Welcome to the blog Muslims and Liberals!

If I had left for Mars in my boyhood and flown back to my native Indian subcontinent today, I ‘d have a hard time recognizing the ways people are living their lives there.

My parents were deeply religious orthodox Muslims in India’s Assam state and later in East Pakistan. I have had a Western education and am secular. Coming to the third generation, some of my nephews and nieces also have a Western education, but they are mostly religious Muslims. They say their daily prayers and are riled up by the Hindu persecution of Indian Muslims. And at least two of them got excited when the American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar hackled U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over US opposition to International Criminal Court (ICC) inquiries into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Islam, which was confined to my parents’ private sphere, occupies parts of my nephews’ and nieces’ public life.

The transformation that Muslims and their societies have been going through have spawned disturbing jitters. Muslims are branded terrorists. They lag behind other peoples in education and economic progress and are saddled with despotic regimes and sometimes the hegemony and occupation of foreign powers. Yet, compared to the days of their grandparents, they are enterprising, modernizing fast and have become more conscious of their religious and social niches and responsibilities than ever before. Focused on rights and freedoms, Westerners seldom worry about such responsibilities.

In the West, where I have lived and worked most of my life, I am fascinated by trends of profound reorientation of values, institutions, and cultural patterns and, for vast numbers, new styles of thinking and changing outlook on life.  Four decades ago, Europe was a jumble of cocky nation-states, zealously guarding their borders. In the 1970s and early 1980s when I used to board trains from Madrid or Rome to travel to Vienna, I had to show my passport at the border of each state. Today nobody on a Eurail train bothers to ask for your passport. Those days many Europeans’ nationalist pride and xenophobia bordered on paranoia. On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, if you didn’t know French and forgot the street that led to your hotel nearby, you had tough luck. Few French passersby knew – or would speak – English to help you. Today more than 80 percent of French school students are taking English as their second language.

Globalization, which is making Europeans multilingual globe-trotters has spawned a new wave of racism and xenophobia.  Liberalism, the creed of post-Enlightenment Europe, is giving way to racist and far-right ideologies and political parties. In countries such as Italy, Austria, Hungary and Poland, those parties have won elections. In Germany, Slovakia and Croatia, “nationalist” or racist bigotry has entered the mainstream political and social discourse. Ominously, representatives of the far-right, the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS), have set up shop in the European Parliament.  All the same, thanks to globalization and the communications revolution, Europeans and Americans today are still bursting with energy and progress and continue to challenge humanity to chart a more fulfilling future. 

I don’t pretend to be able to grasp many of these currents of human thought and action. I have been curious, though, about aspects of this human drama as it brushes with me on my journey through life. Muslims and Liberals is an attempt to portray some of those brush strokes affecting my minuscule life.

I appreciate your stopping by at Muslims and Liberals and will be looking forward to hearing from you.

The Navigation Bar guides you to the blog site’s features.

The Home tab brings up the blog itself.

About presents this narrative, outlining the context and main focus of the blog.

Host introduces you to me, Mustafa Malik, the blog’s host and editor.

In the Morgue tab is saved a collection of my newspaper op-eds, commentaries, journal articles, and book chapters, published during my 40-plus-year career as a journalist and researcher.

Materials from this collection can be pulled up through the Search box, by using relevant keywords.

The Contact tab welcomes you to offer your critiques of the blog and its posts and asks for your suggestions for their improvement. An e-mail address is provided there to send your thoughts to me, the host.

You are also encouraged to share your thoughts on particular posts through the Comment box under each post.

Thank you for visiting Muslims and Liberals and sharing your thoughts with me.