"…When people think of Islam and Muslims, they think normally of places like Iran and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and not of places like India and Indonesia. Secondly, when they think of fundamentalism, they always think of Islam and Muslims and not of other very menacing fundamentalist movements, such as the Hindu fundamentalists in India or the Christian fundamentalists in Serbia. So Islam is thought of in more than one distorted way… Similarly, quite frankly, if Ronald Reagan and his connections with the Moral Majority movement had existed in Egypt, we would clearly see them typed as fundamentalists, which they were. Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and policies to a lesser extent bore very much the stamp of Christian fundamentalists. The conviction, for example, that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire." It was a religious concept of evil empire that bore a certain similarity to Ayatollah Khomeini's description of the United States as the "Satanic Empire." But we don't quite see those similarities, do we?"
Eqbal Ahmad

January 1, 1970

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