Although the proponents of various religions would like us to believe otherwise, upon deep examination, we cannot but fail to acknowledge, that human spirituality is fundamentally the same. Every civilization has, in the end, sought 'the ground of all being' - brahman, the supreme absolute, indeed seems ultimately to be the quest of every religion around, including the Aztec and the Maya. We cannot but agree with Ramakrishna's observation in this regard. The only thing that differs, is the approach to this ground of being, which is shaped by the unique social and economic conditions of different polities - religion.
And although the Islamic religious zealots would like us to believe otherwise, Islam too fits into this same pattern. This religion too, seems the absolute immutable in its spirituality, the tasawwuf. Its practices draw from the harsh life of the desert, where it was shaped. The Islamic religion too broadly ebbs and rises in various moulds through time, depending on the socio-economics of Islamic polities. The religion itself was born under difficult circumstances where the traditional societies of the Arabian lands were under immense stress from the two powerful surrounding hegemonic states, Persia and Byzantine, both professing prophetic and assimilationist ideologies under the 'monotheism' of Zoroastrianism and Christianity. The only way for the pagan Arabs to preserve their identity, was to unite under their own brand of 'monotheism', and to face off the competition - thus was born the aggressive, expansive early Islam. However, as the religion stabilized over large parts of West Asia by the 10th century AD, this aggression briefly gave way to cultural maturity: this period was immensely fertile in terms of cultural exchange with neighbouring great civilizations, including Greece and India. But then again by about the 13th century, under the stress of counter-attacks by the Turkic peoples, the religion reverted back to its aggressive assimilative stance. The new races were converted, and their explosive energies diverted to the outside world. Thus was born the next aggressive cycle - this period lead to immense destruction to India and her culture. Later again, when large parts of Northern India were unified under stable Turkic (Mughal) rule, the next high-phase of Islamic cultural syncretism began, characterized by the era of Akbar. By late 18th century though, the Islamic dream in India was in tatters under the pressure of feisty Hindu counter-attacks: and subcontinental Islam has not yet un-mounted the aggressive stance since then. Facing the stark reality of loss of the traditional values in the face of the new wave of secularism that was spreading in India, ignited by contact with Europe, aggressive subcontinental Islam retreated into the garrison state of Pakistan. Now, the disparate and ill-constructed Pakistani society laid on week foundations and with no positive vision for a future except for aggressive Islamic expansionism back into India, seems to be consumed by an insatiable death-wish.
However, the situation is not hopeless, if the 'Arab spring' is anything to go by. Contrary to currently popular or even fashionable notions, Islam, like any other religion, may be neither inherently violent nor inherently peaceful. Human societies are seldom 'naturally' oriented to peace or war as a black-and-white rule. It is all about survival - societies will adapt any means that seems fit to ensure their survival and perpetuation. Until a generation ago, the Arab world was dismissed as being perennially caught up in medieval and fundamentalist ideologies. Those same Arab youths who until some years ago seemingly thought that militant Islam alone was the route to secure a future, are now seeking the democratic nirvana. What has made the difference? Perhaps the greatest difference to West Asia was done not by western 'experiments in democracy', but by the successful model demonstrated by Islamists in Turkey. Erdogan through his success has perhaps done to West Asia, what Bin Laden and Bush and Blair could not achieve - showing that democracy can work in bringing about positive change in Islamic societies too.
If societies can see that peaceful, pragmatic means are able to deliver prosperity, there is no reason why they should choose a death-wish to secure that for the next generation.
10 comments:
Please allow me to say that I am upset by this post. The society of course influences Islam but to a far lesser extent than Hinduism or Christianity, due to the strong identity consciousness in Quran. You are here making the typical liberal mistake of reducing a question of degree to one of existence.
First, yes there was some maturity that developed during the first three centuries of AH, but still the guy who said Anal Haq was killed for blasphemy. Compare with how we treated Buddha and a host of other saints who professed drastically different ideas.
