The concept of Širk: what it meant before Islam

(Paper read at the annual conference of the Société Européenne pour l’Astronomie Culturelle, Bath UK 2016; published in Dharma Dispatch, Bengaluru, 12 August 2019)

 Abstract:

 The cardinal sin in Islam is Širk, ‘associating (a creature with the Creator)’, roughly ‘polytheism’. Without the use of this same word, the same condemnation is already present in the first of the Biblical Ten Commandments. In this paper, we trace the early and later history of the concept of Širk among those who deliberately practised it. This is a standard job of philological research within the history of ideas, and of philosophical ‘concept clarification’. We illustrate the ancient use of the term with examples both from the time and culture when the corresponding phenomenon was indeed given that name, as well as from other cultures where it also existed.

The Semitic word Širk, first known from inscriptions in Ugarit (ca. 1500 BCE), means ‘the act of associating’, viz. of a deceased king or hero with a star/god. When somebody had earned fame, he became part of the collective consciousness, just like the starry sky. The background is the anciently near-universal deification of the heavens: star-worship was the most common form of polytheism, partly rivalling and partly overlapping with ancestor-worship.

However, Širk in the literal sense has been fading away because of the demystification of the starry sky, either gradually through the natural development of the scientific worldview, or more abruptly through the introduction of monotheism. Yet, the principle remained operative in many religions even after they had emancipated themselves from literal star-worship. It is at that stage of development that we must situate the almost synonymous Greek word Apotheōsis, ‘elevation to godhood’. A fully secularized remnant can be seen in early modern European astronomy. While the Bible still allows star worship for the non-Israelites, the Qur'ân universally prohibits it (as does Christianity implicitly). But even in a metaphorical sense, ‘associating a mortal with the Eternal’, it was now tabooed by monotheism. This way, Širk evolved from a near-universal practice of connecting the stars with the collective consciousness, to the sin par excellence.

The cardinal sin in Islam is Širk, ‘associating (a creature with the Creator)’, ‘polytheism’. Thus, sun-worship means offering worship to a creature, putting it on the Creator’s throne. In this paper, we trace the early and later history of the concept of Širk (rhymes with French cirque, not with English shirk). It is a standard job of philological research within the history of ideas, and of philosophical ‘concept clarification’. We illustrate the ancient use of the term with examples both from the time and culture when the corresponding phenomenon was indeed given that name, as well as from other cultures including Hindu astromythology, which has developed this concept furthest; and, in secularized version, from modern European astronomy.

Širk as polytheism

The Arabic word širk comes from the root š-r-k, ‘to associate’, which we find back in šarīk, ‘companion’, and šarika, ‘a company’. In the Qur’ān it appears with the specific theological meaning ‘associating a creature with the Creator’. Someone who does this, is a mušrik (participle), an ‘associator’, effectively a ‘polytheist’. Since Islam affirms the total incommensurability of the Creator with His creation, it rejects this association and considers it the most fundamental sin.

This core principle of Islam, the rejection of polytheism in favour of strict monotheism (tawḥīd, ‘declaring something to be one’, from wāḥid, ‘one’) is already present in the Bible. The same condemnation of polytheism, though not using the word širk, and the same affirmation of God’s unicity is formulated in the first of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for I am a jealous god.’ (Exodus : ). It led to the central Jewish prayer: ‘Hear Israel, thy God is one.’ Whatever the differences and hostilities between Judaism and Islam, they agree on this fundamental outlook of strict monotheism.

(Christianity makes the same claim, yet from the Jewish and Islamic viewpoint it does not live up to its claim, for it literally ‘associates a creature with the Creator’, viz. Jesus Christ, whom it calls ‘God’s incarnation’ or ‘God’s only-begotten son’. To Islam, a family relation between a finite and mortal creature and its infinite and eternal Creator is absurd.) 

Apotheōsis

The Semitic word širk is first known as carrying a theological meaning from inscriptions in a Northwest-Semitic dialect in Ugarit, ca. -1500. There it means ‘the act of associating’, viz. of a deceased king with a star/god. When somebody had earned fame, he became part of the collective consciousness, just like the starry sky. After his death, his fame survived him, and so he was still part of the collective consciousness, now no longer as a living presence but as a memory rendered visible through identification with a specific star. Or in theological parlance: through association with the god located in that specific star.

With or without having such a simple term, this phenomenon of an eternalizing projection of heroes onto the heavens existed in ‘Pagan’ cultures worldwide. While Semitic polytheism is long dead, ancient and modern astronomy give some well-known examples. For centuries, and certainly today, širk in the literal sense has been fading away, partly through the natural demystification of the starry sky, partly through its forcible desacralization by monotheism.

More broadly, the principle remained operative in many religions even after they had emancipated themselves from literal star-worship. A well-known example is the Greek word Apotheōsis, ‘elevation to godhood’.

Star-worship was the most common form of polytheism, partly rivalling and partly overlapping with ancestor-worship. In the Bible, star worship is still explicitly allowed for the non-Israelites, in the Qur'ān, by contrast, it is universally forbidden. (see below) This way, širk evolved in status from a near-universal practice of connecting the stars with the collective consciousness, to the sin par excellence.  

