Of the main contenders, two are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the Islamist movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s.   They are the official MB standard-bearer, Mohamed Mursi, and an expelled MB figure, Abdel Moneim Abul-Futouh.   Mursi, the chairman of the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), replaced Khairat al-Shater, a  business executive and prominent MB politician, who was disqualified from running by the Egyptian authorities.

The remaining three credible personalities in the race are Amr Moussa, former secretary-general of the Arab League and ex-foreign minister under the deposed Hosni Mubarak; Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister in the Mubarak government, and Hamdeen Sabahi, standing on the legacy of the charismatic pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Pre-electoral polling samples have been inconclusive.  The Egyptian daily Al-Ahram credited Amr Moussa, who enjoys the highest degree of name recognition, as leading, followed by Shafiq, with the MB’s Mursi and the ex-MB member Abul-Futouh in the third and fourth places.    According to BBC News, a more recent survey placed Shafiq in front, followed by Moussa, with Mursi and Abul-Futouh still behind them.

The MB/FJP and the so-called “Salafi” (i.e. Wahhabi) Hizb ul-Nur or “Party of the Light” won, together, a striking majority in the Egyptian parliamentary elections of November 2011 and January 2012.  The FJP gained some 38 percent of votes, while the “Nur” obtained about 28 percent.   The Wahhabis in the “Nur” did not put forward a presidential candidate, but were expected to assist an independent Islamist, sheikh Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.  Sheikh Abu Ismail was also disqualified.

Both the FJP and the “Nur” party have betrayed ambiguous attitudes toward the presidential race.  The FJP promised originally that it would not present a candidate, which caused its rift with Abdel Moneim Abul-Futouh, who favored an FJP campaign for the chief executive’s position.  The Brotherhood then announced that Mursi would serve as its nominee.  As Wahhabis, who until now eschewed parliamentary elections and other democratic practices, the “Nur” party seemed baffled by the removal of sheikh Abu Ismail from the contest, but then transferred its backing to the former MB member, Abul-Futouh.

Although grouped together in Western media as “the Islamists,” the FJP and the “Nur” have not formed a close alliance.  The “Nur” supports Abul-Futouh, considered by many Egyptians as a liberal and modernist exponent of Islamist ideology, although the “Nur,” being a Wahhabi trend, envisions an Egyptian version of Saudi Arabia’s rigid and retrograde social structure.  The “Nur” has been plagued by controversy, including the revelation that Anwar Al-Balkimi, one of its parliamentary deputies, had undergone plastic surgery – a “nose job” – which is forbidden by Wahhabis.  The fundamentalists claim that cosmetic medical treatments are prohibited in that they alter the divinely-created human form.  Yet they are known to impose surgery to “restore” the virginity of women, while justifying the brutal practice of female genital mutilation.

Abul-Futouh has been described as the candidate of all those who do not like the MB-FJP or the military regime that continues to govern.  Such an array would include Wahhabis, liberals, and leftists. He has been endorsed by Wael Ghonim, the now largely-forgotten computer engineer whose emotional appearance on Egyptian television accelerated the resignation of Mubarak.  In this respect, Egypt seems to resemble France, the Netherlands, and Greece, where the radical left and radical right have each attracted voters disaffected with the established parties.   But apparent enthusiasm for Abul-Futouh by the “Nur,” and conspiratorial speculation that his expulsion from the MB was inauthentic, have created suspicion about him.  How, many ask, can Wahhabis, liberals, and leftists agree on a political option?

The MB’s Freedom and Justice Party and its aspirant, Mohamed Mursi, have adopted the manner of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in Turkey, led by the “soft” Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. AKP won national elections three times in a country that epitomized Muslim secularism for decades, and is allied with but not an affiliate of the MB.  The Turkish party served as a patron for the Tunisian MB branch, the Ennahda or Renaissance party, and its ideological controller, Rachid Ghannouchi. Like the AKP and Ennahda, the Egyptian FJP emphasizes its alleged moderation and pragmatism.  The FJP program focuses on economic development and structural reform, the key elements in the success of the Turkish AKP; and, like Erdogan’s party, the FJP appeals to the entrepreneurial class.

Whether either of the Islamist candidates wins the Egyptian election cannot be predicted.  More interesting for an observer of the MB and its history is that both candidates identified with its heritage, Mohamed Mursi and Abdel Moneim Abul-Futouh, represent professions in which the MB has attained organizational dominance in Egypt.  Mursi is a professor of engineering and Abul-Futouh is a physician.

The sociology of the Muslim Brotherhood has changed in the decades since its foundation.  Originally an extreme purificationist movement that exalted violence, it was repressed severely by the Nasser government.   The MB had aided the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, led by the “Free Officers” including Nasser, but turned against him when Nasser moved toward secularism and friendship with the then-existing Soviet Union.  Perhaps most famously, the popularizing polemicist of the MB, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), was executed under Nasser.

After Nasser’s death in 1970, the Egyptian MB renounced violence publicly and observed an unstable political coexistence with Nasser’s successors, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.   Now and then, the Egyptian rulers would arrest and imprison the Brothers, some of who were behind bars when Mubarak fell. But the MB pursued an efficient strategy by penetrating the professions in which Egypt had, and has, numerous over-educated and under-employed members: medicine, pharmacy, engineering, law, and journalism.  The quality of their training in an Egypt where Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak promised, but failed to realize, major educational advances may have reduced their chances of success.  But the plain reality was that Egyptian society could not absorb so large a stratum of overqualified professionals, and that those who were lucky enough to find a relatively-secure place in society remained frustrated and aggrieved at the obstacles that had faced them and continued to obstruct their upward mobility.

In addition, Egyptians and other Muslims – with Pakistan providing a significant parallel – who obtained secular professional status have often felt nostalgia for religion, into which they were born and which they may have largely abandoned.  Becoming engineers and doctors, they may have perceived a contradiction between their religious commitment and their training in rationalist concepts.  This is a mysterious aspect of the problem, since Jewish, Christian, Hindu and other doctors have shown that they can practice their healing arts without losing their faith.  At the same time, Muslim doctors may be deranged by the sense that medicine gives them the power of life and death over humanity.

Once established in their work, some Muslim professionals experience a desire to return to religion. Some seek a simpler, stripped-down version of Islam, that would require little study but provide uncomplicated, oversimplified, and impassioned answers to transcendent questions.   Most of the newly-formed professionals in Egyptian society most certainly did not want to return to their fathers’ traditional, often esoteric Islam.  The MB claimed the mantle of Islamic reform, and like some other Muslim reformers before them, condemned metaphysical Sufi Islam – followed by millions of ordinary Egyptians – as a backward, superstitious, and un-Islamic accretion.

