World Religions 3 – Islam – Beyond the politically correct and the politically incorrect to the philosophically correct

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So are there any questions or comments? To summarize, I spoke today about Islam beyond the politically incorrect and the politically correct to the philosophically correct.
We discussed the life of Muhammad and how he got the revelation of Quran. And how he was both a spiritual teacher and a political leader. And the Quran is a set of revelations which he got at different times which are combined together after his death.
And there is, the Quran is considered, there is no difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. That itself is considered to be spirit. And then there, after his departure, there was a violent succession struggle because his rule was not just spiritual.
His rule was also political. He had got vast swaths of land. And when the grandson of Muhammad, Muhasen, Hasan al-Nali was killed, that created an irrevocable rupture between the Shias and the Sunnis.
Shias are the followers of Ali. Sunnis are the others. And that same, at that time, Muhammad used, for example, he talked about jihad.
So it can refer to the inner war, it can refer to defensive war, but it is also used to refer to aggressive war. Because they say aggressive war ultimately is also for defending. And then they, Muhammad used the principle of taqiyya, which is deception for a right cause.
So for a good cause, bad means can also be used. And that principle has been abused by subsequent Muslim leaders. So individually, Islam is a, many Muslims practice as a pious way of going closer to God.
But socially, sociopolitically, many of the leaders use it more as a political search for power than as a spiritual search for truth. So we discussed about how when the, today’s ethos is of political correctness, we call social justice, that’s the modern day theme. And that’s why people want to, even when there is Islamic terrorism, just like the terrorists say, they are completely against the principle of Kshatriya warfare.
They attack civilians, they attack people who are unarmed, people who are unalert. So the attempt in political correctness is to ascribe this violent cause to something other than Islam. And this political correctness, it arises because the ethos of post-modernity is social justice, social inclusion.
People should not be labeled according to certain categories. And that has been especially used to not label Muslims. And that is true.
You cannot label all Muslims as bad. But at the same time, to try to say that the religious terrorism that has nothing to do with Islam, that is also not true. Go to the other extreme and say that all Muslims are terrorists, that is wrong because all human beings are ultimately like each other.
So we are all, we all want to get on with our life and we use religion as a means to make sense of our life while we are going along. And there are Muslims also in various modes. And we need to see with the philosophical vision that there are people in goodness, passion and ignorance.
And people in ignorance, they don’t want to take intellectual responsibility for understanding their tradition, understanding, separating its principles from its details. So they end up doing, trying to turn back the clock instead of turning on the compass. And that’s why the Islamic state is, say, trying to execute people in the same way in which it was done in the past or other things like that.
So the Islamic renaissance where it learns to take its core and adapt it to the modern world, that has not happened. And that’s why there are the voices of, the intolerant voices often are still very prominent. They are not curved over there.
So the way to deal in the Vedic tradition was that there was Brahman and Kshatriya, the spiritual power and the political power. They were separated. In Islam they are inextricably put together.
And that’s why the two approaches of dealing with, of maintaining order was Shastra and Shastra. Shastra is wielded by the Kshatriyas, Shastra by the Brahmanas. So we also need both.
Now we need to have education so that we don’t do simplistic categorization. All people are like this or no people are like this. The education where we have nuanced vision.
At the same time, there is violent aggression that has to be countered appropriately. So the extremists have to be combated. Categories won’t work with them.
At the same time, we also have to empower the moderates. The tradition, every tradition, it has to reform itself from within, not from without. So labeling Muslims in a particular way is what disempowers the moderates and empowers the extremists.
So Prabhupada appreciated in the Muslims their diligence in their worship of God, in their recitation of prayers. And we see their spiritual way. They are also raising their consciousness from wherever they are.
And at the level of individual interaction, we may have to do the necessary things. But rather than seeing the religion or religious belief as the cause of the problem, we see that ultimately it is the human feelings. It’s lust, anger, greed, envy, pride and illusion.
They are what cause people to become violent. And they use certain, they use racist ideology, they use social class theories or they may use religious scripture to rationalize the violent tendencies. So when we practice bhakti and we share the means of practicing bhakti, we are purifying ourselves and helping others purify themselves of the evil forces within us.
And thus we are hacking at the root of evil. And this is the most efficacious way that as more and more people come to goodness and as more and more of the people who are in goodness become more assertive in expressing themselves, then there will be a restoration of sanity and spirituality in society. Thank you very much.
Hare Krishna!