Gods All known civilizations have a concept called ‘god’, plural or singular. These gods are a category of beings deemed endowed with far more power and a vastly larger longevity than us human beings. For the rest, their characters and functions may vary. The operative meaning of ‘a god’ in human life is the personification of an important collective factor difficult to negotiate, and which you have to take into account in the things you plan to do. So you had better stay friends with them by paying them attention or sacrificing to them. This principle is then generalized, and gods can be personifications of any category of beings or entities. A god is powerful in that he can impact your life. But in a polytheistic pantheon he is not all-powerful, because he has to share his power with other gods. Rarely if ever is he seen as ‘the Creator’ who stood outside the universe and fashioned it from nothing. Rather, he himself is a part of the universe. Creation is normally seen as only a transformation from formless matter to the present world of form, and in that process, gods may play their part. In that limited sense, the world’s mythologies have plenty of ‘creation’ stories, but even they assume that the universe as a whole has always been there, even if it may cyclically become unmanifest or submerged in chaos, only to reappear as a well-ordered universe again. In the most basic level of mankind’s myths, ‘both heaven and earth as well as the ocean are clearly preexistent.’ (Witzel 2013:361) This primordial layer of the world’s myths has been termed ‘Gondwanan’ by Michael Witzel, the more advanced layer ‘Laurasian’. This layer developed a notion of ‘emergence from chaos’ (rather than ‘creatio ex nihilo’) of the world, yet ‘it is important to observe that neither the Gondwana High God, nor the Eurasian (Father) Heaven, nor the Amerindian Great Spirit is a creator god: they do not create the universe or the world, and they leave its establishment to later demiurge deities.’ (Witzel 2013:360) Prophetic monotheism gradually developed this idea: ‘the emergence of the biblical single god and creator took shape only during the second part of the first millennium BCE, clearly under Zoroastrian Persian influence’. (Witzel 2013:360) With this innovation and its later elaboration by theologians came the idea of the ‘creation ex nihilo’ by an extra-cosmic God, an idea too heady for most Laurasian let alone Gondwanan cultures. It is an exclusively Biblical-Quranic belief, further propagated by thinkers who elaborated the Biblical or Quranic assumptions, that a single Supreme Being, in a single moment never to be repeated, created the whole universe from nothing.  Gods are imagined to be endowed with personalities befitting the element of which they are the personification. As such, they are also sensitive to gifts and flattery, and may thus be influenced into exercising their power in a partisan, friendly way. That is why people who would never think of appeasing the stormy sea, do devise rituals to appease the sea god, hoping that he will guarantee smooth sailing. Star worship In writing, the idea of ‘a god’ is first attested in the Sumerian ideogram Dingir, which has the physical form of a radiant star, four straight nails at 45° distance. (Apart from dingir, it can also have the pronunciation an, ‘sky’.) It certainly has the meaning ‘god’, for it is used as the common determinative for a whole class of names signifying gods. This usage as a determinative was also adopted in the cuneiform writing systems of Akkadian and Hittite. The symbol still lives on as part of the logo of the Yezidi religion. That, at any rate, was anciently how a divine being was conceived: as a radiant heaven-dweller. Because a star is radiant and stands in heaven, near-permanently visible to all, it is a part of our collective consciousness, our shared frame of reference; which is what the function of a pantheon was. In neighbouring Akkadian, a Mesopotamian dialect of Semitic. the Sumerian ideogram Dingir was read as Ilu or El, originally meaning ‘a power’. We know this word very well through Hebrew, a northwestern (Levantine) dialect of Semitic. Thus the names Ur-i-el, ‘my light is God’; Gabr-i-el, ‘my strength is God’; Rapha-el, ‘God heals’; Mi-cha-el, ‘who is like God?’ But as we shall see, these names now carry a meaning of ‘God’ that has resulted from a revolution, viz. from poly- to monotheism, severing the immediate connection with the stars. However, anciently, El had been member of a pantheon, the father of the other gods. As father-god, El was identified with Saturn, the slowest visible planet, and concomitantly called ‘the Old One’, grey and wise. His son Ba’l (‘lord’, form of address for Hadad, ‘noise’) was likewise identified with Jupiter: ‘El represents the principle of preservation and balance and Baal that of action and progress. Without the first principle, the world would return to chaos and power would be uncontrollably unleashed. Without the second, life would wither away in torpor and stagnation. Baal's physical appearance is contrasted with that of El. El is a 'bull' with powerful horns and a thick white beard. (…) Baal, on the other hand, is a ‘bull-calf’ with thin horns and narrow beard. (…) He is above all the storm-god.’ (Caquot and Sznycer 1980:12) (This name is probably, through the Phoenician settlements in coastal Western Europe, also the origin of the Germanic god-name Balder, i.e. Ba’l addir, ‘mighty lord’.) A derivative of El is Eloha, ‘a deity’, ‘a god’. We know it mainly through the plural form Elohim, ‘gods’, ‘pantheon’. The Arab form of the term ha-eloha, ‘the deity’, is al-Ilāh, also ‘the deity’. Thence the Moghul emperor Akbar’s Indian city name Ilāh-ābād (wrongly anglicized as Allahabad), ‘divine city’. In contracted form, al-Ilāh becomes Allāh, ‘thé deity’, ‘the god par excellence’. A star, like a god, is, as far as a mortal can tell, eternal: it existed before we were born and goes on existing after we have died. As suggested by the extreme longevity of the physical stars, gods are proverbially deemed immortal. Hence the binary: us mortal earthlings versus the immortal heaven-dwellers. In Babylon and in Harran, each planet was worshipped in a temple of its own. Not all cultures went that far and became that explicit in their identification of stars with gods, yet the general association of gods with stars was pretty universal and assumed as a matter of course. Stars were explicitly recognized as gods by prominent philosophers like Socrates and Plato. The Indo-European gods The same meaning of ‘star’, ‘radiant heaven-dweller’, is present in Vedic Sanskrit Deva, ‘the shining one’ (from div-, ‘shine’, whence Sanskrit divas, Latin dies, ‘day’); hence ‘a god’. It is also etymologically present in cognate words like Latin Deus, ‘a god’. One of the Sanskrit terms for ‘astrologer’, at least since its mention in the 4th-century dictionary Amarakośa, is Daiva-jña, ‘knower of the gods’, or in practice, ‘knower of destiny’. Another is Daiva-lekhaka, ‘gods-writer’, ‘destiny-writer’, i.e. horoscope-maker. Obviously, the stars here were seen as gods regulating man’s destiny. (Note also that planets are called graha, ‘seizer’, like a ghost coming to possess you, a god impressing you with his impact.) A derived secondary root is dyev-, whence Dyaus, ‘heaven (-god)’, related to Greek Zeus, Latin Jupiter, Gothic Tiwaz (a specific Germanic god, whence ‘Tuesday’), Norse Tivar, ‘gods’ in general. It is widely thought that jyoti, ‘light’, (whence jyotiṣa, ‘astronomy’, ‘astrology’, originated as a colloquial form of *dyauti. A parallel development, but omitting (or only implying) the original link with the stars, is found in Slavic Bog, ‘the share-giver’, ‘the apportioner’, ‘the destiny-decider’, related to Sankrit Bhaga, and hence to the derivative Bhagavān. Other god-names are more derived from the practice of worshipping, such as the Germanic counterpart God, ‘the worshipped one’, related to Sanskrit Huta. Or the Greek Theos, ‘god’ (< *thesos), related to Latin festus, ‘celebration’; feriae, ‘holiday’, i.e, ‘religious feast’; to Germanic disir, ‘goddesses’; and to Sanskrit dhiṣā, ‘daring, enthusiastic’, dhiṣaṇā, ‘goddess’, dhiṣṇya, ‘devout’. But even here, a stellar connection reappears, for the latter word is also a name of Śukra/Venus. More examples of the personification of heavenly phenomena as gods are found throughout the Vedas. The deities Mitra and Varuṇa represent the day sky (hence the sun, here remarkably called ‘the friend’) c.q. the night sky, with its stable sphere of the fixed stars, with its regular cycles representative of the world order. In Mazdeism, this Varuṇa is known through his appellative Ahura Mazda, ‘Lord Wisdom’, god of the world order. The Nāsatyas or Aśvins (‘horse-riders’) are thought to represent the two morning- or evening stars, Mercury and Venus, who ‘ride’ the sun, often likened to a horse. Uśa (related elsewhere to Eōs, Aurora, Ostara, and hence to ‘east’ and arguably ‘Easter’) represents the sunrise. Stellar references are explicit in the case of Sūrya, the sun, and of Soma/Candra, the moon; but less so in the case of Viṣṇu, ‘the all-pervader’ (like the sun’s rays), though he has a solar quality; and Śiva (‘the auspicious one’, an apotropaeic flattery of the terrible Vedic god Rudra, ‘the screamer’, the mountain storm), who is the Candradhāra or ‘moon-bearer’, and the Somanātha or ‘lord of the moon’, who has a lunar, nightly quality. The navagraha or ‘nine planets’ (sun, moon, their two eclipse nodes, and the five visible planets) as a whole are a normal object of worship. The 12 Ādityas or ‘suns’ provide the template of the Zodiac. Hindu mythology is abundant and explicit in its stellar references. In other mythologies, this may have become more obscure, often because we only know them in bureaucratic fashion, through preserved narrative texts defective in conveying the experiential and practical meaning of gods for their worshippers. Still, witness this observation of the Greek high gods and of the Germanic gods (Aesir): ‘There are twelve Aesir. In ancient times, the number had more significance than the composition of the group. (…) The Greek pantheon counts twelve Olympians.’ (Ongkowidjojo 2016:245) The identification of the seven planets with the seven week-days is likewise well-known, after conquering the world starting from the Babylonian template. The Chinese divine firmament In a vague sense, Chinese civilization deified the starry sky, where the oldest known word for ‘gods’, 上帝 Shàngdì, ‘the powers on high’, originally referred to both ‘stars’ and ‘ancestors’. The Chinese language makes no difference between singular and plural, so Protestant missionaries adopted it as their term for ‘God’. (This used to be contested by Confucians because Shàngdì never indicated the universe’s Creator, only its Controller/s.) An even less personal word is 天 Tiān: ‘heaven’, introduced as the usual term for the divine by the Zhou dynasty, -11th to -3rd century. The reigning emperor was half-deified as the 天子, Tiānzi, ‘son of Heaven’. The term was personalized by the Catholic missionaries as 天主 Tiānzhǔ, ‘heavenly boss’ = ‘God’. The adjoining Turks and Mongols traditionally worshipped Tanri, c.q. Tengri, which straddles the meanings of ‘heaven, blue sky’ and ‘god’. In Islamicized Turkish, Tanri means ‘God’ and is used in derivatives like ‘theology’. The Japanese use 天 Ten, ‘heaven’, to translate Sanskrit Āditya, ‘one of 12 solar deities’, e.g. Benzai-ten translates the Indian goddess Sarasvatī. The three main individual gods of the folk-Chinese pantheon embody the desired values of happiness, success and longevity. They are also identified with a specific celestial body. Either they are the three stars in the ‘tail’ of the Great Bear: or they are the three stars in the ‘belt’ of Orion; or they are as follows. The star of Fú (福), ‘fortune’, or Fúxīng 福星, refers to the planet Jupiter. Like in Babylonian astrology and its derivatives, the planet Jupiter was deemed auspicious, ‘the bringer of jollity’. The star of Lù (禄), ‘salary coming with rank’, ‘success’, also ‘progeny’, Lùxīng 禄星, is Mizar. The star of Shòu (壽), ‘longevity’, Shòuxīng 寿星, is the southern star Canopus. Širk Heaven-worship is truly the universal religion, rivalled only by ancestor-worship. And even then, these two are intertwined. Like the stars, deemed a real influence in the astrological paradigm, cannot materially but only subtly affect human beings, the dead likewise can subtly affect you. That is why the Romans warned that you should not offend them: De mortuis nihil nisi bene, ‘of the dead nothing but good.’ Deceased ancestors are deemed to be in heaven, often actually associated with a specific star. When your father has died, you take your child on an evening walk, and when the stars appear, you point out one of them and say: ‘There is grandpa, watching over us.’ In the Vedic funeral ritual, a zone in the sky, in the Scorpio-Sagittarius area, is designated as the destination of the dead. The association of a deceased mortal with an ‘immortal’ star is known in Semitic as širk. The word širk is first known from inscriptions in Ugarit, Syria (ca. 1500 BCE), and means ‘the act of associating’, viz. of a deceased king or hero with a star/god. It is from the Semitic root /š-r-k/ ‘to team up with, to join’ (Del Olmo Lete & Sanmartín 2015:88, ref. to De Moor & Spronk, 1982:179); cfr. South-Semitic/Arabic šarīk, ‘friend’ (Aartus 1985). In the text Legend of Kirtu, when king Kirtu lies dying, his wife says to his friends: ‘He is only a finger removed from his death, Kirtu is going to join [š-r-k] Ilu.’ (V:16-17, quoted in De Moor 1990:330; Ilu is an older form of Biblical El.) In nearby Hittite, with lots of Semitic influence, the expression kisat Dingir: ‘he became a god/star’, means: ‘he died’. A king who died henceforth lived on in association with a specific star. When somebody had earned fame, he became part of the collective consciousness, just like the starry sky. After his death, his fame survived him, and so he was still part of the collective consciousness, now no longer as a living presence but as a memory rendered visible through identification with a specific god or star. Or in theological parlance: through association with the god located in that specific star. The Mayas and the Pharaonic Egyptians systematically deified their deceased kings by identifying them with stars. Among the Pharaohs, the earliest dynasties ‘went to’ the circumpolar stars after death, later kings ‘went with’ Ra, the sun god, or Osiris, god of the hereafter. In the Pyramid Texts, king Pepi 1 of Egypt’s 6th dynasty, ca. -2300, is said to have become Rigel (or Orion as a whole) after his death. In China, the three above-mentioned stars identified with a specific god, have also been interpreted by the Daoists as the place where important individuals from the past have been appointed for eternity. The star Fùxīng 福星 (Jupiter) is associated with an ancient governor who bravely protested against a cruel decree by the emperor; the star Lùxīng 禄星 (Mizar) may refer to an ancient official; and the star Shóuxīng 寿星 (Canopus) is sometimes identified with the philosopher Lǎozi. In India, the stars of the Great Bear are identified, from antiquity till today, with seven of the ‘seers’ (Ŗṣis, inspired poets) who composed the Ŗg-Veda, collectively the ‘seven seers’ (Saptarṣi). Here again, the number is more important than the actual names, so in the premodern age different lists competed (details in Mitchiner 2000), with only the sages Atri and Vasiṣṭha as constants. The latter got identified with the star Mizar in the Great Bear’s tail (or in the Big Dipper’s handle), the centre of a multiple star, whose main partner Alcor is named after his wife Arundhātī, thus symbolizing marital fidelity. Another prominent Vedic seer who got eternalized as a star is Agastya, a sage known for his migration to the south, hence associated till today with the southern star Canopus. The seer Vasiṣṭha has left us some poetic imagery of how such deification should be conceived. He was the only Vedic seer to be many times the author, but once also the addressee of a hymn, thus implicitly becoming a god. But far from seeing this as something exceptional, he deems all seerhood as a form of temporarily participating in divine existence. So he went through this process of širk not just after his death, he described it himself: ‘When Varuṇa and I embark together and urge our boat into the midst of the ocean, we, when we ride over ridges of the waters, will swing before that swing and there be happy. Varuṇa placed Vasiṣṭha in the vessel and deftly with his might made him a ṛṣi/seer.’ (Ṛg-Veda 7:88:3-4) The vessel of the heavenly god Varuṇa signifies the seeming motion of the stars around the earth. Vasiṣṭha is associating his status as a ṛṣi with his elevation to the starry sky. In a passage of the Mahābhārata (tra. KM Ganguli 1997:IV.9) referring to the major ancient Indian philosophy, Sāṅkhya (‘enumeration’, viz. of the universe’s elements), this then-innovative system was extolled through a comparison with the well-known ancestral notion that sages move to heaven: ‘Those regenerate ones that follow the Sāṅkhya system enter into the superior state of Brahma like the celestials entering into the firmament.’ The Greek word apotheōsis, ‘elevation to godhood’, has roughly the same meaning as širk. Mortals thus deified among the stars include in mythology some characters of human origin, such as Hercules, Perseus, Andromede, or Ganymede, but there are historical cases too. Antinoos, Roman emperor Hadrian’s lover-boy, who drowned himself upon discovering his first beard hairs, was commemorated through a star in Aquarius. When in the 17th century the southern sky was mapped, one secularized case of širk took place. A constellation was named after the protection given to Vienna by the Polish king Jan Sobieski against the Ottoman siege: Scutum Sobieskii, ‘Sobieski’s shield’, now simply Scutum. The logic, which at once explains the Indo-European poetic ideal of ‘undying fame’ (Greek kleos aphthiton, Sanskrit śravas akṣitam), is that one becomes immortal by one’s glorious deeds, and immortality is the key characteristic of gods. When William Herschel discovered the first planet beyond Saturn in 1781, he named it Sidus Georgium to immortalize his sponsor, king George III. But as so often the latter’s fame proved less than undying, and outside England it was considered irrelevant, so the alternative name Uranus caught on. (Note, for contrast, the term Charles’ Wain, meaning the Great Bear and wrongly thought to refer to Charlemagne or another king Charles; it really means ‘churl’s wain’, and contrasts with the ‘woman’s wain’, i.e. the Little Bear.) A more successful modern form of širk is the custom of naming asteroids and landscape features on planets after meritorious people. While present in many places, some limitations of the method of širk are also in evidence. Very few mortals ever succeeded in eternalizing themselves this way. Few readers will have heard of king Kirtu or pharaoh Pepi, and likewise in other civilizations, the most consequential individuals have not become known as star names. It is not through stars but through another calendrical ingredient that the Roman emperors Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus acquired a place in our everyday consciousness: through the non-stellar month names July and August. Moreover, the mysterious nature of the starry sky, and thus its association with the afterlife, diminished as the mechanics of heaven became better known. Already in the Greek period, dissident freethinkers like the philosopher Anaxagoras and the playwright Aristophanes theorized that stars were only burning rocks. But the most decisive nail in the coffin of širk was the rise of a religious conception that denied any divine dimension to the starry sky: prophetic monotheism. Biblical monotheism versus polytheism The central innovation contained in the Bible is the replacement of polytheism with monotheism. This process is described in the Bible book Exodus and attributed to the leadership of Moses, ca. -1300. Here, the many gods were replaced with a single jealous god. Strangely, the plural form Elohim, ‘the gods’, ‘the pantheon’, survived this theological revolution. It became a kind of plurale majestatis with the meaning ‘God’. The Bible, which received its definitive form only under the Persian empire ca. -500, when this usage was well-established, starts with the sentence: ‘Berešit bara Elohim et ha-šamaim ve-et ha-aretz’, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’   A synonym of Elohim, referring to the same jealous God, is Yahweh. Moses himself introduced this god-name into Biblical tradition. Though new to the Israelites after centuries in Egypt, it must have existed earlier among the Arab (South-Semitic) Beduins as well as among the Northwest-Semitic people of the Levant. Moses, when a fugitive from Egyptian law after he was found out to have committed murder, stayed with a Beduin tribe, the Midianites led by Jethro. They had a storm-god Yahweh, best translated (as pointed out by the path-breaking German Orientalist Julius Wellhausen) as a causative participle of a verb meaning ‘to move in the sky’, whether ‘to blow’ or ‘to stoop like a bird of prey’, from an Arab root , later attested in the Quran (22:32) but not in the Bible. This meaning is confirmed by the fixed expression Yahweh Sabaoth, ‘he who causes the motion on high of the heavenly hosts’, i.e. the motive force of the majestic procession of the stars across heaven. Here again we find a stellar meaning associated with a god-name. Moses saw an apparition of this god in the burning bush. When Moses asks the god who he is, the god expresses his total sovereignty: ‘I am who I am’, ehyeh ašer ehyeh, as if saying: ‘It is none of your business who I am.’ Theologians and translators have contemplated this sentence profusely, until in ca. 1900, the German Orientalist Julius Wellhausen hit upon its probable original meaning: it elaborates a pun on the name Yahweh, which the Hebrews misinterpreted folk-etymologically as a causative participle of the verb , ‘to be’, hence ‘the being one’, ‘he who is’, or more philosophically, ‘he whose essence is existence’, ‘he who necessarily exists’, ‘he who causes existence to exist’. This edifice of profundities is entirely built on a folk-etymological pun, nothing more. Or to put it more positively: a new conception of the divine was grafted onto an old god. At any rate, any stellar element in the Israelite conception of or terminology for the divine was herewith severed. In the Bible, the connection with the stars was not just abandoned but positively prohibited, at least for the Israelites. Strictly speaking, it was still allowed for the other nations: ‘Pay attention lest ye lift your eyes up to the sky for seeing sun, moon and stars, that ye be led astray and adore and serve them, those whom the Lord your God hath assigned to all the nations under heaven.’ (Deut. 4:19) With Christianization or Islamization, all divinity got invested in an extra-cosmic Supreme Being, the Creator. The planets were desacralized and reduced to cogwheels in a cosmic machinery set in motion by the Creator and operated by his angels. Though numerically, a very large part of humanity now espouses this desacralizing view through Christianity and Islam, it is quite exceptional in the history of religions. Do note a few remnants of širk in Christianity. Those individuals elevated to sainthood are given an abstract place in the sky, viz. a day on the Church’s Saints Calendar, corresponding to a specific degree of the Zodiac. Mary’s assumption into heaven, where she became ‘Queen of Heaven’ (which, like ‘Morning Star’, is a Christian borrowing from an epithet of Venus), is a typical case of širk; except that theologically conscious Catholics take care not to deify her: she is strictly speaking only ‘venerated’, not ‘worshipped’, even when prayed to for her ‘intercession’ with the legitimately worshipped Father. Finally, the very core of Christianity, viz. Jesus’ divinity or association with God, whether as his ‘son’ or ‘incarnation’, is the example par excellence of širk, not with a specific star but with a figurative interpreted ‘heaven’ (eternity) as a whole. It is therefore condemned as de facto polytheism by both Judaism and Islam.  Širk in Islam The pre-Islamic religion of Arabia was largely star worship, combined with ancestor worship and the worship of special stones. The Ka’ba (‘cube’) housed a black stone deemed to have fallen from heaven, and peripherally also 360 idols. The main stellar deities were associated with the Ka’ba. The presiding deity of the temple was the moon-god Hubal. He was also described as al-Ilāh, contracted as Allāh, ‘thé deity’, ‘the god par excellence’. Originally it could refer to any earlier-mentioned god. Thus, Moḥammed’s Pagan father was called Abdullāh, ‘servant of the deity’, probably referring to his city’s chief deity, Hubal. Moon gods the world over are often depicted with three women, who may be called ‘wives’ or ‘daughters’ or even ‘mothers’. Thus, Western Wiccas and other neo-Pagans worship ‘the horned god’ (i.e. with the crescent moon in his hair) with his ‘triple goddess’. She represents the three phases of a woman’s life: as virgin, as mother and as crone. Among Hindus, the lunar god Śiva is called ‘he with the three mothers’ (tryambakam, from ambā, ‘mother’, Ṛg-Veda 7:59:12, thus Swami Veda Bharati 2014; often interpreted as ‘the three-eyed one’, so that responsible translators often leave it untranslated, e.g. Jamison and Brereton 2014:954), and is effectively depicted with three goddesses, though mostly separately, as in serial monogamy. In later Hinduism, these have become Pārvatī-Durgā-Kālī. The Vedas also tend to depict other goddesses in threesomes, such as Ilā-Bhāratī-Sarasvatī, or Guṅgu-Sinivālī-Rākā. The latter three women represent three phases of the moon: first crescent, full moon, and last moon-sickle disappearing into the sun/moon conjunction. Similarly, the three Meccan goddesses of Satanic Verses fame, al-Lāt, al-Uzza and Manāt, are also called the three ‘daughters of Hubal’. Alongside the three-phase scheme just sketched, they are understood as the main planets. Al-Uzza was a goddess of fertility and eroticism, quite like Aphrodite/Venus. Al-Lāt is often equated to the Sun, the female-solar counterpart of the male-lunar god Allāh/Hubal. But a full millennium earlier, Herodotos (Histories 1:131:3) already interprets ‘Alilat’ (al-Ilāt, same development as Allāh from al-Ilāh) as Aphrodite. Manāt is equated with the stream of time and fate punctuated by the phases of the moon cycle. At any rate, allowing for a certain bandwith in their interpretation, they are part of the universal tradition of sky-worship. Moḥammed had forbidden his first converts to worship them, but then he developed second thoughts: he might win over many Meccans if only he made this concession of allowing them their favourite goddess triad. Quranic revelation 53:21-22, later repudiated by him as the ‘Satanic verses’, then came out in support of this toleration, stating that the goddesses’ intercession with their Father (like Mary’s in Catholicism) is desirable. But his converts persuaded him that this would be unprincipled, so he improvised the explanation that any permission to worship these ‘exalted birds’ had been whispered into his ear by Satan. A new revelation replaced those two verses, denounced the goddesses as empty names without any reality, and then prohibited their worship for good. Moḥammed, in a bid to establish monotheism among the Arabs, reinterpreted Allāh as a synonym of Yahweh, the ‘jealous God’. He saw himself as the latest (and even last) one of the line of the prophets of Yahweh, renamed Allāh in Arabia. Since star worship was a common form of polytheism, the Qur’ān (6:78, 22:18, 41:37) simply and strictly prohibited star worship: one should not worship the conspicuous heavenly creatures but their unseen Creator. This way, the star-god El, the Semitic reading of the star-shaped Sumerian glyph Dingir, ended up shedding his connection with the stars and becoming the disembodied extra-cosmic Creator-god Yahweh/Allāh. To give more detail, the star cult is universally forbidden in the Qur’ān, without distinction between believers and unbelievers. In verse 6:78, it is narrated how the exemplary prophet Abraham gives up Sun worship and turns to the sun’s Creator instead. In verse 22:18, the stars themselves (and likewise mountains, trees, animals) worship Allah. And in verse 41:37, it is assured that sun and moon are but signs of Allah, the reader is enjoined to worship their Creator instead. It is this zeal for abolishing all stellar references in religion, that made Mohammed opt for the following policies. He inverted the originally planetary-directed circumambulation of Ka’ba, where worshippers had been meant to revolve around the Ka’ba the way planets do (i.e. clockwise in the northern hemisphere): no celestial cycles! He fixed the time for one of his five daily prayers at night, so that it would not amount to sun worship. And he abolished the 13th intercalary month in the lunar calendar, which had been meant to keep lunar and solar cycles in lockstep: no moon worship! For this religious revolution, Moḥammed paradoxically revived a polytheistic concept par excellence, širk. Originally it had meant the association of a mortal with a star/god. Now it came to mean the association of any creature with the one Creator. No human or other being could be deified nor anyhow associated with an or the deity. This affected all known Pagan cults in one way or another, e.g. treating an imaginary elephant-headed creature as god (Gaṇeśa), or associating the hero Kṛṣṇa with the god Viṣṇu (as his ‘incarnation’). It even condemned Islam’s principal rival Christianity, where the mortal man Jesus was associated with the Creator, be it as his ‘son’ or his ‘incarnation’. The anti-idolatrous battle verse: ‘He was not engendered and has not engendered’ (Qur’ān 122:3), while affirming the Creator’s uncreatedness, rejects both the Pagan conception of Allāh’s ‘daughters’ and the Christian conception of Allāh’s ‘only-begotten son’. During the Crusades, when the Pagans of Arabia had long disappeared, it was used as a war motto against the Christians. In Islam, this širk/’association’ of a mortal with a star, or of an image with the real deity, or of a creature with the Creator, became the single worst sin: idolatry. This didn't prevent the Islamic world from developing its own very successful form of stargazing. Astrology remained popular among the Arabs, both the native 28 manāzil (Lunar Houses), and the newly introduced Babylonian-Hellenistic horoscopy. Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam restricted the regard one could have for the stars, but at the same time it provided a way out for astrologers. Allotting a predictive meaning to stars could be accepted on condition that it did not involve any deification. As long as the stars were seen as mere instruments of God’s dispensing of destiny (taqdīr) to the creatures, it was lawful to decipher them in horoscopes. Conclusion At the dawn of history, and practically since the birth of mankind, star worship, partly overlapping with ancestor worship, was the main religion worldwide. With the development of civilization, and with the breakthrough of monotheism, conceptions of the divine grew away from their referents in nature. Star worship remained alive, but that old layer was overlaid with new levels of abstraction. In the Greco-Roman world, the elites outgrew the colourful pantheon and, mainly through Stoicism, accepted a more abstract and more unitary concept of the divine. In Neoplatonism, which may have been influenced by Indian thought centring around the Absolute (brahman), everything was thought to emanate from ‘the One’ (to hen). In China too, ‘the One’, ‘the big oneness’ (tàiyī 太一) was the name of a unifying abstract concept transcending the many natural gods of everyday religion.  In the late Roman empire, this natural evolution was interrupted and driven in a particular direction by the imposition of Christianity. The same scenario repeated itself even more abruptly with the advent of Islam, resulting in the generalized belief in tawḥīd, ‘oneness’ or monotheism. Allāh is conceived as the totally Other: he has no link with stars, men or any other beings. He has no worthy likeness; any image, even heaven, would do Him injustice. In fact, however, it would have been perfectly possible to move from a naturalistic to a more abstract conception of the divine without cultural disruption, without destroying earlier conceptions, as Christianity and Islam did. But either way, the practical impact on our topic is that širk in explicit form is now more or less dead.

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Indraprastha vs. Dînpanah: nothing communal about "Indraprastha"

(Swarajya, 3 Dec. 2016)

Indraprastha was the town founded by the Pandava brothers of Mahabharata fame as their capital. Here, the eldest among them, Yudhishthira, became the “ruler of righteousness” (dharma-râja). More than three thousand years later, on 22-23 November 2016, the Draupadi Dream Trust held the first Indraprastha Conference in the National Museum, Delhi. This was part of a larger initiative on Indraprastha, with an exhibition in the Purana Qila (Old Fort). This fort itself had been built over the ancient site of Indraprastha, now partly made visible by archaeological excavations.

Among secularists, there is predictably an attempt to sow doubt about this. In his 2015 book Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli, the First City of Delhi, Rana Safvi argues that the finds under the Purana Qila have not been established to be the Pandavas’s city, which was but “mythological”. In particular, they are claimed not to contain the characteristic Painted Grey Ware, as per the 1954 excavations by India’s top archaeologist BB Lal. However, 62 years later, the nonagenarian Lal edited the brochure of the present exhibition and, taking into account several excavations since then (which Safvi feigns to ignore), he asserts that PGW was indeed found there, and that it was certainly the city of the Pandavas. Mehrauli was not the oldest part of Delhi, Indraprastha was.

(This repeats two earlier and similar attempts at secularist deception, involving the very same archaeologist. When Lal discovered the temple’s pillar-bases underneath the Babri Masjid, the secularists started nitpicking about his field-notes, when his final report was already in the public domain and affirmed the existence of the temple remains. And till today, defenders of the Aryan Invasion Theory keep on citing as proof of the invasion the identification by the young Lal of the PGW as showing the Aryan invaders on their way deeper into India, a view that he has long dismissed as immature. As ought to be well-known, Lal has for decades testified that there is no proof for this invasion whatsoever, and that Vedic India and the Harappan civilization were two sides of the same coin. In all the three cases, the secularists cite an early or even a non-existent position of Lal’s to trump his well-known mature position.) 

Lightning

A prastha is an open space, a clearing in the forest where you go and settle, a “colony”. Thus, a vanaprastha, an elderly person who withdraws from society, is “one who goes and settles in the forest” or “one who has the forest as his colony”.

The new town was dedicated to Indra. He was the god of the thunderstorm that puts an end to the oppressive summer heat and opens the rainy season. That is why among the 12 Vedic solar months or half-seasons, he rules the first month of the rainy season. As the Rg-Vedic seer Vasishtha says in his celebrated Hymn of the Frogs, both the priests and the frogs croak with joy when the first rainstorm breaks: the frogs because of the advent of water, the priests because of the manifestation of their god, Indra. Implicitly, the priests’ recitation is humorously likened to the frogs’ croaking.

He was also the slayer of the dragon Vrtra, a model for all the dragon-slayers in the world, such as Zeus killing Typhon, or Saint George, or Siegfried, or Beowulf. In Iran, he was transformed into a demon, but his nickname Verethragna (Vedic Vrtrahan, “Vrtra-slayer”) then became a popular god in its own right. There, we have an Indra on the side of both good and evil.

Less poetically and more philosophically, the Atharva-Veda puts him at the centre of the sophisticated concept of Indrajâla, “Indra’s net”. In this net, a diamond in every knot reflects every other diamond knot, and thus the whole. The West needed another four thousand years to develop the similar concept of the “holographic paradigm”.

In India, Indra’s cult gradually declined after the Mahabharata age. Originally an embodiment of masculine stength, he becomes the subject of poetic variations extolling his (and his wife Shachi’s) sexual prowess. Like his Greek counterpart Zeus, he gets involved in flings on the side, such as with sage Gautama’s wife Ahilya. While becoming a character of fun, he further gets disavowed by the Mahabharata hero Krishna. In the famous Govardhan episode, Krishna lifts a mountain and holds it like an umbrella over the common people to protect them from the storm, embodiment of Indra’s wrath. This spurs on the further decline of the Vedic gods and their replacement with the now-familiar Hindu pantheon. By the time Hindus start building temples in the last centuries BCE, Indra is no longer worshiped.

However, the Buddha arrived just in time for Indra to play  a role in his career. it was Indra himself who persuaded the freshly awakened Shakyamuni to start preaching his newfound path. Buddhist monks then spread the cult of Indra to foreign lands as far as Japan. Indra’s weapon, the lightning or vajra, became the emblem of instant Enlightenment. The sought-after “Self-nature” (Chinese zixing) is present all the time, deep in all of us; but when we embark on the path of meditation and finally awaken to it, it strikes like lightning.

Dînpanah and the religion

When the Muslim conquerors incorporated the area into their capital and built the Old Fort there, it was apparently not a case of “a Hindu sacred site destroyed to make way for a showpiece of Muslim power”. Indraprastha had largely fallen in disuse centuries before the conquests, leaving pride of place to other parts of Delhi. Still, the conquerors were aware of the site’s past as Indraprastha, for in his Ain-i-Akbari, Moghul chronicler Abu’l Fazl writes that it had been built on the site of “Indrapat”. There was probably no explicitly communal angle to it when the Muslim rulers chose the Indraprastha site.

That changed when the second Moghul emperor Humayun decided to reorganize the area as his own glimpse of paradise, calling it Dînpanah, “refuge of Islam”. Dîn is the general Semitic word for “justice, righteousness”, even “religion” (roughly, dharma). It was in this sense that the syncretistic emperor Akbar was to use it when he founded the Dîn-i-Ilâhî, the “divine religion”. This new religion was meant as a confluence between Hinduism and Islam, symbolized by Akbar’s newly-founded city of Ilâh-âbâd (“divine city”, wrongly transcribed by the British as Allahabad) on the Ganga-Yamuna confluence. But this religion did not exist yet in Humayun’s time.

Akbar’s usage of Dîn accorded with its original Semitic meaning once used by the Arab Pagans. But it deviated from the meaning that Mohammed had conferred on the term during his rulership in Arabia: specifically the religion of Islam. It is in this more limited sense that the word came to be used in names like Saifu’d-dîn, “sword of Islam”, and likewise in Humayun’s Dînpanah, “refuge of Islam”. Humayun’s rulership of Delhi was short-lived, and when he finally recovered it, he found his Dînpanah in disarray. He did not get a chance to rebuild it for he died soon after. So, it only had a very fleeting existence and made no mark at all in Delhi’s long history. By contrast, the earlier town of Indraprastha had existed for many centuries.