Few MB leaders had or have an Islamic religious education. The MB targeted the doctors’ and engineers’ “syndicates,” i.e. professional guilds with some attributes of a labor union.  A researcher sympathetic to the MB, Amani Kandil, has written that the MB’s strategy in engaging with the professions reflected awareness that the medical and engineering guilds were the places where social change had been most notable in Egypt during the last two decades of the 20^th century. The MB became so powerful in middle-class and elite professional life that it was nicknamed “the engineers’ union.”  Radical influence in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors is exemplified by the pedigree of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the current “emir” of Al-Qaida, whose father, Dr. Muhammad Rabi Al-Zawahiri, an MB adherent, was a pharmacologist and professor at the Ain Shams University Medical School in Cairo, where Ayman Al-Zawahiri graduated as a physician. Numerous other Ain Shams University graduates and faculty have been active in Islamist movements, including the MB “general guide” until 2010, Mohammed Mahdi Akef.  Akef’s successor, Muhammad Badie, is a graduate of Cairo University rather than Ain Shams, but qualified in veterinary medicine.

The Muslim Brotherhood was transformed from a movement of the despairing Muslim masses to a representative of the new elites in Tunisia and Egypt.  But this change has not, regardless of its extensive propaganda – and that of its susceptible Western sympathizers, most of them non-Muslim “experts” – turned the MB/FJP into a moderate force.  Whether by its designated choice, Mohamed Mursi, or its expelled functionary, Abdel Moneim Abul-Futouh, the MB remains a party of those who strive to survive in a makeshift middle class, fearing they have been “cheated” by inferior education or limited opportunity and will lose what status they have accrued.   On the mental horizon of the ordinary MB devotee, resentment at the decline of Islamic power and the subordination of Muslim countries to Western culture is often secondary to simple anger at denial of the rewards expected from a professional education.   The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has completed a journey from its origins as a radical-populist movement of the dispossessed to a vessel for the bitterness of those dissatisfied with their insufficiently-improved, but unarguably better, social position.

In its new incarnation as a party of the Egyptian professional castes, the FJP may prove more dangerous to Egyptian society, the Muslim lands, the West, and the world at large than it was when it was merely an Islamic revivalist movement.  The protesting poor who originally joined the MB saw in it an Islamic alternative to a society they believed had wandered from Muslim values to deep corruption and, indeed, to pre-Islamic ignorance or “jahiliyya,” as theorized by Qutb.  Having experienced the failure of almost 50 years of secular rule in Egypt, it is unsurprising that citizens allowed a free vote (if it is to be free, which is by no means certain given the interference of the military) would choose to give the “believers’ party” a chance to exercise power, on the promise of greater honesty and transparency.

But when the newly-rising elites in Muslim countries like Egypt – and, for that matter, Tunisia and Turkey – engage with Islamist politics, they bear within themselves a deep anxiety, aggravated by forces beyond their borders and their control.  Perhaps the FJP candidate, Mursi, or his shadow, Abul-Futouh, will win a fair count in Egypt’s exercise of the electoral franchise.  Notwithstanding their promises of moderation, however, the victory of an FJP, or of Abul-Futouh, driven by middle-class ambitions in Egypt, will be subject to the vagaries of the global economy.

Lacking the development of civil society, the convulsions of the “Arab Spring” were nothing like the liberal and social revolutions of the 18^th through the 20^th centuries.  Instead, they were episodes in which the chain of international economic and social relations snapped under the pressure of the worldwide crisis that began in 2007.   The FJP in Egypt may find that rather than Turkey or Saudi Arabia, their country will come to resemble a case worse than that of Greece, with a devastated economy, collapse of public confidence, and poverty and deprivation far beyond what they previously suffered.

It is curious that Western commentators on the global economic crisis appear to believe that the middle classes, under siege in the developed countries, can nonetheless flourish suddenly in the regions of the “Arab Spring.”  Muslim Brotherhood rule in Arab states lashed by the economic downturn may see their vulnerable professionals go the way of other educated, once-privileged, but suddenly disinherited “respectable people,” as in Germany after the first world war.  Egypt is not Germany, but the expectations of the middle classes seldom vary from one country to another.  With or without the program and vocabulary of the “Islamic state” as formulated at its origins by the MB, and now demanded by the Wahhabis of the “Nur,” the Egyptian MB could once again make the concept of “Islamofascism” relevant.

Editor’s Note: In a previous FOLKS column a comparison was drawn between S.L. Bhyrappa’s controversial Kannada best seller Aavarana and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, both of which refer to political distortion of history. Where Brown uses the idea for narrative purposes, it forms the central theme of Bhyrappa’s novel. In the climactic scene of Aavarana that comes towards the end of the novel, the protagonist Lakshmi-Razia boldly confronts government appointed committee of education officials (including the minister who bears resemblance to the late Arjun Singh) denouncing them as cowards and falsifiers of history. It is interesting to note that this is a fictionalized account of Bhyrappa’s own experience a few years earlier. Here is his own account written originally in Kannada (Vijaya Karnataka; Sunday, October 8, 2006.) We are grateful to Sandeep Balakrishna of SERIOUSLY SANDEEP for the English version.

Background: A year or so before his famous novel Aavarana appeared, its author S.L Bhyrappa had prepared the ground for the controversy that was to follow by noting how the fanatical Tipu Sultan had been glorified as a freedom fighter and tolerant ruler by ‘secular’ writers bent on whitewashing his record.  The article was titled: “Nationalism can never be strengthened by projecting historical lies.” This led to discussions in which noted literary personalities, dramatists and hundreds of readers participated enthusiastically. What is given below is Bhyrappa second article written in response to his secular critics like Girish Karnad whom he had earlier criticized for whitewashing fanatics like Tipu Sultan and Tughlaq. Bhyrappa had titled his article: “What would be the fate of the truth if a historian seeks advantages like a fiction author?” Here is Bhyrappa’s article, slightly abridged and edited to conform to the style and format of FOLKS.

…I am grateful to Shri. Girish Karnad, Sumatheendra Nadig, Dr. Chidananda Murthy, Dr. Suryanath Kamath, Dr. S. Shettar, Shathavadhani R. Ganesh and others who responded earnestly to my article under the title ‘Nationalism can never be strengthened by projecting historical lies.” To continue the discussions about Mohammed Bin Tugalak and Tipu Sultan would be just an exercise in extracting more details. What we really need to do is to analyze the present political attitudes in teaching history. In order to do this, let me first present what I learnt of the nature of the prevailing political control through my own experience.

During the year 1969 – 70 the Central Government under Mrs. Indira Gandhi established a committee under the Chairmanship of G.Parthasarathy, a diplomat close to Nehru-Gandhi family. Its task was to integrate the nation through education. At that time I was a reader in Educational Philosophy at NCERT and was selected as one of the five members of the committee. In our first meeting Mr. Parthasarathy, as Chairman of the committee explained the purpose of our committee in typically diplomatic language: “It is our duty not to sow the seeds of thorns in the minds of the growing children which will grow up as barriers to national integration. Such thorns are found mostly in the history courses. Occasionally we can find them in language and social science courses also. We have to weed them out. We have to include only such thoughts that go towards inculcating the concept of national integration firmly in the minds of our children. This committee carries this great responsibility.”

