The thread on Chechnya has mutated into a discussion on Islam, civilizational conflict and what not. Zack responds to some of the points on his blog. Luckily, the conversation has stayed both informed and quasi-civil.

In Zack's post he asserts that there is an organic unity of Muslims. I disagree. It seems that the unity of Muslims cross-culturally is highly inorganic, that it is founded on myths and texts and fictive kinship. My personal familial experience is that the most Muslim are the most internationalistic (along with the least Muslim). Devout Muslims are the most likely to reject reject organic elements of their culture. It is my Islamically pious uncles who shrug when they find out that my Bengali is weak, for them, all you need is a language + Arabic. They are unmoored from Bengali identity to a far greater extent than the more nominally observant Muslims.

Second, I do agree that there are three broad civilizational clusters: the Greater West (Islam + post-Christianity), India and China. Many other civilizational groups can be thought of as combinations of these civilizations & native substrate. For example, Southeast Asia has an overlay of Indian, Muslim and Chinese culture grafted on to indigenous traditions. But how do the three "great" civilizations cluster? Many, including "Asian American activists," would assert that South Asia and East Asia have affinities, primarily because of the commonality of Buddhism to both, and the rejection of Abrahamic religion (at least as a dominant confession). But, in The Human Web John McNeill argues that India has traditionally been part of the West Eurasian information network.

What's going on? I think the key is that the rise of the God of Abraham as the dominant supernatural agent in the lands of the West between 0 and 600 cleaved the information networks between South Asia and Western Eurasia. Note that Indian scripts derive from Aramaic, Buddhist missionaries journeyed into the lands of the West (during the time of Ashoka), and Indian philosophical ideas were known in the Greek East. Soldiers from the Indus Valley were in the armies of Dauris and Xerxes that invaded Greece, while Alexander the Great invaded India centuries later.

What you see here is that though South Asia and Western Eurasia share a genetic (in the broad sense, not biologically) affinity that is discernable in the trade links between the cities of the Indus Valley and Sumeria down to the time of the Indo-Greek dynasties in Bacteria and Afghanistan, there were important functional changes in Western Eurasian cultural forms with the rise of exclusivistic monotheism. The reason that European neopagans sometimes publish in magazines like Hinduism Today is that they are attempting to recreate cultural forms and ressurect sensibilities that have been preserved in India, but were once part of their own heritage (the magazine itself was founded by a white convert to Saivaistic Hinduism). I recall reading that some British explorers who had classical educations would sense when they journeyed through India that they were surveying a fragment of their own pagan past.

Contrasts between South Asia and West Eurasian sensibilities on issues like religious pluralism are simply reflections of conventional human variance. This explains why some South Asian Hindus seem to have done a "find & replace" on Islamist documents, reappropriating the language and myths for their own tradition as it is a better reflection of their own sensibilities, while white American Buddhism is in large part shaped by Jews who were never comfortable with the strictures of their natal faith. Though the ideals of each culture have diverged sharply from the other, within them there is still a fair amount of individual variation in oulook. Cultural cross-fertilization and the dissolution of the cartels which imposed identities and expressive modes on individuals has resulted in the coalescence of forms of Hinduism which mimic the sharp edge of the Abrahamic religions while denominations of Christianity have emerged which are more in keeping with Hindu pluralism in their attitude toward a multiplicity of religious expression.

Addenum Obviously India had a lot of interchange with Islam as Muslims were politically dominant in the subcontinent for ~1000 years. Nevertheless, I am unconvinced that a genuine synthesis between Muslim and Hindu religious tradition exists contemporaneously (that is, the folk Hinduism and Islam of the past were closer, but it was practiced by non-elites and tends ti disspiate with the penetration of literacy). The fact that Sikhs are ~2% of India's population, and more ethnically than religious identified, is telling.