Understanding Sanatana Dharma

seedy

its you who is dalit, not we all (compassion or cynical claim of compassion notwithstanding). i dont see any glory in acquring a dalit identity.

here is a new site for you to forage (something other that dalitistan). it states that India has 200 million dalits. numbers on this site are a little confusing and it does not give a source. it says that of 25 million christians, 20 million are dalit, and there is a lot of stuff about dscrimination in the church etc.

http://www.dalitchristians.com/Html/survey.htm

#731 by JohnGalt on July 19, 2004 10:47am PT
omar qureshi #720
Thank you. That was very enlightening.

you`re very welcome John :)

Hey barachota, I`m really sorry to see you go - you wrote some nasty posts towards the end but I prefer to think what we saw in the beginning was your real face - not that it matters what the hell I think of course - anyway, goodbye - go in peace.

(though I hope you change your mind
take tahmed`s advice
drop the hate mask
and stay on -
your earlier posts were witty and intelligent - I enjoyed reading them.)

Godhra: Was it Gujarat`s Reichstag?

By J. Sri Raman

Monday 19 July 2004
Chennai, India - Godhra was a place that figured prominently on the political map of India`s fascists till the other day. Today they wish they could remove the wayside station of Gujarat from the country`s railway map at any rate.
Till the other day, they kept reminding everyone of the railway arson in Godhra every time anyone spoke of the Gujarat carnage. Today, when anyone mentions the place of searing memories, the same fascists advise everyone to forget about the past.
Especially when India`s Railway Minister Lalu Prasad mentions it. And when he mentions it to announce an inquiry into the incident of arson that preceded a large-scale and state-abetted massacre of Gujarat`s minority community.
The reaction to the announcement by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), evicted from power in the recent general election, carries forward a classical fascist campaign against democracy. A democracy that has not delivered the goods for them.
They launched the campaign with an ``anti-foreigner`` offensive in a flagrant violation of the rules of parliamentary democracy. In a show of extra-parliamentary strength, they stopped the elected leader of the party and the alliance wining at the polls from becoming the Prime Minister. They went on to break another basic rule of the game. Questioning the acknowledged privilege of the Prime Minister to choose his own council of ministers, they have been clamoring for the sack of ministers they call ``tainted`` on the basis of unproven criminal charges against them. Now, they are up in arms against a departmental inquiry ordered into the incident of arson - after a delay of nearly two and a half years.
Godhra, by now, is a household name to Indians after all the horrors that originated there. For the uninitiated, the whistle-stop station in the western State witnessed the prelude to the grisly pogrom unleashed on the Muslims of Gujarat for about four months in 2002.
It was a fateful February 27 when the Sabarmati Express pulled up at the small station with too many Muslims for its own good. The train was carrying quite a few `kar sevaks`, free-labor volunteers, of the Ayodhya movement. The movement, with former Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani at its head, had led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque a decade earlier in Ayodhya, considered the birthplace of Hindu deity Ram.
The movement aimed to ``restore`` a Ram temple over the mosque`s ruins. The `kar sevaks` formed one of the many batches that had carried ritually sanctified bricks for the temple-building to Ayodhya and were returning to Gujarat in religious-triumphal fervor. We will pass over stories of their ebullient conduct with Muslims at all stations - with the reported instances including beard-pulling and attempts at unveiling.
The instant version of the tragedy, spread rapidly through rumors and unquestioning official reports, was clearly an attempt to trigger off a reaction of mob fury. The local media and the fascist mouthpieces hurried to tell Gujarat and the country that the Muslims had committed a horrendous crime against the majority community.
A stone-throwing Muslim mob - the story ran - had surrounded the train in a matter of minutes, poured cans of kerosene on the compartment of `kar sevaks` and set it on fire. Fifty-nine occupants of the compartment, including women and children, were burnt alive, according to propagandists calling for revenge.
The story set entire Gujarat aflame for months. BJP chief minister Narendra Modi handed the State over to pillaging hordes of the `parivar` (the far-Right `family`). The state-aided massacre claimed an estimated toll of 3,000, mostly Muslims. We have no definite count of the women of savage gender crimes. No estimate, either, of the crippling economic damage inflicted on the minority community.
Harsh Mander, a sensitive officer of the Indian Administrative Service, who resigned in protest against the pogrom, was among the first to give us samples of the fascist savagery unleashed. He cited the case of a woman eight months pregnant whose assailants: ``slit open her stomach, pulled out the foetus and slaughtered it before her eyes``. He talked about ``a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity``. Similar were cases of liquid petroleum gas (cooking gas) being released into houses and lighted matchsticks tossed in. And many, many others.
The Modi regime has continued to deny the victims justice. First, it arrested the accused in the Godhra case under a special anti-terrorist law but spared their counterparts in the Gujarat cases similar treatment. It proceeded, in the Gujarat cases, to appoint as public prosecutor persons who were proud members and office-bearers of `parivar` outfits that have commended the carnage in public. Witnesses have complained of intimidation by the police and the `parivar`.
The Supreme Court of India has had to transfer outside Gujarat the Best Bakery case, about the burning down of a bakery unit of that name along with 14 persons working there in Baroda (a city of Gujarat) on March 1, 2002. Other victims, too, are demanding a similar transfer of their cases.
It is Godhra that has been cited in justification of all this. Modi flaunted his bad physics and worse arithmetic by famously remarking, ``Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.`` The refrain of the top BJP leadership of the then-ruling federal coalition has been: ``Who started it?`` Both, former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his then-deputy have repeatedly asserted that there would have been ``no Gujarat (carnage) without (the) Godhra (arson)``.
But the question is: Did Godhra happen at all? A Godhra of the fascist propaganda? The proposed inquiry reopens the question, and the `parivar` is clearly panicky.
Others have raised the question before the Railway Minister. Gujarat`s own Forensic Science Laboratory, in its report of May 17, 2002, revealed that the compartment was set on fire from inside, though the propaganda was that the `kar sevaks` had shut and bolted its doors to bar entry by a baying mob.
A team of independent investigators found, six months later, that many of those reported killed were still alive and that only four of the slain were `kar sevaks`! A door-to-door survey by railway officials, too, has led to the same finding. This raises the other curious question: whose were then the bodies wrapped in white displayed for the media cameras as the dead of Godhra?
Lalu Prasad has pointed out, very pertinently, that the previous government never made the official forensic report public. It had also never set up its own inquiry into the incident as required under rule and the previous Railway Minister had refrained from visiting the scene of the incident. The excuse offered is that New Delhi then did not want to interfere with the inquiry by the State government under impartial Modi!
The BJP and the `parivar` have threatened to take to the streets to try and stop the inquiry. The question of questions is: will the government summon the political will to persist with the inquiry?
Godhra, meanwhile, should sound a grim warning to the entire country against swallowing in a hurry other BJP-`parivar` stories that sound similar. Like the ones from the Gujarat police about the alleged terrorists, including a teenage girl, whom the cops killed before they could assassinate Modi. Of this, however, some other time.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071904K.shtml

Reality Check

In apology of Islam

Sir: I write in reference to Arifa Noor’s “How Islam became synonymous with violence” (Daily Times, July 19).

In case of Islam, the question of violence cannot be separated from the corpus which lays the foundation of Islam, that is, the Quran and the Sunnah. If these sources have anything to say on the matter, then the virulent and violent strain in Islam is unmistakable. Indeed it may even be argued that the violent nature of Islam represents the essence of the whole.

The fact that Islam was spread by force right from the beginning is a historical fact which cannot be pushed under the rug through glib rehashing of Islamic jurisprudence using convoluted injunctions from one or another magnum opus of one theocrat or another.

Ms Noor wants to allow this discussion but then by omitting the foundation of her faith she essentially closes the door to objective and fair discussion of the subject. Indeed, no reform is possible in Islam or among its adherents as long as people like Ms Noor are not willing to scratch the surface to unearth the blood-smeared bedrock on which this faith was constructed.
RAJA WAHID
New Jersey, US

#716 by harish_hyd

When did Genghis Khan embrace Islam? Was it a posthumous conversion? Thanks.

#722 by tahmed32

[You are dead wrong: None of these individuals was a suicide bomber or a suicide anything.]

On the contrary, you are the one who`s dead wrong. I never said any of these individuals was a suicide bomber. Comprehension problems?

[Furthermore, far from being a muslim, Genghiz Khan was the worst enemy of the muslims.]

Exactly the point I was making. That someone would soon declare that these barbarians were never Muslim.

[Timur the lame was a muslim in name, but his worst enemy too was none other than the ottoman emperor (a ``fellow`` muslim) bayazid whom he defeated in battle and took prisoner.]

So what`s your point? We have had Muslim ruler fight Muslim ruler in the sub-continent as well, but just what does that prove? A couple of examples of Muslim chivalry cannot be treated as the norm when there have been countless examples otherwise.

[but it is also generally recognized that for centuries the muslims were the torchbearers of human progress, and among the most tolerant of societies]

Now when was that? The history of Islamic societies is littered with gore and blood, and non-Muslims have borne the brunt all along. You are only fooling yourself and no one else when you say that.

[You need to educate yourself a bit, I think before you start making such ignorant assertions.]

And you need to be objective before you try to defend the indefensible. Just because you refuse to see the point doesn`t mean someone is ignorant, but clearly shows your ignorance.

Vasudev Kutumbakam!

One interpretation:
... the universe is not a maze to be navigated; it is a baby (in a family) to be brought up. When we give it love, clarity, and opportunity, we raise a child to be a joyful, giving, successful adult. This is the opportunity we have to farm our little patch of space-time.

Yog -> Seeking Union ... first may be of Body, Mind and Javatma and then to Paramatma (Vasudeva, the universe)

If some one is more interested in an attempt to put what sages had conveyed in todays terms and a thought process suitable for post industrial world, here is a good attempt on path to enlightenment
http://www.memecentral.com/Level3.htm

Colloquial Meaning by a Sindh Ki Beti
http://www.dalsabzi.com/Mantras/vasudeva_kutumbakam.htm
Dont forget her bio http://www.dalsabzi.com/about_dal_sabzi.htm

Finally, Oh Bhagwan (Allah/Lord) give me company seekers of truth but deliver me from those who say they found it.

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re:#709 by Sidhibaat
Ha, ha.
Now, we must hear pearls of wisdom from Pat Robertson!
Looks like he is one guy in USA who talks to God. Or at least he pretends he does!
``Gordon Robertson (his son): ``Wherever you find this type of idolatry, you`ll find a grinding poverty. ``
Papa did not teach Gordon Robertson famous biblical quotes:
``Looking at his disciples, Jesus said: ``Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Luke 6:19-21``

Another quote:
``Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?
James 2:5``
Poverty has nothing to do with faith or spirituality. In fact, yogis have been saying for ages that it is easier for a poor man to advance spiritually than for a rich man.
Sridhar

sidhibaat: tennis and boxing requires a certain amount of skill and talent. exchanging insulting posts requires nothing other than a stupid mind and time to waste.

interesting article from TIME on the tension between Sufism and orthodox Islam in India and Pakistan.

What you must understand is this,`` said Amin, stroking his long, straggly beard. ``Sufism is not Islamic. It is jadoo: magic tricks. It is superstition. It has nothing to do with real Islam.``

Amin ul-Karim and I were standing outside a kebab restaurant among the medieval lanes of Nizamuddin, my favorite part of New Delhi. Clouds of charcoal smoke wafted into the air, and the scent of grilling meat floated out over streets bustling with pilgrims, madrasah students, sellers of rose petals, little boys playing cricket and beggars seeking alms.

To one side lay the destination to which the crowds of pilgrims were heading: a warren of alleys and bazaars leading toward the shrine of India`s most revered Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Nizamuddin was a 14th century Muslim mystic who withdrew from the world and preached a message of prayer, love and the unity of all things. He promised his followers that if they loosened their ties with the world, they could purge their souls of worries and directly experience God. Rituals and fasting were for the pious, said the saint, but love was everywhere and was much the surest route to the divine.

Yet only a short distance from the shrine towered a very different Islamic institution, one that embodied a quite different face of Islam. The merkaz is a modern, gray, concrete structure seven stories tall that houses the world headquarters of an austere Islamic movement called Tablighism, to which Amin belongs. The Tablighis advocate a return to the basic fundamentals of the Koran, and greatly dislike the mystical Islam of Sufism, which they believe encourages such un-Koranic practices as idolatry, music, dancing and the veneration of dead saints. This was certainly the view of Amin, who, when I met him, had been busy trying to persuade passing pilgrims to turn away from their destination. ``I invite these people who come to Nizamuddin to return to the true path of the Koran,`` he said. ``Do not pray to a corpse, I tell them. Go to the mosque, not a grave. Superstition leads to jahannam—hell. True Islam leads to jannah—paradise.``

``What sort of paradise?`` I asked.

``It is beyond all human imagination,`` said Amin. ``But there will be couches to lie on in the shade, and rivers of milk and honey and, cool, clear springwater.``

``What about the Sufi idea that God can also be found in the human heart?`` I asked.

``Paradise within us?`` said Amin, raising his eyebrows. ``No, no, this is emotional talk—a dream only. There is nothing in the Koran about paradise within the body. It is outside. To get there you must follow the commands of the Almighty. Then when you die, insh`allah, that will be where your journey ends.``

Here, it seemed to me, lay some sort of crux—a clash of civilizations, not between East and West but within Islam itself. Between the strictly regulated ways of the orthodox Tablighis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay not just two different understandings of Islam but two entirely different conceptions of how to live, how to die, and how to make the final and most important, and difficult, journey of all—to paradise.

Six years earlier, I had been sitting in a roadside tea shop amid the desert of Rajasthan when I saw a succession of five bicycle rickshaws appear over the horizon, winding their way through the dusty scrub of the Jaipur highway. Every time a juggernaut thundered past, the fragile rickshaws lurched toward the dirt of the hard shoulder. The desert was level and featureless. So flat was the ground that through the shimmering heat haze you could see the convoy struggling for a full half-hour before it finally drew level with the roadside dhaba. Inside the rickshaws were 12 Sufi dervishes, with wild eyes and long, unkempt beards. The fronts of their shalwars were covered with charms, pieces of tinsel and silver talismans. They were all—drivers and dervishes alike—hot and thirsty, and they pulled into the dhaba calling loudly for water and tea.

The men were braving the desert to attend the death anniversary of the Sufi saint Khwaja Garib Nawaz, who lived in the 13th century, a little before Nizamuddin`s time and who belonged to the same mystical tradition. As they shook the desert from their clothes, I asked them about their journey. ``We have cycled all the way from Delhi,`` said one of the drivers.

``Delhi? But that is—what?—400 km away?``

``Garib Nawaz will reward us for our pains,`` he replied. ``It is he who gives us strength.`` The drivers and their passengers sat together on a charpoy, pouring their tea into tin saucers, then noisily sipping the hot, sweet liquid from the plates. ``Anyone who steps through the door of his shrine,`` said another driver, ``will get paradise as his everlasting home.``

I was heading in the same direction, so the following day I went along to the Sufi festival in Ajmer. Virtually overnight the small provincial town was transformed into a heaving, mystic metropolis. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over India were milling around the streets, pouring out of buses, unrolling their bedding on the pavement, and cooking their breakfast on portable stoves. From the different encampments on the outskirts—tent cities that resembled the halting place of some medieval army—rivulets of devotees threaded through the bazaars, forming larger streams as they converged on the streets leading to the shrine.

A succession of Mughal mosques, tombs and pavilions were crammed to bursting with ecstatics and madmen, pilgrims and spectators. The entire complex was alive with the intoxicating smell of roses, which the devotees carried in sweet-smelling punnets to pour great fountains of petals onto the saint`s grave. The numbers were amazing, but what was even more remarkable in a nation polarized by religious rivalries was the different traditions from which the pilgrims were drawn. Many were Muslim, but there were also Hindus, as well as the odd Sikh and Christian, all queuing to pay their respects to the saint. Here, for once, you saw religion bringing people together, not dividing them. Sufism was not just something mystical, ethereal and otherworldly, I felt, but a balm on India`s festering religious wounds. I asked one group of Hindu pilgrims if they were made to feel welcome in a Muslim shrine. ``Of course,`` said their leader, a trader from neighboring Gujarat state. ``All Gods are the same.``

When I asked why they had made the effort to come all this way, the man replied with the following story: ``When our child was young, he became very ill. No medicines from any doctor helped. We tried everything, but our son only got weaker. Then some neighbors said we should come here. We were desperate, so we got on a bus. We brought the boy to the shrine and one of its guardians cured him. What could not be done in 12 months he did in a minute.`` So now the trader and his family return each year to give thanks.

From the very beginning of Sufism, music, dance, poetry and meditation have been seen as crucial spiritual strides on the path of love, an invaluable aid toward attaining unity with God—true paradise. Music, in particular, enables devotees to focus their whole being on the divine so intensely that the soul is both destroyed and resurrected. At Sufi shrines, devotees are lifted by the music into a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Yet these heterodox methods of worship have divided Sufis from many of their Muslim brethren. Throughout Islamic history, more puritanical Muslims have claimed that Sufi practices were infections from Christianity and Hinduism, quite alien to the original principles of Islam. As Najaf Haider, professor of medieval history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, tells it, such conflicts were inevitable: ``In orthodox Islam the object of creation is the worship of God; God is the master and the devotee is the slave. The Sufis argue that God should be worshipped not because he has commanded us to but because he`s such a lovable being. The cornerstone of Sufi ideology is love, and all traditions are tolerated because anyone is capable of expressing love for God.``

The most formidable of all the anti-Sufi movements was Wahhabism from Arabia, its followers the progenitors of modern Islamic fundamentalists, who on coming to power in the early 19th century destroyed all the Sufi and Shi`a shrines in Arabia and Iraq. Today, the most prominent—and powerful—Wahhabis are the Saudis. Because they dominate media in the Arab world, many contemporary Muslims have been taught a story of Islamic religious tradition from which Sufism is rigorously excluded.

I first came across strongly anti-Sufi sentiments last fall when I visited a shrine just outside Peshawar in Pakistan`s North-West Frontier Province. The Sufi shrine of Rahman Baba has for centuries been a place where Muslim musicians and poets have gathered. It is built around the tomb of a 17th century mystic poet whose Pashtu Sufi verses have led to him being described as the nightingale of Peshawar. A friend who had lived nearby in the 1980s advised me to visit on a Thursday night, when crowds of Afghan refugee musicians sing to their saint by the light of the moon—a sight he described as unforgettable. Since he had left Peshawar, however, much had changed. Two Saudi-funded madrasahs had been built on the road to the shrine, and they had taken it upon themselves to halt what they regarded as the shrine`s un-Islamic practices.

One Thursday I drove out of Peshawar, passed the two madrasahs, and found the tarmac road giving way to a mud track, down which herds of sheep were throwing up huge clouds of dust as they were driven back to their village compounds for the night. Past the village was a well-irrigated enclosure sheltered by a windbreak of date palms. Beyond lay the glistening white dome of the shrine, and facing it a mosque and a new mud-brick library. Tamarind, neem trees and a great, spreading banyan grew beside a bubbling spring. But there were no musicians there that evening, only a small crowd of beggars, a man selling chick peas and dates from a trolley, and a couple of Sufi holy men carrying green flags. Watching suspiciously a short distance away were two young men wearing full beards, white robes and checked red-and-white Saudi ghuttras, or head scarves.

I asked one of the shrine`s guardians, Tila Mohammed, why there were not more pilgrims and what had happened to the musicians for which his shrine was once famous. He motioned for me to come into his room beside the library, out of the earshot of the two men in ghuttras.

``My family has been singing here for generations,`` said Tila Mohammed. ``But now these Arab madrasah students come here and create trouble. They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out—even fistfights. This used to be a place where people came for peace of mind. Now they just encounter more problems, so gradually people have stopped coming.``

``We pray that Baba will work a miracle,`` Tila Mohammed continued, ``that good will overcome evil. But our way is pacifist. We love. We never fight. When these Arabs come here, I just don`t know what to do to stop them.``

The tablighis in Nizamuddin are not Wahhabi, but their beliefs are derived from similar theological traditions. They share the Wahhabis` suspicion of the Sufis, and their effect on the Nizamuddin shrine is the same, as they slowly attempt to undermine Islam`s most tolerant and syncretic incarnation just when that face of Islam is most needed in healing the growing breach between Islam and other religions. After leaving Amin at the doors of his Tablighi headquarters, I headed on down into the alleys of Nizamuddin. Taking off my sandals at the entrance of the shrine, I spoke with Hussein, the old man who looks after the shoes of the pilgrims. I asked what he thought of the Tablighis. Hussein`s response was passionate: ``These people are so extreme and intolerant. Look around you. Everyone in Delhi knows about the power of Nizamuddin. Everyone knows that if your heart is pure and you ask him something, that he cannot refuse you. I have felt his power in my own life. I lost my hut in a slum clearance 10 years ago. I was hungry and I had nothing. But I prayed to the saint, and through him I found a place to stay and a way of supporting my family. I tell you: if anybody abuses Nizamuddin Auliya, I will be the first to defend him—with my knife if need be.``

It was a Thursday evening when, during the singing of the qawwalis, the mesmerizing love songs of the Indian Sufis, the spiritual life of the shrine was to reach its climax. Huge crowds of pilgrims were already sitting cross-legged in the forecourt in front of the tomb, and the first qawwali singers were beginning to strike up their music. Around them was a press of excited onlookers. Most pilgrims had come with their families—groups of little boys with eyes wonderfully darkened with kohl, little girls who perhaps had been ill and had been brought for healing. At the shrine itself there were young women trying to tie small threads through the lattices of its screens, each one of them with some prayer or petition, usually a plea for marriage or children.

To one side was a huge cauldron of biryani that had just been carried in to feed the poor. On another was a gathering of women who had come to learn to read Arabic in the simple school that operated from the back of the shrine. There were Muslim grandmothers in black chadors from Bengal, Punjabi Sikhs in their blue turbans, Hindu women from South India with the large red bindis on their foreheads, all coming to pray to the saint, all coming to use Nizamuddin as their intermediary to God.

The crowds thickened. The tempo of the music quickened, and some of the pilgrims began to sink into a trance. Old men were swaying now, arms extended, hands cupped in supplication, lost to the world; women were tossing their hair from side to side; and the first of a succession of dervishes rose to their feet to dance. The atmosphere, already heavy with the rich scent of rose petals, grew heavier still, filled with the softly mouthed and murmured prayers, and with the passionate incantations and expectations of 10,000 pilgrims.

I left them there, with their prayers and petitions, still seeking paradise in that most elusive of all destinations, the human heart.

i must not carry on self-respecting discussions then. . .

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sidhibaat: you are right. however, by changing nicks you lose credibility as a sincere interactor, and thus draw attention towards your ever-changing identity and away from anything interesting you may have to say. This also confuses the discussion. This is fair neither to yourself nor to other posters.

I also dont see how changing nicks has anything to do with discussions not deteriorating into insults (as you say). In fact, most people who carry on a self-respecting discussion have only one identity (the author of this article, e.g., or dost mittar or indeed virtually all chowkies).

jang #735
``other option is providing diplomatic and moral support``

Good advice. Reunification sahib IS quite the diplomat.:)