Similarly the Akbar era : you are mistaking the cause with the effect. Akbar, though he destroyed temples etc., had to ally with the Rajputs to make the Mughal empire really secure. That was what established their position in the succeeding centuries. Did he marry Muslim women to Rajput kings? The only Mughal guy who was genuinely tolerant was probably Dara Shikoh : he himself wrote commentaries on the Upanishads.
The glory of Islamic spirituality is merely the glory of a few exceptional saints who happened to belong to that religion. That is not true of Hindus. Rather, many Hindu saints became popular precisely because our tradition respected saints.
But of course this much does not explain why I am upset with the post. The reason is, it obscures the actual threat Hinduism faces from Islam. One tweet I saw recently said it best : "Its not 'survival' if pace of death is glacial. Hinduism has been dying for 1000 yrs. Af-Pak, Nepal, Bangla, Kerala, Kashmir were all Hindu".
May be because you are a bhakta and place too much faith in God you are feeling confident, but the fact that Islam has been slowly replacing Hinduism and that this process has been completed in so many places (at Lahore Swamiji had said approximately "This is the Brahmavarta of which our great Manu speaks" - now that part of "Brahmavarta" is almost entirely Muslim) is so totally undeniable. SRK, Swamiji etc. have been able to revive it in face of British cultural aggression, but winning against Islam is a different game altogether. As for today's RKM, it is hardly more than a burden on Hinduism (sorry for the harshness, look at the difference between how passionate Swamiji was about Hinduism and how today's RKM monks just talk about the "universal" bit). I don't know one culture that has successfully done that. And now the process is getting accelerated with more and more Muslim males marrying Hindu women and producing Muslim offspring.
What real threat did Iran face when its public voted overwhelmingly (98%) for the Islamic revolution? What threat does Islam in Malaysia face that it should treat this Hindu woman the way they did? Erdogan?? His is an Islamic party and you should be knowing that the country is on its way to undoing the work of Mustafa Kemal.
In the modern times when due to free speech etc. human ego has assumed a much greater role than ever, the only way a religion can survive is by fostering identity consciousness. Unfortunately no Hindu scripture really fosters that. Hindu saints are only interested in propagating their spirituality to a small set (even 0.5% of the Indian population is huge, so there is an illusion of popularity) of devout followers by talking universal bullshit. Gone is the love of Hinduism that Swamiji exuded.
I think the only democratic way out for Hinduism is to let Christian missionaries actively convert. Hindus can live peacefully in a Christian country, not in a Muslim country. At this rate will first go the Malaysian way, and then a more Wahabi way.
We have too much Bhakti, that is why we have become intellectual cretins. Why blame RSS, most of our Swamis today too are anti-intellectual.
Sorry to have offended you: I know that I am taking a very reductionist view here. Having said that, we cannot at all downplay the importance of a Dara Shikoh or the Bahaii and Ahmediyya movements. Plus Sufism too, was such a widespread movement once, existing virtually in all of the Islamic world, that it cannot be dismissed merely as being restricted to 'a few saints'.
There has been a streak of violence in the mainstream Islamic religious practice - this could quite just be because it is younger to the other two religions we are discussing, namely Hinduism and Christianity.
The same may also hold true why Islam seems to confer a stronger identity than the other two religions - however, I have always doubted if the Islamic identity is fundamentally any less fragmentary then Hinduism. There are dozens of squabbling Islamic sects, even within the two main super-sects of Shia and Sunni. There there are clan, tribal and national identities - even an Islamist organization such as Al Qaeda recruited Arabs predominantly. I feel, something like a caste or linguistic identity within Hindu communities may be equal or more powerful than an Islamic sect identity.
