A denier on temple destruction

Llewelyn Morgan, who teaches Classical Philology in Oxford but has never taken a critical look at Islam's source texts, prefers to take on bloggers. In a recent piece in the Huffington Post titled ‘Bamiyan, Timbuktu - Are the Pyramids Next?!’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/llewelyn-morgan/bamiyan-timbuktu-are-the-pyramids-next_b_1673750.html?ir=UK+Universities+%26+Education), he writes : 'If you believe this, the days of the pyramids are numbered: "According to several reports in the Arabic media", writes Raymond Ibrahim, "prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt's Great Pyramids." In actual fact, it seems the story originated in a spoof tweet. But hey! It's the easiest thing in the world to find someone somewhere expressing some wacko view or other; and then Mark Steyn repeats it all, and off we go...'

Unlike Llewelyn Morgan, Mark Steyn was hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission there to defend freedom of speech. The reason is that Islamic militants and their Western dupes are attacking free speech everywhere: the former with guns and bombs, the latter with litigation and specious arguments.

The pyramids and the sphinx

As for Raymond Ibrahim: if the story is true, he seems to have fallen for one of the tricks of the internet age, and should have checked his story more carefully. No, the pyramids are not scheduled for a blow-up; but his story is nonetheless more realistic than Morgan would have us believe.

'Let's be crystal-clear about this right here. The answer to the question in my title is a mile-high, neon "NO". The pyramids of Giza are under no threat whatsoever, and neither is any of the rest of Egypt's glorious archaeological record. This is as radical as the thinking is getting among anyone anywhere near power in Egypt.'

Well, the Pharaonic constructions are not entirely safe: the explosion of a bus carrying tourists to the temples of Luxor (1997) was an attack on all those Pagans coming to look at the ancient Egyptian gods. Sometimes, a busload of American New Agers actually come to worship Ra and Hathor, and otherwise, it is still at Pagan artwork and architecture that foreigners come to gaze, so a stop must be put to all this international tourism. Fortunately, Mohammed was a businessman, Egypt needs money, and the tourists won't come in equal numbers just to see the mosques of Egypt, so Muslims are making a living off their Pagan heritage (though Mohammed stil preferred to be known on Judgment Day as an idol-breaker rather than an idol-seller, as the Sufi poet Farid-ud-din Attar said about Mahmud Ghaznavi, destroyer of Somnath). That is what keeps the pyramids alive.

It is also a fortunate circumstance that many temples are located away from the population centres, or have been covered with sand; when the sphinx was laid bare once, it was treated as an idol by the countryfolk and consequently earmarked for destruction, as Morgan himself testifies: "The Egyptian Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the 15th century AD, attributes the loss of the nose to iconoclasm by Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. In AD 1378, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Sa'im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose, and was hanged for vandalism.'

If true, this seems to be representative of the different forces in the field: Islamic iconoclasm, an idol too big to be destroyed, and soft-Muslim authorities who were concerned with their national riches. But note that smaller items of Pagan religion have disappeared from Egypt: what modern European archeologists found, they had to dig up. Here, both Christians and Muslims conspired to make the Pagan heritage disappear. Note however that Islam was more thorough about this than Christianity, which integrated Mithraic beliefs and Greek philosophy into its theology. Pakistan may sell its Harappan heritage to tourists as ‘5000 years of Pakistan’, but teaches national history to its own schoolkids from Mohammed the Prophet and Mohammed bin Qasim’s landing in Sindh, belittling Harappan civilization as part of Jāhiliyya, the Age of Ignorance.

Timbuktu and Sufism

Morgan alleges: 'Not to put too fine a point on it, Ibrahim is scaremongering, and it comes as no surprise when he goes on to offer a deeply misleading account of what has been happening in Timbuktu: "Currently, in what the International Criminal Court is describing as a possible 'war crime,' Islamic fanatics are destroying the ancient heritage of the city of Timbuktu in Mali -- all to Islam's triumphant war cry, 'Allahu Akbar!'" To read that, you'd think that the only Muslims involved in events at Timbuktu were the ones doing the vandalism. But of course it was Islamic buildings that they were attacking. Ansar al-Din, the al-Qaeda-affiliated zealots in northern Mali, consider the traditional  Sufi practices of Timbuktu to be heretical. What Ibrahim is doing is treating the most extreme voices of Islam as representative of the whole religion, to the extent of implying that the Sufi Muslims of Timbuktu aren't really proper Muslims at all.'

Islam has its roots in general human nature, partly accepting it (e.g. patriarchy or “male chauvinism”) and partly going against it. When turning against it, the religion found itself unable to wipe out all undesirable human traits, though it tried. The worship of saints and their shrines or graves came naturally to the people, and  though Mohammed tried to uproot this tendency, it came back. The Wahhabites in Arabia, and their contemporary followers like al-Qaida and now in Mali the Ansar al-Din, try to emulate the prophet in wiping out all traces of idol-worship, including the worship of Mohammed himself (whose house was destroyed by the Wahhabites) and of the Sufi saints. There is in effect a grey area of ‘Islamic idol-worship’, e.g. worship at Sufi graves, the Moghul school of painting (the paintings were not worshipped, but just to make sure, strict Islam prohibits all depictions), and ‘Muslim music’ (Mohammed, who must have had a nervous impairment, couldn’t stand the sound of music, so that serious Muslims like Aurangzeb and Ayatollah Khomeini did indeed prohibit music), etc.

Al-Qaida and other ‘fanatics’ are quite right: their prohibitions are Mohammed’s own, they are by definition loyal to the ‘essence’ of Islam. But as a matter of history, we have to concede that many nominal Muslims, both among rulers and among commoners, did allow or practise this ‘Islamic idol-worship’, giving a certain Muslim legitimacy to these practices though they were against the prohibitions of the Prophet.

Llewelyn Morgan is in tune with the reigning delusion, viz. the postmodern distrust of ‘essentialism’. He touches on the heart of the matter by making an issue of the “essence” of Islam. Postmodernists including most Islam-watchers and media people abhor the idea that Islam has an “essence”, an unchangeable core. Problem for them is that practically all Muslims do accept the idea of such an essence. ‘Islamic extremism is against the principles of Islam’, or so the so-called moderate Muslims claim. This may be right or wrong, but at any rate presupposes that there is an essence of Islam. Moderates and extremists may have differences of opinion on just what constitutes the essence of Islam, but they agree on the principle that there is an essence to Islam.

Morgan is right when he observes: 'Islam is a very broad church, with no central organizing authority (like a Pope, say) to fix doctrine. As in other religions, there's a tendency for different traditions within the religion to claim themselves as the uniquely authentic face of Islam, and al-Qaeda and their allies make that claim in a particularly uncompromising and brutal way.’

Well, there is a centre, acknowledged by all Muslims, viz. Islamic scripture. But we agree that there is no institutional centre, no Congregation of the Faith as exists in the Catholic Church. This pluri-centrism is not always a virtue. In the Catholic Church they say: Roma locuta, causa finita, ‘when Rome has spoken, the matter has been decided’; so when Rome decrees a reform, it has the force of law throughout the Catholic world. By contrast, if a Mufti (jurisconsult) gives a reformist fatwa, another Mufti can give a counter-fatwa re-establishing the orthodox position. Reformers of Muslim society, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, bewail this pluri-centrism as a factor of Islamic conservatism. But conversely, the bright side is that Ansar al-Din’s interpretation of Islam is not the only one.

