakistan's response towards Indian stance and the importance of conflict resolution especially in the presence of nuclear arsenals.

Within the framework of what can be seen as the overall structure of the prevailing Pakistan-India relationship, there are three very important levels at which this relationship exists today i.e. bilateral, regional and global. Bilateral aspect of this relationship is the defining framework of the other two levels.

For instance, as we see right now in terms of bilateral conflict, the other two dimensions also get impacted upon. Of course, the bilateral relationship between Pakistan and India is basically reflected presently or was reflected in the ongoing dialogue and peace process. And what was the hallmark of this dialogue and peace process? Starting from January 2004 joint statement made by Vajpayee and Musharraf, one of the hallmarks of this process has been the total lack of substantive movement on any of the issues of conflict that exist between Pakistan and India.

In fact there has been a basic difference in the approach of the two countries right from the start. India basically wants conflict management and Pakistan has always been seeking conflict resolution and, therefore, the approach of the two countries to dialogue has been very different. Regarding Kashmir, of course, there has been no meeting point. The two countries have been skating around the issue and much has been focused on the measures like bus service and trade and so on. My own view on CBMs is that CBMs are becoming an end in themselves, without pushing the two countries to a final resolution of the conflict.

On Siachin also, where a blueprint of an agreement is existing since the late 1980s, there is no movement at all and India has now adopted an indirect approach to finalize the occupation of the glacier. This is through the so-called Siachin Tourism.

Sir Creek also remains unresolved. As to the water issues also, India is using delaying tactics and Pakistan is seeking international arbitration. An international arbitration, of course, has been provided by the Indus Water Treaty. But there has been no commitment to any substantive movement on issues of conflict.

Looking back to pre-Mumbai, one sees that there existed a relationship that was good atmospheric but nothing substantive, with little bit of progress on the peripheral issues.

Only one exception existed [bilateral annual exchange of lists of nuclear installations] that will be taken up later. So it is not a surprise that when Mumbai happened, everything fell apart because there was nothing substantive.

What marred this relationship was the unilateral concessionary dis-pensation on the Pakistani side which began and included the January 2004 bilateral statement issued by Musharraf and Vajpayee. In this statement, Pakistan basically admitted that it was running so-called terrorist camps and would not allow them to be run in the future.

This was unnecessary; it was the unilateral concessions on the part of Pakistan and therefore Indian demands that are now coming so strongly after Mumbai are because of the leverage provided by Pakistan government. They have given this impression to the Indians that they are prepared to make unilateral concessions on a number of very crucial issues. The present government has gone even further in the unilateralist concessionary mode where land trade route has been acceded. Pakistan's traditional position was always that unless there is some movement towards conflict resolution, we will not make further concessions on trade.

President Zardari declared that India was never a threat. One can not be sure whether he consulted anybody in the institutions that are supposed to give input into decision making. It seems that history is not his strong point because one would wonder what the three wars were fought for had India never been a threat but a loving country in the neighborhood.He also referred to LoC as more or less a border in some of his statements. So a tradition in the Pakistani ruling elite of rewriting history is being capitalized by the present government as well in the case of the Pak-India relationship.

The issue that has now come to the fore is "terrorism". Despite the SAARC and bilateral memoranda on this issue, India has tended to focus continuously on targeting religious groups within Pakistan as well as Pakistan's intelligence agencies especially the ISI. Pakistan, on the other hand, both in the previous government and in the present one, has maintained the strange silence despite the growing Indian involvement in Baluchistan and in FATA. Now, the Indian Anti Terrorist Cell itself has identified rogue elements within Indian army, who have been linked to the Samjhauta Express act of terrorism, where Pakistanis are killed as well as other terrorist attacks where Muslims were target within India itself. Now, despite this clear cut evidence that has come from the Indian side, Pakistan government has not seemed it fit to use either diplomatically or in any other way to bring the perpetrators of Samjhauta Express act of terror to justice.

The question mark that hangs over the intent of Pakistani government is now even more important. In the face of the Mumbai saga we are wondering why Pakistani state is not demanding the handing over of Colonel Purohit and others that have identified by Indians themselves as being involved in the acts of terror. Indians are making the similar demands in connection with Mumbai on evidence that has not yet been substantiated.

Mumbai showed how quickly mere atmospherics can be destroyed and how, once again, India is using the incident to target Pakistan diplomatically while keeping its military options open also. Unfortunately Pakistani government has no clear-cut policy which was also reflected in the bungling approach from the first bizarre declaration of sending the DG ISI to India. It was forgotten that Director General ISI would not have diplomatic cover and could easily have been arrested by the Indian authorities becoming the source of a major embarrassment.

From that act to all sort of other statements that have been coming and finally the clumsy handling of the issue and eventual sacking of Lt. Gen (r) Mahmood Ali Durrani, the National Secretary Advisor; there appears a lack of coherent policy which has allowed India to take advantage of this weakness within the Pakistani government.

One thing is clear that India learnt its lesson in 2001-02 standoff. India this time was not going to mobilize the bulk of its conventional forces in what was supposed to be a conventional war threat.India has realized that it is not feasible because neither side can afford an all out conventional war. So what has India done?There is a lurking suspicion that there is more to the Mumbai acts of terror than meets the eye. There are some unanswered questions. One is of course, this whole issue of the killing of Hemant Karkare, Chief of Anti Terrorism Squad in Mumbai incident. Everybody knows that he had exposed the rogue Hindu extremist elements within the Indians military.

The second question mark is, the excessive evidence that India is pointing towards Pakistan including some small daily use items such as Pakistani tooth pastes - so on and so forth. There is a lot of nonsense in that sort of excessive evidence. If those involved are so well trained that they can engage the Indian security establishment for hours and days and hold them hostage, they are certainly not going to be as clumsy as to leave this trail of rather ridiculous and amateurish evidence in the little rubber boat that they allegedly came on.

As to the identity of Ajmal Kasab, Pakistani government has handled it very badly to begin with. But where this Mr. Kasab arrives from?Was he actually taken from the prison of Nepal or did be actually come by boat and what exactly is his linkage to the Indian agencies if any? How come he is the only one whose picture is clearly taken on CCTV and the only one who is alive or capitalized or whatever you put to it? And now it is said that the lady who identified the other perpetrators has disappeared. So there are a lot of question marks.

India is trying to create a case against people from Pakistan and now insists that they are linked to agencies in Pakistan. The first thing India did was to handover this whole issue to the electronic media. The whole Mumbai saga has been conducted through the media, not through government to government channels. The Indian media took the lead, defined the parameters of the issue, and went on a attacking Pakistan.

The Pakistani media responded, with restraint. But certainly the tone became much more belligerent as the Indian accusations became wilder and more easily flung through the media channels and the impression was given as if India was about to conduct what referred to as surgical strikes. As we know India has Cold Start Doctrine, which is very interesting, having been evolved specifically to counter the sort of what India saw as stalemate because of the stability of the nuclear deterrence. How to get round it? You cannot fight a conventional war because it may cause nuclear war and you cannot have a limited war because you cannot keep the war limited. No one knows how the other side will respond. So they evolved cold start strategy which of course means that a country is capable of deployment within enemy territory, to counter the slow mobilization of the land forces. The assumption was that India would have reached its objectives very quickly and retreat before Pakistan could respond. In the mean time, all the international community would step in, but the anticipation was that when the international community would step in, in any case, it will basically be to stop Pakistani response.

The media built up this whole hype that India was immediately going to strike. My own view is that India was not going to strike, India was going to use all the diplomatic tools available first to discredit Pakistan and this is the stage it has now arrived at. This dossier was also revealed to media. If you have serious, sensitive information, you do not give it to the media. One of the Indian newspapers got hold of it, put it on its website then our media picked it up. So obviously, there is more of a political intent, diplomatic and propaganda game playing in the dossier than really any hard evidence as such. The prime minister of Pakistan has now also stated the same about the dossier, finally.

It seems that the Indian government is going to play the diplomatic game to the bitter end to see what it can squeeze out of Pakistan depending on the pressure Pakistan will come under. Indians have now appealed even to Saudis to put pressure on Pakistan. Americans, of course, do not need much. They are ready to put pressure on Pakistan in any case and they are doing so. British are playing bizarre game, saying Pakistan state is not involved but coming down heavy on Pakistan, demanding to saying do what Indians want.

My own guess is that at the end of the day, if India is not able to get that what it wants through this diplomatic game it may still use cold startoption. I don't think military option is written off; it still exists, and that is why the media continues to be in the forefront. In the India-Pakistan relationship the media has played very important role. We have had SAFMA playing the peacemaker role; we have now delegations of track two people and the media trying to go to India to express sympathy. The media is being used very cleverly by the Indians.

In Pakistan the media has been used effectively to some extent, but at the same time the Pakistani media is not, now going to play any government game as the Indian media is prepared to do. That is the big difference in the media response and counter response. Indian media by and large has toed the Indian government line, what India wanted to do that is to build up the sight to warn the world that Pakistan is not doing anything and, hence, India has no option but to use military card. And Pakistani media has asked more questions. Pakistani media has even given the Indians' point of view. Many Indian hawks have been interviewed on Pakistan television channels. The equivalent has not been there on the Indian televisions.

There is another difference between Pakistani and Indian approach when it comes to media. In India, it is impossible to catch any of the Pakistani channels. Pakistan has not so far closed down any of the Indian channel. India has just ousted the Pakistani theatre groups from India although these are the groups who have been propagating peace with India, so it is rather ironic. Pakistan has not put any breaks on Indian films or Indian music. So, again, unfortunately Pakistan is going into more unilateral accommodations and concessions. It is going to be very costly to Pakistan.

The way to deal with Mumbai is not in a panic and guilt ridden fashion. Pakistan has nothing to be guilty about. If there is a person who is involved in Mumbai who happens to be Pakistani then he should be dealt with according to the law. But, terrorists have no particular nationality. After all, the hijackers of 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian government was not drawn and the act was not labeled as state terrorism.

Secondly, the Indian government still has not given anything substantive. If and when it does, the onus is on the Pakistani state to demand that it be given access to the information so that it is able to verify the information and the so called evidence for itself. There is no way that the Pakistani government can accept what India said as the gospel truth. Pakistani agencies and investigators need to be involved in the investigation to see whether India is offering as evidence is really evidence or it is concocted information.

At the regional and global level, the whole issue of terrorism and the relationship with India is very important. India is very closely involved in Afghanistan including in a military fashion; and, therefore, the India factor has become important for Pakistan now for the first time on its western border also.

Another factor that is impinging on Pakistan security is the India-US relationship which has a very strong military and defense component. There is no need to go into details, but there is, of course, missile defense cooperation and the nuclear deal which will allow India to produce a lot of weapons. Americans say that they have de-linked their relationship with India from that of Pakistan But for Pakistan, there is no de-linkage because what the US does with India in terms of weapon system and strategic cooperation has a direct bearing on Pakistan security. We, the Pakistanis, also know that Americans want to bring Indian troops into Afghanistan. So the India-US relationship directly impinges now and creates an added factor for Pakistani security consideration.

In 2006 the Indian Air Chief at that time was on a visit to Washington. He declared that they also have now decided to adopt a pre-emptive doctrine and they have a right to hot pursuit in other countries' territories. If one sees all these dynamics of the Indo-US relationship with the large presence of extra regional forces in the Indian Ocean as well as in Afghanistan and Central Asia, one can understand why we are concerned about the India-US relationship and India's intervention into Afghanistan.

India is seeking a global power status and a permanent seat in the Security Council. But, unfortunately, India until puts its own house and its neighborhood in order, it is not going to be accepted as global power and permanent member of the UNSC. Certainly that also is something that Pakistan has to be wary about and, therefore, become more active in its policies in this connection.

In terms of future scenarios, it is becoming clear that there is going to be low intensity conflict in the region. The region is going to be destabilized as long as Afghanistan is not resolved. As long as the US/NATO military presence remains in Afghanistan, there is going to be instability in this region. It should be remembered that this is the region where US has ambitions to redraw boarders, where energy politics is being played out, where a resurgent Russia is going to seek recovery of its lost influence, and where the US wants to build up India as a core state and as a regional partner because this is the area where the US also wants containment of China.

So unless Pakistan moves towards strengthening its civil society and national polity it will provide a temping vacuum to power games by external players. As far as Pakistan-India relationship is concerned, until there is movement towards visible conflict resolution, any incident, will push everything back to square one. Today it is Mumbai; tomorrow it would be something else.

