Puppets Of Faith Theory Of Communal Strife (A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more)

by BS Murthy

  The second group of clergy and scholars may be called progressive teachers. They are those who wish to stress the authority of the Quran over human traditions, to go back to it, to make it a living Book, and to reinterpret it in the light of contemporary needs and conditions. Though these teachers are still in the minority, their number is increasing.

  In madrasas that the clergy preside over are attended by the majority of the M uslim children, the topics of study include an introduction to the Muslim faith and practice, worship forms, biography of the Prophet M uhammad, and stories of other heroes of the faith. M adrasas' purpose is not so much to open the mind as to impress the spirit. They seek to set a tone and to provide some simple rules for being a Muslim.

  Though new forms of madrasa education are developing the overall impact of the madrasa experience on Muslim faith and feeling is a powerful one. Above all, what Muslim boys and girls learn is respect for the Sacred Word. Combined with that, they also gain a sense of their identity as Muslims. The effect of this early concentrated exposure to the Quran is to leave a virtually indelible mark on Muslim spiritual consciousness.”

  No less, the M uslim parents, as the Parent of the M usalman, play their synchronizing part to the boot in M illar's picture of the life and times of a M uslim boy thus:

  "The Islamic creed, the fivefold call to prayer, the annual fast, the steady mutual exhortation of Muslims, in short, the whole of Islam emphasizes the place of God in human life. Immediately after he was born sacred words would have been breathed into its ear. From the age of five to thirteen he would have attended a religious school to be educated in the Word of God (Quran). As a youth he would have listened to the night lectures of religious leaders that he could have attended during the month of fasting (Ramadan). As adults, he and his wife would have shared in the activities of the

  community of believers that is dedicated to carrying the will of God, and they would strive to share this vision with their children, against the alternative visions that come to them from modern life."

  Thus, we see there is this external force, driven by the power and the fear of Allah, to impinge upon the mind of the M usalmans. Besides, the admiration for and the desire to emulate Muhammad is omnipresent in the mohallas to rule the young Muslim mind, and if anything, in his growing-up as a M usalman, his imagination gets impregnated with the Quranic injunctions in masjids 'n madrasas. It is this inculcation of belief in the doctrine of Islam within and without the Islamic home that occasions the all-consuming Parent of the M usalmans religious subconscious.

  What about the 'Harris' recording' of the internal responses of the little M usalman to this unceasing religious conditioning by the society around?

  As the external inputs he would be receiving from the parent subscribe to the environment in which he lives in and interacts with, there should be perfect spiritual harmony in the Child about Islamic religiosity. However, this imposition of religious regimen on the tender 'freedom loving' childhood might result in the subconscious resentment against the Islamist Quadruple Parent as named above. This unique fusion between the external inputs that make the Parent, and the internal responses to the same which make the Child, would ensure that the Child in the adult M usalman would be either of 'righteous consciousness' type in case of compliance or the one imperiled by 'guilty subconscious' sort in case of partially complying / non-complying childhood. And so, as Harris has theorized, the former leads to prejudice and the latter results in delusion.

  Nevertheless, it is the 'Decommissioned Adult' in the M usalman that shows a total lack of interest in contrary inputs that leaves no opportunity for processing the ParentChild data for verification of its veracity. This is how, impervious to the realities of their surroundings, the Musalmans would be able to carve out their pan-lslamic Islands in every place they happen to live in. It's thus; they find themselves out of sync with the national sentiments of their fellow countrymen, preoccupied as they are with their separate identity as M usalmans. It is as if they are simply indifferent to the happenings around that won't concern Islam. The reality is, not that the M usalmans love their country of birth any less but they love the M uslim Brotherhood more!

