Nine. The Interaction of Islam and Hinduism [[123]] AN Aspect of the cultural life of Islamic India that demands special consideration is the nature of the interaction of organized religion and exercise that took place between Islam and Hinduism. There are, however, a variety of factors involved that make the study of this interaction exceedingly complex and prevent any very assured conclusions being attained. I is simply the lack of testify, for the religious movements of medieval India accept left few records. Then at that place is the uncertainty at times whether a blueprint of beliefs and belief in both religions has a mutual origin in 1, or if it grew up independently in both cultures. The intricate question of the relation of Hindu and Islamic mystical movements is an instance of this difficulty. Finally, since one is confronted non just with the problem of identifying Islamic influence on Hinduism merely also Hindu influences on Islam, it is articulate that the process of interaction may be complicated past a double movement. Original Hindu influences, for example, may take passed over into Islam; the move or process that resulted from this may then in turn influence Hinduism, causing a rather different miracle. Mysticism again provides a possible illustration.
The most obvious result of the religious impact of Islam on Hinduism is, of course, the existence of a large Muslim population in Republic of india. The view that Islam propagated itself in India through the sword cannot exist maintained; aside from other evidence, the very distribution of the Muslim population does not support information technology. If the spread of Islam had been due to the might of the Muslim kings, one would expect the largest proportion of Muslims in those areas which were the centers of Muslim political power. This, nevertheless, is not the case. The per centum of Muslims is low around Delhi, Lucknow, Ahmadabad, Ahmadnagar, and Bijapur, the principal seats of Muslim political power. Fifty-fifty in the case of Mysore, where Sultan Tipu is said to take forced conversion to Islam, the ineffectiveness of majestic [[124]] proselytism may be measured past the fact that Muslims are scarcely five percent of the total population of the state. On the other manus, Islam was never a political power in Malabar, yet today Muslims grade nearly thirty percent of its full population. In the two areas in which the concentration of Muslims is heaviest—mod East and West Islamic republic of pakistan—there is fairly articulate prove that conversion was the work of Sufis, mystics who migrated to Bharat throughout the period of the sultanate. In the western area the process was facilitated in the thirteenth century by the thousands of Muslim theologians, saints, and missionaries who fled to India to escape the Mongol terror. The names and careers of some of these are well known. Thus Pir Shams Tabriz came to Multan; Khwaja Qutb-ud-din Bakhtiyar went to Delhi; and Syed Jalal settled in Uch, the great fortress south of Multan. The influence of such men, and of many others, can be traced through the families of their spiritual descendants.
In Bengal, the Muslim missionaries institute the greatest response to their message among the outcastes and the depressed classes, of which there were large numbers in Bengal. To them, the creed of Islam, with its accent on equality, must accept come up equally a liberating force. Then too, the acceptance of the religion of the conquerors would have been a powerful attraction, since it would undoubtedly carry with information technology possibilities of advancement they had never known before. Another factor in the big number of conversions is the somewhat peculiar religious history of Bengal. From the 8th to the 12th century the Pala dynasty had supported Buddhism. Then in the 12th century the Sena dynasty, which had its roots in S India, began to encourage Hindu orthodoxy. The issue was probably a good deal of religious unrest and uncertainty, which made information technology possible for Islam to observe an opening for its work of proselytization. When the Islamic missionaries arrived they found in several instances that the conquering armies had destroyed both the temples of revived Hinduism and the monasteries of the older Buddhism; in their place—often on the same sites—they built new shrines. Moreover, they very frequently transferred ancient Hindu and Buddhist stories of miracles to Muslim saints, fusing the old organized religion into the new on a level that could be accepted past the masses.
[[125]] By the end of the fourteenth century Islam had permeated all parts of India, and the process was fully under way which led to the conversion of a big section of the Indian population to Islam, and resulted in far-reaching cultural and spiritual changes outside the Muslim gild. The developments in the cultural sphere—development of regional languages, the rising of Hindustani, and the evolution of Indo-Muslim music and architecture—take been outlined in the preceding affiliate; hither an try volition be made to examine those religious movements which seem to owe something to the interaction of Hinduism and Islam.
