Islamophobia, the concept and the polemic

 

The attack against criticism of the Islamic religion continues. Like the Soviet Union of yore, the West along with the Islamic world treats critics of the privileged ideology as madmen suffering from a mental disease, an irrational fear, in this case a new-fangled disorder called Islamophobia. This is modeled on xenophobia, “fear of strangers”, and ultimately on genuine diseases like agoraphobia, “fear of public places”, and arachnophobia, “fear of spiders”. The crusaders (or rather the muhajedin) against this disease are not missionaries who claim to love the people they accuse of being devil-worshippers, they are simpler and more straightforward: they just hate these dissenters. They do not wonder why the “Islamophobes” disagree with the official appreciation, they have no time for such luxuries. They simply try to impose their own hatred on public opinion and on lawmakers, for, like Islam itself, they would like to institute laws everywhere prohibiting criticism of Islam.

 

Marginality

Now, the Islamophobia-hunters dispose of a blacklist detailing who exactly the enemy is: Nathan Lean’s book The Islamophobia Industry. How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, Pluto Press, London 2012 (distributed in the US by Palgrave/MacMillan). It is endorsed by the usual suspects: Mark Juergensmeyer, Karen Armstrong, Tariq Ramadan. Reza Aslan, author of No God but God, speaks of “the multi-million-dollar Islamophobia industry”. These Islamophiles seem obsessed with money, real or imaginary, whereas the real stakes of the Islam debate consist of ideas, so painfully absent from the case they are building, and at any rate from this book.

In the foreword, Prof. John Esposito pontificates about how powerful and rich the “Islamophobes” are.  This he does to conceal the simple fact that the Islamophiles enjoy government and establishment patronage, while “Islamophobes” are marginal and have to set up their own institutions. I, for one, who started publishing critiques of Islam during the Satanic Verses affair back in 1989, have not seen these flows of money in more than 23 years. I can only testify that criticism of Islam brings a writer nothing but ostracism and poverty (unless he is also a well-connected leftist, like Salman Rushdie). This is a struggle of rich against poor, and to make sure nobody misunderstands it: the Islamophiles are the rich, the well-rewarded loudspeakers of the system. This book itself relates without protest how a number of Islam critics lost their jobs because of their stand, while no Islam defender is similarly harassed.

The author himself and some people quoted all make the same point. It starts with the title: “the Islamophobia industry” conjures up a powerful network. In reality, there are a handful of bloggers, of whom some correspond with each other while some are really isolated. There are a few retired professors of Islamic studies, from the days when you could get into those departments without first giving proof of your Islamophilia, like the Dutchman Prof. Hans Jansen and the Belgian Prof. Urbain Vermeulen, who was given a reprimand by his university (subsequently withdrawn) after a media campaign against him. So yes, there are a handful of people, and they manage to convince their handful of readers (still too many for Lean) because their theses are so factual, so rooted in primary material. But in terms of power, they are nothing compared to the establishment of Islam apologists, from policy-makers down to the level of “community organizers” whose job consists in combating the “prejudices” pertaining to the Muslim minority.

 

Phobia

Then the subtitle:  How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. It has oddly fallen to the Right to defend the West against Islam. In the past, the struggle against religion would have been deemed naturally Leftist. In the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibarruri a.k.a. la pasionaria eloquently condemned Islam and the Muslim soldiers fighting on the nationalist side for Christ King. In the Muslim world, the critique of Islam has mostly been voiced by declared Marxists, e.g. the late Aziz Nesin in Turkey and Taslima Nasreen in Bangladesh. But in the contemporary West, the Left has chosen to abandon Karl Marx’s dictum that “all criticism starts with criticism of religion”, so we have only the Right to count on.

It is not so sure that the “Islamophobes” really are Rightists, though. They are against hate, therefore against an ideology of hate; and they are for multiculturalism, therefore against an ideology that is the enemy of multicultural societies. Thus, in 1947, South-Asian Muslims forced the Partition of India on the Hindus, Sikhs and Christians (killing a million and forcing some fifteen million to flee) because they did not want to live in a multicultural society with these others. As his life’s mission, Mohammed himself changed Arabia from a vibrant multicultural society into a monolithic Islamic one. I leave it to the reader to make up his mind whether favouring multiculturalism and opposing hate really constitutes “Rightism”.

Fortunately, that Right doesn’t have to “manufacture” fear of Muslims. The whole establishment including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama may say all they want about Islam being a “religion of peace”, but the public also gets the news items that philter through. These factual reports recount day after day how Muslims commit violence here and then there. The media try to put a harmless spin on it, but the viewers and readers retain the hard facts about Islam. And these facts have been taking place ever since the Prophet Mohammed made a living by attacking caravans, raping and ransoming the women, killing the men and selling the children into slavery. The Right doesn’t have to say this, all it has to do is to quote from Islamic scripture.

                Lean cites film character Prof. John Falconer (A single man, 2009) approvingly: “Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society,” etc., then adds: “But this is about something else. This is about a concerted effort on the part of a small cabal of xenophobes to manufacture fear for personal gain.” (p.14) This reviewer really wonders what personal gain could offset his very tangible losses, but Lean tells him where to look: “Hardline supporters of Israel’s quest to extend its reach into Palestinian territories are often major backers of the pseudo-intellectual pugilism that the Islamophobia industry deploys (… ) Their money – and lots of it – has subsidized massive propaganda campaigns against Islam and bankrolled the work of anti-Muslim naysayers (…) Regardless of their religious or political beliefs, their wallets benefit from such discourses.” (p.11) Well, enough said about the unseen but apparently huge “personal gain” to be made from Islam criticism. But at least we might be told just who the “Islamophobes” are.

 

The faces of “Islamophobia”

                We get to learn their names and some details about their careers and affiliation, e.g. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. (Conservative columnist Don Feder said of the latter’s book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t: “If there were a Nobel prize for demolishing inanities, I’d give it to Robert Spencer”, p.207.) Most of the discussion is about their motives, and clairvoyant Lean decides it must be their frustrated need for attention which saw its chance after 11 September 2001. But we get to know nothing about their arguments against Islam. Thus, Dr. Daniel Pipes, a prominent Islam scholar and critic, is alleged to have given and received some money (from the inevitable Zionist money-bags), but his scholarship is not addressed at all.

Indeed, the chief concern of the people concerned, viz. Islam, is simply not discussed. Islam is just a black box, and if ever a statement about it finds any mention, it is without going into the truth of that statement, which would require an analysis of Islam itself. That is a strict no-no to the author, so the reader is required to laugh every possible statement of the “Islamophobes” off as obviously ridiculous.

