Indus Valley Rising

A Sign that the International Order is Breaking Down

2006-06-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

It looks like we're seeing more and more intolerance of other religions all the time:

NEW DELHI: Hindu groups in Malaysia allege that the government is demolishing temples and have appealed to Indian rights groups and the UN to help protect their heritage.

. . .

"At least one temple is being demolished by the authorities every three weeks in an unlawful and indiscriminate fashion, at the federal, state and local levels," said PW Moorthy, chairman of Hindu Rights Action Force, a coalition of about 50 groups.

"Most of these temples are over a century old and have existed even before we got independence. And they have the cheek to deem these temples illegal," a furious Moorthy said.

"Temples in Malaysia under threat." 11 Jun. 2006 Times of India 12 Jun. 2006 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1637380.cms

It looks like increased religious oppression in Islamic countries is a sign that the international order imposed and run by the West is eroding. I think the Islamists rightly perceive the ineffectiveness of the UN and are going to do whatever they want to.

CPI Wins Again in West Bengal

2006-05-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

It looks like Bengal has yet another Communist government. And here is evidence that it wasn't, as was widely believed, due to poll rigging.

What follows naturally, is a bitter pill for those who believed that the CPI-M has clung onto power in West Bengal only through rigging. It is time to accept the reality of mass support for the Left Front in West Bengal. "I was not at all worried about the outcome. Had I been worried, I would have come to the office before the start of counting," was CPI-M State Secretary Biman Bose's reaction when asked about the results. It was typically CPI-M. So are the other reactions from Left leaders like 92-year-old former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu: "It was a reflection of people's faith in our policies and we hope that the Opposition will cooperate with the government in its good work and play a responsible role."

Bhattacharya, Sumit. "The message from Bengal." 11 May 2006 Rediff.com 18 May 2006

But, it appears they didn't win by all that much.

But what is hidden in the numbers is the message that had the Opposition been not so disunited -- though there was a sort of informal cobbled coalition at the grassroots -- this assembly election could have been a very different story.

One pointer to that lies in the margins. Transport and Sports Minister Subhas Chakraborty, one of the CPI-M's electoral heavyweights, won his Belgachia East seat by only 1,744 votes. Of course there were exceptions like Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who won by 58,000 votes from his Jadavpur constituency, but overall the margins are thin. But what is the secret of the Left Front's success in West Bengal? The answer is that the CPI-M's organisation at the grassroots is unparalleled in the country.

Politics is not for any honest person.

The Beautiful Saree

2006-05-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

To see an impressive array of beautiful sarees, a single length of cloth warn by women in India, check out the gallery of Laxmipati Sarees.

Go East, Young Man!

2006-05-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

This just brings tears to my eyes:

BANGALORE, India - Nate Linkon graduated from college last year with a business degree and a lot of offers. But he made an unusual choice: to pack his bags and move 9,000 miles away from corporate America to Bangalore. In his view, there’s no better place to beef up his résumé — even though the pay is much lower.

. . .

Infosys’ profits are three times those of its U.S. competitors. One of the main reasons is salaries. The employees here — the software engineers — make about a quarter of the salary of someone doing the same job in the United States.

Still, a growing number of Americans are looking to Bangalore, where their money goes a lot further. This summer, 100 new U.S. graduates will start as full-time engineers at Infosys, with 200 more to arrive by the end of the year, part of a total staff expansion the company projects to top 50 percent this year.

Like Linkon, they are willing to take lower pay to get the hands-on experience they believe will make them more marketable when they return to a job in the United States.

Brown, Campbell. "Americans make reverse commute — to India: Cutting-edge jobs, early-career experience draw the tech-savvy." 11 May 2006 MSNBC.com 11 May 2006

These young American professionals going to return to America with more than a very marketable resume—they are going to come back with an impression of a beautiful and timeless culture, one that is now full with hope for the future. I can't tell you how happy I am to see this happening.

Holy Men Wanted for Indian Army

2006-05-11T05:14:00.000-07:00

It looks like the Indian Army is upgrading, not only in weaponry but in taking the spiritual concerns of its fighting men more seriously:

Are you a Hindu pandit, Sikh granthi, Buddhist monk, Christian priest or Muslim maulvi looking for a great career? Or, are you an unemployed graduate in the 27 to 34 age group with a religious bent of mind? The Indian Army needs you as a religious teacher. Curious? Read on.

Why does the army need religious teachers? The Indian Army is one of the largest in the world, with 980,000 active troops and 800,000 reservists. There are routine religious activities for an army unit just as civilians like you and me enjoy. For decades, an atmosphere of religious harmony has existed in the armed forces. In some cantonments like Mathura, mosques constructed for the troops of the British Indian Army still continue to be maintained.

Some of the older army regiments in India are so religious that they
have their own dieties. For instance, the icon of Lord Vishnu, popularly known as Badri Vishal, installed at Badrinath in Garhwal, Uttar Pradesh, is the presiding deity of the Garhwal Rifles. All the battalions of the Garhwal Rifles worship the mighty Badri Vishal. What do religious teachers in the Indian Army do?

Lype, George. "Wanted: Holy men for the Indian Army." 10 May 2006. Rediff.com 11 May 2006 <http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2006/may/10ga1.htm>

Orwellian Realism

2006-05-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

In his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a society that was so completely controlled by Communism that it was impossible for any one or any group to oppose the government. The means by which the government excercised its complete control over the population was by complete control of all information--even "illegal" pornography for the proles--and complete control of the resistance movement, symbolized by the fictitious "Goldberg." But, quite thankfully, such a society never materialized--not even close to it. Even a place like North Korea never came close to approximating the subtle and sophisticated control of infomration as portrayed by Orwell's dark, future Communist society.

Yet the fact that 1984's dark society never materialized strongly suggests that Orwell himself believed too much in the philosophy he vehemently denounced. Marx, after all, predicted that an industrial society is a prerequisite for revolution of the proletariat, yet every society that saw the Communists rise to power was not industrial but agrarian. Unlike Germany, England, and (later) America; Russia, China, and so many numerous banana republics, where Communism came to power (at least for some time), were all agrarian societies.

What Marx got right, however, was that the disparities between the very rich and very poor (the differences Marx imagined between the future bourgeoisie and protetariat) are common in agrarian countries, and it is indeed in these countries where Communism has found the most favor. The kind of society Orwell imagined, then, could not exist as an industrial society but as an agrarian society. For a Communist government to persist indefinitely, it would have to strike the right balance between keeping its political elite popular enough with its followers to earn their allegiance, and it has to demonize their society's bourgeoisie just enough so that the mass of people remain inimical to them but that they continue to prop up the government. Such a government exists in this world, and an example of such is in West Bengal, India.

The state of West Bengal has had a Communist state government for nearly 29 years, winning all fourteen elections since then. What political party in America would give their left arm, and perhaps both legs, to have that kind of electoral success? Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar give us a further, detailed glimpse into the success of West Bengal's CPI(M) [CPM]:

The architects of the Left Front, leaders such as the late Pramode Dasgupta, carefully integrated Government policy with a strategy of political mobilisation. This design was flawlessly executed by legendary party managers such as the late Anil Biswas, who created a party machine unmatched in any Indian State. The Left shifted its social base from being a party of the industrial proletariat to that of marginal farmers, sharecroppers and the landless poor. This class base was carefully stitched together; a coalition of the socially marginalised groups that included Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims. This class-community coalition has stood by the Left Front through all the political change of the last three decades. The CPI(M) election machine has ensured a very high level of mobilisation, thus increasing the turnout in the State to one of the highest in the country.

Yadav, Yogendra, Sanjay Kumar. "Why the Left will win West
Bengal Again." 16 Apr. 2006. The Hindu. Online Edition. 1 May 2006
<http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/16/stories/2006041609221200.htm>

Economy and technology are closely related to each other, and both seem to play important roles when used as instruments of oppression. But of the two, since economy seems to be more closely linked to the success of Communism, it could be said that economy is the stronger force. Yet neither economies nor technologies oppress people, people oppress people. Bear in mind that West Bengal's Communist government persists on top of a functional democratic system for electing a government. Througout the world and at all levels of discourse about oppression and liberation, virtue and high character are the persistently missing ideas from all manner of pontifcations about peace.

People get the government, and the society, they deserve.

China Isn't the only place that filters its networks

2006-04-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

It's funny how there is this brouhaha over Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc. kowtowing (literally) to the Chinese government to make sure their people think only "happy thoughts" when Middle-Eastern countries strive to make sure its residents think only of "Allah."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: abc@xyz.com
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 07:28 -0700
Subject: FYI...
To: "Krishna Kirti Prabhu @ Abq" 

The Dubai government runs a "proxy server" that blocks Hindu,
Christian, pornographic sites, etc.

How to keep Dubai people informed?  Only via e-mail?  They
can't do much on the publicity front, in any event! :)

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Letter PAMHO:11492617 (20 lines)
From:      Internet: "A B Cdefghi" 
Subject:   Re: Update on www.siddhanta.com - please see
------------------------------------------------------------
this page is blocked,  we can not open it in Dubai ...
Best Regards,
A B Cdefghi

I'll bet it's been going on for a while. I don't recall any protests over this.

Pictures of Kazakhstan Police Raiding Hare Krishna Commune

2006-04-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

For background, see these posts. Here are pictures:

Guarded by police, a bulldozer prepares to tear down dachas.

An elderly man resists.

And is in turn being arrested.

After the bulldozing, families out on the street.

More pictures here, and there is a movie here.

Update on Kazahkstani Oppression

2006-04-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

[From Bhakti Bhringa Govinda Swami]

Dear Friends,

We have already informed you of the difficult situation with the farm community of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in Kazakhstan. The government is endeavouring to evict the devotees from the land lawfully purchased in 1999, as well as their houses and ashramas which accomodate more than 60 devotees.

This persecution started in October 2004 but now the situation reached its critical point.

Yesterday, April 24, 2006 at 10 p.m. the legal executive (court officer) delivered a notification to the members of the community that today, on April 25, at 11 a.m. their ashramas and cottages will be demolished according to the decision of the court.

We ask you to help us in this difficult situation to stop the > execution of the unlawful decision of the court regarding the demolition > of the ashramas and eviction of the devotees from their homes.

All the devotees are law obiding citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan and now the government wants to make them homeless outcasts.

You can help us by making telephone calls to the Administration of the > President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, to the Presidential Committee on Religious Affairs and the local administrative bodies, and requesting them
to stop the execution of the unlawful decision.

Telephones:

Presidential Office:
+7 (3172) 152634, 152920, 152107
+7 (3172) 324558
Presidential PR department:
+7 (3172) 744051

Administration of the President:
+7 (3172) 151203,
fax +7 (3172) 324480

Prosecutor's office of RK
+7 (3172) 712868, 214025, 712500

Senate
+7 (3172) 153195, 153239, 327710

Senate PR department:
+7 (3172) 153295, 153505
fax +7 (3172) 334639

Committee on Religious Affairs
Mr. Yeraly Lukpanovich Tugzhanov
+7 (3172) 152497, 152217, 152690
fax +7 (3172) 328356

Prime Minister
Mr. Danial Akhmetov
+7 (3172) 152035, 152027

Almaty Regional Land Department
Mr. Nauryzbai Asanbayevich Taubayev
+7 (3272) 270125

Almaty Regional Hakim
Mr. Serik Abikenovich Umbetov
+7 (3282) 271753

Karasai District Hakim
Bolat-bi Satynbayevich Kutpanov
+7 (32771) 21142, 21709

Karasai District Court:
+7 (32771) 20899

Court executive
Ms. R. Baimukhanbetova
+7 (32771) 22030

You can present the following arguments:

Law obiding citizens are deprived of their homes and thrown to the street. All of them have lawfully acquired the right of ownership for their plots of land they have paid all the taxes and membership charges.

The Hakim (Governor) of the district accuses the owners that they never had their property privatized. However the members of the community repeatedly applied to the Hakim for his permission to make the acts of ownership for their cottages and plots but he repeatedly refused. Without his sanction for privatization one cannot make needed documentation for the cottages.

The devotees' houses are located on the territory of a Consumers Cooperative. There are 120 members of this Cooperative. However the claims are brought only against the members of the religious society. In each and every claim the connection of the defendants to the Religious Organization Society for Krishna Consciousness has been illustrated. This is a direct and flagrant violation of human rights and freedoms which are guaranteed by the Constitution of Kazakhstan.

Confiscation of property without compensation is possible only in a criminal case. Ours is a civil case. It is not a criminal case.

According to the law, the citizens whose property is confiscated are given at least 5 days to prepare for the execution of the court decision. In our case we have another transgression of the law as we were given less than one day.

Please act quickly and contact as many friends, supporters, and well-wishers as possible who may not be able to received this message in time.

If you have contacts with the powerful political leaders, businessmen, big media agencies (CNN, BBC, Reuter), please deliver to them this information and give them our telephones:

Maxim Varfolomeev +7 300 7407943,
Rati Manjari devi dasi (Ekaterina Levitskaya) +7 300 7164967.

Your servants from

Sri Vrindavan Dham,
Kazakhstan

The Demolition in Kazakhstan Already Begun

2006-04-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

It looks like time is running out:

On 25 April, in the wake of a regional court ruling last year, court executors - backed by OMON special police - bulldozed five Hare Krishna-owned dachas at their commune on the outskirts of Kazakhstan's commercial capital Almaty. Rati Mandzhari (Yekaterina Levitskaya) of the Hare Krishna community complained to Forum 18 News Service that officials gave less than the required five days notice of the demolition. But an official defended the demolitions, claiming that it was all "perfectly legal". The Hare Krishna community believes the authorities have been trying to destroy the commune since the community bought a farm in 1999 and then bought nearby dachas. Last month a court ordered the farm to be confiscated with no compensation and a district court has ruled that five more Hare Krishna-owned dachas are to be confiscated. Only Hare Krishna-owned dachas have been targeted for confiscation and destruction.

(Quoted from Forum 18 at the Sampradaya Sun.)

If we don't act now, then the worst will happen.

All Kazakhstan Updates Here

2006-04-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

For all news regarding the attempts by the Kazakhstan government to confiscate the Hare Krishna's land there, Palace of the Soul has pictures and updates.

Protest Kazakhstan's Tyrany

2006-04-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

All freedom loving people along with other Hindu groups in the Washington D.C. area should stage a protest in front of the Kazakhstan Embassy--ASAP. If the situation with Kazakhstan confiscating ISKCON's land is as dire as Bhakti Bringa Govinda Swami paints it, then there is no time to lose.

Here is the address of the embassy in D.C.:

1401 16th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Phone numbers:

Tel: 202 232 5488
Fax: 202 232 5845

And their email address:

Embassy: kazakh.embusa@verizon.net
Consular Section: kazakh.consul@verizon.net

And here is their website:

http://www.homestead.com/prosites-kazakhembus/

I ask every reader of this message to please do this one and only one thing:

Contact the leader of every concerned group you belong to and insist that they organize a protest--locally wherever possible but especially in the captial of every country that will allow it, most especially in Washington D.C.

If you live in a national capital, consider it your dharma to either organize a protest or get someone to organize a protest wherever there is an embassy of Kazakhstan.

And that is it. Please do at least that much. Hare Krishna.

p.s. Write to me at krishnakirti(at)gmail(dot)com if you want to participate in or can organize a protest.

