CHAPTER THREE - EXPOSING AND REFUTING NEGATIONISM
Negationism and history-distortion require a large-scale
effort and a very strong grip on the media of information
and education. As soon as the grip loosens, at least the
most blatant of the negationist concoctions are bound to be
exposed, and its propounders lose all credibility. In 1988,
the schools in the Soviet Union decided to suspend the
history exams because "the history books are full of lies
anyway". The great lies and distortions of Soviet
historiography are now items in the gallery of ridicule.
3.1 ENTER VOICE OF INDIA
Just like the Russians have thrown Soviet historiography
into the dustbin, Indian negationism will also be thrown out
in the near future. The newly published second volume of
"Hindu temples, what happened to them", by the Indian
historian Sitaram Goes (1921), is a mortal blow in the face
of negationism. And there are more reasons for calling the
book a milestone.
The author is, together with his friend, the linguist
and philosopher Ram Swarup (1920), the leading light of the
intellectual rearmament of the battered and despondent Hindu
society. Born in 1921 in a poor family (though belonging to
the merchang Agrawal caste) in Haryana, he took an M.A. in
history in Delhi University, winning prizes and scholarships
along the way. In his youth he was a Gandhian activist,
organizing inter-caste dinners and participating in the
Freedom Movement. In the forties, when the Gandhians
themselves were drifting to the Left and adopting socialist
rhetoric, he decided to opt for the original rather than the
imitation, and joined the Communist Party. Within a few
years, he left the Party in disgust, and participated in Ram
Swarup's anti-communist organization in Calcutta, then as
now the centre of Indian communism.
In the fifties he published a number of books exposing
the lies that formed the backbone of communist propaganda.
For instance, in "Whom shall we believe?", he compared the
economic figures in official Russian and Chinese
publications with the propaganda put out by the Communist
Party of India and its fellow-travellers, and demonstrated
the utterly deceitful nature of whatever creditibility
communism had acquired. As the cover of his newest
publication proudly proclaims, "the numerous studies
published by the movement in the fifties exist in cold print
in many libraries and can be consulted for finding out how
the movement anticipated by many years the recent
revelations about communist regimes".
An aspect of history yet to be studied is how such anti-
communist movements in the Third World were not at all
helped (in spite of all allegations of CIA innvolvement) but
rather opposed by Western interest groups whose
understanding of communist ideology and strategy, and of
many other political issues, was just too limited and blunt.
The critique of communism formulated by these Indian
thinkers was often intellectually superior to most of what
has been produced by European and American anti-communists
in the Cold War period.
Shortly before the Chinese invasion (1962), which pin-
pricked the balloon of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's
vainglorious brainchildren, the Non-Aligned Movement and the
Indian-Chinese friendship as an axis of Asian stability,
Sitaram Goel published a critique of Nehru's policy of
friendship with communism, "In Defence of Comrade Krishna
Menon". In it, he debunked the current fashion of
attributing India's communist-leaning forein policy to
minister Krishna Menon, and demonstrated that Nehru himself
had been
a consistent communist sympathizer ever since his visit to
the Soviet Ubnion in 1927. Nehru had stuck to his communist
syumpathies even when the communists insulted him as prime
minister with their unbridled swearology: he used to lick
the boot that kicked him. Nehru's absolute refusal to
support the Tibetans even at the diplomatic level when they
were overrun by the Chinese army, cannot just be attributed
to circumstances or the influence of collaborators: his
hand-over of Tibet to communist China was quite consistent
with his own political convictions.
Eventhough Sitaram Goel's stand was vindicated by the
Chinese invasion, the book about Nehru cost him his job in a
state-affliated company. He went into business himself and
set up a company of book import and export. In its
margin,, he later started the non-profit publishing house
Voice of India. Its aim is to defend Hinduism by placing
before the public correct information aboutthe situation of
Hindu culture and society, and about the nature, motives and
strategies of its enemies.
For, as the title of his book "Hindu society under siege"
(1981) indicates, Hindu society has been suffering a
sustained attack from Islam since the 7th century, from
Christianity since the 15th century, and this
century also from Marxism. The avowed objective of each of
these three world-conquering movements, with their massive
resources, is the replacement of Hinduism by their own
ideology, or in effect: the destruction of Hinduism. This
concern is not at all paranoid (as spokesmen of these
aggressors would say), even if the conversion squads are
remarkably unsuccessful in India. Consider the situation in
Africa: in 1900, 50% of all Africans practised Pagan
religions; today, Christian and Islamic missionaries have
reduced this number to less than 10%. That is the kind of
threat Hinduism is up against. So far, the biggest success
of these aggressors is at the level of thought: many Hindus
have interiorized the depreciation of Hindu culture and
society which their enemies have been feeding them from the
relative power positions which they have had in the past or
are enjoying today. Standing up to the challenge thrown by
these mortal enemies, Voice of India works for the
intellectual mobilization of Hindu society.
The importance of Sitaram Goel's and Ram Swarup's work
can hardly be over-estimated. There is no doubt that future
textbooks on comparative religion as well as those on Indian
political and intellectual history will devote crucial
chapters to their analysis. Ther are the first to give a
first-hand Pagan reply to the versions of history and
"science of religion" imposed by the monotheist world-
conquerors, both at the level of historical fact (e.g.
Sitaram Goel's "History of Hindu-Christian Encounters") and of
fundamental doctrine (e.g. Ram Swarup's "Hinduism vis-a-vis
Christianity and Islam"), both in terms of the specific Hindu
experience (e.g. Sitaram Goel's "Hindu Society under Siege")
and of a more generalized theory of religion free from
prophetic-monotheistic bias (e.g. Ram Swarup's "The Word as
Revelation: Names of Gods", a ground-breaking statement of
Pagan doctrine).
Their long-term intellectual importance is that they
have contributed immensely to breaking the spell of all
kinds of monotheist prejudices and misrepresentations of
Paganism in general, Hinduism in particular. They have done
so in an explicit manner, addressing the polemical
positions taken by the world-conquerors squarely, not merely
eulogizing the qualities of Upanishadic thought and other
Hindu achievements (as too many Hindu revivalists do).
Voice of India's shorter-term political importance
consists in its breaking through the weak apologetic taken
by the established Hindu movement. This movement, including
the Bharatiya Janata Party which won 24% of the vote in the
1991 elections, wastes quite a bit of its energy on proving
its secular credentials and its harmlessness for Muslims
and other minorities, unsuccessfully trying to acquire a new
secular identity and meanwhile undermining its natural
Hindu identity. It is still playing by the rules imposed by
the Marxist-Muslim alliance. Voice of India changes the
rules by debunking the premises of secularist disocurse
(very explicitly in Sitaram Goel's "Perversion of India's
Political Parlance") and exposing the imperialist designs
which are currently stealing a march behind the smokescreen
of secularism.
3.2 INTELLECTUAL DEFENCE OF HINDUISM
Faced with the attack from the world-conquerors, Hindus
has so far failed to put up an intelligent defence. This
should already be clear from the extremely negative image of
the Hindu revivalist movement which the English-language
press has created, and against which this movement itself
has been quite helpless. The organizations claiming to work
for the welfare and defence of Hindu society, have not
managed to give an intellectual dimension to their work, and
have neglected the field of ideological development and of
broadcasting their viewpoints through the media.
There is an India-wide Hindu organization, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, "National Volunteer Corps"), which
is devoted to character-building the physical training, to
cultural activities, and to giving an organizational
backbone to Hindu society. The erstwhile Jan Sangh and now
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are political parties
affiliated with this RSS movement. The degree to which
Hinduism is on the defensive can be inferred from the fact
that these militant Hindu organizations do not even dare to
call themselves Hindus, but go hiding behind neutral terms
like "national" and "Indian".