                On Europe, say on Gates of Vienna or the Brussels Journal, the author is silent, preferring only the more sensational cases of resistance to Islam. Some attention is paid to Geert Wilders, though not to his arguments (and to his trial for racial insults but not to its outcome: full acquittal), plenty to the English Defence League, and to the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. Of course there would have been no Breivik without Islam and the problems it poses; but there is no doubt that he was received by Islam apologists as a god-send. They have all been hiding behind the Norwegian’s broad shoulders, a safe point from which to shoot their arrows at Islam critics. But a year and some months down the line, we can safely say that the hoped-for effect of the Breivik episode failed to materialize. By the Islamic warriors’ endless and newsworthy attacks, killing hundreds in Afghanistan or Iraq, by the degeneration of the “Arab spring” into an “Islamic winter”, by the blasphemy persecutions in Pakistan and stonings in Mali, the population has again replaced Breivik as a bogeyman with the archetypal mujahid, the Islamic holy warrior against the infidels. Unfortunately for the Islam apologists, reality is more persistent than the Breivik blip.

But we appreciate Lean’s testimony to the violence which Islam critics have to face. Thus: “Staging a demonstration against plans for a mosque in Harrow, England, SIOE [Stop Islamization of Europe] activists clashed with brick-wielding counter-protesters. In a storm of fury, the rectangular blocks, along with glass bottles and firecrackers, were hurled airborne.” (p.53) And look at his language on Wilders’ film Fitna: “His flick was chockablock with horrifying images and hateful juxtapositions. Bloodied bodies, dismembered by terrorists, and references to female genital mutilation ran alongside handpicked verses of the Quran. So provocative were some scenes that the ambassadors of 26 Muslim-majority countries called for it to be banned.” (p.175) The author really makes no effort to sound neutral, as a real scholar would, and gives the impression that the call for a ban carries his approval.

 

Christianity

                In America, the strong Evangelical movement also opposes Islam, and the author spends many pages on painting it in the worst light. In 2010, “Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer triggered lurking anti-Muslim sentiment within the crowd. ‘We believe that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator – and by the way, folks, that’s not Allah – with certain unalienable rights’, he roared as the room of white, middle-aged evangelicals erupted in agreement.” (p.97) The partisan doings of the Christian general William Boykin in Iraq in 2003, of course not supported in this by the Government, are discussed at some length. (p.113-115) The Christian subjugation of the American natives with reference to God-given rights to the land as per the Old Testament gets mentioned as proving that Christians are every bit as bad as they themselves allege of Muslims. (p.98)

Well, Christianity has a lot to answer for, but at least it is preferable to Islam in some important respects. As a doctrine, it is a lot more broad-based than Islam, taking in elements from Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, the Jewish tradition, Hellenistic philosophy and Roman law, and this through many erudite writers who thought twice about the book they contributed to Holy Scripture. That is, for instance, why the Crusades, the limiting Just War Theory, and radical pacifism could all be rooted in Christianity. By contrast, Islam is based on the brief and unconsidered utterances of one half-literate businessman, Mohammed.

Moreover, Christianity’s first three centuries were spent as a marginal religion in the mighty Roman empire, so that a doctrine of the separation of Church and State and of obedience to the prevailing law system soon developed. It was not always abided by, but one can always fall back on it, and it has become a cornerstone of modern secular culture. By contrast, Mohammed’s aim was from the beginning to institute a state, governed by Islamic law, and his victories made Islam’s supremacy a matter of course. So, Islam has always been a political religion, seeing State power and Shari’a as one.

 

Racism

Typically, the author tries to expand American racism to include criticism of Islam: “The spheres of Islamophobia and racism overlap greatly. In the last 60 years, in particular, racist language has shifted away from overtly biological prejudices to include a strong cultural component.” (p.96) Even if this opposition to certain cultural traits can be shown to be a prejudice, it is by definition not racism. Islam is not a race, and since the beginning, it was criticized by Mohammed’s fellow tribesmen, who of course shared their race with him. Nowadays, their torch is taken over by numerous people of colour, such as the late Hindu historians Ram Swarup, Harsh Narain, Sita Ram Goel and K.S. Lal, the African novelist Maryse Condé, and most notably by ex-Muslims like the Pakistani-born philologist Ibn Warraq, the Iranian-born law scholar Afshin Ellian and the Somali-born political scientist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Of course, none of them finds mention in this book, which pictures only white Americans so that it can lament how only white Americans are in the picture.

According to the author, “Islamophobes” make a distinction “between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ cultures, the latter of which are marginalized not only because of their ethnic background, but also because of their traditions, beliefs and cultural practices, often described by racists as ‘uncivilized’, ‘backwards’, ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’.” (p.97) The words “superior” in “inferior” are meant to make the link with pre-war racism, but are in fact not much in use now. But alright, by definition Christians consider Christianity as superior to Islam, not of course because of the latter’s “ethnic” background, but purely because both the belief system and the ethics of Islam are deemed wanting when compared to Christianity. Human beings have a freedom to choose their religion, and thus the freedom to compare the religions on offer. Of course they will judge the one as unequal to the other, whether superior or inferior, just as a math teacher will see an inequality between “2 + 2 = 4” and “2 + 2 = 5”. That perfectly normal exercise of the power of discrimination has nothing to do with racism, and has been a problem for Islam ever since Mohammed’s fellow townspeople in Mecca rejected Islam. But Lean would like “Islamophobes” to be racist, because he hopes to score with anti-racist language whereas he knows he cannot win against them if the debate is about Islam as a doctrine.

By the way, American conservatives are right when they call their presidential candidate Herman Cain “a real black as compared to Obama”. (p.99) Obama is what Brazilians would call a mulatto, half-white on his white mother’s side, also the only side on which he has American slaves in his ancestry. Cain, by contrast, is a real descendant of African-American slaves. Obama’s father’s tribe, the Luo, missed the history of Transatlantic slavery, but they may have had something to do with the Arab slave-raids, which used some African tribes to enslave others.

Much is made here, as by Evangelicals, of the question to what extent Obama is a Muslim. No doubt he was first brought up in the religion of his Muslim father and stepfather, and during his primary school days in Indonesia he was registered as a Muslim. Upon returning to America, he lived with his white grandparents and was resocialized as a Christian. Later, in Chicago, he started attending a black church. I for one think he is one of the many ex-Muslims who were roped in by the Protestant churches. For in spite of the Islamic prohibition on conversion out of Islam, Muslims in peripheral zones with limited social control by other Muslims do manage to become Christians. In Indonesia this would probably not have succeeded (and in Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia only at the risk of his life),  but in the US, he could easily get away with it. But I cannot look in his head and have to believe him on faith when he calls himself a Christian. At any rate, it is not “Islamophobia” to have a different opinion on this.

 

Moderate Muslims

 The author, obeying Godwin’s law, brings in Adolf Hitler early on. He shouldn’t have, for “Islamophobic” readers by now all know that the Nazis liked Islam a great deal, that they had Muslim regiments in the Waffen-SS, that the collaborationist Ustasha government of Croatia built a mosque for them in Zagreb (which the subsequent Communist government turned into a pigsty), that the multiculturalist Hitler himself ordered deceased Muslim soldiers to be buried according to Islamic rites, etc. Today, Muslim youngsters in European schools don’t tolerate lessons about the Holocaust or even applaud Hitler for waging the good war against the Jews. By contrast, it was the anti-Nazi war leader Winston Churchill who likened Hitler Mein Kampf to Mohammed’s Quran, a stand later taken over by the author’s bête noire Geert Wilders. If anyone should be called a Nazi (and Lean clearly thinks there should), it is Lean himself.