Does Hinduism face a threat from Islam? More than that from secular deracination? I doubt that. In fact all religions in the subcontinent are equally under threat from secular ideologies. The geographic extent of nations do change, over time. In fact the original greater India was much much larger than just what you mention - including much of Indochina. What about that, then? Instead of worrying about 'what we have lost' and working from a sense of competitive fear, if we just go about doing things that must be done - reforming and reformulating many of our outmoded practices - things may just fall in place in the future. As Koenraad Elst once observed, the march of secularism is impossible to stop: eventually the whole of of East Asia will accept modern rationalist ideologies as opposed to rigid and outmoded religious outlooks. However even when that happens, spirituality will remain relevant - it is that period that we have to hold in mind, when we work right now, and not that 'Islam is replacing Hinduism'. In reality, fundamentalism is the first sign that a religion is under stress - the fact that Pakistan is consumed by the fundamentalist fire, shows, contrary to cursory analysis, that in fact, Pakistan is soon about to renounce militant Islam. This is also equally true of Iran - the vast majority of Iranian youth today, profess no faith at all, or only spiritual religiosity. It was this prognosis that prompted the 'revolution' a generation ago, and it is the impending dire end of their worldview beyond this generation, that is driving current Iranian leaders to millenarian fundamentalist madness. One more generation, and it will all be over. This is what we will learn from history - was exactly happened in Europe - protestant fundamentalism swept through the continent before impending secularization in the late medieval ages. That fundamentalism itself consumed faith into the ashes of modern un-religious Europe.
Here is an article from Spengler, Asia Times Online's most controversial but on occasions, perhaps the finest online analyst around too, on the impending end of the Palestinian intifada:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MF07Ak01.html
And yes, I believe Erdogan has done a greater service to the Muslim peoples than any one else. This is due to the fact that he is an Islamist, and not despite that. Kemalism merely kept the Islamism in Turkish society under the carpet. Force can rarely root out ideologies. But when Islamists came to power in Turkey, learned to make compromises, learned to deal with complex international relations, that's when real change happened. Their model has now emboldened Islamists in many places to consider that perhaps, secular democracy can work for them too - see how Hamas and Hezbollah have sought to enter the electoral process. Their model is perhaps one of the key catalysts to the clamour for democratic reforms now sweeping the Arab world. Democratization, then secularization, then spiritualization - that's the inevitable path, unless stupid western powers intervene and prop up new Islamist regimes.
Since the comments/responses are getting long I will try to identify a few bullet points to discuss :
1. Which is better : secularist "deracination" or Islamization? I say the former. In a secular India or Christian India, Hindus can live and pray openly. Not in a Muslim India. Further, deracination is nothing new : that is the prime reason why Tansen converted to Islam : most Hindus were always empty shells, wimps looking for a settled comfortable life. Atheist west has more life than the "Please give me promotion" Hindus of today.
2. Which is more likely to happen : India becoming secular as in non-religious or India becoming Islamist? You are confident that the former is necessarily the case. I am not so confident as you about the , since I am yet to see one Islamic country where peoples' religious identities have conspicuously decreased. May be you are just extrapolating by looking at the victories of science against Hinduism and Christianity, and then fitting that into your theory that all religions follow similar pattern?
3. I don't know how spiritualist Dara/genuine Sufi-type movements penetrated into the people. You know a lot of violent Sufi "saints", I hope.
4. So you don't think it matters that the core text of Islam is more identity-conscious than those of Hinduism and Christianity, and that the difference may be due to Islam being younger.
Fine, let us go back to younger and more violent days of Christianity. It did not mature before it dispatched to yamaloka a few civilizations like Incas Aztecs etc. I am afraid that position will be taken up by Hinduism.
5. I am afraid Londonistan media might have manipulated your guilty feeling. I see you make stronger adjectives while attributing violence to Hindus ("adharmic blood on their hands"). You see, I am not even saying that there is an Islamist conspiracy to take India over. All I am saying is : (i) The percentage of Muslims might rise to above 50 due to intermarriage etc. (ii) Then a small extremist group might go for the power, and moderate Muslims, believing that the extremist group would root out corruption, might support them.
One can very well be wary of the prospect of Muslim India without considering Muslims bad. It just boils down to : (i) Muslims have stronger identity consciousness (ii) That might make them unwittingly support bad guys.
