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Islamic Counter-Reformation

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Here in the West, one response to the growth of militant extremist Islam has been to suggest that Islam needs a “reformation”—that is, some kind of reform and renewal. I do not want to read too much into this rather loose application of the term, but I think it can be misleading if it suggests that the need is for an Islamic renewal broadly analogous to the sixteenth-century Protestant efforts to renew the Catholic Church. My own view is that many of the problems of contemporary Islam are more like Protestant problems than like Catholic problems, and therefore that something more akin to a dilution of Protestantism is required. Perhaps instead we should be urging an Islamic “Counter-Reformation.”

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Hinduism and Terror

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Since September 11, 2001, the world’s attention has properly been focused on the violence of Islamic extremism, but there are also major violent trends in Hindu extremism that have largely been ignored in the United States. In India, this violence is supported by Hindu extremists and their allies in the Indian government, which is currently led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

One reason for our lack of attention here is that India is not a religiously reactionary state like Saudi Arabia or Iran, and in fact faces its own threats from Islamist militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir, as well as Islamist terrorist attacks throughout the country, most notably the dramatic storming of the Indian parliament in 2001 and the deadly bombing in Bombay that killed fifty-two people in August 2003. India is a strong ally in the war on terrorism and continues to have strong democratic traditions and institutions. It has developed friendlier relations with America and Israel; Ariel Sharon made a state visit in September. The Indian government has also loosened the previously heavily regulated economy to produce one of the highest growth rates in the world, and the Bombay stock market rose 50 percent in 2003. Yet despite these strengths, there is much sectarian hatred in India and it is expressed in frequent, sometimes programmatic, violence.

In the past decade, extremist Hindus have increased their attacks on Christians, until there are now several hundred per year. But this did not make news in the U.S. until a foreigner was attacked. In 1999, Graham Staines, an Australian missionary who had worked with leprosy patients for three decades, was burned alive in Orissa along with his two young sons. The brutal violence visited on Muslims in Gujarat in February 2002 also brought the dangers of Hindu extremism to world attention. Between one and two thousand Muslims were massacred after Muslims reportedly set fire to a train carrying Hindu nationalists, killing several dozen people.

These attacks were not inchoate mob violence, triggered by real or rumored insult; rather, they involved careful planning by organized Hindu extremists with an explicit program and a developed religious-nationalist ideology. Like the ideology of al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists, this ideology began to take shape in the 1920s as a response to European colonialism. It rejected the usually secular outlook of other independence movements; in place of secularism, it synthesized a reactionary form of religion with elements of European millenarian political thought, especially fascism.

Until the nineteenth century, the word “Hindu” had no specific religious meaning and simply referred to the people who lived east of the Indus River, whatever their beliefs. (The Indian Supreme Court itself has held that “no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism.’”) It was only when the census introduced by the British colonial authorities in 1871 included Hindu as a religious designation that many Indians began to think of themselves and their country as Hindu.

Twentieth-century agitation against the British led to the rise not only of the secular and socialist Congress movement but also of the rival Hindu nationalist movement collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (“family of organizations”). The Parivar proclaims an ideology of “Hindutva,” aimed at ensuring the predominance of Hinduism in Indian society, politics, and culture, which it promotes through tactics that include violence and terror. Its agenda includes subjugating or driving out Muslims and Christians, who total some 17 percent of the population. It castigates them as foreign faiths, imposed by foreign conquerors”even though Christians trace their origins in India to the Apostle Thomas in the first century and Islam came to India in the seventh and eighth centuries.

The Sangh Parivar’s central organization is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded by Keshav Hedgewar in 1925. Hedgewar was influenced by V. D. Savarkar, who believed that Hindus were the descendants of the ancient Aryans and properly formed a nation with a unified geography, race, and culture. Savarkar’s 1923 book Hindutva—Who is a Hindu? declared that those who did not consider India as both fatherland and holy land were not true Indians —and that the love of Indian Christians and Muslims for India was “divided” because each group had its own holy land in the Middle East.

