How the struggle for identity fuels the battle of civilisations

I was born a Bangladeshi-Muslim and, despite growing up in Australia, have seen religion seeping through all people derived from the subcontinent. The grandmother of a Hindu-Indian friend refused to eat food cooked in our kitchen, given its Muslim owners. She saw it not as rude but a natural response to her past: Indian partition was the defining event of her life.

My inner struggle to balance an Islamic background while living in the modern West, and an ancient Bengali identity with the secular, frontier attitude of modern Australia, mirrors the wider struggles within India, and the world. Narrow, fixed identities are at the core of many struggles; the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks invoke being Muslim at the expense of all other aspects of their identity.

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How the struggle for identity fuels the battle of civilisations
smh.com.au