AND Now YoU haVe mUsLIm YoGa
Yoga has started entering Islamic countries, but the authorities and teachers there are “converting” it into “Muslim Yoga”, minus the Hindu postures and mantras, and calling it sports.
Saudi Arabia will soon have licensed yoga practitioners. Nouf Marwaai, has been practising yoga since she was 19 years old. Now over 30, she has become the first certified woman yoga trainer in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Ministry of Trade and Industry has listed “Teaching Yoga” under sports and business activities in a notification issued some days ago. Nouf is an Ayurveda expert. She trained in many countries including India. Arab News has reported that she had said that “Yoga and Islam are not at conflict with each other as yoga is the practice of people living in the pre-Buddhist era, over 5,000 years ago.” For long, she has been advocating yoga regardless of religious background of patients. “It is more a lifestyle and a science than a religion.”
However, well-known IndianAmerican Rajiv Malhotra in a communiqué to The Sunday Guardian said, “There is a rapid expanding movement among Muslims to appropriate yoga. Teachers and Islamic experts are collaborating to modify yoga by removing aspects seen as Hinduism, and by adding links with Islam.”
Malhotra has analysed “Muslim yoga” teachers in India, Pakistan, Canada and US. In his survey, he has found the following: outright rejection of yoga, seen as shirk (Arabic), meaning it is banned by Allah; attitudes of blatant “Hindu phobia”, even in some Western schools of Islam; demand to remove Surya-Namaskar because it is seen as idol worship; demand to remove “Om”; demand to remove all mantras; replacing silence with chanting Allah’s name; chanting verses from Quran during the practice; claiming that Yoga was not originally Hindu, but that Hindus hijacked it into their religion; trying to unite all Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) against features in yoga that are “not friendly to monotheism” and blaming these features on the BJP; and digesting yoga systematically into Arabic vocabulary and claiming that it maps on to Islamic practices.