            According to Morgan: ‘But there's a further point: if Raymond Ibrahim treats the Sufi of Timbuktu as not proper Muslims, he's in effect adopting the viewpoint of al-Qaeda. What a stunning victory for extremists this is, that people across the US and beyond are being encouraged to accept al-Qaeda's distorted ideology as the truth!'

Well, truth. Raymond Ibrahim is one of those who don’t believe that Mohammed heard God’s voice or that the Quran is anything other than what the Prophet’s all too human mind made up. So any version of Islam, al-Qaeda’s or Morgan’s own or another, is bound to be false. What is truthful here is at most the interpretation of Islam as meant or not meant by Mohammed, and in that respect, al-Qaeda is very close to the truth as Islamically conceived. Al-Qaeda’s view of idolatry may not be the only one, but they are entirely truthful when they assert that their interpretation of Islam follows the Prophet, and not some innovator during Muslim history. Today and in the West, it may be possible to find a TV Imam giving a modernist interpretation, but most Islamic courts will, if asked, uphold the ‘al-Qaeda interpretation’ and fail to find Islamic grounds to condemn al-Qaeda’s anti-idolatry campaign. Al-Qaeda and the Ansar al-Din are faithfully walking in the footsteps of Mohammed himself when they condemn the veneration of graves and shrines as crypto-idolatrous.

Morgan and his ilk are very annoyed that a group like al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Din shows us what real Islam is. They would rather espouse a’moderate Islam’, which in reality can be analysed as partial Islam compromising with un-Islamic human nature and modern influences. Those who are serious about Islam try to weed out these compromising human and modernist elements.

Ayodhya

Next, Morgan refers to an important source of information: 'The comments under my blog on Timbuktu told a similar story. Someone came in with a link to Ibrahim's article; others encouraged me to read polemics by Hindu nationalists such as Sita Ram Goel's Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, which seeks to prove that Muslim rulers in India systematically destroyed Hindu shrines.'

The late Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003) was a Master of History from Delhi University. His two-volume book is entirely scholarly, full of references to original sources. It is far less deserving of theterm ‘polemics’ than Morgan’s article. Goel's list of about 2000 cases of temple destruction and presentation of the Islamic theology of iconoclasm, as well as of numerous contemporaneous Muslim sources on effective Islamic iconoclasm in India, is more than Llewelyn Morgan can handle. The philosopher of science Karl Popper defined a scientific statement as one that can be falsified. Well, to start with, Goel in his book (1990-1991, second edition 1997) gives some 2000 falsifiable claims of Islamic temple destruction. More than twenty years have elapsed, yet none of these 2000 has effectively been falsified by Morgan and his friends, though they are numerous and well-funded. Nor has the qualitative part, Goel’s presentation and discussion of the Islamic theology and history of iconoclasm, been refuted.

According to Morgan: 'That brought me back to where I started with this whole issue, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. One way that the Taliban and their sympathizers sought to justify the destruction of the Buddhas was to claim it as payback for the demolition of the Baburi Mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu hardliners in 1992… On the other side, numerous Islamist terrorist attacks on Indians have claimed the destruction of this mosque as their motivation.'

 As Morgan certifies, the Babri Masjid has by now been avenged numerous times. It started with the attacks on hundreds of Hindu temples throughout South Asia in the days after the demolition, and twenty in the UK alone. Ever since, these revenge operations have been piling up, to the extent that realistic observers have started suspecting that something else was the matter. These attacks after 1992, and the far more numerous ones before 1992, obviously have a deeper root than the Babri Masjid's 'martyrdom'. But the Indian ‘secularist’ ruling class has, by making the Ayodhya issue far more difficult and far more important than it really deserved, really asked for these numerous Islamic ‘revenge’ operations.

Still according to Morgan: ‘An intense and polarized debate continues to this day about Ayodhya, what was there before the mosque was built by the Moghul emperor Babur, and what (if anything) happened to Hindu buildings on the site, and it was an issue of great interest to Sita Ram Goel.'

It is true that Goel was interested in Islamic iconoclasm, but not that ‘an intense and polarized debate continues to this day about Ayodhya’. Firstly, the Allahabad High  Court has decided the matter, largely in the Hindu side’s favour (30 September 2010), after a thorough perusal of the Court-ordered diggings by the Archeological Survey of India; and secondly, the BJP as the main political conduit for Hindu activism has pulled its hands off  the Ayodhya controversy after the demolition in 1992. After the Court verdict, the secularists widely hoped that the Muslims would rise in revolt, but they didn’t think the Babri Masjid worth more trouble. They had chosen for ‘moderation’, much to the dismay of the secularists. Touching wood, we dare say that calm prevails among Indians on the Ayodhya front. 

‘Extreme Hindu nationalism, like the ideology of al-Qaeda and the paranoid theories of certain US commentators, is very interested in history, but deals in radical historical simplifications--for example, the idea that Islam is a religion hard-wired to destroy the religious monuments of its opponents. That is simply a false account of what happened, historically, when Islamic peoples encountered non-Islamic [peoples].’

A false account? That is a serious accusation. Prof. Morgan’s opponents have made such accusations against Islam only after gathering lots of evidence. He himself can start with the book by Goel which he himself mentioned, and prove it wrong. Let’s say that he begins by proving ten mosques not to have been built on destroyed temples, and ten accounts of temple destruction (by Muslim authors!) to be untrue. That shouldn’t be too difficult if he is right.

When Mohammed started his career, Arabia was a multicultural society. When he had finished his mission, it had only one religion, viz. Islam. Christians and Jews were at best banished to Mesopotamia, Pagans were given a choice between Islam and death. Those who came over in time, “voluntarily”, could only join the victorious Muslims by destroying their idols and turning their temples into mosques. If not, we invite Prof. Morgan to present to us ten of the 360 idols in the Kaaba which, according to Islamic scripture, were destroyed by Mohammed and Ali. He should not dig them up but show how Muslims still worship them or allow others to worship them. If he cannot do that, then not he but Sita Ram Goel stands vindicated.

Bamiyan

According to Morgan, Buddhism in Afghanistan didn’t suffer all that badly: ‘The Buddhas of Bamiyan survived, and were celebrated, for 1,200 years among Muslims before the Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda destroyed them.’

Some encyclopedias say that both the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb and the Persian king Nadir Shah trained their cannon on the Buddhas. Cannon in those days were not very high-tech, so they only managed to damage the giant Buddhas somewhat, not to fully destroy them. That’s already two, and some attempts at destruction may have gone unreported, while of others, we may have lost the chronicles. At any rate, it seems that Morgan has devoted a whole book to the Bamiyan Buddhas, so we are curious to read this Latin professor’s refutation of the Nadir Shah and Aurangzeb accounts.

In nearby Dunhuang, in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, something similar happened. The Buddha statues were systematically defaced or beheaded by the Muslims, but their feet or trunks remained standing – proof enough for Islamophiles to present it as proof that Islam tolerates Buddha statues. Oh, and no Buddhist artifacts remained overground and in the population centres once the Uyghurs converted to Islam.

Indeed, none of this alters the fact that Muslims have made the smaller Buddhist artifacts disappear from Afghanistan, the cradle of the Buddha statue. The Taliban, jointly with the smugglers and black marketeers, did this a second time by removing from the Kabul museum all Buddhist artifacts which mostly Western archeologists had dug up. But we wouldn’t mind the artifacts disappearing, if only the practice of Buddhism had continued. But only foreign tourists kept it alive, busloads of Japanese and Taiwanese tourists who transmuted into devout Buddhists once they saw  the statues in Bamiyan. And this ‘idolatry’ is why the Taliban chose to destroy these gigantic idols.

