Rajaram, Witzel, and Racism

  

 

 

What follows is a comment on the article “Recycled racism in a new bottle” by Navaratna S. Rajaram, published on 10 February 2014 by Vijayvaani.

The Kozhikode workshop

But first a correction to a recent post by the Professor who is attacked in the article. Harvard Sanskrit professor Michael Witzel has published a report on the Vedic workshop in Kozhikode, January 2014: http://vedagya.blogspot.be/2014/03/report-on-6-th-international-vedic.html. In it, he mentions me as “a ‘reformed’ Hindutva writer”, and says that I questioned two speakers “insistently and even a bit aggressively” about the Aryan debate. While this is not an important issue, the contentious Aryan question implies that even small mistakes can develop into dramatic rumours, so I’d better set them straight.

The two questions I asked in sessions where he was present (and which I didn’t intend to be “aggressive”), in fact pertained to the famous Rg-Vedic hymn 1.164, where a lowing cow and her calf are repeatedly mentioned, as well as “the syllable”, hinting at but not really affirming a connection between the two. I cited Witzel’s own jocular comment on his own Indo-Eurasian Research list that this meant the syllable Aum really was an alternative vocalization of “Mooh” (which I consider quite likely), and asked the scholars what the conclusion of their own research was. Both remained non-committal, calling it possible but not really bringing any progress to the debate. In the parallel sessions however, which Witzel laments as necessitated by the too large numbers of papers, I did ask two speakers, who based their conclusions partly on the Aryan Invasion Theory, whether they had any evidence for this theory. Both refrained from offering any hard evidence, one said that it is established well enough and not seriously questioned, the other cited a few authorities to this effect, most of all Witzel himself.

I was at the workshop genuinely to listen, to assemble information on the current thinking among a large number of scholars specialized in ancient Indian culture. I had no intention or expectation of convincing anyone, though I was pleased to find that a number of younger scholars sought me out to know more about the Out-of-India Theory. Publicly, the Aryan question was not discussed at all. For Witzel, the reason was that “it is a purely political and not a scholarly topic”. And this is also exactly the opinion of Witzel’s fiercest opponent, Dr. Navaratna S. Rajaram.

Both of them, probably very surprised to find each other in the same bed, assert that the Aryan debate is over and has been definitively decided. Both think that this debate only shows signs of life once in a while because of its political interest and in spite of its scholarly resolution. Only, Witzel thinks that the AIT has won the debate and its denial only survives because it is politically useful to the Hindutva forces, while Rajaram thinks the AIT has been refuted and only survives because it is politically useful to anti-Hindu forces as well as to various other political movements, including racism. It is this motive that he also discovers in Witzel, as he explains in the VijayVaani article.

 

Rajaram’s position

We summarize Rajaram’s central contention: “Following the Nazi horrors and the American Civil Rights Movement race is now a dirty word.” Yet: “Some writers, even academics at supposedly prestigious institutions, continue to produce works advancing racist positions behind thinly veiled sophistic arguments while avoiding overtly racist terms.” Namely, Harvard Sanskritist Prof. Michael Witzel’s latest book: “The Origins of World Mythologies is the latest addition to this dubious genre by a singular scholar.”

He presents Witzel as “more activist than scholar”, and lists as proofs his interventions to thwart Hindu proposals to eliminate the Aryan invasion theory from the chapter on Hindu history in California schoolbooks, and to ban Dr. Subramanian Swamy, after the latter’s anti-Muslim utterances, from teaching economics at Harvard.  

Not that physicist Rajaram has to teach lessons about Sanskrit studies. He writes for instance that Witzel “claims to have found dialectic changes in the Rigveda around 1200 BC soon after the non-existent Aryan invasion”, but this observation was already worked out in the 19^th century to explain the archaic and non-standard language of the Vedas. Rajaram repeatedly and unknowingly displays his unfamiliarity with the field. Moreover, in his publications including this very article, he passes as a “scientist and historian”. He has a diploma and a career as scientist to his credit, but as if that were not good enough, he also claims to be a historian. This, he is not.

We do not believe in diploma fetishism, so we accept that someone without a history diploma can still be a historian, namely if he does the work of a historian, applying the historical method. This, however, Rajaram haughtily refuses to do. Case in point is his dogged rejection of the very basis of the whole Indo-European theory, even preceding the question of the Homeland, viz. the linguistic finding of a kinship between most Indian and European languages. For him comparative and historical linguistics is a “pseudo-science”.

For this reason, he rejects any quest for a homeland, even if it is India, and therefore also rejects the so-called Out-of-India Theory as detailed by Shrikant Talageri. For years already, he has been saying that the Aryan debate is over and has been won by the AIT skeptics. It is this reputedly authoritative assertion that was believed by the unsuspecting California Hindus and led to their defeat in the textbook affair.   

His scholarly contributions confine themselves to refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory, without proposing an alternative explanation for a linguistic kinship that he rejects. In this respect, his discovery of the relevance of the Seidenberg findings about the anteriority of Baudhayana’s mathematics to Babylonian mathematics (which dates Baudhayana’s late-Vedic writings dramatically earlier than hitherto assumed) remains pivotal in the Aryan debate. But for a presentation of the whole Aryan problem, he simply and willfully lacks the knowledge.

 

Racism

Though not comprehending the scholarly basis of the Aryan debate, Rajaram must be gifted with telepathic powers, for he can read other people’s motives, even where they haven’t expressed them. He can see through any “camouflage” and identify people’s true reasons. Thus:

“Witzel’s latest book looks at world mythologies, going back 100,000 years when the first anatomically modern humans were identified in the African Rift Valley. From there he claims to trace two tracks of mythological development - the Gondwanian and the Laurasian. But this is just camouflage, for his agenda is ultimately racist.”

Oh yes, Witzel must be a racist: as a German, he has it in his blood. But Rajaram’s telepathy loses some of its shine when he claims mere hearsay as his source of authority: “As Tok Thompson of the University of Southern California exposes (as do others), Witzel claims that these represent two races in the world, distinguished by both myth and biology.”

How would he know? I am a witness to the genesis of this claim. On an improvised e-group of some thirty people, functioning in December 2013 to February 2014, only two had read this book, an Indo-American computer scientist and myself. Both had read the book from cover to cover and both asserted at this point that they had not come across any racism. Rajaram and his allies, who are now spreading this article of his, had not even seen the book. He does not know what Witzel said in that book and merely relies on two book reviews: mine (http://koenraadelst.blogspot.be/2013/03/globalization-of-mythology.html), which doesn’t have this accusatory slant, and the said Tok Thompson’s (http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2014/01/a-racist-book-by-witzel-harvard.html).

