This is a three-part summary of the book Hindu View of Christianity and Islam written by Sri Ram Swarup (1920-1998) where he reverses the Hindu gaze on the Semitic or Abrahamic religions. This is an abridged version of the book in three parts and the articles truly belong to Ram Swarupji.

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Introduction

‘Hindu View of Christianity and Islam‘ generated plenty of controversies. The book is important because Hindu scholars never made a serious study of alien religions which came to inhabit the traditional land of India. However, the Islamic rulers and intellectuals, missionaries, and the colonials (mainly influenced by a Protestant framework) ran serious discourses on Hindu traditions. They discovered many ‘religions’ and decided that the evil caste system was an outcome of such false religions.

However, there was no major resistance to protect Indian traditions against such serious misrepresentations and distortions. In fact, many of our reformers, like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, accepting the colonial criticisms, tried removing the layers of superstition and corrupt practices covering the pure and pristine core of ‘Hinduism’. Roy took the task of going back to the pure Upanishads cleansed of all idolatry. Thus, ‘reform’ meant accepting what the colonials or the missionaries said about us.

In such a situation, it was indeed a far cry to reverse the gaze on Semitic religions from a Hindu point of view. The reasons were many. One, it could simply have been due to the power structures which did not allow intellectual freedom for Hindus to critique either Islam or Christianity. Second, it could have been the characteristic indifference of Hindu traditions and philosophies to critically evaluate alien philosophies from outside its borders. The intense internal debates did not extend to Islam or Christianity. The socio-economic condition of the people also might have not allowed the luxury to indulge in such debates. Thirdly, the most important reason could have been the ‘colonial consciousness’ as Dr SN Balagangadhara terms it. It is intellectual violence that permanently alters the colonized minds into believing that the coloniser is superior and everything in the realm of the colonized state is inferior. This violence continues even after the colonisers leave the colonized. Most narratives of Indian intellectuals even today, seven decades of independence, show this phenomenon acutely.

There were great exceptions of course. Bankim Chandra, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda did seriously question our representation by the colonials. Post-independence too, we still have not told our story or assessed the West from our point of view which Dr Balagangadhara exhorts us to do constantly. It is still a work in progress despite all the claims of post-colonial and a plethora of other studies.

Ram Swarup, one of the greatest, but sadly ignored, thinkers of modern India, seriously challenges the Islamic and Christian worldview and how it appears from the Hindu point of view. Unfortunately, this did not gel with our basic distorted sense of ‘secularism’ and ‘liberalism’ which meant, for most political parties, appeasing the minorities and abusing the majority respectively. There were hence ban calls and severe opposition to the book. The author faced several problems, a story by itself. Without animosity towards any individuals practising different faiths, the book simply is an intellectual Hindu response to hundreds of years of one-sided narratives stacked against it.

Christianity and Islam: Doctrinal Affinity but Historical Conflict

Oriental Studies in the West had its genesis in the bitter Christian-Muslim encounters for a thousand years. Islam, overwhelming much of Europe for centuries, finally gave way to the crusades of Christianity. Western Christianity was united; the power of the Pope increased, and Christianity turned towards the East with aggression.

The crusades ended by the last part of the thirteenth century. Christianity now thought of other means of penetration. As a first step, Pope Honorius IV (AD 1286-1287) and later, the Ecumenical Council of Vienna (AD 1311-1312), encouraged the study of oriental languages as an aid to missionary work by setting up chairs at the Universities. The General Council of Basel (AD 1434) decreed that ‘all Bishops must sometimes each year send some men well-grounded in the divine word to those parts where Jews and other infidels live…’

However, the Church faced internal revolts later. Strong Protestant movements came to the fore, questioning Catholic dogmas and the Pope’s authority. Different Christian groups had acute internal quarrels but all faced the non-Christian world unitedly. After a lull, the Protestant nations too joined the missionary game with great fervour considering themselves as the rightful heirs to true Christianity.

The Study of Islam

In this background, Christian researchers began their study of Islam. They regarded it as a ‘spurious faith’ and its author as a ‘false prophet,’ an opinion which has not fundamentally changed since then with some occasional concessions. Charles Forster, a clergyman, and author of Mohammedanism Unveiled (1829), re­garded Islam as a baleful superstition and its Founder as an impostor. Yet he regarded this creed as ‘con­fessedly superior’ to the gross idolatry of its predecessor. Islam had a place in the divine scheme by cleansing heathenism of idolatry and prepare it to receive a purer faith. Christianity detested Islam but honoured it for destroying idolatry.