Marxist support

Morgan then seeks support from the American Islamic scholar Richard Eaton, a self-described Marxist: ‘I encourage anyone interested in Islamic attitudes to Hindu and Buddhist holy places to read Richard M. Eaton's measured, careful analysis, Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States, Part 1 and Part 2. He tells a story of Muslim rulers in India who for the most part protected non-Islamic shrines, and on the rare occasions they did otherwise were following a time-honoured tradition within India of destroying your enemies' favourite temples: Hindus had been demolishing other Hindus' places of worship for centuries before Islam arrived.’

That is simply not true. Firstly, even Eaton manages to find only a handful of Hindu cases of destruction of a temple or abduction of its main idol, a small fraction of the number of Islamic idol destructions that even he has no option but to admit. Though his random list of Islamic temple destructions allows for only some 80 campaigns, the number of 80 which Eaton’s followers bandy about, is woefully inaccurate. Thus, Eaton himself counts as one case the thousandfold temple destruction in Varanasi by Mohammed Ghori’s troops in 1194, so these “80” cases really affected  thousands of temples.

Secondly, there is a big difference between the extremely rare Hindu (and perhaps more frequent Mesopotamian) practice of idol abduction and the frequent Islamic practice of idol destruction. In the rare cases where Hindu rulers abducted an  idol of some prestige, they installed it in their own temple and continued its worship, all while leaving the victim population free to install another idol of the same  respect the svadharma (own religion) of his new subjects. By contrast, where Muslims destroyed  idols and their temples, they did not resume worship of the idol or the deity: theirs was an attack on a religion, and their idol destruction was conceived as part of the destruction of a religion.

Thirdly, there are no cases, even Eaton doesn’t cite one, where an Islamic temple-destroyer (of the pre-Ayodhya-demolition age) cites a Hindu precedent as justification. When they sought a precedent, they found it among their Islamic predecessors and ultimately in Mohammed. I already argued this in my review of Eaton’s theory in 2002 (in my book Ayodhya: the Case Against the Temple), and haven’t received any attempted refutation ever since.

Morgan adds a familiar argument: ‘The crucial point, though, is that these Muslim rulers in India were never driven by religious fanaticism.’

In India, this is the classic put-down when the so-called secularists have to admit that Muslims by their own account destroyed thousands of temples. But the fact is that Muslims themselves don’t make the distinction between ‘fanaticism’ and plunder, between religious and economic warfare. This again goes back to Mohammed, who organized raids on caravans and called them jihād, religious war. So, plunder is Islamically justified, but so is the destruction of little temples where no gain is expected.  

And Mogan argues further: ‘However, in the context of tension between India and Pakistan, extreme simplifications of history thrive: Hindus are superstitious idol-worshippers; Muslims are intolerant idol-smashers. Scrupulous scholars like Richard Eaton prove that it is just not that simple.’

No, Eaton has not done that. He has not  refuted the Hindu and Muslim stereotypes, which have a sound basis in historical reality. But Morgan shows his bias by juxtaposing “idol-worshippers” with “superstitious”, which are two entirely different concepts, and “intolerant” with “idol-smasher”, which are nearly synonyms. Of course idol-smashers are intolerant, but there is no reason why the worship of murtis/statues should be superstitious. It is perfectly possible for a non-idol-worshipper, indeed for an idol-smasher, to be superstitious.

Belief in Muslim testimonies

 Morgan makes his main point again: ‘But, as I commented at the end of my blog on Timbuktu, "Ideologues in one camp have a habit of creating ideologues in other camps, and the argument goes on and on and on..." That notion was illustrated in glorious technicolor below the line. Get your head around this logic, in one of the comments: "if Ansar al-Din, the extremists doing the damage in Timbuktu, claim to be the only true Muslims, then we have to accept that claim, and regard what is happening in Timbuktu as Islam attacking non-Muslims." In other words, we must accept al-Qaeda's analysis of Islam and the world, that they are the only authentic Muslims and all other Muslims must be forced to follow their creed. That strikes me as plain bonkers. What on earth compels us to accept al-Qaeda's view of things?’

Well, again, it is the truth that can decide this. When Muslims talk about themselves, we have to believe them. Thus, when Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Bouyeri and hundreds of other Muslim terrorists declare in their farewell letters/videos that their motive is Islam, we have to believe them. But when they talk about Islam, claiming that their own interpretation is the same as Prophet Mohammed’s, we have to ascertain for ourselves the truth of that claim. And then we find that Prophet Mohammed’s intention was indeed closer to al-Qaeda’s than to that of the Sufis, a movement which invokes Quranic authority but was quite unknown in Mohammed’s day.   

But not according to Morgan: ‘Sufi Muslims are Muslims. Full stop.’ We are inclined to believe every statement by people about themselves. Since Sufis declare themselves Muslims, we should take them at their word. But when Sufism began, it was distrusted by the orthodox and some Sufis ended their lives on the gallows as heretics. They were  takfīr’ed, declared Kāfirs, Pagans. Mohammed did something similar with those who called themselves Muslims but withheld themselves from warfare: he lambasted them as Munāfiqīn, ‘hypocites’. They are the grey area of half-Muslims or soft-Muslims, whom al-Qaeda chooses to treat as non-Muslims. At any rate, they treat these soft-Muslims’ shrines the same way they treat the temples of non-Muslims, viz. destruction.

Islam has an essence, and it is highly questionable whether mysticism satisfies the criteria to be truly Islamic. Al-Qaeda takes the same position today. But medieval authorities decided to allow Sufis in because they could render specific services to Islam, viz. making Islam acceptable to forced converts and even getting people to convert voluntarily. The good is sometimes the enemy of the better, and true Islam sometimes comes into conflict with useful Islam. Muslims may fight this out among themselves, but neither school is well disposed to real religious pluralism. (Thus, in Pakistan, the Ahmadiyas are persecuted by the majority Sunnis, but try to undo this persecution by proving that they are good Muslims, viz. by struggling hard against Hinduism.)

 Morgan: ‘But credit where credit is due: irrational as it is, that comment does capture something essential about the thinking (for want of a better word) on this issue. Radicals like al-Qaeda want to provoke their opponents to be equally radical, because they want to create unbridgeable divisions between peoples, and an existential conflict which (they fondly suppose) will bring their appalling ideology to world domination. Commentators who define Islam as essentially incompatible with Western values are doing al-Qaeda's job for it.’

Again, is this true or not? Some doctrines are incompatible with ’Western values’ (or simply with humanism), and some are not; deciding to which of these two categories Islam belongs, requires something that Llewelyn Morgan has never done, viz. a study of Islam itself. The question of truth doesn’t arise for Morgan, but it is crucial. It allows us to discover the many words and deeds of the Prophet on which al-Qaeda bases its policies; but maybe Morgan can convince the Muslims that Islam is better off without Mohammed?

Moderation

Morgan claims: ‘Sita Ram Goel, Raymond Ibrahim and Ansar al-Din are all, in a peculiar way, speaking the same language, the language of extremes, where religions cannot communicate peacefully with one another, and complex and diverse faiths are reduced to crude caricatures. In the words of the Arab Spring activist Iyad El-Baghdadi, "Islamophobes and extreme Islamists are two peas in a pod. Both invent a radical, extreme sect and call it 'the one & only true Islam'."’

