Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity), BS Murthy [microsoft ebook reader .TXT] 📗

the nobility of humility in its believers, it tends to burden their psyche with a sense of guilt, buttressed by the feeling of sin. Interestingly, the baggage of sin that the Christianity carries like a cross on its conscience might be a psychic relic of the not so human-friendly diktats of Jehovah as enshrined in the Mosaic Laws. However, after centuries of Papal oppression, exemplified by the dogma of sexual sin, the Christian West broke loose from its puritanical shackles, as though with a vengeance. And the end result was the penchant for taboo-less sex, which eventually transformed into free sex in the hippy movement of the sixties of the 20th century.

On the other hand, the Christian dogma that salvation is beyond those who won’t keep faith in the Son of God, and his Gospel, might have insensibly sowed the seeds of racism in the Gentile hearts. Thus, if untouchability is the ‘speck’ in the Hindu eye, the proselytizers might realize that anti-Semitism, nay, racism is a ‘board’ that obstructs the Christian spiritual vision. Well, when six million Jews got exterminated in the Holocaust, attribute that to the Fuehrer’s Final Solution, but if an odd Hindu dalit is abused, blame it upon the Hinduism per se. Oh, what a double standard! Of course, in all this, it is not difficult to see the proselytizing hand with the Christian axe out to grind on the dalit discontent and the tribal self-isolation in Hindustan.

It may be the moot point to ponder over whether the deep- rooted anti-Semitism in the West is a manifestation of the Christian hurt of Jesus’ crucifixion, believed to be brought about by Judas the Jew. Be that as it may, while rightly castigating the obnoxious Hindu untouchability, the Christian credo seems to have no qualms about its own atrocities against the native races in the Americas and elsewhere in the virgin world. Well, though the Christian West went scot-free on that account, its crime of enslaving the blacks of yore came to haunt them in the form of street violence in these changed times. And what could be more galling to the Whites than to see the despised niggers, in numbers, becoming the masters of their own women. And what better poetic justice from the slavish angle!

Nevertheless, the commendable Christian ethos of service to humanity reflects the innate nobility of its religious character. In a way, what Hinduism conceptualized as vasudhaiva kutumbakam (world is one family) that latter-day Brahmanism negated with its prejudices, the Christianity symbolizes that with its service by reaching out to the non-Christian peoples as well. Is not the world better off owing to the penchant of the Christian missionaries in setting up schools to impart secular education and build hospitals to provide healthcare in every nook and corner of the globe?

However, the misplaced zeal of some of its proselytizers to rope in the hapless or gullible, and / or both, from alien faiths into the Christian fold, by means not always fair, places them in the company of the dubious. It’s by no means wise to push under the carpet the resentment of a Dara Singh against the unabated proselytizing of Odisha’s tribals by Graham Staines, the Christian missionary from Australia, which led to the dastardly act of slaying him in his station wagon along with his two sons. Nevertheless, it is to be appreciated that while the short-sighted Indian constitution provides a free hand to the evangelists, the politically constrained Indian State is ever averse to rein in the aggressive proselytizing hands that insensibly alter its demography to the chagrin of the Hindus, who lost a third of their ancient land, not so long ago, to the Musalmans. So, soft-pedaling the vexatious issue might serve some to buttress their secular image but it fails, say, the Indian social harmony in the long run.

Thus, it’s for the Christians themselves to ponder over what Max Mueller and others have said about the Hinduism, and read an Upanishad or two for widening their narrow-minded outlook of salvation. Beside, on the mundane plane, it might serve the Papacy better if it watches out its own backyard from which its Blacks are slipping into the Islamic fold. And this at a time when Islam is branded as a religion of terrorism and publicized besides! That Islam, in spite of its bad brand image, should be the fastest growing religion on the planet is something that should alarm the world, and indeed this book, in the main, is about exploring the dichotomy of that inimical creed.

Just the same it’s in the Christian credo, the proselytizing forerunner of the Semitic Orders, that the seeds of strife that Islam sows everywhere nowadays were originally farmed. Why, when Islam forced its way into its Holy backyard, crusades against the Musalmans became the medieval Christian calling; and now, the mere footmarks of the American GIs on the Islamic Holy land of Saudi Arabia was cause enough for an Osama bin Laden to call for a jihad against the Christian West. If ever the Musalmans came to dominate the Western world again, the predictable Christian response would be a crusade all over, maybe a guerilla war, if not with the fidayēn force. But then, who knows? After all, it is the paranoia of both these proselytizing faiths to ever expand their religious spheres of influence that came to be the curse of the mankind.

Maybe, Jesus had seen it all coming when he said about his mission on earth:

“Do you think I have come to give peace to the earth? No! Rather, strife and division! From now on families will be split apart, three in favour of me, and two against – or perhaps the other way round. A father will decide one way about me; his son, the other; mother and daughter will disagree; and the decision of an honoured mother-in-law will be spurned by her daughter-in-law.”

