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If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem…

06 Wed Dec 2017

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“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” sang the Israelites, “may my right hand forget her cunning, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” That was approximately 2,600 years ago during the Babylonian captivity, a memory preserved in Psalm 137. To most Israelis, US president Donald Trump’s decision to declare his country’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was simply a late awakening to a most basic fact.

To the rest of the world, Trump’s actions, as always, were reason for hyperbole and haranguing. The spokesman for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the US was “plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight,” and the Palestinian envoy to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, added, “He is declaring war in the Middle East, he is declaring war against 1.5 billion Muslims.” As can be expected, criticism has been sharpest from Muslim states and with a little more diplomatic decorum from Europe, Russia, and China. In addition, analysts of all stripes have been all over print and the airwaves predicting great upheaval in the Middle East and the derailment of decades of patient US diplomacy.

It is unclear, however, how much of the breast-beating is warranted. The primary argument against Trump’s declaration seems to be that it will cause unrest in the Middle East. Yet when in the past several decades has something not caused unrest in the region? What is the guarantee that there will be no violence in Gaza if the United States desists from the announcement? Can anyone even distinguish the chaos due to the US declaration from the upheaval, tumult, riot, violence, or disturbance that are routine to the region, and at that point, does it really matter?

The countries of the Levant are swirling in a whirlpool of chaos, instability, and terrorism that has been largely of their own making for almost a decade. Arab street decries any move by the international community that may benefit Israel as detrimental to peace and stability, implicitly encouraging a complete blockade and destruction of the Jewish state.

It must also be remembered, as Tzipi Hotovely recently alluded to, that Israel has constantly lived in a state of undeclared war. Any more unrest that is promised by the terrorists of the Middle East will hardly be noticed in the quotidian deadly exchanges with Hamas, Hezbollah, the occasional Syrians, and other armed thugs.

Another point of criticism of the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been that it violates international law – Jerusalem is seen as occupied territory and any change of demographics on disputed land or official recognition to it is illegal. However, this fails to recognise that the United States has merely recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel but has not defined the boundaries of the city – that is still left to the Israelis and Palestinians in future peace negotiations.

One might argue that Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel muddies its role as an impartial arbitrator. Yet that ship, at least in Arab eyes, has already sailed – no one views the Great Satan as a neutral judge. What Arabs and Israelis both count on is the diplomatic, economic, and military wherewithal the United States is capable of bringing to bear upon the side that violates a peace agreement.

What will Trump’s announcement have on the other states in the region? Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei has warned of dire consequences but it would be an unusual day when the Islamic Republic does not threaten to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Trump’s announcement may force the Palestinians to show strength through terror and this might fray relations between Fatah and Hamas that had only recently been mended with much difficulty. However, Jerusalem does not recognise any Palestinian player as a genuine partner for peace – translation: dial down the terrorism – and there is no missed opportunity here.

Ankara has threatened to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel but relations have already been frigid between the two American allies after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states Israel has peace treaties with, have also not reacted positively to the news. Yet it is not sure what either Abdel Fattah el-Sisi or King Abdullah will or can do as neither country has had a particularly good past with the Palestinians.

The real question is about Saudi Arabia’s reaction to this all. Traditionally, Riyadh has stoked the Palestinian crisis periodically and refused to recognise the Jewish state. Recent rumours, however, have left several commentators murmuring about a clandestine US-Israel-Saudi Arabia alliance to contain Iran’s expanded influence in the Middle East after a successful turn of events in Iraq and Syria. The whispers became even louder after Trump tacitly supported a great purge in the Saudi royal family by the crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman. This has always seemed far-fetched to me and Washington’s recent dousing of Saudi ambitions in Lebanon – Saad Hariri’s removal – leaves one thinking that there are still some kinks in that plan.