Arab Spring activists are in the unenviable position of having to please both sides, so they have to sell Islamic values to their fellow countrymen and moderation to outsiders. Whether such a position is conducive to truthfulness, is another matter. Was Mohammed a moderate? Sometimes he was a diplomat, but mainly he was a strategist, choosing between compassion and ruthlessness depending only on his own and his religion’s interests. The thousands whom he killed will not consider him a moderate, but fortunately for Morgan, these inconvenient witnesses are dead. History is written by the victors, and so Islam has always had many public relations agents, even at Oxford.

That is why Sita Ram Goel drew attention to the ‘mute witnesses’, the destroyed temples and idols which have been retrieved by archeologists, or of which parts have been integrated into mosques. They are the witnesses that have survived the attempt at their annihilation.

So-called Islamophobes (or so they are termed by liberals incapable of imagining that someone sane could disagree with their own opinion) want nothing more eagerly than ‘peaceful communication between religions’. Only, they find that Islam stands in the way. In their study of Islam, they have, along with most Muslims, discovered an essence, viz. the precedent behaviour of the Prophet, and they find that this conflicts with interreligious peace. But the crucial difference between Goel and Ibrahim on the one hand and al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Din on the other, is that the former don’t believe Mohammed’s claim and don’t emulate him, while the latter do. This is a crucial difference, but Morgan tries to paper it over by merely juxtaposing their names and alleging a similarity between anti-fanatics and declared fanatics.

 ‘But we must insist that there is another language, a precious but undervalued one. It isn't glamorous, and it requires the kind of laborious hours in the library that Richard M. Eaton put in. It resists seductively black-and-white explanations of events, and the temptation all humans feel to demonise what they do not know. It is never going to inspire young men to pull down a mosque or become suicide bombers. It is fiddly, unexciting, humane--and true. It is called moderation.’

When a knave writes a book, he is soon followed by a bunch of fools. That is why Richard Eaton is applauded by the likes of ex-nun Karen Armstrong and indeed by Llewelyn Morgan. We haven’t visited Eaton’s library, but we wonder what books they have there. After all, the Quran itself as well as the traditions and biography of the Prophet show that few were ever as adept at ‘demonizing’ as Mohammed. And all Muslims believe that Mohammed was the model man, whose conduct had  and still has the value of precedent. Fortunately they don’t all put  the beliefs to which they pay lip-service, into practice. This abstention from (or lukewarmness in) the practice of Islam  is called moderation. The less Islam, the more moderation. We are all for ‘fiddly, unexciting, humane’ culture, and that is why we hold Islam up to scrutiny.

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The British were not guilty of Partition; somebody else was

The easiest way before an Indian audience to get hands clapping, is to accuse the British of the Partition of India. Try it for yourself and say out loud: “Partition was engineered by the wily Britishers  in their nefarious design of ‘divide and rule’”, success assured. And the applause is sure to follow no matter whether the audience, whose sensibilities you may not know, is Gandhian, Nehruvian-secularist or Hindu nationalist. Yes, Hindu nationalist too.

“Jinnah was brainwashed into dividing India”, I read in RSS mouthpiece Organiser. Well, if it is that  easy, why doesn’t the RSS brainwash the Indian Muslims into becoming India-loving Hindus? Incidentally, how is it done, this “brainwashing”? In reality, the Hindu nationalists are taking a cheap shot at the British in order to mask their fear of pinpointing Muslim guilt.

One would have expected at least Mahatma murderer Nathuram Godse to have criticized Islam, apart from laying as much of the blame as possible at Gandhi’s feet. But Godse says very little about the guilt for Partition. He accuses the British of a “divide and rule” policy, alright, but doesn’t make this the cause of the Pakistan movement. He accuses Gandhi of not countering the Muslim League’s demand of Partition with his trademark means of action, viz. the fast unto death; but he does not go into the question of why the Muslim League made this demand in the first place. So, even among Godse’s fans you won’t find many articulate opponents of the British conspiracy thesis.

In this article, I will argue that the British had nothing to do with Partition, and that this was a purely Muslim operation necessitated by the present democratic age’s belief in numbers. In the medieval period, the Muslims constituted far less than the 24% of the Indian population which they were in the 1940s, yet they ruled. Mohammed Ali Jinnah thought that this was no longer possible in modern times, so if they wanted to be in power, they needed a smaller country where they would constitute the majority. So, the Two-Nation Theory espoused by the Muslim League necessitated two separate states, one of which would have a Muslim majority.

To be sure, the British were guilty of many things, and the fixation of Hindu nationalists on them is understandable. Principally, they caused several very serious famines, they dismantled the technology and economic structure of India, and they imposed a foreign ideology that harmed the natives’ self-respect. This did not make British rule “the biggest crime in history”, as L.K. Advani claims on his blog (15 July 2012), but it was pretty bad. However, none of that made them guilty of Partition. Nor did their policy of “divide and rule” cause the pre-colonial or post-colonial (and generally not even the colonial) hostility between Hindus and Muslims. It was a tactic used at the negotiation table, not meant for the streets (where riots would only upset economic life), much less for a final Partition of the Indian empire.

Viceroys Lord Victor Linlithgow and Lord Archibald Wavell told Jinnah to his face that they would not countenance the division of their nice and neat Indian empire, not even in the event of decolonization. Their successor, Lord Louis Mountbatten, only accepted Partition because the Muslim League threatened and started violence. Congress leaders did the same, including even Mahatma Gandhi in June 1947. All his so-called fasts unto death, his promise that “India will only be divided over my dead body”, proved hollow in the face of the real chance that these opponents would not give in, so that his fast would only be concluded with his death. .

It is only the fledgling Cold War that made the British and also the Americans see a silver lining in the Partition, viz. that one of the parties would join the Western camp and provide it an outpost to monitor the Soviet  threat. This was apparently also what made Lord Mountbatten more pliable. But it was only in 1945 that the Soviet ally became an enemy, five years after the Muslim League adopted the Pakistan resolution, and more than ten years after the idea of Pakistan was first mooted.

In reality, the ideology of Partition was rooted in Islam. According to Islam, Muslims must always be in power. Thus, Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women but non-Muslim men are not allowed to marry Muslim women because wives are deemed to be at the husbands’ command. In the Middle Ages, Muslim minorities had seemed to subdue the Hindus by military means, and Muslim leaders with a medieval mindset concluded logically that numbers were unimportant to decide who will dominate whom. Thus, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who had given an emigration fatwa during the Khilafat movement) is mis-termed a Nationalist Muslim but aimed in fact at the Islamic domination of the whole of India. However, Jinnah had interiorized the modern value of democracy and didn’t dare to ask for more than a country in which Muslims would form the majority.

Islam is against multiculturalism unless it is treated with utmost respect and has at least the perspective of becoming dominant. By contrast, the Hindu nationalists including Nathuram Godse were prepared to give the Muslims far-reaching concessions in order to keep India united. They were not guilty, Congress was not guilty when it proved insufficiently accommodating to the League, and the British rulers were not guilty. If a section of the Muslims had not desired Partition, then Partition would never have happened.

Hindus who blame the British for Partition, show that they are afraid of the truth, and afraid of Islam. It is far easier to accuse the British, who have safely departed, than to lay the blame at the door of Islam. Blaming Islam opens a can of worms, it is difficult to deal with this religion. It is a challenge to one’s courage, but it is mainly a challenge to one’s intelligence. If you are deficient in these departments, then go ahead and blame the British.

