Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more BS Murthy 81-901911-1-X Enhanced edition © 2020 BS Murthy Revised edition © 2013 BS Murthy Copyright © 2003 BS Murthy Cover design by E. Rohini Kumar, GDC creative advertising (p) ltd., Hyderabad Self Imprint F-9, Nandini Mansion, 1-10-234, Ashok Nagar, Hyderabad – 500 020 Other books by BS Murthy - Benign Flame – Saga of Love Jewel-less Crown - Saga of Life Crossing the Mirage – Passing through youth Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel Prey on the Prowl - ...Read More

Chapter 1 Advent of Dharma As opposed to the purported revelation of the God’s ‘chosen path’ to man some messiah, which forms the basis of the Semitic faiths, the essence of Hinduism has been for one to adhere to his dharma, supposedly sanctified by their gods in communion with the rishis of yore. And dharma, though varies from man to man, per se is the common course for the salvation of the souls. It is this salient feature of its religious character that gives Hinduism its theological variety and philosophical edge, sorely lacking in the Semitic faiths, each moulded ...Read More

Chapter 2 God’s quid pro Quo In what could have been the first irony of human history, at the time when the Aryans / Namesakes were subjugating the free people in Bharat, the Jews, in slavery, were enabled by ‘the God’ to escape from Egypt, the land that enslaved them, that too by parting the sea to make way for them. The God, as though in reciprocity, demanded of the Jews to submit to His Will, made explicit in the Torah; and having gained their servitude, as if to massage their ego, He proclaimed them as His Chosen People. ...Read More

Chapter 3 Pyramids of Wisdom It would be interesting to speculate what would have been the religious tenor the Hinduism and its early derivatives, the Jainism and the Buddhism, if only the tribes of India were equal to the task of thwarting the Aryan domination in their individual domains. Would it not have brought about a confrontation between the Aryan gods and the deities of the others? Wouldn’t have Indra, the Aryan spearhead of a god, forced them into a covenant with Him to destroy the alien gods of the rest of the Indian tribes? Fortunately for the Hindu ...Read More

Chapter 4 Ascent to Descent After their remarkable progress in spirituality and rationality, the Brahmans made an acknowledged in astronomy as well. The exposure to the mysteries of the universe that their astronomical pursuits afforded, insensibly led them to probe the vicissitudes of life and fathom the fate of man through the astrological vision. The fascination Brahmans felt for the charms of crystal gazing, in a way, put the wheel of the Brahmanic enlightenment in the reverse gear. As the predictions about man’s future brought the predilections of his present to the fore, and as the acceptance of the ...Read More

Chapter 5 The Zero People While the Brahman genius paved the way for the Aryan’s intellectual superiority, the of the land were denied access to education as a ploy to stall their challenge to them for all times to come. Nonetheless, the indigenous genius was allowed to find expression in arts and crafts earmarked to their castes; thus, by and large, their social re-engineering seems to have worked wonderfully well to justify Max Mueller’s eulogy. The Brahmans who invented the zero, and the decimal as well, had however marginalized the sudras besides turning the outcasts into ciphers, only to ...Read More

Chapter 6 Coming of the Christ Elsewhere in the world, in the land of Israel too, the priestly of Levites, armed with the Mosaic Laws, oppressed the Jewish masses. At length, the Jews found their Buddha in the persona of Jesus, only to be rubbished by their Rabbis, and crucified by the Romans. However, there is so much commonality in the mental makeup of these two great preachers, the chief ones being their concern for the weak and tolerance as a strength. It is the ironical destiny of Buddhism and the Christianity, founded based on their teachings; five-hundred years ...Read More

Chapter 7 Legacy of Prophecy “This son of yours will be a wild one - free and untamed a wild ass! He will be against everyone, and everyone will feel the same towards him.” - The Genesis This prophecy of Gabriel, the Archangel of the Lord, revealed to Hagar, the surrogate wife of Abraham, was about Ishmael, their son, still in her womb then. In time, as their foolhardiness earned them the wrath of Sarah, the spouse of Abraham, the maid and her son were banished into the wilderness of Beersheba. Preoccupied as it was with Isaac, the second ...Read More

Chapter 8 War of Words In the wake of Muhammad’s refusal to their overtures, the Meccans decided to the Islamic thorn from their Bedouin flesh. However, Muhammad, on the mundane level, would have had his own informers to alert him about the conspiracy on his life or, for all that, his sixth sense, of a survivor, sensed the impending threat to his life, thus forcing his flight from Mecca. Yet, in the divine plane, Allah, the All Knowing, might have come to know about the brewing plot to assassinate His Messenger, and He, not the One to be outdone by Hubal’s men, could have ...Read More