More importantly, there were even rumours that Mohammad bin Salman had secretly flown to Israel to meet with its leaders to discuss a Palestinian peace plan, a normalisation of relations, and Iran. Such delicate ventures may be beyond the crown prince in view of his streak of recklessness on display in dealing with other crises such as Yemen. While there is indeed a temporary alignment of interests between Israel and Saudi Arabia, one bête noire does not a rapprochement make.

It is also unlikely, if such a triumvirate ever existed, that the topic of Jerusalem would not have cropped up. In that case, despite Riyadh’s official dismay at the US decision, it will be interesting to see what it actually does. Yet what about the impact on US ties with its other allies in the region such as Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates? Regardless of what State Department mandarins think, this administration has made it quite clear that American allies around the globe have not done enough. It is not improbable that Trump prefers to deal with Riyadh alone and coerce the “smaller” allies with the former’s help.

Could the Jerusalem declaration be part of Trump’s personal “charm?” The president is enveloped in legal battles and his administration has yet to be fully staffed or retain any member for a decent period. Trump had also promised during his election campaign that he would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the US embassy to the city. The Jerusalem declaration not only distracts his opponents from the domestic quagmire but also delivers on a campaign promise, thus reinforcing his image to his base, perhaps, as the anti-politician. It is also possible that Trump is using his declaration as a bargaining chip to force the Palestinians to the negotiating table, the message being that there is much to lose by holding out.

Ultimately, the issue is more religious than national as Hassassian’s statement clearly reveals. As the Oslo Accords and the failed Camp David Summit in 2000 demonstrated, Jerusalem is not a negotiable issue for either side. The Arabs want to control their holy site, the Haram al-Sharif; the Jews remind us that when that was the case before 1967, they were not given access to their holy sites. More than geopolitics, it is this facet that will shape the reaction of the Arab states to American recognition of Jerusalem as the Israelis capital – it would be political suicide to even sit idly by as the United States moved its embassy to the disputed city.

It is altogether a different matter to discuss Palestine’s right over Jerusalem or even its own existence, given that it has never existed as a state – before 1967, the West Bank, along with Jerusalem, was occupied by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The Palestinian government Cairo set up in the Strip, ironically, was not recognised by Jordan.

Israel’s reaction to Trump’s announcement has so far been muted but the bubbling joy underneath the uncharacteristically nonchalant surface is palpable. The most reaction came from Naftali Bennett, the leader of the HaBayit HaYehudi and the Minister for both, Education and Diaspora Affairs, who is said to have written to the US president, “thank you from the bottom of my heart for your commitment and intention to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Otherwise, the government has generally been quiet. The Israeli commentariat, however, has been effusive, Caroline Glick calling the decision 70 years late but welcome and Arsen Ostrovsky reiterating that Jerusalem is the “eternal & undivided capital of the State of Israel and the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people!” Most Israelis probably relate to the words of HaAvoda leader Avi Gabbay. When asked about the imbroglio that had resulted from Trump’s announcement he replied, “When my parents came from Morocco to Jerusalem, I can assure you they didn’t check the State Department website to see if it’s the capital or not. They knew Jerusalem was the capital and just came.”

But what does Trump’s declaration really matter? Jerusalem is the seat of the Israeli government as President Reuven Rivlin remarked, and no military in the Arab world is capable of removing them from it. No borders change on the ground and no one falls one the wrong side of a line; territories are not swapped. Is the whole drama not purely symbolic? Perhaps, but society is not so cynical yet that symbols have lost their value. And in the Middle East, few symbols are bigger than the City of David.

What Islamic Enlightenment?

15 Sat Apr 2017

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Islamic EnlightenmentDe Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. 432 pp.