M. S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s sarsangchalak (supreme director) from 1940 to 1973, sharpened these themes. In 1938, commenting on the Nuremberg racial laws, he declared: “Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us...to learn and profit by.” In an address to RSS members the same year, he also asserted: “If we Hindus grow stronger, in time Muslim friends...will have to play the part of German Jews.” He insisted that “the non-Hindu...must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion.... Or [they] may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.” On March 25, 1939, the Hindu nationalist Mahasabha Party, an RSS ally, likewise proclaimed: “Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the swastika, her patronage of Vedic learning, and the ardent championship of Indo-Germanic civilization are welcomed by the religious and sensible Hindus of India with a jubilant hope.”

This racism and religious and cultural chauvinism brought the Sangh Parivar into conflict with other strands of Hinduism, especially those taught by Mahatma Gandhi. Golwalkar castigated Gandhi as being soft on Muslims, while Gandhi in turn called the RSS “a communal body with a totalitarian outlook.” Hindu nationalists blamed Gandhi for the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 and accused him of dismembering Mother India. The conflict did not stop at words: Gandhi’s assassin was Nathuram Godse, a former RSS member and Savarkar associate.

The RSS is now a major paramilitary organization with millions of members. Its educational wing, the Vidya Bharati, has some twenty thousand educational institutes, with one hundred thousand teachers and two million students. The Vidya Bharati schools distribute booklets containing a map of India that encompasses not only Pakistan and Bangladesh but also the entire region of Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, and parts of Myanmar, all under the heading “Punya Bhoomi Bharat,” the “Indian Holy Land.” The RSS also has separate organizations for tribal peoples, intellectuals, teachers, slum dwellers, leprosy patients, cooperatives, consumers, newspapers, industrialists, Sikhs, ex-servicemen, overseas Indians, and an organization for religion and proselytization, as well as trade unions, student and economic organizations, and a women’s chapter.

Other Sangh Parivar organizations include the Bajrang Dal and the Vishnu Hindu Parishad (VHP-World Hindu Council), which engage in propaganda, virulent hate campaigns, and sometimes violence against religious minorities. The VHP was formed in 1964 to unite Hindu groups and serve as the RSS’s bridge to sympathetic religious leaders. It has sought to radicalize Hindus by claiming that Hindus are under threat from an “exploding” Muslim population and a spate of Christian conversions, and it organized the 1992 nationwide demonstrations that culminated in the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque by Hindu mobs.

In January 2003, the head of the RSS described the Jesuits in India as the “pope’s soldiers” and alleged that they had taken an oath to use “violence and barbaric means to decimate all those who don’t follow the Roman Catholic religion.” Sangh Parivar groups have also been pressing for a ban on religious conversions from Hinduism, which they allege are being done by “force, fraud, and inducement.” They accuse Christian missionaries (who comprise about one half of one percent of the Christians in India) of converting people by offering them money, medical help, and education. Because of this widespread Hindu extremist propaganda, it now appears that a majority of Hindus support a ban on Hindus changing their religion.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has since 1998 formed the national government of India at the head of a coalition of centrist parties, is tied to the RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal, and functions as the Sangh Parivar’s political wing. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee publicly praises the RSS, attends its functions, and has feted the organization’s leadership at his residence. Other senior BJP officials, such as Home Affairs Minister L. K. Advani, are RSS associates. At the national level the BJP advances the ideology of Hindutva through propaganda, the manipulation of cultural institutions, undercutting laws that protect religious minorities, and minimizing or excusing Hindu extremist violence. At the state level its functionaries have abetted and even participated in such violence.

The BJP appoints school officials who alter textbooks and curricula to emphasize Hinduism; they also require that Hindu texts be taught in all schools. Moreover, it has appointed Sangh Parivar adherents to key positions in autonomous bodies such as the Prasar Bharati, which controls the official media, the National Film Development Corporation, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and the National Book Trust.

BJP lawmakers have also attempted to restrict minority religious groups’ international contacts and to reduce their rights to build places of worship. It works to pass anti-conversion laws and to alter the personal laws that govern marriages, adoptions, and inheritance. It practices legal discrimination against Dalits (“untouchables”) who are Christian and Muslim, but not against those who are Hindu. With BJP support, laws have recently been adopted in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat states that restrict the ability of Hindus to change their religion, and proposals for national restrictions have been made. Pope John Paul II described these developments in June 2003 as “unjust” and said they prohibited “free exercise of the natural right to religious freedom.”