The other four members were nodding respectfully. But I said, “Sir, I am unable to understand your words. Will you please explain with a few illustrations?” The Chairman responded: “Ghazni Mohammed looted the Somnath Temple, Aurangzeb built mosques by demolishing the temples in Kashi and Mathura, he collected jizya— is it possible to build a strong India under the present circumstances by conveying such useless facts? What purpose do they serve, other than generating hatred?”

“But are they not historical truths?” I persisted.

“Plenty of truths are there. Using these truths judiciously is the wise way to teach history,” he retorted. The remaining four members simply nodded their heads saying “Yes, yes.” But I was not prepared to let him off.

“You yourself gave examples of Kashi and Mathura. Even today, lakhs of pilgrims from all corners of the country visit these places every year. They can see for themselves the huge mosques built using the walls, pillars and columns that once belonged to demolished temples. They can also see a recently built cow shed like shack in a corner, behind the mosque, that serves as their temple. All these pilgrims are distressed to witness such awful structures. They describe the plight of their temples to their relatives after they return home. Can this create national integration? You can hide such history in the school texts. But can we hide such facts when these children go on excursions and see the truth for themselves? Researchers have listed more than thirty thousand such ruined temples in India. Can we hide them all? . . . . .”

Mr. Parthasarthy interrupted me and asked: “You are a professor of Philosphy. Can you please tell us what is the purpose of history?”

“Nobody can define the purpose of history. We do not know how the things will shape up because of the development of science and technology in the future. Some western thinkers might call it the philosophy of history. But such thoughts are futile. Our discussion here should be— what is the purpose of teaching history? History is seeking out the truths about our past events, learning about ancient human lives by studying the inscriptions, records, literary works, relics, artifacts etc. We should learn also not to commit the same blunders that our predecessors committed. We have to imbibe the noble qualities that they adopted; historical truths help us to learn all these things.”

“What if this search for truth hurts the feelings of the minority? Can we divide society? Can we sow the seeds of poison?” He tried to stop me with these questions.

“Sir, the categorization on the lines of majority and minority would itself be dividing the society, or at least a step towards dividing the society. This idea of ‘seeds of poison’ is prejudiced. Why should the minority think of Gazni Mohammed and Aurangzeb as their own people and heroes? Mughal kingdom was destroyed by the religious bigotry of Aurangzeb. It was at its height in Akbar’s time because his policy of tolerance led to religious and social harmony. Can’t we teach such lessons to children without offending the historical truths? Before teaching the lessons to be learnt from the history, should we not explain the historical truths? This idea of hiding true history is driven politics. This trend will not last long. Whether they are minority or majority, if the education does not impart the character to face the truth with emotional maturity, such education is meaningless and also dangerous.” I replied.

Parthasarathy agreed. He said he appreciated my scholarship and the ability to think clearly. During the lunch break he called me aside, indicated his closeness to me by placing his hand on my shoulders. He then said with a winning smile: “What you say is correct academically. You go and write an article about what you said. But when the government formulates a policy covering the whole nation, it has to consider the interests of all the people. Intellectually pure principles do not serve any purpose.”

Next day when we met, I struck to my stand. I argued that history that is not based on truth is futile and dangerous.  I did not budge even when Parthasarathy showed his irritation on his face. The morning session closed without arriving at any conclusion. Parthasarathy did not speak to me again. We met again after a fortnight. The committee had been re-structured, without me. In my place was a lecturer in history by name Arjun Dev known for his leftist leanings. The revised text books of science and social studies published by NCERT and the new lessons that were introduced in these texts were written under his guidance. These are the books which were prescribed as texts in the Congress and Communist ruled states or they guided the text book writers in these States.

Later, I (Bhyrappa) commented on this in a speech I gave at Alwas Nudisiri, in October 2005:

In the NCERT books for XI standard, the Ancient India part is written by the Marxist historian R.S. Sharma and the Medieval India part is by Satish Chandra, also a Marxist. When examined, one can observe that how members belonging to this group had a scheme to brainwash the minds of growing children. According to them Ashoka preached to respect even (stress is mine) Brahmins by advocating the quality of tolerance. He had banned the ritual of sacrificing the animals and birds. When the performance of yagnas was stopped due to this ban, Brahmins lost their share of dakshina (cash gifts) and their livelihood was affected. The Maurya empire disintegrated after Ashoka and many parts of this kingdom came under the rule of Brahmins.

How childish can one be— to claim that a highly influential religion that had spread all over India and even beyond declined because dissatisfied Brahmins were deprived of their dakshina (cash gifts)? Their other claim is that Muslims demolished temples to loot the riches and wealth accumulated in these temples. This explanation is supposed to rationalize their actions. In some other context they may even say the looting may be according to the laws of Shariat which again paints the events as legally sanctioned. [Sic: Churches in India own huge tracts of prime land. By this logic, it is perfectly legitimate to take this land and use it for other purposes! Editor.]

Actually, Buddhism did not disappear from India after Ashoka. The truth was told by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, a Buddhist himself. In the section, the decline and fall of Buddhism (Writings and Speeches volume III, Government of Maharashtra 1987 pp 229-38) he noted that after Muslim invaders destroyed the universities of Nalanda, Vikramasheela, Jagaddala, Odanthapura etc., followed by brutal killings of the Buddhist monks, forced the survivors to escape to Nepal, Tibet and other neighboring countries to save their lives. As he wrote, “The roots of Buddhism were axed. Islam killed Buddhism by killing priestly class of Buddhism. This is the worst catastrophe suffered by Buddhism in India.”

Like the Devil quoting scripture, Marxists quote Ambedkar whenever it is convenient for them to denigrate Hinduism, but ignore his inconvenient words like “the decline of Buddhism in India is due to the terrifying actions of Muslims.” R.S. Sharma the author of NCERT text on Ancient India, New Delhi, 1992 p 112 writes, “Buddha viharas attracted Turkish invaders because of their wealth. They were the special greedy targets for the invaders. Turks killed many Buddhist monks. Despite these killings, many monks escaped to Nepal and Tibet.”

Who were these Turks? Hindus? Here the clever Marxist Sharma has hidden the fact that these ‘Turks’ were Muslims who destroyed these religious places as dictated by Sharia (Islamic Law). He tries to hide this fact by calling Muslims of Turkey with only the tribal name Turkish. At the same time they (he and others) write that Buddhism declined during Ashoka’s reign because of Brahmins who were deprived of their dakshina (monetary gifts). One should appreciate their sophistry— hiding the truth about Turks being Muslims, but creating the falsehood that Brahmins deprived of dakshina were responsible for the decline of Buddhism after Ashoka. Latin rhetoricians called such a tactic suppressio veri, suggestio falsi.

Shahin Najafi, a Persian musician songwriter is not famed like Rushdie, yet has been convicted to death by another Ayatollah. Again with no due process, for the “sin” of composing a song deemed by the officious Islamic clergy, Ayatollah Golpaygani, as an affront to the Shiite Imams.