The basic political idology of the RSS is called
integral humanism, developed by Deendayal Upadhaya (d. 1967)
on the basis of ancient Hindu social philosophy. The term
means that the world should be organized in such a way that
each of the four goals (purusharthas) of human life is given
its due: Hindu tradition enumerates these as kama (erotics,
pleasure), artha (gain, success), dharma (duty, world
order), moksha (spiritual liberation). It is a humanism in
the sense that human values, not divine revelation, form a
basis of its programme (those who say that the BJP aims at
creating a "Hindu theocratic state", merely display their
ignorance). As an integralist Hindu alternative to the
reductionist ideologies (socialism,, liberalism,
nationalism), integral humanism deserves comparison with
Christian-democracy in Europe. In spite of all the
swearwords hurled at the RSS/BJP, their ideology is quite
unexceptionable. In fact, after the fall of Marxism, the
renewed excess of nationalism, and the obvious limitations
of liberalism beyond the economic sphers, it is clear that
humanity now needs an ideology which can only be some kind
of "integral humanism".
While the ideological starting-point of these Hindu
movements is perfectly acceptable, it is striking that there
is no think-tank to develop this seed into a successful
practical analysis of concrete political problems. Whereas
Marxist have published numerous analyses about every social,
political and cultural topic, the intellectual output of
the RSS movement is minimal. Most of its pamphlets and
manifestoes contain a lot of puffed-up patriotism and
wailing over the Partition of the Hindu motherland, but
little penetrating analysis that could be the basis for
imaginative policies and a realistic strategy.
The intellectual failure of the Hindu movement is most
striking in its dealing with the one great sore in medieval
as well contemporary Hindu history: the Muslim problem. You
hear so much about the Hindu-Muslim conflict, that you would
expect to find a great deal of intellectual effort in
analyzing the nature of this problem as a prerequisite to
any workable solution. In fact, there is no such analysis
by any leader of the organized Hindu movement, except in a
very concise and elementary form, e.g. by prof. Balraj
Madhok (erstwhile Jan Sangh leader who fell out with the
party precisely because, apart from personal conflicts, he
opposed its increasing opportunism and lack of Hindu
consciousness). They all complain a lot that Muslim have
destroyed temples and split the Motherland, that Muslims
start riots, that Hindus are persecuted in Muslim states,
but not one of them dares to ask why believers in Islam
exhibit this unpleasant behaviour.
Most Hindu leaders expressly refuse to search Islamic
doctrine for a reason for the observed fact of Muslim
fanaticism. RSS leader Guru Golwalkar once said: "Islam is a
great religion. Mohammed was a great prophet. But the
Muslims are big fools." This is not logical, for the one
thing that unites the (otherwise diverse) community of
Muslims is their common belief in Islam: if any wrong is
attributed to "the Muslims" as such, it must be situated in
their common belief system.
In the Ayodhya dispute, time and again the BJP leaders
have appealed to the Muslims to relinquish all claims to
the supposed birthplace of the Hindu god Rama, arguing that
destroying temples is against the tenets of Islam, and that
the Quran prohibits the use of a mosque built on disputed
land. In fact, whatever Islam decrees against building
mosques on disputed property, can only concern disputes
within the Muslim community (or its temporary allies under a
treaty). It is perfectly lawful, and established by the
Prophet through his own example, to destroy Pagan
establishments and replace them with mosques. But the BJP
leaders dream of dealing with a tolerant Islam, and they
appeal to the Muslims to remember the tolerance taught by
Mohammed as much as by any other prophet. Perhaps this is
the typically Hindu attitude which generously tries to see
the best in every one; perhaps it is ignorance or cowardice
or wilful self-deception; perhaps it is the psychological
effect of centuries of terror, which make it hard for Hindus
to even criticize their terrorizer. At any rate, the tolerant
Islam of which the BJP leaders speak, does not exist.
Therefore, Sitaram Goel is rather critical of the
current Ayodhya movement. In the foreword to the newly
published second volume of his book "Hindu Temples, What
Happened to Them", he writes: "The movement for the
restoration of Hindu temples has got bogged down around the
Rama Janmabhoomi at Ayodhya. The more important question,
viz. why Hindu temples met the fate they did at the hands of
Islamic invaders, has not been even whispered. Hindu
leaders have endorsed the Muslim propagandists in
proclaiming that Islam does not permit the construction of
mosques at sites occupied earlier by other people's places
of worship... The Islam of which Hindu leaders are talking
exists neither in the Quran nor in the Sunnah of the
Prophet. It is hoped that this volume will help in clearing
the confusion. No movement which shuns or shies away from
truth is likely to succeed. Strategies based on self-
deception stand defeated at the very start."
Somewhat surprisingly, the established Hindu
organizations show very little interest in Voice of India's
work. Apparently they are mentally too slack to see the
importance of fostering a developed Hindu viewpoint among
their own activists. They prefer to invest in lots of
physical locomotion, and to voice the prevalent self-pity
concerning the injustice at the hands of the Muslims and the
secularist state. What they should do instead, is to change
the conceptual framework of Indian politics, and to re-
educate their cadres and the public and free them from the
mental grip of the perverted political parlance imposed by
the Muslim-Marxist combine. That will do a lot more for
overthrowing secularist depotism and India's vassalage to
Islamic imperialism, than all the rathyatras and padyatras
and kar sevas combined.
The ideological helplessness of political Hindus comes
out immediately when you question them about Mahatma Gandhi.
The assessment of Gandhia's significance for Hindu society,
and the fact of his murder by a Hindu, are embarassing
topics with which Hindu-baiters are having a lot of fun.
Invariably, they call the RSS (with its "family" of
affiliated organizations including the BJP) the "murderers of
the Mahatma". As Craig Baxter (in his 1971 book Jana Sangh)
has remarked, this allegation is in definace of the
judicial verdict in the Mahatma murder trial. Nonetheless,
Baxter notices that Gandhi's murder has been "a millstone
around the neck" of the political Hindu movement and
especially the RSS. It is true that the RSS had professed a
very negative opinion of the Mahatma's failed policy of
"Hindu-Muslim unity", which opinion was also Nathuram
Godse's motive for the murder.
According to Balraj Madhok, the murder was "a very un-
Hindu act" which saved the Mahatma from "the dustbin of
history" to which he was heading after the creation of
Pakistan crowned the victory of Islamic separatism over
Gandhi's Hindu vision of trans-sectarian unity. There is
truth in prof. Madhok's assessment, but only if we limit
Gandhi's politics to his quest of "Hindu-Muslim unity".
Voice of India is the only think-tank which has produced a
straightforward, sincere and satisfactory analysis of
Mahatma Gandhi's life and death from the Hindu viewpoint
without reducing Gandhi's significance to his stand on a
single issue.
As authentic Gandhians Ram Swarup (author of Gandhian
economics) and Sitaram Goel can address the issue with an
undisurbed conscience. They are aware of Gandhi's
unconditional commitment to the well-being of Hindu society,
and they have put Gandhi's defeat in the struggle against
Partition in a proper perspective. The chapter on Mahatma
Gandhi in Sitaram Goel's Perversion of India's Political
Parlance should be required reading for anyone who tries to
understand India's "communal problem". It is a powerful
rebuttal both to Nathuram Godse's justification for the
murder of the Mahatma, and to the numerous attempts to use
the Mahatma as a secularist argument against the Hindu
cause. Very briefly this is what it says.
First of all the Islamic and Communist lobbies who
currently invoke the Mahatma's name to blacken Hinduism, had
no use for the Mahatma while he was alive. They attacked
him in the crassest language, thwarted his policies and
opposed him tooth and nail. On this issue as on many
others, the secularist front displays the ugliest
dishonesty. It was the Hindus who revered him, and if the
Islamic-Communist combine consider the use of the Mshatma's
name profitable, it is because the public mainly consists of
Hindus who still revere or at least respect him.
