Resilience in the face of religious change
Recently my friend Josiah Neely mentioned offhand how in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon argued that one reason paganism couldn’t reverse the tide of Christianity is that once a society or individual became Christian and ceased pagan practice, there wasn’t a good roadmap on how to reembrace the old traditions. In …
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A collective religion in an individualistic age
Recently on Twitter someone asked why people of subcontinental backgrounds who leave Islam don’t refamiliarize themselves with the religion of their ancestors. One response could be “well actually, my ancestors weren’t really Hindu…” I think this is a pedantic dodge. In places like Iraqi Kurdistan and Tajikstan some people from Muslim backgrounds are embracing a …
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Religion-in-a-box
Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao is readable anthropology that explores the resurgence of organized and institutional supernatural beliefs over the last generation in the People’s Republic. Though there is some general historical narrative at the beginning, the core of the book involves chapters on various local informants. Evangelical […]
The gods of place
Two books recently have made me wonder about the insights into the development of religion and culture in the Indian subcontinent. The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity explicitly makes an analogy to local Hindu gods and shrines to allow us to conceptualize what pre-Christian Roman religion was like. The whole city was …
Cultural evolution at work!
‘God Will Protect Us’: Coronavirus Spreads Through an Already Struggling Pakistan: And the extremist clerics who often heckle or march against the civilian government, with the tacit approval of the military, are refusing to help. They largely ignored Mr. Khan’s call to limit Friday prayer gatherings. And even after the military deployed to try to …
Pogrom in Kabul
Islamic State Attacks Sikh Temple in Kabul, Killing 25: An Islamic State militant stormed a Sikh temple in the heart of Kabul, killing 25 worshipers and taking dozens of people hostage in a prolonged siege that once again exposed the ability of insurgents to carry out attacks in the Afghan capital. Dozens of Sikh worshipers …
The Delhi riots
Please comment on the riots here, and not the “open thread.” I don’t personally know what’s going on for what it’s worth….
(and it’s sorry that for browns in 2020 this is not surprising)
The rise of Islam after 1500 in the Indian subcontinent
For me, Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, is the best analysis of the peculiar spatial distribution of religion in South Asia today. This is not because Eaton’s work is without flaw, or beyond reproach. It is because few have made as concerted an effort to analyze this issue in …
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South Asian Muslim ancestors were idolaters!
An argument that emerges now and then on this website has to do with the nature of the ancestors of Indian (South Asian) Muslims. Where they Hindus? Much hinges on semantics. The term “Hindu” after all simply meant Indian in the days of yore, so by definition, they were. On the other hand, Hindu today …
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Being different is not bad
Having read a fair portion of Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, I can state now that it’s a book worth reading. The author, Rajiv Malhorta, expresses a distinctively Indian religio-cultural view coherently, clearly, and with a substantial foundation of scholarship. In this way, I would suggest that Malhorta’s work is analogous to …
Atheism waxes and wanes, but the godless abide
This weblog began in 2002. Back then the second Iraq War had not started, and the United States was in the throes of dealing with the 9/11 attack. There was a lot of discussion about Islam, and religion, in the public arena (there was a Bernard Lewis renaissance, and it seemed he was on Charlie […]
Why Indian Muslims are in India not of India
Reading Seshat History of the Axial Age chapters on India was a bit unsatisfying due to a lack of detail. But if you are looking for high-level historiography, it’s not a bad volume. It’s most definitely a good “sourcebook” on the literature. Because of its general and cross-cultural focus, I began considering why Indian Muslims …
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Commentary on Adi Shankara
It seems Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker is now $0.99 on Kindle, so I got a copy. From what little I know the subhead is warranted, so understanding Adi Shankara goes a long way to understanding elite Hinduism. On the other hand, I have a dim view of most religious philosophy personally. But, it is …
Calvinism, atheism, and Hinduism
This apology is simply not enough. You tweeted nearly verbatim, the last words of the suicide bomber of #pulwama. Considering how egregiously hateful these words are, and how important it is for @NPR to maintain at least a veneer of neutrality in India, we expect next steps. https://t.co/oiJOjARu4v pic.twitter.com/n0Mv9NWFKK — Suhag A. Shukla (@SuhagAShukla) September …
How Islam’s greatness redounds to Indian religion
Reading a paper on Yemen made me realize something that is quite bizarre upon reflection: the greater the evidence of Islam’s transformative power, the greater the miracle and robustness of Indian religion in the face of its expansion. To me, Islam’s demographic impact is clear when it comes to Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Though some of …
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Against homo religious
Below some comments emerged reflecting differences in the understanding of religious identity and change. After writing on this blog for 17 years I am tempted to just scream “READ WHAT I’VE WRITTEN!”, but that really doesn’t suffice. So I’ll outline very quickly my general stance, which illuminates my sense of how and why the Roman […]
The creation of perennialism 2,000 years ago
Today I recorded a podcast for Rationally Speaking. Julia Galef wanted to talk to me about my recent post, Stuff I Was Wrong About!. It was a long discussion, and I don’t know what will go into the final edit. But we did touch on this point from my post: …I believe that some sort […]
The invention of world religions 2,000 years ago
Religion is one of those phenomena that is difficult to discuss because so many people (whether believers or not) have strong emotional investments in their opinions on the topic, and, its nature is quite consequential to everyone (whether believers or not). One of the most distinctive aspects of many religions is that names are important […]
The limits of semantics; Hindus before Hinduism
When I was a 20-year old atheist I would read books on the philosophy of religion and explore arguments for and against the existence of god(s). Though I was never naive enough to think that just if people could be exposed to arguments against the argument for design people would be atheists, I wouldn’t have …
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To understand Islam one must understand religion
Over the last few months, the traffic on this website has increased. The proportion of pageviews from India is now approaching parity with the proportion from the USA. To me, this suggests that perhaps it would be useful to outline a few things anyone who has read me in the past would probably know, but …
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