  Maybe, because of this abnormality in such a religiously conditioned Muslim mindset, 'the others' too cannot be faulted for misconstruing their indifferent, if not hostile, behavior. M ore often, 'the others' tend to conclude that the M usalmans are unpatriotic, if not anti-national and it is this negative perception of 'the others' towards them that doubly hurts the Musalmans. But the 'Decommissioned Adult' in them would have rendered them incapable of seeing the other side of the emotional coin, and given their inability to adjust or adapt with 'the others', the M usalmans, somewhere or the other in the wide world, forever get embroiled in some dispute or controversy, and /or both. And that is good enough a reason for the M usalmans to believe that Islam is in danger, to protect which they feel no compunction to resorting to violence. Oh, in what ways this Islamic self-righteous aggressiveness, which its apologists make light as antics of M uslim frustration, the world has been experiencing to its hurt and dismay!

  While 'the others' feel skeptical about the out-of-tune archaic Islamic personal laws, the M usalmans view that as poking into their religious nose, and their gut reaction is to retort that their sharia is their business as, in no way, it impinges upon the lives of 'the others'. After all, social contract is all about making the individual needs subservient to the family good, family good to that of the community welfare, and the community welfare to that of the national interests.

  But living in the Quranic wells in the non-lslamic lands, the Muhammadan Decommissioned Adult fails to appreciate all this. Just to cite an example, population control is in the national interest of any over-populous country such as India, but the Decommissioned Adult of the Musalman approaches the issue with his Parent-Child perspective that family planning is un-lslamic, after all.

  Likewise, polygamy and talaq, more so the triple-talaq, might well serve the M uslim male interest, but aren't they inimical to M uslim female well-being?

  Well, the M ohammedan Decommissioned Adult of the M usalman, unfortunately for him and his family, and by extension to his community and to the nation in which he lives, is incapable of receiving new Adult data. Instead, he relies on the irrelevant Parent- Child inputs, which, anyway, are obscurantist to say the least. It is these psychological aberrations among the M usalmans, never mind whether madrasa trained or convent educated, that produce Islamist terrorists, who became the scourge of the world, the M uslim world included.

  Chapter 18 Fight for the Souls

  During the middle of the 1 st Century A.D, St. Thomas reached India's west coast of Malabar to establish the Church of the Christ, and having succeeded in cementing the Syrian Christian Order there, the evangelist moved on to Madras, now Chennai, to spread the message of the Gospel. However, the temper of the Tamilians ensured a hostile reception to his missionary zeal, and his persistence to proselytize them regardless had ended in his martyrdom for the Christianity. And after that, all was calm and quiet on the Indian religious front till the Buddhist Sind was painted Islamic green by the hand of bin Qasim in the early 8 th Century.

  Notwithstanding Ghazni's sack of Somnath, religious status quo still held good in Hindustan till the end of the 12 th Century, when the sword of Allah wielded by M uhammad Ghuri firmly grounded the religion of the Arabs in the soil of the Arya Varta by enabling his lieutenant to establish the slave dynasty in Delhi. Thus was heralded the M uslim rule in India that was to last till the British signed off Bahadurshah Zafar the Last M ogul in the mid 19 th Century.

  While the oppressive Hindu phenomenon of untouchability worked well for the religion of the Arabs, it was as much the 'social oppression' as the 'religious denial' that would have made these outcastes feel, as if they were living in a no-man's land in Hindustan. M oreso in Bengal, so it seems, where in droves, they had embraced the alien faith of the Islam that came with an odd cult
ural baggage of Arabia, which in the end assumed the proportions of a near exodus into the M uhammadan arena. After all, while the caste Hindus denied the outcastes their gods by keeping them at arm's length from their mandirs, the M uslamans were prepared to share with them the precincts of their masjids for common prayers for Allah Ta'ala's grace. This caste Hindu refusal to share even one amongst their pantheon of gods with the outcastes of Arya Varta, made the latter, as latter-day M usalmans, to shoulder the Islamic urge to grab its 'land wings' for Pakistan. Oh, what shortsightedness of Hindu pigheadedness!