No Religious Freedom in Islamic Countries

2006-04-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

Nowadays there is virtually no religious freedom in Islamic countries. Even if such a thing were possible (and there was religious tolerance under Akhbar in India and the Ottoman Empire of Turkey), when it does manifest it doesn't seem to last all that long, does it? It's, like, "water finds its own level." A recent issue that is close to my heart involves the Hare Krishna's farm in Khazakstan being confiscated by the government there. Here's the latest:

Apr 21, USA (SUN) — In 1999 the devotees in Kazkhstan purchased a beautiful farm outside of the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan. Since that time substantial strides have been made in creating an agricultural community, a home for many vaisnavas, and the venue for a wonderful summer yearly festival attended by devotees from Central Asia and Russia.

Since October 2004 there have been many attempts from the government of Kazakhstan to push us from this property. This has been done by smear campaigns in the media and ongoing litigation in the courts.

On March 29, 2006 a case was conducted in the Almaty Oblast Court. Prior to issuing the ruling the judge declared that the legal arguments of the government land agency had no substance and that the arguments presented by the advocates representing our society were correct and in accordance to the Kazakhstan legal code.

But after private discussion in their chambers the judges emerged and issued a ruling against our society in which it is stated that the land be confiscated and returned to the government. This ruling was illegal and not based on legislation of the government of Kazakhstan.

We purchased the land at the market value in 1999. In 2004 we privatised the land according to the laws of Kazakhstan in. Since this time the value of this land has increased dramatically. The situation we have is that the powerful government land barons want to eliminate us by any illegal process that they may possess the land, again sell, and make astronomical profit.

We have neither time nor options left. Our last option is the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan, but need-less-to-say, the legal system does not work in this country. It is either a matter of paying for the decision or having a powerful person order the decision.

Thus we are requesting devotees throughout the world to assist us in different ways:

Read the whole thing.

Some Culture With That Technology Transfer?

2006-04-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

Now it is Indian culture that is starting to flow into America. With Americans now applying for tech jobs in Bangalore, sharp, young American college grads are first-handing getting acclimatized to Indian culture.

American software engineer Anna Libkhen, 31, took a big pay cut — she now earns about one-fourth her salary in New York City — when she transferred to Bangalore for Thomas Financial in October 2004. But the chance to immerse herself in Indian culture is priceless.
“India as a country has a lot to offer: yoga, ayurveda (herbal medicine), meditation, food, dance, music,” Libkhen said. “These are all the cultural aspects of life I was looking for.”

. . .

N.R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys’ chairman and co-founder, said the company started its internship program six years ago to show foreign students there’s more to India than “cows, poverty and pollution.”

“They get exposed to another side of India,” Murthy said in an interview on the Infosys campus in Bangalore. “These people will become leaders in all walks of life. If we can create a positive impression on their minds at an early stage, it’s good for India and for Infosys.”

Associated Press. "Americans Seeking Jobs in Booming
Bangalore." 2 Apr. 2006 MSNBC 2 Apr. 2006 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12098123/page/2/>

Young Americans who are expected to become leaders are getting trained up in India.

I'm all for it!

Less Secular, Not More

2006-03-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I suggested that to win the Long War, America and India will have to become less secular and more religious. Just now, Phillip Longman has an essay published on Foreign Policy that says this is exactly what is going to happen since "englightened" populations tend not to reproduce:

In the United States, . . . the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents.
Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one's own folk or nation.
This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.
Phillip Longman. "The Return of Patriarchy." March/April 2006. Foreign Policy. 1 Mar 2006 <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376&page=0>

A similar thing is happening in India, too. Indian elites are also failing to reproduce themselves. However, since India's population is still 71% rural and therefore, despite its burgeoning high-tech industry, still qualifies as an agrarian nation, and agrarian societies tend to put a high value on bearning children, India is not poised to slow down so quickly on its birth rate. It boggles the mind to think that India's middle class of around 300 million people, which is almost the population of America, is less than a third of its entire population. So India is not going to run low on people for quite sometime--either of workers or of elites. However, for some time to come, we will see that a large number of its elites will be "first generation" from their own paddy fields. For the time being, that's a good thing.

Indus Valley Rising

2006-02-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

Although the Indus Valley is now squarely located in Pakistan, its cultural heir is unmistakably the modern-day Hindu civilization and India is now its home. Last year I posted some news of America's desire to see India become a super power through the act of an unprecedented change of policy towards India in the U.S. State Department, but now we're seeing more shockwaves--harbingers of India's coming rise to world power. Parag Khanna, a fellow at the North America Foundation, and Raja Mohan, the strategic affairs editor at the Indian Express, post a timely article at Policy Review about India's rise and potential as a world power.

"It has become the norm to speak of India as a 'natural ally' of the United States, and in the first years of the Bush administration, India transacted more political business with the United States than in the previous 40. That public attitudes in India toward the United States have begun to shift in a fundamental manner was evident in a recent Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Survey. Of all the countries surveyed, pro-American sentiment was strongest in India, where 71 percent of respondents reported a favorable view." (Khanna, Mohan)

The article in its entirety is more or less their road-map for the future and what they think are the common interests India and America share and what are the right moves that America should make to further court India. It could be said that the authors themselves are eager to see an allied America and India, but on terms as coequal partners.
Newsweek's cover story this week is also about India, and it's titled "India Rising." Some of the same facts Khanna and Mohan quote (the 70+ percent of Indians favorable to America, for example) make it into the Newsweek piece, too. Among all the money quotes in the article, this one is a gem:

"Such a relationship between the United States and India is almost inevitable. Whether the nuclear agreement goes through or not, whether the governments sign new treaties, the two societies are getting increasingly intertwined. A common language, a familiar world view and a growing fascination
with each other is bringing together businessmen, nongovernmental activists, journalists and writers." (Newsweek)

This quote is exactly right, but not for all the reasons the Newsweek authors, and most likely Khanna and Mohan, might imagine. What else does America and India share, have in common, that distinguishes them from practically the rest of the world? Religion. America is by far the most religious country in the West, and India itself is perhaps the most religious country in the world. Anyone who has visited India can attest that religion pervades the life and culture of virtually everyone in India. But the fact that both countries are outstandingly religious explains only a part of their emerging cultural bond. That they both embrace religious plurality as core, ideological principles is itself a powerful draw between America and India. America's religious plurality arose from the Enlightenment, and India's religious plurality is built in to its culture. This is not to say there are no other compelling reasons and circumstances that draw India and America together as partners for the future, but religion is one that most commentators are likely to miss.

Of course, America as a largely Christian country and India as a predominantly Hindu country have plenty of other cultural differences, but when we consider that despite their external cultural differences America and India seem to understand each other better than, say, Saudi Arabia, whose Islamic culture is historically more intertwined with Christianity and should theoretically be more understandable to Americans, we have to look deeper--to the way each thinks--to understand this emerging partnership between America and India. This is where the Newsweek article and the Policy Review article of Khanna and Mohan miss out on some deep insight:

"But democracy has its own way of rebalancing. The wave of Hindu nationalism that raged through the country in the 1990s is on the wane, for now, and a thoroughly secular government is in power." (Newsweek)

Let's not forget that after 30 years of misplaced pacifism, it was the Hindu-nationalist BJP who finally got the gumption to go ahead and redeveloped their nuclear capability, which at first earned America's approbation but later America's respect. (And anyone familiar with Indian politics today knows that the Congress party of Manmohan Singh, propped up by regional Communist parties, has barely a toehold on power.)

But take another look at this last sentence in the Newsweek quote above and note how the authors think that "a thoroughly secular government" is an important cause for India and America coming closer to each other. I would say that it is the opposite that is happening. As Islam and China are challenging the world in ways that are most dangerous, to rise to meet the challenge the peoples in America and India are becoming more religious, not more secular. (That would also explain why the secularists in both countries have become more shrill.) This means that we will find both countries becoming more religious instead of more secular as the Long War progresses.

A conception of religion which can logically accommodate other religions (but not illogically as a kind of theological multiculturalism) may be what decisively decides this Long War in favor of the Indo-Americaalliancece: India has a culture and religion it is willing to share with the world, China, for example, does not. I myself, and many tens of thousands of other non-Indian Europeans, Hispanics, and Afro-Americans in America (and throughout the West) have accepted the Vaishnava religion, which is major limb of the Hindu cultural tradition. In the Long War, the battle is for the hearts of the world, and religion remains unsurpassed in its ability to win hearts. This is probably because of all other philosophies in the world, it has really only been religions that have developed any certainty that we have a heart--a soul.

The Cold War was a battle of ideologies between the West, led by America, and the Soviet Union, but the Long War will be a battle for hearts and souls. Religion, not secularism, can prevail in such a battle. This predicts that to win, both America and India will necessarily have to become more, not less religious, and it has been my observation that they are becoming more religious--if ever so gradually. This is the kind of fight secularism will never understand--the good fight--since secularism alone at best has only a relative, uncertain conception of what is good. That America and India will be on the same side and coequal partners in the Long War is a real hope for the world's future.

Two Fronts of the War on Terror

2005-10-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

Guess who did this:

At least 16 people were killed and over 60 injured when three blasts rocked crowded markets in Delhi in quick succession on Saturday evening.
The first explosion occurred in Paharganj market at 5:40 PM when it was crowded with people busy shopping for Diwali shopping, killing seven persons and injuring over 60 others.

("Three blasts rock New Delhi; 16 killed." 29 Oct. 2005. Rediff.com 29 Oct. 2005. <http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/oct/29delhi.htm?q=tp&file=.htm>)

Although the article says that India has many militant groups and does not conclude that it was an Islamic terrorist group that triggered the explosion, Islamic militants (terrorists) are by far the most likely people that set of the explosion.

I can just picture Paharganj now: Hindu ladies, draped in elegant saris, with their children and escorted by their husbands, shopping for new clothes; sweet makers, like magicians, producing big, curly orange jalebies; young men buying gold, diamons, and array upon rainbow array of glass bangles for their young wives; families standing around slurping hot and spicy pani-puri; hath-lorry (hand cart) vendors selling steaming, spicy samosas drizzled with tamarind chutney, and then BOOM--for some, the lights go out, their lives end. Others are crippled for life. For many, a warm and beautiful holiday is marred by death and injury. The question boiling underneath the stoic facade of Hindu tolerance is "why?"--WHY MUST THIS BE TOLERATED?

Although it is true that most Muslims don't blow people up, can we ask if it is true that most Muslims are appalled by this? Many are, for sure, yet to discredit a system or a community, it only takes small number of people. There will always be anti-social elements--all societies have them--but is only a fine line between the anti-socials being kept under control and them being out of control. In India, the Islamic anti-social elements are out of control.

Why they are out of control is that Muslim society largely considers itself separate and distinct from the other societies, be they Hindu, Sikh, or even Christian. What happens to them is not their concern, not much anyway. It is their problem, and so they "Hindus" have to do something about it, as long as they don't interfere in Muslim society. Yet the problem itself not only exists in Muslim society, it exists because of Muslim society.

Just consider why, in America, the chances of a criminal successfully escaping the law are slim. If a criminal breaks out of jail, or is identified by law enforcement and a manhunt ensues, it is usually only a matter of time before the criminal is brought to justice. Identification and incarceration happen rather quickly. It can happen because the criminal (or small group of them) are pitted against society itself. Everyone will be on the lookout for him. Justice is swift and almost certain because the scenario is an individual going against a society.

But in the case of Islamic terroism, it is a society against a society. Islamic religious leaders condone terrorism, or at least look the other way if pressed in public, and the body politic of Muslim society, reflecting the views of their social and religious leaders, are vaiously sympathetic toward those who would perform hienous acts against those outside of their community. Even if there are many Muslims who object to terrorism, there are enough social and religious elites who support it: Witness Iran's recent anti-Israeli demonstrations, lead by none-other than their elected president. Because Islamic terrorists have the support of their society, they can melt into it and take advantage of the money, the safe-houses, and sympathy of their fellow Muslims. One front of the war on terror is Muslim society and, especially, its societal elites.

The other front of the war on terror, and this is perhaps the more dangerous front, is the shield of political correctness lent to Muslim society by Western or Western educated intelligentsia. For them no society may be taken to task because acts of terrorism are ultimately individual acts. (There will always be exceptions, though: societies run by white, European males or overtly Hindu males.) Western intellectuals are overwhelmingly radical individualists, and because they are radical individualists, by instinct or by decision, they discount the role of society in shaping the opinions and in provoking the actions of individual members in society. If a moulvi preaches in his mosque that the infidels should be killed by any means, that is free speech. He can say anything he wants and it is not his fault if some of his followers actually go out and kill some infidels. The unwarranted presumption of individualism is that the leader and follower are coequals--it does not admit the power dynamic of the leader over the follower where no coercion is discernable.

But why should the Western intellectuals wield so much power at all over people who themselves are also individualists? The reason is knowledge is power, and intellectuals, as a class, by definition are the final arbiters of that power. They themselves possess power over their cultural and intellectual followers, and, in one sense, to admit that the leaders of Muslim society are largely responsbile for Islamic terrorism would also mean exposing, or admitting to, the responsibility of Western, Left-leaning intellectuals for much of what is wrong in their own society. (And, I might add, the refusal to admit this dynamic of power between leaders and willing, not coerced, followers is why the radically individualistic Left is perhaps among the greatest of threats to the idea of democracy itself.)

Just as there is a geopolitical alliance between China and Muslim countries like Pakistan, there is also a strange but nevertheless existing cultural alliance between the Western intellectual Left and fundamentalist Islam. The alliance, for sure, is one of convenience: destruction of the West. Because India and the West are becoming more alligned, India--Hindu India--is also slated for destruction by Islamic fundamentalists and destruction by Western intellectuals.

Poor, Defenseless Peasants: What are WE going to do about it?

2005-10-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

These people badly need an American-style 2nd Amendment:

On Friday night a family of 25 [in Kha, district Rajouri, Jammu and Kashmir] had a harrowing experience. A tremulous Kamla Devi recalls: ``Four militants came to my house and locked us up. Only when my son Ratan Singh loaded his rifle given to him as a Village Defence Committee member and challenged the militants did they leave. While leaving they threatened to come back and eliminate us." Soon after the incident frightened villagers started leaving.

Rajouri is a district in the South-West end of Jammu and Kashmir, 154 km from Jammu. According to the district's website, Rajouri varies in climate from semi-tropical in the southern areas to temperate in the north, with a temperature variation of 7.42 to 37.4 degrees Celcius. The site lists the population at approximately 478,000 people.

The militants, of course, are Islamic jihadis. Their behavior was like that of bullies, thugs, and other criminals found all over the world. Just as bullies flee when confronted, then they left, but not for long. It was as if they did not expect a confrontation. But they will be back, and they will return with plenty of weapons.

The militants had made an extortion demand of Rs. 50,000 in September. According to Neena Rajput: "We told them that we cannot pay such a huge sum, but they told us to arrange for the money in October." The villagers contacted the authorities who expressed their helplessness.

So the choice left for the villagers is to either flee or fight. The villagers, apparently, chose to flee, although some wanted to take a stand:

Security in remote hilly villages has often been a nightmare and protecting every hamlet is an almost impossible task. Officials came up with the idea of Village Defence Committees (VDCs) to give some semblance of security but militants have struck at will, taking advantage of the poor weaponry in the hands of the villagers.

Zakir Hussian, a VDC member who lost his father at the hands of militants says: ``You do not expect us to fight the militants with these archaic .303 rifles. If you cannot protect us, then give us better weapons to fight with.''