The process of interaction is undeniably obscure, and knowledge of many vital links is lacking, simply what is certain is that the period was of great importance for the evolution of the religious and cultural traditions of modern India. The fifteenth century, it has been observed, "was marked by an boggling burst of devotional poetry inspired by these religious movements, and this stands out as ane of the great formative periods in the history of northern Bharat, a period in which on the ane mitt the modern languages were firmly established as vehicles of literary expression, and on the other the faith of the people was permeated by new ideas."/1/
The religious schools and movements which arose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are generally characterized equally variants of bhakti, or devotional organized religion, and the influence of Islam has been seen as a determining factor. This understanding of the movements is, all the same, an oversimplification of a very complex phenomenon. It is important to remember, showtime of all, that many of the elements associated with the religious movements at the cease of the sultanate had already been dominant in Hinduism itself for many centuries. This is especially true of those areas of South Bharat where Muslim influence had not been strong. It is also quite possible that the Islamic mystics, the Sufis, had been directly or indirectly influenced by Hindu thought and institutions before the conquest of India. Hinduism in the fifteenth century, and so, was receiving in an elaborated class what it had already given to Islam. But of even greater importance in examining [[126]] the religious movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is an awareness of two very dissimilar attitudes which Hindu religious leaders had toward Islam. 1 group accustomed what was congenial to it in the new spiritual organization; the other group adopted a few elements from the spiritual construction of the ascendant race in society to strengthen Hinduism and make information technology better able to withstand Islam. Both reacted to Islam, but one was sympathetic while the other was hostile. The 2 trends are similar to the growth of the tolerant, cosmopolitan Brahmo Samaj and the militant Arya Samaj, when Hinduism was confronted with Christianity in the nineteenth century. Kabir, Guru Nanak, Dadu, and other founders of syncretic sects are included in the first group, while the movement in Bengal, associated with Chaitanya, mirrors the latter tendency.
One of the earliest of the religious leaders, and probably the nearly influential, was Kabir. His dates are uncertain, some scholars giving his birth appointment equally 1398, and some as late as 1440, but it is more often than not agreed that he flourished in the middle of the fifteenth century. At that place has besides been much controversy concerning his religious origins, merely it is quite certain that he was born into a Muslim family. The names of Kabir and Kamal, his son, are both Islamic. Co-ordinate to the popular Tazkirah-i-Auliya-i-Hind (Lives of Muslim Saints), he was a disciple of the Muslim Sufi, Shaikh Taqi. A further indication of his Muslim origin is that his grave at Maghar has always been in the keeping of Muslims. Just Kabir was to a higher place all a religious radical who denounced with equal zest the narrowness of Islamic and Hindu sectarianism. According to one tradition he was a disciple of Ramananda, the smashing mystic who is credited with the spread of bhakti doctrines in North India. That Ramananda himself was influenced by Islam is not certain, only his willingness to admit men of all castes, including Islam, as his disciples, suggests the possibility of this. The right conclusion seems to exist that Kabir was a Muslim Sufi who, having come under Ramananda'due south influence, accepted some Hindu ideas and tried to reconcile Hinduism and Islam. Still it was the Hindus, and particularly those of the lower classes, to whom his message appealed.
With many of his works not bachelor for study, and serious doubts [[127]] existing about the genuineness of others, it is difficult to assess Kabir properly, but at that place is no divergence of opinion virtually the general tenor of his writings. He often uses Hindu religious nomenclature, and is equally at home in Hindu and Muslim religious idea, but at that place is no uncertainty that one of the near salient features of his teachings is denunciation of polytheism, idolatry, and caste. But he is every bit unsparing in his condemnation of Muslim formalism, and he made no distinction between what was sane and holy in the teachings of Hinduism and Islam. He was a truthful seeker subsequently God, and did his all-time to break the barriers that separated Hindus from Muslims. What has appealed to the millions of his followers through the ages, nonetheless, is his passionate conviction that he had found the pathway to God, a pathway attainable to the lowest besides as the highest. That he has in the course of time become a saint of the Hindus rather than of the Muslims is a reflection of the temper of Hinduism, which finds it easier than Islam to bring new sects and doctrines within its spiritual hegemony.
The second great religious leader whose piece of work shows undoubted Islamic influence is Guru Nanak (1469–1539). The Sikh religion, of which Nanak was the founder, is noted for its militant opposition to Islam, but this is largely a product of historical circumstances in the seventeenth century. Nanak's own aim was to unite both Hindu and Muslim through an entreatment to what he considered the great central truths of both. He acknowledged Kabir as his spiritual teacher, and their teachings are very similar. His debt to Islam is shown in his rigorous insistence on the volition and majesty of God, while the underlying structure of his idea, with its tendency to postulate a unity that comprehends all things, suggests his Hindu inheritance. Accompanied past ii companions, one a Muslim and the other a Hindu, he wandered throughout North Bharat and, according to some accounts, to Arabia, preaching his simple gospel. The followers he gained became, in the course of a century, a separate religious customs, but the Sikh scriptures, of which Nanak's sayings provide the core, are a reminder of the attempt to bridge the gap between Hinduism and Islam.