Rajaram makes his readers believe that he is quoting Witzel, when in fact he is quoting Thompson’s review: “As seen by Witzel, ‘…the dark-skinned Gondwana are characterized by ‘lacks’ and ‘deficiencies’ … and are labeled ‘primitive’ at a ‘lower stage of development’, while the noble Laurasian myths are… the only ‘true’ creation stories, and the first ‘complex story’, which the Gondwana never achieved. On the face of it, the common African origin of modern humans is acknowledged, but the sting is in the tail: the dark-skinned Gondwana never progressed beyond their primitive stage to catch up with the ‘noble Laurasians’ -- their superiors in biology as well as intellect and character.”

The “superiority in biology” is purely Thompson’s addition, and the offending references to race are not in evidence in Witzel’s book, a fact which gives the lie to Thompson’s claim that Witzel’s text is “explicitly racist”. He still has to prove his effective allegation that it is implicitly racist, but it certainly is not “explicitly” racist – otherwise he would certainly have quoted the racist statements in it. The racism allegation is now a cheap way of capturing the moral high ground in the West, where anti-racist egalitarianism has become the state religion (a development that has escaped the notice of many Hindu nationalists, who tend to wallow in anachronism), and I have seen it used numerous times to destroy people, on a very slender factual basis or even against the pertinent facts.

Witzel never calls the Laurasian myths “noble” and never speaks about skin colour, which is not what defines his Gondwana-Laurasia dichotomy: the Tamils are as dark as Nelson Mandela, yet they are Laurasians. The Chinese or the Mayas are not white either, but they are Laurasians. He observes that Gondwana mythology “lacks” some Laurasian themes, such as the dragon-slayer or the end-time; but that does not mean it is objectively “deficient”. Girls “lack” what boys have, but it is to be hoped that Tok Thompson doesn’t deduce therefrom that they are “deficient”: their sexual apparatus, including their distinctive capacity to bear children, is less obvious, but is as valuable and necessary as that of the boys.

Finally, Rajaram has also pointed out common themes and universals that transcend his bifurcation. Thus, the Kundalini doctrine, which exists in the “Laurasian” culture of India (and, I may add, in recognizable form also China), also appears among the Gondwana shamanisms of the Australian Aboriginals and the San (Bushmen). On the improvised e-mail list, several Hindus got angry with me for citing the kinship of a venerable Hindu doctrine with these “Bushmen”.

 

Mythology

Thompson then goes on to challenge the truth of Witzel’s division of the world’s myths into two types, citing some Laurasian peoples of North America (which he himself has studied) as not having the typically Laurasian myths of the dragon-slayer, the end-time etc. This may be true: bifurcating mankind culturally after millennia of interaction and ever new waves of emerging or changed stories is an ambitious claim, and Witzel may have reached too high. Or he may not have, that remains a matter for debate among specialists. At the end of his book, Witzel himself admits his own limitations in studying the whole world’s myths and solicits mythographers to volunteer corrections.

What I find very valuable in Witzel’s thesis is his charting a world tree of myths. Of course a first attempt is bound to be seriously imperfect, and the very nature of the reconstruction of ancient myths and their development necessarily has parts which history has made invisible and irretrievable. But unlike Rajaram and Thompson (as very partially known to me through his review), he dares to project verifiable trends deep into the past. Thus, in linguistics, Witzel espouses (and Thompson lambasts) the notion of “Nostratic”, the putative ancestor of many Eurasian and North-African languages. It is simply obvious that the historically attested fragmentation of languages also took place for dozens of millennia before the invention of writing, and that conversely, the reconstruction of ancient languages from a comparison of their modern daughters can in principle be projected into prehistory. Similarly, the principle of a global family tree of myths is impeccable even though its actual reconstruction is only at its beginning. Moreover, this universalism emphasizes the unity of mankind, a position which I had learned to consider anti-racist.

On 15 May 2014, Witzel comes to London to lecture on this debate, and I will reserve my definitive judgment on Thompson’s critique of his book until hearing his own defence.

As for Rajaram, he is back in telepathy mode: “If supported, the notion of the superior white and inferior dark races will be scientifically validated. This is the real agenda of the book, but its ‘science’ is rubbish; it does not even rise to the level of pseudo-science. Mythology is just a camouflage to push this prejudice that is simply not worth spending time over. What interests us are the history and motives lurking behind the book.”

Exactly: the book doesn’t interest him, he will pass judgment on it without even reading it. This is like those Western AIT-espousing philologists who denounce Shrikant Talageri’s work all while accidentally spilling the beans that they haven’t read it (for a recent example, see his fresh discovery of Hans Hock’s ill-informed denunciation). Incidentally, while Western academics have lambasted Talageri as well as myself, the most fiercely negative reviews of both his and my latest book on the Aryan question (The Rigveda and the Avesta c.q. Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan) were written by Rajaram. At the time I decided to ignore it, but hostile as well as anti-scholarly attittudes have accumulated so badly in circles I used to consider friendly, that at least I now have to acknowledge the fact.

 

Indra  

Undaunted, Rajaram keeps denouncing Witzel’s unread book: “Except for the terminology, its arguments are indistinguishable from those of Houston Chamberlain (Inequality of Races), Arthur de Gobineau and other race theorists who provided justification to the Nazi idea of the superior Aryan race. It is important to note that their source was not Indian but European, more specifically Teutonic German. They worshipped Teutonic deities like Thor and Odin, not Vedic ones like Indra and Varuna. Their Swastika was also the German Hakenkreuz (‘hooked cross’) not the Indian svasti symbol.”

The swastika existed in Europe at least since Roman times, so the Nazis didn’t need India to make it their own. Neither Gobineau nor Chamberlain was German, though they did indeed represent the peak of racism as an ideology. Gobineau, like the Nehruvian secularists, adored Sufism, which he saw as an expression of the Iranian genius. Of Chamberlain, I assume he may have picked up some ideas from his adopted German environment, including the Heathen revival which predated his own work. Pagan revivalism has came up in Sweden in the 16^th century with the Storgothic movement, in the 17^th in England with the neo-Druid movement (of which Winston Churchill became an ordained officiant) and the 18^th in Brittany and Germany. It was mainly a form of cultural archaeology, not really Pagan and anti-Christian, hence the preponderance of Christian priests and vicars among its researchers and propagators.