Some early thinkers said the Islamic laws were better than those of the ancient pagans. The prophet did deserve respect, though not equal as Christ, for his natural endowments, his subtle wit, his agreeable behaviour, his liberality and cour­tesy, his fortitude against his enemies, and above all his rever­ence for the name of God.

With more translations of the Quran, some Christian writers dimly perceived Muhammad shared virtues and vices with Biblical prophets. But these Christian writers had to cas­tigate in the Quran what they admired in the Bible. Some of the most fanatical passages in the Quran—like ‘kill them wherever ye find them’ (2.191)—had solid Biblical support and precedent. Rev. E.M. Wherry (A Comprehensive Commentary on Quran in 1882), referring to this injunction, kill them, says the inference that prophet was cruel does not stand since this can apply equally well to Old Testament Scriptures.

Christian writers used strong adjectives and hostile epithets but a few realized that an attack on Islam in a fun­damental way was an attack on Christianity itself. The two were similar in their source (Old Testament), deeper perspective (non-idolatrous), and psychic affinity (God’s chosen fraternities, communication through a favoured intermediary, human founders, and credal religions).

Hostilities Despite Similarities

Similarities failed to bring them together. On the contrary, this made Islam into an ‘undisguised and formidable antagonist.’ The cause of the conflict consists in an inadequate concep­tion of the Godhead on the part of both Christianity and Islam. The God of both teaches them to persecute religions other than their own; both are dogmatic, fundamentalist, and theological; both lack a proper discipline of inner explo­ration; both seek outward expansion; both are aggressively self-righteous, and both by nature know no true theory of peaceful co-existence.

India along with Egypt, Persia and Syria offered fertile op­portunities for Christian researchers in Islam. Henry Martyn, CG Pfander, and Sprenger were a few, but William Muir’s The Life of Mahomet, first published in 1861 in four volumes, was the best. William Muir had strong Christian views but he was also a painstaking and conscientious researcher. He ex­hausted most of the sources on the Prophet’s life.

Most biographies except the hagiographical ones in which miracles abound show a remarkable agreement on facts, though differing in their interpretations. For example, the Prophet massacred the Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza after their surrender. The earliest Muslim biographers celebrate this event; the Christian writers of the last century like Sprenger and Muir treated it with moral horror; and by the beginning of the 20^th century, writers like Margoliouth simply narrates the facts without judgements.

Maxime Rodinson (Mohammed), a distinguished French Arabist later moves further to justify this action: ‘Muhammad had his compulsions and from a purely political point of view, moreover, the massacre was an extremely wise move; the chosen solution was undeniably the best.’ Syed Ameer Ali, a modern apologist, says that the Jewish punishment was self-invited and they were self-condemned. He also shows with the help of many citations that this ‘defensive’ massacre, was like things in the Bible and in the history of Christianity; for example, II Samuel 8.1-5 of the Bible.

Imperial Studies of Islam

Though sometimes reinforcing, the imperial motive replaced the missionary motive later for the study of Islam. Europe was undergoing a rationalist revo­lution. Christianity felt less self-confident and won less sympathy for its viewpoint. Again, the nature of the new scholarship acquired its own independent dimension beyond the confines of earlier Christian lens. This was the background when Margoliouth at the University of Oxford wrote his Mohammed. He was writing for a ‘tolerant’ twentieth-century audience and he decided, even before he wrote his book, to observe towards the prophet ‘the respectful attitude which his greatness de­serves’. As he desired, the book was free of Christian bias but did show an imperial bias when he regards all non-European man­ners and institutions (Bedouins here) as savage.

Margoliouth offers an interesting theory that Islam began as a ‘secret society,’ and that secrecy added to its appeal initially. Interestingly, the word Muslim etymologically means a traitor, and that the word was originally for the adher­ents of Islam by its opponents. Muhammad gave the word a dignified meaning of one who handed over his person to Allah. History is full of instances where de­rogatory epithets become proud titles.

