>If we replace the names of Muhammad and the Shari`a by Ram and the Dharma, we will arrive at the
same ideological tropes as characterise Hindu fundamentalism fascism, and if we substitute for them
Christ or Jeanne d'Arc, we will join up with evangelical fundamentalism and French racism......
>
Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the Ram Rajya. You want to classify him as a Hindu Fundamentalist? Please define Hindu fundamentalism please.
Boy, this is going to be a mess!
I didn't write that quote. Ghandi was a secularist, wasn't he? Or am I misunderstanding his politics? Maybe I can get back to that.
I don't want to be in the position of the judge who couldn't define pornography but knew it when he saw it.
Al-Azmeh describes fundamentalism generally, as follows and it fits with what I've examined:
iran-bulletin.org
"Fundamentalism is an attitude towards time, which it considers of no consequence,
and therefore finds no problem with the absurd proposition that the initial conditions,
the golden age, can be retrieved: either by going back to the texts without the
mediation of traditions considered corrupt (because they represent Time between the
present and its putative beginning), as with Luther and Sunni Salafism generally from
Abduh through Rida and the Muslim Brothers until now, or by the re-formation of
society according to primitivist models seen to be copies of practices in the golden
age, as with what are recognised as fundamentalist movements.
The latter are known as integrism by Catholics, but the phenomena are similar:
moralisation on and in religious terms of private life, authoritarian invigilation and
management of society reformed according to institutions that make this possible:
Calvinism, the Bavarian (Catholic, naturally) Counter-Roformation, Wahhabism,
Khomeinism, are all of this type, in their different ways. Muslim and Protestant
fundamentalism are so similar, according to studies by my friend Sadiq al-Azm, that all
hesitation against the use of the term fundamentalism for Muslim analogues has no
explanation other than sub-orientalist assumptions about Muslim "incommensurability...".
He goes on to expand this quick description with historical background of Islamist fundamentalism, most of which I'll skip:
"The movements in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Wahhabism in Arabia, Mahdism in the Sudan,
Osman Dan Fodio in Nigeria, etc., have a different character altogether from modern
movements - the only comparable movements today are Taleban and the Arab
"Afghans" in Algeria and elsewhere.
The modern movements he says. "...owe their genesis to other factors. Suffice it to
say now that their ideological output is inconceivable without the universally-available
equipment of right-wing, para-fascist, populist movements.
It is not by accident that they emerged in the 20s and 30s of this century, at the same
time as the Indian Hindu fascist RSS, at a time when the West also was very strongly
veering towards the extreme right, in a context of anti-Communism no less than of
acute crisis in the capitalist system. It is also no accident that, after a period of social,
cultural, and political marginalization consonant with developments in the West, they
re-emerged in the 80s at a time when, again, the capitalist system is solving its acute
crises by resort to creating very substantial locations of economic, spatial, and cultural
marginality, in tandem with the revivication of right-wing populist and racist ideologies
(today passing under the title of Cultural difference)."
The source of the "universally-available equiptment of right-wing, para-fascist, populist movements " lies in the reaction to the modernist movement growing out of the new, "vaguely napoleonic" state that came out of the French revolution in which a person was naked before the state without any intervening institution, civic, or otherwise. This model was taken up by the 19th century Ottoman state and thus spread through much of the muslim world. "...our histories," he says, "are still those of the workings of the 19th century and of currents opposed to the
modernism I mentioned."
Al-Azmeh is quite specific as to the sources ("other factors") of the opposition to modernism and it's sources and it's about the best summary I've ever read:
Beginning in provincial anti-capitalism in the late 18th century (most spectacularly
Hamann and his enormous influence and analogues, for instance), and in
Aristocratic-conservative and often (but not necessarily) Catholic anti-Jacobinism (de
Maistre, Burke), this developed over the course of the 19th century in terms of
bourgeois and occasionally royalist movements banding together ideologically against
the spectre announced by Marx and Engels in 1848.
Conservative ideologies, glorifying Culture, tradition, social instinct, hierarchy, and
decrying the deleterious effects of French ideas of progress, historicity, reason, and in
certain forms, democracy or even revolution. This was a bloody history, which among
other things caused highly authoritarian rulers to legislate for (almost) universal
suffrage (Gladstone and Bismarck, for instance).
But there was a tremendous ideological armature correlative with this conservatism,
and this can be very broadly characterised as Romanticism - intended here not as a
sickly or otherwise fiery poetical sensibility, but in the technical sense: this
Romanticism gives Culture premium over history, has an organismic and vitalist
conception of society in that it conceives societies as individuals by analogy with
organic beings, as beings essentially the same, which do not so much change over
time as weaken and strengthen, or atrophy and die, and which react to matters
culturally imported as a body reacts to the intrusion of a parasite.
This Romanticism therefore conceives history as cyclical, and of order - strength and
health - as abidance with the conditions of permanence (Culture, Shari`a, dharma in
India). Political action is therefore one of RESTORATION, and locates assumptions
about reason in history in the realm snares of outsiders, for what is of value is social
instinct, individual and independent of reason.
As for the form of state its takes as the paradigm, it is not only the anti-modernist one
based on bringing social instinct and state form into correspondence (hence an Islamic
state, or an authentically German Reich, or an ancestrally legitimate French monarchy
-- or, today with Le Pen, authentically French republic replete with monarchical and
Catholic associations and resonances), but also a highly Napoleonic state which, by
totalitarian social engineering would coerce society out of its alienation from its past,
and re-make it what it once way (incidentally, Sudan has a ministry of social
engineering).
....