The way these high priest Islamic parasites operate is nothing short of international religious terrorism. They consider it their prerogative to pronounce death sentences on anyone of any nationality anywhere in the world that offends their sensibilities. With their tentacles reaching every corner of the globe, these Islamic Godfathers unleash their lieutenants and soldiers on anyone who dares to in anyway challenge their code of murder and mayhem billed as Allah’s sole valid religion for all of humanity.

Shahin may not be famed like Rushdie, yet he is also a human being who is under a fatwa of death. The man was an ordinary Persian musician and singer before Iran’s grand ayatollah Golpayegani issued a fatwa against the rapper who lives in Germany. Now, Shahin faces death threats after releasing a controversial song containing references to one of the 12 Shi’ites, Muslim Imams.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have watched this controversial clip posted on Youtube. This issue has divided opinions in a nation that religious people finding it offensive and insulting to their beliefs and many others defending the song, saying it broke taboos especially with respect to expressing views about religious personalities.

More Ayatollahs are ganging up on the poor artist. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency reports that, Ayatollah Naser Makareme Shirazi, a pro-Islamic regime cleric based in the holy city of Qom with a great deal of influence among Shi’ites, has also issued a fatwa against Najafi by proclaiming, “Any outrage against the infallible imams … and obvious insult against them would make a Muslim an apostate.” Makarem Shirazi has in the past issued other harsh and absurd religious rulings such as the one against women attending soccer matches, proscriptions against keeping pets, and denial of the Holocaust.

The apostasy ruling was issued after a song released by this rapper titled “Naghi”. Islamist fanatics contend the song desecrates the tenth Imam of Shi’ites, Imam Naghi.

Islam is a vestige of the dark ages and literally in the darkest meaning of the word. It is beyond the pale that a self-glorified turbaned cleric finds it in himself, the audacity to issue a death warrant of a human he has never seen and without even a pretense of trial.

Apostasy is capital offense in most Islamic countries, but execution of the apostate is not common. Yet it does take place from time-to-time by frequently buttressing the “crime” of apostasy with additional fabricated charges. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, often adds the charge of mohareb (one who wars with Allah) to further legitimize its execution of apostates. A case in point pertains to the treatment of the religious minority Baha’is by the Islamic Republic. A number of Baha’is have been charged as apostates and mohareb, executed and some secretly buried in unmarked graves.

It is noteworthy that Islam considers the world as its Ummah and overarches national boundaries. Hence, Islamic clerics feel free to issue fatwa and other adjudications regarding any person, group or nation anywhere in the world. Fanatic Muslims anywhere in the world take it upon themselves to carry out fatwa issued by Islamic high divines. Other high profile cases, the killing of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director and the recent attack on the Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westeraard, are instances of this barbaric arbitrary practice that runs counter to the civilized world’s due process and has serious intimidating impact on the freedom of expression.

Fatwas are religious rulings with wide-ranging and shocking implications. For one, not long ago, Salih bin Fawzan, “a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa proclaiming that there is no minimum age for marriage, and that girls can be married even if they are in the cradle.” Why not? Didn’t Islam’s founder, Muhammad, marry a six-year-old Ayesha? Women in Islam are simply there to serve men’s lust and comfort them in any way they can and be grateful that men take care of them.

The cult of savagery, euphemistically called religion of Islam, needs be fully exposed for what it is, its Godfathers de-frocked and punished if they keep issuing fatwas as binding rules for Muslims to obey and implement.

Half-hearted perfunctory attempts by the civilized world at staying the hands of these villains and preventing them from issuing rulings by fiat only serves to embolden these perpetrators of hatred and violence.

Where do these Islamic clerics get their authority to make life and death pronouncements? They claim it’s from the Quran, for one. A book that was compiled some 1400 years ago by the primitive savages of Arabia and presumed as Allah’s, word-for-word.

Free people and nations should not sacrifice their God-given liberty to please the Islamists by muzzling dissenters and even endangering their safety and their lives.

In the final analysis, there is no difference between a Mafia Godfather issuing a death sentence on people who do not toe his line and a turbaned Islamist who masquerades as the authorized agent of Allah to run and ruin peoples’ lives by fiat.

The civilized free people of the world have paid the ultimate price far too many times in the past and are not likely to shirk their responsibility of fighting off the resurgence of the scourge of Islamism—a cult of intolerance and violence that has shed and continues to shed the blood of far too many people.

Let freedom ring. Let people sing their songs and lead their life without death threats hanging over their heads.

No oppression of women, minorities, freedom-lovers, and no death sentences by fiat. Imams and Mullahs who engage in these criminal acts must be dragged to the court of law and, after due process, meted out their due punishments, in the same way that any criminal is processed by a just and civilized society.

S L Bhyrappa

Upon reading S.L. Bhyrappa’s recent Kannada novel Aavarana, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel Da Vinci Code springs naturally to mind. Both have as their subject the suppression of true history and the propagation of a myth by powerful interests. In Da Vinci Code, the villain is the Catholic Church and its modern secret and sinister arm the Opus Dei. In Bhyrappa’s novel, the villain is the collective of politically correct historians and ‘intellectuals’ who out a combination of greed and fear have suppressed the truth about Islam and its record in India. While these intellectuals—called dhimmis by the Egypt-born scholar Bat Ye’or—can boast of no Vatican or Opus Dei, they do form a powerful clique in India enjoying the support of successive governments who find it politically expedient to appease Islam and conceal the truth about its record and teachings. As this phenomenon is by no means limited to India, Bhyrappa’s Aavarana, and the public reaction to it should be of interest far beyond its intended readership.

The comparison between Aavarana and Da Vinci Code should not be taken too far, for Bhyrappa’s treatment and also the truth—actually truths—he brings out are far more real than the mystery and adventure that make up the story of Dan Brown’s novel. It is not clear if Bhyrappa was influenced by Dan Brown’s novel, but seems unlikely. He does not mention it in his extensive bibliography (for a novel). Also the dark theme and the brooding grandeur of Avarana is wholly different from the cheerful if irreverent mood that prevails in Da Vinci Code. Not that Avarana is lacking in humor, but the atmosphere is totally different. It helps to keep in mind that Bhyrappa’s doctorate was in philosophy and until his retirement, he taught philosophy at several universities.

In his preface to Aavarana, Bhyrappa states what led to his writing the novel Aavarana (my translated summary of Bhyrappa’s words):

“This is my second historical novel. My earlier work Saartha was an attempt to portray in novel form the transitional period (from the old to the medieval) that took place in the eight century AD. In Aavarana I have made a similar attempt for the long period after Saartha to the present. This period of Indian history, though rich in records is in the grip of Aavarana (concealment and suppression) forces. The Saartha period presents no such problems. One can write the truth without fear. It is very different with the Aavarana period. One encounters barriers of aavarana at every step. I had therefore to adopt a radically different approach and narrative technique.