I have said and written many times that “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”. Here we have another illustration of my thesis. Germanic religion was closely akin to Vedic religion. For Christians, the followers of both will go to hell. For scholars, Varuna corresponds roughly to Odin, and Indra quite precisely to Thor. For nationalists, however, they are very different: Odin and Thor, like Jesus, are non-Indian, while Varuna and Indra are Indian. Like many so-called Hindu nationalists, Rajaram doesn’t care two hoots for difficult theological issues like the exact difference in worldview between the different religions, and prefers the much easier division in national and foreign. His attack on Odin and Thor will be applauded by Christians, since they will recognize it as an attack on Varuna and Indra. We already saw Rajaram agreeing with his enemy Witzel, and now we see him do the work of the Christian missions.

 

 

Rocket science

More vintage Rajaram, the telepath who can divine the unseen agenda behind an unread book: “Ideas once central to the Aryan myth resurfaced in various guises under labels like Indology and Indo-European Studies -- and now as mythology. Witzel’s book is only the latest exercise in this attempt to prove the superiority of one race over others; supposedly a study on world mythologies, it has a hidden race-based agenda.”

Indology and Indo-European Studies existed before race thinking became dominant in the second half of the 19^th century. Indo-European reconstruction followed into the footsteps of the reconstruction of the Uralic family in the 18^th century, and ran parallel with the reconstruction of the Afro-Asiatic family tree. The basic finding of Indo-European Studies, viz. the kinship and ultimately equality between the then Indian underlings and European masters, was welcomed by many Indians as a ground for emancipation, just as it was used by the colonizers as a justification for their presence in India. So, the political uses of a theory could vary widely, but the correctness of the theory is not decided by the uses made of it. “E = mc²” is not invalidated by its use in the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. Any “scientist” should know that.

Thus, rocket science was quite literally developed by the Nazis. The American space organization NASA was led by the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun. By Rajaram’s reasoning, rockets are Nazi. Rocket scientists such as himself, who has worked as a consultant for the NASA, must also be gravely tainted with the Nazi brush. If he calls Indo-European Studies or its practitioners racists, then by his very own criteria, he stands exposed as a Nazi. Of course, I am not saying that, but he himself is implying it. 

Read more!

The Gujarat textbook affair

 

(Excerpted from my book Return of the Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi 2007, Ch. 1.3-4)

 

            The secularists are bad losers.  They are the kind of pupil who tampers with his school report before showing it to dad.  For fifteen years, I have seen them bluffing to obscure the fact of their defeat in the Ayodhya evidence debate.  Now, their thesis of a Hindutva fascism had not been confirmed on any score at all even after six years of BJP rule at the Centre.  So, they had to make up some evidence for the same.

            While the BJP hadn’t behaved like Nazis in practice, at least we could turn them into mental Nazis, just regular Indians but who harboured a morbid admiration for the Nazis?  Fresh from the textbook controversy at the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), secularist attention was turned to the textbooks in Gujarat, supposedly a Hindutva hellhole under BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi.  There, it was alleged, children were indoctrinated with pro-Nazi propaganda.

            In the inevitable Times of India (30 September 2004), one Harit Mehta claims: “In Modi’s Gujarat, Hitler is a textbook Hero”.  Let’s hear his story: “Gandhi is not so great, but Hitler is.  Welcome to high school education in Narendra Modi's Gujarat, where authors of social studies textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks have found faults with the freedom movement and glorified Fascism and Nazism.  While a Class VIII student is taught ‘negative aspects’ of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, the Class X social studies textbook has chapters on ‘Hitler, the Supremo’ and ‘Internal Achievements of Nazism’.”

            Readers familiar with secularist and generally Indian English discourse will know that “Supremo” is a simple descriptive term, meaning “the man at the top”.  It does not imply that the user of the term is an admirer of the person designated “Supremo”.  Thus, the secularists themselves often refer to the RSS Sarsanghchalak as the “RSS Supremo”, though they hate him.  As for the internal achievements of Nazism, practitioners of the “political abuse of history” (to borrow the title of a 1989 pamphlet by the JNU historians) may prefer morality tales in black and white, where the evil German race supported Hitler in spite of his purely negative achievements, but genuine historians acknowledge that the Nazi programme contained attractive points and the Nazi regime achieved real successes in some fields, otherwise Hitler’s popularity and rise to power would have been unexplainable.

Mehta specifies: “The Class X book presents a frighteningly uncritical picture of Fascism and Nazism. The strong national pride that both these phenomena generated, the efficiency in the bureaucracy and the administration and other ‘achievements’ are detailed, but pogroms against Jews and atrocities against trade unionists, migrant labourers, and any section of people who did not fit into Mussolini or Hitler's definition of rightful citizen don't find any mention.  ‘They committed the gruesome and inhuman act of suffocating 60 lakh Jews in gas chambers’ is all the book, authored by a panel, mentions of the holocaust.”

So, even in the partisan reporting by the Times of India, at least in the fine print, it is admitted that the textbook (1) does mention the Holocaust, detailing its death toll as 6 million, and (2) adds an explicit condemnation of the Holocaust as “gruesome and inhuman”.  The title of this article and even more so the titles of all the derivative articles in the world press alleging Holocaust denial are thereby rendered mendacious.  The reporter, or more formally the Times of India editor, responsible for the article titles, stands exposed as a liar.  All those who based their stories on the Times of India headline, stand exposed as either accomplices in the lie or silly fishwives.

Mehta continues: “The section on ‘Ideology of Nazism’ reads: ‘Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time by establishing a strong administrative set up.  He created the vast state of Greater Germany.  He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race.  He adopted a new economic policy and brought prosperity to Germany.  He began efforts for the eradication of unemployment.  He started constructing public buildings, providing irrigation facilities, building railways, roads and production of war materials.  He made untiring efforts to make Germany self-reliant within one decade.  Hitler discarded the Treaty of Versailles by calling it just ‘a piece of paper’ and stopped paying the war penalty.  He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.’” 

I have checked with the original (Social Studies textbook, standard 10, Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks, 2003 reprint of the 1993 edition, p.71), and the last-quoted sentence reads in full: “He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people, but in doing so he led Germany to extreme nationalism and caused the Second World War.”  This was obviously not meant as a compliment to the Nazis, which is why the Times of India chose to unquote it.

The wording is clumsy, but the account is not untruthful.  Hitler was a charismatic speaker, he did pursue an anti-Jewish policy, he did advocate German racial superiority and he did discard the Treaty of Versailles.  His Keynesian economic policies were indeed successful in the short run, particularly in pushing back unemployment, which is why they were emulated by many social-democratic governments after 1945.  So, the textbook gives a balanced account of the Nazi era: acknowledging its economic and diplomatic successes up to 1939, but also teaching about the anti-Jewish policies and the “gruesome and inhuman” Holocaust.