Chapter 9 Czar of Medina Hijra changeth it all – the agenda of the Messenger, the content of Quran, the character of the faith, and above all, the destiny of Islam. Had Muhammad, revealing the Quran, confined himself to Mecca, or had he continued with his meditation at Hira, probably, he would have ended up being the Bahira of Kabah. But, even as the rejection of the Quraysh steeled his will, the conversion of the Yathribs into Islam cemented his belief in himself. In the end, the Hijra, with the accompanied submission of the Helpers, turned the Prophet of ...Read More

Chapter 10 Angels of War It was not long before Muhammad in Medina had his eye on Mecca, in the Battle of Badr, the Quraysh in disarray threw open its gates for him. Though the Musalmans to this day gloat over Muhammad’s so-called victory in that battle of Islamic destiny, it is another matter that the Quraysh fought half-heartedly. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the battle that is celebrated in the Islamic folklore is the unshakable belief that Allah, at the behest of Muhammad, had sent in warrior angels to assist the outnumbered Musalmans. “When ye sought help of your Lord ...Read More

Chapter 11 Privates of ‘the God’ “Single robbers, or a few associates, are branded with their genuine name; the exploits of a numerous band assume the character of lawful and honourable war. The temper of a people thus armed against mankind was doubly inflamed by the domestic licence of rapine, murder, and revenge” - so described Edward Gibbon, in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the condition of the Arab society into which Muhammad was born in the 6th century. After the debacle at Badr, the Meccans led a great expedition to Medina which Muhammad joined ...Read More

Chapter 12 Playing to the Gallery Muhammad, after all, came from an exalted family and all along socialized the nobility of the Meccan tribes. Whatever were his childhood deprivations as an orphan, his marriage to Khadijah brought him recompense when still young. Thus, for over forty years, the chance of his birth shaped his sense of belonging to the higher crusts of society. On the other hand, as the circumstances of his life post-Hijra, forced him into the company of the poor, it can be seen that as the Czar of Medina, he condescended to descend to the Helpers ...Read More

Chapter 13 Perils of History Napoleon was wrong in stating that kids should be taught history to enable to learn from past mistakes for history has unerringly demonstrated that as grown-ups, instead of learning from the wrongs of the history, they tend to be bitter about the perceived injustices of the past. The history of man, as taught by the Torah, inculcated a sense of injustice in the collective consciousness of the Arabs that was captured by Edward Gibbon thus: “They pretend that, in the division of the earth, the rich and fertile climates were assigned to the other ...Read More

Chapter 15 Blinkers of Belief Though Muhammad’s religious constituency was the ‘meek of the world’, as paraphrased by he seemed to have shaped Islam but to their detriment. Thus, it calls for an analysis as to how his personal agenda would have influenced the Islamic credo that has come to mire the lives of the poor Musalmans, moreso its women. So, it is for the women in Islam, the ‘educated’ among them, to delve into the proclivities of their prophet that shaped the precepts and practices of their faith to their detriment. However, instead, blinded by their faith, they ...Read More

Chapter 14 Pitfalls of Faith If the ecstasy of the Quran is the soul of Islam, the legend Muhammad is the mind of the Musalman. The exalted sense of his pedigree could have made Muhammad fiercely honest, even in the state of deprivation. It is to be appreciated that neither his insignificance as an orphan affected his self-worth nor his poverty dented his self-esteem. While nature endowed him with a shrewd mind his destiny seems to have helped him cultivate a sense of purpose. Though unlettered, he obviously possessed native intelligence, and thus was alive to every opportunity that ...Read More

Chapter 16 Shackles of Sharia “Say: O disbelievers, I shall not worship that which ye worship, nor will worship that which I worship, nor have I worshipped that which ye worship, nor have ye worshipped that which I worship. For you your religion and for me mine.” This revelation, which is endlessly repeated by the Musalmans to showcase the Islamic tolerance towards other religions, as is known, came to Muhammad when the leaders of the Quraysh tried to persuade him to agree to a compromise. And that was to avoid the schism his Quranic creed was causing in Mecca. ...Read More

Chapter 17 Anatomy of Islam ‘A single people refused to join the common intercourse of mankind,’ so wrote Gibbon about the Jews, and thought that ‘the Jewish religion was admirably fitted for defence’. If the Jews puzzled the medieval world, their religious cousins, the Musalmans, with their accent on separateness, perplex the modern world. What Nehru wrote in ‘The Discovery of India’ seems to prove the parody that is the Muslim Brotherhood. “When Italy suddenly attacked Turkey in the Tripoli War of 1911, and subsequently, during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, an astonishing wave of sympathy for ...Read More

