You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As the celebrated Indian psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, theorizes about Muslim Identity, one might expect that he would explain the psychodynamlcs of fundamentalism by exploring how much Islamic fundamentalism has to do with Islam Itself and what elements of It belong to fundamentalism as a psychic mechanism. However, for Kakar, fundamentalism is “fundamental” to Muslims; a result of their “persecutory anxiety of Hindus” (p. 231). His ethnographic study of communal violence In 1990s Hyderabad, India, can be read as a psychoanalytic explanation of “Why Muslims are fundamentalists?” (And Hindus are not!)
It is not surprising then that the chapter on Muslim Identity Is titled: “Muslim fundamentalist identity.” Kakar explained in the chapter how Muslims are fundamentalists because they “can't stop hating” (p. 219), unlike the victim who Is unable to hate. In effect for Kakar, Muslims aren't victims. When his book was published, this theorlzatlon came in the face of then recent history of the BabrI Masjld (Mosque) demolition in 1992 that was followed by communal violence across the country, most viciously in Bombay in 1993. Even when political scientists asserted the fact of mass violence and killing of thousands (Jefferlot, 1996; Ludden, 1996) and historians Identified the Bombay riots as “antl Muslim pogrom” (Metcalf, 2006, p. 31), Kakar's theorlzatlon insisted on how Muslims aren't “victims.” Stating how multiple fundamentalisms exist in India, all of which find “nationalism and secularism [to be] un-Islamic practices,” he explained fundamentalism as the “Muslim response to the loss of collective self-idealization and the fracture of self-representation brought on by historical change” (p. 219). What's stark in these lines isn't how swiftly Kakar inserted fundamentalism as a consequence of narcissistic injury for Muslims; who being unable to reconcile with the state of not being “rulers,” resort to an “inchoate sense of anger” which they externalize. Rather, it is the ne