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

scripture. This seems to me to be peculiarly unfortunate, for thus we miss their real significance - the unfolding of the human mind in the earliest stages of thought. And what a wonderful mind it was! The Vedas (from the root vid, to know) were simply meant to be a collection of the existing knowledge of the day; they are a jumble of many things: hymns, prayers, ritual for sacrifice, magic, magnificent nature poetry. There is no idolatry in them; no temples for the gods. The vitality and affirmation of life pervading them are extraordinary. The early Vedic Aryans were so full of the zest for life that they paid little attention to the soul. In a vague way they believed in some kind of existence after death.”

Now the moot point for the Musalmans to address is, wouldn’t Muhammad’s genius be behind fashioning the faith of Islam, after all? Well, Martin Lings picks up the threads of history after Muhammad had the honor of placing the Holy Stone at Kabah as it was rebuilt.

“It was not long after this outward sign of his authority and his mission that he began to experience powerful inward signs, in addition to those of which he had already been conscious. When asked about these he spoke of “true visions” which came to him in his sleep and he said that they were “like the breaking of the light of dawn.” The immediate result of these visions was that solitude became dear to him, and he would go for spiritual retreats to a cave in Mount Hira, not far from the outskirts of Mecca.”

After all, wouldn’t the power of concentration insensibly nudge one’s mind into the realms of divinity? Well, many scientists and artists had affirmed the divine inspiration they received in their mundane endeavors, didn’t’ they? Why that couldn’t have been the case with Muhammad as well? After all, didn’t he say that his mind’s eye would be awake even when his eyes sleep? It is in this context it is interesting to note that many Quranic revelations, such as the following one, mention his inspiration:

“And when thou bringest not a verse for them they say: Why hast thou not chosen it? Say: I follow only that which is inspired in me from my Lord. This (Quran) is insight from your Lord, and a guidance and a mercy for a people that believe.” 203. VII

As Nehru so convincingly argued, one can perhaps appreciate the real genius of Muhammad in shaping Islam if only the Quran is approached as the testimony of his inspiration. It is only then the Quranic injunctions could be seen in the given context for much of what is contained in it is contextual to the discerning mind. Thus, it would be interesting to note the breach of an eminently humane Quranic injunction even during the time of Muhammad.

“It is not righteousness that ye turn your faces to the East and West; but righteous is he who believeth in Allah and the Last Day and the angels and the Scripture and the Prophets; and giveth his wealth, for love of Him, to kinsfolk and to orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask, and to set slaves free; and observeth proper worship and payeth the poor -due. And those who keep their treaty when they make one, and the patient in tribulation and adversity and time of stress. Such are they who are sincere. Such are the God-fearing.”

Yet, all the believing Musalmans kept their share of slaves, got as spoils of war, without qualms, and even Muhammad, who claimed that Gabriel would come to him every Ramadan to make sure that nothing of the Revelation had slipped from his memory, only freed his slaves, among them women, just before his death! The tendency of the Musalmans to revere Muhammad, though he himself maintained that he was just human, and approach his life with a sense of divinity binds them to the hadith and sunna without regard to the context in which he said what he said, and did what he did.

The problem with the Musalmans is that they fail to reckon the motive behind Muhammad’s moves in a given context. Even otherwise, it’s worth noting that the hadith and sunna are based on what Muhammad’s followers said that he said, and at any rate, they were all but an overawed crowd to be able to retain objectively in Muhammad’s prophetic presence. Was it not possible, the hallucinations, if not inventions, of such folks might have made their way into the hadith? Besides, hearsay is the bane of best of the times, even in the transparent age of ours, no less on the informed mind . That being the case, it is to be appreciated that the Musalmans are dealing with the hadith and sunna fashioned at a remote place of a bygone age.

After all, weren’t there thousands of remarks attributed to Muhammad that were found to be incredulous while standardizing the hadith on a latter-day! Thus, even at the best, the hadith but contains what the eminent compiler of it felt were genuine utterances of Muhammad and for the Musalmans to make themselves hostage to the judgmental authenticity of a single scholar, eminent though human, and thus fallible, is extraordinary indeed!

It is also worth the consideration of the Musalmans that for all the awe his followers felt for Muhammad, many as well dissented his decisions on occasion. Besides, the success of his prophethood led to the birth of three more prophets - Musaylimah, Tulayhah and Aswad – and a prophetess, Sajah. What is more relevant, they all held sway over their own considerable following in competition to the Prophet of Islam. Obviously, the antiquity of history had lost track of the other prophets, leaving the legend of Muhammad to rule the roost as the ‘Seal of the Prophets’, and to mould the sharia, clouding the mind of the Musalmans in the bargain. Thus, the inability of the Musalmans to conceptualize the sharia in the context of Muhammad’s life and times tend them on a path of blind alley.