Then, there is the usual wailing that a minority of extremists spoils the image of a large majority of moderate Muslims. To be sure, they exist, such as the Muslims who alerted the police to prevent cases of terrorism (p.148-149), but they do not prove Lean’s point. First of all, they have this in common with the terrorists, that they all swear by Islam. The much-maligned Islamophobes keep this fact in mind, and Lean holds this against them:  “—the Quran found in Mohammed Atta’s bag contained the same verses that would be preached to Muslims attending worship in the building’s mosque, they believed.” (p.40). Well, of course. From Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 fame) and Mohammed Bouyeri (the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh) to the Palestinian, Afghan and other suicide terrorists, we have literally hundreds of testimonies, in written or videotaped form, of contemporary Muslims stating that Islam and nothing but Islam was their motivation. We have it from many Muslims, including Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, that the Western establishment is wrong in making a distinction between radical and moderate Muslims. And we take these Muslims at their word, while Lean pretends to know it all better than they themselves.

Secondly, even those moderates applaud and quietly help the extremists in actions they themselves don’t have the mettle for, but approve of. Thirdly, in those cases where they really think the extremists have gone too far, they may be guided by a strategy that seems more promising than confrontation, but that has the same Islamic goal nonetheless (e.g. because they count on demography to make a purely democratic transition to an Islamic order possible). And fourthly, where they really abide by policies such as full integration and acceptance of the law of the land, rather than Shari’a, they obey either the influence of modernity or a deeper, more universally human, pre-Islamic layer in themselves. For Muslims are just human beings who have, after all, had to learn Islam; they were not born as Muslims. Indeed, there is nothing about this mistaken belief system that cannot be washed off. As an ex-Catholic myself, I can testify that there is life after apostasy.

 

Conclusion

Mr. Lean, whose world consists of haters everywhere, would like us to hate his book: “I expect that those who view the world in ways that are diametrically opposed to my own will take great issue with what follows. I delight in their protestations. For were they to find my narrative pleasing, I would feel as if I had done a great injustice.” (p.15) Alas, we have every reason to like this book. It proves our point completely. One, the defenders of Islam have to leave the contents of Islam unmentioned, because any serious analysis of the religion would prove the points made by the “Islamophobes”. Two, they have to pick on vulnerable targets, like shrill Evangelicals and narrow-minded military men, but leave the really knowledgeable critics of Islam outside their readers’ horizon. Thus, ex-Muslim critics are not mentioned at all. This slanted presentation is just what we are used to from our debates with Islam defenders in our own daily lives.

                We also have to compliment Lean on letting out truths of which he doesn’t realize the depth. Thus, he writes that one Imam Ossama “Bahloul was skeptical that the political and economic climates of an election year were the only instigating factors for the sudden surge in anti-Muslim hate.” (p.182) And the same thing counts for Islam itself: the surge in Islamic terrorism was not the result of economic factors, and elections don’t even exists in some of the terrorists’ home countries.

 

Disregarding for now that the author is a hater himself (which is but his freedom of opinion), we must appreciate that here, he hits the nail on the head. No matter that so many apologists of Islam mouth the Marxist platitude of the “real” reason being economic (yes, the poverty of that billionaire Osama bin Laden), or that the media blame the electoral fever, here we have an educated Muslim rejecting  these facile explanations. Anti-Islamism is not the result of political and economic circumstances, but of an increasing awareness of Islam’s doctrine and history. This awareness is forced on us by Islam itself, which impresses its presence upon our societies.

Finally, this book should serve as a call to Islam critics to improve their performance. Shrill and panicky warnings against an Islamic take-over are not what the world needs. The degree to which Islam itself is threatened by modernity and by the West should also be considered. Confusion between Islamic doctrine, which is indeed the germ of some dangerous developments, and the mass of Muslims, who are as much the prisoners as the carriers of Islam, is to be avoided. Muslims can’t help it that they were born into Muslim families, and that they associate the natural respect for their parents with a belief in the religion they received from their parents. If we had been born in their societies, maybe we too would have been Muslims. So we should empathize with them and their difficult situation of having believed in a deluded Prophet for decades. After all, we expect of them that they outgrow their religion, which is possible yet fairly hard to do. We should not so much focus on symptoms, such as the veil or the minarets or the “Ground Zero mosque”, but on the Islamic belief system itself. Our attitude to Muslims should be to say: “Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The rest, from their stopping the slaughter of sheep in their bath-tubs to their abandoning of jihad, will then follow from itself.

 

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Impressions from the AAR conference

 

This is being written at the end of the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago. For six days, there was a fully blue sky, something unthinkable in cloudy rainy Belgium. The temperature was pleasant due to what the locals call the Indian Summer. Just some highlights on a few memorable events.

 

Being different

The debate about Rajiv Malhotra’s book Being Different was very instructive. At the end, Malhotra ably put his critics in their place, but first they had their say. I was appalled by the bad manners of Brian Pennington against the invited responder, Rajiv Malhotra: he wondered aloud, after a long diatribe which I guess was his privilege, why the AAR and organizer Francis Clooney s.j. had cared to pay any attention to Malhotra at all, let alone invite him. It was typical for these academics: they fight by exclusion, they shamelessly  exploit the fact that they are in and Rajiv is out, eventhough his book will prove more influential (and far more factual) than anything they will ever produce, or than the wrongly famous Orientalism by Edward Said.

Rajiv’s central notion of historicity as distinguishing the monotheist faiths from the dharmic traditions, was misunderstood or not addressed, though Jonathan Edelmann had a point in alleging that the Krishna Bhakti doctrine of Krishna’s historicity, as God’s descent on earth, gets dangerously close to the Christian doctrine about Jesus (but those who lived before Krishna are not consigned to hell, as those predating Jesus or Mohammed are). He and Anant Rambachan were a bit pedantic in their critique because the book was not what they had wanted, e.g. one of them went on about the absence of the notion of pramana (means of knowing) from Rajiv’s book. Well, that was not what the book was about, that’s why it wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t recognize a revolution even when it was presented to them on a platter.

