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Hinduism and Islam

Hindu relations with Islam and Christianity are in some ways quite different from the
ties and tensions that bind together religions of Indian origin. Hindus live with a legacy
of domination by Muslim and Christian rulers that stretches back many centuries—in
northern India, to the Delhi sultanate established at the beginning of the 13th century.
The patterns of relationship between Hindus and Muslims have been different between
north and south India. While there is a history of conquest and domination in the north,
Hindu-Muslim relations in Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been peaceful. Islam came to
south India very early, possibly about the 7th century, through traders and sea routes.
There is a vast body of literature on Islam in Tamil composed over almost a thousand
years. The early 19th-century Sira Puranam, a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, is
an excellent example. There are also hundreds of shared ritual spaces, called dargahs
(literally, “doorway” or “threshold”), for Hindus and Muslims. These mark shrines for
revered Muslim (frequently Sufi) leaders and are visited by both Muslims and Hindus.
Moreover, close proximity and daily interaction throughout the centuries has led to
efforts to accommodate the existence of the two religions. One manifestation of such
coexistence occurred among some devotional groups who believed that one God, or the
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“universal principle,” was the same regardless of whether it was called or brahman.
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ARTICLE CONTENTS 
Introduction

Overview

The term Hinduism

General nature of Hinduism

The five tensile strands

Doctrine

Practice

Society
Yet there were periods when the political ambitions of Islamic rulers took strength from
Story
iconoclastic aspects of Muslim teaching and led to the devastation of many major Hindu
Devotion
temple complexes, from Mathura and Varanasi (Banaras) in the north to Chidambaram,
Sriringam,
Central and
conceptions Madurai in the far south; other temples were converted to mosques.
Episodically, since the 14th century this history has provided rhetorical fuel for Hindu
Veda, Brahmans, and issues of
anger against
religious authority Muslim rulers. The bloody partition of the South Asian subcontinent into
India and
Doctrine Pakistan in 1947
of atman-brahman added a new dimension. Mobilizing Hindu sensibilities about
the sacredness of the land as a whole, Hindus have sometimes depicted the creation of
Karma, samsara, and moksha
Pakistan as a dismemberment of the body of India, in the process demonizing Muslims
Dharma and the three paths
who have remained within India’s political boundaries.
Ashramas: the four stages of life
These strands converged at the end of the 20th century in a campaign to destroy the
The history of Hinduism
mosque built in 1528 by a lieutenant of the Mughal emperor Bābur in Ayodhya, a city
Sources of Hinduism
that has traditionally been identified as the place where Rama was born and ruled. In
Indo-European
1992 militantsources
Hindu nationalists from throughout India, who had been organized by the
Vishwa
Other Hindu
sources: Parishad
the process of (VHP; “World Hindu Council”), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
“Sanskritization”
Sangh (RSS; “National Volunteer Alliance”), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP;
The prehistoric
“Indian period (3rd
People’s and 2nd
Party”), destroyed the mosque in an effort to “liberate” Rama and
establish a huge “Rama’s Birthplace Temple” on the spot. The continuing tensions
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including the destruction of some Hindu temples there by militant Muslims. Yet,

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although the relationship between Hindus and Muslims within India remains
complicated and there are occasional eruptions of tension and violence, in many areas
they have been able to coexist peacefully.

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Hinduism and Christianity

Relations between Hinduism and Christianity have been shaped by unequal balances of
political power and cultural influence. Although communities of Christians have lived in
southern India since the middle of the 1st millennium, the great expansion of Indian
Christianity followed the efforts of missionaries working under the protection of British
colonial rule. Their denigration of selected features of Hindu practice—most notably
image worship, suttee, and child marriage (the first two were also criticized by Muslims)
—was shared by certain Hindus. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the
21st, a movement that might be called neo-Vedanta has emphasized the monism of
certain Upanishads, decried “popular” Hindu “degenerations” such as the worship of
idols, acted as an agent of social reform, and championed dialogue between other
religious communities.

Many Hindus are ready to accept the ethical teachings of the Gospels, particularly the
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Sermon on the Mount (whose influence on Gandhi is well known),withbut areject the
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theological superstructure. They regard Christian conceptions about love and its social
consequences as a kind of bhakti and tend to venerate Jesus as a saint, yet many resent
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the organization, the reliance on authorities, and the exclusiveness of Christianity,

considering these as obstacles to harmonious cooperation. They subscribe to Gandhi’s
opinion that missionaries should confine their activities to humanitarian service and look
askance at conversion, finding also in Hinduism what might be attractive in Christianity.
A far more typical sentiment is expressed in the eagerness of Hindus of all social stations,
especially the middle class, to send their children to high-quality (often English-
language) schools established and maintained by Christian organizations. No great fear
exists that the religious element in the curriculum will cause Hindu children to abandon
their parents’ faith.

