IndiaStar:
A Literary-Art Magazine
-book reviews-
Voice of India Publications:
*The Hindu View of Christianity and Islam
by Ram Swarup*Stalinist "Historians" Spread the Big Lie
by Sita Ram Goel*The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India
by Sita Ram GoelPublished by Voice of India
2/18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, 110 002
Books available at:
http://www.swordoftruth.com/PUBLICATION/titles.htmlReviewed by C.J.S. Wallia =======================
"Yet, as a secular humanist,
I would like to make a
distinction between an ideology
and its adherents, especially those born into it. From my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as
any other Indian."-- C.J.S.Wallia
======================
Voice of India (http://www.voi.org) has been more for than two decades publishing books focusing on renascent India. In addition to the books reviewed here, other outstanding titles include:
* The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India
by David Frawley;
* Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them
by Arun Shourie, Jay Dubash, et. al.;
*Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam
by Koenraad Elst; and
*Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society
by Koenraad Elst.
In The Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, Ram Swarup quotes the noted Amercan writer Gore Vidal: "From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam." Vidal calls them "sky-god religions," which, observes Swarup, "would have been no harm if they had been a yogic sky-god, for a yogic sky-god is in all the gods and includes all other gods - - gods of the earth as well as of the heaven and beyond - - as man is kin both to the earth as well as to the sky. But the trouble is that the prophetic god is not a yogic god; in fact, he is hardly a spiritual being; he is a fanatic entity, an intolerant and hegemonic idea."
Prior to their prophet Moses, the Jews did not worship an exclusive sky-God. "While Jehovah revealed himself to Moses as the only God of the Jews, they were worshipping another God under the symbol of a Bull." Swarup wonders whether this had "something to do with Nandi of Hinduism." Moreover, worship of Jehovah under the form of a Bull or golden calf continued for many centuries. In his famous book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud reasoned that a militant and exclusive God, Jehovah, was "suited to a people who were starting out to occupy a new homeland by force," and who promised them "a land flowing with milk and honey," while urging them to exterminate its inhabitants "with the edge of the sword." In Deut. 7.1-6, Jehovah says: "Thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them...thou shalt destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves... For thou art an holy people unto the Lord."
The concept of one God and his chosen, holy people, writes Swarup, "brought in the concept of two humanities and religious aggression became the highest duty and morality. Religion itself became dogmatic and lost its inwardness and vision. People both individually and collectively felt empty inside." In contrast, spiritual religions such as Hinduism and European Paganism have "multiple Gods but one humanity; Semitic religions have one God but at least two humanities: believers on one hand and unbelievers or infidels or heathens on the other. The division is not social, or racial, or cultural; it is metaphysical. Believers owe nothing to infidels, not even ordinary ethical behaviour." Witness the Quranic injunction (chapter IX, verse 5): "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent [i.e. convert to Islam] and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave them free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful." However, Allah's mercy is exclusively reserved for his chosen, holy people, the Muslims. According to a hadis (Sahih Muslim, 6665-6669) "if there would be people among the Muslims with as heavy sins as a mountain, Allah would forgive them and he would place in their stead the Jews and Christians... on the Day of Resurrection, Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: 'That is your rescue from Hell-Fire.' "
The historic record of the Christians is equally blood-soaked -- for example, the mass slaughter of natives in South America for refusal to convert to Christianity. Citing the record of the Portuguese in coastal pockets of India around 1540 AD, Swarup writes: "They had nothing to learn from their Muslim counterparts. A. K. Priolkar, in The Goa Inquisition, provides a list of 131 villages in the three islands of Goa, Salsete, and Bardez with 601 temples, all from official sources, which were destroyed by Christians. Franciscan friars who were active in Bardez 'destroyed 300 Hindu temples where false Gods were worshipped. Jesuits, more active in Salsete, destroyed, at about the same time, 280 temples."
Although the Christians destroyed idolatrous temples in Goa and in South America, they themselves have "idols in thousands in their churches as in St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London; they are representational and there is not even an attempt to give them an iconic form." Moreover, the Christian worship of relics is widespread: "In France, Voltaire counted six foreskins of Jesus to which barren women made pilgrimage. Calvin found so much wood in the relics of the Cross that not even three hundred men could carry them. Similarly, the Virgin's milk was aplenty. San Bernardino of Siena tells us that 'all the buffalo cows of Lombardy would not have as much milk as is shown about the world.' "
In Islam, particularly among the Sufis, grave worship is pervasive. The "dargah" of Muinuddin Chisti in Ajmer -- founded on the ruins of a Hindu temple -- is a much publicized example. Contrary to the propaganda ofIslamic apologists, many Sufi "saints" were instigators and enthusiastic participants in jihad as documented in R. M. Eaton's scholarly study Sufis of Bijapur, published by Princeton University Press, 1978.
Swarup's central thesis is that Semitic religions are not religions at all -- in the sense of spiritual religions -- but political ideologies. Spiritual religions, in contrast to Semitic religions, focus on the seeker's inner life and the essential oneness of the universe. Historically, Christianity is an imposition on the indigenous spiritual religions of Europe and, later, South America. Likewise, Islam is an imposition on the spiritual religions of Arabia, Egypt, and West Asia. Swarup sees a growing recognition of these impositions: "Europe is witnessing a revival of its ancient religion... it's trying to throw off the yoke of Christianity.... Prudence Jones, spokesperson for the U.K. Pagan Federation, observed that all the world's indigenous religions have three features in common: they are nature-venerating, seeing nature as a manifestation of Divinity; they are polytheistic and recognize many Gods, many Manifestations; they recognize the Goddess, the female aspect of Divinity as well as the male. She showed how European Paganism was similar to Hinduism, Shintoism, and the North American tradition."