On the other hand, if you have courage and intelligence, it should be easy to face the fact of Muslim causation of the Partition of India. Today, it takes a moderate dosis of courage to criticize Islam: you risk the ire of the institutions (and your job if you are a scholar in the Humanities), the violence of some indignant Muslim, and if you are a Hindu, also the displeasure of your fellow Hindus. But these risks are manageable, and as I will explain on some future occasion, I do not buy the myth of Hindu lack of bravery. Criticizing Islam also requires a large amount on intelligence, viz. the power to discriminate between causes (the doctrine of Islam) and symptoms (the behavior of Muslims, only partly caused by this doctrine), and the balancing act between uncompromising criticism of the doctrine and sympathy at the human level. Even you could have been born and brought up as a Muslim and developed an attachment for Islam’s irrational beliefs. If you believe in reincarnation, you should realize that you even could have been a Muslim, perhaps several times over. So, responsibly criticizing Islam and its role in the Partition of India requires intelligence.

It is here that I have more reason to worry. Though Hindus have shown great intelligence in the literature of the past and ICT initiatives of the present, they have mostly failed to apply their intelligence to the Islam problem, though this is staring them in the face every day. But I am confident that now you will do something about it.

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The Buddha and Caste

               Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature,  sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an elite movement, recruiting among the upper castes and patronized by kings and magnates. We will argue that these believers are right, while the neo-Buddhists in India and outside enthusiasts in the West are wrong.

                A good place to start is the Buddha's use of the term Ārya. Buddhists claim that when the Buddha lived and taught, the term Ārya had a general psychological-ethical meaning “noble”, a character trait larger than and not dependent on any specific cultural or religious tradition or social class (let alone linguistic or racial group). It is used in the famous Buddhist expressions, the “four noble truths” (catvāri-ārya-satyāni) and the “noble eightfold path” (ārya-astāngika-mārga).   However, we must look at the historical data without assuming modern and sectarian preferences.

Firstly, we must take into account the possibility that the Buddha too used the term Ārya in the implied sense of “Vedic”, broadly conceived. It no longer meant “Paurava”, the ethnic horizon of the Veda-composing tribes (whereas in Anatolian and Iranian it would retain this ethnic meaning, “fellow citizens” against “foreigners”, “us” against “them”), but in the post-Buddha Manu Smrti and in general Hindu usage, it would retain the association with the Vedic tradition, hence the meaning “civilized” in the sense of “observing Vedic norms and customs”. The Buddha too may have conceived of his personal practice as restored-Vedic and more Vedic than the “decadent” formalism around him. “Back to the roots” is of all ages, and it may have affected the Buddha as well. What speaks in favour of this thesis is that the Buddha himself, far from being a revolutionary, appealed to the “ancient way” which he himself trod, and which “the Buddhas of the past” had also trodden.

After Vedic tradition got carried away into what he deemed non-essentials, he intended to restore what he conceived as the original Vedic spirit. After all, the anti-Vedicism and anti-Brahmanism now routinely attributed to him, are largely in the eye of the modern beholder. Though later Brahmin-born Buddhist thinkers polemicized against Brahmin institutions and the idolizing of the Veda, the Buddha himself didn’t mind attributing to the Vedic gods Indra and Brahma his recognition as the Buddha and his mission to teach. His disciples took the worship of the Vedic gods as far as Japan.

As Luis Gómez [1999: “Noble lineage and august demeanour. Religious and social meanings of Aryan virtue”, in Bronkhorst & Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia, Harvard, p.132-133] points out, the Buddhist usage of Ārya is subject to “ambiguities”, e.g. in the Mahāvibhāsā: “The Buddha said, ‘What the noble ones say is the truth, what the other say is not true. And why is this? The noble ones […] understand things as they are, the common folk do not understand. […] Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those who own the wealth and assets of the noble ones. Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those who are conceived in the womb of a noble person.’”

At the end of his life, the Buddha unwittingly got involved in a political intrigue when Varsakāra, a minister of the Magadha kingdom, asked him for the secret of the strength of the republican states. Among the seven unfailing factors of strength of a society, he included “sticking to ancient laws and traditions” and “maintaining sacred sites and honouring ancient rituals”. [Dīgha Nikāya 2:73] So, contrary to his modern image as a “revolutionary”, the Buddha’s view of the good society was close to Confucian and indeed Brahmanical conservatism. Far from denouncing “empty ritual”, he praised it as a factor of social harmony and strength.  He wanted people to maintain the ancestral worship of the Vedic gods, go to the Vedic sites of pilgrimage and celebrate the Vedic festivals. In this light, his understanding of Ārya may have been closer to the Brahminical interpretation of the term as “Vedic” than nowadays usually assumed.

This even applies to the Buddha’s view of caste. Of most of the hundreds of men recruited to the Buddha’s monastic order, we know the provenance, hence the caste. More than 80% of the hundreds of men he recruited, were from the upper castes. More than 40% were Brahmins. The Buddha himself was a Ksatriya, son of the President-for-life of the proud Sākya tribe, and member of its senate. His lay patrons, who had their personnel or their feudal subordinates build monasteries for the Buddha, included most of the kings and magnates of the nether Ganga region. Indeed, this patronage is the main reason why Buddhism succeeded in becoming a world religion where most other contemporaneous sects dwindled and disappeared.

                The successor-Buddha prophesied for the future, the Maitreya, is to be born in a Brahman family, according to the Buddha himself. When the Buddha died, his ashes were divided and sent to eight cities, where the elites had staked their claims purely in caste terms: “He was a Kshatriya and we are Kshatriyas, so we are entitled to his ashes.” Clearly, his disciples, after undergoing his teachings for forty-five years, were not in the least hesitant to display their caste in a Buddhist context par excellence.

In his study of caste and the Buddha (“Buddhism, an atheistic and anti-caste religion? Modern ideology and historical reality of the ancient Indian Bauddha Dharma”, Journal of Religious Culture, no.50 (2001)), the German Indologist Edmund Weber quotes the biographical source-text Lalitavistara and concludes: “The standpoint which caste a Buddha should belong to has not been revised in Buddhism up to the present day. It is dogmatised in the Lalitavistara in the following way: a Bodhisattva can by no means come from a lower or even mixed caste: ‘After all Bodhisattvas were not born in despised lineage, among pariahs, in families of pipe or cart makers, or mixed castes.’ Instead, in perfect harmony with the Great Sermon, it was said that: ‘The Bodhisattvas appear only in two kinds of lineage, the one of the brahmanas and of the warriors (kshatriya).’”

                A word returning frequently in Buddhist texts is “nobly-born”. Buddhists were proud to say this of their Guru, whose noble birth from the direct descendants of Manu Vaivasvata was an endless object of praise. Birth was very important to the Buddha, which is why his disciples wrote a lot of hagiographical fantasy around his own birth, with miracles attending his birth from a queen. The Buddha himself said it many times, e.g. of the girls who should not be molested: they should be those of noble birth, as distinct from the base-born women who in the Buddha’s estimation were not equally delicate.

                The Buddha also didn’t believe in gender equality. For long he refused to recruit women into his monastic order, saying that nuns would shorten its life-span by five hundred years. At long last he relented when his mother was widowed and other relatives, nobly-born Kshatriyas like the Buddha himself, insisted. Nepotism wasn’t alien to him either. But he made this institution of female monastics conditional upon the acceptance that even the most seasoned nun was subordinate to even the dullest and most junior monk. Some Theravada countries have even re-abolished the women’s monastic order, and it is only under Western feminist influence that Thailand is gradually reaccepting nuns.