The Mahatma's first and foremost loyalty was towards
Hindu society. If he criticized it, it was for its own
upliftment, to force it out of its inertia, rejuvenate and
re-awaken it. He was a proud and combative Hindu.
The Mahatma's defence of Hinduism against the claim and
allegations levelled by Christianity and by colonialism was
very clear and unwavering. So was his opposition to the
seeds of separatism which hostile forces tried to sow within
Hindu society, via the Tamils, the Harijans, the Sikhs. In
the Freedom struggle it was his strategy that managed to
involve the masses. Unlike the Hindu Mahasabha, which
championed religion but thought and worked in strictly
political terms (borrowed from Western secular nationalism)
the Mahatma understood that the Hindu masses could only be
won over by a deeply religious appeal. The ethical
dimension of politics which he emphasized, regained for
Hinduism a good name throughout the world, and is still
highly relevant (see Arun Shouie's book "Individuals
Institutions Processes" for some practical lessons).
Therefore, it is nothing short of morbid to remember the
Mahatma only as the leader who failed to stop Islamic
separatism, as Nathuram Godse did, and as a minority within
the Hindu movement still does.
On the other hand, "it must be admitted that the failure
which the Mahatma met vis-a-vis the Muslims was truly of
startling proportions". It is a fact that his policy
towards Muslims had always been one of appeasement at the
cost of Hindu society. But nothing had helped and with every
concession the Muslims continued to grow more hostile:
"There must be something very hard in the heart of Islam
that even a man of an oceanic goodwill like Mahatma Gandhi
failed to move it".
The failure to prevent Partition can only be attributed
to the Mahatma for the period (and to the extent) that he
dictated Congress policy. The political course which had
led to Partition, had been started before his arrival on the
Indian scene. And when he was at the helm, most Congress
leaders had equally approved of decisions which we can now
recognize as steps on the road to Partition. For instance,
the 1916 Lucknow Pact between Congress and the Muslim
League, which legitimized the privileges (separate
electorates, one-third representation in the Central
Assembly) that the League had obtained from the British, was
signed by Lokamanya Tilak, an unquestionably staunch Hindu.
The involvement in the khilafat movement, that giant boost
for Muslim separatism, was accepted not only by the Nehrus,
whose support for Islamic causes was always a foregone
conclusion, but also by such Hindu stalwarts as Lala Lajpat
Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya.
It is true that the Mahatma has made a number of
sentimental and flatly untrue statements about Islam, such
as: "Islam is a noble faith." He denied that the Quran
preached intolerance, even when his multireligious prayer-
sessions must have given him ample opportunity to inform
himself of the numerous Quranic injunctions to, and
expressions of, intolerance and hatred. But this stubborn
blindness before the grim facts about Islam, which accords
the aura of an avatar to Mohammed, the sancity of a
Scripture to the Quran, etc. have been practised for a long
time before the rise of the Mahatma, and are still being
practised by a great many Hindus, including sadhus,
intellectuals and politicians. Hinduism has always seen
Islam through the eyes of its own spirituality, and
projected its own qualities onto this radically different
ideology.
The Mahatma had at least acknowledged the typical
behaviour pattern of Islam ("In my experience the average
Muslim is a bully, the average Hindu a coward"), so he was
not a negationist. But he failed to trace Islamic
fanaticism to its source, viz. the Quran and the example of
the Prophet. Instead, he invented good-natured but fatally
flawed explanations ("Islam is still a very young
religion"), which ignored or denied the special character of
Islam. The habit of explaining away the unpleasant facts
about the Islam problem is still very much alive, even in
circles dubbed as Hindu communalist and anti-Muslim.
The failure of the Mahatma before Islamic aggression was
the failure of Hindu society. Sitaram Goel strongly rejects
Nathuram Godse's allegation that the Mahatma was the chief
culprit for the Partition: "It is highly doubtful if Hindu
society would have been able to prevent Partition even if
there had been no Mahatma Gandhi. On the other hand, there
is ample evidence that Hindu society would have failed in
any case."
Gandhi has propounded the following views which are in
stark contrast with those of the Nehruvian establishment :
- India is one nation. It is not, as self-glorifying
Britons and Nehruvians thought, "a nation in the making".
It has a common culture called Sanatana Dharma ("eternal
value system", Hindusim), and the adherence to this common
heritage tranwscends the borders between language areas and
other divisions which elsewhere would define a nation.
- Hinduism is in no way inferior to other religions and
ideologies. On the contrary: "Whatever of substance is
contained in any other religion is always to be found in
Hinduism, and what is not contained in it is insubstantial
or unnecessary."
- Political achievements like independence, national unity
and social transformation can only be based on a religious
and cultural awakening of Hindu society.
These are viewpoints which the political Hindu movement
shares, and it should emphasize that secularism's claims on
the Mahatma are entirely false. In the Indian context of
sycophancy, it is important to have revered personalities on
your side, and to quote their infallible statements. So, in
the struggle for the Mahatma's heritage, the Nehruvian
traitors to his message of Hindu self-confidence have
invested a lot in misrepresenting the Mahatma as a
secularist. But if Hindu society calls their bluff and
honestly examines his work, it will expose the stark
opposition between Gandhi and Nehru, between patriots and
fellow-travellers, between practitioners of Hindu tolerance
and bootlickers of Islamic imperialism. Hindus should claim
the Mahatma back from those who call themselves Gandhians,
but who kill the Mahatma a second time by emulating those
very Hindu-baiters (e.g. the missionaries) who saw in the
Mahatma their most dangerous opponent.
Sitaram Goel's conslusion puts the Mahatma in the centre
of the Hindu revival: "The one lesson we learn from the
Freedom movement as a whole is that a religious and cultural
awakening in Hindu society has to precede political
awakening. The language of Indian nationalism has to be the
language of Sanatana Dharma before it can challenge and
defeat the various languages of imperialism. The more
clearly Hindu society sees the universal truths of Hindu
spirituality and culture, the more readily will it reject
political ideologies masquerading as religion or promising a
paradise on this earth. Mahatma Gandhi stands squarely with
Maharshi Dayanand, Bankim Chandra, Swami Vivekananda,
Lokamanya Tilak and Sri Aurobindo in developing the language
of Indian nationalism. His mistake about Islam does not
diminish the lustre of that language which he spoke with
full faith and confidence. On the contrary, his mistake
carries a message of its own."
The message present in the Mahatma's failure vis-a-vis
Islam, is that Hindu society will only develop in peace and
in dignity if it removes Islam. No amount of goodwill is
capable of changing Islamic theology and its inherent
policical ambition of world conquest. But this is a
conclusion from which the Hindu organizations are still
shying away. it is quite unthinkable that one of their
leaders would say: "Islam is a hostile and destructive
ideology. We will not make any concession to it, and we
work for its dissolution." Imagine the shrieks and howls in
the secularists media in case of such a clear rejection of
Islam's pretences, and you will understand why Hindu leaders
shy away from it. But let then pause and think: is not
braving the pandemonium of secularist indignation preferable
to (self-) censoring the truth about Hindu society's mortal
enemy?
The European humanists (deists as well as atheists) who
attacked the power position of Christianity, were very clear
about their objective: Ecrasez l'Infame! ("crush the
infamous one" i.e. the Church). Many liberal and socialist
parties were very outspoken in their rejection of the
Christian religion, the opium of the masses (note that
they were hardly aware that religion could be something
better than the irrational belief systems of prophetic
monotheism). Till today, the Communists are very
unambiguous about their condemnation of all religion as an
obscurantist superstition, and about their determination to
ultimately liberate the people from the straglehold of
religion (unlike Hindu critics of Islam, the Communists
understand removing a religion as a physical elimination
of at least its ordained members, as they have amply proven
on Buddhists in Mongolia,, Cambodia, etc. Even when anti-
Christian socialists or liberals have entered coalitions
with Christian-democrats, they never made it an occasion to
renounce their fundamental rejection of Christianity. Even
when Communists set up joint fronts for peace or against
imperialism along with Christian useful idiots (to use
Lenin's term) they did not change their official line. So
the Hindu movement would not do anything extraordinary if it
states clearly that it rejects and condemns Islam as a
mistaken belief system and a destructive ideology.