“…As things stand today, forces of aavarana hold both the historian and history in their grip. How can historical truth flourish when the historian stands as the main barrier to its discovery? …Truth and beauty, that is to say the link between truth and art, as well as the differences— this has been the subject of my research (in his doctoral dissertation and later as academic). Later as a novelist, I have had to grapple with this challenge at every stage of my creative life.

“In writing historical fiction, I am constantly aware of my responsibility for being true to history. One can write fiction about contemporary issues without research. But in a historical novel every important detail must be supported by research. A writer’s ultimate responsibility is to historical truth. When there is a conflict between beauty and truth, the writer must choose truth over beauty.”

From this discussion it is clear that Bhyrappa is a serious thinker (as befits an academic philosopher) who has studied the subject, often going to the primary sources and major research works. His bibliography is quite extensive for a novel and artfully introduced as part of the narrative. (A surprising omission is the eight volume magnum opus History of India as Told by Its Own Historians compiled by Eliot and Dowson. This was corrected when it was pointed out to him.)

It is to Bhyrappa’s credit that he has gone beyond superficialities by tracing the horrors of Islamic rule and Jihad to the sources themselves— the Quran and the Hadits. He has consulted several Islamic scholars and lived with Muslim friends to learn how Indian Muslims today practice their faith and also how they relate to their history. As a result, Aavarana is more than a novel about Muslim India; it is also a primer on the beliefs and practices that condition the life and thought of Indian Muslims. Aavarana owes a major debt to the pioneering work of the late Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel and their followers, which he duly acknowledges.

In this regard, as in much else, Aavarana is a much more serious work than Dan Brown’s novel. To begin with, the readers of Da Vinci Code don’t carry the burden of history to the same extent as Hindus and Muslims. The Catholic Church sees Dan Brown’s novel as an assault on its doctrine and its version of history, but the largely secular West can shrug it off and treat it as entertainment. To understand the potential impact of Aavarana, one has to imagine what Da Vinci Code would have provoked had it appeared in Europe in Martin Luther’s time. When Aavarana appears in English—as one hopes it will—the reaction even in the West, is likely to be much more vociferous than what we have seen against Da Vinci Code, especially among the Muslims and their apologists.

Dan Brown, author of Da Vinci code

India today is caught in a time warp. Though secular in name, its people, Muslims in particular, are still trapped in the medieval ethos of the Islamic past. Driven by a combination of political expediency and fear of violence, successive governments have refrained from rocking the boat. Left dominated intellectuals have turned Islam negationism (Jihad negationaism)—comparable to Holocaust negationism—into official ideology. Any work that challenges the cozy myth of peaceful Hindu-Muslim coexistence is bound to raise their ire. Bhyrappa is the bete noir of this brand of intellectuals. He sees them as enemies of truth and is not afraid to say so. They are the real villain of his novel. This background is necessary to fully appreciate the novel as well as the ferocity of the denunciations that will soon be coming.

To return to Da Vinci Code, what Brown has rattled is the theological construct called the Gospels, which the Church also projects as authentic history. The suppression of the true origins of Christianity is something that most scholars including many theologians are prepared to acknowledge. But Brown goes beyond this to the claim that Jesus survived the crucifixion and left a bloodline by fathering Mary Magdalene’s children. This according to Da Vinci Code led to the Merovingian dynasty that went on to rule what is now France. This rests on flimsy evidence at best, though there is a persistent tradition in the Provence region of France that Mary Magdalene did migrate to southern France from Palestine.

The main source for Brown’s novel is the speculative work Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln that appeared nearly twenty years ago. More substantial is Brown’s claim that Mary Magdalene was a much more important figure in the early Church, even called the ‘Apostle of Apostles.’ She was defamed by the Church and turned into the prototypical sinner who repents and is forgiven by Jesus. The Vatican may not accept it, but the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts, known also (wrongly) as the Gnostic Gospels do suggest that she was an important figure on par with the other Apostles. (For the record, Gnostic Christians were not Christians and Gnostic Gospels are not gospels, if we mean by gospel a theological biography of Jesus.)

A second thread in Dan Brown’s novel is the destruction of the feminine divine by early Church leaders and the institutionalization of anti-feminism by the Vatican. The idea that Christianity was originally not anti-feminist and Jesus was a feminist is favorite theme of feminist theologians like Barbara Thiering. But this theory does not wash unless we make early Christianity more Pagan than Jewish, and turn Jesus into a Pagan sage. These theologians and writers don’t seem to see that the feminine divine is incompatible with monotheism. Religions of the Book—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—will never allow their One God to be usurped by a Goddess. The exaltation of Mary Magdalene too has its limits: she can only reflect Jesus’s glory, never exist independently of him.

Be as it may, Da Vinci Code may still be read as an entertaining mystery thriller untroubled by its subversive message— some would say its hidden agenda. He leaves untouched the darker aspects of the medieval history of Europe, especially the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade launched by Pope Innocent III that destroyed the brilliant Provencal civilization in what amounted to genocide of the followers of the Albigensian heresy. In place of this real history Dan Brown gives us a romanticized version of the Knights Templars as preservers of the secret and its possibly fictional successor Priory of Sion as the protectors of the Merovingian royal line. So, far all the turmoil it has caused, Da Vinci Code remains entertaining fiction that causes no great anguish.

Bhyrappa’s Aavarana gives the reader no such respite from historical horrors. It narrates the story of a Rajput prince and his wife captured in the siege of Deoghar and turned into slaves in Muslim courts in the time of the Mogul Emperor Aurangazeb (reigned 1659 – 1707). He later accompanies a Mogul officer and witnesses the destruction of the great Vishwanath Temple in Benares and witnesses the horrors inflicted by Moguls on the Hindus. Aavarana describes these horrors in vivid detail and understated language, leaving little to the imagination. There is no hyperbole to obscure facts, which makes the horror all the more real.

To bring out how these horrors are whitewashed and even concealed by modern negationists (aavarana forces in his words), Bhyrappa introduces a contemporary character Lakshmi-Razia, a Muslim convert who returns to Hinduism after being shocked by the truth about India’s Islamic past. She receives her first jolt when she visits the famous ruins of Vijayanagar (destroyed in 1565), now a World Heritage Site, as a script writer for a documentary. Soon her father, whom she had not seen since her conversion to Islam dies and she inherits his papers. She finds that her father in her absence had made a detailed study of Islam and its record in India. Using his notes she writes and publishes the novel about the captured Rajput prince in Mogul service noted earlier.

This lands her in all kinds of trouble, beginning with her former colleagues and friends, especially her mentor, one Professor Krishna Shastry. Her novel has blown their cover and they use their influence to have the novel banned and she is forced to go into hiding. In this, Bhyrappa has given a hint of what may befall his own novel for the same crime: he has exposed the horrors to a wide audience and has also punctured the scholarly pretensions of Jihad apologists masquerading as intellectuals.