The current legal status of religious conversion in India is ambiguous. In a 1977 judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that “converting” people was not a fundamental right, that conversions could potentially impinge on freedom of conscience, and that, if conversions disrupt community life, they could amount to “disturbing public order.” The states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and Arunachal Pradesh have a legal ban on “forced conversion.” Officials of the National Commission for Minorities, a government body with the mandate to protect minorities, believe that such laws are unconstitutional; and despite many investigations into allegations, no “forced conversions” have ever been documented or proven.

While restrictions on conversion—or, more precisely, restrictions on the legal recognition that someone has in fact converted—affect all Indians, they are particularly onerous for Dalits. Because of their desperate status in Indian society, many lower-caste Hindus have considered converting in order to escape their religiously defined plight (most Christians in India are from Dalit background). In 1956, B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, declared that he had converted to Buddhism to escape Hinduism. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand Dalits have followed his example. In 1981, about a thousand Dalits converted to Islam in Tamil Nadu. In August 2002, 250 Dalit youth from the same area converted to Christianity. Apart from their directly religious significance, such conversions erode the dominance of traditional Hinduism’s higher castes, especially the Brahmins, and undercut the power of landowners, generally higher-caste, over their laborers, who are frequently lower-caste. The attempts to forbid religious conversion are also attempts to keep the underclass in its place.

The BJP policies on Hindutva and conversion coincide with increasingly violent attacks by Hindu militants on religious minorities. Attacks on Christians, especially in the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa, have surged in recent years. India’s Home Ministry (internal security) and its National Commission for Minorities officially list over a hundred religiously motivated attacks against Christians per year, but the real number is certainly higher, as Indian journalists estimate that only some ten percent of incidents are ever reported. These attacks include murders of missionaries and priests, sexual assault on nuns, ransacking of churches, convents, and other Christian institutions, desecration of cemeteries, and Bible burnings.

The other major target of Hindu extremists is the Muslim community, which is haunted by the fear of recurrent communal riots that have taken the lives of thousands of Muslims and Hindus since Indian independence. During the outbreak of violence in Gujarat in February 2002, many of the victims were burned alive or dismembered while police and BJP state government authorities either stood by or joined in. The mobs had with them lists of homes and businesses owned by Muslims, lists that they could have acquired only from government sources.

After the massacre, state BJP officials also impeded the investigation. In the high-profile “Best Bakery Case,” a judge dismissed charges against twenty-one defendants on trial for setting fire to a Muslim-owned bakery and killing and injuring its owners because the main witness, a nineteen-year-old girl, stated that she could not identify any of the attackers. She later told the press that “she testified falsely after local Hindu politicians repeatedly threatened her family... and after concluding that prosecutors, who made no effort to meet with her before the trial, were not serious about gaining convictions.” On September 12, 2003, the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court expressed his disgust with the situation by declaring publicly that he has “no faith left in the prosecution and the Gujarat government.”

Following the violence, Gujarat’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, a BJP member, called upon his supporters to “teach a lesson” to those who “believe in multiplying the population,” referring to Muslims. Other Sangh Parivar officials were even more explicitly threatening. VHP International President Ashok Singhal described the Gujarat carnage as a “successful experiment” and warned that it would be repeated all over India. After the December 2002 BJP election victory in Gujarat, VHP General Secretary Pravin Togadia declared, “All Hindutva opponents will get the death sentence, and we will leave this to the people to carry out. The process of forming a Hindu rule in the country has begun with Gujarat, and VHP will take the Gujarat experiment to every nook and corner of the country.”

To maintain the political coalition that enables it to rule at the national level, the BJP downplays its specifically religious goals and portrays itself as a moderate party. But it also allies with the Sangh Parivar to appeal to its base. In its 2004 recommendations, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom proposed that India be included on the State Department’s official shortlist of the worst religious persecutors for its “egregious, systematic, and ongoing” violations of religious rights.

Since it is the world’s largest democracy, good relations with India are important to the U.S. It is also a growing trading partner, a possible geopolitical counterweight to China, and a strong U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. But the growth of often-violent Hindu nationalism threatens India’s tolerant traditions and pluralistic democracy. If religious extremism continues to grow, it will, as we have learned elsewhere, drag India’s democracy, economy, and foreign policy down with it. In the face of such a threat, we cannot afford to be silent.

Paul Marshall is a Senior Fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom. Among his recent books are Islam at the Crossroads (2002) ; God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics (2002); and the Center’s recent report, The Rise of Hindu Extremism.