                The Buddha’s ascent to Awakening was predetermined by physical marks he was born with, according to his disciples. Buddhist scripture makes much of the Buddha’s noble birth in the Solar lineage, as a relative of Rāma. The Buddha himself claimed to be a reincarnation of Rama, in the Buddhist retelling of the Rāmāyana in the Jātakas. He also likened himself to the mightily-striding Visnu. Later Hindus see both Rama and the Buddha as incarnations of Vishnu, but the Buddha started it all by claiming to by Rama’s reincarnation.

To play devil’s advocate, we could even extend our skepticism of the Buddha’s progressive image to an involvement in the racist understanding of Ārya. Some pre-WW2 racists waxed enthusiastic about descriptions by contemporaries of the Buddha as “tall and light-skinned”. [Schuman, H.W., 1989: The Historical Buddha, London: Arkana, p.194] That would seem to make him “Aryan” in the once-common sense of “Nordic”.

Nowadays, some scholars including Michael Witzel [on his own Indo-Eurasian Research yahoo list] suggest that the Buddha’s Śākya tribe may have been of Iranian origin (related to Śaka, “Scythian”), which would explain his taller stature and lighter skin in comparison with his Gangetic fellow-men. It would also explain their fierce endogamy, i.e. their systematic practice of cousin marriage. Indeed, the Buddha himself had only four great-grandparents because his paternal grandfather was the brother of his maternal grandmother while his maternal grandfather was the brother of his paternal grandmother. The Brahminical lawbooks prohibited this close endogamy (gotras are exogamous) and, like the Catholic Church, imposed respect for "prohibited degrees of consanguinity"; but consanguineous marriages were common among Iranians. (They were also common among Dravidians, a lead not yet fully exploited by neo-Buddhists claiming the Buddha as “pre-Aryan”.) The Śākya tribe justified the practice through pride in their direct pure descent from the Ārya patriarch Manu Vaivasvata, but this could be a made-up explanation adapted to the Indian milieu and hiding their Iranian origin (which they themselves too could have forgotten), still visible in their physical profile. So, that would make the Buddha an “Aryan” in the historically most justified ethnic use of the term, viz. as “Iranian”.

                At any rate, nothing in Buddhist  history justifies the modern romance of Buddhism as a movement for social reform. Everywhere it went, Buddhism accepted the social mores prevalent in that country, be it Chinese imperial-centralistic bureaucracy, Japanese militaristic feudalism, or indeed Hindu caste society. Buddhism even accepted the religious mores of the people (a rare exception is the abolition of a widow’s burial along with her husband in Mongol society effected by the third Dalai Lama), it only recruited monks from among them and made these do the Buddhist practices. In “caste-ridden India”, the Buddhist emperor Aśoka dared to go against the existing mores when he prohibited animal-slaughter on specific days, but even he made no move to abolish caste.

                Buddhism wasn’t more casteist than what went before. It didn’t bring caste to India anymore than the Muslims or the Britons did. Caste is an ancient Indian institution of which the Buddha was a part. But he, its personal beneficiary, didn’t think of changing it, just as his followers in other countries didn’t think of changing the prevailing system.

(first published on the Hindu Human Rights website)

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Hindu survival: what is to be done

 

                Some Hindus ask me, as a sympathizing outsider, if I have any advice for them when they want to revive their fortunes. In principle, I have no advice; it would be arrogant to pretend to know something that the people concerned are not so sure about. But then again, Hindus are no different from others, they are subject to the same laws, so an approximative knowledge of their condition is enough to predict where they are moving and to say what they have to do to make the best of it. So, here goes.

1. Self-knowledge

                The first thing Hindus have to do, is to know themselves. The great problem of Hindus today is that they have become sleep-walkers, forgetful of their civilization. It gets worse with every passing year, as the ever-larger Hindu middle-class is becoming Americanized both in consumer patterns and in values. Their knowledge of Western films and music is becoming bigger as their knowledge of Hindu tradition is lessening. And the worst is that increasing numbers take pride in their ignorance.

                In the past, it didn’t matter if you skipped religion classes. You would just breathe Hinduism. You would know the tales from the Mahabharata and the Puranas through songs and theatre plays performed in your village square. Girls would learn Hindu traditions from their mothers and pass them on to their own children. But that can no longer be taken for granted.

                In a way, the world has become more conducive to Christian-style religion. NRI-PIOs congregate in their temples the way Christians gather in their churches. They organize Sunday school for their children the way they learnt from their Protestant neighbours. India itself is becoming similar, if only because the same family pattern with two wage-earners is being transplanted. You can study religion on your own, the way the first Christians practised their religion (even in secret), against or at least without support from your surroundings. At any rate, unlike in the past, if you don’t make a deliberate choice to do something about your religion, chances are that you won’t.    

                To Hindus, this is a new situation. In days  gone by, religion was just there, you fell in line with your surroundings, you did as everyone did. Now, to an increasing extent, you have to make a choice for it. The law of inertia is no longer working for Hinduism; it starts to work against it. The missionaries know this; the Hindus, I am not so sure.

                But they can save their Hinduism by practising it. The very first result is that they themselves will realize again what Hinduism is all about.  Not otherworldly Hinduism but the kind that Krishna preached, on the Kurukshetra, with the real enemies and opportunities and the real world.

2. Language

                For Hindus abroad, depending on circumstances, knowledge of Indian languages is probably lost. In a few places, native languages are perhaps viable, like Hindi in Suriname or Tamil in Singapore. If Hindu families can speak their Indian language inside the home and transmit it to the children, so much the better. But in mixed families and in oceans of powerful languages like the Anglosphere, children or grandchildren are bound to take to the language of their surroundings, so it is a waste to still your guilt feelings as an immigrant by forcing your children to learn a smattering of Bengali or Kannada. It is better to teach your children Hindu values, and if this has to take the form of a language, let it be Sankrit, the key to the main Hindu scriptures. For the rest, let  them acquire a thorough grounding in Hindu stories and ritual, in English or whatever vernacular they take to, rather than investing your and their precious time in a language that is bound to die.

                In India itself, English should be shown its place as first foreign language. Mind you, mine is a position against self-interest, for I will never have more fluency in an Indian language than in English; by contrast, all Indians and Westerners pleading for English happen to be self-serving. At any rate, an anti-English stand is not voguish, now that Indian politicians are not just sending their own children to English-medium schools while promoting vernacular-medium education for the common man, but openly replace vernacular with English schooling. This is a political choice: either Panjabis and Malayalis will speak English with each other, like Danes with Koreans or Congolese with Pakistanis; or they will speak an Indian language. If you want Indian unity, you’d better aim for an Indian language that will set India apart from the Anglosphere.

                That Indian language can only be Sanskrit. At this distance, we can say that it was a fateful day when the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad, cast the deciding vote in the Constituent Assembly in favour of Hindi as link language, to the detriment of the other candidate, Sanskrit. Hindi was not accepted by the chauvinist speakers of the other vernaculars. One of the good reasons was that it was but a recent language, a common denominator between old literary languages like Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Rajasthani and others. Hindi as it is, was deemed vulgar by speakers of highly civilized non-Hindi languages like Bengali or Telugu. It didn’t have the kind of prestige that could overrule such objections.

                By contrast, Sanskrit if chosen as the link language would have sent a cry of admiration through countries like China and Japan, Russia and Germany, France and America. The state of Israel, that chose to make Biblical Hebrew its first language, would have understood very well that India made its main Scriptural medium into its second language. The Flemish, who waged a struggle against French-language masses all while accepting Latin masses as a matter of course, would have understood it if the Indians had preferred their common sacred language over a vernacular. Even the Muslim world would have understood it. Most importantly, it would have been accepted by the Indian people. Speakers of the constituent members of the Hindi commonwealth would have had no objection, and speakers of non-Hindi languages (even Tamil chauvinists) would have had fewer objections than against Hindi. As for the English-speaking elite, it would militate no harder against one Indian language than against another.