And since we’re discussing what was not mentioned rather than what was, I said during question time that the Indologists in the panel ignored the book’s challenge to their guild, viz. that unlike specialists in any other field, they actively desired and worked for the demise of their subject, Hinduism. They have been flagrantly wrong about central issues, e.g. in the 1990s many of them predicted that if the BJP came to power, it would open gas chambers for the Muslims or throw them into the Indian Ocean. But the BJP did come to power and nothing of the sort happened. This means that they were not just a bit wrong but totally wrong on one of the few things in their field that mattered to lay society. Yet none of them apologized for their gross but false accusation, and all of them kept their posts, which they visibly don’t deserve. Their collective wrongness on the Ayodhya affair is another example: all sources including the Muslim ones said until the 1980s that there had been a Hindu temple on the disputed site, this has again and again been confirmed by archaeologists and finally by the Allahabad High Court, so everybody could know the truth, but the Indologists insisted upon just the opposite scenario. So, it would be fitting for Indologists to acknowledge their mistakes and correct their ways, especially when faced with a book that details their own role in a process of Western-Christian imperialism that is unfolding before our very eyes. 

 

Hindu-bashing

I no longer get worked up about the endless Hindu-bashing by young as well as by established scholars. There was plenty of that in all Hindu-related forums, though in different doses: the more the study topic was sociological (as the modern Orientalists want) and the less it is textual (the focus of the old Orientalists), the more Hinduism and especially the Brahmin caste were put in a bad light. Thus, there was what a Hindu listener, citing Paul Krugman, called “zombie lies”: they have been disproven any number of times, yet there they are again. In particular, he meant the presentation claiming that relations between the Jains and the Sultanate rulers were quite friendly, and that the occasional destruction of idols had nothing to do with religion. We don’t need to repeat our arguments against these long-lasting Marxist lies.  

In young scholars joining in the long-standing criminalization of Hinduism, optimist Hindus might see an opportunist stance to make a career, for the least show of sympathy to the wrong parties will be ruthlessly punished with exclusion from the institutions. But it is more likely that these doctorandi have lapped up what they have been taught, and really mean it with their Hindu-bashing, which they consider only natural. To them, Hinduism really is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste; anything that may happen in India, past or present, is the result of a conspiracy by the wily Brahmins. In established scholars, of course, Hindu-bashing is the habit of a lifetime and is very hard to dislodge.

 

Pagan international

My own paper, in a session co-organized by the Paganism and the Indigenous Religions groups, was about the crucial role of Hindu nationalism in the creation of a Pagan international. The Hindu diaspora is well-placed to organize first bilateral meetings between Hindus and local “Pagan” or indigenous people, and then a global platform such as the triannual Gathering of the Elders, organized in India. This has taken shape in the “Gatherings of the Elders”  

Near the end of the question-and-answer round, a conformistic Indologist objected to my relativizing the meaning of the Hindu nationalist participation in this forum. He alleged that the Hindu nationalists mistreated the “indigenous” people, “the Dravidians and the Adivasis” and that the latter were being “converted” by Hindu nationalists. In reality, the charity for tribals is one of the oldest and most successful fronts of the Hindu nationalists, countering the Christian missionaries with their own weapons: social welfare and schools. As testified precisely at this forum, the tribals are quite happy with this concern, and while a rare narrow-minded local officer may insist on imparting certain Hindu practices to the tribals, the over-all policy of the Hindu nationalist workers among the tribals is to fully respect the local traditions and integrate the tribal cultures wholesale into the wide bosom of Hindu society. “Conversion” is a Christian concept which does not apply to the relation between urban Hindus and forest-dwellers.

I pointed out that the Indologist used the term Adivasi, “Aboriginal”, a missionary neologism creating the false impression of native familiarity with the division of the population into aboriginals and invaders – which most non-tribals are not (and even if they were, it wouldn’t matter). Indians use descriptive terms like Vanavasi, “forest-dweller”, or Girijan, “hill people”, not the ideologically loaded and false term Adivasi. To repeat myself: the term Adivasi is the most successful one-word disinformation campaign in history.

 

 

Identity

Over-all, the striking thing about most papers and about the whole conference was the emphasis on the sociological angle and the concern for “identity”. Americans even more than other contemporaries are just obsessed with it. This conference was full of papers on this or that religion as a  tool for (black, Hispanic, gay, Asian-American, women’s, the handicapped’s) “identity formation”. But identity has little place in a conference on religion, which transcends identities.

A Hindu I met at the conference observed this American obsession (which, through sociology, is being imposed on all other nations) and commented: “Identity is simply there. It is what you start from when you proceed to something else.” So you forget about it and concentrate on something higher. As a Hindu master I interviewed long ago told me: “He who is enlightened, knows he is the same as everybody else.”

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Hindu bravery

One hears it all too often: ‘Hindus are cowards, they only deserve what they are suffering.’ Mahatma Gandhi said it clearly enough: ‘The Muslim is a bully, the Hindu a coward.’

But Hindus are by no means cowards. Hindus as such have their problems, but lack of bravery is not one of them. Look at the Bangladesh war of 1971. The Pakistani Army was brave enough as long as its job consisted in raping Bengali women, but as soon as the Indian Army appeared on the scene, all they could do was to flee and to surrender. The Hindu-Sikh Army liberated the oppressed Muslims and the persecuted Hindus of Bangladesh. Or look at the Kargil war of 1999. Though the politicians forbade the Indian soldiers from taking the war into enemy territory by crossing the Pak border, the Indian Army besieged the Kargil mountain which the Pak invaders had taken, and reconquered it.

Let us look at the historical record. First off, the Vedas and the Hindu epics, like most ancient writings, extolled bravery. The Bhagavad-Gita also underpins its plea for bravery on the battlefield with a typically Hindu (at least very un-Christian and un-Islamic) philosophy, namely the belief in reincarnation. Cicero and Caesar had noted the Gallic men’s battlefield bravery and its connection to their belief in reincarnation. This was equally true of the Hindu warriors: they were not afraid of death.

Then, Hindus stopped Alexander the Great. To be sure, this is old history, we have a paucity of reliable sources about what really happened, and the map shows that Alexander’s soldiers were uniquely far from home and understandably unwilling to go farther even if they could. But fact is: the great Alexander was satisfied with the Iranian provinces of India’s frontier and declined to enter India proper. That was no mean achievement of the Hindus.

Then the Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas managed to gain a foothold in India’s Northwest. The Shakas were defeated, the Vikram calendar begins with this victory. These conquering foreigners were not fully expelled, but at least they were absorbed. There is no distinct Shaka, Kushana or Huna community today, much less do they demand minority privileges.

The Muslims entered Indian history with a naval attack north of present-day Mumbai in 636, only four years after Mohammed’s death. It was repelled. Then for half a century they sent a number of expeditions from Mesopotamia to Sindh. Each expedition was defeated. While conquering North Africa was a cakewalk, there was a Caliph who expressed his reluctance to send another army to Sindh, because those expeditions only cost the lives of so many good Muslims. But of course, if you keep trying, you will break through one day, so eventually, Mohammed bin Qasim occupied Sindh in 712. But even then, his successor was soon defeated.

Meanwhile, the Muslim armies conquered Central Asia and their next attack was through Afghanistan and the Khyber pass. Afghanistan was ruled by the Hindu Shahiya dynasty, which gave them a long-drawn-out fight. But towards the year 1000 the Muslims finally won through, and the Shahiya king killed himself when he found himself unable to defend his subjects. From Afghanistan, Mahmud Ghaznavi entered India proper for what his court chroniclers described as raids. In fact, he would have been happy enough to occupy India permanently, but the Hindus were still too strong for that.

