178. Karen Armstrongguered and endangered than their brothers and sisters in the
West. The Hindus and Muslims of India are all still haunted
by the tragic violence of the partition of the subcontinent in
1947, and though many Hindus stand up for Muslim rights in
India, Muslims tend to get a bad press. They are accused of a
ghetto mentality, of being loyal at heart to Pakistan or Kash-
mir; they are blamed for having too many children, and for
being backward. Indian Muslims are being squeezed out of
the villages, cannot easily get good jobs and are often refused
decent accommodation. The only signs of the glorious Moghul
past are the great buildings: the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and
the Juneh Mosque, which have also become a rallying point
for the Hindu fundamentalist group, the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), which claims that they were really built by Hin-
dus, that the Muslims destroyed the temples of India and
erected mosques in their place. The BJP's chief target was the
Mosque of Babur, the founder of the Moghul dynasty, at Ay-
odhya, which the BJP dismantled in ten hours in December
1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. The
impact on the Muslims of India has been devastating. They
fear that this symbolic destruction was only the beginning of
further troubles, and that soon they and their memory will be
erased in India. This dread of annihilation lay behind their
frantic opposition to The Satanic Verses, which seemed yet an-
other threat to the faith. Yet the communalism and intoler-
ance is against the most tolerant and civilized traditions of
Indian Islam. Yet again, fear and oppression have distorted
the faith.The Way Forward
On the eve of the second Christian millennium, the Cru-
saders massacred some thirty thousand Jews and Muslims in
Jerusalem, turning the thriving Islamic holy city into a stink-