                The vote in the Constituent Assembly, fifty-fifty between Sanskrit and shuddh Hindi,  shows how far India has slipped, and what an outrageous failure the so-called Hindu Nationalist movement has been. If the vote were held today, it would rather be fifty-fifty between English and Bollywood Hindi, i.e. Urdu. The secularists were then a small coterie around Nehru, now the same stream of opinion controls all the cultural and other institutions. Back then, a vote for English would be unthinkable, now the same taboo counts almost for a vote against English. The Muslims were only 10% and smarting under their guilt for the Partition, not in a position to make demands; now they are 15% and growing fast, and in active opposition to every language policy that smells of either Hinduism or nationalism. Sanskrit has been borrowed heavily by the South-Indian languages and would be welcomed by their speakers (so would shuddh Hindi, for that matter, and for the same reason), whereas “Hindustani” or Urdu brings Hindi a lot closer to the official language of Pakistan but at a greater distance from the Southern languages of India itself.

                So, you have a choice. Supporting Bollywood Hindi will make Indian unity weaker and the Muslim factor stronger. But more importantly, supporting English will make Indian unity and democracy weaker, and the hold of the secularist elite stronger. By contrast, supporting Sanskrit will make Indian unity stronger, along with popular access to the Hindu tradition. Whether India as a unified state survives, depends on many things, but English will certainly not be a factor of unity. A Kannadiga may speak English with a native of Karachi or Chittagong, as he would with a native of Hong Kong or Cairo or anywhere, without sharing a national state with them; and the same counts for a native of Mumbai or Delhi.        

Admittedly, Sanskrit is a difficult language, but then it is equally difficult for everyone. And if one positive development can be mentioned since 1947, it is the decreased importance of caste pride, which led many upper-caste people to have a sneaking sympathy for the Nehruvian anti-Sanskrit policy, which at least kept Sanskrit out of the hands of the lower castes. One of the formative episodes in Dr. Ambedkar’s life was when he was denied the right to study Sanskrit in school because of his low caste. It helped make him a partisan of Sanskrit as national link language, a choice not followed by his so-called followers in the Dalit movement. They favour English, a choice unthinkable to the freedom struggle generation.

So, the anti-Sanskrit forces are a lot stronger than in the late forties, when they very narrowly won the day. Still Sanskrit is the only chance the lovers of India have. Hindi failed, and English will only weaken Indian unity, apart  from being an utterly undignified choice of link language. Brace yourselves for a difficult struggle – or for national disintegration.

3. Build your own Hindu organization

                It is counterproductive to hope for tangible results from the Sangh Parivar. In most respects, they achieved nothing for the Hindus. A few merits go to their credit, viz. relief work and, in some areas,  security for Hindus threatened by aggressive “minorities” (i.e. the local branches of international religions with a lot of support from abroad). Important as these merits undoubtedly are, they do not justify the Sangh Parivar’s national claims for the “awakening of the Hindus”. On the contrary, the Sangh Parivar has done its bit for keeping the Hindus asleep. They have misdirected their flock and neglected a number of concerns of those Hindus who were awake.

                One good thing the Sangh did, was to organize. I call upon you to do the same. Unfortunately, the Sangh saw this as a goal in itself. It forgot to make self-organization subservient to a Hindu vision, because it had none.

                However, that criticism of the Sangh has been expressed enough times and on enough forums. Repeating it is only one form of what Rajiv Malhotra calls “mouse-clicking Hindu activism”, a useless activity that may be ego-flattering but otherwise makes no difference. It may be necessary to keep Hindus from a mistaken line of involvement, but it has mostly outlived its use now. The thing to do is simply to set up your own Hindu centre of activity and ignore the ideological line of the Sangh.

                The focus may be very different depending on local needs. Physical security is an important concern in areas where the so-called minorities are strong and growing, like West Bengal and Kerala. That is why the Hindu Samhati in West Bengal is so important: it promises to be more effective than the RSS, and has so far also lived up to its promise. It channels the natural Hindu capacity for self-defence. In opulent areas where Hindu self-forgetfulness due to the invasion of American consumerism is a greater menace, by contrast, the focus may be more on Hindu identity and the revival of Hindu knowledge.

                The national and international dimension can be taken care of far more easily that in the past, thanks to the internet. The pure communication dimension of this transregional cooperation will take care of itself. But is there a need of some more formal way of grouping along national and international lines? In particular, shouldn’t there be a party like the BJP?

                If there were an effective lobby group, like the Jewish lobby in the US, there would be no need of a Hindu political party. There is no Jewish political party, but both the Democrats and the Republicans do their best to curry the favour of the Jewish lobby. For the impartisan form, the VHP (World Hindu Council) has in the past approached all political parties with its “Hindu agenda”, but in practice it only counted on the BJP. And even this party did not do the Hindu lobby’s bidding, e.g. whereas the VHP’s Hindu agenda of 1996 contained an anti-abortion item, in keeping with the Brahmanic-Shastric interdiction of abortion, the BJP programme (in keeping with most other parties’ and governments’) was all for birth-control by any means necessary, including legal abortion. So Hindus don’t consist of the right human material to form an effective lobby-group pressurizing political parties.

                A party like the BJP is better than nothing, according to many Hindus. While it fails to do anything for Hindu causes, at least when it is in power nothing will be done against the Hindus, unlike the other parties; or so they say. The opening of Indian media ownership under the NDA regime can be given as a counterexample, a BJP-engineered disaster for Hindu society; but we don’t want to be difficult. Well, let the BJP exist, it will do so anyway, but let that not stop you from doing anything on your own.

                Once you’ve built up something, it will automatically become the lobby that some were dreaming of. The BJP, and perhaps other parties, will seek your approval when making its programme, your support during the campaign. It always does so when it sees people who know what they want; it did so with the secularists, and it will do so again with Hindus. This will put you in a position to make demands. The BJP will make some of your programme its own if it has the impression that you are consistent and credible. All  this and more will accrue to those who really do something and get started.

4. Let the facts speak for themselves

According to Rajiv Malhotra, Hindus are “under-informed and over-opinionated”. I already had that impression, but being a foreigner, I had no business saying it. However, if an Indian says it, it deserves to be quoted. They haven’t done their “Purva-Paksha”, their study of the opponent’s viewpoint, and --  now I quote Sita Ram Goel --  yet “they think they know everything about everything”. I have, for instance, made many an argument with Hindus who claimed to know more of my home religion, Christianity, than I myself did. Perhaps it is an atavistic behaviour pattern dating back to the time when India was on top of the world, and when Indians had a superiority rather than their present inferiority complex.

On the internet, I have come across many Hindus who were ill-mannered and unwilling to abide by the general rules of good conduct. That will not influence my opinions too seriously, because my mind has by now been made up, but it will affect those of many others.  What they prove is that a good cause can be spoilt by bad servants. They give a good message a bad name by their lack of self-control.

They feel good about themselves because they had their say. They think it is impressive if they shove it into the other side’s face. But what they never do, is listen to feedback. Am I achieving what I set out to achieve? Well, the problem with most of these folks is that they don’t really want to achieve anything. The thought of getting somewhere just doesn’t cross their minds. They merely want an emotional kick, a feeling of having said it in a way that the other side, or more likely the sympathizing reader (they are not aware of another side), is unlikely to forget. They want to live out what is inside of them, and the result be damned.

