The Fundamental Failure

The Fundamental Failure
by
Sita Ram Goel (From "The Calcutta Koran Petition" available online at www.bharatvani.org)
These perverse efforts to re-write medieval Muslim history in India are bound to fail in solving the “communal problem” because the psyche which created that history continues to pulsate in the Quran.  The Quran cannot be re-written by re-writing that history.  On the other hand, an honest presentation of that history can help immensely an understanding of the Muslim behaviour pattern which is shaped by the Quran.  Let there be no mistake that Hindus will never be able to tackle the “Muslim minority” unless they understand the source of its behaviour pattern.
But Hindus have so far failed to study the Quran with any seriousness whatsoever.  That is why they have readily conceded the Muslim claim that the Quran is a “religious scripture full of lofty messages, moral and spiritual”.  They have confused the language of the Quran with the language of Hindu spirituality so that Allah passes for the ParmAtman and the Prophet for the Purushottama.  They feel puzzled when Muslims “fail” to live upto their expectations.  But they never care to examine the assumptions on which those expectations are based.  On the contrary, they appeal to the Muslims in the name of the Quran.  Muslims cannot be blamed if they feel amused at this presumptuousness on the part of “accursed infidels”.
It is high time for Hindu scholarship to come forward and make a serious study of the Quran with the help of Islamic theology and history.  It is high time for Hindus to have a close look at the character of Allah which is the seed from which everything else in Islam has sprouted.  The results will be very rewarding.
“Hindus have fought Muslim invaders,” writes Ram Swarup, “land locally established Muslim dynasties but neglected to study the religious and ideological motives of the invaders.  Hindu learning, or whatever remained of its earlier glory, followed the old grooves and its texts and speculations remained unmindful of the new phenomenon in their midst.  For example, even as late as the thirteenth century, when Malik Kafur was attacking areas in the far South, in the vicinity of the seat of Sri Ramanujacharya, the scholarly dissertations of the disciples of the great teacher show no awareness of this fact.”
He continues: “Hindus were masters of many spiritual disciplines; they had many Yogas and they had a developed science of inner exploration.  There had been a continuing discussion whether the ultimate reality was dvaita or advaita.  It would have been very interesting and instructive to find out if any of these savants of Yoga ever met, on their inner journey, a Quranic being, Allah (or its original, Jehovah of the Bible), who is jealous of other Gods, who claims sole sovereignty and yet whom no one knows except through a pet go-between, who appoints a favourite emissary and uses the latter’s mouth to publish his decrees, who proclaims crusades and jihad, who teaches to kill the unbelievers and to destroy their shrines and temples and to levy permanent tribute on them and to convert them into zimmis, into hewers of wood and drawers of water.  Even today, the question retains its importance.  Is the Allah of the Quran a spiritual being?  Or, is he some sort of a mental and vital formation, a hegemonistic idea?  Does he represent man’s own deepest truth and reside in his innermost being?  Or, is he a projection of a less edifying source in man’s psyche?  Is he discovered when a man’s heart is tranquil, desireless and pure?  Or, does he originate in a fevered state of the mind?  Is his source the Samadhi of the Yogic bhumi or some sort of a trance of a non-Yogic bhumi?  In the Yoga-darshana, this distinction is fundamental but it is not much remembered these days.”