The end of the Cold War did not usher in a thousand years of peace; nor did it see the end of History. Instead, even as the victorious Western alliance was popping champagne, a new menace was taking shape in the Islamic world. Terrorism was certainly not a new phenomenon, but the global reach and sophistication of what emerged in the closing decade of the second millennium was unsurpassed. Samuel Huntington famously – controversially – called it a clash of civilisations. Whether he was right or not, the Age of Terrorism has come to be deeply linked to Islam. It is this perception that Christopher de Bellaigue hopes to dispel. His latest book, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, is meant to be a riposte against Western historians, politicians, and commentators who repeatedly demand that Islam join the 21st century, that it should “subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.” To those who clamour for an Islamic Enlightenment, Reformation, and Renaissance, to those insisting that the religion of Muhammad develop a sense of humour, de Bellaigue’s response is that it already has, albeit with a particular cultural touch.

Westerners have not generally come to the East with open minds and in their inability to see past a European universalism, de Bellaigue contends, have missed the fact that not all Muslims are primitive, regressive terrorists. In fact, the Islamic world has not shown any more hostility towards modernity than Christendom did a couple of centuries earlier. The author dates the clash between European modernity and Islam in 1798 with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army on the shores of Egypt. De Bellaigue astutely observes that Western ideas were initially absorbed with greater success when they were perceived to be universal than later, after World War I, when they were seen as the business end of a hostile ideology.

Islamic Enlightenment locates the foci of modernisation in Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran, where numerous figures, nationalists, litterateurs, monarchists, as well as the ulema, engaged with Western science, technology, and political science to adapt them to the needs of Islamically-minded societies. However, many of the modernisers were inspired not by the trinkets and gimmicks of European innovation but by the achievements of classical Islamic civilisation. De Bellaigue narrates the tales of modernisers of all shades. Some were intrinsically hostile to Western methods yet awed by them such as Abdulrahman al-Jabarti; others infused the “genius of Islam” in the universal knowledge the West possessed such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Some of the reformers were optimistic of Western intentions in the Muslim world such as Muhammad Abduh, while others felt forced into reforms such as the Ottoman sultans Abdulmecid I and Abdulaziz. There were, of course, a few who saw modernity as a means to power and pursued Western knowledge with a purely secular interest such as Muhammad Ali Pasha. Regardless, the author notes, a liberalising, modernising tendency had emerged strongly in the Middle East.

This pushback against Islamophobia is laudable yet eventually flawed in its conception. Fundamentally, Islamic Enlightenment tries to pack into one term what in Europe properly describes at least four zeitgeists – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to imagine, at least in Europe, an Enlightenment that was not preceded by the Reformation and the Renaissance. It was the rediscovery of the classical world and an emphasis on humanism based on reason that caused the first crack in the totalising edifice of the Christian faith. Renaissance intellectuals did not necessarily reject religion but there was, nonetheless, a subtle shift in the way they approach it. The Reformation continued this trend in two important ways – first, and more obvious, is the theological schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, and second, the savagery and horrendous toll of the Thirty Years’ War – between a third and half of the population of Europe – finally broke the power of the Church in temporal matters after the peace at Westphalia in 1648.

These two short yet turbulent epochs paved the way for the Enlightenment. Made receptive to a gradual shift from faith to reason, autocracy to democracy, European society broadly supported the principles of the Enlightenment even if not the pace of some of its most forceful advocates. The Counter-Enlightenment remained a German nationalistic rebellion against French supremacy in the arts rather than a full-blooded critique of the Enlightenment itself. Various aspects of Enlightenment thinking – in the arts, political reform, economic reorganisation, religious reconceptualisation – were realised over the next century and half in step with the Industrial Revolution.

De Bellaigue’s brief history of 19th century reform movements in the Middle East – to which he devotes half the book – describes abortive attempts at modernisation that underscores this point further. Middle Eastern – Islamic? – attempts to replicate Europe’s material successes failed precisely because they focused purely on the material aspects of the European experience without adequately contemplating on the socio-cultural reformations that had taken place since the late 14th century that had brought Europe to a place whence the Enlightenment was possible. ‘Enlightenment with an Islamic flavour’ deviates sufficiently from the European experience that it cannot be herded under the same umbrella.