Both Ali Shariati and Sayyid Qutb were great admirers of Alexis Carrel - a famous
eugenicist of the 1920s, cultural advisor to the Marechal Petain, who railed against
degeneration within, and advocated the cause of a small saviour minority which will
bring health to the body of society diseased by degeneration.
----------------------------------
So, I've a fairly clear idea, now, of what fundamentalism looks like. I can find a Hindu version wearing various kinds of atire.
From the home page of the BJP party. In polite clothes:
bjp.org
This simple
fact is indisputable, that nations do not come into existence by a mere co habitation.
There was never a time in the lives of the citizens of these decadent nations, when
they stopped living in a group. On the other hand Israeli Jews lived for centuries
with other peoples scattered far and wide, yet they did not get annihilated in the
societies in which they lived because of cohabitation. It is clear therefore that the
source of national feeling is not in staying on a particular piece of land, but is in
something etc.
a bit further on:
Thus the fundamental law of human nature us the standard for deciding the propriety
of behavior in various situations. We have termed this very law as' Dharma'. The
nearest equivalent English term for Dharma can be "Innate law", which, however,
does not express the full meaning of Dharma, Since 'Dharma' is supreme, our ideal
of the state has been "Dharma Rajya".
.....
Here in our country the situation in this regard is very much like old Hindu marriages
where a married couple could not divorce even if both the parties wished. The
principle was that their behavior should be regulated not by their sweet will but by
Dharma. The same is case with the nation. If the four million people of Kashmir say
that they want to secede, if the people of Goa say they want to secede, some say
they want the Portuguese to return, all this is against Dharma.
..........................
Let us understand very clearly that Dharma is not necessarily with the majority or
with the people. Dharma is eternal.
..........................................
Not quite such nice clothing:
bjp.org
Hindus are at last free. They control their destiny now and there is no
power that can control them except their own tolerant ethos. India in
turn is finally free. Having ignored its history, it has now come face to
face with a repressed conscience. The destruction of the structure at
Ayodhya was the release of the history that Indians had not fully come
to terms with. Thousands of years of anger and shame, so diligently
bottled up by these same interests, was released when the first piece
of the so-called Babri Masjid was torn down.
It is a fundamental concept of Hindu Dharma that has won:
righteousness. Truth won when Hindus, realizing that Truth could not be
won through political or legal means, took the law into their own hands.
Hindus have been divided politically and the laws have not
acknowledged the quiet Hindu yearning for Hindu unity which has until
recently taken a back seat to economic development and Muslim
appeasement. Similarly, the freedom movement represented the
supercedence of Indian unity over loyalty to the British Crown. In
comparison to the freedom movement though, Hindutva involves many
more people and represents the mental freedom that 1947 did not
bring.
The future of Bharat is set. Hindutva is here to stay. It is up to the
Muslims whether they will be included in the new nationalistic spirit of
Bharat. It is up to the government and the Muslim leadership whether
they wish to increase Hindu furor or work with the Hindu leadership to
show that Muslims and the government will consider Hindu sentiments.
The era of one-way compromise of Hindus is over, for from now on,
secularism must mean that all parties must compromise.
Hindutva will not mean any Hindu theocracy or theology. However, it
will mean that the guiding principles of Bharat will come from two of the
great teachings of the Vedas, the ancient Hindu and Indian scriptures,
which so boldly proclaimed -
TRUTH IS ONE, SAGES CALL IT BY MANY NAMES - and - THE
WHOLE UNIVERSE IS ONE FAMILY.
Vulgar clothing:
hinduunity.org
geocities.com
Evil clothing:
hindutva.org
hindutva.org
There is a breed of kafir leaders who claim to represent
the interests of the kafirs, but in reality they look after
their own interests as well as the interests of the Moslems,
letting down the kafirs every time. Mahatma Gandhi and
Pandit Nehru were such leaders. India's current prime
minister Indira Gandhi is another example.
Mahatma Gandhi was born and brought up among the
Moslems of Gujarat [1]. His entire education from schools
in India to Law college in London was paid for by his
Moslem guardian. His business in South Africa was also
established at the Moslem's expense. Gandhi was hired by
a wealthy Moslem businessman in South Africa. His
entire educational life was spent living among the
Moslems. In London, he was part of the Anjurnane
Islamiah which later developed into Muslim League. His
knowledge of Hindu scriptures was superficial at best.
There's lots more about Gandhi. It wouldn't appear, from whatt this person writes, that Gandhi was a fundamentalist.
It appears Al-Azmeh is using the trem fascist correctly - the individual is exists as part of the collectivity bound up in it like the twigs in a wood broom.
It appears that some in this Hindu movement which is of course, quite varied, have bought into the extreme side, are rejecting modernity using the tools of modernity, are becoming highly prescriptive, have demonized a group (muslims) for reasons of self identity and raising alarm in their followers and others, have picked a modern model of how to overcome persecution (Jews in Israel) - yes, they seem to believe a population of @900 million is being persecuted and that its culture and religion is in danger of destruction!
They have ideologized the concept of Dharma as a principle for requiring conformity and some imply that only a certain few have authority to interpret it. They desire desperately, many of them, a return to the golden age prior to the muslim invasion and in the process re-exhume the wrongs of the period which came after.
Some of the model they produce is much like the Islamists - government should be ultimately subject to Dharma and its interpreters, as Islamists say it should be subject to Sharia.
Many have a very military rhetoric which goes beyond figurative.
I don't think I've defined Hindu fundamentalism as much as found something to show you and perhaps Al-Azmeh's article is a useful tool for looking at it.
I apologize for the length of this post but I've very busy and haven't time to make it shorter. |