Recently, some well-meaning but illiterate bureaucrat came up with the idea that Lutyens’ Delhi should be renamed as Dînpanah. However, naming a central neighbourhood of Delhi after a particular religion might not go down well with the preponderantly secular-minded population. Probably the bureaucrats who considered naming the area’s development project Dînpanah had not considered this because they had not realized the meaning of Dîn. At any rate, the plan was shelved when they learned of the far better credentials of Indraprastha.

The god

 Now, some usual suspects will object upon hearing anything with the Vedic god Indra in it: “Communal!” They are mistaken. There is nothing communal about the Holographic Paradigm. There is nothing communal about sudden Awakening. He is the same stormgod whom we find the world over: Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter among the Romans, Thor among the Vikings (whence Thursday), Marduk in Babylon, Ba’al in the Levant. Note how Indra is likened to a bull, how Zeus seduced princess Europa in the shape of a bull, and how Ba’al was famously worshipped as a bull in the Biblical episode of the Golden Calf.

In fact, in the Golden Calf events, two faces of the storm-god were in confrontation: not just Ba’al but even Moses’ god Yahweh are evolutes of essentially the same god. A lesser-known face of the storm-god was indeed Yahweh among the Midianite Beduins in northwestern Arabia. Among them, then led by chieftain Jethro, the fugitive Egyptian prince Moses found asylum. That is when he acquired both a wife and a new religion. Yes, Yahweh was originally an Arab storm-god, whose name was misinterpreted by the Bible authors as “He who is”. His name stems from a verbal root h-w-h also attested in the Quran, and meaning “to move in the sky”. This is both in the sense of the storm-wind’s blowing (an image of the palpable though subtle power of heaven) and of an eagle swooping down to catch its prey (an image of the sudden whims of destiny).

This Yahweh, this choleric storm-god, was then taken to Egypt, apparently in the age when some of Pharaoh Akhnaton’s monotheistic reform was in the air. Next, he led Moses and the Israelites in the legendary Exodus through the desert. He remained powerful, sovereign and choleric, but was theologically transformed into the Biblical “jealous god”, who tolerates no second god beside him. This Yahweh, the sender of prophets, was later to be embraced by Mohammed under the name Allah, from al-Ilâh, “the god”.

Long live Indraprastha!

So, everybody can feel happy with the name Indraprastha. No Muslim invader ever destroyed a temple to Indra, for he had been worshipped before the Hindus even used idols housed in temples. Indra throwing the lightning (elsewhere “Thor’s hammer”) is an apt image of a heavenly intervention in earthly affairs. Everybody naturally considers thunder and lightning to be the prime symbol of heaven’s unchained might over us. Thus there is nothing communal about this name, on the contrary: Indra’s thunder-storms are a pan-religious symbol, an embodiment of the basic unity underlying the plurality of religions.

Indraprastha  was founded as the capital of the Pandavas’ small-time kingdom but the area was destined by fate to become the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, the Moghul Empire, Samrat Hemachandra’s short-lived Empire, British India spanning the whole Subcontinent, and now the Indian Republic. It is a source of pride, and worth celebrating, that here, the “righteous ruler” once chose to highlight the great universal ideas personified in Indra. Therefore, the open-minded Delhiites all agree: Indraprastha amar rahe!

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Interview to a student of religion

(Interview given to a student of Religious Studies collecting material for her dissertation)

1. You have written that a Hindu simply is an Indian pagan. This raises the question: what is a pagan, exactly? Or what is paganism?

  

Strictly a “rustic”, “peasant” or “village bumpkin”, as opposed to the Christians in the Roman Empire, who were at first mostly city-dwellers. The textbook definition since the 4th century is “a non-Christian”. After Islam became more familiar in Europe, it often came to mean a non-Abrahamist, or better, anyone who does not subscribe to prophetic monotheism. The category “Pagan” strictly includes both atheists and polytheists, but mostly it is only used for a type of religious people, excluding non-religious atheists and agnostics.

When the Muslim invaders brought the Persian geographical term “Hindu” (“Indian”) into India, it came to mean “Indian by birth and by religion”, excluding those who were non-Indian or who were Indian but followed a non-Indian religion. In those days, people remained conscious of their original nationality for very long. When in the wake of the British, some Indian Zoroastrians settled in South Africa, they called themselves “Persians” though their families had lived in India for a thousand years. By the same token, the Syrian Christians counted as Syrians; but even if they counted as Indians, they would still not be Hindus, for they followed a non-Indian religion.

By contrast, all Indians without foreign links are Hindus: Brahmins, upper castes, middle castes, downtrodden, tribals, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins” according to the 8th-century Muslim chronicle Chach-Nama), Jains. By implication even sects that did not exist yet, were Hindu upon birth: Lingayats, Sikhs, Arya Samaj, RK Mission, ISKCon. Today, “Hindu” is a dirty word, so they all try to weasel out of it and declare themselves non-Hindu, also to enjoy the legal benefits of being a minority. (Indeed, under the prevailing anti-secular Constitution, non-Hindus are privileged above Hindus.) They see Hinduism as a sinking ship, and being rats, they leave it. But I am not impressed by this. People should simply grow up and face facts: they satisfy the definition of “Hindu”, so they are Hindus, Indian Pagans. I don’t care what elephants think of being called elephants; since they satisfy the definition of “elephant”, they are elephants, period.

Since roughly 1980, the RSS family of Hindu Nationalist organizations have tried to water this clear historical definition down by saying that “Hindu” simply means “Indian”. That would have been the pre-invasion usage, when Persian and Arabic were not tainted by Islam yet. But when the word was brought into India, it immediately differed from “Indian” by its religious dimension. Muslims and Christians are by definition not Hindu. But because the contemporary Hindutva leaders are not clear-headed (or not brave) enough to face difference, they try to spirit the difference between Hinduism and Islam away by calling the Indian Muslims “Mohammedi Hindus”. And likewise, “Christi Hindus”. I think that is the summum of cowardice.

Look, I don’t claim to be brave. I just sit behind my computer screen. Writing articles that displease some people doesn’t require more courage than posting cheerful holiday messages on Facebook; it’s just words. It is nothing compared to a soldier on the battlefield running into enemy fire.  Here in Flanders’ fields, we are presently commemorating every event that punctuated WW1, a hundred years ago. When you read about those events, you come across unspeakable acts of bravery. So, compared to that, scholarship is nothing, even when a bit controversial. But conversely, when even words can intimidate you, when even a purely logical application of the definition of “Hindu” is too much, when even a word of disapproval by the secularists is too much, that is really intolerable cowardice. To be sure, even the secularists approve of a difference between “Hindu” and “Indian”, but the so-called Hintutva people now try to out-secularize the secularists by even denying that there is a separate religious category “Hindu”, different from the secular-geographical term “Indian”. They have come a long way: from flattering themselves as being the “vanguard of Hindu society” to denying that there is even such a thing as a “Hindu Indian” different from a “non-Hindu Indian”.  

2. You have criticized both Christianity and Islam for being basically a set of superstitious beliefs. Yet many would claim to the contrary that there is a lot more superstition in Hinduism. For instance, while Christianity and Islam at least have a historical basis to many of their most important stories, this is less the case for the Hindu stories about various gods and goddesses, which are more akin to the stories about Greek or Egyptian gods. Furthermore, the practice of image- or idol-worship could itself be considered superstitious, since it leads the worshipper to fetishize the idol as a source of magical powers, or as a divine being in itself. What is your response to this?

The core beliefs of Christianity and Islam are superstitious. Or without bringing in any psychologizing jargon like “superstitious”, they are, more simply, untrue. It is not true that Mohammed had a direct telephone line with God, and that the Quran is simply a collection of divine messages. It is simply not true that Jesus rose from the dead; just like all deceased people, he is not part of this world anymore. Much less is it true that he thereby freed mankind from sin (and thereby also of mortality, the punishment that befell Adam and Eve after their Fall into sinfulness); levels of sinfuless or of human mortality have not appreciably changed in 33 AD. Yes, it is claimed by believers as a historical that Jesus resurrected or that Mohammed received revelations, but apart from the fact that the date given is realistic, the event is definitely not. And I don’t even go into the theories that Jesus or Mohammed never existed. Believing something that is flatly untrue, and moreover as the basis of your worldview, that is simply not the case with Hinduism.