Unfortunately, Indian law is very restrictive of weapons, not unlike how Britain sees to it that its own populace is, more or less, disarmed. Of course, if a population has the potential for insurrection, then disarmament is generally a reasonable strategy, and India has more than its share of insurrections. Yet when the government cannot or will not protect its people, then abiding by laws that prevent people from protecting themselves is something like removing a cat's claws and teeth and then setting it out in the wild.

The oppressed villagers, who are mostly Hindus, need weapons, training, and the wherewithal to use them--even if the only means of doing it is through illegal gun running and turning them into militants. To be pacifist in the presence of murderers is to simply aid and abet murder.

India and the World-Wide Baby Bust

2005-10-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

In The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity, the author, Phillip Longman, asserts that very little of the world population is growing. Rather, it is depopulating. The potential bad news for India is that, according to Longman, it has also started to depopulate:

India's fertility rate dropped by roughly a fifth since the first half of the 1990s. [13] Residents of the major southern provinces of Kerala and Tamil Nadu already produce too few children to replace themselves, and this will be true for Indians as a whole by the end of the next decade. [14] Meanwhile, India's sudden drop in fertility means that its population will be aging at three times the rate of the U.S. population over the next half century. By 2050, the median age in India is expected to be 37.9, making its population older than that of the United States today. [15] These projections assume, however, that India does not experience an AIDS pandemic, as now seems increasingly likely. The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts that 25 million Indians could be infected with HIV/AIDS by 2010. [16] (Longman 11)

However, from "World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision Population Database," cited by Longman in the above passage, India's urban population is still only 29 percent of the country whereas its rural population is 71%. Since high rates of population growth are strongly correlated with an agrarian economy, the declining birth rate Longman projects is more likely tied to urbanization. Longman in his analysis doesn't distinguish between urban and rural birth rates, and the World Population Prospects database indeed predicts that by 2050, 58.6% of India's population will be urbanized.

But India's progressive urbanization along these lines is not a foregone conclusion. India is notorious for remaining "backward" in terms of bureaucracy (read corruption) and hesitancy to implement new technology. Current land laws also discourage the accumulation of large tracts of land required for industrial farming, which in turn slows urbanziation.

The irony of this is if India remains backward like this for some time to come, the projected decline in fertility could be retarded and, even more ironically, contribute positively to India's wealth relative to parts of the world that are more rapidly depopulating. This is because wealth, despite advances in technology, is still mainly tied to population growth. Another source of Indian affluence will come from the Indian diaspora, the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), whose net worth is equal to if not greater than the GNP of India. A high rate of population growth at home in India and highly successful and affluent NRI's outside of India could fuel India's rise as a world power in a most unpredictable way.

India is truly an enigma.

Works Cited

Longman, Phillip. The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

The Indo-American Alliance: More than just a Strategic Partnership

2005-10-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

When this web log started, I said the West and India are natural allies; now here is the incontrovertible proof: (Emphasis added.)

The global war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq and the sonorous espousal of democracy for all have just been relegated to their subordinate place in the strategic priorities of the Bush administration. Its real legacy was announced last Friday, in a low-key briefing at the State Department that explained in some detail the historic decision that has been made.

It is now the policy, or perhaps that should be rephrased as the Grand Strategy of the United States, "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement."

There is really no precedent for this in the 230 years of American diplomacy. This was never said to China, nor to Japan, nor to post-Soviet Russia. The Bush administration's National Security Strategy paper published in September, 2002, had said that the United States would not permit the emergence of any hostile strategic peer competitor, which means that India is now deemed in the White House to be fundamentally and permanently friendly, a status granted hitherto only to the British.

The implications of this are enormous. The first is that the United States now considers that the 21st century is going to be defined by the struggle for mastery in Asia, that China must not be allowed to win that status by default, and so India must be built up to provide an essential balance. (UPI)

India and America have long wanted to like each other but, on account of India's Cold War alliance with the former Soviet Union, couldn't. Both have much in common: they were formerly colonized by Britain; both threw off the yoke of Britain, their colonial master (even if India did so 170+ years later than the American colonies); the more educated members of each country speak English; and the people in both countries--to varying degrees--appreciate their British heritage. With the end of the Cold War, the adversarial relationship between America, leader of the West, and India, the cradle of Hindu civilization, has started to thaw.

With the U.S. State Department's declared policy of helping India become a world power, aid and cooperation between India and America--and thus aid and cooperation between Hindu Civilization and Western Civilization--is beginning to take place at levels which will alter the balance of power in the world. How this alliance will affect each country and each civilization will not be known for some time. What we should know is that the U.S. State Department's declaration of policy toward India is an important event that, in time, will affect the world.

Works Cited

UPI. "Walker's World: U.S. to make India a world power." 29 March 2005. United Press International, Washington Times. 5 Oct 2005. <http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050329-084255-7465r.htm>

Back in Action

2005-10-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

Pardon me for being so tardy in posting, but I've had a very busy month. I thought I would be out of action for a week, but some important things in my personal life needed attention first.

The most important of them was my wife's being naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Here is a short essay I wrote on the occaision to my coworkers, with some pictures:

As I was out last Friday [September 23, 2005] on account of my wife becoming a U.S. citizen, those I told may likely ask how it went. As it was a wonderful event, I don't think I could do justice to it by saying "it went fine" and mentioning some scant details in the few minutes we sometimes have between projects and meetings. So here I'll just describe the event briefly and include a few pictures as well.

This was the first time I've attended a naturalization ceremony and swearing of an oath of citizenship. More than 220 people from 54 countries were naturalized, and this was just at one ceremony in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the ceremony, the Honorable Judith C. Herrera of the U.S. District Court presided. During the ceremony, as each country was called out, all the candidates from that country stood up. Among the candidates some were military personnel, in uniform. Soon after everyone was introduced by their respective countries, all the candidates took the Oath of Citizenship.

I am a natural born U.S. citizen, and this is my first time hearing the Oath of Citizenship. As someone who grew up in America, I kind of know all the obligations of being a U.S. citizen. If there is a war and you are required by law to fight, you must fight. If there is some national work that is required then it must be done. Yet I think it is also true that in the last forty years the sentiments for these commitments have been somewhat weakened, at least among us natural-born citizens. So to hear the Oath of Citizenship in the context of a solemn ceremony, keeping in mind what these candidates for U.S. citizenship are actually giving up and the staggering number of countries they come from, I was impelled to rethink the meaning and value of U.S. citizenship. Those of us born as U.S. citizens are more susceptible to think of citizenship as a right, but the ceremony and oath conveyed most eloquently that citizenship is really a privilege--even for those of us born as U.S. citizens.

The guest speaker was Dr. Lourdes Monserrat, an expert in Latin American studies, educator, and social activist. She came to America from Cuba through the CIA's Operation Pedro Pan (Peter Pan), which from 1960 to 1962 evacuated 14,000 children from Cuba. After her evacuation she was soon reunited with her brothers and sisters (also evacuated through Pedro Pan), and then later with her parents, who she says escaped on the last boat form Cuba. In an anecdote about her time in Honduras as a teacher, during the Watergate affair, she related how her Honduran students, colleagues, and friends were genuinely perplexed that the president of the United States of America could be asked to step down on account of lying. For them, such behavior was to be expected from politicians. Her response was that this was one of the things that made America great--in America no one is above the law, what to speak of above moral behavior. She ended her speech by telling all the candidates that America is very generous to those who work hard and those who seriously pursue education. She furthermore emphasized the need and importance of voting, and that as a citizen it is one's civic duty to dissent wherever wrongdoing is discovered.

For me the ceremony was a side of America I had never seen. I can't think of any time where I've been in the presence of so many people from so many different countries, and, embarrassingly enough for me, it was the first time I had heard the Oath of Citizenship--something many of us natural born citizens never hear. I am grateful I had the opportunity to attend, and I am personally pleased that my wife is now a U.S. citizen.

Here are a few pictures from the ceremony:

Little girl at Santa Fe Plaza. (I think her mother was getting naturalized.)

The Honorable Judith C. Herrera, U.S. District Court.

All the candidates taking the Oath of Citizenship.

These two Tibetan ladies became U.S. citizens. Both had been in the U.S. for the past 7 - 8 years.

This is my wife, Usha, with her certificate of naturalization.

Islamic Jihad: Educating and Spreading the Word

2005-09-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

Radical Islam is a threat to peace and to civilization wherever it exists. Yet it appears there is a significant class of people who refuse to acknowledge this. We all have our own social networks, our own communities, and we can work most effectively within those. With regard to my own social network (please see the introduction to this blog for further background), some of our top people have posted an article on an official site that could unwittingly augment the threat from radical Islam. This was my response, which has so far been posted anonymously within the internal email channels of my social network:

This evening via email I received a message telling me about an article titled "A Distant View of 9/11," written by a devotee. That the article appears on krishna.com is notable. As far as I am aware, krishna.com is an official ISKCON project, or close enough to being one. It is not one of these websites with a disclaimer that says, "The articles published here do not necessarily represent the views of ISKCON." Considering where the article is posted, I wonder if the article somewhat reflects ISKCON's official view of the war between the West and Islam, or whether this is a harbinger of a coming ISKCON policy statement that sounds something like this article. These two possibilities worry me, and I would like to explain why.

Although the author states that he is wary of conspiracy theories, fundamentally it is a conspiracy theory he promotes. His conspiracy theory is an old and tired one at that. Anyone who is not in ISKCON and also hasn't spent the last four years in a sensory deprevation tank knows this conspiracy theory well: "Blood for Oil." The article, "A Distant View of 9/11," is perhaps more aptly named than the author intended, because if the author had been more in touch with both the old media and new media of the Internet, he might also have known that "Blood for Oil" conspiracy theories are isomorphic forms of theories embodied by slogans like "Support for Saddam." You know, Saddam Hussain? He's the one responsible for having prisoners thrown feet first into wood chippers; who tortured and killed women by having them hung upside down during their menstral periods so that their menses would stay in their bodies, ferment, and poison them; who was responsible for the slaughter tens of thousands of his own countrymen by heavy weapons and by poison gas--burying them in mass graves of the kind not seen since since tyrants like Pol Pot. You know who I'm talking about, right? Saddam and others of his ilk are the kind of people Prahlada Maharaja had in mind when he said "even saintly persons take pleasure in the killing of a scorpion or a snake." Saddam H. is just one, Osama Bin Laden is another. America and Europe say OBL downed the WTC towers, the Middle East says he did it. Heck, even OBL says he did it. Maybe OBL is a CIA mole? The conspiracy theories get weirder all the time.

There really is such a thing as a good war, and even good wars can be criticized by doubting motivations. Merely doubting motives, however, doesn't prove anything. It just means you think the other person has ill motives. The Pandavas' war on the Kauravas, although dharmic, could be recast as "Blood for Land", or "Lust for Power", or whatever other ill motive we can dream up. How about this one: "Blood for Cotton"? It would work well as a conspiracy theory for the American North's war against the South in the American Civil War. In fact, that's what some American Southerners said about the North's motives (as did some in the North). The war was over slavery--make no mistake about that. Yet no matter how good a cause might be, ill motives can always be ascribed to the persons going to war. Although some wars the U.S. has been involved in have been motivated by less than honorable motives, not all have been ill motivated. What dark ulterior motive could we ascribe to the United States's struggle against Nazi Germany and to save the Jews? And then how would we explain the more than charitable Marshal plan for the reconstruction of Germany? Ditto for the reconstruction of Japan.

Finally, if ISKCON is going to make foreign policy statements (and putting something like "A Distant View" on Krishna.com comes close), then I think a little more thought needs to go into figuring out where ISKCON stands in all of this, starting with what it stands to win or lose. What might happen if the West falls? How might that affect ISKCON? In this scenario, Europe more or less becomes an Islamic population and America loses its dominance as an economic, scientific, and military leader. It probably wouldn't be a good thing for India. India has endured for centuries Islamic invaders who happily plundered and slaughtered innocent Hindus, destroyed their temples, built mosques on the foundations of the temples they destroyed, and systematically oppressed the surviviors who would still not become Muslims. There is a mosque sitting right on top of the Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi in Mathura, where a temple to Lord Sri Krishna once stood. Let that sink in for a minute, and then think of all the hundreds and thousands of temples destroyed by Muslim invaders. And now think about how Pakistan, with Chinese assistance, developed a nuclear arsenal (to be used against "you know who"), and then also consider that both Pakistan and China have fought wars with India over its sovereign territory.

India has much to protect that is worthy of protection. Whatever the West may be, it would be in the interests of both the West and India to ally themselves against a demonstrably hostile Sino-Islamic alliance. One of the things India protects is the source of our cultural and religious heritage. Since ISKCON has a personal stake in seeing that India's territorial and cultural integrity be maintained, ISKCON also needs to lend whatever encouragement and guidance (we *are* brahmanas, right?) to those who would protect our heritage. Protecting the dhamas, the Deities, and religious culture is not a material endeavor. But if ISKCON makes policy statements that directly or indirectly support those who would destroy all that we stand for, or if ISKCON's body politic unofficially sides with those who wouldn't mind seeing devotees dead, then we might get what we deserve--up to and including annihilation.

Although ISKCON is not in the business of diplomacy and war, out of necessiity ISKCON could become an important player in the containment and destruction of Islam. Necessity would mean that ISKCON could lose an awful lot, if not itself, if it chose not to act. In the face of global Islamic Jihad, that is a possibility we have to consider. It took an alliance between the United States and the Roman Catholic Church to finally bring down the Soviet State. It may also be the case that a similar alliance of both material and spiritual resources between the West and India will be needed to reign in Islam once and for all. But then on the other hand, things may have to get worse before they get better. Perhaps Europe has to become Eurabia, and perhaps America has to get nuked into insignificance. Perhaps India has to yet again be overrun by foreign invaders, who have neither love nor sympathy for Krishna consciousness. The Muslim invaders who ruled India around the time of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu did not have weapons of mass destruction. If Aurangzeb had nukes, poison gas, and biological weapons like we have today, what do you think he would have done with them?

The world situation is such that even if we do not want to be involved in the nasty business of politics and war, for the sake of survival we might have to be involved anyway. That means being prepared, and the first step is to think a little more carefully about ISKCON's foreign policy.

If anyone wants to write the editors of the Krishna.com site, I encourage you to do so, as it might help them see things from a different perspective. If you do, please post your letter in the comments here, or send it to me at krishna_kirti@hotmail.com and I will post it anonymously.

p.s. I will be going on vacation and won't be back until Teusday or Wednesday of next week. I will post lots of good stuff when I return.

Hindu and Muslim Oragnaizations Donate to Katrina Relief Funds

2005-09-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

Over at Rediff.com is mention of the The National Federation of Indian American Associations raising funds for the victims of Hurricane Katrina:

"We cannot sit and do nothing," said Radha Krishnan, the president-elect of the NFIAA. "People have no homes left, no electricity and no drinking water. The Red Cross and other agencies helping the victims are running out of funds. We need to help these agencies."

And so is the Islamic Society of North America:

[U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen] Hughes thanked ISNA for starting a special fund to help the victims of hurricane Katrina and making an initial donation of $20,000 from its own resources. After September 2 Friday prayers, ISNA announced that it had collected $2 million, with additional contributions expected.

"Muslim Americans must come forward and assist their fellow Americans in this time of need," said Sayyid M. Syeed, secretary general of ISNA.