The RSS-BJP have been trying to be Muslim-friendly, and
they are proud to tell you that they have some Muslims in
their own ranks, even in leading positions. This makes it
difficult for them to criticize Islam. A Muslim communalist
leader has said that the presence of Muslims in any
organization is always useful, as it effectively disarms
that organization in the struggle against Islam. Even the
most Hindu-friendly Muslims in the BJP is still a Trojan
horse, not because he chooses to assume that role, but
because his surroundings immediately change their language
and behaviour one they meet a Muslim. It seems that no
Hindu (especially with any political ambition in the
Nehruvian fremework) dares to criticize Islam in the
presence of Muslims.
This is not to say that a Hindu-minded political party
should refuse Muslims as members. On the contrary, it
should definitely continue to prove that the Islamic
establishment has no monopoly on the common Muslims'
loyalty, and that many Alis and Fatimas refuse to be held on
a leash by the Bukharis and Shahabuddins. However, it
shouldnot compromise on its Hindu perspective, and it should
acknowledge that Islam is presently Hindu society's worst
enemy. Perhaps it can use a more diplomatic language in
passing judgement on Islam, but there should be no
compromise about contents. After the ambiguity about the
Hindu movement's opinion of Islam has been cleared, Muslim-
born Indians should be attracted not with re-assuring
eulogies to the noble faith of Islam, but with a positive
and non-sectarian programme of Integral Humanism, embodying
the best of Hindu social philosophy without hammering too
much on name-tags like Hindu. In the Gandhian perspective
which Voice of India has been actualizing, Sanatana Dharma is
not a banner, but a practical way of realizing the intrinsic
goals of individual and society. Its central virtue is
satya, truthfulness.
For Voice of India, as for Mahatma Gandhi, truth is as
much an instrument as a goal: "In this fight for men's
minds, out only weapon is Truth. Truth must be told, as
much about Hindu society and culture as about the alien
ideoligies which have been on the war-path since the days of
foreign domination over the Hindu homeland." Political
leaders who claim the confidence of Hindu society would do
well to take some inspiration from this, and to rethink
their ambiguous attitude regarding Islam. Not facing the
truth about Islam was a costly mistake in Gandhi's time.
With Islam's increasing strength and self-confidence, it may
prove to be a deadly mistake in the near future.
3.3 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HINDU TEMPLES ?
In all the lands it conquered, Islam has replaced
indigenous places of worship mosques. In Iran, there are no
ancient Zoroastrian or Manichean shrines left. In Central
Asia, there are no Buddhist temples left. Similarly, in
India (except the far South where Islam hardly penetrated)
there are practically no Hindu temples that have survived
the Muslim period. But there are thousands of mosques built
on the foundations of Hindu temples, often with the debris
of those very temples. These archaeological remains are
mute witnesses to the long and repetitive story of Islamic
iconoclasm.
The first volume of the "Hindu Temples" book subtitted "A
Preliminary Survey", was published in the spring of 1990 and
played an important role in the political debate over the
controversial Rama tempel in Ayodhya. It contains a
competently presented list of about 2000 mosques in India
that have forcibly replaced Hindu temples. This list is not
complete, and does not concern Pakistan and other countries
where temples have been violently replaced with mosques.
Moreover, the number of temples of which material has been
used in these 2000 mosques far exceeds 2000. For the single
Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi, as an inscription at the
entrance proudly proclaims 27 Hindu temples had been
destroyed. These 2000 are only the tip of an iceberg.
This first volume also contains a list of over 200
temples destroyed in Bandgladesh in November 1989 under
pretext of protest against the Shilanyas (laying of the
first stone) ceremony of the prospective Rama temple in
Ayodhya. Muslims have raised a hue and cry over the
demolition of the Babri Masjid (which they had not used
since decades), but few outsiders seem to realize that
destruction of the religious places of minorities is a
routine affair in Islamic states.
The book also contains articles by Ram Swarup, Jay
Dubashi, Prof. Harsh Narain, and the famous journalist Arun
Shourie. Ram Swarup, like editor Sitaram Goel, traces the
facts of Islamic intolerance and iconoclasm to the
exclusivist theology of the Quran and the Sunnah
(tradition). He also deals with the role of Marxism is
recent negationist efforts: "Marxists have taken to
rewriting Indian history on a large scale and it has meant
its systematic falsification... The Marxists' contempt for
India, particularly the India of religion, culture and
philosophy, is deep and theoretically fortified. It exceeds
the contempt ever shown by the most die-hard imperialists...
Marx ruled out self-rule for India altogether and in this
matter gave her no choice... Marxism idealizes old
imperialisms and prepares a people for a new one. Its
moving power is deep-rooted self-alienation and its greatest
ally is cultural and spiritual illiteracy... No true history
of India is possible without countering their philosophy,
ideas and influence."
Jay Dubashi, an economist affiliated with the Bharatiya
Janata Party, links the laying of the first stone for the
planned Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya with the tearing
down of the Berlin Wall, which happened on the very same
day: "While a temple was going up in Ayodhya, a Communist
temple was being demolished 5,000 miles away in Europe...
The two events...mark the end of the post-Nehru era and the
beginning of a truly national era in India on the one hand,
and the...beginning of a truly democratic era in Europe on
the other. History has rejected Nehru in India and also
overthrown Communism in Europe." Reductionist systems which
see man only as producer or consumer of material goods, are
out. The mental horizon clears up and prepares for the era
of an integral humanism continuous with the age-old
spiritual vision of Sanatana Dharma.
Harsh Narain, a historian who has taught at both Aligarh
Muslim University and Benaras Hindu University, presents
four pieces of testimony for the local tradition that the
Babri Masjid had replaced a Rama Temple, all written in the
19th century by local Muslims outside the sphere of British
influence. One of these testimonies narrowly escaped
oblivion: it was part of a manuscript that was recently
published as a book by a Muslim foundation, which decided to
omit the chapter containing the inconvenient testimony.
Fortunately, a descendant of the author had the
controversial chapter published separately.
A similar story is told in greater detail by Arun
Shourie (sacked in 1990 as Indian Express editor after
exposing V.P.Singh's deal with secularists like imam
Bukhari) about yet another piece of Muslim testimony for the
pre-existence of a Rama temple at the Babri Masjid site. A
book mentioning this tradition had been published in tempore
non suspecto, but recently efforts had been made to get back
all the copies from places where unbelievers might get
access to it.
None of the negationist historians, and none of the so-
called secularists at large, has spent one word of comment
on these attempts to tamper with the historical Ayodhya
record. They condone anything that may weaken the Hindu
case in the Ayodhya debate. Whatever the mistakes committed
by the Hindu Ayodhya movement on the ground, at the
intellectual level it is a struggle for truth and honesty,
against attempts (some petty, some high-handed) to falsify
history. On the other hand, the stand taken by leading
negationist historians in this debate wil be studied in the
future as a classic in latter-day Marxist history
falsification.
In November 1990 there had been proposals in the
national parliament and in the state parliament of Uttar
Pradesh to ban this first volume of "Hindu Temples: What
Happened to Them". This step was not taken, possibly because
negationists thought the ban would be counter productive by
drawing attention to the list of disputable mosques. None
of the negationist historians has come forward with a reply
or with the announcement that a mistake has been discovered
in Mr. Goel's list of monuments of Islamic fanaticism.