But the Times of India is against balanced history-writing, and not only on the subject of Nazism.  Thus, India’s leading newspaper rejects any account of Mahatma Gandhi that is less than hagiographical: “A few classes junior, students in Gandhi's home state read that the Bapu really may have been overrated.  In the chapter on ‘Gandhian Era and National Movement’, there's a section sub-headlined ‘The Negative Aspect’.”  Here at least, the Marxist hard core in the educational establishment should not have any objections against the so-called BJP textbooks, for in his day, Gandhiji was fiercely criticized by the Left.  Oh yes, there were negative aspects to the Mahatma’s career.

            The story of the “Nazi” schoolbooks got picked up quickly, lies and all, in policy-making circles in Washington D.C.  On 15 March 2005 the US House of Representatives heard Rep. John Conyers introduce House Resolution 156, reintroduced a few days later as Resolution 160, indicting Narendra Modi:

“Condemning the conduct of Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his actions to incite religious persecution and urging the United States to condemn all violations of religious freedom in India. (…) Whereas the Supreme Court of India has reported that those arrested in connection with the bombings and retaliatory attacks on Hindus in India have claimed that they carried out their actions ‘in revenge for the state-assisted killings of Muslims in Gujarat’; Whereas the United States Department of State has discussed in one of its reports the role of Chief Minister Modi and his government in promoting attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred, and the legacy of Nazism through his government's support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified; Whereas the United States Department of State has found that Chief Minister Modi revised the text of high school social studies textbooks in Gujarat schools to describe the ‘charismatic personality’ of ‘Hitler the Supremo’, and the ‘achievements’ of Nazism at great length, while failing to acknowledge the Nazi extermination policies, the concentration camps, and the religious persecution that occurred under the Nazi regime; Now therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives (1) condemns the conduct of Chief Minister Narendra Modi for condoning or inciting bigotry and intolerance against any religious group in India, including people of the Christian and Islamic faiths; (…)”

            Note the exculpation of the numerous Islamic terror attacks on Hindus as “retaliatory”.  This is now the standard secularist line: any and every Islamic crime is an understandable “retaliation” for the central event of Indian history, the Gujarat riots.  It makes me wonder whether Rep. Conyers would dare to say on the  floor of the House that Islamic attacks on Americans are “retaliatory”.  Yet, that exactly is the explicit message of the perpetrators, who invoke American mass killings of Iraqis and the like as the justification for “hitting back” at America. 

After this expression of American brain-dead parroting of Indian secularist propaganda, it was no surprise that the USA subsequently refused an entry visa to Narendra Modi when he was scheduled to visit the country.  The stated reason was his violation of the International Religious Freedom Act.  Indo-American Communists and American Christian fanatics jointly hailed this ban as a great success for their own lobbying.

 

 

The Gujarat textbook affair, bis

 

Indian secularist discourse is, among other unpleasant things, very repetitive.  If it has discovered a successful line for incriminating the Hindus, it is bound to repeat and revive that line endlessly.  So, a few months after the American domino effect of the “Nazi textbook” offensive, the Times of India’s Tina Parekh claims in her title that “Modi's Gujarat worships Hitler” (23 July 2005).  Note first of all the wildly exaggerated language: nowhere in her actual report is any fact mentioned that amounts to “worship”, a concept of which the secularists have no experience anyway.

            It seems the reprints of the indicted textbooks hadn’t changed sufficiently.  So this is her story: “The world over, it would be outrageous to attribute the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were butchered by Nazis, to German nationalism, without the faintest hint of condemnation.  But not in Gujarat where, a year after the eruption of a controversy over distortion of history in school textbooks, students got updated books that continue to talk about Nazism as ‘a co-ordination of nationalism and socialism’.” 

Are we now supposed to feel scandalized?  What else did she think Nazism, or National-Socialism in full, really was?  Yes, much as Indian leftists may want to deny it, Hitler did pursue a form of socialism along with nationalism.  Only socialists would read that as a form of praise.  And as we have already seen, even the unchanged textbooks did condemn the Holocaust.  There was no reason to change an account that happens to be factual, even if authored by Congress-appointed historians, and even if misrepresented by Ms. Parekh as follows: “In the revised social studies textbooks for classes IX and X, grave distortions persist along with an uncritical appraisal of Hitler and his Nazis.  Times of India last year raised the issue of glorification of Hitler in the Class X textbook, but that book is still taught in classrooms across the state because the BJP government took the defence that these books were introduced during the previous Congress regime.”

Then she mentions the Class IX social studies textbook which apparently covers the same ground and again “glorifies Hitler”.  As proof, she quotes: “Hitler adopted aggressive policy and led the Germans towards ardent nationalism.”  And: “Due to severe nationalism of Italy and Germany and their aggressive policy, the nations of the world thought of forming groups.”  Once more, the account is not untruthful, eventhough the wording is embarrassingly clumsy.  Twice it mentions Hitler’s “aggressive policy”, which only the Times of India reads as a way of “glorifying Hitler”.  It is simply a lie to say that the book treats the Nazi record “without the faintest hint of condemnation”.

The BBC News website (bbc.co.uk, 23-7-2005, “‘Nazi’ row over Indian textbooks”) immediately relayed the story worldwide: “Human rights campaigners in India's Gujarat state have condemned school textbooks which they say praise Hitler.  The books are issued by the Hindu nationalist state government.  One includes a chapter on the ‘internal achievements of Nazism’.  A Jesuit priest and social activist, Cedric Prakash, says the books contain more than 300 factual errors and make little mention of the holocaust.”

            The Jesuits are wiser than the secularists, who are smitten with hubris and drunk on their currently unlimited power.  Whereas the Times of India prefers to quote itself and highlight its own earlier “revelations” on the matter, the Jesuit leaves the honour to others and positions himself as a humble go-between for the “protests from parents, peace activists and educationists”.  The secularists’ lies are bound to get exposed one day, and their names will become synonymous with “liar”, but the Jesuits have famously perfected the art of “lying without lying”.  Rarely do they get caught in the act of uttering an actual lie, even when their audience comes away with an understanding of matters that is different from the truth.  They won’t formally lie by alleging that the book denies or ignores the Holocaust, but create the same effect among receptive audiences by saying that it “makes little mention” of the Holocaust.  But what is “little” in schoolbooks that have to cover the causes, conduct, outcome and after-effects of World War 2 in just a few pages?  As I’ve been able to verify, all the other subplots of Nazi history are equally rushed through in a few sentences, if discussed at all.

The BBC has learned a thing or two from the Jesuits.  It is often aggressively partisan but has perfected the art of creating a false semblance of even-handedness.  In this case, it also gives a say to the accused party: “The Gujarat government has dismissed the charges as baseless.  A senior official from the state education department told the BBC that anomalies arose when the book was translated from Gujarati into English, and are being quoted out of context.”