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Diasporic Hinduism

Since the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions in

Chicago in 1893 and the subsequent establishment of the Vedanta Society in various
American and British cities, Hinduism has had a growing missionary profile outside the
Indian subcontinent. Conversion as understood by Christians or Muslims is usually not
the aim. As seen in the Vedanta Society, Hindu perspectives are held to be sufficiently
capacious that they do not require new adherents to abandon traditions of worship with
which they are familiar, merely to see them as part of a greater whole.
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“Truth is one, but scholars speak of it in many ways” (“Ekam sat vipra a Britannica
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is much quoted. Many transnational Hindu communities—including Radha Soami

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Satsang Beas, Transcendental Meditation, the self-realization fellowship Siddha Yoga,

the Sathya Sai Baba Satsang, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness
(ISKCON, popularly called Hare Krishna)—have focused on specific gurus or on forms of
religious praxis such as devotional worship or meditation, particularly in their stages of
most rapid growth. They frequently emphasize techniques of spiritual discipline more
than doctrine. Of these groups, only ISKCON has a deeply exclusivist cast—which makes
it, in fact, generally more doctrinaire than the Gaudiya Vaishnava lineages out of which
its founding guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta, emerged.

Vivekananda.
From The Science and Philosophy of Religion, by Swami Vivekananda, 1915

At least as important as these guru-centred communities in the increasingly

international texture of Hindu life are communities of Hindus who have emigrated from
South Asia to other parts of the world. Their character differs markedly according to
region, class, and the time at which emigration occurred. Tamils in Malaysia celebrate a
festival to the god Murugan (Thaipusam) that accommodates body-piercing vows.
Formerly indentured labourers who settled on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in the
mid-19th century have consolidated doctrine and practice from various locales in
Gangetic India, with the result that Rama and Sita have a heightened profile. Many
migrants from rural western India, especially Gujarat, became urbanized in East Africa
in the late 19th century and resettled in Britain. Like those Gujaratis who came directly
to the United States from India since the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws in 1965,
once abroad they are more apt to embrace the reformist guru-centred Swaminarayan
faith than they would be in their native Gujarat, though this is by no means universal.

Professional-class emigrants from South India have spearheaded the construction of a

series of impressive Shrivaishnava-style temples throughout the United States,
sometimes receiving financial and technical assistance from the great Vaishnava temple
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institutions at Tirupati. The placement of some of these temples, such
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temple near Pittsburgh, Pa., reveals the desire to evoke Tirupati’s natural environment
on American soil. Similarly, Telugu-speaking priests from the Tirupati region have been
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imported to serve at temples such as the historically important Ganesha temple,

constructed in Queens, New York, in 1975–77. Yet the population worshipping at these
temples is far more mixed than that in India. This produces on the one hand sectarian
and regional eclecticism and on the other hand a vigorous attempt to establish doctrinal
common ground. As Vasudha Narayanan observed, educational materials produced at
such temples typically hold that Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life, that it insists
in principle on religious tolerance, that its Godhead is functionally trinitarian (the male
trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva is meant, although temple worship is often very
active at goddesses’ shrines), and that Hindu rituals have inner meanings consonant with
scientific principles and are conducive to good health.

A small fraction of diaspora Hindus are also important contributors to the VHP, whose
efforts since 1964 to find common ground among disparate Hindu groups have not only
helped establish educational programs for youths but sometimes also contributed to
displays of Hindu nationalism such as were seen at Ayodhya in 1992. The struggle
between “left” and “right” within the Hindu fold continued into the early 21st century,
with diasporic groups playing a more important role than ever before. Because of their
wealth and education, because globalizing processes lend them prestige and enable them
to communicate constantly with Hindus living in South Asia, and because their
experience as minorities tends to set them apart from their families in India itself, their
contribution to the evolution of Hinduism has been a very interesting one.

“Hinduism,” originally an outsider’s word, designates a multitude of realities defined by

period, time, sect, class, and caste. Yet the veins and bones that hold this complex
organism together are not just chimeras of external perception. Hindus themselves—
particularly diasporic Hindus—affirm them, continuing and even accelerating a process
of self-definition that has been going on for millennia.

Vasudha Narayanan

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The ultimate effects of these cross-cultural (and commercial) exchanges with western and
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Among the collected hymns of the Rigveda (which may date from 1500 bc and probably constitute the earliest
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monasticism: Hinduism

Although Hinduism has been the dominant religious tradition of India, it has often borrowed from other
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