UPDATE: The American Atheists are also raising funds for hurricane relief, but I don't see any figures for how much they have raised so far. They don't strike me as being a well-monied group, but any effort is appreciated.

Multiculturalism Divides, not Unites

2005-09-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

Multiculturalism promotes a social identity based on difference, not likeness, and consequently divides people instead of uniting them. Compare religious sentiment with multiculturalist sentiment:

"I thought we were going to die out there," Bernadette Washington said. "We had to sleep on the ground. Use the bathroom in front of each other. Laying on that ground, I just couldn't take it. I felt like Job."

Then, somehow, a bus, and then Baton Rouge. At that moment, a lady — white — came by the rest stop and handed her some baby items.

"Bless you," Washington said.

That exchange forced something from Warren Carter: "White man came up to me little while ago and offered me some money. I said thank you, but no thanks. I got money to hold us over. But it does go to show you that racism ain't everywhere."

(Haygood, Wil. "'It just seems like black people are marked.'" 2 Sep 2005. The Washington Post. 2 Sep 2005. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9166350/>)

The reaction of the black lady, who appeared to frame her experiences through Biblical pastimes, differed markedly from the reaction of the black man, who appeared to frame his experiences in "us / them" terms. The white woman got a blessing, but the white man was identified as not a racist. Not being against someone does not necessarily mean you like him--offers of help not withstanding. Not being friends, even if you are not enemies, does not make for a stable and lasting peace.

Liking, however, requires that we identify "something" we cherish that is also fundamental and common to ourselves and to others. Religion has provided that "something," an identity--a conception of the self and of others--that transcendes differences inherent in bodies, cultures, families, and racial histories. Multiculturalism, however, cannot move us to the stage of liking the other, because liking is a matter of discovering fundamental simiarities between ourselves, and multiculturalism moves away from likenesses toward differences.

New Talavan Post-Hurricane Pictures

2005-09-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

These are pictures around the Hare Krishna's New Talavan farm community, post Hurricane Katrina. An earlier report mentioned that the eye of the hurricane came within 10 miles of the farm. Also, as a side note, durring the hurricane the cows there continued to graze.

More later.

Industry, Redundancy, and Coping with Hurricane Katrina

2005-09-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

It looks like fully industrialized societies may not be much of an improvement over societies that have not fully industrialized. In engineering (mechanical, software, etc.), when critical services that other system services depend on are concentrated in a single component or single center or operation, if that component or service fails the rest of the system goes down with it. That is called a "single point of failure." Systems that have multiple failover mechanisms and redundant components are, however, considered more reliable because if one or more components go down, then the other redundant components for a time can assume the extra load. The system is strained, but it doesn't go down. The cost of redundancy is high, but the cost of system failure is higher--even if it rarely happens. Like any other system that depends on highly specialized components but lacks redundancy, a highly industrialized society is similarly fragile because critical services become concentrated with a small number of people or agencies. If small but important social components fail on account of sabotage or disaster, the effect on the rest of society can be disproportionately catastrophic.

America, which is known as "the bread basket of the world," has an especially vulnerable food supply. The seeming benefit of the industrialized food supply is that it allows fewer people to produce considerably more food. America produces so much food that to keep food prices high enough, the government has to offer subsidies to farmers to not grow food or just dump grains in the ocean. The down-side of America's industrialized food supply is that, because food production is concentrated in the hands of a few (and we aren't talking of storage systems that largely depend on the availability of transportation and electricity), the system has little scope for failover. This is true of many other essential components of society, but the food supply is perhaps the most obvious failure-prone component.

The recent disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina has highlighted this fragility in the American social system. The national response to the disaster has been heroic, commendable, will save many lives and will eventually restore order. In the mean time, however, there has been considerable disorder. Reports of hundreds, perhaps thousands dead in New Orleans and in Mississippi, the widespread looting in the aftermath, a breakdown of law enforcement, and the inability to quickly mend the destruction wreaked by nature reminded me of news reports we often hear of when typhoons hit places like India or Bangladesh. Even since 9/11, America is not a place that we expect hundreds and thousands of people to perish in cataclysmic mass destruction--whether natural or man-made.

The environment, the economy, and the geopolitical situation are all changing, and with these changes the kind of society we build may affect our future chances of survival. If means of production, especially that of food, is a critical component of any social system, which will be the better long-term social strategy to implement:

globalization with its potential for higher efficiency and higher profits but increased dependency on services and products from foreign lands, or
localized production that is redundant and therefore more robust but less efficient and less profitable?

A localized means of production might be better suited to withstanding environmental threats like the Hurricane Katrina disaster or, more increasingly, disasters that could be wreaked by foreign enemies. These are things for which we shouldn't be caught unprepared. Scaling down American commercial farm enterprises and encouraging small farmers who relied less on industrialized means of farming could be in the interest of America's national security. Right now the chemical industry, the machinery industry, and food production are all tightly coupled. Loosening the couplings between these subsystems, which means making them less interdependent, would make for a more robust social system that could better withstand a catastrophy.

To put a personal face on all this socio-economic / systemic theory, there is the untold story of how two small, unnoticed Hare Krishna temple and farm communities in New Orleans and Mississippi are coping with the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. The Hare Krishna devotees at the farm community, who seem to be doing better than some of their neighbors, are providing a helping hand. This is a letter sent from the Hare Krishna farm community near Carriere, Mississippi. (The name of the farm community is New Talavan):

[email dated 31 August 2005 from Yogindra Vandana das Adhikary]
Dear Maharajas, GBCs, Temple Presidents, Web & Magazine Editors and Devotees,

Hare Krsna! Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

The power of the Lord's external energy is inconceivable. How one storm can destroy the social structure of an area ranging from 50 miles west of New Orleans all the way to Mobile, Alabama is stunning. In Mississippi, everything from Jackson on south is devastated. There are no commerce, transportation or other normal activities going on.

Despite our good fortune to have our temples in both New Orleans and New Talavan emerge relatively unscathed, the harsh reality is that there is no functioning society around us. The devotees in New Orleans are virtually trapped. Although they have supplies, there is no power, running water or cooking gas. The sanitation system is nonexistent. There is no water pressure in case of a fire, and water is till rising in the city from a 500-foot break in the river levee. This just came in this morning's news [only approximate link could be ascertained]:

NEW ORLEANS - The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We've sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers struggled without success to plug New Orleans' breached levees with sandbags, and Blanco said Wednesday the situation was worsening, leaving no choice but to evacuate.

"The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Blanco said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "The National Guard has been dropping sandbags into it, but it's like dropping it into a black hole."

As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, four Navy ships raced toward the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, and Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region. The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen.

The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.

A full day after the city thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets of New Orleans on Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.

"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."

Perhaps when civil and governmental authorities find the New Orleans devotees, they will ship them to New Talavan or engage them in cooking and serving meals to the other storm refugees. If anyone reading this has the ability to communicate by phone, please inform the New Orleans emergency authorities that there are at least 15 Hare Krsna devotees, including the devotees hurt in the recent accident, in urgent need of evacuation at 2936 Esplanade Ave., and if possible they need to get to New Talavan in Carriere, Mississippi, where our community can care for them.

New Talavan is a different situation. Although we have well water, LP cooking gas and some bhoga [food that can be cooked or eaten], supplies such as LP gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, dahl, rice, oats, cash etc. are running low and need to be rationed. There is no phone service, and the electricity will be out for at least two months. If we don't start our own massive cleanup operation, it will be months before the local government can clear the county roads. The devotees have already cleared the roads on the farm itself, but we are still cut off from the surrounding area.

Our need and request is to please contact FEMA administrators (601 960-9999) and the Red Cross (800 GET-HELP). Inform them about our community in NW Hancock County, north of Leetown at 31492 Anner Road, We are providing water and meals for locals and 23 devotees on the temple property. If they can supply us with LP gas, rice, oats, beans, corn, canned tomatoes, butter and sugar, gasoline and diesel fuel to run our generator, etc., we can supply meals to many people from the surrounding community.

It is stunning and shocking to have your entire social system stripped down naked. There are some here who have lost their mental equilibrium, perhaps the greatest danger of such a disaster. All of our books distributors and Food for Life collectors worked the New Orleans tourist district, which is under water and will not reopen for months. We cannot even send or receive mail, which was another important source of income. All the banks and ATMs are closed and inoperative. Thus the only for us to receive funds is electronically. If you read this and want to send a donation, the only way at present is through PayPal.com. At least we can collect donations now and use them to purchase things online as soon as the postal system is functional again. The email addresses for dominations are adoptacow@newtalavana.org for New Talavan, and devotee_relief@iskcon-nola.us for the New Orleans devotees.

For the time being, our schedule revolves around the sun coming up and going down. We have altered our sadhana and Deity schedules to accommodate the lack of lighting and water. Mangal-arati will continue to be at 4:30 but we are offering only burfy and milk. Afterwards, the devotees just chant japa. At sunup around 7 AM, the devotees can bathe and dress the Deities. Then we cook and offer breakfast around 10 AM. Then again around 3 PM we can cook and offer about 6 PM, have arati, class and distribute prasadam. The daily temperatures are still in the 90s, so the devotees welcome and relish the cool mornings and evenings.

Please send us your prayers and let's not forget the two seriously injured boys in the ICU in El Paso. Lalita-pranesvara Prabhu is there alone caring for them. His cell phone number is 504 638-4874. Please call him, since we cannot, and inspire him to continue his difficult service.

Although we are down, we are far from out; so with your prayers and blessings we will be back stronger than ever. Hoping this finds y'all relishing the mercy of Guru and Gauranga,

your servant,

Yogindra Vandana das Adhikari

_____

ISKCON New Talavan Community
Founder-Acharya: His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Temple President: His Grace Yogindra Vandana das Adhikari
31492 Anner Rd. Carriere MS 39426 601 749-9460
http://www.newtalavana.org

Please always chant:

Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare

The one part in the letter above that really struck me was this: "It is stunning and shocking to have your entire social system stripped down naked. There are some here who have lost their mental equilibrium, perhaps the greatest danger of such a disaster." That's what prompted me to open this post with some discussion on what makes systems robust or failure-prone. The farm community at New Talavan has tried to be as self-sufficient as possible, though it still relies somewhat on modern amenities like LP gas, electricity, and email. My wife visited New Orleans several months ago and also visited the temple farm communities there. (We live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.) She brought back with her some whole-wheat flour grown and milled on the New Talavan farm. We still have some of the flour, and from time-to-time we bake bread with it. Because the New Talavan community was a little self-sufficient, it appears they were in a better position to help soften the blow of the disaster than were some of their neighbors. I also felt this fact was relevant to wider social issues, which is why I brought them up at the beginning of this post.

The Hare Krishna community in Carriere, Mississippi will greatfully accept donations in cash or in kind and will put them to good use for the surrounding community immediately. If you donate or send help their way, please also mention this weblog (Indus Valley Rising) referred you.

Indian Arms Purchases Tops 2004 Buyers

2005-08-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

According to this article at Rediff.com, for 2004 India was "the largest buyer from the United States," beating China, which had been the largest arms buyer from the US for the last four years. Also of note in the article is that Russia is the number 2 arms-dealer in the world, and mainly supplies India and China. Looks like India, China, and probably Pakistan are saving up for a big "party."

Also of note is the arms-race between Pakistan and India. In negotiating the purchase of 75 F-16s from the US, Jehangir Karamat (the Pakistani ambassador to the US) said:

'Pakistan does not want any upset in the balance of power between the two states, "as then, Pakistan has to inevitably take steps to redress that (an imbalance).'

However, it should be expected that the bulk of Pakistani military spending will be in developing their nuclear arsenal and strategic weapons as India has always had a superiority in conventional military strength. The United States followed a similar policy in containing the erstwhile Soviet Union, which also had a significant numeric superiority in conventional military force.

Then there is this link to an article titled "Why is the US indulging Pakistan?"

An Ontological Explanation for Jihad

2005-08-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

Over at The Belmont Club, Wretchard reports on Paul Berman's book Terror and Liberalism, which affords a critique of the modern Left's political alliance with radical Islam. As reported by Wretchard, Berman asserts that the Left should have concluded that radical Islam must be opposed because it stands against everything Western liberals have fought for. Yet quite the opposite happened, and Berman tries to answer why. According to Berman, liberals considered avoiding war to be the unquestionable moral principle that all other moral principles bowed down to: "Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil." In short, "people dying" was considered an intrinsically bad thing; preventing it therefore justified any cost or compromise in values.

But the problem with holding up the preservation of life as the ultimate moral principle brings into question whose life? There will always be circumstances where one set of lives have to be valued more than another set, and in war this almost always involves large sets of lives. The follow-up question to whose lives are worth preserving over others is this: is there anything in the world that is worth sacrificing one or more lives for, or every last life for? When the preservation of life itself is made the pinnacle of morality, then the answer is no. And that perhaps explains why the Left seems consistently inclined to compromise with the worst of tyrants.

But this is a phenomenal explanation for the Left's seemingly perpetual attraction to tyrants, because all rational explanations are ultimately founded on fundamental assumptions that can never be validated by logic. Logic is a system for manipulating symbols, ideas. Every known system of logic must begin with irreducible axioms. No explanation for jihad or the global Left's genuflexion toward it can therefore be complete without describing their ontologies. In other words, the question of what motivates jihadis and the Left begins with understanding what they think themselves to be. All questions of value and morality begin not with rationality but with a fundamental conception of the self. In deliberating the values of the Marxists, one 20th century thinker ruminated thusly:

The . . . doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and . . . thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.

Into the 21st century, sounds like things haven't changed so much after all, have they? His analysis of the faults in Marxism begin with an understanding of the self--nature, personality, nationality, and culture. And this analysis is perhaps spot on, because Marxists logically arrive at the conclusion that man is no more significant than his own body--personally or collectively within the context of society. From this conception of the self can be derived an abstract rationalization against the bourgeosie, the capitalists, and anyone else who retains extraordinary wealth and influence. Communism's perpetual enmity with the more privileged classes is thus a rationalism that is rooted in a fundamental, irreducible conception of the self.

In critiquing Marxism, the thinker also betrays the fundamentally irreducible self-conception upon which his own rationalizations are founded. Like the Communists, he also believes himself to be a thing of Nature, except his view of nature was perhaps more reverential than those of the Communists, who also tend to be humanistic. Who is this critic of Marxist doctrine? The first sentence rendered in full should make clearer the author and the role of self-conceptions in the matter of rational exegeses: "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature. . ." The critic was Hitler.

Hitler's "final solution" too was derived from his fundamental self-conception: (emphasis added)

I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could lay hands on and sought the names of their authors: Jews. I noted the names of the leaders; by far the greatest part were likewise members of the 'chosen people,' whether they were representatives in the Reichsrat or trade-union secretaries, the heads of organizations or street agitators. It was always the same gruesome picture. The names of the Austerlitzes, Davids, Adlers, Ellenbogens, etc., will remain forever graven in my memory. One thing had grown dear to me: the party with whose petty representatives I had been carrying on the most violent struggle for months was, as to leadership, almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people; for, to my deep and joyful satisfaction, I had at last come to the conclusion that the Jew was no German. (Mein Kampf, chapter 2)

If Hitler had felt the Jews were not hostile nor hold-outs against that which he considered most dear--idealized, nationalistic German culture--then perhaps the world would not have seen "the final solution." But that was not to be. Hitler's "final solution" was rational because, to him and his followers, the rationalizations followed from an unquestionable, irreducible conception of the self.