Only one CBM has not been impacted upon in the crises that both countries have sustained, which is the exchange of the nuclear installations' lists at the end of every year.It also shows that India is aware that the dynamics have changed and that there is a now nuclear order in South Asia. But whereas Pakistan wants to play a more conscious game, India is creating more space in this nuclear scenario for brinkmanship and adventurism. But India also knows that at the end of the day that brinkmanship, if it is not contained, can be an extremely costly way of achieving all the aims and, in fact, in the nuclear situation no one is going to achieve anything.

At the back of India's mind there is this realization and that is why the list was exchanged this December also. But India is testing the waters to see how far it can gat away with it. That, at the end of the day, defines India's present policy after the Mumbai incident. Unfortunately countries like the US are also involved in this very dangerous game that India is playing.

It is rather surprising when people say let us sit across the table and talk about our problems. One can not be sure whether states have ever done that, simply out of the goodness of heart, sitting on the table and resolving anything. Other tactics have to be used, indeed, and we also did a couple of conventional things.

In 1997, the two governments looked ready for at least working out a framework for establishing peace. And while talking about conflict resolution between Pakistan and India, it may be useful to first of all analyze the theoretical framework of peace process and how it was evolved.

The "authors" of peace included the then foreign secretaries of the two countries, and the process was nudged by the two prime Ministers, Gujral on Indian side and Nawaz Sharif on Pakistani side. The PMs said to the two secretaries to work out a framework. Incidentally, we the Pakistanis keep forgetting about certain aspects of "Gujral doctrine" that we neither understood nor worked upon.

It is understandable that over the period of time, a process may reach a point where it can be said that we are ready to talk, but how do we do it and what is the framework? And the first problem, it is argued, is what to do with Kashmir. Whenever we say it's the core problem, one always wonders how to get to the core without going through the crust. I think this insistence of Pakistan that we must resolve Kashmir first then something will happen was not a very strong point. The environment has to be improved before we can get the grips with these most difficult problems.

But even then, was it possible for the two sides to say we will now put it on the ice, talk about that later on, and first of all we have to do certain other things? So that is where the ingenuity of the people must have come into play and they said we will work at 8 difficult tracks and Kashmir, of course the most important point, would be handled at the foreign secretaries level. We could be happy that Kashmir was given due importance, but it is a fact that foreign secretaries do not meet very often, may be once in 2 years and that will be the slowest track in any case. We have nothing much to talk on Kashmir except the Pakistani point. However, both the sides had something at least to sell at home.

But essentially, the idea to try to improve the environment was not that bad as it could be possible that once the two sides are ready, may be the environment would be so favorable that something could be done about Kashmir, gradually.

For the problems of such nature, the solutions only evolve and blueprints are very difficult to be worked out.

Making a plan is only 10%. The remaining 90 % comprises how is it implemented, adjusted and managed and most importantly how to take care of the distractions. There are people, basically military establishment but also in civil establishments, who would suspect, and if they feel that the process will benefit the other side more, they will cut it.

So the biggest challenge is that how the political leadership has to take care of them.

While we have not done very well, but one can still go through a certain chronology to explain what actually happened. The process was called "composite dialogue", which does not seem to be the appropriate name. The composite would have meant that the slowest and the fastest tracks would be moving with the same speed. In the military terms, or from first of all the civilian terms, it could actually be called a multi tracked and multi speed process, in which things will move at their own speed. The easier problem can be resolved quicker, and for the difficult problems, you will have to wait till you have enough confidence. Although, no military man was involved, but had there been one, he would have approved the concept.

The idea was good and the sub-continent is so rich in ideas, although so poor in implementation. The first thing that happened was that immediately after this signing of the framework for Composite Dialogue in 1997 some media started saying that for the first time in 50 years, we have made the Indians agree that they are going to talk about Kashmir. The Indians responded that we are not going to talk about it. However this wasn't going to be an event that would have prevented the two sides from proceeding further. The next year, in 1998, after the nuclear tests, the two sides felt that there was more urgency now to go on this and implement or operationalize the so-called composite dialogue.

Soon after that, Vajpayee visited Lahore (February 1999), and the thinking must have been that what must be done urgently so that the nuclear accidents can be prevented. Both the sides had resolved to resume or to take up the composite dialogue, the process that was not going very far because of Kargil, and later on the military coup in Pakistan in 1999.

After that, the same person Musharraf who was considered to have spoiled the process because of Kargil and coup was at the center stage in Pakistan. Agra summit also failed for whatever number of reasons - not enough preparation by us or not having understood that how to pursue this process further. For example, if the emphasis from Pakistani side again was Kashmir, it was going to be difficult.

The Indians, in the mean time also came up with some very dis-ingenious thoughts, which also were not helpful. They started saying that unless we take care of "terrorism" emanating from the Pakistani side we can not move. Pre conditions make things more difficult. There is no way that you one measure that "terrorism" is now below the acceptable level and we are prepared to talk. Of course, by saying that, you are giving the handle on the peace process to someone else.

It is not easy to talk about non-state actors alone, because state actors can also do the same thing. If there is a feeling that other side is benefiting, both can scuttle the link. Nobody knows that whether hawks in India - Advani and others played any role. It can also not be said with certainty that what really happened at the breakfast meeting. However, it was understood that these things have to be taken care of.

In Pakistan, people were not happy after the two-line resolution that was issued after the meting between Musharraf and Vajpai on the sidelines of SAARCK Summit in January 2004 in Islamabad, saying that that "terrorism" will not be allowed from Pakistani side and the Indian side saying that Kashmir is very important. However, the fact is that the things did kick-start after that.

It is also true that no substantial progress was made except one i.e.

bilateral annual exchange of lists of nuclear installations. Surprisingly the easier issues were not being solved and Kashmir, of course, was nowhere near solution. As I said earlier, you can put the problems like Kashmir on the back burner or on ice once,

but political management requires that something is done that gives the Kashmiris the confidence that something is going to happen for them with their involvement - not just between Islamabad and Delhi - and something substantial, not just wada-e-ferda (promise for tomorrow).

Good things were also happening, such as the movement of people including those from APHC, the bus service between Srinagr and Muzaffarabad and some other routes were started and some trade was likely to start. These can be considered as steps in the right direction although their management was poor, so the people who authored and conceived the process could not be blamed.

So-called unilateral concessions were wrong for another reason, from the designological point of view.

Talk of dividing Kashmir into 7 regions or the proposals like Chenab formula, were giving the Indians an impression that as Pakistani President is coming up with some new concession and proposal every week, why not wait some more time, as he might come up with the solution which we can accept immediately. So non-response was correct on their part. Such concessions also gave the impression that Pakistan was desperate and under pressure of time and has weakened its bargaining position. Lastly, it also sowed confusion not only in Pakistan but among the Kashmiris.

It was, however, a benefit of this situation that eastern border was quite for last 4 or 5 years, and there was some respite, although we had such a murky security situation for Pakistan on the western front.

And then comes Mumbai. I am not going to say who done it, but whoever did it, did more damage to Pakistan than to anyone else. That's why there is an interest for Pakistan in ensuring that we get to the bottom of it and punish the perpetrators.

I don't know how we are going to look like as we are acting seriously, because we could not be seen as not talking seriously about Kashmir - while India, for its own political reasons, can not be seen talking seriously about Kashmir. However, one can say that dynamics have changed, particularly because of very complex subject "terrorism".

The two sides signed joint anti-terrorism mechanism two or there years ago, which is the best mechanism, operationally. The best way to fight "terrorism" is to fight it jointly - otherwise no one can do so. Joint investigations and interrogations are essential. Some people have reservations about the mechanism in Pakistan also, but on the Indian side there seems to be a unanimity that it was wrong to have signed joint anti terrorism mechanism, as they feel it inappropriate to let Pakistanis interrogate anyone including, Kasab.

This Indian apprehension makes it difficult to proceed further.

Lastly, India does believe that it is now in an entire different league, and it is no longer 1997, although there may be a feeling that it is strategic partner of USA and, therefore, can perhaps get away with certain things that Americans also tried and got away with. But we should keep in mind that with the foreign forces being there in the region, the mightiest military machine in the world i.e. NATO led by the US remain the real threat. Pakistan is certainly facing threat but the danger is for the whole region.

If the threat is like this, from Pakistani point of view, it is important to find the "regional consensus", because unless the countries in the region resolve their conflicts, the outsiders will always have sound reasons and some rational to come in and play the role that we asked them to play when ever it suits us. When it suited Pakistan, it asked for their intervention. The Indians has done this on at least three occasions. Now they are invoking American intervention citing Americans' statements in their favor. However, if US is interested in playing a role in resolving Kashmir, and Indians may not be happy, I feel Pakistan should also be concerned about US role as America's interest would be different.

Peace Process and post Mumbai Tension

In order to understand strange and complex Pak-India relationship, which arouses the best and the worst of emotions at different times, and thus makes the two sides obsessive about each other, one has to delve long into history. Only thus one can understand the psyche of each regarding the other. Hindu Muslim communities in South Asia claim inheritance to two great civilizations of the region- the Mauryan and the Mughal. The partition of Sub-Continent which the Congress accepted only when left with no alternative, and the bloodshed that accompanied it further exacerbated the hard feelings. Kashmir dispute ensured the continuance of the feeling of animosity between the two countries.

As both countries have not been able to resolve their disputes including Kashmir, the rift has deepened. Other issues of concern are; the water issue, Sir Creek and Siachin. As a result, Pak-India relations are laced with suspicion and mistrust, and pose a serious challenge to peace and stability in South Asia.

Starting from the Simla Agreement in 1972, almost every major political party which is represented on the political horizon of Pakistan today has undertaken substantial steps for the purpose of creating stable and peaceful conditions in South Asia during its tenure in power. This was natural since it was a security imperative.

The recent decade long period of CBMs was initiated in 1997 by Pakistan to resume bilateral talks with India in order to resolve peacefully all outstanding issues between the two countries including Jammu & Kashmir.

The two countries held three rounds of Foreign Secretary level talks on the agreed eight item agenda. The eight items agreed for the composite dialogue included peace and security including CBMs, Jammu & Kashmir, Siachen, Sir Creek, terrorism and drug trafficking, economic and commercial cooperation and promotion of friendly exchanges in various fields. However, little progress was achieved during this phase. During this period, a momentous development took place with far-reaching implications for regional as well as international peace and security. India conducted five nuclear tests and these were followed by six tests in the same month, May 1998 by Pakistan.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Lahore on February 21, 1999 and the Lahore Declaration signed during the visit committed the two countries to intensify efforts to resolve all outstanding bilateral issues including Kashmir. It also obliged both sides to refrain from interference in each other's internal affairs and evolve measures to reduce risk of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, strengthen SAARC and combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.

The period between 1999 and 2002 witnessed a high level of tension between India and Pakistan due to a number of factors including among others, Kargil 1999, the inconclusive Agra Summit 2001, attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001, and the mobilization of a million troops on the border.

Taking over as the foreign minister in 2002, I strongly believed that normalization of relations is in the best interest of both Pakistan and India and that the people of Pakistan want peace with India provided peace is with honor.

At that time, in the wake of 9/11 India had unleashed a campaign to project itself as a longstanding victim of terrorism and to convince the world of links between Osama Bin Ladin, Taliban and the freedom struggle in Indian held Kashmir. Accordingly, very unfortunately and very unfairly the Kashmir freedom struggle was now being seen internationally in a different light.

Pakistani argument and stance till then that Kashmir freedom struggle is indigenous and that Pakistan extended only political, diplomatic and moral support was not evoking acceptability from the US and EU and especially after 9/11, even Pakistan's closest friends began to advise us to think of an alternative way for achieving our objectives. It was, therefore, becoming clear amongst a large section of the influential decisions makers and the intelligentsia in Pakistan that while maintaining our position of principle on the issue of Kashmir, we have to adopt a different strategy.

Indians also learnt a lesson after the troops' mobilization (in 2002) when they realized that Pakistan did not blink or cave in because of India's show of military might. Pakistan made it clear that it would not accept Indian diktat and would counter any aggression.

Indian PM Vajpayee on April 18, 2003 offered in his own words 'a hand of friendship' to Pakistan. Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali welcomed the announcement in a call facilitated by the then US Secretary of State Colin Powel. Pakistan's strategy was based on the recognition that the international community had zero tolerance for violent means for changing the status quo, no matter what the cause. The distinction between the freedom struggle and terrorism was beginning to disappear.

Some Indian parliamentarians also visited Pakistan in August 2003 interaction proved very useful at that stage.

