Written by preeminent Kashmiri poet Zarif Ahmad Zarif, this verse captures the dismal situation in Kashmir after the armed insurgency of the late 1980s. This years-long fight between insurgents and the Indian state led to massive human rights violations in the Valley, whose inhabitants, regardless of their religious affiliation, bore the brunt of the war. The human tragedy that has since unfolded in Kashmir has impacted Kashmiri families, crystallized religious identities, and created a seemingly unbridgeable gap between its Hindu and Muslim communities, forever changing Kashmir's social and cultural landscape.

Most scholarship on the region views the Kashmir insurgency through the prism of Indian and Pakistani claims on the state, as a threat to the nation-states’ strategic security. Another strand of scholarship sees the insurgency as a reaction to India's failed democratic attempt to integrate Kashmiri Muslims. Others portray it as an Islamist movement sponsored by Pakistan, or, more recently, as a manifestation of Islamic terrorism or jihad. In this chapter, however, I unravel the complex ways religion and politics intertwined within Kashmiri discourse, differentiating between Kashmiri Muslim attachment to their religious and regional identity and the articulation of Islamist ideology by political groups that aimed to transform Kashmir into an Islamic state. This chapter asserts that Kashmiris’ disillusionment with the compromise politics of their mainstream political leaders provided a space for the advocates of political Islam to reshape concepts of self-determination in their interest, providing new Islamic frames of reference to construct and internalize political identity. Indeed, the Islamists attempted to rewire Kashmiri mindsets to reject imported nationalist models and embrace politics as an inseparable part of the Islamic faith. Meanwhile, the anti- Muslim rhetoric of the Hindu right in India and its increasing political power enhanced the already existing fears of Kashmiri Muslims that Hindu nationalists would erase their religiously informed cultural identity.