As it happens, Hinduism is not one definite worldview. It is not based on one untrue statement, like Christianity or Islam. It is not necessarily based on a true statement either. Within the Hindu big tent, there are many traditions with their own doctrines. They have an awe for the sacred in common, but what counts as sacred is conceived in many ways. As the Rg-Veda says: the wise ones call the one reality by many names. Among these traditions, the Upanishadic ones converge on an insight that is not historical but true, just as the Law of Gravity is not historical (its date and place of discovery happen to be known but are immaterial, as it is valid everywhere and forever). It is the Atmavad or doctrine of the Self, summed up in Great Sayings like Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahma. That is the monist or Vedanta view, in parallel you have the dualist or Sankhya view, still within the Hindu big tent, the basis of Patañjali’s yoga. It is both rational and spiritual; Christianity and Islam cannot boast of anything parallel. But I agree that this is only the spiritual backbone of Hinduism, and that many of the beliefs and practices around it are not so rational. However, these don’t have the status that the core beliefs of Christianity c.q. Islam have. You can safely discard them and still be a Hindu.   

3. You have questioned the conventional view that Siddharta Gautama broke away from Hinduism and founded a new religion. Yet did he not deny the authority of the Vedas? And did he not reject the caste system, saying (variously quoted): “By birth one is not an outcaste, by birth one is not a Brahmin; by deeds alone one is an outcaste, by deeds alone one is a Brahmin”?

He did not go out of his way to deny the Vedas, and if he did, it only followed the latter part of the Veda itself. The Jnanakanda part (knowledge), the Upanishads, is explicit in declaring the Karmakanda part (ritualism), the Brahmanas, as outdated. Shankara lambasts the Sankhya-Yoga school for never quoting the Veda. It was part (not the whole, but part) of Hinduism to ignore the Veda.

He did not bother about the caste system, which Buddhists in Lanka and Tibet also practised. Buddhism never changed the social system in China, Japan or Thailand, because it had a spiritual agenda incompatible with a social reform agenda. If pursuing your own desires is already incompatible with pursuing Enlightenment, this counts even more for the immense job of structurally changing society. Either you do that, or you become a monk practising the spiritual path, but you cannot do both.

 It simply accepted the social structures it found. Check the Buddha’s own life. Once his friend Prasenajit discovered that his queen was not a true Kshatriya, only on her father’s side, so he repudiated her and their common son. The Buddha persuaded him to take them back, pleading for the older conception of the caste system, which was purely in the paternal line (same caste as father, mother’s caste can be any). Now, if he had been a caste revolutionary, as all Indian schoolkids are taught nowadays, this incident would have been the occasion par excellence to lambast and ridicule the caste system. But he does no such thing, he upholds one version (the older one, for far from being a revolutionary, he was a conservative) of the caste system.

Or consider the distribution of his ashes after his cremation. They are divided in eight and given to eight cities for keeping them as a relic in a Stupa. The ruling elites of those cities had staked their claim exclusively and purely in casteist terms, though this was a Buddhist context par excellence. After 45 yeas of Buddhism, they say: “He was a Kshatriya, we are Kshatriyas, so we are entitled to his ashes.” If Buddhism had been anti-casteist, then as bad pupils they still might have thought in casteist terms, but they would have used a non-casteist wording. Instead, they have no compunction at all in using casteist terms.

I have more examples, but to sum up: the Buddha was an elite figure par excellence, he mainly recruited his novices among the elite, and all the later Buddhist thinkers were Brahmins, as would be the Maitreya, the next Buddha. He was not an egalitarian at all, witness his initial refusal to ordain women, and when he relented on this, he ordered that even the seniormost nun would be subservient to the juniormost monk. So, the secularist-cum-Ambedkarite attempt to appropriate the Buddha for modern socialist causes is totally false. It is bad history par excellence.     

4. Regarding Islam, it seems that one of your foremost critiques of this religion is the Qur’an itself, which you view as (if I understand your position correctly) irredeemably fanatical and intolerant. Yet as you are surely aware, the Qur’an is a complex work which takes on different qualities depending on how the verses are interpreted, which verses are emphasized, whether a verse is considered as universal or contextual, and so on. Thus there are many Islamic scholars who claim, for instance, that armed jihad is only permitted in self-defense, seeing that militant verses are often accompanied by verses preaching restraint and forgiveness. So does the Qur’an really have to be problematic in itself? Is it not rather certain traditions (mostly Salafi) of interpreting the Qur’an which are a problem?

Let me clarify first that my fairly elaborate answers to your questions on Islam do not mean that I am especially interested in Islam. The Salman Rushie and the Ayodhya affairs forced me to study it more closely, but since the 1990s, I have only returned to it when current affairs dragged me back to it. As a subject, it has lost my interest because it is quite straightforward and all the important answers have already been given. The only meaningful debate that remains, is on which policy vis-à-vis Islam wil deliver both Muslims and non-Muslims from it, as painlessly as possible.

Now, your very common position that “source text good, tradition bad”, or “founder good, followers bad”, or “prophet full of good intentions, followers misunderstood him”. (It is equally used in the case of Christianity: “freeing Christ from Churchianity”, and all that.) Only by not reading the Qur’an, and especially the life events of the Prophet, can you say that. The magic wand of “interpretation” does not impress me. What interpretation do you know of that turns QaTaLa, “slaughter”, into “restraint and forgiveness”? Moreover, Muslims and their sympathizers have had decades to “reinterpret” their scriptures, and what is the result? The prophet’s biography (Sirat Rasul Allah), of which the authoritative translation by Alfred Guillaume is very literal and has been published in Karachi under Islamic supervision, is used by Muslims worldwide (their Quranic Arabic is usually not that fluent either), unaltered. Thomas Cleary’s islamophile “translation” of the Qur’an does not meaningfuly “reinterpret” the Qur’an, but simply leaves out the embarrassing parts; similarly a Dutch selective translation of the Sira that was recently published. The most-used English translations of the Qur’an are by Muslims, yet they faithfully translate that “war will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone”. There, we are fortunate that their great respect for the prophet’s every word prevents them from imposing their own false interpretations instead of it.

Jihad only permitted in self-defence? Pray, why did Mohammed order a (failed) invasion of the Byzantine empire? Why did he attack the Meccan caravans, who went about their business peacefully? When the Muslim army was defeated in central France by Charles the Hammer in 731, what was it doing there, thousands of miles from Arabia? Defending itself? These are just silly sop-stories. As an intellectual spectacle, it is amusing to see the acrobatics of “enlightened” Islamophiles in exculpation of Islam.

The solution is simply to grow up. It is not so hard to outgrow childhood beliefs, though it does take an intellectual and social transition, especially in the intermediate period when you have to co-exist with relatives who still shy away from taking this step. But then, I am asking no one to make changes in his life and outlook that I haven’t been through myself. I had the exceptional good fortune of being in the middle of a nation-wide (largely Europe-wide, in fact) religious conversion. I was born in Catholic Flanders, a frontline of the Roman Church against Anglican England, Calvinist Holland, Lutheran Germany and secular-Masonic France. In the 1950s, society was still deeply penetrated by the Church’s all-seeing eyes. Everyone in my primary school went to church on Sundays, was baptized, had a Catholic Saint’s name, etc. In the 1960s, this edifice started crumbling, with Vatican 2 as both cause and consequence. By the 1980s, this became the dominant narrative, and the conformists who had earlier gone to church because everyone did, now stayed away because everyone did. Today, practising Catholics are a small minority. The ex-Catholics are now the dominant group, until the next generation takes over, because they are not even “ex”, they simply have no memory of Catholicism. And all this without bloodshed, without destruction of the admittedly wonderful artistic heritage of the Church. (I still sing Gregorian plainchant under  the shower.)

So, that is what I wish for my Muslim friends too. Make Islam un-cool. Outgrow it. And take it from me: there is life after apostasy.