Dadu (1544–1603) was the third of the religious leaders through [[128]] whose teachings Islamic ideas found broad currency amongst non-Muslims. While he does not belong chronologically in a survey of the early interaction of Hinduism and Islam, since he lived into the seventeenth century, his membership in a Kabir sect makes a cursory consideration of his career useful. Furthermore, his biography shows the aforementioned process at work that is seen in the accounts of the life of Kabir. Dadu is stated by his later followers to have been the son of a Nagar Brahman, but contempo researches have shown that he was born in a family of Muslim cotton fiber-carders. This is borne out by his ain works and the fact that all the members of his family have Muslim names: his father's proper name was Lodi, his mother's, Basiran; his sons were Garib and Miskin and his grandson, Faqir. His instructor was Shaikh Budhan, a Muslim saint of the Qadri order. The early Hindu followers of Dadu were not disturbed by the noesis that he was a Muslim by birth, but later ones were. The fable of his Brahmanical origin made its commencement advent in a commentary on the Bhaktamala, written equally late as 1800. It is said that until recent times documents existed at the monasteries of the followers of Dadu which suggested that he had been a Muslim, simply that these were destroyed by the keepers who were unwilling to admit that his origins were not Hindu./2/
The metamorphosis which the life story and teachings of Kabir and Dadu have undergone is not merely the work of those who were anxious to secure for their heroes high lineage and a link with Hinduism; it is symptomatic of the full general movement of separation that became common in both Islam and Hinduism in afterward centuies. As the Muslims grew more than orthodox, they turned away from men such as Kabir and Dadu, while the Hindus accepted them as saints, but forgot their Islamic origins. In order to conform to the requirements of the Hindu bhakti tradition, they have undergone a transformation that at times necessitates a falsification of history. Two poet-saints who are clearly in the Hindu bhakti tradition but show traces of Islamic influence are Namadeva and Tukaram, the bang-up religious figures of the Maratha country. Namadeva, who lived in the late fourteenth or early on fifteenth century, used a number of Western farsi and Arabic words, suggesting that even at this early fourth dimension the influence of Islam [[129]] was felt by a human, in a remote area of the state, whose only business concern seems to have been with religion. The writings of Tukaram (1598–1649), the greatest of the Marāthi poets, incorporate many obvious references to Islam, such equally the following:
First amid the great names is Allah, never forget to respect information technology.
Allah is verily ane, the prophet is verily one.
At that place Chiliad fine art one, there Thou fine art one, There Grand art one, O friend.
At that place is neither I nor thou./3/
In full general the attitude of the Marathas to Muslim saints was one of respect, the near bright example of this being the great faith Shivaji's grandad had in Shah Sharif of Ahmadnagar. In honor of the saint he gave his sons the names of Shahji and Sharifji. While a full study of the religious and social ferment of Maharashtra in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has yet to be fabricated; information technology seems certain that the new religious life did not have the class of a Hindu revivalism that emphasized the separation of the Hindus from Islam. Antagonism toward Muslims came later, and, as was the instance with the Sikhs, had definite antecedents in particular historical events. The creative spiritual and literary motility provided the ground on which the Maratha nation could be built, and its emergence equally the great antagonist of Muslim power in India was based on political, non religious, factors. The prove from the songs of Namadeva and Tukaram strongly suggests that they were not reacting in any hostile manner to Islam. For this reaction one must look to Chaitanya and the Vaishnavite movement in Bengal.
Chaitanya (1485–1533) of Bengal represents an attribute of the bhakti motility that is very unlike from that seen in the lives and teachings of Kabir and his successors. Chaitanya'south concern, unlike that of Kabir, was not with bringing people to an understanding of a God beyond all creeds and formulations; it was to exalt the superiority of Krishna over all other deities./four/ Information technology was, in other words, a revivalist, non a syncretic, motility, a render to a worship of Vishnu nether one of his nearly appealing forms, the loving ecstatic Krishna. The mental attitude [[130]] of Bengal Vaishnavites toward Islam was the antonym of the attitude advocated past Kabir and Nanak. Conscious of the appeal beingness made by Islam, they did not try to reform Hinduism by adopting any of the attractive features of the rival faith. Instead, they emphasized precisely those features, such as devotion to Krishna, which were well-nigh antipathetic to the Islamic spirit. Some other deviation between Chaitanya's movement and that of Kabir is the mental attitude toward degree. While it is truthful that Chaitanya fabricated disciples from all classes, one does non find the same note of condemnation of caste as one does in Kabir. According to some students of the period, this indicates the essential difference betwixt the two aspects of bhakti in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: only where Hinduism was directly influenced past Islam was there evidence of business organization for social inequities./v/
Because of the involvement that is fastened to such great names equally that of Kabir, there is a tendency to retrieve of the motility of interaction between the two faiths equally mainly from Islam to Hinduism. This was not true, even so, for Muslim social club was deeply influenced by its contacts with Hinduism. Some contacts had been made fifty-fifty before Islamic dominion was established in Bharat; for example the probable Hindu chemical element in sure forms of Islamic mysticism, and the intellectual interchanges that had taken identify afterward the conquest of Sind in the seventh and eighth centuries. During the sultanate, changes of a quite dissimilar order were credible.
