[nukkad] Koenraad Elst Vs Psecs

["Mahesh chandra gupta" <>]

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The present piece is to be read in conjunction with the first 
piece titles Ayodhya posted by me, along with the same 
introductory paragraph as in case of the former. It is long, but 
worth reading. It is, needless to say, being posted here in pure 
academic interest.

MC Gupta
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Q:Islam is an intrisically political religion aiming at the 
creation of an Islamic state ultimately spanning the whole world. 
This appears to be a dogmatic view of Islam, i.e. one emanating 
 from a 'dogma' that there exists now and has existed in the past 
a "unique" Islam bent on world domination. I ask yourself to 
substitute "Judaism" for "Islam" in what you said, and you will 
have a typical ant-semitic statement made over a hundred years.

Koenraad Elst : Let's bring in the thief again. A *true* 
allegation of theft against person A, an actual thief, is 
necessarily reminiscent in form and content of any *false* 
allegation of theft against person B. However, from B's innocence 
in spite of the allegation, you cannot deduce A's innocence. 
Islam's high ambitions are not refuted by Judaism's more modest 
ones: the two are different and a given description may apply to 
the one but not to the other. To make the case of a Jewish design 
for world conquest, a *forgery* had to be propagated (the 
Protocols of the Elders of Zion), whereas in the case of Islam, it 
suffices to quote impeccable Islamic sources from the Quran to 
Ayatollah Khomeini.

Q/Comment: This is a squeamish claim made by some Hindutva 
spokesmen who want to avoid the conflict with Islam by presenting 
the destruction of non- Islamic places of worship as "un-Islamic". 
In reality, from the Prophet's own destruction of the idols in the 
Kaaba onwards, the forcible take-over of non-Muslim places of 
worship is intrinsic to the Islamic scheme of world conquest. Your 
statemnent "Islamic scheme of world conquest" is again reminiscent 
of tarditional anti-semitism "Jewish scheme of world conquest"

Koenraad Elst : See above. To be sure, i am perfectly aware that 
most ordinary muslims have more pressing concerns than world 
conquest. But those few who do dream of world conquest, have the 
support of scripture and tradition. Apart from that, it seems 
important to me, and new to most of you, to point out the 
existence (actually, predominance) of
squeamishness in the Hindutva rhetoric regarding Islam, as I 
have
documented in my book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind. This 
squeamishness
is a very serious problem, for there is an inverse 
proportionality
between ideological criticism of Islam and hatred of Muslims. If 
your
relatives are murdered in the umpteenth massacre of Hindus in 
Jammu,
you won't need any prompting to start hating Muslims as a
collectivity. At that point, it is crucial whether someone 
explains
to you the ideological causes of terrorism, so as to distinguish
between the ideology invoked by the terrorists and the people 
who
have a nominal and mostly only tenuous link to it. As I recall 
 from
my Catholic school days, we were taught to "hate communism but 
love
the communists". I regret to note that that sense of viveka is
lacking in certain Hindutvavadi circles.

Q/Comment: "There is no point in discussing the rights and wrongs 
of Ayodhya with people who don't have the honesty and moral 
courage to face facts, such as the continent-spanning and 
millennium-spanning fact that the expansion of Islam in North 
Africa, Europe and Asia was marked by many thousands of forcible 
expropriations (with or without destruction of the building) of 
places of worship." Well if there is no point in the discussion, I 
assume you will not wish to stay at IPI because discussion is what 
we do. I am for a third time intrigued by the similarity of your 
anti-Islamic view with the same form of words of anti-semites.

Koenraad Elst : I am sorry if I made it sound like I expected 
people at this list to be thus unwilling. That was not what i 
meant. And of course, like you, I am all for discussion.

As for the facts, they remain as i said: unlike Judaism, Islam 
has
indeed marked its expansion with literally thousands of temple
expropriations or destructions. This fact need not make much
difference to the secular position regarding Ayodhya, for it is 
one
of the possible reasonable positions that *in spite of* this 
massive
destruction of temples and churches, the Babri Masjid should 
have
been protected. Unfortunately, inebriated by their mediatic 
power,
*some* secularists including even historians thought it opportune 
to
underpin that political position with false history and expected 
to
get away with it.