The root to Hindu survival is not spirituality. Spirituality hasn't done any good for India, except the brief Hindu revival of Swami Vivekananda. The way to survive is identity consciousness, not spirituality. Survival gets higher priority than avoiding deracination.
Your point on Erdogan may be right, I don't have enough knowledge to verify that.
While I post my thoughts on some of your points, there's one thing I'd like to comment upon, you say:
'I am afraid Londonistan media might have manipulated your guilty feeling. I see you make stronger adjectives while attributing violence to Hindus ("adharmic blood on their hands")'
I dont know about Londonistan media, but one thing I am sure about, is how much Sangh takes itself seriously and how much it has affected your thinking. In that post, I was attacking elements of the Sangh and that they had adharmic blood on their hands. Now you say that I wrote those things about all Hindus! In my mind, the Sangh is only one minority and depressed (as of today) organization that fights (or claims to) for Hindus. I have always often disagreed with their methods - there's nothing new about this. But to your mind, thats critizing all Hindus - to you, Sangh = Hindus. Thats the extent to which they have affected you!
No, it was just that my phrasing was sloppy. By saying "attributing violence to Hindus" I only meant "attributing violence to certain Hindu organizations". Sure, there was a better way to phrase it. But on the main point though, there is absolutely no evidence against Sangh or Modi. The miscreants might have belonged to the Sangh but that is not Sangh's responsibility, that level of micromanagement is just not feasible for large organizations.
BTW to clarify I don't consider Sangh "intellectual" : it is just that I consider our Swamis to be as divorced from reality as the Sangh is. Both of them haven't just woken to the realities of the day. Our Swamis who on one hand celebrate Swami Vivekananda's skepticism but don't give space to their own audience' skepticism. The idea of "don't reason, just have faith" worked well when Indians as a whole had a lot of faith, today that just doesn't cut ice. Our Swamis and not only Sangh, are discrediting Hinduism.
In the meanwhile I should also say there is one aspect of secularization that truly concerns me - secularization facilitates dhimmitude. Don't you see how Baba Ramdev is called a homophobe for his stupid comment, while Islamist takes on homosexuality are ignored? Don't you see a difference between our media treatment of christian paedophilia and Nityananda? Don't we come across articles like this one on Tulsidas while citing much cruder Islamic texts is considered insensitivity? My friend Gaurav once made a statement evocatively, "Hindus are the untermensch of secularism". The secularist has framed discourse in such a manner that one religion be subject to utmost scrutiny, while the other treated with utmost sensitivity. Both points of view are valid in their own right, independently, but put together, and you get differential treatment that favors one religion over the other.
Thus, in some sense, modern secularism, while per se compatible with existence and well being of Hindus, accelerates the path to dhimmitude.
Come on Sandeep, I lived through the Godhra period - everybody knew the Sangh help organize counter-attacks at sevral places. The riots may have been 'spontaneous' at some places, but the fact that at many others, the attacks targeted Mulsims so specifically, including shops co-owned with Hindus showed that someone had given the rioters information such as voter lists etc. On the morning after riots began, a senior VHP leader and a Sahitya Academi award winner gave an interview on how they did it and why they did it. That we dont have 'evidence' now, is another matter. If someone touched their hearts and told the truth, things would come out. Of course the secularist media also did make up stories, but that doesnt erase the fact that the riots were orgnaized.
This aspect of 'secularization' - yes, this, I agree with. In the past I had coined a term for this distorted version of secularism popular in the subcontinent - Indosecularism. Thats why I have believed from some time now, anyone interested in the future of our country must promote hard, real secularism, closer to the original Eurosecularism.
Activists must speak strongly to condemn these heirs of the Indian uber-rich, who never contribute a grain to the welfare of the country, but come and besmirch someone who is trying to do something.
At the same time, I feel, Swamis must do thier job better and not come into politics. If they do that, if they put their feet in the current day murky politics, they will face the blowback, but they cannot 'give them back in the same coin', as they can never stoop so low as the current lot of politicians. We do need Hindu perspectives on social and political issues though, but we cannot find them anywhere. Myopic views on issues such as homosexuality are not what we want - we want in depth interpretation of our scriptures and traditions to address current issues.