But what the Hindus had in bravery, they lacked in alertness. They didn’t realize that Islam was a new type of enemy, much more difficult to digest than the earlier invaders. In the peripheral Kashmir region, the king acted “secular” and gave Muslims positions of power and confidence, which gave them the opportunity to take steps towards the Islamization of the region. This would be repeated many times, down to the present. Thus, the kings of the Vijayanagar empire showed off their broad-mindedness (now mistermed “secularism”) by hiring Muslim troops, only to find in the battle of Talikota that their Muslim armies defected to the Muslim opponent camp and inflicted defeat on their erstwhile Hindu overlord.

Meanwhile, Mahmud’s nephew Salar Mahmud Ghaznavi made a successful foray into the Ganga basin. The Hindu kings in the neighbourhood got together to stop him. Led by Sukhadeva and including the famous philosopher-king Raja Bhoja, they defeated Ghaznavi in the battle of Bahraich near Ayodhya in 1033. (It is a different matter that sentimental Hindu sleepwalkers of later years joined their Muslim neighbours in worshipping at Salar Masud Ghaznavi’s grave, not appreciating the bravery and foresight of the Hindu kings and soldiers who defeated him; there are certain things very wrong with the Hindu mentality, but again, lack of bravery is not among them.) For more than a century and a half, the people of the Ganga basin considered Islamic invasion a thing of the past.  

But then, the breakthrough came. It was not due to Hindu cowardice, but to Hindu magnanimity and overconfidence. A year after being defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan, who spared him, Mohammed Ghori did battle again and took his erstwhile victor captive. After blinding and executing Prithviraj, he and his generals conquered the entire Ganga plain, using newer battlefield strategies. From there, they would extend their power southwards to cover almost the whole subcontinent in due course. But for five centuries and a half, the Hindus had prevented this, while West Asia, North Africa and Spain had fallen within eighty years.

The age of Muslim expansion was again marked by endless Hindu resistance. Wise Muslim rulers opted for a compromise with this unbeatable foe (misinterpreted by secularists as “secularism”), but more zealous rulers depleted their forces in endless wars. In this endeavour, they were helped by a stream of West-Asian adventurers and African slave-soldiers who came to India to increase the Delhi Sultanate’s large standing armies. The Muslim states were totally geared to warfare, something unseen in Hindu history. For this reason, we can say with the comfort of hindsight that the Muslims could finally have conquered all of the subcontinent had they remained united. Even Hindu bravery could not have prevented it, any more than the brief acts of North-African bravery could stop the Islamization of North Africa. But fortunately, Muslim states or Muslim ethnic lobbies within a state also fought each other, which gave Hindus a chance to regroup and to mount another attack.

Also, some Hindu kings did what they thought best under the circumstances, viz. they surrendered without war, paid tribute, and retained sufficient autonomy to house rebels from other areas (like Guru Govind Singh’s asylum with the Hill Rajas) or become rebellious themselves once circumstances allowed this. It was important for a come-back to have these free territories (just like the reconquista of Spain was only possible because its Asturian region had managed to remain free since the beginning). Their collaboration was not cowardice but a ruse to gain time.

All the same, this meant that Hindus enlisted in the armed force of sagacious Muslim rulers. Akbar, who had consolidated his power by defeating the Hindu ruler Himu, was smart enough to keep enough of the Hindus on his side to overpower rival Muslim claimants and to fight Hindu  freedom fighters. Famously, the rebellious Rana Pratap was countered by Man Singh, who wielded the sword of the Moghul empire. Hindu bravery was employed by Muslim rulers.  

Finally, in the 17^th century, a rebellious Shivaji, born in a family of collaborators, would arise and restore Hindu sovereignty. Where his Maratha army appeared, defeat of their enemies was a certainty. The Moghul empire became a mere shadow of its former self, while the military power rested with the Marathas. In 1817, the Peshwas, who had taken over the Maratha confederacy, were terminally defeated by the British. But again this was not for Hindus’ lack of bravery. They fought like lions, and on the other side, other Hindu divisions fought like lions for the British, who could conquer and rule India without doing too much fighting themselves.

 If something can be held against the Marathas and their Peshwa successors, it is not a lack of bravery or military prowess, but lack of proper ideological motivation. This is why they spilled their energies in predatory raids against other Hindu populations, it is why their leader prostrated before the powerless Moghul emperor in 1771, it is why some Peshwa descendents could be enticed into a Hindu-Muslim or Moghul-Maratha cooperation (which was really a case of mutual deception) in the Mutiny of 1857. They lapsed from Shivaji’s sense of mission as the liberator of the Hindus.

One constant for at least 8 centuries was that Hindus didn’t use their brains to update their warfare. They didn’t learn from their enemies’ successes. Also, they were sentimental and too overly attached to the person of their leader. They could bravely fight all they wanted, but if the leader was killed, there was no second person, much less a collective plan, to take his place. When you look at today’s Hindu politicians and internet warriors, you find exactly the same defects.

In a hostile sense too, Hindus are too focused on persons. They have wasted their energies attacking Sonia Gandhi and her family, and failed to dismantle the secularist dispensation established by her grandfather-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru, and given a Marxist slant  by her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi. They haven’t emulated the techniques by which the secularists, like the British of yore, exercise power totally out of proportion to their numbers. They haven’t figured out how to stop the phenomenon of “Hindus wielding the sword of Islam”, in which Akbar exulted, but which has become so commonplace under the guise of secularism. For that, an analysis of all the factors in the field is necessary. This is not too difficult, it only takes a normal degree of involvement and will. But so far, Hindus have not mustered the will to win.

 

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The municipal elections in Belgium 2012

                Nothing is beneath the dignity of our attention, so even the municipal elections of Belgium, last Sunday 14 October 2012, can be deemed to have their importance. I cannot discuss every trend that came out of the results, but a few stand out.

                On the Walloon side, little remarkable happened. All four established parties (Socialists, Liberals, Christian-Democrats secularized as “Humanists”, and Ecologists) held their own, the Socialists even strengthening their dominant position. Some personal issues are of some interest, e.g. how a coalition managed to oust the 20-year mayor of Molenbeek, Philippe Moureaux; this coalition was engineered by the Christian-Democrats in revenge for their own ousting from the coalition in the city of Brussels, where the Socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans strengthened his position.