Pakistan also announced a major CBM to observe ceasefire by Pakistani forces along the LOC with effect from Eid-al-Fitr on November 26, 2003. Musharraf and Vajpai met on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Islamabad in January 2004 and a joint statement was issued that included reference to the need for a resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute to the satisfaction of both Pakistan and India and that Pakistan would not allow its territory to be used for terrorism. The issue of joint statement generated optimism and contributed to the lessening of tension. It was hailed by the international community and the two leaders were given credit for their vision in breaking the impasse.

During this phase of relations, Pakistan followed a three track approach, namely CBMs, Composite dialogue and back-channel on Kashmir. The four points that President Musharraf often spoke about regarding Kashmir included identification of region (Pakistan wanted to ensure that the Northern Areas are non-negotiable), demilitarization, self governance and joint mechanism.

During this period, the then government came under some criticism that Pakistan has taken a U-turn on Kashmir; President's four point proposal amounted to giving up on our principled stand, Pakistan is offering concession on all issues without any quid pro quo; and pro-Pakistan elements in Kashmir are being isolated. The then policy makers, however, believed that such perceptions were entirely misplaced.

In April 2005, Indian PM Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Musharraf met in New Delhi, and declared that the Peace Process was "irreversible". As a result of the process, several high level contacts were made. People to people contact reached to an unprecedented level in 2005 when thousands of Pakistanis were visiting India monthly and an equal number were coming from India to Pakistan. The direct bilateral trade had increased from 200 million to over 2 billion dollars, the bus and rail links started between the two countries on various routes.

On terrorism, Pakistan was able to make India and the world realize that it is as much a victim of terrorism as any other country. The joint anti-terrorism mechanism is supposed to be used by the two countries to convey concerns of each other on incidents of terrorism. A lot of progress was made on the backchannel on Jammu and Kashmir. On Siachen, at the political level, the two sides were inching towards a package proposal.

On Sir Creek, the two sides have already conducted a joint survey.

Regarding nuclear CBMs, the two countries had concluded Agreements on pre-notification of flight testing of ballistic missiles and on reducing the risk from accidents relating to nuclear weapons. Conventional CBMs included: re-confirmation of both sides to the commitment of upholding of the ceasefire, implementation of the 1991 agreement on air space violation, up-gradation of hotlines between the DGMOs, hotlines between Indian coastguards and Pakistan Maritime Security Agencies, across LOC travel, bus and truck service.

Pakistan was working in the hope that this process of composite dialogue, CBMs and back channel diplomacy would create the necessary environment for resolution of outstanding disputes particularly Kashmir.

Pakistan continued to emphasize the need to make genuine progress on substantive issues.

Coming to post Mumbai tension, it can be said that threat of military confrontation is abating. Indian forces are deployed on non-peace time formations. Pakistan has asked these forces to be reallocated to peace time positions. The cost for both countries of a conflict or a surgical strike by India will entail unforeseen risks. However, current state of tension is unlikely to pass quickly since India believes Pakistan is resisting the crackdown on militants.

India often accuses Pakistan of living in a state of denial regarding terrorism, but itself lives in a state of denial about Kashmir. Additionally, it is common knowledge that there are various types of secessionist, regional, ethnic, and ideological movements in different parts of India. I am not just referring to Muslim outrage over the demolition of Babri Mosque or the massacre of the Muslims in Gujrat; Maoists violence against upper caste Hindus is unleashed in major parts of India covering almost 1/3 of its territory. The details of Indian homegrown militancy are well documented. Even extremist elements have been identified in Indian military. India is ignoring these realities and continues to blame Pakistan.

Mumbai Incident: Approach of External Powers

Reaction of the International Community Including US, EU, China and other major countries to the current crisis is stated below.

Tilt towards Indian stance by high profile visitors from America, Britain and EU including Dr. Rice, Admiral Mullen, Senator McCain, Senator Kerry and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in their statements is evident.

Dr. Rice also suggested that Pakistan's principal problem is not India but militancy and stabilization of border with Afghanistan where more needs to be done. This point of view is also being echoed by large number of Pakistani scholars and commentators who believe that terrorism is a common threat and it needs to be addressed jointly. President Zardari in his telephone conversation with President Bush on the last day of 2008 reiterated the position of the government of Pakistan that it would not allow its territory to be used by non-state actors for launching attacks on other countries; he went on to add that anybody found involved in such attacks from the soil of Pakistan will be dealt with sternly.

President Bush urged both Indian Prime Minister and Pakistani President on this occasion to cooperate with each other in the Mumbai attack investigation as well as counter terrorism in general.

There is a growing realization among some western writers and thinkers about the need to address the root causes of the Muslim hate against the west. For instance, recently Robert Fisk writing in the Independent in a peace titled "Why do they hate the west so much, we will ask" has focused on what he describes as the double standards of the west in its foreign policy, and more particularly, of the Bush administration and its blanket support to Israel which has led to bloodletting and "atrocity on the level of the Balkans war of the 1990's". When the Muslims show "blind anger on the west", the west has to realize the reasons for it. This reminds me of a telephone call I received as Foreign Minister from a very well known person in Washington who expressed his desire to come to Islamabad and wanted to know if I would be able to see him. I said of course I would, but I just wanted to know the immediate purpose of the visit. I was told that the distinguished person wanted to know why Americans were so hated in Pakistan. I immediately corrected the person and said that Americans were not hated at all; it was the American foreign policy that was thoroughly unpopular among large number of Pakistanis. I added that the distinguished visitor would find a similar situation everywhere from Indonesia to Morocco. I further said in a lighter vein that the Pakistanis did not dislike America; if that was the case there would not be such long queues of visa seekers outside the US Embassy. I sincerely hope that the new Administration in the United States which has been voted in on a promise of 'Change' will do a deep re-think about US Foreign Policy towards the Muslim world generally.

As a general reflection of the US and Western approach towards the issue, even before the Mumbai attacks a report of the Pakistan Policy Working Group in September 2008 titled 'the Next Chapter - the US and Pakistan' seeks to adjust Pakistan's cost benefit calculus of using militants in its foreign policy through close cooperation and by calibrating American assistance. This report is the work of a bipartisan group of American Experts to make recommendation to the new US President and his administration on managing this partnership. The group was guided by the understanding that Pakistan will remain one of America's foremost foreign policy and national security challenges. The report was endorsed by Richard Armitage former Deputy Secretary of State and Lee Hamilton former US Representative and Co-Chair of the 9/11 Commission. Obviously this report will influence the mind of the new Administration.

The Chinese Special Envoy and Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei was in Pakistan on 29 December, 2008 and met the Pakistani Leadership. China's efforts were aimed at defusing tension and immediate de-escalation and resumption of dialogue. It feels lingering conflict would strengthen the terrorists in the region. China itself is a victim of terrorism; Chinese Engineers have been mercilessly murdered in Pakistan but it is a reason to salute China that it still continues its multi-faceted cooperation with Pakistan despite such threats to its nationals. China targeted terrorism much before US started its current focus following 9/11. It is however appropriate to note that while China continued to give good advice publicly and privately, it showed its commitment towards the government and people of Pakistan during the high profile visit of General Tariq Majid, Chairman Joint Chief of Staff, precisely at this time of crisis.

Comparison of Mumbai attacks 2008 and Mumbai Blasts 2006

According to Professor Joe Nye of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, "politics in the information age is about whose story is winning" It is obvious that Pakistan's story is not winning any "kudos" in the current media war over Mumbai. Before going on to discuss Pakistan's response, let me take you down the memory lane, when the Government of which I was the Foreign Minister, had to deal with serial bomb blasts on commuter trains in Mumbai 209 persons lost their lives and more than 700 were injured in July 2006. It would be instructive to compare Pakistani response then to the present situation. I was in New York and I instantly realized that this disaster would have a major impact on the dialogue that we were going through with India and for which both sides had worked very hard, including on matters pertaining to conflict resolution. There was great anger in India then as now and fingers were instantly pointed towards Pakistan. Following points become very clear:

1. That all stakeholders including the President, the Foreign Minister, the Foreign Office spokesman and the Information Ministry were speaking from the same page. As a result we were spared the criticism of flip-flops and contradictions, which we saw recently e.g. the strange issue of the hoax call from Foreign Minister Mukherjee to President Zardari, whether the DG ISI was going to India or not or the nature of the violation of our airspace by the Indian Air Force; the summary dismissal of the National Security Advisor is so bizarre that it is in a class of its own and shows a total absence of communications between the two top functionaries of the govern-ment. Such acts also impact negatively on the credibility of the government both internally and externally. In 2006 there was also complete understanding between the government, the military and the ISI and there were regular meetings to coordinate our response.

2. We were continuously stating our side of story. I was interacting with the Pakistani, Indian and the Western media personally. We were telling them that Pakistan would cooperate fully in the investigations and that Pakistan could not possibly have any motive behind the ghastly incident.

3. We were proactively engaged from day one with the foreign governments and I spoke to a very large number of my counterparts rebutting the Indian allegations.

4. We also kept channels of communication open with India both diplomatically and through the track 2.

The reaction of the Indian Government and media was very jingoistic initially. Both countries expelled each other's diplomats.Early in August 2006 a very critical statement was issued by the Indian External Affairs Ministry interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan (in connection with tragic demise of Nawab Bugti in Balochistan), the Foreign Office also issued a strong rejoinder. It is important to note that while all this was going on we were also discussing behind closed doors with the Indian government. We were also in constant touch with major governments of the world to build diplomatic pressure in favor of our position. Through this focused interaction, we were able to find a way out and drafted the outlines of the joint anti-terror mechanism which was finally approved by the two leaders at Havana in September 2006 just eight weeks after the Mumbai serial blasts. In 2006 Pakistan was able to project its side of the story in a satisfactory manner.

Way Forward: Internal dimension

Unity and integrity of Pakistan is also threatened by many internal factors. We are not a very tolerant society; every one claims to be the exclusive protagonist of truth and what is worse of "national interest". Every body else is conveniently dubbed as anti Pakistan.

Regarding sectarian disharmony, the less said the better. There have been suicide bomb attacks on mosques and imam Bargahs. The origin of the current violent non-state actors can be traced to sectarian disharmony. Our national curriculum has not done much to promote a culture of tolerance.

Violent non-state actors present a clear danger to Pakistan and its survival. We have to make a choice whether we want to go back to Quaid-e-Azam's vision of a modern, forward looking Muslim state attuned to breath taking changes occurring in different disciplines almost on a daily basis or develop a close mindset. If handled appropriately and with a national consensus behind an agreed solution, the current crisis offers us an opportunity for a paradigm shift and enable us to be credible and transparent in the fight for the soul of Pakistan which in my opinion, the Quaid's vision amply represented.

FATA has been neglected by all governments since 1947. The time has now come for all of us to think of how best to integrate it with the rest of the country as quickly as possible politically, administratively and economically.

Madrassa education system in Pakistan basically attends to the needs of the poor and at the same time reflects the failure of the state sector in education. We can no longer afford to ignore education. Resources have to be generated internally and in case of any shortfall, it can be said that the world will help out willingly in upgrading Pakistan state education with resources and technical advice. In this connection the recent visit of Vice President elect Joe Biden in which he has reiterated United States commitment to pass the Lugar Biden Bill showing US's continued commitment over the next fives years to Pakistan's social sector particularly education, health and infrastructure development is illustrative of the above.

It has become fashionable for our planners to refer to 100 million young citizens of Pakistan below the age of 25 as a demographic dividend. If we do nothing concrete towards educating and training this massive pool of human resource, it could well become a demographic nightmare.

As a result of the violence generated by non-state actors there is a feeling of pessimism throughout the country regarding the economic future of Pakistan. Forget all possibilities of direct foreign investment. All of us know a large number of Pakistanis who are taking their own capital out the country - one major reason for the decline of the rupee value so dramatically.

From the above it is clear that Pakistan has strong reasons to control domestic terrorism of its own.

Way Forward: External dimension

For economic, national security and many other reasons, Pakistan just cannot afford isolation. It cannot be, has never been and never should be allowed to be isolated like some other countries have been in recent times and whose innocent populations have paid the price. National pride does not demand national isolation. Pakistan's Foreign policy has ever since its existence tried to avoid precisely this situation. Many reasons can be given but it suffices to say here that our situation in the region and our desire to maintain relationship with neighboring countries on the principles of sovereign equality preclude such a course.