Islamic Jihad is also based on a fundamental conception of the self which, like Marxism and Facism, is also materialistic. Dying for the sake of carnal rewards, whether earthly, or heavenly, or for the preservation of the ummah, is still a conception of the self rooted in the body. For Muslims too, that thing about them which is fundamentally irreducible and not subject to rationalization provides their most basic answer to the questions "what am I?", "what are we?", and by extension "what are you?" Those who fundamentally differ from them on this level tend to be regarded as enemies, even if the so-called enemies mean Islamists no harm. It is the otherness that is threatening, because by association, becoming "like" the other is something is something akin to suicide. If one's inner-most self is destroyed, goes missing, or becomes something else, what then is the use of everything else? For Islam to thus protect itself, the "other" must be dehumanized--made fit for derision, subjugation, exploitation, and termination. Justification for jihad, like Hitler's justification for the Final Solution, is rational, not irrational, once the axioms inherent in radical Islamic are accepted as the starting point for all rationalizations.

The West and allied civilizations like the Orthodox and Hindu civlizations are inadvertently in search of a fundamental, irreducible conception of themselves, lest the modern Left define it for them. To a significant extent, all three of these civilizations, and others not mentioned here, have been significantly affected by empiricism and liberal ideologies which have at their root a conception of the self--a conception demonstrated by the modern Left as self-defeating. So in one sense the greater part of the battle against radical Islam is really a set of intracivilizational, ideological battles to define the reigning ontologies for each of these civilizations.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of these battles, to see what type of conception of the self each civilization arrives at and whether or not these conceptions can stand up to the ummah. It is our ontological understanding of the self, whether visceral, religious, cultural, or even intellectual, that forms the starting point from which all rationalizations, values, and ethics descend. This ontological understanding need not be religious, either. It can be cultural, national, class-based, race-based, etc. One thing the Belmont Club article should make clear is that the ontological conception at the heart of the modern Left cannot stand up to radical Islam. If the Left wins, the jihadis win with them.

The current challenge to evolutionary theory from the religious Right in America, in the form of promoting Intelligent Design in education, is perhaps a metaphor for the American struggle in establishing who the Americans really are. The modern Left has a hammer-lock on educational institutions throughout the West, and advocacy for teaching Intelligent Design by all appearances seems to be an attempt to break that hammer-lock. Although the connection between ID advocacy and fighting radical Islam is not obvious, the winners of this and other future cultural battles will create the people who ultimately have to take a stand against radical Islam, perhaps laying down their lives or surrendering. Secular culture has little choice but to give up some of its dominance, or like the French liberals who later came to occupy posts in government of Vichy France, give up completely at the feet of a tyranical conqueror who at least believed in something worth dying for.

Janmastami

2005-08-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Today is Janmashtami, the appearance day of Lord Sri Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Jaya Sri Krishna!!

Further Thoughts on Inter-Civilizational Cooperation

2005-08-25T05:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's post "What Annoys Indians?" could have just as well been named "What Annoys?" The answer is always "the other"--that which is not like us. The Sino-Islamic axis is basically limited to military and economic cooperation against a set of common enemies. Beyond that there is no love between Islamists and the Han Chinese. Perhaps it is too optimistic to expect a love between Western and Hindu civilizations beyond substantial military and economic cooperation.

Different aspects of India's social system, for example, just plain annoy Westerners and probably always will, and vice-versa. In the book May You Be The Mother of a Hundred Sons, Elisabeth Bumiller, in contemplating the preocupation Indian mothers have with arranging their children's marriages, wryly observes that in general young Indian boys and girls are not allowed to date--as if being allowed to date were a sign of cultural progress. That is typical wisdom coming from someone who appears to support many if not all the social conventions that are responsible for the West's spiraling depopulation; in history, depopulation has been a harbinger of civilizational collapse. After ruling the world for the last 200 - 300 years, on cultural issues the West has become something like an old man who refuses to accept that he is losing control of his body and lashes out at anyone who suggests he should give up his car keys.

Cooperation between Hindu and Western civilizations, as in other civilizational joint ventures, is probably not a viable proposition beyond military and economic cooperation. When the need for such cooperation disappears, then the rivalry between former civilizational partners will again move to conflict in the economic and military arenas.

What Annoys Indians?

2005-08-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

We think we already have a good idea of what annoys Westerners. Since one of the objectives of this blog is fostering Western-Hindu cooperation (partly to counter the Sino-Islamic axis that harbors not-so-good intentions toward Westerners and Hindus), overcoming annoyances that arise between Westerners and Hindus is something this site has an interest in. Over at Gates of Vienna is a discussion, which to begin with, is a summary study of how Westerners piss off Hindus and how pissed-off Hindus react. Let's see if the feathers on both sides can be unruffled. This post will be updated.

Update

Well, the discussion didn't go much anywhere, but up through Sumnath's comment is a pretty good encapsulation of mutual cultural annoyance (MCA). It starts with the main post and goes downhill from there. (If you stick this out to the end, there is dry land at the end of this swamp--I promise.)

Main Post and Comments

If you take the conclusion as the summarization and implications of whatever preceded it (which it usually should be), then its a post about liberty and freedom--like what would it take to liberate these poor, abused women. The facts the authoress marshals to support her case speak not only of widespread abuse but suggests that such abuse has social approval, or has at least met with indifference. In other words, it's not just a bunch of bad men but its the social norms that are being examined. This is a commentary on a society, specifically a South Asian Islamic society.

Now enter the rest of South Asia: (quoted from the post, emphasis mine) As it is in India, so in Bangladesh: very young women — girls, really — are married off to older men. In what should function as a kind of economic surety for the girls, the dowry that accompanies marriage is used by the husband and his family for their own purposes.

Bangladeshi Muslim society is now being used as a proxy for India (meaning Hindu society in India); few things upset Hindus more than being lumped in with Muslims. This begins to explain the comment from Sumnath, who from what I gather from his posted link is not excactly a self-loathing-secular-liberal-hinduoid-offspring of Lord McCauley. Of course, it is not that things like this don't go on among Hindus, either, its just that most Hindus get offended because most Hindus don't do those kinds of things, and then you have someone casually passing judgment on what must be more than a billion people. It doesn't feel good, really.

Then in the comments section things go down hill from there. One commentator wrote, "Maybe it's time to drop them a half-billion Liberty pistols with pictoral instructions on how to shoot their abusive men in their sleep."

And no one commenting is exactly protesting this, either.

You can start to see why Indians, Hindus especially, see the global war on terror as America's war on terror. Hindus haven't forgotten that the British government in India covertly supported the Muslim League to use it as a bargaining chip with the Hindu nationalists, and Muslim behavior toward Hindus back then was no more charitable than it is now--propaganda not withstanding. What does that have to do with the post and comments under discussion? A continuation of ill will, perhaps.

It appears that the commentator Sumnath submitted his comment as a counterbalance to the uncharitable rhetoric about Indian society. Perhaps what he wrote was not so convincing, but after all that's been said in the post and in the thread, he's Indian and subsequently he's already a dog with a bad name. So who's going to take him seriously or reconsider their opinions? I wouldn't regard his attempt to sway the minds of the other readers and commentators as forceful, but undoubtedly it was his way of saying things in India aren't what they've been made out to be.

Analysis

Here are the essential points:

Lack of personal familiarity with the societies being discussed.
Culture leaves a distinct impression on all facets of a participant society.

Considering these two points, the post and the comments themselves were overly broad in their criticisms and too far removed from their subject. Non-challant expressions that amounted to suggesting that wiping out an entire civilization might not be a bad thing weren't protested; that undermined any legitimate concerns that may have been expressed in the posting or in the comments. Those kinds of comments were probably not seen as offensive by the commentators because there was little if any personal connection with the people being talked about.

Also, crime as it happens in India or wherever is going to look culturally distinct from crimes as we are used to them in the good old USA or in even older Europe. That distinctness of the "other" is easily confused as a social norm for the other society. For example, Andrea Yates's drowning her five children was a horrible and shocking crime within America. But then if it was so shocking, why did NOW (National Organization of Women) rush to Yates's defense? NOW had their reasons, all of which were about "root causes," and it so happens that lack of conscience or morality somehow never made it to NOW's root-cause list. But come on, NOW--killing your own children because you had a bad day? Indian women, many of whom have 5 or more children, couldn't be blamed for experiencing a xenophobic shiver on getting this news. Ok, the hairy-legged man-haters over at NOW can get silly; most Americans agreed that Andrea Yates committed a heinous crime. But the crime certainly wasn't normal, was it?

This press release from the Government of India in the Washington Times (July 19, 1996) puts dowry deaths in a similar perspective:

Correspondent doesn't permit facts to get in the way of a good story
Let me respond to the article, "`Women's court' chips away at backlog" (World, July 8), which included the statement: "Dowry deaths are a common crime. The usual method is for the husband and his parents to burn the women."

This letter is prompted by the sweeping generalizations in the article. India is a hugely complex society, and it is a nation of more than 900 million people, about half of whom are women. It is easy to make generalizations by buttressing reports with numbers that sound impressive, but just a little more care would produce articles that would be more reflective of the truth and, therefore, would give your readers a clearer picture.

The dowry system is outlawed. Only very recently the Supreme Court of India handed down an extremely tough interpretation of the law that makes dowry de-mands - before, during or after marriage negotiations, a crime. It is a truism that the article ignores that even the toughest of laws does not remove social flaws overnight, particularly if a flaw has existed for thousands of years.

The highest number of dowry deaths in India in a single year was documented by authorities at slightly more than 4,000, but if you compare that to the total number of married women in India (just over 250 million), perhaps then one would understand that describing dowry deaths as "common" is ludicrous. They happen, but they are an aberration.

Arianna Huffington's July 9 column ("Inflicting agony in the name of family," Commentary) mentioned that more than 1,000 children are killed by their parents each year in the United States, and an article in Time magazine a few years ago said that more than 2,000 wives are battered to death by their husbands each year in this country. This certainly does not make the United States a nation where child-killing and wife-battering are "common." These are aberrations, and it is legitimate for an alert and free press to highlight them so that law and society can tackle the problem.

To portray isolated crimes as almost a norm in society, as that article does, is perhaps typical of the "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" school of journalism.

SHIV S. MUKHERJEE

Minister (Press, Information and Culture)

Embassy of India

Washington

To our Western friends in particular, what's being asked of you is to be a leeetle bit more cautious with what you write and please think 100 times before tarring-and-feathering with the written or spoken word some other society that, when the facts are in, is most likely as civilized as your own. And to our Hindu friends, please try to move on from the past, and don't forget that some of the less savory customs you sometimes associate with Western peoples are becoming prominent among Indians. (And I'm talking about customs and habits that really aren't good for anyone no matter what the civilization and in whatever period of history.)

No one is "fit to cast the first stone," and there is a lot to appreciate in each other. So, with mutual respect, can we please move on from here? We have a world to save. . .

Burned to the Ground

2005-08-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

It seems Akbar the Great, Mogul ruler of India, really was contemptuous of Islam:

On the same occasion the King [Akbar] caused all the Alcorans in the town in which he then held his court to be razed to the ground. By the word 'Alcoran'2 is signified not only the law of Mahomet, but certain high towers from which the ministers of the sect of Mahomet, in a loud voice, invoke their false prophet, and from which they summon the people to prayer. The mosques also, which are the temples of the same deceiver, were by his order converted into stables for horses and elephants; and since one of the greatest of his former difficulties had been the multitude of his wives, he abandoned them all save one, giving them in marriage to various lords and gentlemen of his court. 3 He also made proclamation, by sound of trumpet, that, from that time forward, no Mahometan should circumcise his male children until they had attained the age of 15 years, so that they might choose for themselves the law which they desired to follow. (Du Jarric 45)

This might have to become a necessary policy in dealing with radical Islam. The Mahometans sure don't have any qualms about destroying anyone else's place of worship.

Works Cited

Pierre Du Jarric, Akbar and the Jesuits: An Account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar, trans. Payne, C. H., eds. Ross, E. Denison andEileen Power (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926)

Islam as an Ideology

2005-08-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

In the last entry, "Why Akbar Did Not Become A Christian," I wrote:

If there is any modern parallel to Akbar's stumbling blocks in his spiritual journey, it is that secularism and sexual license also seem to go hand-in-hand. It should be noted that all the other great religions of the world that have a fundamental doctrine of peace and nonviolence also have built into them an asceticism that clearly designates worldly pleasure as detrimental to spiritual progress. This is true of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but not so of Islam. Furthermore, if we analyze other radically materialistic ideologies that have seen extensive political expression, Facism and Communism of the last century are unparalleled in their brutality and contempt for life. Islam therefore appears to be a radically worldly ideology, like Facism or Communism, but decorated in the trappings of religious ritual and tradition.

Now there is blog with quotes from tons of people who have made similar observations and who, unlike me, are not nobodies. Welcome to the the blogosphere The Truth Project. They are all "money" quotes, but here is a sample:

The reason I am against Islam is not because it is a religion but because it is a political ideology of imperialism and domination in the guise of religion.
Because Islam does not follow the Golden Rule, it attracts violent people.
-Al Sina

And we could add that it creates violent people, too. Here's one from the Mahometans:

We have the right to kill 4 million Americans, two million of them children.
-Abu Gheith, Al-Qaeda spokesman

My God! If we're going to win this war, our most formidable enemy is not the Muslims but the social, political, and academic Left. Long ago they forgot that their vantage point from which they can sneer at the rest of us moralists was made possible by men who, unlike them, could tell right from wrong and who acted with a conscience. I mean, how in the name of multiculturalism can Islam be passed off by the Left as a "peaceful religion"?

Any way, visit The Truth Project. (Hat tip: The Gates of Vienna.)

Why Akbar Did Not Become A Christian

2005-08-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

In the book "Akbar and the Jesuits: An Account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar," which is a narrative of the Jesuit missions to the court of Akbar in India, from 1578 through 1605 (the year Akbar died), the Jesuit Fathers describe the interest and reverence Akbar had for the Christian faith. He displayed so much reverence for it that the Jesuit Fathers were full with expectations of his conversion.

On one occasion, the King [Akbar], having come to see what his son was learning, bade him read aloud to him the exercise which the Fathers had given him to write. The exercise commenced with the words 'In the name of God,' on hearing which his Majesty at once told him to add the words 'and of Jesus Christ the true prophet and son of God'; and this was done then and there in his presence. 4 He then entered the chapel, where the Fathers daily said mass for the benefit of the Portuguese connected with the court; for there were several who had made their homes in this country, and others who had journeyed there for the purpose of trade. The King entered the oratory unaccompanied by any of his guards or courtiers, and having removed his turban from his head, fell upon his knees and prayed, first of all in our fashion, then in his own, that is to say, after the manner of the Saracens of Persia, whose law he still outwardly observed, and lastly in the fashion of the Gentiles. "God," he said, as he rose from his devotions, "ought to be adored with every kind of adoration." After that, he seated himself on a cushion on the floor; and when the Fathers had also seated themselves, he told them that he did not doubt that our law was the best of all, and that he beheld something more than human in the life and miracles of Jesus-Christ; but that it was beyond his comprehension how God could have a son. On a subsequent visit, after talking on sundry topics, he said: "Fathers, you have, by your discourses, taught me many things about your law, which please me more than all that I have been able to learn of other laws, whether of the Saracens, or the Gentiles; and, for my part, I regard the law of the Saracens as worse than any other."