  Thus, by the time the political prop came to the M issionaries of the Christ in the form of the East India Company, in the late 18 th Century, the homes of most of the disgruntled outcasts and vulnerable Hindus and / or both, were firmly in the Islamic tent. Even otherwise, the bottom line of the alien religious appeal to the populace of Hindustan is that Islam and the Christianity could only impinge upon the fringes of its polity, that too when the rulers belonged to the respective religious dispensations. After all, this is understandable since man tends to weigh the temporal advantages more than the spiritual benefits when it comes to embracing a new religion, and depending on the

  state of evolution in a given society or commune, the factors that prompt one's conversion change from time to time.

  Nonetheless, as East India Company and later the British Viceroys were interested more in commercial exploitation than in religious conversions, the evangelists could not harvest as many souls, as Pope John Paul II had paraphrased it in recent times, as they would have loved to. Yet the Christianity made its Indian mark in remarkable ways, more so being instrumental in introducing secular education that ushered in social reengineering in an otherwise stagnant Hindu society, the sad relic of a once vibrant Upanishadic polity. Eventually though, what with so much reformist water having flowed down the untouchable bride, of course, pumped by the western educated Hindus leading up to the independence struggle and beyond, the caste color of Hindustan began to acquire a new shade albeit imperceptibly.

  It was only time before modernism became the new mantra of upward mobility, and the western education, the preferred route to social savvy in the Indian society, but as Islam is conceptually antagonistic to both, at last, it lost its erstwhile sway over even among the disaffected harijans, nay dalits, who, instead, tended to seek the Standard of the Christ as a benign brand equity. Thus, it is no wonder that the Christian salvation had become the natural selection for the Hindu fringes, if only seduced with the right inducements from the Catholic Church.

  Nevertheless, unlike the Brahmanical indifference of yore to those unabated conversions into Islam, the Hindu mood of the day is in no mood to brook the compulsive Christian urge to proselytize, by means fair or foul. This justifiable Hindu resentment against the Christian zeal to convert others into its religious creed had unfortunately led to unjustifiable atrocities on the evangelists on occasion.

  All said and done the so-called revealed religions that supposedly preach the pure message, or purportedly show the straight path, have failed to touch the mainstream of the Hindu polity. And that is in spite of the unceasing efforts of their proselytizers and the presence of their converts in their midst for a millennium! It is thus, the surprising resistance of the Hindu dharma to the dogma of Semitic religions, unlike the political capitulation of India to foreign forces, would be worth probing for the fault lines in the proselytizing faiths.

  The assumption of the Christians is that only the Gospel could enable man's salvation, and that Jesus, the Son of God, only could intervene on behalf of man on the Day of Reckoning. The novel path of salvation through the Christianity that Jesus showed would have surely excited the Christian missionaries, and their desire to share their noble creed with the others is unexceptionable. But for the Christians to imagine that there could be no salvation sans their God's Son betrays the credulity of their minds at best, and their ignorance of the Hindu philosophy's sophistication at worst. It is a different matter though, that for the orthodoxjews, Jesus was a Judaic renegade, and for the idolatrous Arabs, M uhammad was but a deviant, and so on, which brings to the fore the fallacy of prophetic glorification.

  Though it was the unwavering belief in Jesus that enabled the Christian missionaries, in spite of centuries of persecution, to spread his word on the continent and elsewhere that kept the Christianity alive to start with, the eclipse of the Greco-Roman Gods in the heart of the Roman Empire at its expense was achieved more through the conversion of Emperor Constantine than by the miracles of the Son of God and his anointed Saints. Whatever, this Christian conviction of salvation coupled with the mistaken belief that the Hindu souls were languishing for want of the message from the Messiah, which could have brought St. Thomas to the Malabar Coast half a century after Jesus had died on the Cross.

  On the contrary, with the sword of Allah in one hand and M uhammad's Quran in the other, the Caliphs of Islam set out to pillage the world with an army of zealots, who had their eyes on plunder or Paradise, and / or both. Whatever, it was the good fortune of Islam, and the misfortune of its adversaries, that its adherents encountered little or no resistance from the nations of the world, by then exhausted after centuries of wars, to spread its wings all across. Oh, how one religion's food had turned out to be other religions' poison!