The Revelations of the Prophet

Like so many other biographers of Muhammad, Margoli­outh too was intrigued by his revelations, and he tries to under­stand them. He finds the whole process of revelations ‘suspicious’, hinting at several hypotheses like ‘epileptic fits’, ‘trickery’, or ‘mediumistic communications.’ The last was an inspiration of the contemporary Spiritualism (the alleged calling up of the departed spirits through a sensitive medium) of the author’s era. Margoliouth also perceives behind these revelations a deep and steady motive of ‘personal distinction’ on the part of Muhammad reproducing in himself the role of Jesus and Moses. Muham­mad’s revelations had two dogmas: (1) the dogma of One God which he borrowed from the Bible, and (2) the dogma of his own apostleship, which is his specific contribution.

Margoliouth also sees a family likeness between the Muslim prophet and the prophet of the Mormons- Joseph Smith (1805-1844), and their respective revelations. But Muhammad started no new fashion. He himself followed an old model well established in the Bible. Indeed, to raise deeper questions about Muhammad’s revelations is to raise questions about the whole species of revelatory spirituality of which the Bible is the scripture par excellence. This Margoli­outh did not do.

Central Doctrines and the Conflict with Hinduism

The central piece of the two creeds is ‘one true God’ of masculine gender who makes himself known to his believers through an equally single, favoured individual. The theory of mediumistic communication has not only a psychology: it has also a theology laid down long ago in the oldest part of the Bible in Deuteronomy (18.19, 20). The whole prophetic spirituality, whether found in the Bible or in the Quran, is mediumistic. Here everything takes place through a proxy, through an intermediary.

None of the similarities however promote peace. The seeds of conflict, not only amongst the ‘believers’ but also with the rest of the world, lie at the heart of the two ideologies. A larger charity of mutual respect, toler­ance, and co-existence cannot be the strong points of such the­ologies.

Like Christianity, Hinduism too, though not by choice, found itself in conflict with Islam. But unlike Christianity, it never tried to study it. Hindus fought Muslim invaders but neglected to study the religious and ideological motives of the invaders. Hindus developed a deep science of inner exploration. They did not speak or consider worth evaluating a spiritual claim of an exclusive God, jealous of other gods, who has a favourite emissary to deliver his messages, and allows his followers to carry crusades; kill if the ‘non-believers’ fail to convert; or levy heavy taxes for the non-believers to live as zimmis.

Is the Allah of the Quran a spiritual being? Is he discovered when a man’s heart is tran­quil, desireless and pure? Or, does he originate in a fevered state of the mind? What is the truth of Prophetism which lays down that God can be known only indirectly through a favourite intermediary- a ‘Last Prophet’? Hindu spirituality did not argue, debate, or oppose. It proclaimed that the true Godhead was beyond number and count; that it had many manifestations approachable in different ways; and so on without commenting or understanding the exclusivism inherent in other faiths. Hindu society paid a price for its indifference.

Hitherto we have looked on Hinduism through the eyes of Islam and Christianity. What are these ideologies from the point of Hindu spirituality? They are no more than ideologies, lacking in the inwardness of true religion and spirituality. Such an exercise also throws light on the modem ideologies of Commu­nism and Imperialism, inheritors of the prophetic mission or ‘burden’, which are just secularized versions of Christianity and Islam.

The East is waking up from its slumber. Its wisdom is becoming available to the world. Dogmas are under a cloud and claims of exclusivity are becoming unacceptable. Men and women are ceasing to be obedient believ­ers and are becoming seekers. People now realize that Godhead is their own true, secret status and they seek it in the depth of their own being. All this is in keeping with the wisdom of the East.

William Muir’s Book

Sir William Muir’s The Life of Mahomet, first published in 1861 in four volumes, was a pioneering and exhaustive study based wholly on orthodox original sources. Muir was also a believing Christian. He did have a missionary motivation though it did not much compromise his scholarship. In fact, he thought that for Missionary enterprise to succeed, a good biography of the Prophet, based on unimpeachable sources, respected by orthodox Muslim schol­ars, was a first necessary step.

His objectives wanted to oppose two kinds of narratives on the life of Muhammed. One was by Mis­sionary writers careless about their facts, slipshod in scholarship, hostile in intent, unsympathetic in treatment, and uninhibited in expressing their opinions. Muir probably shared these opinions, but he probably thought that facts would speak for themselves. He also wanted to oppose biographies written by native Muslim writers, highly fanciful and extrava­gant, based on fabricated traditions. He wanted his Life to be faithful to the early tradition which Muslims would respect better. This would finally help missionary activity as thinking Muslims would convert when they examine that the fanciful descriptions do not make historical sense.