Manini Chatterjee, reviewer for The Telegraph, could do no
more than calling it a "very bad book". Very bad for the
negationists, indeed.
The second volume of Sitaram Goel's book, subtitled "The
Islamic Evidence", and published in May 1991, takes us a lot
farther in its revelations of the grim facts of the Islamic
campaign to destroy Hinduism. It also contains some head-on
attacks on negationism. By way of introduction, it deals in
great detail with the controversies over Krishna's
birthplace temple in Mathura and the Rudramahalaya temple
complex in Sidhpur, both forcibly replaced with Islamic
structures and exposed the negationists' machinations to
distort or conceal the facts. The chapter From the Horse's
Mouth gives 174 pages full of quotations from Muslim
documents that describe and glofify the destruction of Hindu
temples very explicitly. It is only an anthology, and the
already very impressive material collected in this chapter
is again only the tip of an iceberg.
If this book gets the publicity it deserves, negationist
historians will find it difficult to show their faces in
public. They stand exposed, and only their control over the
media can save their reputation by censoring this critique
of their career-long efforts at history falsification.
In appendix, the book contains a questionnaire for the
negationist historians concerning their second front:
allegations that Hinduism has demolished or stolen many
Buddhist and "Animist" shrines. As we have seen in ch.2.7.,
the negationists go on spreading the story that the Hindu
had persecuted and destroyed Buddhism. Now, Sitaram Goel
challenges the negationist historians to come forward and
present, among other things:
- a list of Hindu temples that have forcibly replaced
Buddhist (or Jain or animist) temples;
- a list of epigraphs recording such temple destructions;
- a list of literary sources decribing these temple
destructions;
- a list of injunctions to, and glorifications of, the
destruction of non-Hindu temples in Hindu scriptures;
- a list of known historical Buddhist (Jain, animist)
temples which are now missing due to Hindu iconoclasm.
Of course, the negationist historians have not reacted
so far. Perhaps the reply has already been given implicitly
in their earlier publications? As we have seen in ch.2.7.,
the negationist books and articles in which this allegation
against Hinduism is made, try but fail to give the answers
to Mr. Goel's questions, viz. the evidence required to
substantiate the allegation. It may be hard to believe for
followers of iconoclastic religions and ideologies, but non-
fanatical religions do exist, and some of them have co-
existed for millennia with only marginal moments of
friction.
3.4 FACE TO FACE WITH MOHAMMED'S MODEL BEHAVIOUR
The most important part of the second volume is the 145-
page chapter about the Islamic theology of iconoclasm (i.e.
the destruction of what other people consider sacred objects
or buildings). Here, the spotlight is moved from India to
Arabia. The Islamic destructions in India were nothing but
a long-drawn-out reply of Prophet Mohammed's own exemplary
practice, which in turn is only an application of Quranic
injunctions.
One of the great founding-moments of Islam was the
capturing of the Kaaba, the sanctuary in Mecca. With their
own hands, Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali smashed to pieces
all 360 idols. After that, Mohammed sent patrols to all the
population centres of Arabia to smash the idols and to
destroy or convert the temples (mostly polytheist but also
including a Christian church). Since the Quran and the
Prophet's model behaviour count as normative, we must
recotgnize that the desecration and destruction of other
people's sanctuaries is an intrinsic component of Islam, not
a later accidental outgrowth.
The Dome on the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque have also
been built on a sacred place stolen from others: the Jewish
Temple Mount. True, under Byzantine rule the Jews could not
rebuild their Temple, but still the site remained most
sacred to them. Nonetheless (or rather, precisely for the
reason), Mohammed's successors took it from them, in order
to affirm Mohammed's claim to being the final fulfilment of
the Abrahamic prophetic tradition. Similarly the cathedral
of Damascus, of Cordova (both cathedrals had themselves
replaced Pagan temples) and of many other places were taken
from the Christians, as would also happen 8 centuries later
to the Aya Sophia of constantinople. The take-over of these
Jewish and Christian places of worshop should moreover be
seen against the background of the relative tolerance which
these two communities still enjoyed under Islamic rule: if
this tolerance could not prevent the take-over of important
places of worship, how much less chance did an Pagan temple
have.
In parenthesis, we should draw attention to the flimsy
rationalizations which Islam has produced to justify the
occupation of the most sacred places of other religions. In
the Ayodhya conflict, the Muslim side has often said that
the Hindus must first produce proof that Rama was indeed
born on the spot which Hindus claim as his birthsite. If
historical proof is the prerequisite brfore a sacred site
can be recognized and accorded respect, then Muslims will
have to give up both the Kaaba and the Temple Mount. Of the
Kaaba, which Mohammed took from the Arab Pagans, they claim
that it was build by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham (facts
suppressed in the Old Testament by a Jewish conspiracy to
distort God's word), and later stolen by the Pagans. Of the
Temple Mount, which they took from the Jews in order to
affirm Mohammed's status as the seal of the lineage of
Jewish prophets, they claim that it was Mohammed's landing-
site in his night journey through heaven on a winged horse.
These ridiculous claims can hardly be considered as
historically proven.
Sitaram Goel analyzes the relation between the Prophet
and the unbelievers. As a Hindu, i.e. as a Pagan, he is
especially interested in the viewpoint of the Arab
polytheists. That is one thing which makes this book a
milestone in the science of religion. Until now, the study
of Islam has been either a part of Christian apologetics,
which applauded Mohammed's destruction of idolatry even
while denouncing his claims of prophethood as imposture; or
it was part of the recent effort to create a "better
understanding" of Islam, which in effect tends to mean the
apriori suppression of all criticism of Mohammed as being
mere prejudice. Here, a Pagan stands up to
reconstruct the Pagan viewpoint.
That it is a Hindu who should direct our attention to
the viewpoint of the Arab Pagans, is normal. Hinduism is
almost the only polytheist culture to survive till today,
and the attitude of the Muslims towards Arab and Indian
Pagans was essentially the same. In pre-Islamic days, there
were not only intense trade contacts between Indian and Arab
Pagans, but also a kind of pilgrimage exchange. The Hindus
visiting Arabia payed their respects to the Arab
sanctuaries, and considered the black stone in the Kaaba as
a shivalingam, a phallus of Shiva (as Western orientalists
translate it). The Arabs, in turn, went to pray in the
Somnath temple in Gujrat. The Muslims believed that the
idols of the Pagan goddesses Al-Lat and Manat (of Satanic
Verses fame) had been transferred to Somnath, and this is
one reason why Mahmud Ghaznavi and other Muslims risked
their lives in conducting raids deep into Hindu territory in
order to destroy the Somnath temple.
Within the framework of the current unprejudiced
approach to Islam, multiculturalist do-gooders copy all the
Islamic accusations against the Pagans, a party which isn't
there anymore to give its own version of the facts. They
say that Paganism no longer satisfied the Arabs, so that
they welcomed Islam; that the Prophet identified with the
poor and was welcomed by them as a liberator from the
oppressive Pagan elite; that the Muslims were the victims of
persecution by Pagan fanatics, so that their fight against
the Pagans was merely defensive; that the position of women
in Islam "may not be ideal, but at least a great step
forwards compared to the pre-Islamic period"; that the
Pagans only opposed Mohammed because they feared for their
unrighteous power positions and for the dishonest income
from the superstitious pilgrimage to the Kaaba idols.
Similar things hve been said by the negationists about the
advent of Islam in India, demonstrably wrongly.
In numerous European works on Islam, the Islamic
negative judgement on the Arab Pagans is adopted lock, stock
and barrel. Only Mohammed's relation with Jews and
Christians comes in for a bit of polite criticism. Of
course, if on some occasions Mohammed was tolerant towards
Jews and Christians, it was because he had borrowed from
them the monotheism which he wanted to impose on his own
people, and because he had expected them to recognize him,
in due course, as a Prophet of their own tradition. For the
Pagans there was no mercy at all (except in one promising
moment of weakness, the socalled Satanic Verses in which he
accorded a measure of respect to three Pagan goddesses).