Eight days later, he again came to the oratory, accompanied this time by his three sons, and some of the chief nobles of his court. For a while he stood apart, looking attentively at the various objects in the chapel, and expressing his admiration of them in the presence of his courtiers. He then removed his shoes from his feet, and ordered his sons and all who were with him to do likewise, this being the custom observed by Moslims when entering their mosques. He showed great reverence for the pictures of our Saviour and the blessed Virgin, and even for those of other saints; and he ordered his painter to make copies of those which the Fathers had placed in their chapel. He also ordered his goldsmith to make for him a casket of gold with a richly carved lid, similar in shape to the copper casket in which the Fathers carried the images of our Saviour and the Virgin. Before leaving, he told the Fathers that their law appealed to him very strongly; but that there were two points in it which he could not comprehend, namely, the Trinity and the Incarnation. If they could explain these two things to his satisfaction, he would, he said, declare himself a Christian, even though it cost him his kingdom. (Du Jarric 25 - 27)

From this description, even if partially true, we could forgive the Jesuit Fathers for thinking that Akbar would become a Christian. But Akbar never converted. Why?

According to the Jesuits, Akbar had several stumbling blocks, the most prominent of which were his preference to subordinate faith to reason, political ambition, and his attachment to his many wives. With regard to his preference for understanding everything according to reason, the Jesuits wrote:

But although such acts as these seemed to show that the King held the Christian faith in high esteem, there were, nevertheless, many things which stood in the way of his embracing it. The first was his unwillingness to accept the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation without being able to comprehend them; so that he was kept in a state of perpetual irresolution, not knowing where to fix his faith. "For the Gentiles," he said, "regard their law as good; and so likewise do the Saracens and the Christians. To which then shall we give our adherence?" Thus we see in this Prince the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to make reason subservient to faith, and, accepting nothing as true which his feeble mind is unable to fathom, is content to submit to his own imperfect judgement matters transcending the highest limits of human understanding. (Du Jarric 29)

The Jesuits have a valid epistemological point: If everything about God were understandable by reason alone (Deism), then would it be God that was actually being understood? If God could fit neatly into whatever conceptual boundaries that can be formed by the human mind, then God wouldn't be God, for being perfectly conceivable by virtue of the efforts of limited beings would have to mean God Himself would be so limited. Akbar much appreciated Christian teachings, and he even more appreciated the habits, demeanor, and devotion of the Jesuit Fathers, yet Akbar insisted that all assertions ultimately had to be understood through the agency of reason. We can see from this that Akbar was by temperament quite secular even by today's standards.

His political compulsions also got the better of him. On account of his tryst with Christianity, a Mohammedan uprising took place in Bengal and which, if unchecked, threatened his personal and political well being. Becoming a Christian would have been at odds with his political ambitions, and on account of this he distanced himself for some time from the Jesuits, although inwardly he maintained his appreciation of Christian teachings over that of Islam.

The last significant stumbling block was allowances the Koran made for a man to have many wives, or in the afterlife promises made by the Koran for heavenly but nevertheless carnal rewards. If Akbar were to convert, he could only keep one wife--something neither he nor his many wives wanted.

But, in the eyes of many, that which constituted the greatest hindrance to his conversion to our faith was the multitude of wives which the Mahometan law permitted him to keep. There were in his seraglio as many as a hundred women; and it was doubtful if he would ever be willing to renounce all of these but one, and to live with that one in lawful wedlock, as the Christian law demands. (Du Jarric 30)

Furthermore, though convinced in his [Akbar's] own mind that the law of the Evangelists was superior to all others, he was still held in bondage by the vicious customs and licentious indulgences to which the law of Mahomet gives its sanction. (Du Jarric 37)

Akbar hesitated to embrace Christianity because of his intellectual disposition and his attachment to sensual pleasure, whether in this world or the next. Akbar's intellectual disposition was clearly secular, and the epitome of his proclivity for worldy enjoyment was sexual license (with politics as a close second). Akbar, it appears, was a moderate--a liberal of his time--who came to the precipice of embracing a superior way, yet couldn't on account of his worldly attachments.

If there is any modern parallel to Akbar's stumbling blocks in his spiritual journey, it is that secularism and sexual license also seem to go hand-in-hand. It should be noted that all the other great religions of the world that have a fundamental doctrine of peace and nonviolence also have built into them an asceticism that clearly designates worldly pleasure as detrimental to spiritual progress. This is true of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but not so of Islam. Furthermore, if we analyze other radically materialistic ideologies that have seen extensive political expression, Facism and Communism of the last century are unparalleled in their brutality and contempt for life. Islam therefore appears to be a radically worldly ideology, like Facism or Communism, but decorated in the trappings of religious ritual and tradition.

Works Cited

Pierre Du Jarric, Akbar and the Jesuits: An Account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar, trans. Payne, C. H., eds. Ross, E. Denison andEileen Power (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926)

Secularism as a Harmonizing Social Substrate

2005-08-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Around the world the conventional wisdom is that for people of differing religions to accommodate one another the social context must be secular. Secularism itself is seen as transcending sectarian religious belief, so that makes it the logical choice of society in which other sub-beliefs can be accommodated. Yet secularism, which is guided by empirical science, is unable to define a concept of the self that transcends the brute stuff of nature: atoms, molecules, and other natural phenomena. And because secularism is also a belief about who we really are, instead of being an accommodating social subtrate for other beliefs it becomes yet another belief--one among many--that has to compete with the rest. That would explain why it was ulitmately unacceptable that the secular Congress party of India represent the interests of Muslims in Kashmir.

However, they [Kashmiri Muslims] had limited room for manoeuvre, tied as they were to political events and discourse in India. Zutshi shows persuasively how Sheikh Abdullah, a popular leader of Kashmir Muslims against the Hindu maharajah, ended up allying himself with the Hindu-dominated Congress party and its rhetoric of secularism in independent India. A secular nationalist platform was better able to accommodate regional and religious diversity within Jammu and Kashmir, and so it was a convenient means to achieve power. It also helped maintain a moral advantage over political opponents, who could be discredited as rank "communalists".

But Abdullah's expedient secularism subordinated Kashmir to a distant power in Delhi; and it denied citizenship rights to Kashmiri Muslims while asking them to give up their loyalty to their regional and religious groupings. No wonder that most Kashmiris resented this bargain and that Sheikh Abdullah became a hated figure among the young, educated Muslims who began the anti-India insurgency in 1989. (Mishra)

Essentially the Kashmiri Muslims rejected a definition of the self inherent in the secularism on which the Congress party was intellectually founded. In the face of powerful global forces which are behind a revival of religion in the world, secular ideology eventually had to give way to radicalized forms of religion. Samuel Huntington notes that globalization creates a vacuum in self-identity that religion is well suited to fill.

Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from long-standing local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations. (Huntington 2)

Note that the Kashmiri Muslims who rallied around radical Islam tended to be educated, just as Mohammed Atta and the other World Trade Center bombers were also educated. Radical Islam is as much about finding an identity that transcends the metaphysically empty secularism on which modern globalism is founded. This indicates that any social substrate that can accommodate a tamed form of Islam must necessarily have metaphysical substance and be able to accommodate differing expressions of religious beliefs.

On a practical and immediate level, if true, this would suggest that the Iraqi constitution, if it fails, will fail for metaphysical reasons if not for anything else.

Works Cited

Huntington, Samuel. "The clash of civilizations?" Foreign Affairs. New York: Summer 1993. Online 20 Aug 2005. <http://www.columbia.edu/itc/sipa/U6800/readings-sm/foreign_aff_huntington.pdf>
Mishra, Pankaj. "Valley of the shadows." (A review of Mridu Rai's "Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, rights and the history of Kashmir.") 30 Aug 2004. The New Statesman. 20 Aug 2005. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4703_133/ai_n6247140>

Akbar "The Great"

2005-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

If ever there was an influential Muslim ruler who was remembered for his great works rather than his military conquests, that Muslim ruler was Akbar "The Great," who lived from 1542 - 1605 and ruled India. In Akbar is a template for what a tolerant Muslim ruler would be like. Indiahistory.com provides a brief synopsis of Akbar The Great's life.

Akbar came to throne in 1556, after the death of his father, Humayun. At that time, Akbar was only 13 years old. Akbar was the only Mughal king to ascend to the throne without the customary war of succession; as his brother Muhammad Hakim was too feeble to offer any resistance. (Indiahistory.com)

This was an anomaly, to be sure. It is also telling that warfare was customary in the matter of succession. It appears that in Muslim society "might makes right" is a virtue. Nonetheless, Akbar's patronage of culture, advocacy of tolerance of non-Muslims, and his military conquests made him indisputably great.

It may come as a surprise for many that a great ruler like Akbar actually could not read or write! And yet, he had a tremendous love for learning. During his lifetime, Akbar collected thousands of beautifully written and illustrated manuscripts. He also surrounded himself with writers, scholars, musicians, painters, and translators. His court had the fabled Nine Gems - nine famous personalities from different walks of life. These included music maestro Tansen and intelligent statesman Birbal.

The reign of Akbar was a period of renaissance of Persian literature. The Ain-i-Akbari gives the names of 59 great Persian poets of Akbar's court. History was the most important branch of Persian prose literature. Abul Fazl's Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari were complementary works. Akbar and his successors, Jehangir and Shah Jehan greatly contributed to the development of Indian music. Tansen was the most accomplished musician of the age. Ain-i-Akbari gives the names of 36 first-rate musicians of Akbar's court where Hindu and Muslim style of music mingled freely. The Mughal architectural style began as a definite movement under his rule. Akbar's most ambitious and magnificent architectural undertaking was the new capital city that he built on the ridge at Sikri near Agra. The city was named as Fatehpur to commemorate Akbar's conquest of Gujrat in 1572. The most impressive creation of this new capital is the grand Jamia Masjid. The southern entrance to the Jamia Masjid is an impressive gateway known as Buland Darwaza. (Indiahistory.com)

There seems to be a connection between tolerance and an appreciation of culture, art, poetry, scholarship, architecture, etc. Once when I was in India, I attended a concert given by Zakir Hussain, the world renowned tabla player. At these concerts, people often dress in clothes they might wear to a temple and decorate themselves with religious markings on their faces. This was the case at this concert. However, up in front several concert attendees were lying on their backs. During the concert Zakir Hussain noticed this and announced that everyone should sit up, but they did not respond. Zakir Hussain (himself a Muslim) then stopped the concert and admonished them, saying, "This is the venue of Goddess Sarasvati, please sit up and show respect." (Sarasvati is the Hindu goddess of learning.) After everyone complied, the concert went on.

So, the other thing that made Akbar great were his military conquests and his tolerance of Hindus.

During his reign, Akbar managed to subdue almost all of India, with the remaining areas becoming tributary states. Along with his military conquests, he introduced a series of reforms to consolidate his power. Akbar practiced tolerance aimed at Hindu-Muslim unification through the introduction of a new religion known as Din-i-Ilahi. He won over the Hindus by naming them to important military and civil positions, by conferring honors upon them, and by marrying a Hindu princess.

He appointed nobles and mansabdars without any religious prejudice. Akbar's religious innovations and policies, and deviation from Islamic dogma, have been a source of debate and controversy. Akbar was a great patron of literary works and scholars. His court had numerous scholars of the day who are well known as "Nauratan".

It appears that Akbar's tolerance was correlated with distancing himself from Islam. His tolerance was not through a revitalization of faith in Islam. We could surmise from this that a future wave of tolerance within the body politic of Islam might be similar to this, where the people in general distance themselves from Islam.

It also seems to be true that Akbar could for a time get away with his public brand of tolerant religion because back then military power could be possessed only by those wealthy and strong enough to possess them. I'm sure that many, many imams back then thought ill of Akbar (and from what I hear they still think ill of him), but without the proliferation of small arms and heavy hand-held weapons like RPGs as is the situation today, what could they have done?

Now because of the proliferation of technology, even if we were to bomb all the factories that produce all the weapons used in the Middle East, the knowledge and technical means for reproducing them are still available. Nonetheless, producing these weapons requires significant industrial resources, and significant industrial resources require significant capital. So reigning in radical Islam might require not only enlightened leaders like Akbar but the destruction of the Islamic economy so that the wealth needed to arm insurgents becomes significantly more difficult.

So, the creation of an Akbar appears to require a distancing from Islam itself. And to protect those who might preside over Islamic society but distance themselves from Islam, as did Akbar, the means of warfare, if at all possible, has to again become an expensive proposition out of reach of most people. The latter requirement, however, appears quite far fetched. Is it achievable? If it is, I don't see how.

Works Cited

Indiahistory.com. "Akbar - The Great" 19 Aug 2005. Indiahistory.com. 19 Aug 2005. <http://www.indhistory.com/akbar.html>

America's War on Terror

2005-08-18T05:58:00.000-07:00

This news item about the US seeking India's help in the global fight against terror is not exactly upbeat. Although the article identifies terrorism as a scourge, it isn't exactly gushing, either. And in the middle of the article is a link that reads, "Also see America's war on terror." But it's supposed to be every-civilized-one's war on terror, right?

Indians have forgotten about more terror incidents in their own country than Americans, Brittons, Spaniards, or the French may ever encounter at home in their life-times--combined. What is 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center compared to the nearly 40,000 people killed in Kashmir? The cynicism is understandable: with India having the world's largest Muslim population of any country, and nuclear-armed and inimical Pakistan to its West and less-than-grateful Bangladesh to its East, what does the Global War on Terror get for India? Not much, it seems.

Killing Trumps Culture

2005-08-18T05:48:00.000-07:00

For all the talk of starting a cultural revolution within Islam to subdue its radical elements, that can only happen when the voice of opposition cannot be silenced, or killed. This is an old report, but it is likely still a strategy being pursued.

In a change of strategy, members of the Taliban are killing Muslim clerics who oppose the call for jihad or holy war against American and foreign troops in Afghanistan, a media report in New York said on Monday.

PTI. "Taliban changes strategy; targets clerics opposed to jihad: Report" August 04, 2003 Rediff.com 18 Aug 2005. <http://www.rediff.com/us/2003/aug/04ny.htm>

You can't have a cultural revolution when your cultural revolutionary leaders are being killed off. Targeting fundamentalist clerics in kind seems to be the logical counter-strategy. These people don't respect anything but violence, so speaking their language is the best bet to get their attention.

Courting India for the War on Terror

2005-08-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

India could probably do a lot more in the War on Terror, even if much of it is still in its own country. But it appears the West has much to do to win the confidence of Indians. With Indians, it's like "Muslim terrorism. . . Uh huh. . . so what's new?" Rajeev Srinivasan writes:

Muslim violence and terrorism in India have never bothered the British. The Maraad massacre and the Godhra incineration and the ethnic cleansing in Jammu and Kashmir were either ignored or rationalised by them. The recent incident in Jammu, when five Hindus were beheaded and a Hindu woman was hacked to death with an axe, did not excite their alleged sense of 'fair play'. Then should Indians weep for them when they are victimised? Poetic justice, as Indira Gandhi found out: He who rides the fundamentalist tiger is skating on thin ice, to mix metaphors wildly. (Srinivasan)

Not only is there an element of "We told you so," but there is a kind of angry incredulity--"You sucked up to the Pakis, right? Well, good for you, maybe you could use a few more bomgings." Let's face it, Hindus are still upset with the treatment they have received from the West up till, like recently.

Although I'm sure there is heightened cooperation between Western and Indian intelligence agencies since 9/11, India is a democracy, and we can expect that the political decisions India makes will to some extent resemble popular sentiment.