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The First Freedom Under Siege

Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Worldwide, religious freedom is deteriorating. A world is a difficult thing to summarize, but the trend shows that repression of religious minorities is widespread in countries with large populations, such as China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, and Nigeria, and that religion is increasingly a key element of modern wars in the Balkans, Israel, Chechnya, and Kashmir.

While overall the situation is worse, however, there is also good news. Latin America has become one of the most religiously free areas in the world. And, except for the former Yugoslavia, the countries of Eastern Europe have also become largely free. One great story of the last quarter century is the victory of freedom in the traditionally Catholic world. There are also many free countries in Africa, especially in the south, while several smaller Asian countries are also free. Nevertheless, the dominant pattern in the world is the increasing political influence of religion coupled with increasing religious repression.

Religious persecution, meaning violence in which the religion of the persecuted or the persecutor is a factor, affects all religious groups. Christians and animists in Sudan, Baha’is in Iran, Ahmadiyas in Pakistan, Buddhists in Tibet, and Falun Gong in China are the most intensely persecuted, while Christians are the most widely persecuted group. But there is no group in the world that does not suffer because of its beliefs. All religions, whether large, such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, or small, such as Baha’i, Jehovah’s Witness, or Judaism, suffer to some degree. In many cases these attacks come from their own religious group. Thus Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan suffer persecution and even death from some dominant Sunni groups.

Religious freedom is also not confined to any one area or continent. There are relatively free countries in every continent and of every religious background. Perhaps surprisingly, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, Botswana, Mali, and Namibia are freer than France and Belgium. There are now absolutely no grounds for thinking that religious freedom is an exclusively Western desire or achievement.

Religious freedom varies depending on the historical religion of the country. This is complex, since current regimes may reflect comparatively little of a country’s religious background. China, North Korea, and Vietnam have a largely Buddhist background, but current religious repression comes from self“proclaimed atheistic materialists. Turkey has an Islamic background but the present secular government aggressively represses peaceful Muslim expression. Thirty years ago many traditionally Christian countries were under Communist repression. Despite this variety, the overall patterns can be illuminating.

Historically Christian countries, with the notable exception of Cuba, Belarus, and Serbia, are now nearly all religiously free. Within Christianity, Protestantism tends to score higher than Catholicism and both higher than Orthodoxy. Other religiously free countries include Israel and countries of largely Buddhist background, including Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan. This suggests that a Buddhist tradition can be a good foundation for religious freedom.

The most striking recent change has been in traditionally Hindu countries, notably India. India has a strong history of religious freedom but has recently voted into power a party promoting an intolerant Hinduism, thereby removing a country harboring nearly a fifth of the world’s people from the list of nations that are religiously free.

Historically Islamic countries form the large majority of the unfree regimes. There may soon be improvement since Indonesia, with the world’s largest Muslim population, is in a painful transition to democracy while Nigeria, about half Muslim, may also establish itself as a democracy. However, both countries are currently unsettled, and their move to democracy is marked by large-scale regional religious violence.

Policy elites tend to overlook the religious motivations of foreign regimes, letting their secularism prevent them from even seeing, much less understanding, the role of religion in human life. For example, at the end of 1997 the former executive editor of the New York Times , A. M. Rosenthal, confessed, “Early this year I realized that in decades of reporting, writing, or assigning stories on human rights, I rarely touched on one of the most important. Political human rights, legal, civil, and press rights, emphatically often; but the right to worship where and how God or conscience leads, almost never.”

This myopia can have painful consequences. The CIA refused to examine the beliefs and attitudes of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers in Iran before they took power, claiming it would be mere “sociology,” intelligence-speak for irrelevant academic verbiage. Parallel tales can be told of Vietnam, Bosnia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Nicaragua, India, Israel, Sudan, and Indonesia.

This neglect often comes from redefining religion as “ethnicity,” a tendency to which Americans are particularly prone. Distinguished diplomat Chester Crocker’s otherwise excellent lecture to the Foreign Policy Research Institute on “How to Think about Ethnic Conflict” described even the Northern Ireland and India-Pakistan conflicts as “ethnic,” even though the sides share ethnicity, and are divided by religion. “Ethnic cleansing” is the new term for religious repression all over the world, thanks to depictions of the former Yugoslavia wherein war between Orthodox, Catholics, and Muslims was routinely described as “ethnic.”