It is unlikely that Bhyrappa and his latest novel will suffer the same fate as the novelist-hero and her novel in Aavarana. He is too well-known a figure with a huge following. The political climate has also changed. But the experience of many recent authors suffering a similar fate is too fresh in memory for readers to miss the main points of his novel: horrors of Islamic rule and the collusion of Aavarana forces.

In summary, with his latest novel Aavarana Dr. S.L.Bhyrappa has produced a major literary work distinguished by skill, scholarship and courage. One hopes that it will soon be translated into other languages and made available to a wide audience. Of one thing we may be certain: Aavarana will be “cussed and discussed” for a long time to come, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln.

A lapse lasts only as long as a news cycle. The hurry to name candidates is quite inexplicable. There are still six weeks left for nominations; and 10 for the actual poll. This is the time to ponder; judgment can come later. Long used to filling Rashtrapati Bhavan by selection, political parties seem a trifle bemused by the prospect of a genuine election. Congress is merely repeating what it did in 2007: Throwing up names to check which will float, which will be punctured by pellets, and which will sink under their own deadweight. In 2007 Pranab Mukherjee was on the first Congress list. Mrs Sonia Gandhi sabotaged Mukherjee only after he shifted from probable to possible, after endorsement from the Left. She then pulled out Mrs Pratibha Patil from well-deserved anonymity, aware that a short deadline left little opportunity for debate. The early Congress bird does not necessarily get the worm.

2012 is different for at least two reasons. After five years of Mrs Patil, Indians want someone with dignity, calibre and honesty as their President. Another sleight-of-the-hand choice might, just conceivably, muster up numbers in the electoral college, but will be punished by public opinion.

In 2007, discussions were about candidates, not victory. Today, Congress is racked with uncertainty because it heads a coalition that is invulnerable on paper and vulnerable in practice. Numbers do not bring stability; governance does. upa 1 had focus and cogency, as well as allies who knew the value of questions. That partnership of the willing has degenerated into an alliance of the haphazard. Congress has destabilised itself; and this infection has spread to allies. If the axis of a coalition becomes unsteady, the rim cannot hold.

Defeat in UP or Punjab or Delhi is only a symptom; the wasting disease is shrinking credibility. Each week something happens, minor or major, to jolt a party already in grip of ceaseless tremors. Examine the catalogue of the past seven days. A former Maharashtra chief minister is indicted in high-rise corruption. A former national spokesman of the party is trapped in low-rise shenanigans. A court hears allegations of corruption against the Union home minister. Revolt begins to unhinge the most successful Congress CM, in Assam. Rumour gives the Congress CM in Andhra only a few more weeks in office. A frightened Government tries to frighten media with a private member’s “Print and Electronic Media Standards and Regulations Bill, 2012”.

It seeks to legitimise censorship and authoritarian coercion through familiar means, like an annual licence renewal and punitive fines for “unverified and dubious material”, a phrase whose elasticity could bankrupt most media companies through legal fees. Government, incidentally, never has a problem with lawyers’ fees: It pays them with your money. The author of this proposed legislation is Meenakshi Natrajan, whose fame rests on her proximity to Rahul Gandhi. Congress spokesmen deny Rahul Gandhi’s
role; but you could hardly expect them to confirm it.

Curiously, neither the Government nor the Opposition has a majority in this Lok Sabha. The Opposition is in disarray since the largest Opposition party, bjp, has not successfully negotiated the terms of reference for a viable alternative. The Government is not strong enough to govern; the Opposition is not strong enough to displace it. Government wafts along from crisis to crisis on this anomaly.

The situation is reminiscent of 1969. Exploiting uncertainty with great skill, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi defied her own party and put up V.V. Giri against the official Congress nominee Sanjeeva Reddy. Presidential campaigns are conducted in silence. When 1969’s deals were done, every traditional line between left, right and centre had blurred. No one was certain which way the vote would go. Mrs Gandhi triumphed thanks to the Akali Dal and the second preference votes of a west UP leader, Chaudhary Charan Singh. In six years, the Akalis as well as Charan Singh were in Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency jails; in 1977, they routed Congress and made Sanjeeva Reddy President.

In 1969 Mrs Gandhi prepared two speeches on counting day. One of them was meant for defeat, in which case she would have resigned. Selection is tick-tac-toe. An election is a game with formidable stakes.

"The Deciphered Indus Script" by N Jha and N S Rajaram

Ever since its discovery in 1921 the Harappan civilisation (also called Indus Valley civilisation) has been studied extensively by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and Indologists. Of particular interest to all of them are several thousand seals found at these sites bearing both images and writings on them. Despite numerous intensive studies the script has remained undeciphered and the writings unintelligible. This is a major gap in our knowledge of the past.

About a decade ago, in a monumental work embodying path-breaking research on the language, writings and literature of Harappans, Dr. Natwar Jha and Dr. Navaratna Rajaram sought to solve this major technical problem of our times (The Deciphered Indus Script N Jha and N S Rajaram. Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2000, Pp. xxviii +269. Price: Rs. 950/-.)

The Deciphered Indus Script offers a methodology for reading the Indus script by combining paleography with ancient literary accounts and Vedic grammar.

The authors firmly reject all the notions, conclusions and theories which form the mainstay of the present Indology. According to them, the central problem of Indology is that the achievements of the Harappan civilisation have been attributed to a people called proto-Dravidians who never existed, speaking a language that too never existed. The writings left behind by the creators of the Harappan civilisation have been sought to be read by imposing on them this imaginary language spoken by an imaginary people inhabiting this very real civilisation.

The authors maintain that Harappan civilisation formed the last stage of the Vedic Age, often called the Sutra period. This was the period, spanning several centuries, during which great works of philosophy and several other disciplines were codified in the form terse aphorisms (sutras) to facilitate memorization. The best known works of this genre are the Yogasutra of Patanjali, and Panini’s famous grammar Ashtadhyayi.

This identification of the Harappan civilisation with the Sutra period is the authors’ point of departure. This identification, which upsets the chronology given by the Aryan Invasion Theory, is not new. Earlier, writing in 1980, K D Sethna identified the Harappan culture with the Brahmana and sutra period of Vedic literature (The Problem of Aryan Origins from an Indian Point of View, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi 1980). The authors have fortified this position further with lot of fresh material.

Evidence for this major departure from conventional wisdom comes from archaeology, mathematics, astronomy and metallurgy. It can briefly be summarized as follows.

Archaeology tells us that Harappans and the Mesopotamians of Sumer-Akkad period were not only contemporary but also had trade relations. Among the commodities exported to Mesopotamia were lapis lazuli and cotton. Now, Karpāsa, the only Sanskrit word for cotton, occurs for the first time in Sutra literature. Remarkably, the same word also occurs in Mesopotamian records as Kapazum. The same records also tell us that Kapazum (cotton) was imported from Meluha (pronounced Melukha), derived from Prakrit Malekha which in turn is a corruption of Sanskrit Mlechchha, often applied to the west and to those who had deviated from the strict Vedic orthodoxy prevalent in its Kuru-Panchala stronghold in the east.