Chapter 18 Fight for the Souls During the middle of the 1st Century A.D, St. Thomas India’s west coast of Malabar to establish the Church of the Christ, and having succeeded in cementing the Syrian Christian Order there, the evangelist moved on to Madras, now Chennai, to spread the message of the Gospel. However, the temper of the Tamilians ensured a hostile reception to his missionary zeal, and his persistence to proselytize them regardless had ended in his martyrdom for the Christianity. And after that, all was calm and quiet on the Indian religious front till the Buddhist Sind ...Read More

Chapter 19 India in Coma The zeal of the Arabs to spread Muhammad’s word that catered to their urge to plunder, which for Edward Gibbon made Islam ‘the profitable religion of Arabia’, obliterated the great cultures of the time, occasioned by his thesis that “the Koran inculcates, in the most absolute sense, the tenets of fate and predestination, which would extinguish both industry and virtue, if the actions of man were governed by his speculative belief.” Whatever, after the initial fanatical momentum of the booties, the Arabs, bereft of any political culture to name began to yield the pan-Islamic ...Read More

Chapter 20 Double Jeopardy It may be interesting to follow the Islamic fate of those unfortunate untouchables and marginal caste groups of Hindustan, who had embraced the bigoted faith of Muhammad. True, the Hindu fringes, at last, got their God that the Brahmans so cruelly denied them, even one amongst their three crore deities, and what if Allah Ta’ala was an alien One for they were never allowed to feel like the coparceners of the land of their own forebears? Nevertheless, as the enshrined caste edifice was too strong even for the Almighty Allah to pull down, and since ...Read More

Chapter 21 Paradise of Parasites The discovery, in 2,000 C.E., of a submerged city of 7,500 B.C.E. vintage, the Gulf of Khambhat, would have made the 3,500 B.C.E’s Mohen jo daro ‘n Harappa seem modern in the ancient Arya Varta. As the North America and the Europe have proved in the modern times that economic well-being and social development are but the obverse and the reverse of the ‘national’ coin of healthy work ethics, it can be inferred that without a sound work culture, the Khambhats and the Harappas wouldn’t have happened in the Bharat Varsha in the antique ...Read More

Chapter 22 The Number Game “If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen.” Well, this fascinating proposition of Maryam Jameelah in Islam and Orientalism, Adam Publishers, New Delhi, would deserve the indulgence of any historian. It might be so that even as man’s strengths could debilitate him at times, his weaknesses might become blessings in disguise for him, something akin to the Shakespearean ...Read More

Chapter 23 Winds of Change The Muhammadan downturn in the 18th Century that enabled the dawn of the Raj in India turned out to be a godsend to the Hindu upswing. Historically, the parochial character of the myriad kingdoms precluded India’s Hindus from imbibing a sense of belonging to their motherland, which continues to plague the political system of the Union of India that is Bharat. In the chequered history of Hindustan, its Rajas, and their Sāmants, who came by dime a dozen, saw their adjoining territories as pieces of real estate to be grabbed to boost up their ...Read More

Chapter 24 Ant Grows Wings Never in the history of Islam, not excluding that of its Messenger, was destiny of the leader so providentially tied with the fate of his people as that of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Indian Musalmans. And like Muhammad before him, Jinnah (peace be upon him as well for his soul too must be restless in his grave) also did not survive long enough to bring about the political consolidation of Pakistan, and to the like effect. While the grand religion of Muhammad rendered itself into sub-faiths so soon after his death, Quaid -e- ...Read More

Chapter 25 Constitutional Amnesia Muhammad Ali Jinnah got what he wanted for Indian Musalmans though in time, their zeal turned Pakistan into a Rogue State. What of India, the product of an irony of a partition in that while some Musalmans walked away with one-fourth of its land, others stayed back to nurse their separatist dogma in its truncated bosom? While the Hindu nationalists lamented about the loss of their ancient land, the Musalman intellectuals were alarmed at their reduced numbers vis-à-vis the Hindus. Even as the Golwalkars articulated the Hindu frustration in shrill tones, the Abul Kalam Azads ...Read More

Chapter 26 The Stymied State The Indian State with its dominant Muslim minority and its short-sighted constitution was to be politically stymied to the hurt of its Hindu majority. And the minority-centric politics of the country as it evolved over the years – stretched to incredulous lengths by Prime Minister Minoan Singh in averring that its minorities have the first right on national resources – has been increasingly compounding the Hindu emotional misery. Why blame Singh, as Muslim Appeasement, owing to the wooly Nehru has been the policy of the Indian State, to start with. Thus, though it was ...Read More

Chapter 27 The Wages of God The WE-THEY obsession of the Islamic ethos debilitates the Musalmans with troubled While the ayats of Quran spell out who THEY are - the Jews, the Christians and the idolaters (read Hindus, in later centuries) – the Islamic theology defines who THEY are, the Sunnis, the Shias and the Sufis et al. And the political divide too is clear as to who THEY are - the Iranians and the Iraqis, the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, Saudis and Yemenis all Musalmans though. Well, for those perceived as WE, Islam is all green but it ...Read More