As de Bellaigue narrates, most Muslim modernisers were enthralled by Western science and technology but retained their faith in the supremacy of Islam. Even secular, power-hungry rulers and administrators were loathe to go to war against the ulema in the name of Western science or progress for fear that they would destabilise their kingdoms and lose their thrones, or worse, their lives. This was not an altogether unfounded fear, as Mirza Taki Khan Farahani found out in a bathhouse in Kashan.

Reforms with largely material goals in mind can hardly be termed an Enlightenment. If technology were the sole arbiter of progress, some of today’s most visious terrorist groups such as the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and ISIS could be said to be progressive. All the major terrorist groups in the 21st century have access to highly sophisticated weaponry and knowledge of explosives and tactics to challenge most national armies, an equation that Middle Eastern rulers of two centuries ago would have yearned for. The pitfall of such progress is visible – although the armies of Muslim states reduced the technological gap between themselves and their European counterparts over the 19th century, there was a backlash against cooperation with Europe after World War I that returned the socio-political situation almost to where it had been a hundred years earlier.

It is also difficult to understand how de Bellaigue considers the fervour of the 19th century as an Enlightenment when many of the most influential actors, be they pashas, clerics, or men of science, continued to cast a sheep’s eye on Islam. Nor was this the Islam of the 10th century Mu’tazilites, a relatively open faith not allergic to external knowledge or inquiry. By the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, it was well past the era of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali or Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya and the closing of the Muslim mind. This Islam, intrinsically regressive as Shiraz Maher argues in his excellent Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea, looked to the era of its prophet and his companions as the most perfect era in human history and was, thus, fundamentally antithetical to reason. This is not to say that such a society cannot change, but there is certainly a big question mark on whether such a society is capable of an Enlightenment.

Finally, the European Age of Imperialism was not an epoch of liberalism in the Middle East. None of the bold reformers of Egypt, Turkey, or Iran were democrats in the spirit of Jacques Pierre Brissot. In fact, all of de Bellaigue’s examples were despots whose liberal tendencies ended outside the throne room. The question for the author becomes whether it is possible for autocrats to usher in an Enlightenment. Unintentionally, Islamic Enlightenment serves as a warning to Western politicians who believe that they can play midwife to liberal democracy in the Middle East: even when such an endeavour had local support, it was not quite liberal and eventually failed.

All said and done, de Bellaigue is not wrong in his larger point. There is a tendency to view Islamic societies as intrinsically defective and prone to violence. This is no more true for them than it is for Christian societies, especially in the past, even the recent past. A little nuance beyond the sterile dichotomies an attention-deficit media churns out is required in reading the politics of the Middle East. However, nuance cannot be an excuse to whitewash all sorts of regressive social customs and political beliefs. No one sane thinks all Muslims are terrorists but there is a gradation of radicalisation in the Muslim world from terrorists to those who, for example, think blasphemy and apostasy should be punishable by death, to a far more tolerant and humanist sample. Although our attention is held mostly by one extreme end of the spectrum, it is only prudent to consider whether problems also lie further along the spectrum. Furthermore, while a more pleasant distant past holds out hope, it is only natural that it is the stormy present that educates our policies and beliefs.

It is tragic that those who are convinced of de Bellaigue’s broader message probably do not need his book as much and are already familiar with the research of scholars like Majid Fakhry, Lenn Goodman, Marshall Hodgson, and Ira Lapidus. Those who are not convinced, however, will likely not be persuaded by his book or even read it.