Those who like to fight against intercultural prejudices and
misconceptions, should accord posthumous restoration of
honour to the destroyed culture of the Arab Pagans, whose
own testimony has been obliterated though it can be glimpsed
indirectly through some passages in Islamic Scripture.
Serious historiography would start by noticing that the
Islamic reports on the Pagans are the highly coloured
version of their mortal enemy.
The Islamic statements about the unbelievers, in the
original Hadis as well as (in fact, even more strongly) in
modern apologetics, serve a similar purpose as the anti-
Semitic Nazi film The dirty Jew Suss, or the forged
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They serve to justify the
annihilation of a religion and the subjection of a nation
(Mohammed conceived of his community as a nation). While
the core of the Islamic version of islam's early history is
of course historical,, there is no doubt that,, on top of
the highly partisan viewpoint expressed in the Quran,, a lot
of motivated distortion has crept in during the two
centuries between the facts and the edition of the Hadis.
For instance, the contention made in the Hadith that the
Muslims in Mecca (before Mohammed set up his state in
Medina) were subjected to persecution, is not borne out by
the more reliable information in the Quran (finalized a few
years after Mohammed's death). The Quran gives a lot of
details about the Pagans' reaction to Mohammed's
performance, what questions and arguments they confronted
him with; but persecution does not figure in it. Any hints
at confrontation date from the time when Mohammed, already
established as the leader of Medina, had launched his
caravan raids and finally his open warfare against the
Meccans and other unbelievers.
Even the Islamic traditions leave us in no doubt as to
who ws the aggressor. in Ibn Ishaq's orthodox biography of
Mohammed, we read that the first blood in Islamic history
flowed when a Meccan happened to witness the prayer-session
of the new sect, laughed, and got beaten up (the very act of
laughing is still frowned upon in Islamic theology). One
fine day, Mohammed announced to the Meccans in the Kaaba:
"By the One Who holds my life in His hand, I bring you
slaughter." Without provocation, he and his comrades used
to disturb the Pagan festivals and insult the Meccan
religion.
The Pagans were definitely not intolerant: they allowed
Christians and Jews to live amongst them, in spite of the
persecutions by Jewish and Christian leaders only a few
decades earlier. It was Mohammed who rejected any "live and
let live" agreement, most explicitly when this proposal was
made to him around his uncle Abu Talib's deathbed. The
simpletons who claim that the Quranic verse: "To you your
religion, to me my religion" (Q.109:6), is a statement of
tolerance, should know that this is literally the proposal
made to him around Abu Talib's deathbed by the Arab Pagans,
and that he turned it down, demanding that they embrace
Islam, nothing less. The Quranic verse simply means: I will
have nothing to do with you, there is no compromise possible
between your religion and mine. The Indian secularists
who have dreamed up the notion of composite culture
uniting Islamic and native Indian elements, should remember
that according to every Muslim who stands by the Quran, such
synthesis of Islamic and non-Islamic elements is
impermissible and a watered-down act of apostasy.
Mohammed did not tolerate the Meccans' rejection of his
claim to prophethood, and threatened all non-believers in
his claim with hellfire. If the civilized and tolerant
Meccans didn't tolerate his intolerant rantings forever, it
is quite understandable; but still their patience was a lot
bigger than Islamic apologetics wants us to believe. It is
only logical for a religion which preaches war, to develop a
cult of martyrdom (unknown in Buddhism and Taoism, among
others); the Hadis traditionists have blamed the whole
conflict on the destroyed Pagan society of Mecca, and
attributed a touch of heroic martyrology to the early
Muslims. But the fact that it is the Pagan and not the
Muslim version which has been obliterated, is a strong clue
to who was aggressor and who was victim.
Sitaram Goel is one of the first historians to keep the
proper distance from the partisan Muslim version. He
summarizes what we may know objectively about the Pagan
culture and the complexities of its religion, through
inscriptions, pre-Islamic literary documents (Greek,
Roman, Mesopotamian), and indirectly through Islamic
scripture. They had a pantheon comparable to that of the
ancient Greeks or Hindus, embodying metaphysical,
cosmological and ethical notions. On this basis Mr. Goel
rejects the now-classical description of the Arab-Pagans as
"quarelling rabble addicted to idol-worship", and concludes:
"It is nothing short of slanderous to say that pre-Islamic
Arabs were barbarians devoid of religion and culture, unless
we mean by religion and culture what the Muslim theologians
mean."
The Arab Pagans have only made the mistake of being
defeated, but "the fact that they failed to understand the
ways of Mohammed and could not match his mailed fist in the
final round, should not be held against them. It was
neither the first nor the last time that a democratic
society succumbed in the face of determined gangsterism. We
know how Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung succeeded in our own
times."
A modern myth spread by Islamic apologists and
especially by Western friends of Islam, is that the Meccans
did not really care for their religion, and only opposed
Mohammed because of financial calculations concerning the
revenue of the annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba. For
instance, in the introduction to Prof. J.H. Kramers's Dutch
translation of the Quran, we read: "In Mohammed's time the
religious aspect of the Haji festival had been lost, it had
become a big market, more fit for doing business than for
devotion to the gods... The Arab religion was a primitive
polytheism, poor in real religiosity..."
However, it is a fact that the Meccans' revenue
increased immensely after the Kaaba had been transformed
into an Islamic place of pilgrimage, anf after the entry
into the Muslim fold gave them the right to share in the
booty of raids and conquests: they gained enormously by
converting, at least politically and materially. More
pertient for the historian is the fact that the Islamic
sources themselves don't bother about attributing such
materialistic motives to the Meccans, and merely hold it
against them that they are idolaters and refuse to recognize
Mohammed's prophethood. At most, accusations of injustice
and hoarding riches are added to blacken them, but the
object of the Islamic campaign against them is not to change
their socio-economic life (although this would inevitably be
influenced by the endless inflow of booty and later by the
imperial size and structure of the Islamic state), but to
change the religion.
The crude allegation of materialistic motives can be
turned around against Mohammed, on firmer grounds. The
Meccans were traders, and maybe some were even usurers, as
modern apologetics claims. But Mohammed was worse: he
organized 80 raids on peaceful caravans, and led 26 of them
in person. He had Allah reveal that booty from raids on
Pagans and conquest of Pagan lands was lawful (Q.8.69), and
that one-fifth of the booth (including slaves) was the
Prophet's own. If no fighting had occurred, all of the
booty belonged to Allah and His Prophet.
In the classic of Marxist negationism, Communalism in
Modern India, Prof. Bipan Chandra describes how "Hindu
communalists" spread the myth of the inherently intolerant
character of Islam, and quotes as prime example the Hindu
Mahasabha leader Swatantryaveer Savarker, who wrote in 1923:
"Religion is a mighty motive force. So is rapine. But
where religion in goaded on by rapine and rapine serves as a
handmaid to religion, the propelling force that is generated
by these together is only equalled by the profundity of human
misery and devastation they leave behind them in their
march. Heaven and Hell making a common case - such were the
forces, overwhelmingly furious, that took India by surprise
the day that Mahmud Ghaznavi crossed the Indus and invaded
her." Of course, Bipan Chandra doesn't even attempt to
argue against the contents of this statement, he takes it as
axioma that such views are nothing but inventions of a
communalist false consciousness.
Whatever we may think of Savarkar's poolitical views,
his brief analysis of the nature and impact of islam is
impeccable. It is not only borne out by the career of Islam
in India, but also in detail, by the Quran and Hadith. They
have no room for doubt about Mohammed's own unhesitating
initiative in linking religion with rapine.