No friend or ally Islamic or western condones terrorism. Killing of innocent civilians cannot be justified on any grounds. Who should know better than Pakistanis who continue to pay a price almost on a daily basis with even Mosques and Imam Bargahs are not being spared. Friends like China and Saudi Arabia are victims of terrorism and are confronting it effectively. Other traditionally close friends and neighbors including Turkey, Iran and the Gulf countries have shown their concern over the escalation and tried to defuse the situation.

As Foreign Minister I used to get well meaning and innocent advice whenever Pakistan faced a difficult crisis to further strengthen its relationship with China and or call a meeting of the OIC. I am not making light of this advice since it came from the heart and they say the heart has its own reasons. I used to always tell my friends that our relationship with China were closer than they could realize and that China was really a true friend of Pakistan, but a true friend always gives a sane and good advice sometimes not readily or necessarily popular on the streets. As for the OIC we tried our best to strengthen it during my tenure.

Pakistan's Response

In view of the diplomatic and media offensive by India Pakistan needs to take action in the following manner.

We need to be more pro-activate diplomatically to counter Indian diplomatic offensive. To sensitize the world about our story, our concerns, our issues, our sacrifices in this epic struggle against terrorism have to be repeatedly highlighted.

Pakistan has to respond to international media which has started echoing Indian story after the Mumbai attacks. In a way this was natural because India had been a victim of a gruesome act of terrorism. The government of Pakistan responded by offering joint investigation while the government of India has rejected it. The western media is pointing to the divergences between the declaratory and operational policies on combating India focused militant organizations. We need to make efforts to put things in perspective and point out more aggressively both our offers for joint investigation as well as the recent historic upsurge in Kashmir where the Kashmiri youth demonstrated for weeks in mammoth gatherings and processions in favour of Azadi or freedom in a totally peaceful manner. No one in India accused Pakistan of being behind these demonstrations by the new generation in Kashmir

.

Pakistan must undertake all necessary steps referred to above in order to combat terrorism comprehensively inside the country. It must also investigate all the leads that we get from India regarding the Mumbai attacks. This is really in Pakistan's own interest. While undertaking all these measures we must emphasize to the international community that unilateralism in international relations and trying to secure homeland security at all costs without addressing the underlying causes of terrorism is bound to fail as it is shortsighted, cruel and foolish as Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan so amply prove. It is not just the international opinion which has rejected such narrow minded approach to the issue of terrorism but it seems that the American electorate has also reached a similar conclusion while voting for change in the recent elections.

It can be hoped that there is a genuine re-think by the new US administration on the concerns of the Muslim world and its genuine grievances. The use of force without moral authority is doomed to failure, more so in an age where asymmetric warfare can be successfully waged by people with a cause which they think is worth dying for. In my experience, Europe is ready for such a re-think. I saw this when I was representing Pakistan in the UN SC during the Iraq war. A change in US policies will have a huge effect all over the world and not just in Europe. No wonder much before the American elections the European, Asian and African public opinion was almost wholly in favor of Obama.

While hoping for such changes in the international climate, Pakistan must put his own house in order. There is a need for institutionalized decision making; haphazard and ad-hoc decision making as seen recently must be avoided. There is a need to develop consensus on issues confronting us. The government was right in calling an 'all parties meeting' after the Mumbai tragedy. There is a vital need for developing a consensus to meet terrorism in a more coherent, integrated and a more holistic manner. Regrettably, the parliamentary resolution which was passed on the issue, lacked focus and anyone could interpret it in any manner that they liked - and they did so. It is difficult to arrive at a consensus when there are so many different parties with diverse agendas but the nature of the challenge that Pakistan faces calls for nothing less than precisely that.

Normalization of relationship with India, as an objective, is not in dispute. Somebody may be called a hawk and somebody as dove, but the normalization of relationship is perhaps common between all of them. The question is that of peace with honor, justice and for resolving disputes, not deferring or sitting on them. So from that viewpoint, one has to realize that there are dynamics of power politics and idealism.

Morality is relevant but keeping in view the power equation, and the convergence and divergence of interests and finding out a more equitable sustainable equation is the real challenge. The psyche with which Indian leadership has been dealing with Pakistan; and our own mindset is not just product of current situation. It goes back to a thousand years and one cannot totally de-link from that. We have coexisted but we have never converged. We can live in peace with each other but to think of having a common civilization, culture and lifestyle is against reality. So it is a complex issue.

The issue of Kashmir is not a question of political game but an issue that deals with life, honor and liberty of 15 million people. It is not a land dispute; and India and Pakistan and for that matter any other power has no right to deny Kashmiris their right of self determination. To say that Kashmir has kept our relationship or the whole peace process a hostage is not in keeping with the human and political reality of the region. The issue of Kashmir has to be resolved and resolved with justice; and unless it is resolved with justice that satisfies the rights of the people of Kashmir, there is no future for the normalization of relationship in the region.

Water issue is also critically important. Pakistan ignored it but now we are in a situation that we can no longer ignore it. It requires a very clear vision of our own policy. Institutionalized policy making is something that we lacked. Ad-hocism needs to be done away with and medium and long term formulation of policy is required.

Another point relates to the whole business of terrorism. Terrorism which involves killing of innocent people is a crime against humanity - conducted by an individual, groups or states. But it has been seen after 9/11 that terrorism, after its denomination as war, de-linking it from the reality of its being an act of crime to be addressed to as a crime under the system of criminal justice, has changed the whole grammar of politics. The way terrorism is being used today has become a part of new colonial hegemonic designs of the powerful. It is no longer a question of terrorism per se it is an instrument of policy of neo-colonialism. One has to see that who has benefited and gained from the incidents such as 9/11 in the US and 26 November 2008 in Mumbai.

It is true that Pakistanis, Muslims, in fact people all over the world, do not hate America but American policies. The policies of hegemony, exploitation, domination, occupation, support for Israel and ensuring that those who are trying to seek justice and freedom from oppression are not helped but efforts are made to exterminate them. But the agony is that beside this perception, our rulers continue to follow those very American policies in our lands.

The real conflict is between the aspirations of the people and the interests of the superpower and their collaborators who are ignoring the wishes of the people and are pursuing what is aggravating the situation. Whether it is Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir or FATA, these policies are failing and yet we are hands in gloves with those who are perpetrating these policies. That is the dilemma. The people have to be prepared to see it and rise; otherwise, one can not see any way out. If the people of the world want a peaceful planet and a just world order then such oppressive policies have to be checked and countered.

It can be said that even Mumbai has to be seen in this context. One should not be accused of falling back on conspiracy theories; because what is often dubbed as conspiracy may play a very important role in the making of the policy of powerful. Looking at the pre-Mumbai scenario, one sees that there was a remote possibility of some change as a result of elections in America. Then there are the phenomenon of popular uprising during June, July and August in Kashmir, the shift from militancy or counter-militancy to a democratic uprising, the emergence of indigenous force that could have influenced the future struggle in Kashmir, elections within India and the changed situation in Pakistan. Mumbai took place in a very extraordinary context and it deserves to be examined who had benefited. Some kind of a 'reverse-engineering' is needed in political complexities of this type.

There are a number of writers within India and around the world who are pointing that there is something more fundamental behind it. While Pakistan has called for joint investigation, it is well known that people can be used by those who are playing this game of power. The Indian Prime Minister has said that what happened in Mumbai could not have taken place without state support considering the level of sophistication of planning, execution and implementation.

One can raise the question that who rules in Mumbai? Who has command of the Indian Navy? Who is responsible for Indian agencies? Was it possible that a small bunch of youth - 10 persons coming from sky or somewhere else could have held the city and the entire Indian government, agencies, system and Indian Navy as hostages? Where were the coastal guards and Navy? How the struggle was sustained for 60 hours at Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels? How was the ammunition moved? What was the channel? Is it possible without support from within? So these are very fundamental issues.

And now the whole Kashmir issue has been sidelined and the sacrifices in the uprisings up to 2008 have been marginalized. These are very fundamental issues that are to be examined. The purpose of raising these questions is to find out what is the reality. And I have no reservation in saying that willingly or unwilling, by choice or by compulsion, if any Pakistani was involved in Mumbai attacks, he should be punished, and punished under Pakistani law, through its judicial process. It is right to say that Pakistan's cause has suffered; has not gained.

But the issue is more complicated. Who did what? Who was behind? Who was used and how this very game has been played in the past. We know that at the time of every major and historic moment particularly during the last twenty years, when something of strategic importance was going to happen, some such unfortunate event did take place. When former US president Bill Clinton was visiting India in 2000, 38 Sikhs were killed in Chattisingh Pora. Pakistan was blamed and it was later found out that local agencies were responsible for it. Clinton, while writing the foreword of the book by Madeline Albright, has very intelligently suggested that had he not visited India those 38 persons would have been saved. So the incidents like Mumbai should not be seen as simply a new phenomenon; there seems to be a pattern.

The need is to listen to each other, identify issues, continue discussion and dialogue and to help the policy makers seek these dimensions so that more informed judgments could be arrived at, and policies which are not ad-hocand do not lack harmony are framed.

Dr. Shireen M. Mazari is senior security an alyst and former Director General, Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.

On February 18, 2007, sixty eight people were killed and scores more injured in the terrorist attack on Samjhauta Express, a twice weekly peace train that runs between Delhi and Lahore, at Diwana station near the Indian city of Panipet. In the course of the investigation conducted by Anti Terrorist Squad Marashtra India Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving officer in Indian Army, confessed that he provided explosives for this act of terror ( IndianExpress, Nov 15, 2008)

1. With neighbors like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka ,India does not ask for reciprocity, but gives and accommodates what it can in good faith and trust.

2. No South Asian country should allow its territory to be used against the interest of another country of the region.

3. No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another.

4. All South Asian countries must respect each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.

5. They should settle all their disputes through peaceful bilateral negotiations.

Mian Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri is former foreign minister (2002-2007) of Pakistan.

This section of Mr. Kasuri's speech has been abridged and rearranged for space constraints. Full text of the speech can be accessed at www.ips.org.pk

China itself is a victim of terrorism. Chinese concerns about terrorism are well known; they are keen to defuse the current crisis. Saudi Arabia confronted terrorism as early as the seventies when terrorists tried to storm the Kaaba. In more recent times Saudi Arabia bore the full brunt of terrorism and devised an effective strategy to combat it.

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Pak-India Relations: Security Dynamics and Future Scenario - Institute of Policy Studies

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Seminar deliberations throwing light on ties between the arch rivals in post Mumbai attacks scenario Policy Perspectives , Volume6 , Number1, January - June 2009 The relations between Pakistan and India have rarely been smooth throughout their history. But the situation after November 26 incidents in Mumbai has created unprecedented tension and a quite visible war hysteria.

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Hamilton, Hamish. "Hamish Hamilton Interview with Mohsin Hamid." Mohsinhamid.com. Mohsin Hamid, Feb. 2007. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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Hamilton, Hamish. "Hamish Hamilton Interview with Mohsin Hamid." Mohsinhamid.com. Mohsin Hamid, Feb. 2007. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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This interview between Hamish Hamilton and Mohsin Hamid focuses on Hamid's life and writing style. It touches upon the fact that many of the works he writes have main characters whose lives mirror his own, to an extent, and begs the question of whether or not Hamid sees himself in these characters. While Hamid says his characters are not created in his own image, he concedes that he and the character share similarities that allowed him to empathize with his character and make him come to life like the place of their motherland, alma mater, and knowing the lifestyle that comes with corporate New York. This interview helps me understand the novella "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because it allows me to become more acquainted with the author and his life and gives me the ability to draw connections between he, the novel, and his inspirations for writing the novel.

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A: My next novel has been forming in my head for about a year now, and once my book tour is over I will need to get down to it. I am both excited and hesitant to embark upon something new: after a seven-year, monogamous fictional relationship part of me wants to play the field.

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Lewis, Bernard. "The Revolt of Islam." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2001. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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Lewis, Bernard. "The Revolt of Islam." The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2001. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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This article describes Al Qaeda's incentive behind the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. It makes a point of terrorism not being based on the Islamic faith itself and that the idea that it does is a threat to the livelihood of Muslims, when in reality, terrorist groups do not single out Western nations for their attacks. Places in the Middle East face terrorism by radical groups regularly, yet get little to no coverage. I believe this article helps me better understand "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because it is a primary source written a little over a month after the event itself took place. This means I can get a firsthand look at reactions to the attack, the Islamophobia that arose because of it, and how the fire of this phobia was both fed and quelled.