Riflessioni: India’s Religious Other

01 Fri May 2015

Posted by in India, Society, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

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One often hears Indian traditionalists argue that not all religions are equal, that the Sanskrit dharma does not translate as the English religion. In essence, the Gandhian phrase, sarva dharma sama bhava, which is considered the root of Indian secularism (though it speaks more to pluralism, actually), does not apply to the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Why are the latter two of these three religions – Judaism presents a complication that will be discussed later – considered as “outsiders” to the subcontinent despite having existed in the subcontinent for over a thousand years? In India, what passes for debate and discussion on this issue in the public sphere has so far been high on politicisation and wanting in scholarship. In academia, however, ironically even the Western variety that many Indian traditionalists like to ignorantly scoff at, there have been some articulate expositions of why the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally different from and unequal to the faith systems of the cultural Indosphere and elsewhere. The argument runs that the differences between the two groups are not simply about what to call the sine qua non (G-d) or even if it is indeed sine quibus non (many gods) but involve a radical difference in views on the political order as well.

How Many Gods?

Theo Sundermeier, professor of theology at Heidelberg University, makes an insightful distinction between religions in his Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext between primary and secondary religions. The former, Sundermeier explains, developed over hundreds if not thousands of years, usually within a single culture, society, and language with which the religion is inextricably intertwined. These would include the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions as easily as Hinduism. The latter category of religions are those that originate from an act of revelation or foundation and are monotheistic, universal, and of the Book. Secondary religions denounce primary religions as paganism, a collection of superstitions, and idolatry. The three Abrahamic faiths fit this description well.

This seemingly obvious categorisation holds an evolution of great import – from primary to secondary, religion changes from being a system that is irrevocably embedded in the institutional, linguistic, and cultural conditions of a society to become an autonomous system that can transcend political, ethnic, and other boundaries and transplant itself into any alien culture. As Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist at the University of Konstanz, describes in his Die Mosaische Unterscheidung: oder der Preis des Monotheismus, this change, which he calls the Mosaic distinction, is hardly about whether there is one god or there are many gods but about truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. Monotheistic faiths rest firmly on the distinction between their true god and the falseness of other gods; their truth does not stand in a complementary relationship to other truths but relegates any such claims to the realm of falsehood. They are exclusive, antagonistic, and explicitly codified and clearly communicated. As Assmann explains, the truth to be proclaimed comes complete with an enemy to be fought – only they know of “heretics and pagans, false doctrine, sects, superstition, idolatry, magic, ignorance, unbelief, heresy, and whatever other terms have been coined to designate what they denounce, persecute and proscribe as manifestations of untruth.” Secondary religions do not evolve from primary religions – rather, the emergence of the former represents a revolution, a rupture with the past that uncompromisingly divides the world between “Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christians and Jews, Muslims and infidels, true believers and heretics.”

Truth and Falsehood

Such orthodoxy was unknown to the followers of primary religions and they found secondary religions intolerant. Indeed, this is an age-old argument that has been most vividly captured perhaps by David Hume in The Natural History of Religions. What is the root of such unyielding intolerance, or to put it in more sympathetic terms, conviction in their version of the truth? Assmann argues that the Mosaic distinction created an entirely new category of truth – faith – and draws an interesting parallel with a scientific development that Werner Jäger, a 20th century classicist at Harvard University, described as the Parmenidian distinction in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Parmenides was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 6th century BCE and articulated something that is so taken for granted today in science that it would be difficult to imagine a world without such an obvious principle: Being is, and Notbeing is not; that which is cannot not be, and that which is not cannot be. Thus, knowledge is based on the distinction between true and false cognition and the irreconcilability between the two. In a sense, we can speak of scientific knowledge as intolerant too, as Hume did of monotheism.

Before the Mosaic distinction, knowledge and faith were not separate concepts. Pagans knew their gods but did not believe in them for they were not objects of faith; like myths, they were unverifiable to science but not necessarily devoid of knowledge. Before the Mosaic distinction, there were four kinds of fundamental truth: experiential (water is wet), mathematical (two plus two is four), historical (the life of Mokshagundam Visveswaraya), and truths conducive to life (ethics). The Mosaic distinction cleaved faith from knowledge and installed the former as a fifth truth that claimed knowledge of the highest authority even if it could not be verified on scientific grounds. The psychological and social impact of this differentiation is most visible in how Greek or Hindu science never conflicted with its philosophy, myths, or religious practices – each operated in their own domain. In fact, there are several anecdotes of highly acclaimed Hindu scientists subscribing to superstitions – S Ramanujan’s belief in astrology and CV Raman’s concern about the ill-effects of a solar eclipse come most readily to mind. But the monotheistic preoccupation with untruth in conjunction with faith-as-truth caused much acrimony in Christendom and the dar al-Islam.