 

Chapter 17

Anatomy of Islam

 

‘A single people refused to join the common intercourse of mankind,’ so wrote Edward Gibbon about the Jews, and thought that ‘the Jewish religion was admirably fitted for defence’. If the Jews puzzled the medieval world, their religious cousins, the Musalmans, with their accent on separateness, perplex the modern world. What Nehru wrote in ‘The Discovery of India’ seems to prove the parody that is the Muslim Brotherhood.

“When Italy suddenly attacked Turkey in the Tripoli War of 1911, and subsequently, during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, an astonishing wave of sympathy for Turkey roused Indian Moslems. All Indians felt that sympathy and anxiety but in the case of Moslems this was keener and something almost personal. The last remaining Moslem power was threatened with extinction; the sheet anchor of their faith in the future was being destroyed. Dr. M. A. Ansari led a strong medical mission to Turkey and even the poor subscribed; money came more rapidly than for any proposal for the uplift of the Indian Moslems themselves.”

One might contrast this hackneyed clamor of the Musalmans to the low-key Hindu murmur when Mahendra Choudhary was ousted in a coup in Fiji, and made captive besides. The ready explanation for the universal nature of the Muslim agitation is that in them it is cultivated that Islam in essence is a brotherhood of believers transcending races, cultures, and nations. Laudable though the Islamic precept is, what indeed motivates the Musalmans to be so moved by it needs our understanding?

It is, of course, the Muslim credo that Islam is a body of believers as well as belief, and admittedly, this belief could be sustained only by the collective compulsion of the community to stick to the tenets of its faith. And this practice invariably leads to paranoia of belief, which occasions a collective resistance to change, fearing that might insensibly weaken their faith that sustains that credo.

While religion is meant to mend man’s soul and as human psychology tends his mind-set, it is imperative to probe into the psycho-cultural underpinnings of the Islamic upbringing, for which we have I’m Ok – You’re OK (Avon Books, New York) of Thomas A. Harris, who, after synthesizing the theories of many a psychologist, had come out with a psychological connectivity of the Parent, Child and Adult in human beings in that famous book as under:

“The parent is a huge collection of recordings in the brain of unquestioned or imposed external events perceived by a person in his early years, a period which we have designed roughly as the first five years of life. This is the period before the social birth of the individual, before he leaves home in response to the demands of society and enters school.

While the external events are being recorded as that body of data we call the Parent, there is another recording being made simultaneously [that is of the Child]. This is the recording of the internal events, the responses of the little person to what he sees and hears. In this connection it is important to recall Penfield’s observation that the subject feels again the emotion which the situation originally produced in him and he is aware of the same interpretations, true or false, which he himself gave to the experiences in the first place. This evoked recollection is not the exact photographic or phonographic reproduction of past scenes or events. It is reproduction of what the patient saw and heard and felt and understood.

The Adult is a data-processing computer, which grinds out decisions after computing the information from three sources: the Parent, the Child, and the data, which the Adult has gathered and is gathering. One of the important functions of the Adult is to examine the data in the Parent, to see whether or not it is true and still applicable today, and then to accept it or reject it; and to examine the Child to see whether or not the feelings there are appropriate to the present or are archaic and in response to archaic Parent data. The goal is not to do away with the Parent and the Child but to be free to examine these bodies of data. The Adult, in the words of Emerson, ‘must not be hindered by the goodness, but must examine if it be goodness’; or badness, for that matter.’

The Adult develops later than the Parent and Child and seems to have a difficult time catching up throughout life. The more one knows of the content of Parent and Child (in him) the more easily one can separate Parent and Child from the adult. The more sensitive one is to one’s own Parent and Child, the more separated, autonomous, and strong becomes the Adult.

Ideally the P-A-C circles are separate. In many people, however, the circles overlap. The overlap of the Parent and the Adult would result in a contamination of the latter by the dated, un-examined Parent data which is externalized as true. This is called prejudice. Prejudice develops in early childhood when the door of inquiry is shut on certain subject by the security-giving parents. The little person dares not open it for fear of parental rebuke.

The contamination of Adult-Child overlap affects in the form of feelings or archaic experiences which are inappropriately externalized in the present. Two of the most common symptoms of this kind of contamination are delusions and hallucinations. A delusion is grounded in fear. A hallucination is a phenomenon produced by extreme stress, wherein what was once experienced externally - derogation, rejection, and criticism - is again experienced externally even though ‘no one is there’. A recorded experience ‘comes on for real’ and the person ‘hears’ voices that existed in the past reality.

In addition to the contamination there is another functional disorder that explains how we differ: exclusion. Exclusion is manifested by a stereotyped, predictable attitude which is steadfastly maintained