Unacceptable differences
Ex-Muslims of North America has a horror story:
In November 2020, a teenage Muslim boy opened fire on a family of Ahmadis, a religious minority in Pakistan who consider themselves Muslims but are not considered such by the government. Tahir Ahmad Mahmood was killed, and his father and two uncles suffered injuries. The teenage culprit was restrained and apprehended by police, whom he told his motive: the Ahmadis “were insulting Islam” and possessed unacceptable “religious differences.”
And “unacceptable” apparently means “deserving of death.”
Islamic Pakistan and polytheist India sit side by side on the Eurasian landmass as if in a controlled experiment on the effect of Islam on a population of a given and constant ethnicity. India is an economic and cultural powerhouse. Pakistan by the same measure is a basket case.
Omar: While in no way defending Pakistan, I am not sure your example holds very well. India may be an economic and cultural powerhouse, but it also has serious religious violence. Read a little bit about Hindutva and the government-sponsored riots enabled by the current authoritarian prime minister. Read about how Indians who (gasp) eat beef are treated by Hindu fanatics who seem to be copying the Saudi Arabian religious police in their behavior. They are not as bad as Pakistan or Bangladesh, but there is similar nationalism and fanaticism at play.
Also, India is an economic powerhouse mainly by virtue of its vast population. The wealth of the population however tends to be very low.
Holms, with extremely rich people at the top. Enormous gap between the haves and have nots, and in many places, they still operate under that ghastly class system.
This may be a terribly stereotypical observation, but the sense of entitlement and the class snobbery of upper caste Indians I have met almost (almost) transcends that of conservative American Republicans. :(