On the Flemish side, however, something of a revolution took place. The papers were most vocal about the giant victory of the N-VA (“New-Flemish Alliance”). From a marginal alliance partner of the Christian-Democrats in one go to the status of biggest party of the country with more than a quarter of the vote in its own right, it is indeed impressive. Partly, this was a reaction of indignation by the electorate against the latest government formation, in which the classical parties sold out the Flemish nation’s rights badly. Partly, it was because the N-VA has placed itself on the map as a decent conservative party. But it remains to be seen whether they will live up to this new image: the party is as  yet a bit inconsistent and ideologically amateurish. The rightward slant is at any rate undeniable: its rather leftist mayoral candidate in Ghent with a Socialist past, Siegfried Bracke, won comparatively little, whereas their candidates with a right-wing image or past, like Bruno Stevenheydens in Beveren, Karim Van Overmeire in Aalst and party president Bruno De Wever in Antwerp, won hugely.

Not that they can enjoy their newfound power in many places, for the traditional parties have mostly ganged up to keep the N-VA out of power, even if it is the biggest party. In the city of Halle, for instance, the mayoral candidate Mark Demesmaeker ended first but was unexpectedly bypassed by a coalition of the losers. But the N-VA knows how to play the same game: in Bilzen, MEP Frieda Brepoels will be the mayor, replacing her meritorious ex-party comrade (now Christian-Democrat), mayor Johan Sauwens. And in Kortrijk, N-VA supported the coup de théatre by Vincent van Quickenborne, who leaves his ministership in the central government to oust the sitting mayor, former minister De Clerck. For the first time in 150 years, Kortrijk will have a Liberal mayor instead of a Christian.

The Green Party gained somewhat, though a big progress in votes could not save their mayor Ingrid Pira of Mortsel, where yours truly happens to live; the N-VA was bigger there, as in most towns around Antwerp, where they will have a number of mayors. The far-left Partij van de Arbeid (“Labour Party”) put itself back on the map in Antwerp and a few other  towns. The traditional parties all lost somewhat. The victories of the Socialists (at least seemingly, for the real winner was their Green alliance partner) in Ghent and of the Liberals in Tongeren and Mechelen are the opposite of the general picture. But the big loser was the Christian-Democratic Party CD&V.

                In terms of votes, they held out fairly well, slightly better than the Socialists and Liberals. But given their deep implantation in Flemish society, their loss of ground is definitive and a major contrast to their past omnipresence. The decline of the Christian-Democratic party is another step in a long-term decline, combining the structural evolution of people becoming less religious and at any rate less Christian, with the conjunctural disappointment at the party’s selling out the rights of the Flemish people in the latest government formation. Its proverbially incompetent president Wouter Beke tried to put a brave face on his defeat, lying that his party was still the greatest at the municipal level. It is still the dominant party in some rural area, but with the loss of the cities of Aalst, Bruges and Kortrijk, it has very little power in the centres anymore.

This can be compared to that political family’s fortunes in the neighbouring countries. In the Netherlands, the CDA (“Christian-Democratic appeal”) was reduced in the last few years to one-third of its strength, marginalized into irrelevance from what till recently was the natural party of government which mostly furnished the Prime Minister. Its line was centre-left, its tradition and voters centre-right, and once they were presented with an alternative (including Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam party), they left the party in droves. The problem here, as in many parties, is that the voters have their private opinions at ease, while the public figures who sit in parliament are influenced by leftist fashions: either because they really believe these, or because they play to the gallery out of fear that centre-right opinions will be punished by the leftist opinion hegemons. In Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana, for decades in government and the natural partner of the Americans in containing the Communist threat, simply collapsed and disappeared. In Germany  by contrast, the Christian-Democrats profiled themselves as a mildly but consistently conservative party, where Christians and secularized people feel equally at home, so that it survived the secularization of the population unharmed.

                The other big news of these elections was the huge defeat of the Vlaams Belang (VB, “Flemish Interest”, formerly Vlaams Blok, “Flemish Bloc”), also a Flemish nationalist and resolutely separatist party, but known mostly for its anti-immigrant stance. Well, the party spokesmen will say they are not anti-immigrant per se, that they welcome people who are willing to throw in their lot with the natives and become Fleming with the Flemings. But they are perceived as so anti-immigrant that they are shunned by all other parties including the N-VA and kept locked in a cordon sanitaire, i.e. an agreement to boycott them. While increasing its share of the vote constantly, it never took part in exercising power at any level. All kinds of things were tried to counter its influence, including a trial which outlawed the party and forced it to refound itself.

Its presence became counterproductive, as the other parties felt compelled to take the opposite view or at any rate carry out the opposite policies. Thus, the Vlaams Belang was at its strongest around 2004, when the other parties agreed to the Fast-Belgian Act, the most liberal nationality law in the world. More restrictive immigration policies in the European countries have been enacted by the mainstream parties, and all the more so if they had no sizable anti-immigrant parties to define themselves against.

In the nineties, as the Vlaams Blok was going from strength to strength, Prof. Johan Leman, appointed as director of a government centre to combat “racism”, meaning this party, remarked that the answer to the Vlaams Blok was a decent centre-right party which could attract its voters. At the time, there was no such alternative. The parties which the left (and hence the media) likes to describe as centre-right, namely the Christian-Democrats, the Liberals and also the Volksunie (= an earlier incarnation of the N-VA), all rejected that label and pursued centre-left policies. So, they failed to attract VB voters. But now, the new leader of the N-VA, Bart De Wever, managed to give the party a centre-right image at last. He lauds Theodore Dalrymple and Roger Scruton, makes deals with David Cameron, and writes his own conservative column in a leading newspaper. So, his party at long last gave the electorate their decent centre-right alternative. This was just what the voters had been waiting for. Now they want the party to be true to its promises.

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The Parapsychological Conference in Leiden

Yours truly attended the Parapsychological Conference in Leiden, on 15 September 2012, organized by Prof. Hans Gerding and his colleagues at the Parapsychologisch Instituut of the Netherlands.

Prof. David Lukoff spoke of the understanding of religion and spirituality by psychologists and psychiatrists in their bible, the DSM-4 and -5. After an introduction to his youthful experiences as a hippie, when he took LSD and briefly saw himself as a religious prophet, the professor came to the point. It took a long time, but now the mental-healthcare professionals are increasingly taking religious/spirituality seriously. Especially military psychologists use the DSM category of religious or spiritual problem in their diagnosis. Many people think that their mental disorders are the result of sins they have committed. Conversion of oneself or on a family member is another frequent cause of mental problems.

This is by no means self-evident. Because of their training, clinicians are programmed to be wary of this. From the 1930 till the 1970s, psychologists used the term “catatonia” frequently when describing meditation. Indeed, meditators are inward-looking and therefore insensitive to outside stimuli, a feature they share with catatonia patients. But meditators choose to turn inwards, while catatonic patients have no choice in the matter, their behavior is compulsive. Today, this crucial distinction between normal and sick human beings is widely recognized. Indeed, psychologists now devote serious research to near-death and mystical experiences.

Prof. Liane Hofmann of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, spoke of the relevance of religion and spirituality to psychotherapy. She had a high focus on the therapeutic context, and typically she started out by asking the psychotherapists among the audience to identify themselves. There were many.