5. I would also like to ask the same question regarding Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the prophet of Islam. There are many hadiths attributed to Muhammad which certainly seem to us to set a bad example, but there are also many hadiths to the contrary. Is it not again simply a matter of emphasis and interpretation? For instance, consider this opinion by the scholar Hamza Yusuf, who was traditionally educated in the Maliki madhab. Do you consider his understanding of what Muhammad stood for as somehow Islamically illegitimate? (pardon the flawed subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmcQOb_FPO4

I have toughed it out to listen through the Shaykh’s special pleading, but I really knew enough after the first sentence, where he names Karen Armstrong as his main inspiration. Hers is a rare extreme of special pleading, distorting everything of Islamic history to fit modern values. The rest of his narrative is the usual idealization of the person Mohammed, as in his very special courtship with the widow Khadija (but with the false allegation that women before Islam had no inheritance rights, just when Khadija’s case proves the opposite). It is the basic conjuror's trick: directing the audience’s focus to a few nice episodes in Mohammed’s life and keeping the rest out of view. That is why Muslims are more properly called “Mohammedans”: they are far more punctual followers of Mohammed than Christians are of Christ.

To be sure, Mohammed may well have had some positive traits. He was known as very reliable, and I have no quarrel with that. Whether Khadija chose him because of those traits, as amply argued here, is another matter: he was a good young toyboy for this mature lady, and like his poverty (he worked as a shepherd in the service of the Meccan townspeople), his age made him her inferior and thus less likely to claim lordship over the wealth she had inherited or augmented by her entrepreneurial skills. But even i fit was a marriage made in heaven, wit hall manner of perfections accruing to the bridegroom,that doesn’t make him God’s spokesman. Shaykh may pontificate as much as he wants about Mohammed’s claimed virtues, that still does not make him more than the next man. He was neither the Son of God (as Muslims rightly hold against the Christians) nor a prophet with a private telephone line with God (as Muslims believe; it is the heart of their religion). 

Let’s cut short all the circumlocutions, let us cut out all the modern propaganda, and look at what the primary sources say.  We can summarize Mohammed’s life story in a single sentence: he destroyed an existing pluralistic society (Polytheists, Sabians, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews and Hanifs) and replaced it with a monolithic Islamic dictatorship. That is what the Islamic source texts themselves say. It is the height of ridiculousness that the multiculturalists in Europe, like their “secularist” counterparts in India, hobnob with Mohammed’s followers.

A lot also becomes clear when we know that most Arabs shook off Islam after Mohammed’s death and defeated the Muslim army. Unfortunately, they demobilized after that, the Muslim army came back and this time they securely imposed Islam. But the Arabs were the first victims of Islam. Mohamed practised robbery, extortion, abduction for ransom, rape, enslavement, slave-trade, and the murder of his critics and of a resistant Jewish tribe. All those data are in the primary sources of Islam. There is no way that an Islamic court can declare them un-Islamic,-- short of saying that “Mohammed was a bad Muslim”.

It follows that I am skeptical of Muslims who call themselves “moderate”. First of all, the distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims is an invention by non-Muslim soft-brains, unknown in Islam, and firmly rejected both by ex-Muslims and by leading Muslims such as Turkish president Erdoğan. He calls it insulting to Islam to make such a distinction. At any rate, I will accept Shaykh’s interpretation as moderate the day I hear him say: “Mohammed was wrong. Don’t follow Mohammed.” If, by contrast, he still recommends following Mohammed, as every Muslim is expected to do, he is in fact telling us: do practise abduction, robbery, rape, slave-taking, beheading, stoning, for those are all things he actually did, not just displaying his charms to win Khadija in marriage, as you might think after hearing Shaykh's narrative. Until he takes this distance from Mohammed’s precedent behaviour, he is just a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

6. Finally, I haven been impressed by many of your writings, which always allow the reader to follow transparently your train of thought – more than can be said about much academic literature in my opinion – and which offer some thought-provoking conclusions on diverse subjects. I am not always in agreement with your viewpoints (and sometimes I simply don’t know), but all the same your method strikes me as a very refreshing example of how the history of religions can actually be studied. This is all the more interesting since you are, if I understand correctly, unaffiliated with any university and basically carrying out your research on your own. So my final question is: What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue the same path? What type of literature would you recommend; how does one work with the primary sources; how many languages does one need to master? (How many languages do you know yourself?)

To start at the end: I have studied mother tongue Dutch, other Belgian national languages French and German, and English; these I read and speak fluently. Afrikaans is really simplified Dutch, so I can also follow it effortlessly. Because of my studies, I can get around in Mandarin and Hindi, but claim no fluency. Persian I have largely forgotten. I also know a smattering of Spanish, and in my young days, I also browsed through the Teach Yourself books of the Celtic, Scandinavian, the main Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian), Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. I totally forgot about those, though I can still decipher written Scandinavian because of the closeness to my mother tongue, Dutch. But knowing something of the structure of the languages has proved useful in comparative linguistics and studies of the Indo-European language family.  Among classical languages, my Latin was always good, my study of Wenyan (classical Chinese) and Sanskrit was thorough but I claim no fluency, alas no time to go deeply into them lately. I also studied Greek for two years, some Biblical Hebrew, and a smattering of Quranic Arabic, Sumerian and Sangam Tamil. The net result is that I know plenty of political and philosophical terminology and can place the concepts in their proper contexts, but I rarely use those languages as language. Thus, when I need to look something up in the Vedas or the Mahabharata, I scroll through the English text, and only when I come to the passage I was looking for, I switch to reading the original. Life is short, and languages only interest me as entry to a world of thought. I am a historian and more and more a philosopher; philology has been a good basis but only as an instrument. 

For born Indians, it ought to be a feasible minimum to familiarize yourself with Sanskrit. For doing Indian history or philosophy, it is simply necessary. For medieval history, you need to know Persian, and Arabic is a plus. In the US, they did a test: of two equally-gifted groups of pupils, one took 8 hours of English, and one 4 hours of English and 4 hours of Latin. After a few years, the second group not only knew Latin, unlike the other group, but also had a better knowledge of English. Similarly, your knowledge of your Indian mother tongue will increase if you take out time to study the supposedly useless Sanskrit. It also promotes national unity, the convergence between the vernaculars, and also the phasing out of English, which you and me may find practical, but which to Indians is an anti-democratic imposition by the Nehruvian elite.

Whenever possible, you should go back to the primary sources. Thus, I am presently working on the history of early Buddhism, and I was initially surprised by the world of difference between the usual narrative peddled nowadays in schoolbooks and popular introductions, and the narrative revealed by the primary sources. Apart from the many errors that have crept into the modern narrative (mostly showing a strong anti-Hindu bias; see e.g. what I told you above about caste), the over-all conceptual mistake is the cardinal sin in history: the projection of modern concerns onto ancient developments. History is all about difference, the fact that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.  

My being outside academe was not a matter of choice, but of being boycotted. Thus, my very first Indological conference was the International Ramayana Conference 1990 at my own university, Leuven, and I defended the existence of a Hindu temple forcibly replaced by Babar’s mosque. One-third of the professors there were privately in support but publicly silent; one-third were furious at my daring to violate their safe space of rationality with such a silly and politically tainted claim; and the last one-third just didn’t have an opinion but were embarrassed at the commotion. The following years, I was boycotted and bad-mouthed throughout academe. But the fact is: I was right all along, as recent excavations and a court verdict have confirmed, and all those big-time professors were wrong.

The good thing about being on my own is that I don’t feel pressured to conform to the received wisdom. Thus, on Buddhism, practically all academics concerned swear by the paradigm “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”. If I had been part of their circuit, I would probably have conformed to some extent to their view, at least to accept the narrative of “Hinduism and Buddhism”, as if these were two distinct entities on the same footing. Today I can just ignore their fairy-tale and state: the Buddha was 100% a Hindu.  

I don’t advise anyone to take the path I stumbled upon. But if somehow it happens, at least you should enjoy its good side. Meanwhile, I keep hoping against hope that the present supposedly Hindu gevernment will come to its senses and invest in scholarship, rather than parroting the narratives that several generations of secularist control over culture and education have established. In that endeavour, they will not only have to deconstruct all the harm done by the Nehruvians, but also the hare-brained alternatives presented by traditionalist Hindu “history-rewriters”, who think history means quoting from the Puranas. The last half-century, a gap in Hindu scholarship has grown that will require energetic initiatives to fill.

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