Another mistake is to assimilate religious disputes to the political categories of Western Enlightenment culture, as though this constituted the common opinion of reasonable humankind, or at least the common opinion of Americans. Thus, Islamic and Hindu militants are often described as “right-wing.” But what is a “right-wing” or “left-wing” view of plans to build a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri mosque, or the place of the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem? Neither has anything to do with categories of left and right, and each situation can be understood only in light of its deep-seated religious context.

When ethnicity fails to subsume religion, a common alternative is to call it “fundamentalist,” a catchall term for any manifestation of intense religious fervor. Such religious militancy is often treated as the sublimation of drives that can really be explained by poverty, economic change, or the stresses of modernity. Of course, these can play a role in religious expression; no part of human life is sealed off from any other. But all too often what we encounter is a priori methodological commitment to treat religion as secondary, as an evanescent and derivative phenomenon that can be explained, but never used to explain.

Taking religion seriously in international affairs can illuminate conflicts of various kinds. It is worth noting that most wars in the last fifty years have occurred on the margins of the traditional religions. The Middle East, the southern Sahara, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia are where Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism intersect. These conflicts are not usually explicitly religious wars. But since religion shapes culture, people at these boundaries have different histories and different views of human life, and are thus more likely to oppose one another.

I am not suggesting that religion, independent of other cultural, ethnic, economic, political, or strategic elements, is the only or the key factor in explaining social behavior: societies are complex. But I am saying that it is simply absurd to examine a political order without attending to the role of religion.

One reason why religion is frequently associated with social unrest is that “globalization” or “westernization” is penetrating deeply into traditional cultures. Traditional believers in Japan or Java did not in the past wonder about who they were. But now, through new communications and commodities, local identity cannot simply be taken for granted, and, so, needs to be consciously asserted.

It is also significant that the leaders of these societies are less likely than their immediate postwar predecessors to have been shaped by contact with and education in former colonizing societies. Recent generations of political elites in traditional societies have most often grown up within their country and profess less need to adopt Western ways.

Both these trends are exacerbated by the collapse of communism, which eliminated the only major alternative to globalization. Consequently those distressed by the dominant directions of the world now look to their own country’s traditions, which of course are predominantly religious traditions.

One result of these trends is the growth of religious nationalism, whether heartfelt or contrived, wherein countries are defined increasingly by their religious inheritance. This has typified the conflicts between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. It is endemic in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, while, to acquire legitimacy, the Burmese junta masquerades as Buddhist. The Chinese government inveighs against “foreign” religions, while other regimes in the region celebrate so-called “Asian values.”

Within the Islamic world, this religious nationalism interweaves with pan-Islamic or pan-Arab motifs. In Egypt, Afghanistan, and Malaysia, the focus is more on the particular country, while for most terrorists loyalty is to the whole Islamic world. This pan-Islamicism is rapidly becoming a major factor in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and underlies most of the terrorism in Indonesia.

Despite the claims of their proponents, these trends are not repristinations of previous religious patterns. In traditional societies there was little need to assert or defend a religious identity, which is one reason that some of the most religiously free Muslim societies are monarchies such as Jordan and Morocco. But in the modern world, with its democratic jostlings and communication networks, religious identities are challenged and, hence, religious leaders must rally their supporters. The result is that belief becomes more like ideology and the faithful become more like a movement.

Some policy analysts in the U.S. prefer to play down issues of religious freedom because they recognize that religious issues are often intractable. Compromises over religion are much harder to negotiate than deals over land or water. Religious issues are not named for fear that their mere mention conjures them into existence.

However, religious conflict and religious repression will not go away simply because our foreign policy elites refuse to speak of it. The United States can only address such conflict if it clearly and unsentimentally acknowledges it. Religious freedom is historically the first freedom in the growth of human rights and often has more to do with the growth of democracy than does a direct focus on political activity itself. Integrating religious issues and concerns into a coherent policy is extremely difficult, of course. While all human rights pressures make realists nervous, religion carries the added burden of touching on very deep-seated commitments. But America’s historic concern for freedom will not be sustained without a more informed and urgent appreciation of religious freedom.

Paul Marshall is the author and editor of many books, including the best-selling Their Blood Cries Out . He is Senior Fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, Freedom House, Washington, D.C., and the General Editor of its Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution (Broadman and Holman, 2000).

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