What struck me is the conventionality of the goals set by therapists, the total absence of the need and search for enlightenment (or its religious equivalent, salvation). The theologian Hans Küng once said it during an invited speech before the American Psychiatric Association: religion is absent in psychotherapy, it is the big taboo of the profession. Even our professor only spoke of religion and spirituality, but never of their natural goals. These are still treated by psychologists as private pet issues, not taken seriously. Nevertheless, from her European angle, she confirmed what the American professor had observed: that psychotherapists increasingly value religion and spirituality and are gaining expertise in this field. But it should be noted that, while this time she spoke before a friendly audience, she clearly was used toskeptical or hostile audiences, which is why she took cover behind otherwise unnecessary statistics and investigation reports.

Prof. Hein van Dongen from the host university spoke of “energy”. It has a vague meaning, like Chinese “qi”, for an atmosphere is a room or a circle of people, but otherwise we use it in its literal meaning. Aristotle already used it, Paul used it for God’s working, and there is already a difference, for to Aristotle, energy was inherent in things, whereas to Saint Paul, it was inherent in one Supreme Being. Paul influenced the use of the term in a religious sense till the 18^th century. It also meant “spiritual force”. Poets used it for landscapes, which also have an energy, and its organ was called “imagination”. According to William Blake, reason is sublimated energy, while pure energy is vitality emanating from the body, including eroticism. He also mentioned Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, to whom qi also the basis of an esthetic (call it “energy stream”) and the Dutch Sinologist Bourel who said some hundred years ago that the origin of all qi is the sun.

Prof. A. van der Braak (from the Calvinist Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) read a paper on the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and the Zen master Dōgen. It is now common to give a Zen interpretation of Meister Eckhart. Schopenhauer already used Eckhart to understand Zen. Daisetz Suzuki introduced Zen to Westerners beginning with Eckhart. His interpretation follows the common one: a  rebellious mystic who goes against established religion. Suzuki only sees differences between Christianity and Buddhism as a waste of time. The rebellious and mystical image of Zen was counterfeited in Tang China and sold to the West by 20^th century Japanese scholars.

“There is nothing mystical about Zen.” Here I am not sure the speaker was quoting someone or speaking for himself. I do know, however, that this viewpoint of denying a mystical dimension to Zen is quite popular among Christian missionaries. They may even be right, depending on how “mysticism” is defined. If mysticism is defined theistically, then of course, Zen is not mystical while Christian mysticism is. But in speaking of “mysticism”, most people think of meditation, emptying the mind, and in that sense Zen is mystical par excellence. Anyway, the speaker explained himself: “Zen is a body practice, to embody the Buddha nature, not to understand it.“ Oh, well. But I agree with him when he laughs at the New Age simpletons who say: “Zen’s emptiness = Eckhart’s nothingness.”

Meister Eckhart wrote his mystical works in German, his serious works in Latin. Eckhart writing in Latin was just a scholastic philosopher. Both Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer say: our understanding of a text is based on our pre-understanding, it determines what we notice (or not) in a thinker. Givenness is never neutral or objective. Thus, the reading of Eckhart as an anti-Church mystic is determined by some people’s Romantic premises. Objectivity should be pursued, but we should remain aware of our pre-understanding and explicitate it. For Eckhart, mysticism is always tied to reading the Bible. He believed in Biblical revelation.

Dōgen Zenji was the founder of the Soto tradition of Zen (as opposed to Rinzai, from Lin Ji). Zen here is not about a mystical transcendent experience, but about permanently realizing the Buddha nature. Dogen: “Buddhism s to study the self. Studying the self is to forget the self …” Could Eckhart have said that?

Conclusion: rather than saying that mystics meet one another and transcend their own tradition, their going deeper in their own tradition seems more like it. Maybe it is time for a second wave of Zen to the west. Eckhart and Dōgen entered their own tradition more profoundly. They were not universal and didn’t think of trying.

Prof. Anna Bosman of Radboud University, Nijmegen spoke on sensitivity, a perfectly normal condition, even a component of spriirituality, that professionals have long misdiagnosed as a symptom of a disease. Included in the definition of spiritual crisis is that it “reveals itself by extraordinary experiences”. The speaker said: “I found it absurd till this morning, when my colleague [David Lukoff] told of his LSD experience. Hey, I have one of those, I thought. I had space cake and an out-of-the-body experience.”

Sensitivity has as its original meaning: to find your way. In a source of 1400, it meant “interpretation”, in 1526 the “external sense organs”, in 1816 an “extreme physical experience”. Only in 1900 did it start to mean what we understand as sensitivity.

She also protested against the tendency of professionals to treak people as statistical averages. Thus, they say: ”Autistic people have a lower memory”, and proceed to expect that of every single autistic patient. We treat people like that, projecting statistical data on averages onto individuals.

                Afterwards, I heard several other therapists complain that this is what is being said for the last several decades. Nothing new, they said. It reminded me of the presence of too many therapists working on people’s normalcy and too few yogis working towards enlightenment.

Pim van Lommel spoke about “non-local consciousness”. He wrote a book about the near-death experience (NDE) and its life-changing effects. Is it possible to speak of a beginning of our consciousness and will it ever end?

He said: we were happy in 1967 for resuscitating a patient, it was new then; but he seemed disappointed at coming back to life, so good had his NDE been. NDE raised a number of questions. How does the content of an NDE come about? Why does it change life so radically?

And first of all: what is an NDE? For most physicians it is  incomprehensible. During cardiac arrest, anoxia (lack of oxygen) in the brain sets in and the patient must be resuscitated within 5 minutes. During this time, some report having had an NDE. We investigated this with a control group who did not report an NDE. We found no effect from duration of cardiac arrest, of unconsciousness, the administering of drugs, gender, religion, degree of education.. The effect of an NDE was no more fear of death, compassion, acceptance, increased appreciation of life, enhanced intuitive sensibility. But an NDE is also traumatic, both at the inter- and intrapersonal level: integration of the experience, loneliness, homesickness, nostalgia after forced return to the body, and fear of rejection.

Only 18% of anoxia or cardiac arrest patients reported an NDE. Psychological, pharmacological, physiological explanations all fail. There have been four investigation, all had a similar result: 11% to 23% have an NDE. Patients also report similar sensations during an NDE. Thus, many report a holographic life review: thet had remembered every action, even every thought. They also report Importance of love, causation, etc. Many also saw their future life, e.g. someone saw his wife’s future death.

There are just too many proofs of the reality of NDE and no sussessful skeptical explanations. So, it seems functions like a TV or mobile phone: it receives and transmits information, but does not produce it.

                Prof. Pim van Lommel concluded by showing us two quotations. UN general secretary  and Nobel peace prize winner Dag Hammerskjöld said: “Our ideas about death define how we live our life.” And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said in Faust 2 to a skeptic:

“I see the learned man in what you say!
What you don’t touch, for you lies miles away;
What you don’t grasp, is wholly lost to you;
What you don’t reckon, you believe not true;
What you don’t weigh, that has for you no weight;
What you don’t count, you’re sure is counterfeit.”