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President Bush and other Western politicians have taken great pains to make it clear that the war in which we are engaged is a war against terrorism-not a war against Arabs, or, more generally, against Muslims, who are urged to join us in this struggle against our common enemy. Osama bin Laden's message is the opposite. For bin Laden and those who follow him, this is a religious war, a war for Islam and against infidels, and therefore, inevitably, against the United States, the greatest power in the world of the infidels.

In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American-and, no doubt, European-observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners-the people he was addressing-picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated-its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement. One of their first acts, in November, 1922, was to abolish the sultanate. The Ottoman sovereign was not only a sultan, the ruler of a specific state; he was also widely recognized as the caliph, the head of all Sunni Islam, and the last in a line of such rulers that dated back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in 632 A.D. After a brief experiment with a separate caliph, the Turks, in March, 1924, abolished the caliphate, too. During its nearly thirteen centuries, the caliphate had gone through many vicissitudes, but it remained a potent symbol of Muslim unity, even identity, and its abolition, under the double assault of foreign imperialists and domestic modernists, was felt throughout the Muslim world.

Historical allusions such as bin Laden's, which may seem abstruse to many Americans, are common among Muslims, and can be properly understood only within the context of Middle Eastern perceptions of identity and against the background of Middle Eastern history. Even the concepts of history and identity require redefinition for the Westerner trying to understand the contemporary Middle East. In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences-even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be-indeed, often is-slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant.

But history of what? In the Western world, the basic unit of human organization is the nation, which is then subdivided in various ways, one of which is by religion. Muslims, however, tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion subdivided into nations. This is no doubt partly because most of the nation-states that make up the modern Middle East are relatively new creations, left over from the era of Anglo-French imperial domination that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and they preserve the state-building and frontier demarcations of their former imperial masters. Even their names reflect this artificiality: Iraq was a medieval province, with borders very different from those of the modern republic; Syria, Palestine, and Libya are names from classical antiquity that hadn't been used in the region for a thousand years or more before they were revived and imposed by European imperialists in the twentieth century; Algeria and Tunisia do not even exist as words in Arabic-the same name serves for the city and the country. Most remarkable of all, there is no word in the Arabic language for Arabia, and modern Saudi Arabia is spoken of instead as "the Saudi Arab kingdom" or "the peninsula of the Arabs," depending on the context. This is not because Arabic is a poor language-quite the reverse is true-but because the Arabs simply did not think in terms of combined ethnic and territorial identity. Indeed, the caliph Omar, the second in succession after the Prophet Muhammad, is quoted as saying to the Arabs, "Learn your genealogies, and do not be like the local peasants who, when they are asked who they are, reply: 'I am from such-and-such a place.' "

In the early centuries of the Muslim era, the Islamic community was one state under one ruler. Even after that community split up into many states, the ideal of a single Islamic polity persisted. The states were almost all dynastic, with shifting frontiers, and it is surely significant that, in the immensely rich historiography of the Islamic world in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, there are histories of dynasties, of cities, and, primarily, of the Islamic state and community, but no histories of Arabia, Persia, or Turkey. Both Arabs and Turks produced a vast literature describing their struggles against Christian Europe, from the first Arab incursions in the eighth century to the final Turkish retreat in the twentieth. But until the modern period, when European concepts and categories became dominant, Islamic commentators almost always referred to their opponents not in territorial or ethnic terms but simply as infidels ( kafir). They never referred to their own side as Arab or Turkish; they identified themselves as Muslims. This perspective helps to explain, among other things, Pakistan's concern for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The name Pakistan, a twentieth-century invention, designates a country defined entirely by its Islamic religion. In every other respect, the country and people of Pakistan are-as they have been for millennia-part of India. An Afghanistan defined by its Islamic identity would be a natural ally, even a satellite, of Pakistan. An Afghanistan defined by ethnic nationality, on the other hand, could be a dangerous neighbor, advancing irredentist claims on the Pashto-speaking areas of northwestern Pakistan and perhaps even allying itself with India.
II-THE HOUSE OF WAR

In the course of human history, many civilizations have risen and fallen-China, India, Greece, Rome, and, before them, the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. During the centuries that in European history are called medieval, the most advanced civilization in the world was undoubtedly that of Islam. Islam may have been equalled-or even, in some ways, surpassed-by India and China, but both of those civilizations remained essentially limited to one region and to one ethnic group, and their impact on the rest of the world was correspondingly restricted. The civilization of Islam, on the other hand, was ecumenical in its outlook, and explicitly so in its aspirations. One of the basic tasks bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet was jihad. This word, which literally means "striving," was usually cited in the Koranic phrase "striving in the path of God" and was interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power. In principle, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state.

From an early date, Muslims knew that there were certain differences among the peoples of the House of War. Most of them were simply polytheists and idolaters, who represented no serious threat to Islam and were likely prospects for conversion. The major exception was the Christians, whom Muslims recognized as having a religion of the same kind as their own, and therefore as their primary rival in the struggle for world domination-or, as they would have put it, world enlightenment. It is surely significant that the Koranic and other inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, one of the earliest Muslim religious structures outside Arabia, built in Jerusalem between 691 and 692 A.D., include a number of directly anti-Christian polemics: "Praise be to God, who begets no son, and has no partner," and "He is God, one, eternal. He does not beget, nor is he begotten, and he has no peer." For the early Muslims, the leader of Christendom, the Christian equivalent of the Muslim caliph, was the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Later, his place was taken by the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, and his in turn by the new rulers of the West. Each of these, in his time, was the principal adversary of the jihad.

In practice, of course, the application of jihad wasn't always rigorous or violent. The canonically obligatory state of war could be interrupted by what were legally defined as "truces," but these differed little from the so-called peace treaties the warring European powers signed with one another. Such truces were made by the Prophet with his pagan enemies, and they became the basis of what one might call Islamic international law. In the lands under Muslim rule, Islamic law required that Jews and Christians be allowed to practice their religions and run their own affairs, subject to certain disabilities, the most important being a poll tax that they were required to pay. In modern parlance, Jews and Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by law and the Koran and recognized by public opinion, was far better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West. The jihad also did not prevent Muslim governments from occasionally seeking Christian allies against Muslim rivals-even during the Crusades, when Christians set up four principalities in the Syro-Palestinian area. The great twelfth-century Muslim leader Saladin, for instance, entered into an agreement with the Crusader king of Jerusalem, to keep the peace for their mutual convenience.

Under the medieval caliphate, and again under the Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world, and for most of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman Emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding lands as distant as the British Isles and, on one occasion, in 1627, even Iceland.

Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat-an entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. A contemporary Turkish historian, Silihdar Mehmet Aga, described the disaster with commendable frankness: "This was a calamitous defeat, so great that there has been none like it since the first appearance of the Ottoman state." This defeat, suffered by what was then the major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The argument began among the Ottoman military and political élite as a discussion of two questions: Why had the once victorious Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian enemy? And how could they restore the previous situation?

There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands, pursued their former invaders whence they had come, the Russians moving into North and Central Asia, the Portuguese into Africa and around Africa to South and Southeast Asia. Even small European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade.

For most historians, Middle Eastern and Western alike, the conventional beginning of modern history in the Middle East dates from 1798, when the French Revolution, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, landed in Egypt. Within a remarkably short time, General Bonaparte and his small expeditionary force were able to conquer, occupy, and rule the country. There had been, before this, attacks, retreats, and losses of territory on the remote frontiers, where the Turks and the Persians faced Austria and Russia. But for a small Western force to invade one of the heartlands of Islam was a profound shock. The departure of the French was, in a sense, an even greater shock. They were forced to leave Egypt not by the Egyptians, nor by their suzerains the Turks, but by a small squadron of the British Royal Navy, commanded by a young admiral named Horatio Nelson. This was the second bitter lesson the Muslims had to learn: not only could a Western power arrive, invade, and rule at will but only another Western power could get it out.

By the early twentieth century-although a precarious independence was retained by Turkey and Iran and by some remoter countries like Afghanistan, which at that time did not seem worth the trouble of invading-almost the entire Muslim world had been incorporated into the four European empires of Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. Middle Eastern governments and factions were forced to learn how to play these mighty rivals off against one another. For a time, they played the game with some success. Since the Western allies-Britain and France and then the United States-effectively dominated the region, Middle Eastern resisters naturally looked to those allies' enemies for support. In the Second World War, they turned to Germany; in the Cold War, to the Soviet Union.

And then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the sole world superpower. The era of Middle Eastern history that had been inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was ended by Gorbachev and the elder George Bush. At first, it seemed that the era of imperial rivalry had ended with the withdrawal of both competitors: the Soviet Union couldn't play the imperial role, and the United States wouldn't. But most Middle Easterners didn't see it that way. For them, this was simply a new phase in the old imperial game, with America as the latest in a succession of Western imperial overlords, except that this overlord had no rival-no Hitler or Stalin-whom they could use either to damage or to influence the West. In the absence of such a patron, Middle Easterners found themselves obliged to mobilize their own force of resistance. Al Qaeda-its leaders, its sponsors, its financiers-is one such force.
III-"THE GREAT SATAN"

America's new role-and the Middle East's perception of it-was vividly illustrated by an incident in Pakistan in 1979. On November 20th, a band of a thousand Muslim religious radicals seized the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. Their declared aim was to "purify Islam" and liberate the holy land of Arabia from the royal "clique of infidels" and the corrupt religious leaders who supported them. Their leader, in speeches played from loudspeakers, denounced Westerners as the destroyers of fundamental Islamic values and the Saudi government as their accomplices. He called for a return to the old Islamic traditions of "justice and equality." After some hard fighting, the rebels were suppressed. Their leader was executed on January 9, 1980, along with sixty-two of his followers, among them Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, and citizens of other Arab countries.

Meanwhile, a demonstration in support of the rebels took place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A rumor had circulated-endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in the process of establishing himself as the revolutionary leader in Iran-that American troops had been involved in the clashes in Mecca. The American Embassy was attacked by a crowd of Muslim demonstrators, and two Americans and two Pakistani employees were killed. Why had Khomeini stood by a report that was not only false but wildly improbable?

These events took place within the context of the Iranian revolution of 1979. On November 4th, the United States Embassy in Teheran had been seized, and fifty-two Americans were taken hostage; those hostages were then held for four hundred and forty-four days, until their release on January 20, 1981. The motives for this, baffling to many at the time, have become clearer since, thanks to subsequent statements and revelations from the hostage-takers and others. It is now apparent that the hostage crisis occurred not because relations between Iran and the United States were deteriorating but because they were improving. In the fall of 1979, the relatively moderate Iranian Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, had arranged to meet with the American national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the aegis of the Algerian government. The two men met on November 1st, and were reported to have been photographed shaking hands. There seemed to be a real possibility-in the eyes of the radicals, a real danger-that there might be some accommodation between the two countries. Protesters seized the Embassy and took the American diplomats hostage in order to destroy any hope of further dialogue.

For Khomeini, the United States was "the Great Satan," the principal adversary against whom he had to wage his holy war for Islam. America was by then perceived-rightly-as the leader of what we like to call "the free world." Then, as in the past, this world of unbelievers was seen as the only serious force rivalling and preventing the divinely ordained spread and triumph of Islam. But American observers, reluctant to recognize the historical quality of the hostility, sought other reasons for the anti-American sentiment that had been intensifying in the Islamic world for some time. One explanation, which was widely accepted, particularly in American foreign-policy circles, was that America's image had been tarnished by its wartime and continuing alliance with the former colonial powers of Europe.

In their country's defense, some American commentators pointed out that, unlike the Western European imperialists, America had itself been a victim of colonialism; the United States was the first country to win freedom from British rule. But the hope that the Middle Eastern subjects of the former British and French Empires would accept the American Revolution as a model for their own anti-imperialist struggle rested on a basic fallacy that Arab writers were quick to point out. The American Revolution was fought not by Native American nationalists but by British settlers, and, far from being a victory against colonialism, it represented colonialism's ultimate triumph-the English in North America succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer needed the support of the mother country.

It is hardly surprising that former colonial subjects in the Middle East would see America as being tainted by the same kind of imperialism as Western Europe. But Middle Eastern resentment of imperial powers has not always been consistent. The Soviet Union, which extended the imperial conquests of the tsars of Russia, ruled with no light hand over tens of millions of Muslim subjects in Central Asian states and in the Caucasus; had it not been for American opposition and the Cold War, the Arab world might well have shared the fate of Poland and Hungary, or, more probably, that of Uzbekistan. And yet the Soviet Union suffered no similar backlash of anger and hatred from the Arab community. Even the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979-a clear case of imperialist aggression, conquest, and domination-triggered only a muted response in the Islamic world. The P.L.O. observer at the United Nations defended the invasion, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference did little to protest it. South Yemen and Syria boycotted a meeting held to discuss the issue, Libya delivered an attack on the United States, and the P.L.O. representative abstained from voting and submitted his reservations in writing. Ironically, it was the United States, in the end, that was left to orchestrate an Islamic response to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan.

As the Western European empires faded, Middle Eastern anti-Americanism was attributed more and more to another cause: American support for Israel, first in its conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, then in its conflict with the neighboring Arab states and the larger Islamic world. There is certainly support for this hypothesis in Arab statements on the subject. But there are incongruities, too. In the nineteen-thirties, Nazi Germany's policies were the main cause of Jewish migration to Palestine, then a British mandate, and the consequent reinforcement of the Jewish community there. The Nazis not only permitted this migration; they facilitated it until the outbreak of the war, while the British, in the somewhat forlorn hope of winning Arab good will, imposed and enforced restrictions. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership of the time, and many other Arab leaders, supported the Germans, who sent the Jews to Palestine, rather than the British, who tried to keep them out.

The same kind of discrepancy can be seen in the events leading to and following the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948. The Soviet Union played a significant role in procuring the majority by which the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and then gave Israel immediate de-jure recognition. The United States, however, gave only de-facto recognition. More important, the American government maintained a partial arms embargo on Israel, while Czechoslovakia, at Moscow's direction, immediately sent a supply of weaponry, which enabled the new state to survive the attempts to strangle it at birth. As late as the war of 1967, Israel still relied for its arms on European, mainly French, suppliers, not on the United States.

The Soviet Union had been one of Israel's biggest supporters. Yet, when Egypt announced an arms deal with Russia, in September of 1955, there was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response in the Arab press. The Chambers of Deputies in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan met immediately and voted resolutions of congratulation to President Nasser; even Nuri Said, the pro-Western ruler of Iraq, felt obliged to congratulate his Egyptian colleague-this despite the fact that the Arabs had no special love of Russia, nor did Muslims in the Arab world or elsewhere wish to invite either Communist ideology or Soviet power to their lands. What delighted them was that they saw the arms deal-no doubt correctly-as a slap in the face for the West. The slap, and the agitated Western response, reinforced the mood of hatred and spite toward the West and encouraged its exponents. It also encouraged the United States to look more favorably on Israel, now seen as a reliable and potentially useful ally in a largely hostile region. Today, it is often forgotten that the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel was a consequence, not a cause, of Soviet penetration.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of many struggles between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds-on a list that includes Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Sinkiang, Kashmir, and Mindanao-but it has attracted far more attention than any of the others. There are several reasons for this. First, since Israel is a democracy and an open society, it is much easier to report-and misreport-what is going on. Second, Jews are involved, and this can usually secure the attention of those who, for one reason or another, are for or against them. Third, and most important, resentment of Israel is the only grievance that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger.
IV-DOUBLE STANDARDS

This raises another issue. Increasingly in recent decades, Middle Easterners have articulated a new grievance against American policy: not American complicity with imperialism or with Zionism but something nearer home and more immediate-American complicity with the corrupt tyrants who rule over them. For obvious reasons, this particular complaint does not often appear in public discourse. Middle Eastern governments, such as those of Iraq, Syria, and the Palestine Authority, have developed great skill in controlling their own media and manipulating those of Western countries. Nor, for equally obvious reasons, is it raised in diplomatic negotiation. But it is discussed, with increasing anguish and urgency, in private conversations with listeners who can be trusted, and recently even in public. (Interestingly, the Iranian revolution of 1979 was one time when this resentment was expressed openly. The Shah was accused of supporting America, but America was also attacked for imposing an impious and tyrannical leader as its puppet.)

Almost the entire Muslim world is affected by poverty and tyranny. Both of these problems are attributed, especially by those with an interest in diverting attention from themselves, to America-the first to American economic dominance and exploitation, now thinly disguised as "globalization"; the second to America's support for the many so-called Muslim tyrants who serve its purposes. Globalization has become a major theme in the Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with American economic penetration. The increasingly wretched economic situation in most of the Muslim world, relative not only to the West but also to the tiger economies of East Asia, fuels these frustrations. American paramountcy, as Middle Easterners see it, indicates where to direct the blame and the resulting hostility.

There is some justice in one charge that is frequently levelled against the United States: Middle Easterners increasingly complain that the United States judges them by different and lower standards than it does Europeans and Americans, both in what is expected of them and in what they may expect-in terms of their financial well-being and their political freedom. They assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even defend actions and support rulers that they would not tolerate in their own countries. As many Middle Easterners see it, the Western and American governments' basic position is: "We don't care what you do to your own people at home, so long as you are coöperative in meeting our needs and protecting our interests."

The most dramatic example of this form of racial and cultural arrogance was what Iraqis and others see as the betrayal of 1991, when the United States called on the Iraqi people to revolt against Saddam Hussein. The rebels of northern and southern Iraq did so, and the United States forces watched while Saddam, using the helicopters that the ceasefire agreement had allowed him to retain, bloodily suppressed them, group by group. The reasoning behind this action-or, rather, inaction-is not difficult to see. Certainly, the victorious Gulf War coalition wanted a change of government in Iraq, but they had hoped for a coup d'état, not a revolution. They saw a genuine popular uprising as dangerous-it could lead to uncertainty or even anarchy in the region. A coup would be more predictable and could achieve the desired result-the replacement of Saddam Hussein by another, more amenable tyrant, who could take his place among America's so-called allies in the coalition. The United States' abandonment of Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets was understood in much the same way as its abandonment of the Iraqi rebels.

Another example of this double standard occurred in the Syrian city of Hama and in refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila. The troubles in Hama began with an uprising headed by the radical group the Muslim Brothers in 1982. The government responded swiftly. Troops were sent, supported by armor, artillery, and aircraft, and within a very short time they had reduced a large part of the city to rubble. The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand. The action, which was ordered and supervised by the Syrian President, Hafiz al-Assad, attracted little attention at the time, and did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting Assad, who received a long succession of visits from American Secretaries of State James Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright, and even from President Clinton. It is hardly likely that Americans would have been so eager to propitiate a ruler who had perpetrated such crimes on Western soil, with Western victims.

The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of the Lebanese President Bashir Gemayyel. Ariel Sharon, who at the time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his position as Minister of Defense. It is understandable that the Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon for crimes against humanity before a tribunal in Europe. No such suggestion was made regarding either Saddam Hussein or Hafiz al-Assad, who slaughtered tens of thousands of their compatriots. It is easy to understand the bitterness of those who see the implication here. It was as if the militia who had carried out the deed were animals, not accountable by the same human standards as the Israelis.

Thanks to modern communications, the people of the Middle East are increasingly aware of the deep and widening gulf between the opportunities of the free world outside their borders and the appalling privation and repression within them. The resulting anger is naturally directed first against their rulers, and then against those whom they see as keeping those rulers in power for selfish reasons. It is surely significant that most of the terrorists who have been identified in the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington come from Saudi Arabia and Egypt-that is, from countries whose rulers are deemed friendly to the United States.
V-A FAILURE OF MODERNITY

If America's double standards-and its selfish support for corrupt regimes in the Arab world-have long caused anger among Muslims, why has that anger only recently found its expression in acts of terrorism? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslims responded in two ways to the widening imbalance of power and wealth between their societies and those of the West. The reformers or modernizers tried to identify the sources of Western wealth and power and adapt them to their own use, in order to meet the West on equal terms. Muslim governments-first in Turkey, then in Egypt and Iran-made great efforts to modernize, that is, to Westernize, the weaponry and equipment of their armed forces; they even dressed them in Western-style uniforms and marched them to the tune of brass bands. When defeats on the battlefield were matched by others in the marketplace, the reformers tried to discover the secrets of Western economic success and to emulate them by establishing industries of their own. Young Muslim students who were sent to the West to study the arts of war also came back with dangerous and explosive notions about elected assemblies and constitutional governments.

All attempts at reform ended badly. If anything, the modernization of the armed forces accelerated the process of defeat and withdrawal, culminating in the humiliating failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent a half million Jews from building a new state in the debris of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1948. With rare exceptions, the economic reforms, capitalist and socialist alike, fared no better. The Middle Eastern combination of low productivity and high birth rate makes for an unstable mix, and by all indications the Arab countries, in such matters as job creation, education, technology, and productivity, lag ever farther behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the more recent recruits to Western-style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Out of a hundred and fifty-five countries ranked for economic freedom in 2001, the highest-ranking Muslim states are Bahrain (No. 9), the United Arab Emirates (No. 14), and Kuwait (No. 42). According to the World Bank, in 2000 the average annual income in the Muslim countries from Morocco to Bangladesh was only half the world average, and in the nineties the combined gross national products of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon-that is, three of Israel's Arab neighbors-were considerably smaller than that of Israel alone. The per-capita figures are worse. According to United Nations statistics, Israel's per-capita G.D.P. was three and a half times that of Lebanon and Syria, twelve times that of Jordan, and thirteen and a half times that of Egypt. The contrast with the West, and now also with the Far East, is even more disconcerting.

Modernization in politics has fared no better-perhaps even worse-than in warfare and economics. Many Islamic countries have experimented with democratic institutions of one kind or another. In some, as in Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, they were introduced by innovative native reformers; in others, they were installed and then bequeathed by departing imperialists. The record, with the possible exception of Turkey, is one of almost unrelieved failure. Western-style parties and parliaments almost invariably ended in corrupt tyrannies, maintained by repression and indoctrination. The only European model that worked, in the sense of accomplishing its purposes, was the one-party dictatorship. The Baath Party, different branches of which have ruled Iraq and Syria for decades, incorporated the worst features of its Nazi and Soviet models. Since the death of Nasser, in 1970, no Arab leader has been able to gain extensive support outside his own country. Indeed, no Arab leader has been willing to submit his claim to power to a free vote. The leaders who have come closest to winning pan-Arab approval are Qaddafi in the seventies and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. That these two, of all Arab rulers, should enjoy such wide popularity is in itself both appalling and revealing.

In view of this, it is hardly surprising that many Muslims speak of the failure of modernization. The rejection of modernity in favor of a return to the sacred past has a varied and ramified history in the region and has given rise to a number of movements. The most important of these, Wahhabism, has lasted more than two and a half centuries and exerts a significant influence on Muslim movements in the Middle East today. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87), was a theologian from the Najd area of Arabia. In 1744, he launched a campaign of purification and renewal. His purpose was to return the Muslim world to the pure and authentic Islam of the Prophet, removing and, where necessary, destroying all later accretions. The Wahhabi cause was embraced by the Saudi rulers of Najd, who promoted it, for a while successfully, by force. In a series of campaigns, they carried their rule and their faith to much of central and eastern Arabia, before being rebuffed, at the end of the eighteenth century, by the Ottoman sultan, whom the Saudi ruler had denounced as a backslider from the true faith and a usurper in the Muslim state. The second alliance of Wahhabi doctrine and Saudi force began in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continued after the collapse. The Saudi conquest of the Hejaz, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, increased the prestige of the House of Saud and gave new scope to the Wahhabi doctrine, which spread, in a variety of forms, throughout the Islamic world.

From the nineteen-thirties on, the discovery of oil in the eastern provinces of Arabia and its exploitation, chiefly by American companies, brought vast new wealth and bitter new social tensions. In the old society, inequalities of wealth had been limited, and their effects were restrained, on the one hand, by the traditional social bonds and obligations that linked rich and poor and, on the other hand, by the privacy of Muslim home life. Modernization has all too often widened the gap, destroyed those social bonds, and, through the universality of the modern media, made the resulting inequalities painfully visible. All this has created new and receptive audiences for Wahhabi teachings and those of other like-minded groups, among them the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It has now become normal to designate these movements as "fundamentalist." The term is unfortunate for a number of reasons. It was originally an American Protestant term, used to designate Protestant churches that differed in some respects from the mainstream churches. These differences bear no resemblance to those that divide Muslim fundamentalists from the Islamic mainstream, and the use of the term can therefore be misleading. Broadly speaking, Muslim fundamentalists are those who feel that the troubles of the Muslim world at the present time are the result not of insufficient modernization but of excessive modernization. From their point of view, the primary struggle is not against the Western enemy as such but against the Westernizing enemies at home, who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim peoples. The task of the Muslims is to depose and remove these infidel rulers, sometimes by defeating or expelling their foreign patrons and protectors, and to abrogate and destroy the laws, institutions, and social customs that they have introduced, so as to return to a purely Islamic way of life, in accordance with the principles of Islam and the rules of the Holy Law.
VI-THE RISE OF TERRORISM

Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers may not represent Islam, and their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christian civilization, so they must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and historical context.