  If the credo of the Christianity is courting other religious souls in covetous ways, the creed of the Musalman has been to turn the kafirs of the world into servants of their God, and by extension admirers of their prophet. After the destruction of the idols of the Arabia, the mandirs of India that the Musalmans might have heard about should have raised their hopes of mundane plunder, even as they would have outraged their religious sensitivity. Muhammad's allergy for the idols at the Kabah was to turn out, some three centuries later, to be the nightmare of the Hindu deities in their resplendent mandirs. The anecdote quoted by M J Akbar in The Shade of the Swords', published by Roli Books, is illustrative.

  "The story of the Muslim conquest of central India may have begun with a misunderstanding: one man's pronunciation can become another man's poison. The three most revered pagan goddesses of pre-lslamic Mecca were Al Lat, Al Uzza, and Manat, denounced in the Quran as false deities and the source of the infamous controversy about the alleged 'Satanic Verses'. According to an old belief, when the Prophet smashed the idols of the Kaaba, the image of M anat was missing: it had been secreted away, and sent in a trading ship to a port-town in India called Prabhas, which imported Arab horses. According to this belief, idol-worshippers built a temple to M anat, and renamed the place So-M anat, or Somnath. The warrior king M ahmud, who built an empire from the Afghan city of Ghazni, waged the first jihad in the heart of India. His most famous raid was the one in which he destroyed the idol at Somnath and carried away enough booty to appease avarice."

  However, the very fact that Mahmud raided the temples of Mathura, Thanesar and Kannauj before plundering Somnath would leave one wondering whether it was not a Muslim rationalization of the gruesome killing of over 'fifty thousand' souls, possibly, including a thousand Brahman priests, in the temple of So-M anat? But, what is relevant is the reported hope of Mahmud that once the idol of Somnath was captured and destroyed, the Hindus would become Muhammadans, a la Meccans. But, that didn't happen, and as though to signify the symbolism of Somnath to the Hindu ethos, even the secular government of Nehru's India thought it fit that the temple should be rebuilt.

  What was in the Hindu dharma that soured St. Thomas' dream to proselytize the polity and belied Mahmud's hopes to see a Muslim India? The logical and rational answer would be that the Hindus are neither heathens as assumed by the Christians nor are they idolaters as presumed by the M usalmans. On the other hand, as against the single-scripture wisdom of the Abrahamic Orders and the dogmas of their prophets, the Hindu sandtana dharma is a spiritual way of life with an imbibed philosophical ethos that is steeped in deep-rooted culture and tradition. Thus, in terms of reach and approach, the strai
ght but narrow paths of Judaism, the Christianity, not to speak of Islam, appear like by-lanes of bigotry compared to the Highway of Hindu Spirituality, exemplified by the dictum of vasudhaiva kutumbakam - (world is one family).

  However, the irony of Hinduism is that this laudable premise was neither passed on to the outside world, and what is worse, nor put in practice in its homeland either, if not why were there those untouchables and the downtrodden in the Hindu backyard? After all, notwithstanding their hallowed precepts, doublespeak and double standards seem to be the common features of all the religions. Just the same, while the Semitic religions

  are faith driven, the sandtana dharma is philosophical in its orientation, and that enables the Hindus to probe the vicissitudes of life unbound by any scriptural dogma. And this has always been the strength of Hinduism notwithstanding its Achilles' heel of caste discrimination for possible course correction, all by itself, which, in time, led to the birth of the likes of Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.

  It is in this context that the Roberto Baggio episode is to be seen. The Italian footballer, dejected as he was owing to his penalty goof-up that cost his country the World Cup, reportedly turned to Buddhism for solace for he felt that the Christian dogma had no philosophical inputs in it to face of the vicissitudes of life. That Jesus died for the sinners won't help his faithful in any way to handle their own predicaments. After all, the feature of the Semitic religious faiths is the dogmatic belief sustained by habit while spirituality epitomizes the search for the self in this world and beyond.

  Whatever others might think of the Hindus of the day, their forebears once believed, as Americans do now, as Alberuni observed that,

  "there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs".