It was indeed very nice of you to give me an opportunity to express my views on the important points raised by Dr. Godbole of Pune.
Alas!
every word of Dr. Godbole is true. This truth has been brought out clearly
in many documented publications on Christianity and Islam.
�Sarva Dharma Samabãhva�
People, who think on these lines commit the blunder of believing that Islam is only Namaz, Roza, Zakat and Hajj which are of course common to all religions in one form or the other. The fact is, and it needs to be widely known, that individual and communal effort for converting other people to Islam and Jihad for achieving it, is as much a part of religious duty prescribed by the Quran and the Hadis for every Muslim.
Only Hindus ignorant of the true nature of Islam can preach the concept of unity of Hindu and Semitic religions. It has never been accepted by the Muslims, and justifiably so. They say, �How can we respect a philosophy which we believe to be entirely misguided? Where is the question of equal respect?� (Dr. Mushirul Huq: Islam in Secular India). Had India been an Islamic country run by Shariat law, people claiming that both Islam and Hinduism are true would have been beheaded as is recorded by Muslim historians to have been the rule during the reign of Firoz Tughlaq and Sikandar Lodi etc.
The famous Ali Mian (of Nadwa Madrasa, Lucknow), one of the most respected and internationally recognised authority on Islam today, says in his book, Calamity of Linguistic and Cultural Chauvinism: �A man should have not only emotional attachment to Islam, he should also hate all un-Islamic philosophies, thoughts and ideals. As a matter of fact, the Quran expresses at numerous places its hatred for the devil and the standard-bearers of falsehood and ignorance.� (Read Non-Muslims)
Scholars like Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Syed Qutb of Egypt strongly assert that Quran divides humanity into two parties: Muslims, the party of God, and all others, the party of the Devil.
Therefore, people who think that Muslims can retain the Islam of the Quran, the Hadis and the Hidayah and yet respect or tolerate the polytheistic and idolatrous Hindus, are living in a fool�s paradise. � �Islam with all its apparatus was conceived and devised as the religion to end all religions� (M.R.A. Beg), and not to compromise or fraternize with them, except as a matter of strategy. Its scriptures and history repeatedly proclaim that it is engaged in perpetual war against Kufr (idol-worship and polytheism). The celebrated author of the Hidayah says that war with Kafirs is the norm and peace contingent upon circumstances beyond the control of Muslims. This war will end only when the whole of humanity accepts Islam.
Indian religions and Islam are not two currents flowing in the same direction and converging towards a common goal as is often argued. They are in fact two currents of thought flowing in diametrically opposite directions. No sane person can ever think of riding two boats floating in these two currents and reach the same destination. Nothing but disaster awaits such a person. Hindus have been witnessing that disaster for 1400 years. They may go on pleasing themselves by repeating such experiments till ultimately Islam catches up with them. The latest to take up such experiment is the Gayatri Parivar based in Shantikunja (Haridwar). The founder of this organization, Acharya Shriram Sharma, is reported to have said� �The Gita is the Quran of India, while the Quran is the Gita of Arabia.�
Only a
few people like Dr. Godbole realize that Muslims are what Islam has made
them, otherwise how is it that neo-convert Muslim rulers were more cruel
and ruthless than foreign Muslims towards Hindus, their co-religionists
of a few days earlier? They did not brutalize Islam, Islam brutalized them.
Muslims commitment to Islam
If there is one religion which still sits heavily on its followers in the modern world, it is Islam. It has not shed its Quranic proselytization zeal a bit over 14 centuries. In the words of Syed Shahabuddin, a person who denies even a single word of the Quran or the Hadis ceases to be a Muslim. The Quran and the Hadis have not a single word advocating respect (ãdar) for prevailing un-Islamic faiths.
Preaching Mantras like �equal respect for all religions�, �all religions advocate non-violence and egalitarianism�, and �all religions are different paths leading to the same universal truth�, has done incalculable harm to the gullible Hindu.
The modern Hindu youths� knowledge of Islam is nil and their knowledge of Hinduism is confined to what they see in the weekly visits of their parents to the temples, or in abundantly increasing commercial screening of mythological films and T.V. serials (some of them produced by Muslims), or the very effective propaganda presenting Islam as tolerant and secular and Muslims as the persecuted lot by Hindu rulers.
The result of ad nauseum repetition of the above Mantras during last 120 years has been that Hindu boys and girls find no objection to changing over from their religion to what they have come to believe as equally good or better - Islam or Christianity - for petty matrimonial or financial benefits.
On the other hand, Islam has a vast, well-organised and well funded educational system. It runs in India about 40,000 Madrasas and 8,00,000 Maktabs (most of them opened after 1950) besides thousand of Islamic schools and colleges and three Universities. There are said to be about 30,00,000 mosques in India where congregational prayers are held and sermons given by learned and devout persons having views similar to the Maulanas quoted above. It has a large and well-organised Muslim press and propaganda machine publishing lakhs of books and pamphlets every year in all Indian languages. Young Muslim boys and girls born and brought up in such religiously charged atmosphere can under no circumstance be persuaded into believing that any religion other than their�s is true and worthy of respect. The result is a constant flow of youth from Hinduism to Islam.
Another result of this propaganda is that any political party which talks of Hinduism is looked upon as communal even by the vast majority of Hindus fed upon it.
Speaking of propaganda, I can do no better than quote the French scholar JACQUES ELLUL from the preface of BAT YE�OR�s well-documented book, The Dhimmi (Jews and Christians under Islam):
This was written in 1980.One ought not to forget that the terrible war of 1947 in India between the Muslims and Hindus was fought on a purely religious basis. More than one million people died and since massacres had not taken place when the Muslims had lived within the Hindu-Buddhist orbit, one may presume that the war was caused by the attempt to set up an independent Islamic republic� The discovery of Islam�s oil resources and economic power, hardly needs elaboration. Taken as a whole,� [it] follows a logical sequence: Political independence, religious revival, and economic power. We are now witnessing a vast program to propagate Islam, involving the building of mosques everywhere, even in the USSR, the diffusion of Arab literature and culture, and the recovery of history. Islam now boasts of having been the cradle of all civilization at a time when Europe was sunk in barbarism and the Far East was torn asunder by divisions. Islam as the origin of all the sciences and arts is a theme that is constantly developed.
In France it is no longer acceptable to criticize Islam or the Arab countries. This has led many intellectuals, Christians and others, to be favourably and uncritically disposed towards them. On the intellectual level there is first of all an increasing number of works of an apparently scholarly nature whose declared purpose is to eradicate prejudices and false preconceptions about Islam, with regard to both its doctrines and its customs (History). Thus these works �demonstrate� that it is untrue that the Arabs were cruel conquerors and that they disseminated terror and massacred those people who would not submit to their rule. It is false that Islam is intolerant; on the contrary, it is held to be tolerance itself. It is false that women had an inferior status and that they were excluded from public life. It is false that the Jihad (Holy War) was a war fought for material gain, and so on. In other words, everything that has been regarded as historically unquestionable about Islam is considered as propaganda, and a false picture of Islam has been implanted in the West, which, it is claimed, must be corrected by the truth.
It is no longer a matter of an exchange of ideas between intellectuals, but rather of an authentic religious adherence. Several well known French intellectuals have made a spectacular conversion to Islam. Islam regards itself as having a universal vocation and proclaims itself to be the only true religion to which everyone must adhere. We should have no illusions about the matter: no part of the world will be excluded. Now that Islam has national, military, and economic power, it will attempt to extend its religion everywhere, including the British Commonwealth and the United States.
If advanced
Christian countries like Britain, France and USA are worried about such
propaganda by Islam, a sister religion of Christianity, Hindu India can
ignore it only at her great peril. Muslim leaders and scholars are never
tired of telling their co-religionists, �India, the whole of it, is our
heritage because every inch of it had been conquered by our ancestors by
sheddig their blood� (F.K. Durrani in Meaning of Pakistan, Hussain
Ahmad Madni quoted by Hamid Dalwai in Muslim Politics in Secular India,
and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad quoted by B.R. Nanda in Gandhism, Pan-Islamism,
Imperialism and Nationalism).
Common Ancestors
It is no use reminding Muslims that their ancestors were Hindus. They can only feel sorry for them like the Prophet of Islam who felt sorry for his uncle on the latter�s refusal to convert to Islam at the time of his death. Consequently, according to the Prophet, he had to go to hell. While Allah is all forgiving, the sin of polytheism and idolatry is so heinous that even the Prophet was not permitted by Allah to pray for the soul of his deceased mother because she died a non-Muslim. (Sahi Muslim)
So those
with 33 crores of gods and goddesses can only be looked upon by devout
Muslims as denizens of hell to be abhorred and at best pitied.
Sufis, Pirs, Ghazis and Shahids
For those who have read about Sufis, the most ludicrous event is the sight of our big-wigs placing wreaths and chadars on their graves and praising them for their humanism and secularism. Their biographies, written by Muslim scholars, rapturously boast of their enthusiasm for converting Hindus to Islam by fair and foul means including threat of death and slavery. Athar Abbas Ali Rizvi, the author of History of Sufism in India, feels disgusted by the ignorance/indifference of Hindus. Says he: �To the Hindus who considered him (Salar Masud Ghazi, who offered only the sword or the Quran to lakhs of Hindus), a saint of miraculous powers, the number of their brethren he killed or Islamised was then, as it is now, meaningless.�
This comment
of a Muslim scholar who has made a special study of Sufism in India applies
to most of the Sufis and Muslim saints, who have been honoured by their
co-religionists by affixing to their names the honorific Ghazi (the killer
of Hindus) or Shahid (the martyr in war against Hindus). Many of the important
ones amongst them are publicly venerated by our Presidents, Prime Ministers,
Chief Ministers and Governors setting an examples for the ignorant and
gullible Hindu masses.
Need of the Hour
The need of the hour for Hindus is to wake up to realities instead of perpetuating delusions. Listen and give a chance to the realists.
The realist Dr. B.R. Ambedkar says: �This (Hindu-Muslim) antagonism is not to be attributed to material causes. It is spiritual in character� historical, religious, cultural and social� the realist must take note of the fact that the Mussalmans look upon the Hindus as Kafirs, who deserve more to be exterminated than protected.�
Another realist Mohammad Ali of Khilafat fame says: �It is poor statesmanship to slur over inconvenient realities� honest and frank recognition of the deep-seated prejudices that hinder it (Hindu-Muslim Unity) and the yawning differences that divide.�
Dr. Ishwari
Prasad, the eminent historian, says: �The religions of the two (Muslims
and Hindus) are so fundamentally different that coalescence is only possible
when some parts of their orthodox religions are forgotten and their place
is taken by liberal tolerance.� Hinduism, time and again, has proved its
capacity and desire to accommodate. The big and inconvenient question is:
Can Islam give up its hatred for Kufr (Hinduism) and its right to destroy
it? Can it give up its proselytization of Hindus? Can it officially accept
family planning? Can the Muslim Ulema be made agreeable to issue unanimous
fatwas to this effect?
Footnotes:
The
writer lives in Lucknow (UP), and has been doing great service to Hindu
Dharma and Society through his writings and publications.