Alterity and Exclusion

Were the conflict between primary and secondary religion merely about how many gods there were, the world might have been spared much strife. Hans Zirker, emeritus professor of theology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, sees monotheism as also a statement against being influenced by strife between divine powers, being divided permanently between a dualism of Good and Evil, or being trapped in the incessant wars of self-affirmation of pluralist people. This is the political dimension of monotheism. Eric Santner, professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, suggests that the universalism of monotheism is imposed upon all, thereby forcing them to acquiesce to the Mosaic distinction or to be regarded as failures. In The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, an obvious play on the title of Sigmund Freud’s work on psychopathology, Santner makes a case for the stranger – pagan? – to be the Other not for his spatial exteriority but because of his internal alterity. Externalities could be tolerated or influenced but internal alterity was far more insidious as it challenged faith-as-truth.

What makes Judaism different from Christianity and Islam, Assmann argues, is that Jews posit this universalism to be implemented at a messianic end-time whereas Christianity and Islam see it as an event at the time of their foundation. Judaism is no less exclusive than its Abrahamic descendents but as a result of a future date of redemption, Jewish communities have excluded themselves from the social and cultural customs of local gentile populations. Self-isolation has no need to resort to violence or persecute those with differing beliefs; for the Jews, goyim were free to worship whomever they wished. As a result Jewish communities have existed in harmony amidst pagan societies or found themselves to be co-victims of their own monotheistic cousins, alongside pagans, in the lands which came to be dominated by secondary religion.

In contrast, Christianity and Islam excluded the pagan rather than themselves. The Great Commission of Christianity and the Islamic obligation of da’wah not only excludes the pagan but directly puts them on a path of conflict. This intolerance stems from the absolute certitude that faith brings to Christianity and Islam. As Assmann points out, it makes no sense to talk of tolerance in pagan systems because there is no notion of incompatibility: one can tolerate something that is incompatible and irresolvable with one’s own views but how does one tolerate something that is not so steadfastly oppositional?

Translatability

Among the practitioners of primary religions, there has always been a translatability of divinity – the cosmology of different communities was believed to be compatible with each other. In a practice that has been the norm since at least Sumerian times, pagan communities sealed contracts upon oaths to their gods – for example, if the Akkadians wanted to consecrate a treaty with the Egyptians, the former would swear by Utu and the latter by Ra, the solar deities of their respective civilisations. There was no question of the falsehood of the other’s cosmology. The worship of each others’ gods was not unknown either – the Egyptian goddess Isis had a popular cult in Rome and the Syrian Atargatis and Phrygian Cybele and followers all around the Mediterranean. Usually, these gods would travel to foreign lands with traders and with increasing commerce and familiarity, would be established in the local pantheon as well. In the Indian context, the spread of Vedic Hinduism in India occurred along similar lines. The philosophical precepts of the Vedic Hindus were laid over the beliefs of the local communities and their gods were integrated into the Vedic pantheon. Many temples in Indian and Sri Lankan villages are dedicated to gramadevate – village deities – the legends behind whom trace their lineage back to a Puranic deity.