In Stalinist "Historians" Spread the Big Lie, Sita Ram Goel challenges Marxist historians to substantiate their assertions about demolitions of Buddhist monasteries by Hindu kings and of Shaivite-Vaishnavite blood-soaked feuds. Goel characterizes the dean of the Marxist historians, Romila Thapar, as a professional Hindu-baiter. "It is intriguing indeed that whenever achaelogical evidence points towards a mosque as standing on the site of a Hindu temple, our Marxist professors start seeing a Buddhist monastery buried underneath. They also invent some Saiva king as destroying Buddhist and Jain shrines whenever the large-scale destruction of Hindu temples by Islamic invaders is mentioned."
In The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, S.R. Goel's thesis is that the current textbooks of history in Indian schools and universities are full of falsities. Moreover, these falsities have been deliberately inserted in the cause of pseudo-secularism. "Hitherto this 'Experiment with Untruth' was confined mainly to Muslim and Communist 'historians' who have come to control the Indian History Congress, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and even the University Grants Commission. Now it has been taken up by the National Integration Council (of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India). And this perverse programme of suppressing truth and spreading falsehood is being sponsored by a state which inscribes 'Satyameva Jayate' on its emblem."
Throughout The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India, Goel draws on contemporary Muslim chronicles: Chachnama on the eighth century Arab invasion of Sindh; Tarikh-i-Yamini of Utbi, Mahmud Ghaznavi's secretary; Kamil-ut-Tawarikh of Ibn Asir on Muhammad Ghuri's invasions; Tuzk-i-Timuri of Amir Timur; and so on to the Mughal dynasty. Here's a sample quote from Goel's meticulous historical research: "Amir Khusru, the dearest disciple of Nizamuddin Awlyia and supposed to be the pioneer of secularism in India by India's secularist historias wrote as follows in his Khazain-ul-Futuh also known as the Tarikh-i-Alai: 'The whole country by means of the sword of our holy warriors has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. The land has been saturated by the waters of the sword, and the vapours of infidelism [Hinduism] have been dispersed. The strong men of Hind have been trodden under foot, and all are ready to pay tribute. Islam is truimphant, idolatory is subdued. Had not the law of Hanifa granted exemption form death by the payment of jiziya, the very name of Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished.'"
Goel would wholly agree with the thesis of Francois Gautier's recent book, Rewriting Indian History: "Let it be said right away: the massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese."
However, the British, in pursuing their policy of divide-and-rule, colluded "to whitewash" the atrocious record of the Muslims so that they could set up the Muslims as a strategic counterbalance to the Hindus. During the freedom struggle, Gandhi and Nehru went around encrusting even thicker coats of whitewash so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Muslim unity against British colonial rule. After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by their distorting ideology, repeated the big lie about the Muslim record.
Like Gautier, Goel cites the well-known American historian Will Durant in The Story of Civilization: "...the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Almost all the Muslims of South Asia are descendants of weaker elements of the population who had succumbed to forcible Islamic conversion.
About Gandhi's whitewash of Muslims, Gautier observed: "Ultimately, it must be said that whatever his saintliness, his extreme and somehow rigid asceticism, Gandhi did enormous harm to India... The British must have rubbed their hands in glee: here was a man who was perfecting their policy of divide-and-rule, for ultimately no one contributed more to the partition of India, by his obsession to always give in to the Muslims; by his indulgence of Jinnah, going as far as proposing to make him the prime minister of India."
Worse yet, Gandhi's anointed disciple, Nehru, propagated false readings of Indian history in his books and speeches. Gautier quoted Nehru's "amazing eulogy" of the tyrant Mahmud Ghazni, the destroyer of Mathura's great Hindu temples, Gujarat's Somnath, and numerous other Hindu and Buddhist temples. When Nehru, the arrant appeaser of Muslims, became India's first prime minister, he appointed a fundamentalist Muslim, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as the first education minister. Under Nehru's pseudo-secular rule, "Hindu-bashing became a popular pastime." Moreover, Nehru "had a great sympathy for communism.... He encouraged Marxist think-tanks such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University [JNU] in New Delhi, which has bred a lot of 'Hindu-hating scholars' who are adept at negating Muslim atrocities and running to the ground the greatness of Hinduism and its institutions." These Marxist "historians," well-ensconced at JNU, have long been masterminding the politically correct textbooks of India's history used in Indian schools. No wonder, JNU is also known as "the Kremlin by the Jumna." For a long time, the Indian Marxists had been so brainwashed that whenever it rained in Moscow -- the capital of their "only true fatherland"-- they opened their umbrellas in Delhi.
From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that any whitewashing of historical record is counterproductive. No matter how lofty the ideals of a current cause, any whitewash of history tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive its horrendous facts can be redemptive. Forgive -- but never forget -- history. A salient example of making sure that the horrors of history are not forgotten is the contemporary German state's law prohibiting any World War II history that whitewashes the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews, Gypsies, and Poles. The Jews rightly insist that the world must never forget what happened to them. Where is the Hindu Holocaust Museum?
Yet, as a secular humanist, I would like to make a distinction between an ideology and its adherents, especially those born into it. From my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian.