Editor,
A friend of mine jokingly told a Swiss tourist, “Look at the sun of Kolkata. This is not the sun of Zurich!” The tourist got the joke. But in religion, this is no joke. Our-your conflicts between different religions and between different castes within the same religion can make a person believe that her or his religion and caste is holier-than-thou.
Sri Ramkrishna used to say, “Many opinions, many paths.” This means that every religion has the same goal even though their paths are different. Sri Ramakrshna practiced what he preached. He embraced Islam and religiously followed its path. Then again he embraced Christianity and did the same. Actually, he lived what he said, “Many opinions, many paths.”
Indeed, every religion in one way or the other has contributed to our progress. Sri Aurobindo had said, “Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer; Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to god; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these god-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.”
It is wrong to associate terrorism with a particular religion, because it is not a problem of a religion but a problem of religious dogma that exists in every faith. The reason of this problem has beautifully been explained by the Mother (spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo). She said, “The first and principal article of these established and formal religions runs always, ‘Mine is the supreme, the only truth; all others are in falsehood or inferior.’ For without this fundamental dogma, established credal religions could not have existed. If you do not believe and proclaim that you alone possess the one or the highest truth, you will not be able to impress people and make them flock to you.”
Khaled Abou El Fadl said, “We should be ambassadors for Islam, not ambassadors for terror.” It is a good message for some dogmatic Muslims. This should also be a message for all dogmatic religious persons in every faith. When some Christians killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, those Christians were not ambassadors for Christianity but ambassadors for terror. Historian DN Jha’s ‘Brahmanical Intolerance in Early India’ cites accounts of Pushyamitra Shunga destroying thousands of Buddhist stupas and monasteries. Pushyamitra and his officials were certainly not ambassadors for Hinduism but ambassadors for terror. The same thing can be said about the culprits in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots. Similarly, the killers of Rohingyas are not ambassadors of Buddhism but ambassadors of terror.
Malala Yousafzai of Afghanistan is a victim of religious dogma-generated gender inequality. But gender inequality is not confined to one particular religion. Unlike Afghanistan, Muslim women in Turkey enjoy great amount of freedom. The fact of the matter is gender inequality exists in many parts of the world and in different religions. That is why we still need Raja Rammohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and Kemal Ataturk among us.
It is a shame that 22-year-old Masa Amini was arrested by religious morality police of Iran for not wearing a hijab in September 2022. Later she died in a hospital under suspicious circumstances. Her death raised a storm of protest against the Iranian government.
It is also a shame that 21-year-old Prasanna Reddy was killed and beheaded not by any moral gang but by her own father for falling in love with a local youth of a different caste. It happened in Alamuru village in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, in February last year. That was just one of the many cases of honour (?) killing. Not a single religion is bad. But dogma which exists in every religion can bring out the worst in people.
Sujit De,
Kolkata