That’s definitely not all he told the reporters, for he can hardly have left unmentioned that upon scrutiny, the textbook turns out to be pretty mainstream in its view of World War 2 history.  Yes, it is a vague on details and shabby in language, not unlike textbooks in many Indian states and on many subjects, but it does teach the principal facts.  The BBC, however, prefers to withhold that crucial information and presents the government spokesman as being evasive by shifting the problem from the English to the Gujarati version of the textbook rather than defending the textbook’s contents in either version. 

Under the present power equation, where the pro-Hindu forces have almost no capable presence in the media and among the influential experts, this kind of libel against a Hindu-minded government is virtually inevitable.  It will keep on happening until Hindus get their act together and their message across.   

On the bright side, though, we should also notice that the Hindu-hating coalition is practically admitting the hollowness of its case if it is reduced to proving “Hindu fascism” with nothing better than the misrepresentation of a provincial school textbook.  Not actual policies, nothing of material consequence to any of the minorities, not even the much-discussed NCERT national history textbooks, only a few paragraphs from two textbooks in a single state, and even those had to be misrepresented for the desired effect.  The uninformed public (which includes quite a few so-called experts) may be fooled by the Hindu-baiters’ bluff, but anyone who scrutinizes the arguments will see through it.  The record of BJP governance has utterly disproved the shrill allegations of “Hindu fascism”.

Read more!

European unity

 

People sometimes ask me about my views on Europe and the EU. I don’t have any specific expertise in this field, e.g. I understand nothing of the ongoing discussion of the “Eurobonds”. But I know something of international relations, and understand that we cannot seriously go back to the confinement to small states which Europe was conceived to liberate us from.  I will briefly state where I stand.

Flemings of my generations were Europe-minded as a matter of course, and I still feel that way. One reason is that we don’t have a nation-state to exchange for a European identity. “Belgian” is only a passport identity, there is no such thing as a Belgian nation. Therefore, in supporting European integration, we are not losing or even compromising a nation-state; we never had one. When I hear the Dutch philosopher Thierry Baudet argue for Dutch sovereignty and against the projected European identity, I hear someone speak from a confident sense of nationality, which I realize we have never had.

Another reason is that the European level counts internationally. For us, being from a small country, Europe is the only way to feel big. Maybe the French don’t need Europe to take themselves seriously, or at least they still have the historical memory of greatness, so they know what it feels to be something else than European. But for us, being European is the highest concrete political identity we aspire to.

In today’s and tomorrow’s world, size matters. One day we may have global unity, but during my lifetime, it will be alright if we can already manage continental unity. When we have to deal with giants like India or China, we do have to speak from a sufficiently large platform rather than from a small Dutch or Portuguese or Latvian position.

So much for my general sympathies: I am all for European unity. My study of India’s struggle for its own unity and integrity confirms the importance of a sense of unity over and above the sense of local specificity.

As for the euro currency: I am all for a common currency, which is very practical for borderers (and in Belgium, you’re always near a border) and travellers. Moreover, for Flemish autonomy, it takes away one of the worst hurdles: a Belgian currency would always be used as a blackmail instrument against the plan to break up Belgium. It is always said that the Belgian level will erode between the Flemish and European levels, but we see no such thing happening. In the case of the currency, however, it does. That is one reason to oppose these left- and right-wing radicals who oppose the common currency. However, a common currency requires a common economic policy. That is why I support further political and economic unity.

The problem is the EU’s reach and structure, not the abstract geographical entity Europe (of which democratic Switzerland and Iceland and prosperous Norway are parts, even though they reject EU membership). It is obvious that the EU badly needs to be democratized. The EU has just condemned the Swiss referendum resulting in a majority for limiting immigration, as well as the Crimean referendum yielding an immense majority for accession to Russia. It ignored and overruled the 2005 French and Dutch referendum results rejecting the proposed EU Constitution, which was reintroduced as the Lisbon Treaty. It made the Irish vote again until their referendum yielded the “right” majority, thus making a mockery of people’s sovereignty. As for representative democracy, the European Parliament is not really representative and does not have the power to bring down the effective EU government, called the European Commission.

So, the EU institutions have to be restructured to create a democratic and transparent power hierarchy, and provision must be made for a binding referendum at citizen’s initiative. Many competences in the cultural and social fields should be de-europeanized and given back to the member states, the European level should simply not deal with them.

On the other hand, the EU should speak with one voice on the world stage. Foreign policy and defence competences should be delegated by the states upwards to the European level. A European army should be created, not because we are eager to make war on anyone, but to give credibility to the EU’s diplomacy.

The present situation is neither here nor there. It is very confused and has its priorities backwards. We need to have less EU involvement with quota for butter or so, and more with the serious business of international relations. So, there is a lot of work to do in order to make Europe a fatherland we can love. But this is no reason to back off from the original plan to unite the European countries. I am not a Eurosceptic.

Since Europe is not a very deep concern, I will appeal to a very light kind of authority here.  As Toto Cotugno, the 1990 Eurosong winner from Italy, sang: “Insieme: unite, unite, Europe!”

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The wheel of the world ruler

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Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective, this is the subject and subtitle of a much-needed project: classifying what in history Belgium had to do with the emerging superpower India. As this book is unlikely to be translated, I take it upon myself to summarize some of its salient findings. Compiler of the book is the Slavicist and historian, Professor Idesbald Goddeeris, whose focus is the history of colonization and now, increasingly, of modern India. Previously he wrote a standard work on the history of India together with Prof.Em. Winand Callewaert.

The title, The Wheel of Ashoka, is a reference to La Roue d' Açoka, title of the memoirs of Prince Eugène de Ligne (1959), the first Belgian ambassador in independent India (1947-51). Although an admirer of his class peer Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not quite believe in the latter’s identification of this symbol of Emperor Ashoka . Rightly, he wrote that this was an older symbol of empire, the ideal of the Cakravarti or " wheel turner ", the emperor who is in the centre of administration and receives tribute from all the vassal states. The ideal of the universal ruler existed for centuries, though Ashoka (not Queen Victoria, as too many Westerners still think) was the first who realized it by uniting most of the subcontinent under one scepter.

Belgians in India, politically

In strictly political terms, Belgium and India have had little to do with each other. Some Belgian seamen were employed by the Portuguese fleet and thus were among the first to colonize some peripheral regions of India, especially Sri Lanka and Goa. In 1498 Vasco da Gama landed in the southwestern coastal city of Kozhikode (Calicut). That area, cocopalmwaving Kerala and neighboring Sri Lanka, were regarded as the earthly paradise. An Antwerp imprint of Thomas More's book Utopia therefore contains a poem by the humanist Pieter Gillis which is partly in the local language, Malayalam.