Q/Comment: "Thus, unlike in secular states, Indian are classified 
by religion, and their membership of this or that religion gives 
them different rights and subjection to different law systems. My 
criterion for qualifying someone as a secularist in modern India 
is whether you are actively working for a Common Civil Code, 
bedrock and intrinsic property of a secular state." This appears 
hackneyed and narrow-minded to my Macaulayite p-sec ears. It 
ignores how backward, from a natural scientific point of  view, 
the belief systems of many millions of people in India are, e.g. 
the widespread belief in astrology based on Ptolemy which declined 
in Europe after Copernicus. I too would fully well like to see a 
Common Civil Code in India -- just as much as is claimed by the 
Sangh and its foreign sympathisers like yourself. But unlike the 
Sangh, I see this coming from the progress of natural science in 
India -- which will in due course destroy many pseudo-scientific 
myths and legends of all the religions in India, Islam and 
Hinduism included.

Koenraad Elst : I doubt that superstition is what stood in the way 
of a secular law system. There was still plenty of superstition in 
America when it adopted a secular constitution. For all his 
promotion of astrology, Murli Manohar Joshi does pay lip-service 
to the Common Civil Code (that the BJP isn't very serious about 
implementing it is another
matter), whereas hard-boiled atheist materialists in the 
opposition
parties oppose the same. Nehru, though a believer in astrology
himself, was all for the "scientific temper", and so was the 
immense
majority of the Constituent Assembly. Regardless of the palmreader 
on
the street corner, the assembled politicians could easily have
adopted a secular system. In 1947-50, because of the profound 
disgust
at the events of partition, a full decommunalization of the polity 
by
means of a Common Civil Code was very much on the cards,-- it was 
in
fact enshrined in Article 44. But under certain pressures, this
injunction was safely parked away among the non-enforceable 
"directive principles". Those pressures deserve closer scrutiny.

Nonetheless, like yourself, I do expect a lot of good from the 
spread
of scientific knowledge. I have seen in Europe how Christianity 
has
lost its grip due to the spread of scientific thought and 
knowledge.
Unfortunately in India, it is only the Organiser which, in its
deplorably shrill language, publicizes the deconstruction of
Christian myths once in a while (along with the scandal news 
about
vatican intrigues and pedophile priests). By contrast, 
secularist
papers are the most ardent propagators of, say, the story of 
Saint
Thomas's arrival in India and martyrdom at the hands of evil
Brahmins,-- a story long discredited by scholars and abandoned 
even
in Christian universities in the West. Which brings us back to 
the
basic problem: secularism in India isn't secular, it is the
handmaiden of certain obscurantist forces.

Q/Comment:I would like to thank Dr Elst for his cogent reply to my 
comments.  He suggests that my saying his remarks on Islam are 
similar to that  of anti-Semites on Judaism is inaccurate, because 
Judaism has had no ambitions for world domination while Islam has 
done. But suppose one argued conversely that not merely Islam (and 
perhaps Judaism if not now then in ancient history), but also 
Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism and Marxism etc. have all 
had ambitions of world
domination to some extent -- but all have failed and are perhaps 
destined to fail in the face of e.g. scientific progress. If such 
a comparison is made, then does not the highlighting of Muslim 
ambitions alone merely amount to prejudice? As a generalisation, 
it does seem to many non-Sangh Hindus that the Sangh view is 
premised on prejudicial views of India's "Abrahamic" minorities, 
namely, Muslims and Christians. And furthermore, that such 
prejudices amount to a contradiction of Hindu dharma. Citing the 
history of India as to who did what to whom when appears 
irrelevant as a guide to a progressive future for India.

Koenraad Elst : I am not necessarily against world conquest, not 
if the conquering doctrine happens to be true. But precisely in 
that case, the conquest typically won't require missions and 
jihads. Thus, heliocentrism conquered the world. Eventhough 
geocentrism enjoyed the support of common sense (everyone can 
*see* that the sun revolves around the earth, right?) and the 
Church, heliocentrism was superior and quitetly won all thinking 
minds over.

