The Meeting of Opposites?. Andrew Wingate
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history of these faiths – the call of Abraham, Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the commandments, the exodus from Egypt; the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the formation of the Church at Pentecost; the calling of the Prophet Muhammad, the revelation of the Qur’an and the formation of the new Islamic community.
In apparent contrast with this, the traditions behind Hinduism go back an unspecified number of years – 5,000 years is often referred to loosely. There is no one and agreed founder, no one official scripture recognized as mandatory for the believer. There is no authorized creed, no organization to be compared with church, no hierarchy that is immediately recognizable. There are of course rich traditions and ancestors to whom Hindus look, such as Shankara and Ramunuja, and there are a range of scriptures central to different groups, as well as the Vedas, traditionally acknowledged by all. The Upanishads and Vedanta are also so recognized, and the countless stories (Puranas), and epics. The Bhagavadgita (or simply ‘the Gita’) has become almost the scripture in the West, as it was for Gandhi.
But of course there are organizations and hierarchies within different Hindu groups; and there is the caste organization, with Brahmins at the top of a very powerful hierarchy. There is the Sanskrit language, unifying across higher-caste Hindus. There are immense regional variations. There is no common understanding of what it means to be a Hindu. It may have little to do with temple attendance or religious practice or knowledge; it has a great deal to do with seemingly hard-to-define questions such as ethos, culture, tradition, heritage, Indianness, regional feel.
To go on to consider the engagement between indigenous Christians and incoming Hindus in the UK, the USA and elsewhere, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the encounter at the Indian end, and our next chapter looks at the churches in India within the Hindu context where they were born and developed. There is a fundamental difference here. Incoming Christian missionaries came as a tiny minority with a primary purpose of creating Christian churches in a new land. In no sense did Hindus come to the West, or to British imperial territories in Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the East, to create new Hindu communities. They brought those communities with them as they came for other purposes – trade, employment, education or as bonded labourers. Of course, in the colonial era, Christians came to India as administrators, soldiers, engineers, tea planters, educators, doctors, traders, adventurers. The colonial administrators and traders not only adjusted to Hinduism as they found it, but often used it for their own purpose, encouraging the highest-caste Brahmins to help them to divide and rule.
But there was a particular group who came to spread Christianity, following an expansionist ideology, ‘to make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28.19), which included Indians of all varieties. Here they met the challenge of Hinduism in all its complexity, as we shall be considering in this book, a challenge that has only come directly to UK churches and those in other Western countries in the last few decades. Until then, encounter with Hinduism was always ‘over there’ and was encounter with ‘the exotic’ or ‘the demonic’, to be read about, to be heard about in missionary talks, but to be kept safely at a distance. As such there was a fascination with Hinduism as it was gradually discovered and engaged with. Geoff Oddie, in his recent book Reimagining Hinduism,1 has shown through a study of missionary journals and literature that in the nineteenth century it was Hinduism rather than Islam that received most of the attention. It was an exciting journey of discovery, with the early emphasis being on the horrific, and later the challenge of a religion to be taken very seriously as a rival for Indian minds and communities.
There can be no dispute that the present (early twenty-first-century) perceived challenge to Christians, and to churches, lies in the profile of Islam. How to respond to the post-1989 dominance of agendas related to Islam? September 11, 2001 is the tip of the iceberg, the moment when this became most apparent. But this date does not represent an isolated event, coming from nowhere. The Huntington Thesis, about the inevitability of the Clash of Civilizations between Islam and the West, became highlighted at this point, and gained considerable credibility – and indeed notoriety.2 But this was because it was the most dramatic of a series of such incidents, and was followed also by further terrorist events, such as the London Bombings of 7 July 2005, and the bombings of 2004 in Madrid, and in Boston and a Nairobi shopping centre in 2013. These were only the most striking of the events happening in the West. Meanwhile, there were endless terrorist events going on in countries in Africa and Asia, involving Islamist rhetoric, and the vast number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, precipitated by the invasions of these countries in response to September 11. Huntington could claim at least a prima facie case for this thesis, and popular rhetoric and the media fed itself on belief in this. The clash between capitalism and Marxist communism had been replaced decisively by that between Christianity and Islam.
This was not just about violence. It was also about world view, philosophy and way of life; it was about cultural difference. It was about the law, rationalism, the place of women, moral values, materialism, freedom, democracy. Emotionally, sharia, and all it symbolized, was as important a part of this clash as the seemingly endless acts of violence in the name of Allah. Huntington wrote memorably:
Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture, and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.3
He was also conscious of what he felt were the inherent weaknesses in the West, and in the USA in particular. The American dream had become fragmented, not least by Hispanic immigration. Christianity was fragmented also, and in Europe in steep decline. An ideologically coherent Islam posed a real threat, not just in terms of global presence, but also in the heartlands of the USA and Europe.
There are many flaws in Huntington’s often oversimplistic generalizations, and painting things as black and white, with little grey. I will quote just two critiques. The first is from a leading younger Muslim academic practitioner in the UK:
Muslims are now part of the West, so the discussion is not really between ‘them’ and ‘us’ but between ‘us’ and ‘us’, amongst ourselves, with our common humanity. Talk of ‘clash of civilisations’ in this context is not only dangerous and irresponsible (for the fault lines it perpetuates), it is also foolish . . . Muslims living in the West may not agree with certain material motivations in the West or the way the family is being neglected, and on these issues they may stand together with many of their fellow citizens of Christian and other faiths, and non-faith backgrounds. Muslims living in the West may take issue with the current state of social and international justice, and they would again stand with the majority of fellow citizens.4
The other is from the leading prophet of Islamic reform, Tariq Ramadan. He writes in the powerful summary he has compiled of his thinking, What I Believe:
I mean to build bridges between two universes of reference, between two (highly debatable) constructions termed Western and Islamic ‘civilizations’ (as if those were closed, monolithic entities), and between citizens within Western societies themselves. My aim is to show, in theory and in practice, that one can be both fully Muslim and Western and that beyond our different affiliations we share many common principles and values through which it is possible to ‘live together’ within contemporary pluralistic, multicultural societies where various religions coexist.5
Less prominent in the discussion have been Samuel Huntington’s other ‘civilizations’ – they are Latin, Japanese, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox and African. Even since Huntington wrote 15 years or more ago, the growing importance of the Chinese presence in the world has been endorsed by its population numbers, its enormous economic growth and its centrality to the world economy, with its vital contribution to stabilization after the great banking crisis of 2008–9. It has now overtaken Japan as the second largest economy in the world. Brazil has been leading South America economically, while Venezuela resisted the power of the USA with the demagogic leadership and socialist rhetoric of its now late President Chavez. The Hispanic population grows in proportion rapidly within the USA. Africa has the potential to become less of a basket case, and more assertive of its place in the world. Here we have witnessed the symbolism of the football World Cup taking place in South Africa, and the potential growth in several countries,