In 1500 the Portuguese trading posts became the Estado da India, the base of some Flemish travellers, including diamond traders and missionaries who tried to win souls, on site or farther inland. For example, while in prison awaiting his execution, Moghul prince and throne pretender Dara Shikoh reported profound discussions with the Flemish Jesuit Father Busée. In 1602, the Netherlands founded the United East India Company (VOC), also an employer of a lot of Flemish adventurers. Christophe Vielle (Louvain-la-Neuve) and Michael Limberger (Ghent) present an overview of these early contacts, from antiquity to about 1700. The following contributions deal with the next stages of colonization , which include the momentary Ostend counterpart of the Dutch East India Company in ca. 1720.

The Kingdom of Belgium (1830-) had no structural links with India, only a lot of personal and business contacts, with the diamond trade as its crown jewel, and only in the last twenty years, the fast-growing Indian investments in the Belgian industry. When still a prince, Leopold II paid a visit to India in 1865, and Albert I, his successor as king, did so in 1925. It was especially his wife Elizabeth who conceived a lifelong fascination with India . She took up practising yoga and received some well-known yoga masters. Brussels became one of the main centres for introducing yoga to the West.

 

In 1943, the Flemish collaboration leader Hendrik Elias received his Indian counterpart Subhas Chandra Bose, or so history has come to call them, but both saw themselves more as freedom fighters. Bose was killed in 1945 in Taiwan, but his country was independent two years thereafter, while Flanders is still waiting. In the reserved atmosphere of the Cold War, King Baudouin (r.1951-1993) waited until 1970 before paying this Soviet ally a state visit.

At a slightly lower protocol level, however, there had been a major contact between Belgium and the fledgling Indian republic concerning the Kashmir issue. In 1947, this principality had not joined the newly independent India nor the tear-away state of Pakistan. When irregular forces from Pakistan invaded the area, it acceded to India and was narrowly saved by Indian troops, who began the reconquest of the state. This would have been completed in 1948, were it not that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had already referred the matter to the nascent UN. Precisely that month, Belgium presided over the Security Council, and so it was up to the Belgian diplomacy to resolve this conflict. A thankless chore, and we cannot say it was really  "resolved" : for we hear frequently in the news that as late as in 2014, there is still a Kashmir question, with the same line of control as in 1948, an effective boundary between the recaptured territory and the third of Kashmir that is still under Pakistani occupation. In that area in 1947-48, Pakistan has wiped out all non –Muslims, and it has refused to vacate the conquered territory, a condition imposed by the UN for a plebiscite. In 1965 and 1999 there were more wars over Kashmir, and it became a sde flashpoint in the 1971 Bangladesh war. In 1948-49, the Belgian diplomats acquired the reputation of being very pro-Pakistan, and so the Kashmir issue has continued to fester. At this point, this review adds the information that one of the best sources of information on Kashmir is the bulletin issued by the former professional soldier Paul Beersmans, who stayed in the area for long as a UN observer and revisits it frequently.

"Oriënt"

The book reports correctly that there has been a shift from the study of the classics ("Indology") to the sociological approach ("South Asian Studies") within the Orientalist departments. The authors, like most intellectuals involved, seem to find this good and normal, but we have our doubts. The “natives” concerned are still very focused on their classics. Islam’s Western advocates strongly support "studying not Islam but Muslims", but the Muslims themselves faithfully keep to their source texts. Their Islam is in essence, following the scripturally recorded example of the Prophet, but what postmodern Islamologists choose to study is precisely the non-Islamic element in the lives of Muslims. In Hindus, the role of the scriptural corpus is less pronounced but still stronger than the trendy neglect of the classics presupposes. This shift takes place both in India itself, where Sanskrit comes increasingly under pressure, and in the entire West, where not only Orientalist chairs be abolished, but in parallel also Latin and Greek, along with history. The classics and any reference to the past are wilfully side-tracked by socialist policy-makers ideologically driven to capture the population under a dome of contemporaneity. On this, they make common cause with the liberals, who shut down chairs of Latin or Sanskrit in pursuance of the Thatcherite principle of abolishing everything that is not immediately self-supporting or lucrative, “to invest less in chicken and more in eggs".

Consubstantial with the rejection of classical studies is the use of "Orientalist" as a term of abuse. Orientalists were eccentric scholars of Asian cultures to the extent that they devoted a lifetime to studying them. They and their perfectly venerable discipline, Oriental studies, were vilified by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian who claimed that they had only been water-carriers of the colonial or imperialist project by purposely devising a contempt -laden characterization of Oriental man. In his famous book Orientalism (1978), Said only defended Islam by denouncing its Western analysers, though his approach has been applied to other fields within Oriental Studies. He painted Islam as a pathetic victim, although the British in India persisted in honouring and maintaining the Moghul empire until 1857, and made ​​common cause with the Muslim League against a freedom movement identified as Hindu. Among the colonial powers it was only Portugal that had attacked Islam as such. It is somewhat understandable that Muslims still flaunt Said’s thesis: after all, he served their interests. But for others it is quite ridiculous, partly because his book is teeming with factual errors, partly because of its over-all nature of what should be called a conspiracy theory: the so-called scholars across countries and centuries actually were all agents of imperialism, and their seemingly scientific theories were only coded weapons to belittle the Asian civilizations and put them in manageable boxes.

Since about 1990, all students of Political Science and Oriental Studies are given large doses of Said’s worldview, a trend that will no doubt be studied one day as a textbook example of a politically motivated aberration In the present book, different contributions show its influence. Thus, we find an example of this “Orientalism” discourse in an otherwise very informative chapter of this book, "shapes of the spirit" by Patrick Pasture and Elwin Hofman (both historians from Leuven), about the history of yoga. This is hardly a reproach to the authors: they only apply a theory which, although wrong, happens to be the prevalent paradigm. In any case, their trendy proposition that yoga is but a Western-inspired recent phenomenon is factually incorrect. The yoga tradition has existed since at least three thousand years. The very popular Bhagavad-Gita exhorted its hero Arjuna two thousand years ago to “become a yogi”, the Yoga Sutra was commented by many ancient and more recent philosophers, the postures of hatha yoga are the subject of written instruction recorded since a thousand years.