I don't want to sound like a certain member of our vs****** list, but "everybody knows" is not a good argument especially when we have a Hindu-hating media.
Your statement about the VHP leader is serious, but can you give a direct link as opposed to indirect reference : eg. does it show VHP was involved or was the leader acting in his "individual capacity"? Further, I refuse to bend to the insistence on holding the Sangh, i.e., RSS, responsible for everything the VHP does.
Dear Naqshbandi (and similarly please don't call me by actual name here), please go through this article and see who among Modi and Setalvad actually justified violence - it clears a very important misconception about Modi.
Now on the more philosophical point of secularism : when my friend said "Hindus are the untermensch of secularism", I think he was talking about ("euro")secularism and not pseudo-secularism.
At any rate, I think the statement to be somewhat valid about western liberal elite as well : they find all Hindu culture and sensibility nauseating, read the works of Wendy Doniger, articles like this one. Aside : a lot of this, I have come to the belief, has to do with weird Indian literature (sorry, Kalidasa sucks to someone with modern sensibilities) as opposed to the esoteric Persian literature, Hindu architecture being grotesque and gaudy, made in dull colors and dimly lit (compared to the Taj Mahal and other Mughal palaces for which the westerners always drop in a word about the tastefulness of the rulers) etc. Have you noticed western articles praising Pakistani men for their "chocolate" "lovery boy" looks? I hope to write a post some time correlating aesthetic considerations with the pariah status of Hinduism. Didn't you see the westerners link to Meera Nanda's article on Yoga? In very subtle ways, Hindus will be discriminated against by any secularist world. Why, even you are not at all worried at Islam gradually swallowing Hinduism.
Have you noticed that the westerners who have actually borrowed Hindu ideas are poor liberals (neither conservatives nor rich liberals)? I prefer western conservatives to rich liberals though, because better apathy than hatred.
I don't agree that Hindus, specifically, are 'untermenschen' under secularism. Its all down to different Hindu communities. I have seen this in UK - while many Indian Hindu communities lead the life of a 'meek Hindu' afraid to even mention they are Hindu, forget about Hindu identity, I have seen strong Hindu communities like Sri Lankan Tamils, East-African Gujaratis and Carribean Hindus lead a proud Hindu life. Sri Lankan Tamils' devotion and faith are absolutely admirable - under the same British secular rules, while many Indian-origin Hindus lived miserable lives of self-denial, Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus have built beautiful temples (the first Hindu temples in the UK were built by them, marvelous considering that Indian Hindus lived in UK for a century before) and conduct them superbly (they have ratha-yatras on the streets, with fanfare that can rival Indian temple towns), maintained their cultural heritage fully, and are also slowly rising in prominence in society. They are not abashed about their faith and their culture. No wonder, the government fosters them, the police, lawmakers and even the royalty do not hesitate in being associated with the community and their temples. If a community is strong and confident, people will naturally respect them.
And I don't agree with your view of 'western liberals' as well - while you thought I was perhaps affected by propaganda, it seems to me in fact, you have been badly affected by the US progressive-left movement. I must tell you, secularism is not equal to the agenda of the US Democratic party or their acolytes. Nor is US academia full of only of the repulsive donigerite type. Contrary to all the stereotypes peddled by pseudo-liberals from the west, I have met and interacted with several western people including academics, who have great empathy for Hindu culture. they in fact find the dry, colourless, bare puritanical Islamic architecture grotesque and fearsome. in the rich Hindu mythos, they find solace. They come to Mahabalipuram and Halebid and Hampi and Belur (Karnataka) to appreciate Hindu art.
Here is the touching story of a Professor of Hindu studies at Michigan State University, narrated by himself: https://www.msu.edu/user/grimesj/ganesha.html?iswt=1288087167
Check the mans homepage!!!
https://www.msu.edu/user/grimesj/
Post a Comment