                So, between the extremes of believing anything and disbelieving anything (skepticism), there is an attitude of investigating the mysterious and sometimes upholding it when it proves to be consistent and surviving any attempts to explain it away.

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Proving reincarnation

  

Michiel Hegener is a Dutch journalist who has kept his personal memories of reincarnation to himself for many years. He immediately sensed , and is now in a position to confirm from his own and his interviewees’ experience, that openly expressing a belief in reincarnation can damage one’s career. His book Leven op herhaling (in Dutch: “Living in repeat mode”) started as a journalistic search into the truth of reincarnation which the leading Rotterdam daily NRC refused to publish.

The writer looks at the existing proof for reincarnation. This proof is mainly the spontaneous testimony of children, the testimony of adults brought into trance by regression therapists, and the procedures of the Tibetan Tulkus and others who consciously deal with reincarnation. He does not hesitate to map out their weak points, but concludes nonetheless that what remains is still very persuasive: memories from past lives are a fact, and reincarnation is this fact’s most credible explanation.

 

Proof

Persuasive proof is for instance provided by the case of James Feininger, an American child of Christian parents who at first set out to disprove his reincarnation “fantasies”. He reported many facts, which were all verified, about the life of fighter pilot James Huston, shot down by the Japanese in World War 2. His parents Bruce and Andrea Feininger devoted the book Soul Survivor to the long and tortuous process of verification and their conversion to reincarnation belief. Many cases of children reporting past lives have been studied by Ian Stevenson and his successor Jim Tucker, and by the Indian woman researcher Satwant Pasricha. Adult cases of regression have been tested and largely or fully verified by the Australian researcher Peter Ramster, such as the case of the Australian housewife Gwen McDonald who reports having lived in 18^th-century Britain, by the Icelandic researcher Elendur Haraldsson, and a few others. US police inspector Robert Snow documented how he discovered and fully verified how he lived in the 19th century as the painter Carroll Beckwith.

No two people remember the same life, which would have been an argument against reincarnation and for a lesser paranormal explanation such as telepathy. Two large samples of adults both show an almost equal division of past lives as man or as woman, which is an argument for their testimonies’ veracity.

 

Skeptics

The writer also cites some Tulkus (consciously reincarnating Lamas) such as  Gyalwang Karmapa, Dutch regression therapist Lowie de Bie, and researcher Titus Rivas. Finally, he crosses swords with the skeptics Steve Hales (student of reincarnation researcher Robert Almeder) and Rob Nanninga.

In particular, he reports rather negatively on an article on reincarnation research by the leading Dutch skeptic Rob Nanninga. Skeptics have this knee-jerk reaction of alleging fraud. They are paranoids living in a world full of deceivers eager for money. Indeed, they are very money-oriented. They will say, for instance, about natural diets that “they don’t make you lighter, except your wallet”. From my experience in the New Age world, I have found there are far more deluded people than outright frauds, who don’t believe what they say but make others believe it. At any rate, the allegation of fraud is a serious affair, and should only be made if you can provide positive proof, not as an automatic alternative when a real explanation of unexplained facts is lacking.

But the good side of the hostile attitude of the skeptics and of the Western establishment is that nothing but the best evidence is good enough. The sloppy evidence common among internet Hindus, who claim to have “proven” reincarnation where it turns out that from their armchairs they have only argued that it is more rational and just than Christianity’s eternal afterlife (which plays upon the fond expectation that the world is just after all), will not do. Here, the anomalies are so strong that a explanation other than reincarnation becomes very unlikely. The interpretation of a karmic connection between lives, already disputed and practically undiscussed in this book, is much harder to prove, and is at any rate very different from the mere fact that we reincarnate. The Hindu-Buddhist belief in karmic reincarnation is now perhaps the best-known version of the reincarnation theory in the West, but is by no means universal. Some peoples believe that reincarnation is desirable, not something that must be ended (as Buddhists believe), or that it is simply a fact of life.

One thing that strikes me, as an Orientalist and decennia-long student of Hindu-Buddhist traditions involving reincarnation, is that this book, like every regression therapist or reincarnation researcher that I have heard lecture or with whom I have talked, treats reincarnation without encountering any fact that points to karma. There seems to be a continuity between lives, e.g. birthmarks are at the spot where the earlier incarnation suffered wounds, and an obvious tendency is reported to be reborn in roughly the same neighbourhood, family or circumstances. But there seems to be no evidence of reward or punishment, of being born blind as a punishment for past sins.

There is only little reference to existing ethnic beliefs about reincarnation. The Tibetan Tulkus are merely cited for their practice of “recognizing” new incarnations, not for their doctrines. Even the selection of interesting cases strongly discriminates against people from nations that already have a widespread belief in reincarnation. This is done on purpose: the numerous cases reported in India would be shot down by skeptics as cases of encouragement by the environment, which applauds recognized cases of reincarnations as prestigious or at least as welcome. In the West, and especially in atheist, Muslim and militantly Christian circles, claims of reincarnation are resolutely disbelieved, so cases are reported which were actually discovered by people who were at first out to disprove reincarnation.

 

Implications

Among the implications of reincarnation are a far greater attention to children’s rights. We are our children or grandchildren. Thus, children should not be given lifelong bodily interventions such as circumcision. They should not be forced into a religion. Of course, if reincarnation is recognized as a fact, it will be very harmful for the religions that deny it. So, this research has an inherent bias against Christianity and Islam, unless it concludes negatively.

Meanwhile, the belief in reincarnation should also stimulate interreligious tolerance. Those against whom we now fight on the streets (or otherwise hate), might be a community to which we once belonged ourselves. In India, 19 cases of reincarnation in a sample of 387 turned out to have changed religion between lives. But again, such a scenario is anything but religiously neutral: it confirms a widespread (though not a defining) Hindu belief and refutes the official Muslim position.

Another implication is ecology. We must leave the earth in good condition to future generations, because we ourselves are the future generations. A related issue is animal welfare, to whom Hindus and Jains pay so much attention:. That cow you see on the streets, or in the meadow, may (at least according to some reincarnation researchers) be the temporary abode of a soul normally incarnated in humans.

The writer is inclined to the oft-heard position that we shall never fully know, but that is to be doubted. Isaac Newton formulated the law of gravity, which became just another line in textbooks, then died in 1727. Two centuries later, people were applying his finding by flying in airplanes. Later, they set foot on the moon, and now satellites form an important and irreplaceable part of our telecommunications. If reincarnation proves to be true, our gaining of knowledge will be accelerated by more generous funding (the main problem so far) and a larger focus on this line of research. Even without those, we will soon investigate such questions as: what is the relationship between successive lives (maybe there is karma after all)? Is reincarnation in non-human life forms possible? What is the beginning of this cycle and how does it end? Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.  

 

Michiel Hegener: Leven op herhaling. Bewijzen voor reïncarnatie, Ten Have 2012.

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