Hinduism, like Confucianism and like Greek/Hellenistic culture, 
did
expand by absorbing neighbouring "barbaric" tribes, sometimes 
with
but often without the benefit of first militarily defeating or
intimidating them. All while convinced of their superiority, they 
did
not make such extreme claims for the necessity of joining their
doctrines as Islam and Christianity have done; and hence they 
have
never been as eager to uproot other cultures. It is to be noted 
that
in each of these cases, many of the barbarians concerned
*volunteered* to join what they too saw as "civilization". Tamil 
and
Bengali and Southeast-Asian kings *invited* Brahmins to come and
teach them the ways of civilization so as to give more prestige 
and
more raison d'être to their dynasties. The Romans had conquered
Greece and could have ignored this small province of their 
far-flung
empire, yet they imported Greek teachers in order to learn the 
ways
of civilization from them. Today, Western societies are 
importing
teachers and teachings from India, Tibet, China and Japan on a
massive scale, resulting in the progressive orientalization of
medicine, physical culture, religion and the arts.

Unlike the former, Buddhism did develop a missionary outreach. 
Unlike
the gradual acculturation just described, Buddhism did go out to
*convert* people, to trouble people who hadn't asked for it with 
its
message of suffering and liberation. But unlike Christianity and
Islam, it refrained from the use of force, though it did use 
state
patronage to its advantage where possible.

In the history of Islam, by contrast, reasoned persuasion plays
practically no role at all. When Mohammed summoned the Byzantine 
and
Persian emperors to submit to his divine mission, they cold-
shouldered what they considered a self-important and deluded 
cult
leader. Just as Mohammed's own Meccan townsfolk had dismissed him 
as
a ghost-possessed crank. Without military conquest, islam would 
have
gotten nowhere. No one was thirsting for the message of Islam. On 
the
contrary, it was the Muslims who eagerly absorbed Greek and 
Persian
culture from the defeated peoples until Islamic orthodoxy became
strong enough to prohibit and terminate all this dabbling in 
Pagan
syncretism.

Christianity is a different matter. After the Muslim conquest and 
the
counter-offensive known as the Crusades, it did adopt the 
Islamic
ways of conquest as a means of propagating the faith. But mostly 
it
had to propagate itself in more sophisticated ways, being 
initially
only a small and powerless cult in the Roman empire. This is 
where
the art of propaganda and of apologetics was perfected. Many 
Pagan
kings were converted without military compulsion, overawed by 
the
superstitious interpretation of odd events or by the Christian use 
of
the prestige of originally non-Christian elements such as Roman
organization or Greek esthetics. And after the kings' 
conversion,
their patronage was adroitly used to introduce Christianity to 
the
people and make it replace the native religion in 
well-thought-out
stages. Till today, Christian missionaries overawe tribals with 
the
false association of Christianity with the scientific 
achievements
and economic opulence of the "Christian" West.

The above could be worked out in more detail and sophistication; 
but
it does not in any way amount to "prejudice". Unmedidated 
judgments
or "prejudices" do abound in this field, and they include such
gandhian and secularist gems like "all religions essentially 
teach
the same truths", "all religions condemn terrorism" etc. But 
I'll
grant that the Sangh people cultivate their own equally silly
prejudices, e.g. "the Christian mission is merely a CIA front", 
"WHO
figures show that Muslims will be the majority in India by 2000"
(written in 1990), "Mohammed would have condemned the demolition 
of
the Ram temple in Ayodhya", etc. But these mistaken claims still
don't nullify the difference in behaviour between the different
religions.

The clearest example of a bid for world domination is of course
Marxism, because it flourished in the 20th century when the world 
had
become small enough to make the very thought of world conquest 
within
one lifetime thinkable at all. And you won't hear me say
that "Islam's ambitions have been worse than all others": Marxism 
at
least definitely did worse. It probably killed more people in 
seventy
years than Islam in its whole history. It also destroyed more 
places
of worship. Question: then why is it still popular and 
influential
and shielded from criticism among Indian secularists?

KE


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