He did not make clear however how Immaculate Con­ception, the Virgin Mother, the Only Begotten Son would also satisfy their historical sense. In fact, some of the thinking Mohammedans on whom Muir so much relied re­mained unmoved by Muir’s labour. Sir Sayyid Ahmad, writing his own biography of the Prophet in reply to Muir’s, argued that the Christians were dogmatic and had learnt to believe that while the miracles of Jesus were historical and well attested, those found in rival faiths were irrational.

Uncomfortable Affinities

Missionary scholars studying Islam with a view to converting Muslims found that there was a lot in common between Islam and their own faith. Both were Judaic in origin and both had common prophets. The Quran honours biblical proph­ets including Jesus. Both shared a common God and a common line of prophets, and both believed in Revelation from the same God. In fact, the prophet of Islam claimed that he communicated with the same God who communicated with Moses and Jesus and that he was merely re­viving the old religion of Ibrahim, the common patriarch of them all. In this revival, he expected the Jews, the Arabs, and the Christians to enlist under his banner.

With so much in common, missionaries thought that the Muslims should find no difficulty in converting to Christianity. Muir disagreed and he felt that this convergence was of no avail. For, the Muslims believed in Jesus not because of the Bible but because of the Quran, and his study had convinced him that the “object of Mahomet was entirely to supersede Christianity”. Also, since the Quran has taken much from the Bible, it, therefore, abounds with approaches to truth in a similar manner.

Corrupted Influences on the Prophet

Some Missionaries wondered why Islam should have in the first instance succeeded since all considering that Christianity was already present and the good news already known. They believed that the founder of Islam encountered a corrupt form of Christianity and that had he known the purer type; the story would have been very different. Muir agreed here. Sir Monier Williams, a Sanskritist with deep Missionary concerns, speculated in Modern India in 1878 that had Muhammad associated with the purer form of Chris­tianity, Asia would have had millions of Christians and Muhammed would have become a great saint in Christianity for his brilliant work.

A new opportunity came again for Christianity when England dominated the world during the last few centuries. Muir rues at the lost opportunity. English rulers neglected their responsibility and ‘their lives too often presented a practical and powerful, a constant and a living, argument against the truth of our holy faith.’

The Quarrels Stay Intact Despite Similarities

Though so much alike and have the same origin, Christi­anity and Islam quarrelled for centuries with fire and sword. At one time, it seemed that Islam had won and it was knocking at the door of Europe. But after much labour and luck, Europe greatly improved its weaponry, its military position, which added to a weapon of ideological warfare to stay strong. Islam had no way of meeting this challenge.  It had to even allow some sort of free­dom and physical security to the Christians and the Jews in the countries it dominated.

Meanwhile, Europe, through a period of rationalism, became less Christian and did not apply the Spanish solution (Inquisitions) to the Muslim problem. But it did recognize the usefulness of Christianity for the empire. The Missionaries did not have the encouragement to use blatant force but had tacit support from the administrators. They developed Apologetics, the art of establishing the truths of Christianity and controverting those of other faiths.

The Muslims were new to religious discussion but picked up the art well. The Missionaries tried to prove Jesus with the help of the Quran, Muslims tried to prove Muhammad’s mission with the help of the Bible which prophesized Muhammad’s mission. Thus, they bluffed each other but could not always keep the mask on.

Muir found in Islam a ‘dangerous adversary’ who has ‘borrowed so many weapons from Christianity.’ Muslims argued that had the Jews and the Christians not falsified their scriptures, they would have long back joined the banner of Islam. Interestingly, each side was ra­tional about the faith of the other, but not about its own. The language of the debate was often sharp, its parameters were however limited; a single God communicating with followers through a privileged single medium and exercising an un­bending enmity towards heathens and infidels. There were no concerns of a deeper spirituality.

Common Enemy-Idolatry

Though Christianity and Islam quarrelled between them­selves, their real and ultimate target remained “Idolatry”— their name for all non-Semitic religions. The Missionary writers highly appreciated Islam’s role in cleansing the world from the scourge of idolatry. Islam recognized Chris­tians as “people of the Book,” an honour allowing them some amount of security.

