It would be funny if it was not so predictably tragic. As soon as an election comes to town, where there are Muslim votes at stake, reason and good sense take a distinct low place. Constitutional proprieties are forgotten and an almost medieval celebration of murderously divisive identities starts. Darul Uloom which blotted its copybook not so long ago by appointing, and then sacking a modernising moderate Muslim scholar as the head of its faculty, revived one of the old canards of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.