The fact that they are participating in discussions on Hinduism and its plight at least proves they feel that something is not right. Let that be a start. For the rest, you have your own teachers to go to. You don’t need me to tell you that self-control (in Sanskrit: yoga) is better for you and for everyone than self-indulgence. You have Hindu civilization for that.

Hindu tradition teaches you all about Purva-Paksha, the “earlier wing” against which your own viewpoint is the counter-wing. It teaches you that you first have to acquaint yourself with what the others are saying before you can answer them. Short, it doesn’t want you to be lazy. It doesn’t want you to take the laughable posture of pretending you know it all without studying. By extension, it teaches you to take into account what the others say in answering you. It wants you to learn from their feedback. Thus, there has never been a Hindu who has convinced an outsider by means of a false (P.N. Oak-ian) etymology, it has solely earned them ridicule; only Hindus fall for this kind of “argument”, and that should tell you something.

How does this work out in practice? Instead of letting your emotions take centre-stage, you should let the facts speak for themselves. That works best. Isn’t it funny, Hindus who have the facts as their best friends yet want to hide these behind their own anger? In making your point, you should first of all let reality do the talking. Nothing convinces as much as reality does.

And yet, reality is not enough. Some Hindus know how to let reality speak and how to make their own emotions shut up, yet their performance is insufficient. For instance, so many times already I have received copies of Nathuram Godse’s speech about Mahatma Gandhi. Hindus think they are meritorious by spreading the word and propagating Godse’s speech, because it stays close to the facts,and because it is itself a historical fact. But except for a secularist of sorts (Ashis Nandy), I am the only author of an analysis of Godse’s speech. Many Hindus admire Godse, but they don’t bother to stop and think about his speech. They merely repeat it, mantra-like, without adding anything to it.

So, once in a while it is necessary to think things over. Was Nathuram Gods right? Was he more right in his words than in his act? What was the result of his act? Discussion forums are an excellent place to make a start. The “wisdom of crowds” is represented there, and I have already learnt a lot from it, even from the most ordinary people who have their moments of brilliance too, and their area of expertise. Hindus could learn a lot too, and train themselves in making up their own minds and influencing other people’s.

5. Don’t create false problems

                According to textbooks, Hindus and especially low-castes (who were only induced into Hinduism by the evil Aryan invaders) are fed up with “empty ritual”. That is, according to the secularists, why they want to leave Hinduism. If you see Christians eat the flesh of Christ, just remember that they would never want to be Hindus and condemned to doing “empty rituals”.

                In reality, there may be some things in Hinduism that trouble them, but “empty ritual” is not it. Take it from an eyewitness to the slow death of a religious culture, Christianity in Europe, who has seen numerous contemporaries sigh: “Yes, Christianity is a pack of fairy-tales, but where will I find such a good ritual setting for my funeral as a mass in church, conducted by a real priest?” Religion may be nonsense, but ritual is very important. So, when I see Hindus on internet lists complain about “empty ritual”, I know they are just rattling off what they learned in their Jesuit school. Of course, the Jesuits know the value of ritual and also practice it, but to Hindu pupils they teach about its emptiness.

Ritual will take care of itself, it gets reborn easily, but some matters are more serious when they are made into problems. One perfectly false issue that has been keeping Hindus busy for a century and a half (if not for a thousand years) is polytheism vs. monotheism.  Pharaoh Akhenaten, Moses and Mohammed thought  they stumbled upon some important realization when they declared monotheism true and polytheism false. Against them, some Hindus defend their ancestral polytheism, which nowadays is a brave thing to do. Others, whom the Buddha called lickspittles, try to curry favour with their enemies by espousing monotheism. To have an edge over other Hindus, they declare that the others have not understood how a single God is hiding behind the seeming multiplicity of Vedic gods.

But the truth of the matter is that the Vedic seers didn’t cared two hoots for this quarrel between monotheists and polytheists. The divine manifests itself as one or as many, and both could be lived with. You should not import into Hinduism a problem that only your enemies created, and in the name of which they have destroyed your idols and temples.

A related “problem” is that of idolatry. For thousands of years, Hindus have depicted the divine through paintings and sculptures. To be sure, they also worshipped in the open air, with the wind as the natural idol of Vayu, the thunder as the natural idol of Indra, and so on. But surely the culture of artificial idols has so long and so intimately been interwoven with living Hinduism that we can call idolatry Hindu par excellence. So, it is safe to ignore those Hindus who, wanting to cozy up to their self-described enemies, suddenly “discover” that the Hindus have always been oppressed by false and evil idolatry.  

The so-called problems of polytheism and idolatry are false problems floated by those Hindus who want to feel  superior to other Hindus, viz. by bathing in the reflected glory of Christianity and Islam. Hindus had better concentrate on real issues, like how to maintain their Hinduism in a sea of hostile forces, or how to save girl babies.

6. Creativity

                One very good thing by which Hinduism stood out, both in its Vedic and its Puranic phase, was its unbridled creativity. Today, this is what is sorely lacking. Sita Ram Goel diagnosed the Hindu activists among his fellow students ca. 1940 as the most mediocre of the lot. Those who had nothing to offer individually gravitated towards causes which tilted them above themselves but to which they themselves had indeed little to offer.  They gave their time and energy, nobody can deny them this dedication, but a winning movement cannot be built exclusively of such grey people.

                The creative people are on the other side. Most Bollywood actors and directors are either on the anti-Hindu or, at best, on the mindlessly Hindu side. They have named their industry after its American counterpart and some say their product is lousy, but at least they know how to attract money and they certainly have a good time. Hindus ought to feel jealous, if at all they have the ambition to do as well as Bollywood.

                Creativity was to be found in the late M.F. Husain, hated by the Hindus and disliked by a great many Muslims too. He was driven by hate, old and uninspired hate, but undeniably he created things in painting. Hindus could do nothing but demand a ban, the most humourless and uncreative solution. No Hindu came forward to be the anti-Husain, let alone some original way to silence him.

                It was different once. Every art form was steered to new heights by Hindu artists. Every province of India had its own variation of the performing arts. In the visual arts, no tradition was a match for the richness in characters that the fable collections, epics and Puranas had to offer. Whereas Chinese and Japanese classical music are museum pieces next to omnipresent Western classical music (at performing which the East-Asians excel), Indian classical music remains as the only rival. More individualistic yet more complex, it differs from European classical music the way adult music differs from children’s songs. Hindus are fairly good at maintaining what was great among the inventions of their ancestors, but not so good at giving a creative answer to today’s challenges.

                So, gird up your loins to start anew. Create Hindu art. Let it not be an imitation of Western “modern art”, the West is fed up with it and you have no need of Indians pretending to like it. Forget about trying to be original, just be Hindu and your originality will take care of itself. Except for calendar artists, no artist wants to be known as a Hindu, so by doing Hindu art you automatically stand out.

7. Celebrate

                The greatest thing about Hinduism for all its adherents are its festivals. As long as people celebrate these, the religion will exist.  Just apply the Americans proverb: “If it’s fun, it gets done.” The same counts for the more serious Hindu business, like meditation. It is not airy-fairy, as Westerners imagine, but very down-to-earth, the most realistic thing in the world. But it is also the happiest thing, the source of joy.

  And judging by this criterion, Hinduism is alive and kicking. So, I am not all that pessimistic about the future. You simply have to do what it takes.

(first published on the Hindu Human Rights website, ca. 17 May 2012)

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