At most, some foreign elements have been included: around 400 AD the Chinese notion of the "microcosmic orbit" (a guided tour of attention along the spine up to the crown and along the front back down) had a formative influence on the so-called kundalini yoga and the chakra system; and around 1900, some elements of Western gymnastics crept into Hatha Yoga, especially the headstand and the concatenation of 12 ancient postures into a dynamic sequence, the " salute to the sun”. The approach to the postures, which requires total relaxation and slow performance, however, is unknown in the West, except precisely in recent disciplines that draw on Hatha Yoga in this regard. Conversely, the western pelvic floor muscle exercises that every pregnant woman nowadays, are actually inspired on the yogic mula bandha ("root lock"), not to mention the numerous neuro- and psychological techniques that are based on ancient Indian meditation exercises. A recent example is Mindfulness, a velvet version of Vipassana meditation which was, among others, already practiced by the Buddha.

Jesuits

The topic of a playful chapter illustrates the Zeitgeist before and after independence quite well: Belgian comic-strips. We see the gradual elimination of the existing stereotypes and prejudices. The recent economic and demographic history is also discussed, including the experiences of the now numerous Indian students in Belgium, and a description of the newly built Jain temple in Antwerp by museum curator Chris De Lauwer, who regularly guides visitors there.

An important aspect, especially for the historically very Catholic territory of Flanders, is mission history. After the Congo, India was the destination of most of the missionaries from our region. In Kerala, Panjab and especially Chotanagpur (today Jharkhand and a part of West Bengal), they could leave their mark. The Jesuit mission expanded from Kolkata to the tribal area west of the city, and there the mission of Constant Lievens s.j. played an important role. The naive tribals understood nothing of the property laws the British imposed, and lost their mineral-rich lands to urban investors; so Lievens offered them legal support. "Fire must burn", was his motto. Another important figure was Herman Rasschaert s.j, who tried to intervene in religious riots and was slain by his own tribals on March 24, 1964 (exactly 50 years ago). Recently, the pastoral responsibility was transferred to indigenous priests .

Typical of the Flemish priests, unlike for example the American missionaries, was their attention for the vernacular languages. Camille Bulcke s.j. wrote a Hindi dictionary that is still authoritative. The tribal languages ​​in Chotanagpur were written down for the first time, provided with modern terminology, and introduced as medium for primary education. In 2000, the Hindu nationalist government added some languages to the list of official languages​​, including the tribal language Santali. That these tribal language were upgraded is the merit of the Government, to be sure, but that they had become mature vehicles of culture and therefore came to be considered for official status at all, was mainly the work of the Flemish Jesuits .

Belgian research into India is the subject of a contribution by Winand Callewaert (Leuven). Important scholars include Charles de Harlez (Louvain), Louis de la Vallée-Poussin (Ghent) and Etienne Lamotte (Louvain) . A well-known name in the Flemish movement is Walter Couvreur, co-founder of the Flemish nationalist party in the 1950s, but here mainly the Sanskritist who also taught Hittite and Tocharian (Ghent) . Then comes the more recent research, including my own professors Pierre Eggermont and Gilbert Pollet (Leuven). The latest generation includes among others Christophe Vielle (Louvain) and Eva De Clercq (Ghent). I should add that Callewaert himself is no doubt the most famous Belgian scholar in modern India, writer of a vast Hindi-English dictionary of the devotional movement and editor of many works by or about popular devotional saints (Dadu, Ravidas and others), whose followers deeply venerate him. Foremost in this category is his editing the Guru Granth, the holy book of Sikhism.

Since completeness is not of this world ("only Allah is perfect"), we cannot summarize the whole book. But we can warmly recommend it, there was a real need for a work that presents all this information.

Idesbald Goddeeris , ed : Het Wiel van Ashoka. Belgisch-Indiase Contacten in Historisch Perspectief (Dutch: “The wheel of Ashoka, Belgo-Indian contacts in historical perspective”), Lipsius , Leuven 2013 , 243 pp. , € 29.50 , ISBN 978 90 5867 954 3 .

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A quarter century ago: my first criticism of Islam

Bovenkant formulier

 

(Rough translation of an article published in Dutch in the digital magazine De Bron, 3 March 2014.)

Just a quarter century ago, I published my first article criticizing Islam. It described the history of the death sentence by Ayatollah Khomeini on the writer Salman Rushdie, a case that had erupted half a year earlier in India with a ban on his newly published book The Satanic Verses. My text appeared on the first pages of the Dutch-language Communist weekly Toestanden, now defunct, on 3 March 1989, and was the reason for lectures at the Brussels and Sint -Niklaas sections of the Communist Masereel Foundation. At that time the Left was anti-religion, and so it welcomed criticism of Islam.

Stories born from ulterior motives

That fact itself refutes a lot of talk about myself that comes to my attention. Sometimes we are told that "September 1, 2001, brought a wave of Islam-bashing." Since the perpetrators of the attacks in Washington and New York expressly invoked Islam, it seems only natural that people held Islam against the light, some in a scholarly and others in a less sophisticated way. But that has nothing to do with me, and the explanatory value for my own contribution to the criticism of Islam is zero point zero.

 

I wrote twelve years earlier about Islam, and the primary reason for this was a meeting in Varanasi in 1988 with a family of refugees from Bangladesh, who after intense persuasion told me with great difficulty the story of their persecution by their Muslim neighbors. (This is how you can recognize the genuine refugees; by contrast, asylum seekers thumping their chests upon entry about how they had been tortured, dish up a rehearsed story.) Incidentally, these were refugees as dark-skinned as their neighbors, and their “Islamophobia” had nothing to do with “racism". If ever someone throws the "racism" clincher at me, he is ipso facto guilty of libel, and since racism in Belgium is legally an offence, he is also guilty of defamation -- itself a criminal offence.

Since the '90s, criticism of Islam in Flanders also entails the automatic association with the "VB" (formerly Vlaams Blok, “Flemish Bloc”, since 2004 Vlaams Belang, “Flemish Interest”). In fact, it took more than three years after my first and several following articles before that party even invited me to give a lecture. They probably had read my guest columns in the Gazet van Antwerpen, such as “Moordwapens en dooddoeners” (“Murder weapons and knock-down arguments”), on the precedent behaviour of the Prophet in the murders or executions of writers critical of Islam. In any case, the initiative was only of a few party tenors against the general party-line: this was still anti-foreigner, sometimes with Islam thrown in as an exotic marker, without any fundamental criticism of Islam. On the contrary, at that time, the Nationalist Students’ Union led by current VB MP Bart Laeremans, invited Afghan Islamic fighters to give their account of their "freedom struggle" against the Soviets. As late as 1996, party chairman Frank Van Hecke said that to him, Buddhism was as foreign as Islam and he opposed it just as much. Only at the end of the 90s, there was a distinct bend in the party-line towards criticism of Islam. Even then there were party members, especially the nostalgics of damals (“back then”, i.e. before 1945), who saw Islam as an ally against the Jewish danger and against moral decadence; in 1992 this stand was still the dominant one.