Christians and Muslims derived their Monotheism from the Jews, but the Jews them­selves were not monotheists in the beginning. Like other neigh­bouring peoples, they had their tribal god towards whom they felt a special loyalty but did not deny the gods of others. This develop­ment of one god as true and others as false had to wait till the arrival of their Prophets, beginning with Moses.

It seems that the early Jews did not know Jehovah accord­ing to the biblical testimony itself. While Jehovah revealed himself to Moses as the only God of the Jews, they were worshipping another God under the symbol of a Bull, a mode they had probably adopted in Egypt. ‘Slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour,’ ordered Jehovah to those who truly followed him. Three thousand men died in a day and a new relig­ion came into existence. The killers became the priestly class, the Levites.

Jewish scholars tried to allegorize the events of Exodus and ethicize their God. The Talmuds contain much that is noble and inspiring. But the biblical similarities remain strong. Its God could not shed his jealousy and his exclusive character, and it continued to regard the Gods of other people as “abominations.” In course of time, Christianity and Islam adopted this God in all his exclusiveness and jeal­ousy.

While with the Jews, he remained their God alone; but, except spasmodically, he refused to be the God of others. Other people had to make do with their own Gods, howsoever ‘false’. With the advent of Christianity and Islam, Jehovah came into his own and He offered to be the God of all. As His followers became more powerful, the peril became increasingly more physical. There was another difference. Though the Jewish God was single, he spoke through many mouths. Moses was probably the most important, but a plurality of prophethood was recog­nized. It is unfortunate that the Judaic religion could not take full advantage of this principle.

Pre-Islamic Arabs

Monotheism of the Semitic kind was also unknown to Pre- Islamic Arabs. They knew the Jews and the Christians but they had no attraction for their God. They had their own Gods and they were perfectly satisfied with them. The more religious of the Arabs who sought a deeper contact with their Gods often retired to the hills in their vicinity.

Their neighbours followed a faith that had a single God and a single Prophet. Muhammad was one of those persons attracted by the new creed. He adopted the God of his powerful neighbours and claimed that He communicated with him like earlier communication with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; that, in fact, his communication updated earlier communications and even abro­gated them. He also insisted that he was also the last apostle of this true God.

The Prophet fulminated against the traditional Gods of his people but without being able to move them. In the process, at one stage, he even felt isolated. In this state of mind, he recognized the traditional deities of Mecca as worthy intermediaries. The Meccans were pleased and offered to make up. But the Prophet began to have doubts and thought that Satan inspired the conciliatory verses. These are ‘Satanic verses’ which from a deeper spiritual angle were probably the most Angelic of the Quranic verses.

The Prophet appealed to the Arabs’ patriotic feeling that his was an Arabic revelation. But the people argued that he was a poet, or a soothsayer, or was plainly out of his mind. As the Prophet gained strength, he supplemented spiritual threats with physical ones. They plundered the Meccans and their caravans. He eventually invaded Mecca. The traditional idols and their shrines became houses of the new God. The Arabs had an option be­tween conversion and death.

The new creed was attractive economically and politically. There was a promise to the believers of not only houris in paradise but had also a share in the booty accruing from new religious wars that were becoming the order of the day; they also had a share in the large revenues coming from a fast-expanding Muslim Empire. Every Arab drafted as a soldier of Islam and was a partner in the revenues derived from the loot and exploitation of the newly conquered lands- brotherhood in action.

The remunerations were according to one’s nearness to the Prophet. The widows of Muhammad received an annual allow­ance of 10,000 dirhams each. These stipends were hereditary, and they created a class of people who lived on the fat of the land they occupied. They laid the foundation of a thorough imperialism that was more du­rable than any other the world had known in the past. And this is how a people who had been hitherto upright and chivalrous, became a great scourge and cruel invaders and rulers.

But the greatest decline was in the concept of their Godhead. Their new God was “one”; it was male; it was exclusive and intoler­ant.  It was also different from their accus­tomed Gods in another important sense: their traditional Gods spoke to them directly but the new one dealt with them through an intermediary. Pagan Arabs were a tolerant people. In fact, many Christians and Jews had found shelter with them. But as soon as the Pagan Arabs became Muslim, Jews and Christians had no place.

Continued in Part 2