This is not to say that there were no conflicts among pagans – there were, and quite a few, but to go to war over theological differences was incomprehensible to them. In fact, conquerors often stole the idols of the vanquished to re-consecrate the deities back home with the dignity due them. Hercules has thus been around the Mediterranean quite a few times in the wars of Phoenicia, Greece, Carthage, and Rome. Religion, however, functioned as a medium of communication rather than as a criterion to exclude and eliminate. Varro, the Roman scholar who lived at the end of the 2nd century BCE, did not understand the need to distinguish between Jupiter and Yahweh as “the names are of no importance so long as the same thing is intended.” The Mosaic distinction prevented this translatability for Allah could never be Zeus nor Jesus be Apollo. This is another political ramification of monotheism.

Dominus Unum

The Mosaic distinction, if understood correctly, is, thus, a new political order rather than a cosmological order. The importance of this can be seen in that the primus inter pares status of the Abrahamic god and the prohibition of graven images is cemented in the first two of the ten commandments in every version. According to Assmann, this implies that monotheism does not deny the existence of other gods but merely holds them to be false and their worship, therefore, is not meaningless but disloyalty. The former is a cognitive category, a matter of knowledge, while the latter is a political category. In essence, one could not serve two masters. Christians themselves felt the repercussions of this tenet during the Reformation in the Early Modern era when Catholics were viewed with suspicion by monarchs belonging to the breakaway sects.

Historically, monotheistic faiths made outlandish accusations against pagan religions to keep their base radicalised while turning one community against another. The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, for example, spoke of pagans sacrificing their children in sacrifices and secret ceremonies, living in communities defined by adultery, murder, theft, corruption, and all other manner of immoral behavior. Idols, the faithful are told, is the beginning of spiritual fornication and the corruption of life. Thus, idolatrous religions are depicted as completely lacking in ethical orientation. Though this critique might be dated to a specific period of monotheistic radicalisation during the third century, it nonetheless lays claim to proper worship and ethical conduct. This dispute is not merely about the number of gods one worships but about the negation of all gods but one. Strictly speaking, most polytheistic faiths do not claim there to be many gods but that a singular divine presence animates itself in many ways. In that sense, the unity of divinity is not a monotheistic invention. However, the monotheistic spiritual binary is incapable of allowing for a primary god and several subordinate gods – it must insist on the exclusion of all gods but theirs.

There was no such paranoia in the lands where primary religions flourished. Monarchs patronised all religions in their kingdom despite their personal beliefs. Admittedly, at times, some received greater favour than others but never was a faith and its adherents exiled or made into second class subjects. Such pluralism was evident even in recent times. In Nepal, during the monarchy, Hindu and Buddhist holy days were both observed despite the official status of the state as Hindu and an overwhelming portion of the population – about 85 per cent – being Hindu. The closeness between the Hindu and Buddhist communities has historically been so great that it is difficult to demarcate the two in terms of social customs even today. During the famous Bunga Dyah Jatra festival in Laliptur, for example, the Hindu kings of Nepal participated during the climactic Bhoto Jatra phase during which they had to climb up the ceremonial chariot and display a sacred vest to the crowds.

Disenchanting the World

Another reason monotheism stands as the Other is that unlike polytheistic faiths, it disenchants the world. Pagan myths usually involved humans cavorting with the gods, in war as well as in love. This entanglement gives structure to the cosmos, describing its oppositional and synergetic forces in a manner that can be easily grasped by all. Furthermore, the gods bring order to society: with each trade, settlement, and resource associated with a patron deity, a network of duties and obligations is created. Each cult, so to speak, must be balanced with others in the greater community. As Assmann argues, this can even be extended to human destiny in that the stories of the gods give meaning to human relations as well. “By telling stories about the gods, myths bring order to human life.” Polytheism is synonymous with cosmotheism, and the divine cannot be divorced from the world. It is this theology that monotheism attacks. The divine is liberated from its ties to the cosmos, society, and the people, and in its place is the relationship of the individual with a divinity that stands outside the world, time, and space. Monotheism changes not only the image of god but man’s image of himself as well; instead of being in a seamless and symbiotic relationship with nature, he now stands alone but above it, to rule over it freely and independently, subservient only to a true god. To secondary religions, divinity is transcendent whereas for primary religions, it is immanent. Through this distinction between transcendence and immanence, the mosaic distinction also achieves a distinction between man and the world.

