Credit: The Wall Street Journal by Wasim Sroya
By SADANAND DHUME
Until the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American view of radical Islam and its many discontents was shaped more by the Middle East than South Asia. The U.S. has long been at odds with the raging Ayatollah in Iran, the murderous truck bomber in Lebanon and the masked Palestinian “freedom fighter.” Only over the past decade has the geographical footprint of this scourge expanded in the popular imagination to include Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In this sense, the Navy SEALs raid on Osama bin Laden’s home in Pakistan, a year ago, marked the culmination of a widely shared intellectual journey. Its milestones include the war against the Taliban, the capture or killing of dozens of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistani safe houses, and the tracing of some of the world’s most prominent terrorist acts—including the 2005 London bombings and the 2008 Mumbai attacks—to Karachi, Islamabad and the badlands straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Even so, our recently updated understanding of radical Islam tends to halt at Pakistan’s border with India. Despite India’s 150-million-strong Muslim population, its status as the birthplace of Islamist thought in South Asia, and a clutch of jihadist groups operating on its territory, the country figures only tangentially in the best-known books on the subject. It is this lack that the London-based journalist and historian Dilip Hiro seeks to address in “Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia.” The jacket announces it as the “first complete history of Islamist terrorism in South Asia.”