To justify his share of the booty, Mohammed decreed that
his own revenue, both from booty and from the charity tax
(zakat) which all Muslims had to pay, was to be used for
charity. Here we have another item from the apologist's
tool kit: the notion that Mohammed brought the practice of
charity to the selfish and greedy Pagans. In fact, the
zakat was originally a Pagan practice on an individual
basis, which was nationalized by Mohammed's Islamic state.
As for its caritative purposes: the Hadith collections tell
us more about the Islamic revenue being used to buy arms and
horses, for new and bigger raids, than aboout charity in
the usual sense. In fact, the Quranic decree (9.60) that
this income be used in the service of Allah and "for
winning over the hearts [to Islam]", means in plain
language: for the Holy War, and as a material incentive for
loyalty to Islam. So, all the resources which became
available to the Muslim state through whatever means, were
to be used to strengthen and expand this state; charity to
keep the poor happy was one element in this policy, but
really a minor one. The end justified the means, and war
coffers of Medina as well as the enthusiasm of the Islamic
soldiers were replenished with a constant infolow of booty.
Those who perforce want to reduce the conflict between
Pagans and Muslims to case of crude greed, had better thrown
the stone in Mohammed's direction.
The real reason why the Meccans rejected Mohammed's
prophecies, can be inferred very clearly from the Quran.
It was not for any materialistic reason, because at that
time especially after the creation of the first Islamic
state in Medina, joining Mohammed was the short road to
wealth and slave-ownership. The real reasons, which the
Meccans themselves formulated in discussion with Mohammed,
were the following.
Firstly, they were attached to their ancestral religion.
This is not stupid obscurantism, but a very sensible
consequence of the basic premise that religion is concerned
with eternal truths. Give me that old-time religion: it was
good for my ancestors, it is good enough for me. The
Meccans felt a sincere disgust when Mohammed consigned their
ancestors, including his own mother to the fire of hell
because of their having lived in the pre-Mohammedan "era of
ignorance" (jahiliya). The split of history into hell-bound
people who had not been followers of Mohammed, and heaven-
bound Mohammedans, was just too puerile (and egocentric on
Mohammed's part) to be taken serious by a grown-up human
beings.
Secondly, the Meccans made a clear diagnosis of someone
who hears voices and thinks he is God's own spokesman. A
number of times of Quran dictates what Mohammed has to
answer when the Pagans say he is possessed. In modern
terminology, the Pagans thought he was mentally deranged.
That is not a prejudice from medieval polemics Islam, but
the perception of numerous contemporary eye-witnesses.
Moreover, the orthodox biography and the traditions also
give some involuntary indications for a neuro-mental
disorder: as a child Mohammed had been thrown on the ground
general times (by God), to the worry of his guardians;
when receiving revelations he became all chilly and foamed
at the mouth; his first revelations frightened him intensely
and he himself wondered whether he was becoming crazy (the
soothing impact of habit and of his compassionate wife
Khadija re-assured him). The Meccans' inference that
Mohammed was merely hallucinating, whether correct or not,
was at any rate not far-fetched, nor necessarily dishonest.
When the most authentic sources keep on saying that the
Meccans opposed Mohammed because they didn't believe him and
because they refused to give up their time-tested religion
for the railings of a mad poet, it is methodologically
quite indefensible to ignore this and to replace it with the
gratuitous contention that they defended their religion only
out of false materialistic motives. Imagine being in the
same situation as the Meccans: someone walks into your house
uninvitedly and telly you that he has a private telephone
line with God that he is the last one to enjoy this
privilege, that he cn intercede for you on Judgement Day,
that you have to smash to pieces what you cherish most, and
that you will burn forever in hell if you don't believe him.
Would you need any base motives to show him the door?
3.5 THE NATURE OF ISLAM
While Mohammed enthusiastically assumed his role of
God's spokesman because of a peculiar psychological
condition, the theology which he espoused and which was
developed in detail by later generations of Muslims clerics,
was largely a continuation of the older monotheism of the
Jews and Christians. From them, Mohammed had picked up a
number of Bible stories and theological notions including
prophethood. A large part of the Old Testament is devoted
to the struggle against polytheism and idolatry. Moses
ordered the sternest measures against these alternatives to
his own cult of Yahweh, and successive prophets would employ
the foulest language and sometimes the most treacherous
means to annihilate god-pluralism.
In advanced Christian apologetics, the struggle between
the One God and the many gods is portrayed as a struggle
between the proper religious veneration of the Divine and
the false religious treatment of non-religious objects like
money, status, enjoyment, power and other worldly things.
But that is not at all what the prophets' fierce and
sometimes bloody struggle against idol-worship was about.
The two contenders were not ethically different, and among
the Ten Commandments, only the first and second (no other
gods, no images of sentient beings) were a point of
difference between Pagans and monotheists. They were not
the violent vs. the peaceful, or the lewd vs. the chaste (in
the prophets' tirades, fornication means idolatry) or the
good vs. the bad, or the religious vs. the irreligious. The
Pagans had a culture, a code of ethics, a religion complete
with rituals, festivals mystical practices and doctrines; at
best, the monotheists had the same things, but under the
aegis of a different God, the jealous and vindictive
Yahweh/Allah. What Moses could not tolerate about the Golden
Calf, was not that it was made of gold (as modern moralistic
Christians think), for it was only natural that people
wanted to sacrifice some of their riches to glorify what
they consider most sacred, viz. the god they worship. The
Horned god worshipped by the Pagans in Moses' following was
not intolerable because his statue was made of god, but
because he was an alternative to Yahweh.
In his chapter on the doctrine of iconoclasm, Sitaram
Goel traces this doctrine to its Old Testament sources, and
lists all the instances of verbal and physical violence
against idolatry. This story might make defenders of
Islam say: "See whatever you say about Islam, Judaism and
Christianity aren't any better." That is true if you
consider an earlier stage of the Jewish and Christian
religions. But it is a hopeful sign that these two
religions have come a long way since the arch-fanatic Moses.
The Jews have not had a state for many centuries, and they
have developed a social outlook of live and let live.
They never had a doctrine of world conquest anyway, and had
limited their ambition to the Promised Land. In present-
day Israel, the Jewish authorities respect and protect the
religious rights and pilgrimage places of Christians,
Muslims and Bahais. Judaism is one religion that has
actually grown, matured over the centuries. For
Christianity, the days of persecuting Pagans and heretics
are not that far behind us yet and more civilized forms of
fanaticism are still there. But at least the principle of
religious freedom has been conceded by the Second Vatican
Council, and the effort to enter a dialogue with other
religions is not entirely an eyewash.
The last few centureies, a strong humanization has taken
place within Chrisitianity. For instance, after condoning
the institution of slavery of about 18 centuries, Christian
have abolished slavery in their domains. The motive was not
outside pressure alone, but also ethical considertions
developed by Christial clerics ant thinkers since the
Renaissance. As the case of William Wilberforce shows,
abolition of slavery could even go hand with Christian
fanaticism. By contrast Islamic countries have only
abolished slavery under pressure from Western culture. Even
after that, slavery has continued to be practised
occasionally in countries like Sudan and Mauretania.
The Islamic doctrine of slavery was closely linked with
its doctrine of the inescapable struggle between believers
and unbelievers: a Pagan could not own a Muslim slave, but a
Muslim could of course own a Pagan slave, and Pagans were
routinely sold into slavery if they had the misfortune of
being captured by Muslims. Wherefrom the European folklore
character of Saint Nicolas' associate, the Moor Black
Pete, who puts naughty children in his bag to carry them
off and beat them with his rod. And wherefrom the Afrikaans
(South African) word kaffer, negro, originally black
slave, from Arabic kafir, Pagan. In contemporary Islamic
apologetics for African and Black American consumption,
Islam is portrayed as anti-slavery. That is yet another
instance of negationism.