Among the more interesting representatives of the Sutra genre are Sulbasutras. Part of Vedic literature, they contain mathematical principles, especially geometry, needed in the design and construction of Vedic sacrificial altars.

The eminent American mathematician and historian of science, late A Seidenberg established that the mathematics of both the old Babyloania (1900-1750 BC) and the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (2100-1800 BC) must have been derived from the Sulbasutras.

This is logical. The very existence of highly planned cities like Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Lothal and Dholavira presupposes extensive knowledge of geometry and other branches of mathematics going back well into the third millennium BC and beyond.

According to the authors, the traditional date of 3102 BC (or near it) for the eighteen-day Mahabharata Battle is supported by astronomical evidence in ancient texts. Silver ornaments found at the Sarasvati site of Kunal prove that copper purification (which releases silver as byproduct) was known in India before 3000 BC. [Sic: Also silver was unknown to the Rig Veda which shows the Rig Veda to be older than that date. Editor.]

Coming to the Indus script, it is no longer the closed book which it had been for decades. The renowned archaeologist, S R Rao, the discoverer of Lothal and sunken city of Dwarka, had presented a Sanskrit-related development of the Indus script in his book “Dawn and Devolution of Indus Civilisation.” According to him, the language on Indus seals is a dialect of Sanksrit, the script largely similar to the Semitic alphabets that appeared around 1600 BC and to the Brahmi script attested since about 400 BC.

According to the authors, the language of the seals is Vedic Sanskrit, with a significant number of them containing words and phrases traceable to ancient Vedic Glossary Nighantu, complied from still earlier sources by the sage Yaska and his commentary Nirukta.

The methodology adopted by the authors in deciphering the Indus script is largely empirical, resting entirely on existing languages, scripts and literature. They explain in detail how phonetic values are assigned to different symbols and discuss technical issues like homophones and polyphones, pictorial symbols, numerical signs, direction of writings, use of strokes, grammar rules, relation with other scripts, transition to Brahmi etc. with the help of numerous illustrations from the seals. Their decipherment passes a double test: the language written on the seals is roughly known to us. And it uses signs of which many are known from another place and another time.

According to authors, the Indus script is a syllabic script with a generic vowel symbol. It represents an intermediate stage in the transition from a primitive symbolic system to a scientific phonetic alphabet like Brahmi from which nearly all Indian scripts are derived. Composite letters make their appearance. The decipherment of the script and the readings of seals do not support the popular view of the Harappan civilisation as divorced from the Vedic tradition; nor do they support the belief that the language of the seals is some form of proto-Dravidian unrelated to Sanskrit or the ancestor of Vedic (proto-Aryan) language.

The language is less archaic than that of Rig Veda and corresponds closely to that found in later Vedic works like the Sutras and Upanishads. Despite the shortness of the messages, the rules of Vedic grammar and phonetics are clearly discernible in the structure of the Indus script. In style, the messages are similar to the cryptic aphorisms for which Sutra literature is justly famous, familiar examples being Panini’s Ashtādhyāyi, Patanjali’s Yogasutra and Badarayana’s Brahmasutra.

The images on the seals are often symbolic representations of Vedic themes. The written messages often serve to explain the symbolism of images. Writings and images on some of the most famous seals like the bull, unicorn bull, horse, Omkara mudra, seven goddesses, Pashupati, tiger etc. are explained by accurate references to Vedic texts, bringing out their religious and literary significance.

The famous Dholavira signboard also is deciphered and explained by the authors. Some of the seals are shown to contain mathematical formulas from Sulbrasutras, while some deal with mundane matters.

The book gives about six hundred readings and since many of them are repeated on different seals, they cover about fifteen hundred seals. The authors conclude that the Harappan seals and their contents form an inseparable part of the Vedic literature and culture.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the authors’ work for a clearer understanding of ancient Indian history. The Indus valley people, who until now had remained a silent enigma, now speak to us; and they speak to us in a language that we (a few of us, that is) know— Vedic Sanskrit.

Conversely, we now have an archaeological and geographical context for the Vedic Aryans. Far from nomadic invaders who destroyed the Indus valley civilisation, Aryans actually turn out to be its creators.

It is for other scholars to pronounce a final judgment on the validity of Jha and Rajaram’s decipherment of the Indus script. However, as noted above, there is considerable independent evidence to support it.

Following a detailed study of Dholavira in Gujarat, its excavator R S Bisht has concluded that creators of Harappan civilisation were Vedic Aryans of the Saraswati heartland. Jha and Rajaram arrived at the same conclusion independently and used it to interpret Harappan seals including the writing.

Some other archaeologists have noted that the Harappan civilisation was largely maritime with extensive riverine communications. This is reflected in the authors’ readings of seals as well as hymns of Rig Veda.

The high price of the book may be justified by the large size of the pages, high quality of paper, printing, binding and above all, by the value of its contents. The style is surprisingly lucid for its highly technical nature. There is some overlapping of materials as the authors develop their argument. While this makes the book more readable for average readers, experts may find some portions repetitive.

As the authors humbly acknowledge, for all its depth and originality, their work is only the beginning of a great endeavour. The corpus of still unread seals must be studied along with source material and symbolism. For this, modern experts will have to work with traditional Vedic scholars.

As noted above, this identification of the Harappan civilisation with the Sutra period is the authors’ point of departure. This at once this sets them in frontal opposition to powerful backers of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) who occupy influential positions in media and academia in India and abroad. That explains the vehemence with which their work was received in some quarters. Extraneous issues like presence of horse on some seals were raised and played up to shift the focus away from the main theme.

Dr. Natwar Jha, unfortunately, is no longer among us. However, Dr. Rajaram is working on the new book they had planned to write presenting more evidence and results. It will be keenly awaited by all those with a genuine interest in the subject.

Virendra Parekh is Executive Editor, Corporate India, and lives in Mumbai

Indus seal with unicorn bull

In the year 2000 the late Natwar Jha and this writer published a book called The Deciphered Indus Script: methodology, readings, interpretations that offered a solution to a vexing problem of ancient India— the identity and culture of the people who created the vast and advanced archaeological remains of the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilization. At that time it was held by some scholars, but by no means universally, that Harappan archaeology was the creation of a people who were the original inhabitants of India who were defeated and driven south by an invading race of people called the Aryas (or Aryans). For political reasons colonial officials and missionaries identified these supposed ‘original’ inhabitants of India with the ‘Dravidian’ people of South India.

This is the famous, now infamous Aryan invasion theory (AIT) invented by Western scholars of the colonial era. Since they controlled the writing of textbooks, this version of the Aryan invasion and the Aryan-Dravidian conflicts became the official version of history taught to children— a situation that continued after independence. While science— first archaeology and then genetics has discredited the theory, it has acquired powerful political and academic interests that have allowed this version to continue in textbooks and universities, in both India and the West.