Ethics, the Law, and Justice

The disruption from culture and history, the certitude of a new type of truth, the exclusive rejection of other gods, the falsehood and criminality of the Other, the demand of fealty, and the disenchantment of the world pave the way to one of monotheism’s most important claims – that it is the religion of justice. Again, this is a political rather than theological claim. The key point of this claim is that ethics gained entry into religion precisely through biblical monotheism since the gods of Babylon, Assyria, or Rome had nothing to do with ethics in this sense. For the first time in history, justice, law, and freedom are declared to be the central themes of religion and the sole prerogative of god. Though technically true, this is a misleading statement. The monotheistic point of view is that since god is the true authority, only he can be the final arbiter of justice; the temporal laws of man are inferior to the divine. The story of the exodus from Egypt ties in well with ideas of liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. Furthermore, their escape, divinely sanctioned, also took the power to sit in judgment over them away from the pharaoh and invested it in god. The Shemot, or the Book of Exodus, is thus more concerned with political theology than with idolatry (the story of the golden calf). Thus, in monotheism, the political role of justice was given to religion. The authority of the king was superseded by that of the high clergy, god’s representatives on earth, as papal power well into the Early Modern era demonstrated. This fusion of the political with the religious in secondary religions but not primary belief systems is exactly what makes secularism a requirement solely of the former in the modern era.

In pagan religions, justice was of this world for even the gods were of this world. A Roman or an Egyptian who had been wronged could appeal to the local magistrate for justice for its own sake without reference to the gods. Indeed, in Hinduism, dharma is not only properly a function of kaala, desha, and paristhiti but the chaturanga purusharthas mention it along with artha and kama as one of the three goals of mortal life. The ultimate goal, moksha, is beyond short-term earthly consideration. As Hindi novelist Gurudutt explains in धर्म तथा समाजवाद (dharma tatha samajwad) and धर्म संस्कृत और राज्य (dharma, sanskriti, aur rajya), the individual is free to interact with the divine in a manner of his choosing but wherever he must interact with another, their conduct must be guided by the precepts of dharma, artha, and kama. Ethics and the law were intrinsically this-worldy and had no business to be under divine purview. Thus, justice, or ethics at least, existed much before secondary religions came on the scene but were not truly a part of the religious system.

In a world enchanted, this caused no philosophical problems. The famous story of Indra, the king of the Hindu pantheon, being cursed by Gautama Maharishi for seducing his wife, Ahalya, illustrates how virtue reigns even above the gods in Hinduism. Monotheism did not usher law, justice, or ethics into the world; these had long been in existence. Yet monotheism first made justice a matter of direct interest to god; before then, the world had not known a law-giving god. Any claim that law, morality, and justice are terrestrial and not celestial goods still arouses feelings of deep unease in theological circles; even today, the Church defends the dogma of the inseparable unity of monotheism and justice.

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Behind the Mosaic distinction between true and false in religion, there ultimately stands the distinction between god and the world. This worldview is not only fundamentally alien to Hindus but it is also antithetical and inimical to their way of thinking. The emphasis of secondary religions on universalism and all its attendant political baggage keeps them at an arm’s length from the pagan practices of the subcontinent. Were the rejection of Christianity and Islam by Indian traditionalists merely a matter of geography, it would be silly. Yet the grounds for suspicion and Otherness are twofold – a predatory proselytism of exclusive monotheisms and the entire cosmology of secondary religions. Neither of these traits have mellowed over the 1,000+ years secondary religions have been in India, and until they do, the two religions will remain outsiders to the Indosphere.

*I would like to express my gratitude to Rangesh Shridhar for reading through the first draft of this essay and countless hours of debate, discussion, and hair-pulling!

This post appeared on FirstPost on May 11, 2015.