Another example of the difference between Islam and
Christianity is the fact that among the Christian
missionaries who accompanied the Conquistadores in the New
World, there were some who expressed pity and regret when
they described the sad plight of the native Americans.
There were some who tried to save the natives' lives and
freedom (though not their religion). In the numerous
chronicles of the Muslim conquests and rule in India, there
are to my knowldege no such considerations. At least a germ
of a universal ethics and a universal human fellow-feeling,
transcending the frontiers between religious communities,
was present in Christianity, even if for a very long time it
was obscured by monotheistic and ecclesiastic exclusivism
("outside the Church no slavation"). In Islam, this glimpse
of universalism is confined to a few of the early heterodox
Sufis, who were considered heretics by authoritative
guardians of Islam. At any rate, their works are only read
by a few intellectual amateurs, but the official doctrines
are hammered into children's minds in Islamic schools the
world over. An occasional tolerant Muslim does not have the
power to overrule and abrogate the Quran. Not one Islamic
school in the world teaches that Allah's declarations of war
on the unbelievers stand abrogated. The cleavage of
humanity into Muslims and non-Muslims is so fundamental of
Islamic doctrine, that it is very hard to even imagine the
transformation of Islam into a tolerant religion.
Christianity has a broader basis than just the Moses
line of intolerant monotheism, it has incorporated elements
from Pagan sources such as Greek philosophy, and so it can
disown some parts of its history without having to disown
its very identity and dissolve itself. Judaism has
developed a pluralist culture of debate and interpretation,
embodied in the Talmud, which makes it temperamentally
averse to the fanaticism characteristic of the world-
conquering religions. But Islam is bound up very closely
with the text of the Quran and the personality of Mohammed.
It cannot disown these without dissolving itself. Islam is
by its own description a "seamless garment": pull out one
thread and the whole fabric comes apart. Since fanaticism
and persecution of non-Muslims are an intrinsic and strongly
emphasized teaching of the Quran, there is no hope of
witnessing the emergence of a genuinely tolerant Islam.
Sitaram Goel's sharp criticism of Islam can in no way be
explained as an expression of anti-Arab racism (which would
be the standard reply to such criticism in Europe). First
of all, equating Islam criticism with anti-Arab racism is a
typically eurocentric allegation, because outside Europe the
opposition between Muslim and non-Muslim seldom has a racial
dimension. Moreover, Islam (and more generally monothieism)
had been a foreign and eccentric fad to the Arabs, and was
forcibly imposed on them by Mohammed. As Sitaram Goel
explains, the Arabs were the first to be robbed of their
culture by Islam. Like the Persians, Egyptians and many
others after them, they were robbed of their history, which
was condemned as an age of darkness and replaced by a fake
ancestry involving Ismael and Abraham.
Even the large-scale crimes against humanity which the
Arabs were to commit during the Islamic Blitzkrieg under
Mohammed and his immediate successors, should not be held
against the Arabs, but against Islam: "Nor should the image
of what the Arabs became after they were forced into the
fold of Islam be confused with what they were before... For
it was Islam which brutalized the Arabs and turned them into
bloodthirsty bandits who spread fire and sword, far and wide.
In the majority of mankind, the baser drives of human nature
are never far from the threshold. Islam brought them to the
fore in the case of the majority of Arabs." Criticizing
Islam is not an attack on nations or individuals, but it is
an ideological critique, as well as a psychological critique
of what is called prophethood. Instead of accusing "the
Muslims" of the numerous crimes which their community has
undeniably committed, this critique absolves many Muslim-
born individuals of this guilt, by placing it squarely where
it belongs: in the doctrine of Islam as the ideological
motivation for these acts of fanaticism.
In Europe there is no Voltaire anymore who would dare to
give one of his works the title "Mahomet ou le fanatisme"
("Mohammed or fanaticism", a play criticizing religious
fanaticism, showing Mohammed murdering one of his critics).
Even the Rushdie affair has not sent European intellectuals
searching Islamic Scripture and informing the public that
Mohammed himself had ordered the murder of poets who had
criticized him, thus setting the example for Khomeini's
"death sentence" on Rushdie. There is no Schopenhauer
anymore who dares to speak openly of the contrast between
the humane philosophies of South and East Asia and the
barbaric fanaticism taught and practised by Mohammed.
European intelectuals observe a taboo on criticism of
Islam. I am sure this is only temporary, but at least it is
definitely the case today. This criticism of Islam, making
use of all the methodological process which the science of
history has made in the West, must now apparently be done in
India. A powerful lead in this endeavour has been given by
Sitaram Goel.
After debunking the pious claims which Islamic
apologists, Indian "secularists" and Western
"multiculturalists" (who do not realize that Islam has
systematically destroyed pluralist cultures and is the very
antithesis of multicultural co-existence) are making for
Islam, intellectuals should prepare for the next important
task: helping the Muslim masses on their way into a humanist
world culture, i.e. out of the mental and social shackles of
Islam. We have to educate the Muslim masses on their way
into a humanist world culture, i.e. out of the mental and
social shackles of Islam. We have to educate the Muslim
masses, and frankly make them aware of the choice they have:
staying in or opting out of a religion of backwardness and
fanaticism. We should not have the field of information
about Islam to the obscurantist mullahs and the negationist
history-falsifiers. This is more than a propaganda task,
because it involves understanding the universal values which
common Muslims identify with Islam, and preserving them
while eliminating the distinctive exclusivism and fanaticism
of Islam.
Islam is not an inborn quality of a community of people,
which has to be accepted as an unchangeable element which we
have to learn to live with. The Muslims are just human
beings, descendants of people who were mostly converted to
Islam under pressure (ranging from material incentives to a
choice at swordpoint), and there is no reason to believe
that they are immune to the influence of rational thought
and humanist culture. But straightforward criticism of
Islam is likely to infuriate the Islamic clerics and many
common Muslims. A lot of intelligence will be needed to
dissolve the mental grip of Islam in a gentle way.
The easy part is to be honest with ourselves, and stop
these attempts to paint Islam in rosy colours. It is the
duty of all those who come in contact with negationism, to
expose this intellectual crime. We need not pin people down
on the appalling record of the religion they were born into,
and we may forgive everything, but wrongdoings can only be
forgiven once they are recognized as such. Therefore, there
is no virtue in concealing and denying the crimes against
humanity which Islam has committed systematically in India
and elsewhere. For social harmony, it is far better to face
the truth.
Of course, ultimately it is for the Muslims themselves
to see the shortcomings of their religion, and revise it
suitably so that it permits them to live at peace with non-
Muslims. No critique of Islam from the outside can be a
substituite for a critique from within the Muslim fold. But
so long as Muslims are held down by despotic theocracies or
frightened by fierce fundamentalism, and cannot speak
freely, people from the outside have to speak freely, people
from the outside have to speak for them. The history of how
Christian theocracy and Communist totalitarianism got shaken
in the long run, shows the way. In both cases, it was a
critique from the outside which proved a powerful catalytic
agent. Voices of reason and humanism have a way of
penetrating the thickest theological walls and the strongest
iron curtains.
In this context, Hindus are in a unique position. They
have been victims of Islamic imperialism and intolerance for
more than thirteen centuries. They know it in their bones
what Islam has done to their ancient homeland, their
society, their culture, and what it has so far stood for.
They have only to stop complaining about the Muslim
behaviour pattern, and trace that pattern to its source in
the Islamic scripture: then they will acquire an initiative
which they have never had in their long encounter with
Islam. Once they educate themselves about the true
character of Islam, they will be in a position to educate
their Muslim countrymen, on most of whom Islam sits rather
lightly. It need not be a compaign for Shuddhi, it has to
be only a battle for liberating Muslims from the
stranglehold of a closed creed.
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