The call of the Christ to spread the faith and the prophetic warning about the coming strife in the world was the harbinger of the destabilization of the religious harmony of the ancient world, achieved, as Edward Gibbon had observed, by ‘the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other’s superstitions.’

 

Chapter 7

Legacy of Prophecy

 

“This son of yours will be a wild one - free and untamed as a wild ass! He will be against everyone, and everyone will feel the same towards him.” - The Genesis

This prophecy of Gabriel, the Archangel of the Lord, revealed to Hagar, the surrogate wife of Abraham, was about Ishmael, their son, still in her womb then. In time, as their foolhardiness earned them the wrath of Sarah, the spouse of Abraham, the maid and her son were banished into the wilderness of Beersheba.

Preoccupied as it was with Isaac, the second son of Abraham, born to Sarah later, and the Hebrews, his descendents, ‘The Torah’ mentions about Ishmael becoming an expert archer, and in the passing refers to his marriage with an Egyptian girl. And that was all there to Ishmael in the Book, as thereafter it chose not to record his life and times for the posterity.

Thus, there would have been no more to the tale of Ishmael, if not for the advent of Muhammad, his most illustrious descendant. And as the world knows, it was Muhammad who founded Islam, some six hundred years after Jesus, the peach Isaac’s progeny that ushered in the Christianity. Nonetheless, the Quran, the Script of Islam, too doesn’t contain any reference to the saga of Ishmael in so far as the said prophecy is concerned.

However, going by the strife in Muhammad’s life and the stances Musalmans tend to take in the name of the faith he founded, one might wonder at the truism of this telling prophecy with regard to Ishmael’s progeny. Whether it was owing to divine design or human aberration, and / or both, the acrimony between the Musalmans and the ‘others’ they dub kafirs seems to have come to stay. In a way, the Semitic schism could be attributed to the will of ‘the God’ after all.

It’s a wonder why did ‘the God’ ordain Abraham to beget Ishmael through his surrogate wife Hagar, even as He enabled him to sire Isaac later through Sarah, his old, though, wedded wife! But now the moot point is whether in this age and time, driven by information technology, won’t be a change of the Semitic order be in order? And the imperative for man is to find out an agreeable detour from the centuries old vexatious route laid in the Semitic religious tracks.

It is interesting to note that it invariably is the case with all the so-called revealed religions that the persona of its prophet tends to shape the course of its propagation. Besides, the sublimity of Jesus as a preacher and the divinity associated with his miracles, in The Gospel there is no reference to his proclivities as a person. After all, the apostles of Jesus, who came to script The Gospel, would have been in the know of the messiah as man, and all that goes with being human.

And yet, they could have thought it fit to exclude from the Gospel the mundane of the Christ, lest human vulgarity should equate the divinity of the God with the frailties of His Son. In spite of this thoughtful omission by his apostles, yet, from time to time, the Christian world gets embroiled in controversies involving the speculation about Jesus’ personal life, the Davinci Code being the latest.

On the contrary, as the divine got weaved with the mundane in Islam, the proclivities Muhammad captured in the hadith and sunna, became the corollaries of the Quran. Since it’s in the nature of the believers to equate the mission of the Messiah with the message of ‘the God’, in time, the life of Muhammad turned out to be the essence of Islam. Well, Muhammad shaped Islam all by himself, aided though by the Quran, and didn’t commission any to regulate his religion, as did the Christ.

But, seen in the context of the religion he founded, and Allah’s mandate to fulfill his ambition, the course the Christ adopted would not have served Muhammad’s cause. In essence, Jesus was a preacher of the Christian values more than the founder of the Christianity. But, Muhammad had assumed the role, not just of reciting the word of ‘the God’ to the willing through the Quran, but of setting the rules for Islamic practice and propagation, of course, as dictated by the circumstances of his life and times.

It is thus, while the Christian ethos is shaped by the preaching of Jesus that led to his crucifixion, the Islamic creed is a product of the conduct of Muhammad that gained him the Kabah. Hence, one cannot possibly appreciate the mind of a Musalman without understanding the psyche of Muhammad, shaped by the trials and tribulations he encountered in propagating the faith he had founded. An attempt is made here towards this end that owes the content, and at times the text even, wherever quoted, of “Muhammad – his life based on the earliest sources,” the remarkable biography by Martin Lings published by Inner Traditions International, USA.

It is said in the Quran, as ordained by ‘the God’, Abraham and Ishmael built the sanctorum of Kabah near the well of Zamzam in Mecca. And the history tells us that their descendents, the tribe of Khuzaah, by installing its idol had turned it into the house of Hubal. After a prolonged tussle for its possession, the guardianship of Kabah changed hands from Khuzaah to Quraysh, one of the powerful Arab tribes of Abrahamic descent. That was in the 4th century A.D, and the Quraysh were still in control of Kabah when destiny brought Muhammad into its stock.

However, to bring about Muhammad’s birth on April 22, 571 A.D, fate had to play its part in preserving the life of Abd Allah of the Quraysh. It was thus, Mughirah, the