Ane of these concerns the lives of converts to Islam. Hither the important point to keep in heed is that when one sees Hindu practices followed by Indian Muslims, it is not a case of Hindu influence, just simply of incomplete change from the sometime way of life. Indian Muslims did not start with orthodox Islam, only began by accepting a few basic features, and only in the course of time, particularly during the last two centuries, have they become more than orthodox. The procedure is less consummate in the lower classes, or those groups which, like the Khojas, adopted a somewhat composite form of religion. More than religious beliefs, Indian Islam retained certain characteristic features of Hindu society which, if not religious in themselves, certainly had [[131]] been given religious sanction. I of these was the place given to caste, with converts clinging to some memory of their former status in a hierarchical society, while what may be called Muslim castes developed as Indian Muslims classified themselves equally Sayyid, Shaikh, Mughal, or Pathan. This structure was never very rigid; as Bernier commented, anyone who put on a white turban called himself a Mughal. An sometime saying makes the same point: "Terminal yr I was a Julaha (weaver); this year a Shaikh; and side by side year if the harvest be good, I shall be a Sayyid." And in the mosque the Islamic ideals of alliance and equality remained triumphant.
Muslims in India also adopted the Hindu practices of early marriages and of objection to widow remarriage. Some social ceremonies connected with births, deaths, and marriages may also be traced to Hindu origin. Some writers think that reverence for pirs, or saints, and their graves, a marked feature of popular Indian Islam, is a carry-over of Hindu practices. This estimation overlooks the fact, however, that even exterior India pirs and their tombs are objects of not bad attending and veneration.
The main influence of Hinduism on Islam, however, is probably seen non and then much in these specific instances every bit in a general softening of the original attitude of the conquerors, specially the Turks, in religious matters. This softening is to be seen partly as a movement of Hindu attitudes toward the universe into Islamic thought; information technology is likewise partly a recognition of the position of Islam in Republic of india. More than hitting than the amount of interaction that took identify in the first three centuries of Muslim rule was the fact that in that location was non more. The impression one gains is that at that place was never a very witting effort to create understanding, except on the part of Kabir and Nanak, and that the contacts between the two great religions were, on the whole, remarkably superficial as far as the total life of the state was concerned. Writing in 1030, earlier the total tide of conquest had begun, Al-Biruni spoke of how the Hindus differed from the Muslims in every respect, and, considering of the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni, "cherish the well-nigh inveterate aversion toward all Muslims."/6/ Nearly iii centuries afterwards another traveler, Ibn Battuta, remarked that [[132]] Hindus and Muslims lived in entirely carve up communities. For Hindus, there could exist no intermarriage with Muslims nor even interdining. "It is the custom amongst the heathen of the Malabar state," he remarked, "that no Muslim should enter their houses or utilize their vessels for eating purposes. If a Muslim is fed out of their vessels, they either pause the vessels or give them away to the Muslims."/7/
It is against this groundwork that one must meet the greatness of the achievements of men similar Kabir and Nanak and, at the same time, the almost insurmountable barriers to a 18-carat rapprochement. The tenacity with which attempts connected to be made to establish links between the two religions is a dominant theme in the cultural history of the Mughals, the new group who entered India at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
N O T E S
/1/ W. H. Moreland and A. C. Chatterjee, A Short History of Republic of india (London, 1945), p. 193.
/2/ K. M. Sen, Medieval Mysticism in India (London, 1936), p. 8.
/three/ Quoted in Tarachand, The Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (Allahabad, 1946), p. 228.
/4/ M. T. Kennedy, The Chaitanya Move (Calcutta, 1925), pp. 92–93.
/5/ T. K. Raychaudhuri, Bengal nether Akbar and Jahangir (Calcutta, 1953), pp. 94–95.
/half dozen/ East. C. Sachau, Alberuni's India (London, 1914), I, 22.
/7/ Mahdi Husain, The Rehla of Ibn Battuta (Baroda, 1953), p. 182.
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