This distortion of Islam is worse than what the American missionary is accused of committing

Dear Editor,

Permit me a long quote from a letter by Swami Aksharananda which appeared in your edition of May 4, `I advocate radical separation between church and state and stand by the secularism declared by our constitution’ advocating what he calls “secularism” and offers as “religious tolerance”.

The paragraphs below can, by any measure, be cited as expressions of intolerance and examples of a violence of the discursive kind. In them the Swami names the revealed ‘Abrahamic’ faiths and permits himself to essentialise them by howling that their ‘violent expression were central to their world view’. I will quote the offensive paragraphs and add a comment. You will observe that, all the while enrobed in a secular piety, the writer manages to return to one of his favourite themes, his objection to Hindus converting to other faiths. And one would ask whether the objection to the Christian missionary’s visit to the schools to give his take on Hinduism, is not merely rooted in a terror of the proselytism that has, in Guyana as elsewhere, released many Hindus from the millennial dharma in which the Swami sees them born and bound.

The essay published is a fine piece, but the Swami is unable to restrain himself and wrote

“Religious persecution of minorities is not only a historical issue. It is perhaps the most explosive issue facing society today, and secularism, though it may never eradicate all forms of persecution completely, remains the safest option for such minorities, like the persecuted Christian minority is in Pakistan and the Coptic Christians in Egypt who, not surprisingly, are themselves calling for a secular state.

“The major religions of the world, even those closely related as in the case of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are not only incompatible but mutually antithetical and their unadulterated and violent expressions are not aberrations but central to their worldviews. From their perspectives, all others are perennially damned. Without the safeguard of a secular polity there can be an open conflagration based on religious differences.”

The Swami is a leading Hindu figure in our part of the world and an activist, I had read, for India’s ruling BJP and its affiliates. He therefore speaks with some authority. The concern with secularism is understandable propaganda when one reads Bharata Bharati, an internet organ that seems to promote the BJP.

To quote from that magazine

“The BJP has for long been afraid of getting branded as a Hindu party and has been desperately pleading to Indian Secularists to certify it as a `secular enough party’”.

Hence the sudden proselytising of a secularism that would limit the rights of Hindus to convert out of the caste violence of their faith. So even though the Swami says in his letter people should be free to choose faiths he is ambivalent on my rights to share my faith with Hindu others. One is “born a Hindu”, it was said to Hindus.

The anti Islam/Christianity/Judaism comment from the Swami, then, has nothing to do with the religious tolerance he claims to be calling for, but forms part of the armory of ideologies of the BJP, a party whose leader Modi had been accused in 2002 as Chief Minister of Gujarat as initiating and condoning violence against Muslims and whose activists have been said to be responsible for deaths of Muslims in India whom they accuse of desecrating the cow god by eating meat. etc. The Hindu-induced violence in India has caused more deaths than the ignorance in Pakistan and Egypt that the writer mentions.

In his letter the learned Swami engages Dr Henry Jeffrey on the idea of secularism. It is a topic at the centre of political debate here in France and I have dealt with it in essays in the past found on Oumma.com. Generally the secularism and terrorism concerns are attached to anti-Muslim sentiment and serve as pretexts to demonise Islam and Muslim immigrants.

In terms of his volley against Christians (and perhaps 20% of Indians in Guyana are now Christian) we should count on the popes, bishops, apostles and other high ranks on the Guyanese faithscape to defend a movement that has produced an amazing variety of beliefs and practices, from the pietist, pacifism, from ascetics to crusaders. The Jewish faith has also generated its variants.

But for Islam, the Swami, despite the Aurangzeb Mughal caricatures brandished by Indian nationalists seeking to reduce Islam in India to a reportedly antiHindu emperor, the faith as a complete system, has rules that set out how one deals with the “Other” as he defines himself and is defined by us.

Islam, the Quran itself, enjoins us to maintain a polite and peaceful discourse with Christians and Jews with whom we share many ideals and scriptural references.

As for the polytheists, animists and other categories of non-Muslims we are told to live in peace with them unless they oblige us to defend ourselves and our families by arms. In communities occupied by both groups there are rules of cohabitation that guarantee the rights of each group. This is written in the Quran and practiced by Prophet Muhammad. That in the histories of faiths peopled by men there would be deviance is inevitable. The Swami needs to start by explaining the many cases of Muslim killings in BJP-controlled areas and send us a quote from the Quran where violence is propagated and becomes “central to their worldview.” This distortion of Islam is worse than what the American missionary is accused of committing. Aksharananda should retract, apologise or explain why he is planting antagonism under the guise of preaching tolerance.

Memories are short, the Basque separatist group ETA, the German far left groups , the Irish Republican Army, the Corse nationalists and other separatist movements in the Balkans killed countless more people than have died in all of the attacks in Europe by self-proclaimed Muslims. It is a complex matter that requires a separate letter. Secularism in France and many ex Catholic countries is a form of anti-clericalism that was a reaction to a Catholic regime that became a retarding force in humanistic and scientific terms.

The islamophobia is a transference of the anti-clericalism to the immediate and obvious target, one designated by the relationship of conquest and occupation that characterised French contact with some of the Muslim world. The Muslim world has fallen into forms of backwardness in many places and the needed reform work is being done.

But to return to the Swami, while he takes time to dismantle the scriptural support for anti-sodomy sentiments and makes a broad generalisation about cultural prejudice, he fails to give examples of the Anglo-Christian coloration of our country that made Hindu weddings illegitimate, divorce difficult, the absurdity of singing hymns in school acceptable, and I am sure, there are many more examples out there.

It is noteworthy that none of the Hindu activists has really come out with a programme to remedy this. The last government did nothing. As I wrote a dozen years ago here, the real consensus is that the Indo-Guyanese wants to evolve at his own pace, and will live the contradictions as he wills.

Yours faithfully, Abu Bakr