Chapter 28 Delusions of Grandeur Peace being the ‘supposed’ message of Islam, the religion that the Palestinians and Pakistanis together profess, strife seems alike to be their political fate. While it is apparent that the Arab hostility towards Israel is steeped in the legality of tenancy, it can be seen that the Kashmir quagmire is rooted in Pakistan’s delusions of Islamic-grandeur. Whatever, it is the paradox of the Muhammadan creed in that that it provides a common ground for the Palestinian need, and the Pakistani greed, for ‘land’ that leads them on their self-destructive course. Even before the ink ...Read More

Chapter 29 Ways of the Bigots The obscurantist self-destruct of the Muhammadans is a weird phenomenon as Islam the compelling character of infusing in its believers a frenzied madness of religious insanity. Hadn’t the Wahabis once dug up Muhammad’s grave to make Islam purer! But, now, what of the growing trend of the Islamic car-bombings even in the holy land, not to speak of the conquered ones, aimed at fellow Musalmans, not to speak of kafirs? It’s as if the Quranic terrorism, willy-nilly nursed by the umma, like the Frankenstein Monster, has begun to devour the Islamic Hypocrites of ...Read More

Chapter 30 The Rift Within Based on the finding of its opinion poll, The India Today (August 26, had averred that – “In the past six months communalism and Pakistan-sponsored terrorism have grabbed the national headlines. On these issues there is a definite Hindu-Muslim rift. Take the on-again-off-again Ayodhya dispute. On this issue, there seems to be a hardening of stand in favour of building a Ram temple immediately - 43 per cent were in favour six months ago, today it is 47 per cent. Even among Congress voters, 43 per cent want the temple now. Predictably, this is ...Read More

Chapter 31 While the wise use their abiliThe Way Around ties as the building blocks of life, bigots turn their dogmas into its stumbling blocks, and same applies to nation building or causing its ruination, Pakistan being a living example of the latter. However, in what is left of Arya Varta, it is a socio-political reality that even as the Hindus cannot wish away the preponderant Muslim presence in it, there is no way the Musalmans can turn it into a dar al-Islam either. So, as the Union of India, Allah Ta’ala willing, would forever remain a place of ...Read More

Chapter 32 The Hindu Rebound The Hindu fundamentalism is a misnomer, coined by the cunning and subscribed by naïve, which comes in handy to the Semitic proselytizers to undermine the Indian nationalism. Why, it should be apparent to the discerning that while Brahmanism is orthodox, the sanātana dharma, delineated by swadharma, is amorphous, and in them lay the social diversity of the Hindu spiritual ethos. By the time Bharat gained independence, what with the gurukuls having given way to the missionary schools for long, the Brahmans, by and large, were an unemployed lot, and in spite of their depleted ...Read More

Chapter33 Italian Interregnum When fate wedded an Italian, Antonia Maino, to Rajiv Gandhi, and ensconced her as Sonia in his mother’s 1, Safdarjung Road bungalow, Lutyens’ Delhi, as badi bahu, it’s as if history woke up to the amusing fact that even though it granted the tiny Portugal a ‘Goan’ foothold in India under the British Raj, when it came to enslaving its ancient people, by oversight, it overlooked the mighty medieval Italy. So, it set things in motion, so it seems. BY then, however, Indira had her dynastic grip on the democratic India firmly clasped by the Congress ...Read More

Chapter 34 Rama Rajya When the euphoria of Modi’s saffron triumph had subsided, the Hindu nationalists turned skeptical it could be a flash in the Indian political pan, but not an enduring Hindu Rebound to bind Bharat’s caste-divisive electoral ground. But Modi, who apparently came to believe in his destiny as the chosen one to retrieve Bharat Māta from the abyss the rākshasa regimes pushed her into, had set a much higher and nobler goal - of Hindu renaissance - for himself, and what is more, began working in a mission mode to achieve that in a time-bound manner ...Read More

Chapter 35 Wait for the Savant While Krishna in the Bhagvad Gita sought man to shed his ‘fear death’, Muhammad with his Quran made the Musalmans fall in love with ‘the hereafter’; and for a prophetic paradox, he pursued his passions with gusto even as he trivialized the life ‘here’ for his flock, which dichotomy but for the Islamic barrier of blind belief should have dismayed his faithful. Whatever, haven’t the Quran-bred jihadi chickens let loose on Israel come home to hatch the Islamic fidayēn in Iran and Iraq not to speak of Afghanistan and Pakistan? However, the Sunni ...Read More