It looks like the West has more to do to bring India on board with them, and it looks like that will mean making up to India somehow. From India's side, that will likely mean gradually taking a stand against Pakistani designs and incursions on Kashmir and the rest of Indian sovereign territory. Until then, expect tepid Indian support for the West in the War on Terror.

Works Cited

Srinivasan, Rajeev. "Terrorism comes to Londonistan." 9 Aug 2005. Rediff.com. 16 Aug 2005. <http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/aug/10rajeev.htm>

Theology Matters

2005-08-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

Commenator wildiris, who reposts a comment he made over at The Belmont Club, nails it:

The Reformation, as I have come to understand it, was not just a religious event, but a cultural/political tranformation of western European society that took several generations to work through. The important point, for the purpose of discussions here, is that the early Protestant Christians, by trying to return Christianity to its roots, brought back into being, a form of Christianity that was not only tolerant but fully supportive of the new political/social/cultural changes that were occurring across western European societies at that time.

Once I started to think about the Reformation in this manner, it became clear that, unlke Christianity, Islam has no "there" there to go back to. In fact, just the opposite would be true, Islam by returning to its roots could only turn into an even more intolerant and hostile force against modern western cultural ways; which apparently is what is actually happening these days.

Read the whole thing.

Separation of Church / Temple and State / Rashtra

2005-08-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington observes that the separation of spiritual and temporal authority appears to be a practice and belief that both Western and Hindu civilizations have in common: (Emphasis added.)

Throughout Western history first the Church and then many churches existed apart from the state. God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar's junior partner. The separation and recurring clashes between chruch and state that typify Western civilization have existed in no other civilization. This division of authority contributed immeasurably to the development of freedom in the West. (Huntington 70)

Clashes between spiritual and temporal authority are also to be found in the history of Hindu civilization. Two scriptural references from the Bhagavata Purana include the destruction of the kshatriya (warrior) order (all the kings in the world) by Parashurama, a brahmana (priest) and incarnation of Vishnu. Then there is also the killing of King Vena by the brahmanas on account of Vena's atrocities. Probably the best known example in recorded history was the successful dethronement of King Dhananand of the Nanda dynasty by Chanakya Pandit (a brahmana scholar). The Nandas were the rulers of Magadha, a powerful kingdom in what is now Bihar, India. In Dhananand's place, Chanakya Pandit installed Chandragupta Maurya, who was also Chanakya's student from boyhood.

Works Cited

Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations. First trade paperback edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Srimad-Bhagavatam. 4 Jul 2004. Bhaktivedanta VedaBase Network. 14 August 2005. <http://vedabase.net/sb/4/14/en1>
Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Srimad-Bhagavatam. 4 Jul 2004. Bhaktivedanta VedaBase Network. 14 August 2005. <http://vedabase.net/sb/9/16/en1>
Wikipedia. "Magadha." 12 Aug 2005. Wikipedia. 14 Aug 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magadha>
Rao, B.N. Gunda. Chanakya. "I Will Dethrone You." Freeindia.org. 14 Aug 2005. <http://www.freeindia.org/biographies/greatpersonalities/chanakya/page6.htm>

Where Does Islam Fit In?

2005-08-15T05:43:00.000-07:00

Over at Midwest Conservative Journal, a reader by the name of Katherine made this comment:

This constant repetition of the "three Abrahamic faiths" line is getting on my nerves. Christianity is founded firmly on the base of the Hebrew Scriptures. We read them, quote them, pray the Psalms, and find Jesus as the fulfillment of them. Islam is something else. Islam pays lip service to "the Book" but its conception of God is radically different. Where it refers to OT or NT stories, they are in garbled form, consistent with Muhammad's only surface familiarity with both Judaism and Christianity. Seventh-century Christians who knew Islam regarded it as a Christian heresy, like the gnostics before it, understanding only a small portion of the revelation of God to Jews and Christians, and misunderstanding its meaning. Neither Jews nor Christians can accept Islamic "revelation" as valid.

Katherine. Comment to "Frankly Speaking." 13 Aug 2005. Midwest Conservative Journal. 15 Aug 2005. <http://mcj.bloghorn.com/1868#Comments>

Contempt for the scriptures of the Jews and Christians appears to manifest as contempt for the Jews and Christians themselves. If we want to talk about root causes, here's one.

Good Religion, Bad Religion: What's really at the Core?

2005-08-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

Over at rediff.com Sushant Sareen (kind of) hits the nail on the head:

. . . it is critical that no justification is provided to terrorism by talking of 'root causes'. The war against Islamic terrorism has to be really fought within Islamic societies if a 'clash of civilisations' is to beavoided. (Sareen)

He's right that it will ultimately take a cultural revolution from within to rein in radical Islam. How he comes to this conclusion, though, could prevent this from happening because it still sets secular ideology as superior to religion--something that has broadly offendend religious people throughout the world--and needless to say has fueled a big part of radical Islam. Sareen writes:

Until the separation of the Church from the State, Christianity was hardly a religion of peace -- remember the inquisitions and the desire to 'harvest the souls of heathens and pagans' by whatever means necessary. However, today, Christians, if not their Church and priests, are far more tolerant of other religions and cultures.

Hinduism too has its share of institutionalised hatred. It is hardly important whether the obnoxious caste system has religious sanction or not. What is important is that many practising Hindus still discriminate against the so-called lower castes. But caste discrimination, while it still exists, is no longer the ruling paradigm of Hindu religion. Whether this is the result of a political churning taking place in the country or the result of 'enlightenment' is hardly an issue. (Sareen)

Evolution seems to be the underlying concept in this analysis. His point seems to be that religions evolve to a higher, more civilized standard of human rights. They start out violent and then over time "grow up." I think that is not necessarily the case with all religions. For example, the early Christians displayed some of the most tolerant behavior in the history of man. In chapter 2 of The Martyrs of Palestine, by Eusebius, there is the story of Romanus, who was siezed at Antioch:

When the judge had informed him that he was to die by flames, with a cheerful countenance and a most ardent mind he received the sentence and was led away. He was then tied to the stake, and when the wood was heaped up about him, and they were kindling the pile, only waiting the word from the expected emperor, he exclaimed, "where then is the fire?" Saying this he was summoned again before the emperor, to be subjected to new tortures, and tehrefore had his tongue cut out, which he bore with the greatest of fortitude, as he proved his actions to all, showing also that the power of God is always present to the aid of those who are obliged to bear any hardship for the sake of religion, to lighten their labours, and to strengthen their ardor. (qtd. in Stark 165)

It appears that tolerance defined the earliest Christians. Similarly the degraded caste system Sareen refers to appears to be a later development within Hinduism. In the Bhagavata Purana, the sons of Rshabadeva, an incarnation of Vishnu but a kshatriya (warrior caste) nonetheless, gave birth to sons who became brahmanas (priestly caste):

In addition to these nineteen sons mentioned above, there were eighty-one younger ones, all born of Rshabhadeva and Jayanti. According to the order of their father, they became well cultured, well behaved, very pure in their activities and expert in Vedic knowledge and the performance of Vedic rituals. Thus they all became perfectly qualified brahmanas. (Prabhupada 5.4.13 trans.)

Then there is the history of Vishvamitra Muni, who was formerly a kshatriya but who later by penance became a brahmana. Vasudeva, the father of Krishna, was a kshatriya and the brother of Maharaja Nanda, who was a vaishya, a lower caste. Their exchanges as retold within the Bhagavat Purana are intimate and full of love. And finally, in the Chandogya Upanishad there is this exchange between Gautama Rishi and Jabala Satyakama, the son of a prostitute who wanted to become a brahmana:

Once, Satyakama, the son of Jabala, asked his mother, 'I want to live as a brahmacari. Which dynasty (gotra) do I belong to?' Jabala answered, 'My son, I do not know which dynasty you belong to; in my youth I served as a midservant in various places and at that time begot you as my son. Therefore I don't know which gotra you belong to. My name is Jabala and your name is Satyakama. Therefore you should say that your name is Satyakama Jabala.' Thereafter Satyakama Jabala approached Haridrumata Gautama and said, 'I wish to live with you as a brahmacari.' Gautama replied, 'O gentle one, which dynasty do you belong to?' Satyakama replied, ' I do not know which dynasty I belong to. I askd my mother and she said, 'I begot you as my son when I was wandering in my youth as a maidservant. Therefore I do not know which dynasty you belong to. My name is Jabala and your name is Satyakama. So I am called Satyakama Jabala.'Gautama then said to him, 'My dear son, no one other than a brahmana can speak such truth that you have spoken. Therefore you are a brahmana, and I accept you. O gentle one, go and bring wood for sacrifice.' Jabala replied, 'I am going right now to bring wood.' Gautama said, 'Never divert from the truth.' (Gosai)

In the case of Christianity and the virtue of tolerance, and in Hinduism with the idea that social status is based not on birth but on merit, both religions appear to possess these idea from the begining.

But Sareen articulates a popular idea, that religion is almost infinitely maleable.

Thus, for every Quranic verse that preaches love, brotherhood and equality of man, there is another verse that preaches the opposite. Therefore, to say that 'suicide bombing' is an Un-Islamic act is simply a matter of how someone interprets and understands the religion. (Sareen)

From this the solution seems obvious: all you have to do is get all the Muslims to emphasize all the good verses and avoid the bad ones, or interpret them into oblivion, and everyone will be happy. Not so. Syncretism is useful in understanding religions only to a limited point.

Religions still have an historical beginning, and although they appear to evolve over time, they still have core precepts which shape their entire existence. Christian tolerance and the merit-based society within Hinduism were ideas that did not gradually evolve. They were there from the beginning, even if later there were periods where the original idea seemed to be covered and later recovered. This is important because it means that religions start out with specific ideas, and if those ideas are good they may be revived and retain their scriptural and traditional authenticity. But if a religion starts out with some bad precepts, then, reinterpreting scripture to make them good may in the process invalidate the religion's authenticity. Revisionism, especially through formalist criticism (Wenz), has significantly weakened the authority of Christianity in the West, not improved it nor strengthened it.

The idea that religions are what you make of them, that they can mean anything you want them to, hides religion's core precepts--in effect sheltering them from critical analysis. Because of this idea, our secular friends-in-arms, who more or less are in charge of the world-order, could never perform an analysis which might lead them to conclude that Islam might just have to go. On the other hand, after a careful analysis, the core precepts of Islam may prove to be compatible with the rest of the civilized world.

But the idea that we can know something for sure, particularly about religion, is perhaps a frightening prospect. If we set ourselves up as being in possession of the objective truth, then we also set ourselves up to be potential tyrants. Not only Islam, but Christianity, Hinduism, and any other religion might become fair game for those who think they possess the truth--secularism, too. But we can't fight for what we are unsure of, so unsurity, particularly of values, is perhaps the soft underbelly of secularist world-order. Victory over a determined enemy requires that the victor to have been similarly determined, and those most likely to possess that determination will be those who accept there is an objective truth and that it can be known, even if somewhat. These are your religious people.

Just as the defeat of the Soviet Union was made possible by the alliance of America and the Catholic Church, an alliance of the secular and the sacred, defeating radical Islam will likely require a similar alliance--perhaps something grander than the alliance that defeated the Soviet Union.

Works Cited

Gosai "Brahmana Vaisnava Ontology." 13 Aug 2005. Gosai.com <http://www.gosai.com/dvaita/madhvacarya/Brahmana-Vaisnava.html>
Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Srimad-Bhagavatam. 4 Jul 2004. Bhaktivedanta VedaBase Network. 12 August 2005. <http://vedabase.net/sb/5/4/13/en1>
Sareen, Sushant. "The war against radical Islam." 5 Aug 2005. Rediff.com 13 Aug 2005. <http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/aug/06guest1.htm>
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Wenz, Bob. "'Truth' on Two Hills." 9 Jul 2005. Christianity Today (Online). 13 Aug 2005. <http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/007/32.46.html>

Friends of Democracy

2005-08-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Totten while subbing for Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit tells us about the Friends of Democracy website, which is billed as providing translations of some of the Arabic to Arabic blogging conversations going on. He writes:

Iraqis who blog in English are aware that their audience is primarily Western. Iraqis who blog in Arabic are talking to each other in their own language. Reading Friends of Democracy is your chance to eavesdrop.

OK, so let's go over to FOD and check it out. I'll take three posts at random and see how they hit me. The logical place is to start with the first post:

By the way, I heard an exchange between a citizen and a food ration distributor the other day. The citizen asked if the monthly rations had arrived yet.

"Yes," the distributor said. “We received two items, beans and soap!"

The poor citizen angrily responded: "No wonder everything is upside down when our trade minister is a Kurd."

Keep in mind that the Iraqi bloggers who are reporting this are, compared to most people who are going to participate in the proposed Iraqi democracy, better educated than most. The people complaining about a minister because he is a Kurd will comprise most of the people who are going to call the shots. (It's like that in India, too, BTW.) I'm reminded of the scene in Peter O'Toole's rendition of Col. T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia trying to bring democracy to the Bedouin tribes. It's really like that in much of Asia.

Scrolling down a little (we're still in the first post, BTW), there is this tidbit:

To the Minister of Housing,

We wish to offer our sincere thanks and appreciation for your ministry's plans to build apartment complexes in Najaf exclusively for exiles and expatriates who suffered from full bellies and from stacking Euros and Dollars while enduring the extremely difficult living conditions in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and... Iran.

They did not enjoy the pleasures of eating bread made from black (unrefined) flour or drinking muddy water during the reign of Saddam.

Resentment against affluent expatriate outsiders who did not rough it with the rest. If some of the reins of power are being handed over to some of these expatriates, then that would explain this reaction.

Then there is this quip that is tangentially about gender:

To Sayyid Ammar Al-Hakim,

The people of Najaf sincerely appreciate your educational efforts during your repeated visits to girls' high schools and colleges. We wish you would extend this honor to male high schools and colleges and not to limit it to members of the fair sex.

It is difficult to me to read much into this, but parda, or separation of the sexes, is still a social virtue there. Without more information I don't think any more can be read into it. My assessment of the first post is positive: people have time to worry about social triffles rather than worry about whether or not they will be living the next moment. That could mean things on the ground are getting marginally better.

The next post is a report of a lecture and round table discussion about women and the constitution. Nice pictures of beautifully dressed women in attendence, most of them wearing the hijab, head scarf. Here's the money quote that points to exacerbating the conflict between the sacred and secular within Iraqi society:

The Personal Affairs Law’s undermining of women's rights was a hot topic. So were the issues of a woman’s freedom to travel without a sibling male escort, “honor killings,” and the rights of women to assume high posts in government. The participants also condemned the suggestion to call Iraq an Islamic country.

Under Saddam there was a considerable degree of secularism, so it's likely this conflict will pick up where it left off. The big difference will be that without Saddam religious groups will feel less restrained in opposing the more secular leaning people. It will be interesting to see where this goes. To early to tell yet.

The third post at the very bottom is about religious conspiracy theories (that's its title, too). This post examines some stories of irreligious girls who were transformed into an animal because of defiling the Quran, concludes these stories are hoaxes, and the author wonders why Muslims are trying to deceive other Muslims.

I do not understand these childish attempts to fool Islam and Muslims by other Muslims.

Is it an attempt to glorify God, as if He were sitting there waiting for us to fabricate some illusionary divine victory in order to prove His power?

To me it just looks like another conspiracy theory where everyone is supposedly out there to get Islam and Muslims - only we discover yet again that the real conspiracy was actually plotted by other Muslims.

I guess these things probably started with a fraud, and it is things like this which eventually serve to discredit religious leaders themselves. The author of the post seems to believe that this is not something good in the sense that it unnecessarily discredits religious leaders.

The strangest thing about this incident is that many mosques helped spread the story without making any effort made to confirm it, as should have been the responsibility of the mosque's Imam and preacher.

It appears that this poster is concerned that Islam maintain a good repuation among its adherents; the poster does not seem to be as concerned with outsiders. And indeed, it is the insiders, not the outsiders, who matter in creating the acceptability of religion and the authority of religious leaders.

From this sampling, my take on things in Iraq are that they aren't so different from things over here. We also have problems with our politicians, public gender issues are hotly debated, and at any one time half of America thinks we have a jerk in the White House. The big difference seems to be that enough Iraqis have heavy weapons and no compunction about using them to settle social and political disputes. Aside from that, we seem to be on the same page.

A Hindu Encounter With Islam

2005-08-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, whom Gaudiya Vaishnavas worship as Krishna (God) Himself, appeared in Mayapur, Bengal, in 1486 and resided on this Earth for 48 years to the year 1532. During this time, by Mahaprabhu's influence, a powerful and historical spiritual rennaisance took place in Bengal and throughout throughout much of India. For readers of this blog, what is especially noteworthy is that Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's spiritual rennaisance, called The Sankirtan Movement, took place in a land that was controlled by Muslim invaders. The following excerpt from the scripture Sri Caitanya-caritamrita, by Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami, describes an incident in which Mahaprabhu and His associates encountered a group of Muslim soldiers and converted them to Vaishnavism.

The next morning, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu got up early. After taking His bath, He became ecstatic with love, knowing that He now had to leave Vrindavana. Although the Lord did not exhibit any external symptoms, His mind was filled with ecstatic love. At that time, Balabhadra Bhattacarya said, "Let us go to Mahavana [Gokula]."

Saying this, Balabhadra Bhattacarya made Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu sit aboard a boat. After they crossed the river, he took the Lord with him. Both Rajaputa Krishnadasa and the Sanodiya brahmana knew the path along the Ganges bank very well. While walking, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, understanding that the others were fatigued, took them all beneath a tree and sat down. There were many cows grazing near that tree, and the Lord was very pleased to see them. Suddenly a cowherd boy blew on his flute, and immediately the Lord was struck with ecstatic love. Filled with ecstatic love, the Lord fell to the ground unconscious. He foamed about the mouth, and His breathing stopped.

While the Lord was unconscious, ten cavalry soldiers belonging to the Muslim Pathana military order rode up and dismounted. Seeing the Lord unconscious, the soldiers thought, "This sannyasi must have possessed a large quantity of gold. These four rogues here must have taken away that sannyasi's riches after killing Him by making Him take the poison dhutura."

Thinking this, the Pathana soldiers arrested the four persons and decided to kill them. Because of this, the two Bengalis began to tremble. The devotee Krishnadasa, who belonged to the Rajaputa race, was very fearless. The Sanodiya brahmana was also fearless, and he spoke very bravely. The brahmana said, "You Pathana soldiers are all under the protection of your king. Let us go to your commander and get his decision. This sannyasi is my spiritual master, and I am from Mathura. I am a brahmana, and I know many people who are in the service of the Muslim king. This sannyasi sometimes falls unconscious due to the influence of a disease. Please sit down here, and you will see that He will very soon regain consciousness and His normal condition. Sit down here for a while and keep us all under arrest. When the sannyasi regains his senses, you can question Him. Then, if you like, you can kill us all."

The Pathana soldiers said, "You are all rogues. One of you belongs to the western lands, one to the district of Mathura, and the other two, who are trembling, belong to Bengal.

Rajaputa Krishnadasa said, "I have my home here, and I also have about two hundred Turkish soldiers and about one hundred cannons. If I call loudly, they will come immediately to kill you and plunder your horses and saddles. The Bengali pilgrims are not rogues. You are rogues, for you want to kill the pilgrims and plunder them."

Upon hearing this challenge, the Pathana soldiers became hesitant. Then suddenly Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu regained consciousness. Coming to His senses, the Lord very loudly began chanting the holy name, "Hari! Hari!" The Lord raised His arms upward and began to dance in ecstatic love. When the Lord shouted very loudly in ecstatic love, it appeared to the Muslim soldiers that their hearts were struck by thunderbolts. Seized by fear, all the Pathana soldiers immediately released the four persons. Thus Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu did not see His personal associates arrested. At that time, Balabhadra Bhattacarya went to Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu and made Him sit down. Seeing the Muslim soldiers, the Lord regained His normal senses.

All the Muslim soldiers then came before the Lord, worshiped His lotus feet and said, "Here are four rogues. "These rogues have made You take dhutura. Having made You mad, they have taken all Your possessions."

Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu said, "These are not rogues. They are My associates. Being a sannyasi beggar, I do not possess anything. Due to epilepsy, I sometimes fall unconscious. Out of their mercy, these four men maintain Me."

Among the Muslims was a grave person who was wearing a black dress. People called him a saintly person. The heart of that saintly person softened upon seeing Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. He wanted to talk to Him and establish impersonal Brahman on the basis of his own scripture, the Koran. When that person tried to establish the impersonal Brahman conception of the Absolute Truth on the basis of the Koran, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu refuted his argument. Whatever arguments he put forward, the Lord refuted them all. Finally the person became stunned and could not speak.

Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu said, "The Koran certainly establishes impersonalism, but at the end it refutes that impersonalism and establishes the personal God. The Koran accepts the fact that ultimately there is only one God. He is full of opulence, and His bodily complexion is blackish. According to the Koran, the Lord has a supreme, blissful, transcendental body. He is the Absolute Truth, the all-pervading, omniscient and eternal being. He is the origin of everything. Creation, maintenance and dissolution come from Him. He is the original shelter of all gross and subtle cosmic manifestations."

"The Lord is the Supreme Truth, worshipable by everyone. He is the cause of all causes. By engaging in His devotional service, the living entity is relieved from material existence. No conditioned soul can get out of material bondage without serving the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Love at His lotus feet is the ultimate goal of life. The happiness of liberation, whereby one merges into the Lord's existence, cannot even be compared to a fragment of the transcendental bliss obtained by service unto the Lord's lotus feet.

"In the Koran there are descriptions of fruitive activity, speculative knowledge, mystic power and union with the Supreme, but ultimately all this is refuted and the Lord's personal feature established, along with His devotional service. The scholars of the Koran are not very advanced in knowledge. Although there are many methods prescribed, they do not know that the ultimate conclusion should be considered the most powerful. Seeing your own Koran and deliberating over what is written there, what is your conclusion?"

The saintly Muslim replied, "All that You have said is true. This has certainly been written in the Koran, but our scholars can neither understand nor accept it. Usually they describe the Lord's impersonal aspect, but they hardly know that the Lord's personal feature is worshipable. They are undoubtedly lacking this knowledge. Since You are that very same Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself, please be merciful upon me. I am fallen and unfit. I have studied the Muslim scripture very extensively, but from it I cannot conclusively decide what the ultimate goal of life is or how I can approach it. Now that I have seen You, my tongue is chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. The false prestige I felt from being a learned scholar is now gone."

Saying this, the saintly Muslim fell at the lotus feet of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu and requested Him to speak of life's ultimate goal and the process by which it could be obtained. Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu said, "Please get up. You have chanted the holy name of Krishna; therefore the sinful reactions you have accrued for many millions of lives are now gone. You are now pure." Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu then told all the Muslims there, "Chant the holy name of Krishna! Chant the holy name of Krishna!" As they all began to chant, they were overwhelmed by ecstatic love. In this way Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu directly initiated the saintly Muslim by advising him to chant the holy name of Krishna.

The Muslim's name was changed to Ramadasa. Another Pathana Muslim present there was named Vijuli Khan. Vijuli Khan was very young, and he was the son of the king. All the other Muslims, or Pathanas, headed by Ramadasa, were his servants. Vijuli Khan also fell down at the lotus feet of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Lord placed His foot on his head. After bestowing His mercy upon them in this way, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu left. All those Pathana Muslims then became mendicants. Later these very Pathanas became celebrated as the Pathana Vaishnavas. They toured all over the country and chanted the glorious activities of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Vijuli Khan became a greatly advanced devotee, and his importance was celebrated at every holy place of pilgrimage.

Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta. Sri Caitanya-caritamrta. (Online) Ch. 18, Verses 155 - 212. 4 Jul 2004. Bhaktivedanta VedaBase Network. 12 August 2005. <http://vedabase.net/cc/madhya/18/en1>

Most notable in this encounter is Mahaprabhu's debate with the moulana. In the debate, the moulana tried to establish what is called the brahman feature of the Absolute Truth. Brahman is said to be existence, and consciousness of that existence. In this feature of the absolute the Lord is impersonal, all pervasive, and not in possession of any personality. At least as it is understood by scholars and followers of Mohammed, Islam can be said to be an impersonal religion. That they are forbidden to portray in pictures anyone they recognize as a prophet is a manifestation of this impersonalist tendency.

From a Vaishnava theological perspective, it is the impersonalist idea of God that results in a materialistic religion. The reason is simple: if God is impersonal, then He has no desires. Of course, Islam, like other religions, say that God has desires because He asks something of us, but because the idea of God is ultimately impersonal, beyond paying your "religion tax" by doing some namaz and killing some infidels, the center of satisfaction becomes the self. Persons have desires, non-persons do not. By most religious standards in the world's main religions, the reward of being able to enjoy 70-plus virgins for dying in jihad is quite paltry. In fact, any material reward is quite paltry, because being finite beings we have our limitations. And again, the emphasis of the reward is a carnal and selfish pleasure quite detached from any involvement with God at all in Paradise.

Indeed, we can say that the Islamic conception of Paradise is the kingdom of God without God; what does God do in His own abode that is of any significance? Surely it would involve non-interference with the post-martyrdom jihadist's enjoyment of 70-plus virgins. Clearly, the Islamic conception of religion is self-centered, not God centered, because pious life is motivated by sensual pleasure. This is not to say that many people throughout all of religious history have not performed religious acts for materialistic purposes, or have performed materialistic and violent acts in the name of religion. But when the core doctrines are defined by materialism and promoted by topmost religious authorities, then you have a necessary ingredient for the creation of a civilization wherein violence and envy are elevated to the level of virtue.

So Mahaprabhu's refutation of the moulana's exposition is significant in that Mahaprabhu proposed a higher conception of the Absolute Truth in which the pursuit of selfish-pleasure could never be considered a virtue. The personalist conception, wherein God is a person, presupposes a relationship between the servant and God, and pleasure itself is derived from selfless service. To the degree that the service is motivated for personal gain, there is no pleasure. And because all other living entities, including animals and plants, have a personal relationship with God, just as we have, violence against them becomes anathema since that would constitute envy of something else that is dear to God. Essentially, what Mahaprabhu in his exchange with the Pathans did was reestablish God, the person, in a Godless conception of Paradise.

What is important in this exchange between Mahaprabhu and the Pathans is the role theology and philosophy can play in changing people. A secondary role is etiquette, and a tertiary but not unimportant role is knowledge of the other's scripture. The Pathans could listen to Mahaprabhu's refutution of their ideas because they were respectful to Him, and it was also important that Mahaprabhu argued theology on the basis of the Koran. In developing a strategy to deal with the Question of Islam, theology and philosophy must play a significant role. The true conquest is cultural, and it will ultimately be the kind of religion and culture the descendants of Mohammed (and for that matter, ourselves) adopt in the future that will decide whether or not we live in a world without terror.

Preparing for the Monsoon?

2005-08-12T02:52:00.000-07:00

On the other hand, it looks like the Catholic Church is hedging its bets on the resilliancy of European civilization. It looks like they are starting to save up for the next round of the Dark Ages:

Yet the new pontiff is also a man of great patience. He had gone to Subiaco to receive an award and to speak about Saint Benedict of Nurcia, who founded his monastic order there in the sixth century. Ratzinger has argued that in the bleak European landscape of faithlessness today, as in the Dark Ages, "the Church herself must form cells" to wait for the light—and work toward it for centuries—just as the Benedictines did.

Dickey, Christopher. "Near 'The Edge of the Abyss'." 15 Aug. 2005 edition. Newsweek (Online Edition). 11 Aug 2005. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8852854/site/newsweek/>

If the dark ages come to Europe, they will probably resemble in some ways the Moghul oppression India went through. If that happens, the bad news is that technology might help make a potential dark age considerably more darker. The good news is that it is possible to whether it, as India had done for centuries. Who knows--things might have to get worse before they get better. . .

Winning the War on Terrorism

2005-08-12T02:41:00.000-07:00

A military conquest without a cultural conquest is no conquest. This is a strong indication of what will eventually allow the war on terror to succeed:

“Harry Potter is a popular title among some of the detainee population,” said the librarian, a civilian contractor identified only as “Lorie” who works at the prison camp for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Lorie said the popularity of the best-selling Harry Potter books, which recount the adventures of a boy wizard as he triumphs over the powers of evil, was matched only by the prisoners' passion for Agatha Christie, some of whose murder mysteries are set in the Middle East.

Reuters. "Harry Potter bewitches Gitmo prisoners." 10 Aug 2005 MSNBC.com 11 Aug 2005. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8894577/>

The military is just to hold them off long enough to get books in their hands. (Not Korans.) That's a big clue.

Indus Valley Rising - Introduction

2005-08-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

This blog has been inspired by Baron Bodissey and Dymphna over at Gates of Vienna. After reading their blog for some time I became convinced that I need to become more active in the public discourse--especially with regard to the world's Muslim Question. Up until now my online blogging has been restricted to current events and social issues within ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, at Hare Krishna Cultural Journal. Although I am a long-time member of what to many in my American host-culture seems to be an avant-garde religion (and some might disparagingly refer to it is a cult), I am quite conservative in both my social and theological views, and so I naturally tend to identify on cultural issues with the more conservative (particularly neoconservative) counterparts in America and in Europe (if they still have any conservatives there). While my blog over at HKCJ is addressed to ISKCON insiders, this blog is addressed to the world and world issues, as seen through the lens of a confirmed Anglo-American, long-standing convert to Vaishnavism, a main branch of Hinduism.

I named this blog Indus Valley Rising because India is gradually becoming a world power. Of all the other civilizations that are rising in the World, I think it is in the best interests of the world--particularly the West as well as India, of course--that India prevails over others such as China to its East and Islam from its innards to the West. India retains an historical and linguistic kinship with Britain and the rest of the Anglosphere, so from a purely political and cultural point of view the rise of India as a super-power is in the best interests of the West. The West does not want China nor Islam to get substantially more powerful than they are. That will be a mutual disaster for both the West and India. In order to revive culture and peace in the world, the depopulating West is unlikely to do it without the help of a friendly civilization that has still retained the idea of a future worth creating. I believe that civilization to be centered within India, and that civilization is the Hindu civilization.

I think Western Civilization and Hindu Civilization can and should help each other, and I think there is more of a natural inclination between the Western peoples and the Indian peoples to this end. I further think that such cooperation might in the future prove to be essential to the survival of both civilizations. This web log is therefore created for the sake of presenting and discussing ideas for the preservation and upliftment of the sister Hindu and Western Civilizations, and along with them the upliftment of the world.

(Updated 14 Aug. 2005)