If one looks at the historical record, the Muslim approach to war does not differ greatly from that of Christians, or that of Jews in the very ancient and very modern periods when the option was open to them. While Muslims, perhaps more frequently than Christians, made war against the followers of other faiths to bring them within the scope of Islam, Christians-with the notable exception of the Crusades, which were themselves an imitation of Muslim practice-were more prone to fight internal religious wars against those whom they saw as schismatics or heretics. Islam, no doubt owing to the political and military involvement of its founder, takes what one might call a more pragmatic view than the Gospels of the realities of societal relationships. Because war for the faith has been a religious obligation within Islam from the beginning, it is elaborately regulated. Islamic religious law, or the Sharia, deals in some detail with such matters as the opening, conclusion, and resumption of hostilities, the avoidance of injury to noncombatants, the treatment of prisoners, the division of booty, and even the types of weapons that may be used. Some of these rules have been explained away by modern radical commentators who support the fundamentalists; others are simply disregarded.

What about terrorism? Followers of many faiths have at one time or another invoked religion in the practice of murder, both retail and wholesale. Two words deriving from such movements in Eastern religions have even entered the English language: "thug," from India, and "assassin," from the Middle East, both commemorating fanatical religious sects whose form of worship was to murder those whom they regarded as enemies of the faith. The question of the lawfulness of assassination in Islam first arose in 656 A.D., with the murder of the third caliph, Uthman, by pious Muslim rebels who believed they were carrying out the will of God. The first of a succession of civil wars was fought over the question of whether the rebels were fulfilling or defying God's commandment. Islamic law and tradition are very clear on the duty of obedience to the Islamic ruler. But they also quote two sayings attributed to the Prophet: "There is no obedience in sin" and "Do not obey a creature against his creator." If a ruler orders something that is contrary to the law of God, then the duty of obedience is replaced by a duty of disobedience. The notion of tyrannicide-the justified removal of a tyrant-was not an Islamic innovation; it was familiar in antiquity, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike, and those who performed it were often acclaimed as heroes.

Members of the eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Muslim sect known as the Assassins, which was based in Iran and Syria, seem to have been the first to transform the act that was named after them into a system and an ideology. Their efforts, contrary to popular belief, were primarily directed not against the Crusaders but against their own leaders, whom they saw as impious usurpers. In this sense, the Assassins are the true predecessors of many of the so-called Islamic terrorists of today, some of whom explicitly make this point. The name Assassins, with its connotation of "hashish-taker," was given to them by their Muslim enemies. They called themselves fidayeen -those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for their cause. The term has been revived and adopted by their modern imitators. In two respects, however-in their choice of weapons and of victims-the Assassins were markedly different from their modern successors. The victim was always an individual-a highly placed political, military, or religious leader who was seen as the source of evil. He, and he alone, was killed. This action was not terrorism in the current sense of that term but, rather, what we would call "targeted assassination." The method was always the same: the dagger. The Assassins disdained the use of poison, crossbows, and other weapons that could be used from a distance, and the Assassin did not expect-or, it would seem, even desire-to survive his act, which he believed would insure him eternal bliss. But in no circumstance did he commit suicide. He died at the hands of his captors.

The twentieth century brought a renewal of such actions in the Middle East, though of different types and for different purposes, and terrorism has gone through several phases. During the last years of the British Empire, imperial Britain faced terrorist movements in its Middle Eastern dependencies that represented three different cultures: Greeks in Cyprus, Jews in Palestine, and Arabs in Aden. All three acted from nationalist, rather than religious, motives. Though very different in their backgrounds and political circumstances, the three were substantially alike in their tactics. Their purpose was to persuade the imperial power that staying in the region was not worth the cost in blood. Their method was to attack the military and, to a lesser extent, administrative personnel and installations. All three operated only within their own territory and generally avoided collateral damage. All three succeeded in their endeavors.

Thanks to the rapid development of the media, and especially of television, the more recent forms of terrorism are targeted not at specific and limited enemy objectives but at world opinion. Their primary purpose is not to defeat or even to weaken the enemy militarily but to gain publicity-a psychological victory. The most successful group by far in this exercise has been the Palestine Liberation Organization. The P.L.O. was founded in 1964 but became important in 1967, after the defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War. Regular warfare had failed; it was time to try other methods. The targets in this form of armed struggle were not military or other government establishments, which are usually too well guarded, but public places and gatherings of any kind, which are overwhelmingly civilian, and in which the victims do not necessarily have a connection to the declared enemy. Examples of this include, in 1970, the hijacking of three aircraft-one Swiss, one British, and one American-which were all taken to Amman; the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the seizure in 1973 of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, and the murder there of two Americans and a Belgian diplomat; and the takeover of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in 1985. Other attacks were directed against schools, shopping malls, discothèques, pizzerias, and even passengers waiting in line at European airports. These and other attacks by the P.L.O. were immediately and remarkably successful in attaining their objectives-the capture of newspaper headlines and television screens. They also drew a great deal of support in sometimes unexpected places, and raised their perpetrators to starring roles in the drama of international relations. Small wonder that others were encouraged to follow their example-in Ireland, in Spain, and elsewhere.

The Arab terrorists of the seventies and eighties made it clear that they were waging a war for an Arab or Palestinian cause, not for Islam. Indeed, a significant proportion of the P.L.O. leaders and activists were Christian. Unlike socialism, which was discredited by its failure, nationalism was discredited by its success. In every Arab land but Palestine, the nationalists achieved their purposes-the defeat and departure of imperialist rulers, and the establishment of national sovereignty under national leaders. For a while, freedom and independence were used as more or less synonymous and interchangeable terms. The early experience of independence, however, revealed that this was a sad error. Independence and freedom are very different, and all too often the attainment of one meant the end of the other.

Both in defeat and in victory, the Arab nationalists of the twentieth century pioneered the methods that were later adopted by religious terrorists, in particular the lack of concern at the slaughter of innocent bystanders. This unconcern reached new proportions in the terror campaign launched by Osama bin Laden in the early nineties. The first major example was the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. In order to kill twelve American diplomats, the terrorists were willing to slaughter more than two hundred Africans, many of them Muslims, who happened to be in the vicinity. The same disregard for human life, on a vastly greater scale, underlay the action in New York on September 11th.

There is no doubt that the foundation of Al Qaeda and the consecutive declarations of war by Osama bin Laden marked the beginning of a new and ominous phase in the history of both Islam and terrorism. The triggers for bin Laden's actions, as he himself has explained very clearly, were America's presence in Arabia during the Gulf War-a desecration of the Muslim Holy Land-and America's use of Saudi Arabia as a base for an attack on Iraq. If Arabia is the most symbolic location in the world of Islam, Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history, is the second.

There was another, perhaps more important, factor driving bin Laden. In the past, Muslims fighting against the West could always turn to the enemies of the West for comfort, encouragement, and material and military help. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the first time in centuries there was no such useful enemy. There were some nations that had the will, but they lacked the means to play the role of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. Bin Laden and his cohorts soon realized that, in the new configuration of world power, if they wished to fight America they had to do it themselves. Some eleven years ago, they created Al Qaeda, which included many veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Their task might have seemed daunting to anyone else, but they did not see it that way. In their view, they had already driven the Russians out of Afghanistan, in a defeat so overwhelming that it led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Having overcome the superpower that they had always regarded as more formidable, they felt ready to take on the other; in this they were encouraged by the opinion, often expressed by Osama bin Laden, among others, that America was a paper tiger.

Muslim terrorists had been driven by such beliefs before. One of the most surprising revelations in the memoirs of those who held the American Embassy in Teheran from 1979 to 1981 was that their original intention had been to hold the building and the hostages for only a few days. They changed their minds when statements from Washington made it clear that there was no danger of serious action against them. They finally released the hostages, they explained, only because they feared that the new President, Ronald Reagan, might approach the problem "like a cowboy."

Bin Laden and his followers clearly have no such concern, and their hatred is neither constrained by fear nor diluted by respect. As precedents, they repeatedly cite the American retreats from Vietnam, from Lebanon, and-the most important of all, in their eyes-from Somalia. Bin Laden's remarks in an interview with John Miller, of ABC News, on May 28, 1998, are especially revealing:

We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than twenty-four hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. . . . The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers. . . . After a few blows, they ran in defeat. . . . They forgot about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order. [They] left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat, and stopped using such titles.

Similar inferences are drawn when American spokesmen refuse to implicate-and sometimes even hasten to exculpate-parties that most Middle Easterners believe to be deeply involved in the attacks on America. A good example is the repeated official denial of any Iraqi involvement in the events of September 11th. It may indeed be true that there is no evidence of Iraqi involvement, and that the Administration is unwilling to make false accusations. But it is difficult for Middle Easterners to resist the idea that this refusal to implicate Saddam Hussein is due less to a concern for legality than to a fear of confronting him. He would indeed be a formidable adversary. If he faces the prospect of imminent destruction, as would be inevitable in a real confrontation, there is no knowing what he might do with his already considerable arsenal of unconventional weapons. Certainly, he would not be restrained by any scruples, or by the consideration that the greatest victims of any such attack would be his own people and their immediate neighbors.

For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century. For him and his followers, this is a moment of opportunity. Today, America exemplifies the civilization and embodies the leadership of the House of War, and, like Rome and Byzantium, it has become degenerate and demoralized, ready to be overthrown. Khomeini's designation of the United States as "the Great Satan" was telling. In the Koran, Satan is described as "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men." This is the essential point about Satan: he is neither a conqueror nor an exploiter-he is, first and last, a tempter. And for the members of Al Qaeda it is the seduction of America that represents the greatest threat to the kind of Islam they wish to impose on their fellow-Muslims.

But there are others for whom America offers a different kind of temptation-the promise of human rights, of free institutions, and of a responsible and elected government. There are a growing number of individuals and even some movements that have undertaken the complex task of introducing such institutions in their own countries. It is not easy. Similar attempts, as noted, led to many of today's corrupt regimes. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, only one, the Turkish Republic, has operated democratic institutions over a long period of time and, despite difficult and ongoing problems, has made progress in establishing a liberal economy and a free society and political order.

In two countries, Iraq and Iran, where the regimes are strongly anti-American, there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments. We could do much to help them, and have done little. In most other countries in the region, there are people who share our values, sympathize with us, and would like to share our way of life. They understand freedom, and want to enjoy it at home. It is more difficult for us to help those people, but at least we should not hinder them. If they succeed, we shall have friends and allies in the true, not just the diplomatic, sense of these words.

Meanwhile, there is a more urgent problem. If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam-Russia, China, India-who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam. ♦

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President Bush and other Western politicians have taken great pains to make it clear that the war in which we are engaged is a war against terrorism-not a war against Arabs, or, more generally, against Muslims, who are urged to join us in this struggle against our common enemy.

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Soltas, Evan, and Stephens-Davidowitz ,Seth. "The Rise of Hate Search." The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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Soltas, Evan, and Stephens-Davidowitz ,Seth. "The Rise of Hate Search." The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Dec. 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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This New York Times article describes correlation in the rise of prejudice searches on the internet and hate speech/crimes. In particular it analyzes the rise in anti-Muslim internet searches and hate speech and crime targeted towards Muslim people post-9/11 (between 2004 and 2013), and comparing it to the prejudice and stigmatic ideology and action other groups face. This article helps enhance my understanding of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"  because it directly examines the rise in Islamophobia and racism against people of Middle-Eastern descent post 9/11, a hard-hitting topic in the novella.

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HOURS after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, and minutes after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.

The top Google search in California with the word "Muslims" in it was "kill Muslims." And the rest of America searched for the phrase "kill Muslims" with about the same frequency that they searched for "martini recipe," "migraine symptoms" and "Cowboys roster."

People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?

Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.

We measured Islamophobic sentiment by using common Google searches that imply hateful attitudes toward Muslims. A search for "are all Muslims terrorists?" for example leaves little to the imagination about what the searcher really thinks. Searches for "I hate Muslims" are even clearer.

When Islamophobic searches are at their highest levels, such as during the controversy over the "ground zero mosque" in 2010 or around the anniversary of 9/11, hate crimes tend to be at their highest levels, too.

In 2014, according to the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes represented 16.3 percent of the total of 1,092 reported offenses motivated by religious bias. Anti-Semitism still led the way as a motive for these crimes, at 58.2 percent.

Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.

The frightening thing is this: If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although it will take awhile for the F.B.I. to collect and analyze the data before we know whether anti-Muslim hate crimes are in fact rising spectacularly now, Islamophobic searches in the United States were 10 times higher the week after the Paris attacks than the week before. They have been elevated since then and rose again after the San Bernardino attack.

According to our model, when all the data is analyzed by the F.B.I., there will have been more than 200 anti-Muslim attacks in 2015, making it the worst year since 2001.

How can these Google searches track Islamophobia so well? Who searches for "I hate Muslims" anyway?

We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night's game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.

There are thousands of searches every year, for example, for "I hate my boss," "people are annoying" and "I am drunk." Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.

There are about 1,600 searches for "I hate my boss" every month in the United States. In a survey of American workers, half of the respondents said that they had left a job because they hated their boss; there are about 150 million workers in America.

In November, there were about 3,600 searches in the United States for "I hate Muslims" and about 2,400 for "kill Muslims." We suspect these Islamophobic searches represent a similarly tiny fraction of those who had the same thoughts but didn't drop them into Google.

"If someone is willing to say 'I hate them' or 'they disgust me,' we know that those emotions are as good a predictor of behavior as actual intent," said Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton, pointing to 50 years of psychology research on anti-black bias. "If people are making expressive searches about Muslims, it's likely to be tied to anti-Muslim hate crime."

Google searches seem to suffer from selection bias: Instead of asking a random sample of Americans how they feel, you just get information from those who are motivated to search. But this restriction may actually help search data predict hate crimes.

"Public polls, properly done, describe what a representative sample of Americans believe and feel about an issue," Paul Sniderman, a political scientist at Stanford, explained in an email. "Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes."

It doesn't take a representative sample to commit a hate crime. It takes one person. And many Muslim Americans have already experienced the havoc that one Islamophobe can create.

Asma Mohammed Nizami is a 23-year-old Muslim woman from Minnesota who directs services for students at a nonprofit and wears a head scarf, or hijab. Last Saturday, driving home from an event, she stopped at a traffic light, where she saw a man in the next car over glaring at her. He rolled down his window and called her a "Muslim bitch." When Ms. Nizami started to drive away, he trailed her and then tried to run her off the road with his red Chevy Impala.

"It was terrifying," said Ms. Nizami. "Ever since San Bernardino, I was scared someone would blame me, would react this way." After the incident, she said, she ordered Mace spray and a dashboard camera from Amazon and wants to get her car windows tinted.

"It's cold out here in Minnesota, so when I drive, I've started putting my hood up over my hijab," Ms. Nizami said. "If I know someone can walk me to my car, I ask. It feels childish, but I ask."

While the vast majority of Muslim Americans won't be victims of hate crimes, few escape the "constant sense of fear and paranoia" that they or their loved ones might be next, said Rana Ibrahem, a Muslim woman from Long Island who works as a paralegal.

"When I see the hate crimes against mosques, I worry about my brother, who is bearded, and I worry about my mother, who wears the hijab," said Ms. Ibrahem. "My mother tells me, 'When I go to the supermarket now, I feel like everyone is staring at me, like I might be the object of their concern and fear.' "

What about the other side of the coin - compassion and understanding? Do they stand a chance against hate?

Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. "Who is Muhammad?" "what do Muslims believe?" and "what does the Quran say?" for instance, were no match for intolerance. In the days following the San Bernardino attacks, for every American concerned with "Islamophobia," another was searching for "kill Muslims." While hate searches were about 20 percent of all top searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it.

It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It's that it's exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States.

We examined prejudicial searches against black people, white people, gay people, Asians, Jews, Mexicans and Christians. We estimate that negative attitudes against Muslims today are higher than prejudice against any group in any month since 2004, when Google began preserving detailed data on search volumes.

The search data also tells us that changes in Americans' policy concerns have been dramatic. They happened, quite literally, within minutes of the terror attacks.

Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans' searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could "help," "volunteer" or "aid." The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.

Or consider searches related to mosques. For most of the past decade, the top searches for mosques expressed cultural curiosity - "what are mosques?" "what does mosque mean?" and "when do Muslims go to mosque?" But right after the San Bernardino shooting, searches about closing mosques, a once-unthinkable policy, surged to a sixth of Americans' search volume about mosques.

What, then, can we do to fight Islamophobia?

Unfortunately, there is not much evidence that some of the most obvious-sounding solutions might work. One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the " contact hypothesis ": If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate.

We did not find support for this in the data - in fact, we found evidence for the opposite. We looked at searches in the 10 counties with the highest Muslim populations in the United States. On average, these counties are about 11 percent Muslim, compared with 0.9 percent of the United States as a whole. We estimate, in these 10 counties, that anti-Muslim search rates are about eight times higher than they are in the rest of the country.

That's evidence for the dominance of the " racial threat " hypothesis, which predicts that proximity breeds tension, not trust. John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, said, "This is one of the better chances for contact to work, and it doesn't."

Another solution might be for leaders to talk about the importance of tolerance and the irrationality of hatred, as President Obama did in his Oval Office speech last Sunday night. He asked Americans to reject discrimination and religious tests for immigration. The reactions to his speech offer an excellent opportunity to see what works and what doesn't work.

Mostly, we found that Mr. Obama's well-meaning words fell on deaf ears. Overall, in fact, his speech provoked intolerance. The president said, "It is the responsibility of all Americans - of every faith - to reject discrimination." But searches calling Muslims "terrorists," "bad," "violent" and "evil" doubled during and shortly after his speech.

Mr. Obama also said, "It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country." But negative searches about Syrian refugees rose 60 percent. Searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35 percent. The president asked us to "not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear." But searches for "kill Muslims" tripled during his speech.

There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, "Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country."

After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after "Muslim" was not "terrorists," "extremists" or "refugees." It was "athletes," followed by "soldiers." And, in fact, "athletes" kept the top spot for a full day afterward.

Jon Favreau, the president's former chief speechwriter, was not surprised that this line was so effective. He singled it out as the best in an early draft he read, and noticed the many shocked tweets from those who had learned that Shaquille O'Neal is Muslim.

"Finding out that someone who's been a hero of yours, that you've looked up to your whole life, happens to be a Muslim," Mr. Favreau said. "That's a pretty powerful reminder, this is a religion that is a part of America and has always been a part of America."

On the whole, though, the response to the president's speech shows that appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire. Subtly provoking their curiosity, giving them new information, and offering them new images of the group that is stoking their rage: That may direct their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

After sifting through the search data, we think there are three things the rest of us not giving speeches in the Oval Office can do.

First, parents should be talking to their kids about how the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans pose no threat to them.

Second, police departments would be wise to use search data to allocate resources through predictive policing. The data, for example, could tell police chiefs when sending a cop to do an extra drive through a Muslim neighborhood, or making sure that the town mosque was safe overnight, would be a good idea.

Third, Muslim Americans are right to take some precautions. Like most grave threats, hate crimes are rare. Our model suggests that, if Islamophobic sentiment stays at its current level, about one in every 10,000 Muslims will be the victim of a reported hate crime over the next year, similar to the rate of automobile fatalities and orders of magnitude higher than the chance of being a victim of terrorism.

The human capacity for rage and anger will never disappear. But there is a huge difference between this flare-up of hatred and those from decades past. We now have rich, digital data that can help us figure out what causes hate and what may work to contain it. That might offer some hope to Muslim Americans who see a country that right now appears more prone to fury than understanding.

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HOURS after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, and minutes after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.

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Ahmad, Bilal. "Post-Modernist Study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Academia.edu. University of Dundee, School of Humanities, n.d. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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Ahmad, Bilal. "Post-Modernist Study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist." Academia.edu. University of Dundee, School of Humanities, n.d. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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This scholarly essay acknowledges symbolism throughout the novella that relates to Pakistani culture as well as how Americans perceived Pakistani people ,and vice versa, before and after 9/11. One really notable point made in the study is that the main character's name is Changez. This is the Urdu (language of Pakistan) name for Genghis as in the Mongolian leader Genghis Khan, famed for his persecution of Muslims. By using the name Changez, I personally believe (although this thought process was not presented in the article) that Hamid wanted to make the point that Changez does not follow the ideologies of Islamic Fundamentalism, but is rather just patriotic of his mother country, very clear. He does not intend or wish for harm to come to nations of the Western hemisphere, but rather recognizes their short comings. The article helps me better understand "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because it helps me examine symbolism throughout the book by providing me with insight based on Pakistani culture.

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Post-Modernist Study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.

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Asik, Siddika. "Silencing the Other: "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"" Questica.com/library. Civilacademy Journal of Social Sciences, Winter 2008. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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Asik, Siddika. "Silencing the Other: "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"" Questica.com/library. Civilacademy Journal of Social Sciences, Winter 2008. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

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This is a scholarly article which focuses on how the media contributes to peoples perception of the world around them. It narrows in on how media contributed to the American perception of Muslims and people of Middle-Eastern descent post-9/11 and how this Islamophobia was portrayed and brought to light through Hamid's novella. Post-9/11 xenophobia that targeted people of the Middle-East significantly heightened in America and has not gone away due to tensions based off the war on terror and stigma, this arises as a topic in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" when Changez faces threats and phobia of New Yorkers after 9/11 due to being Pakistani, especially after growing a beard like many devout Muslims do to emulate the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. The article helps me better understand the novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" because it provides in-depth examination between the book and the reality of the time period.

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Silencing the Other: The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Counter Discourse

   "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of
   assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you.
   Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a
   lover of America..." So speaks the
   mysterious Pakistani at a Lahore cafe as
   the dark settles, seeming to invite the
   reader to sip tea with them as he/she
   reads absorbed in his ironic
   "conversation" with his unnamed
   American guest.

We are living in an era of constant exposure to one-sided discourses in every single phase of our lives through various forms of media. This is such an exposure that on one hand, we unconsciously start to take such discourses for granted even if they actually attack the way we live or believe; and on the other, we produce our own without even being aware of that fact most of the time. One cannot deny the role of mass media or technology in this process.

We walk around with media generated images of the world, using them to construct meaning about political and social issues. The lens through which we receive these images is not neutral but evinces the power and point of view of the political and economic elites who operate and focus it. And the special genius of this system is to make the whole process seem so normal and natural that the very art of social construction is invisible. (Gamson et al. 374)

This is true for all media, both printed and otherwise. Another effect is certainly globalization in a larger sense, which "has had positive consequences with respect to cultural regeneration, communications, decentralization of power, economic efficiency, etc" as well as some negative impacts like "worsening working conditions, increased ecological degradation, widened arbitrary inequalities [...]" in the view of Scholte in Globalization.

Such discourses are more implicit in works of fiction compared to those of non-fiction. All in all, in the midst of a postmodern world when any concrete definition given to any concept has been challenged; any so-called stable civilization or identity starts to erode; and critical debates over new paradigms (like international nations, transcultu-ralism, transnationalism, transgender issues, multilingualism, Western hegemony versus Islamic radicalism, nationalism versus global culture) are so widespread, almost all the works of arts and even science create their own discourse. Such discourses (or anti-discourses) are more apparent in works dealing with some crucial themes of the postmodern world such as the multicultural and postcolo-nial societies, the confrontation of the East and West, contemporary foreign policies/economies. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is such a work by a Pakistani writer Moh-sin Hamid. It is a 2007 novel, an international bestseller, which elaborates quite a controversial issue with a deceptively simple narrative.

The novel claims to provide the reader with a well-oriented account of an Eastern immigrant in the West with all the hardships he goes through. As a Pakistani embracing America, the main character in the book--Changez is depicted undergoing shock and disillusionment as now, in the wake of 9/11, he has to confront 'the drastically changed face of America from an inclusive to an exclusive society'. What is gripping about The Reluctant Fundamentalist for many is that it seems to aim at giving an account of the repercussions of 9/11 through Changez both as an insider (as he feels himself to be) and an outsider. By means of frequent flashbacks, Hamid draws a detailed picture of the overwhelming events in the life of this Pakistani immigrant who is a former Princeton student and a well-paid American employee with a respectable job in New York before, during and after the September 11 attacks. Nevertheless, what makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist seem brave and provocative for some critics is that it reveals Hamid's own attacking view of the West in a smart cover of fiction, rich in irony and intelligence. ...

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Silencing the Other: "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" as a Counter discourse/'Oteki'ni Susturmak: Karsi Bir Soylem Olarak the Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Silencing the Other: The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Counter Discourse "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America..."