 

The text of my lecture became the core of my later book De islam voor ongelovigen (“Islam for unbelievers”, 1997), which the many Islam apologists in our society have never even tried to refute. Or, well, there was a feeble one-sentence attempt by “honorary Palestinian” Lucas Catherine, who opined that quotations from the Quran don’t really matter because “the Quran is already an old book”; I invite him to go and repeat this blasphemy in a mosque full of Muslims. All the commentators who had actually read my text, both on the VB side (Marc Joris) and on the Left (Patrick Stouthuysen, Lucas Catherine) noted that my pro-assimilation position was diametrically opposed to the then party line, which was pro “return policy” and proposed a separate educational system for foreigners.

 

However, till today, any expression of criticism of Islam in Flanders, no matter how scientific, automatically evokes cries of "VB!" This comes from people so dull that they can’t think beyond party slogans, and really assume that this is where scholars get their ideas from. Still, in far-away India, Meera Nanda and Sanjay Subramaniam have insisted on displaying their fishwife nature by quoting this rhetoric as Gospel.

Absurd is also the latest contraption of a "moderate Muslim", who disdainfully called Geert Wilders my “guru”. Clearly he hadn’t read any of my writings on Islam and its sources, though that didn’t stop him from venting his opinion, nor from being parroted by a compliant bourgeoisie. Apologists of Islam are indeed typically "under- informed but over-opinionated". However, even without ever opening a book, he could have known that he was telling nonsense: I wrote about the Islam problem in 1989, some 15 years before Wilders left his party, the liberal VVD, and gradually started to emerge as a controversial critic of Islam. The politicians go to consult the scholars, not vice versa. Wilders has been duly informed by Islam experts, especially by Islamologist Prof. Hans Jansen and the American-Lebanese post-2001 Islam analyst Robert Spencer. Since then, he develops a political line vis-à-vis the Islam problem that is much better informed than the multiculturalist line of his opponents;  but still only a simplified version of what Islam experts have developed..

The ideological landscape since then

The 90s were marked by a radical shift of the Left toward Islam. At first, liberals were anti-religious and anti-conservative, but a few years later they turned friends of Islam so that they managed to defend obscurantist practices such as the veil and even female circumcision. The whole panoply of leftist dominance in academia and the media, leftist rhetorical power and leftist hatred was pressed into the service of Islam. An illustration of this evolution was the fatwa Yves Desmet (editor of the Flemish leftist tabloid De Morgen) issued against Islam expert Professor Urbain Vermeulen. Universities that used to nominate its academic personal purely on merit, so that at least some “Orientalists” turned out to be critics of Islam, now base their recruitment policies on ideological conformity and give in to the anti-anti-Islamic attitudes of the dominant groups in society.

The most striking phenomenon is the systematic and persistent dishonesty of the Islamophile camp. One example is the recent series of articles on "racism" in the former quality broadsheet De Standaard, which thoroughly and deliberately made ​​an amalgam between racism and criticism of Islam, now mistermed “Islamophobia”. This is a militant Islamic term, literally declaring criticism of Islam a mental illness and effectively criminalizing it. A less elitist medium could perhaps resort to a plea of ignorance, but The Standaard owes it to its standing to spurn this explanation. The only explanation that remains then, is bad faith.

So-called moderate Muslims, sensitive to the negative publicity effect of radical Islam, adopt the discourse of the leftist Islamophiles. They claim to know of a "real, moderate Islam", different from "fanatical Islam" or "Islamism". This “real” Islam, invented by the media (but which authorities like Recep Tayyip Erdogan have called non-existent), should serve as a first line of defence for the true, orthodox Islam.

Many progressives, sensing the hostile mood towards Islam in the population, have tried to come across as progressive and critical, but at the same time channel the existing criticism towards targets other than Islam. That Taslima Nasrin has been persecuted in Bangladesh since 1993, was not due to her feminist commitment, as our media claimed, but to her plea against the violent persecution of the Hindu minority in December 1992, which most of her vocal sympathizers at the time of her European award stubbornly concealed or distorted. Currently Annemie Struyf is inviting some attention for the problem of female circumcision through her documentary, but the VRT (Flemish TV broadcaster) diverted  its reportage to non-Islamic Africa, while the vast majority of affected women are Muslim. Moreover, virtually all cases of female genital mutilation outside of Africa, of which the count goes into the millions and is still rising (Yemen, Kurdistan, Indonesia and other countries, not to mention some fast-growing immigrant communities in Europe), have only come about as the handiwork of Islam. It is hypocritical to show female circumcision without addressing the problem of Islam. So this is my final opinion on the officially propagated islamophilia: a mixture of ignorance and hypocrisy.

In all the slander and ostracism encountered, a funny consolation was the condescending attitude of Islamophiliac intellectuals, who prefer politically suitable fairy-tales to scholarship. From their crass ignorance about the core doctrine of Islam, they take on airs of superiority towards the fact-faithful simplicity of true scholars of Islam. We are said not to understand the "true " Islam, it is all a matter of poverty and imperialism, we would be obsessively busy with the ancient founding texts of Islam while every sensible person “knows” that militant Islam is but a recent invention. They are like children who address adults compassionately, patiently explaining the true story of Sinterklaas (in the low countries, a Saint who brings toys for the children through the chimneys): "Those toys near the chimney on 6 December, some say that they were put there by our parents. Don’t believe that story, though, for they were put there by Sinterklaas."

And now ...

Life is short, but longer than necessary to fathom Islam, which is a simple subject. I still read about the history of Islam on occasion, but actually this doctrine and its application offer me no intellectual challenge anymore. That does not mean it has lost my interest, but our knowledge of Islam is quite sufficient for basing action on. I remain available for formulating a policy regarding Islam based upon scientific knowledge, not the fairy tales and taboos of the current policies. But about Islam as a doctrine that motivates the actions of Muslims over the centuries, there is nothing new to understand anymore. There remain many people to convince, but mostly they have already heard the facts and simply decided to remain deaf to them. You can take a horse to the river but you cannot force it to drink. Some people are simply happier in their delusions, and only a rough collision with reality will be able to help them.

 

I discovered the problem of Islam, as a problem, shortly after I arrived in 1988 in the Indian city of Varanasi. I actually wanted to immerse myself in Hindu-Buddhist thought, but then I decided that the current inter-religious relations formed a more pressing concern. In my life, the study of Islam has been a temporary detour. In recent years I have found the way back to my first love. To her, I want to give the best of myself in the years that remain to me.

 

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