A curious thing is that any argument or evidence against the AIT was not countered or refuted but simply dismissed and the people opposing it denounced as ignoramuses, chauvinists and worse. The distinguished American historian of science Abraham Seidenberg ridiculed them observing that “their ‘refutations’ were little more than haughty dismissals.”

Entrenched interests

This is a strange attitude for scholars to adopt. To fathom this bizarre behavior we need to recognize that the AIT or its latest incarnation called the AMT (for the Aryan Migration Theory, for there is no evidence for any invasion) has several faces that cater to the socio-political needs of several different groups. First and simplest, it is used to justify the political ideology of Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu that hold that Tamil culture was ‘pure’ until it was defiled with Sanskrit by invading Aryans, especially by the Brahmins. This divisive myth was created by Robert Caldwell, Bishop of Tirunelveli as part of the missionary strategy of ‘divide and convert’. This was picked up by Dravidian party politicians like Karunanidhi to claim they were victims of Aryan, particularly Brahmin oppression. In this the politicians had and continue to have the strong support of Christian missionaries.

Then there are also entrenched Indologists in Western academia whose survival is tied to this model of history. As per the AIT (now AMT), Vedas and the Sanskrit language were not created by the Indians themselves but brought by an invading superior race of Aryans, now called Indo-Europeans (to avoid the taint of Nazi horrors.) Until recently, and even now to a significant extent, these invaders are portrayed as fair skinned people related to Europeans. While these academics may be prepared to give up the idea of racial superiority—or at least claim to—they are not prepared give up the idea of being the descendants of a superior people who brought the Vedic Civilization to India. There whole discipline is built on it; it is just not their identity but also their livelihood that is threatened by the collapse of AIT-AMT version of history.

In India, these Western interests don’t have a direct bearing except for the status of Indian scholars that goes with being associated with Western scholars. In addition, being in their good books by toeing their line can yield perks like fellowships, visiting positions and the like at Western institutions. Until recently this Indian elite prided on being seen as sharing a common ancestry with the British rulers, namely the Aryans or Indo-Europeans. This made them feel superior to fellow natives. (The British nurtured this superstitious vanity to gain Indian collaborators.)

Sarasvati satellite image

Politics rules

In addition, the Indian history establishment after independence has been dominated by Marxists like Romila Thapar and her associates. Marx also said India has no history except the record of invaders. Further, the Marxists used the AIT to interpret the fictional Aryan-Dravidian conflicts as a class struggle. According to these, even the caste system represents a transformation of classes. On the other hand, the British attributed the caste system to racial differences, supposedly based on something called the ‘nasal index’. Its message— longer the nose, higher the caste!

Even from this cursory discussion it should be obvious that this brand of ‘scholars’ are complete ignoramuses when it comes to science. So they were and are in no position to understand let alone dispute the findings of ancient astronomy, metallurgy and other sciences that contradict their theories. As far back as 1893, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Hermann Jacobi used astronomical references in the Vedic literature to show that the Rig Veda must have existed long before 3000 BC. About 20 years ago, this writer used metallurgical data to show that the Rig Veda could not be later than 3500 BC. But these scholars could not comprehend it so they ignored it.

Even more amazingly, many of these scholars, most prominently Thapar are completely ignorant of Sanskrit and cannot read the Vedic literature! They depend entirely on colonial era English translations. They project themselves, and are also acknowledged by the media as authorities on Vedic India. This is like a mathematical illiterate claiming to be an expert in modern physics. How could it be possible? The answer is political influence. These ‘secularist’ historians have cultivated political connections with the Congress party and its politicians going back to Jawaharlal Nehru whose prejudices they are careful to project in their works. (The Thapar family has close ties with the Nehru family, and Romila Thapar was a personal friend of Indira Gandhi.)

The Congress and its’ secular’  affiliates have long patronized Marxist historians like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma, Irfan Habib and others. The ruling Congress today for all practical purposes has no Indian nationalistic roots. It is now a conglomerate of Marxists and worshippers of the West; this includes Marxism, which is the most extreme of Eurocentric ideologies. (During the Freedom Movement, the Communists acted as ‘spies and stooges’ of the British for which they were generously paid.)

Hostility to anything Indian, especially Hindu is hardwired into them. A real but unstated goal of making Vedas and Sanskrit foreign imports is to be able to claim that like Islam and Christianity, Hinduism is also of non-Indian origin and therefore has no special place in Indian history and culture. In this campaign it is not surprising to see Christian missionaries to be strong supporters of this version of ‘history’. Some Christian ‘scholars’ have gone to the extent of claiming that Sanskrit came to India only after St Thomas brought Christianity to India!

Natwar Jha, foremost scholar of Vedic-Harappan civilization

Sarasvati unifies Vedic and Harappan

The situation in 2000 when the book The Deciphered Indus Script appeared can be summarized as follows. Cracks were appearing in the AIT version of history, mainly on the basis of the Sarasvati river evidence. The problem is that the Rig Veda extols the Sarasvati as the greatest river, not once or twice but many times. Scientific studies based on satellite photography and archaeology showed that the Sarasvati had dried up completely by 2000 BC. So the Aryan invaders arriving in India in 1500 BC could not have described and worshipped the Sarasvati as the greatest river when it had dried up 500 years earlier.

To counter this, Thapar’s follower Rajesh Kocchar wrote that the Sarasvati described in the Rig Veda was a river in Afghanistan which the Aryans had encountered on their way to India. But there are no great rivers in Afghanistan. Also the Rig Veda describes the Sarasvati as flowing from “the mountain to the sea,” which is impossible in landlocked Afghanistan. (For more details on the Sarasvati and related matters, see http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/scientific-verif-vedas.html.)

All this went to demolishing the AIT version of history— showing there was no invasion of Aryans or anyone else in the late ancient age. But it left open the identity of the Harappan civilization. Archaeologists, however, began to notice that a large number of so-called Indus sites (or Harappan sites) lay not along the Indus but along the now dry Sarasvati. This showed that the same river—the Sarasvati—which is called the greatest in the Rig Veda was also the lifeblood of the Harappan civilization. The Harappan civilization collapsed when the Sarasvati dried up. (See map of the Sarasvati River.)

This (and other) evidence showed that the Vedic and the Harappan civilizations were intimately related, the question really was the temporal relationship between the two. Then K.D. Sethna of Pondicherry and this writer working independently and following completely different approaches showed that the Harappan civilization, which may be dated to the 3000 – 2000 BC (to a first approximation) belonged to what is known as the Sutra period of the Vedic literature.

The Vedic literature can conveniently be divided into Samhitas (Vedic hymns like the Rig Veda), Brahmanas (prose commentaries) and Sutras (codified texts like the Patanjali Yoga Sutra). (This is an oversimplification but will do here.) Since any codification can come only towards the end, it showed that the Rig Veda was much older than the Sutra literature period, which was shown to be contemporary with the Harappan archaeology.

Perhaps more importantly, it showed that the language of the Harappans could not be too far removed from the archaic (Vedic) Sanskrit of the Sutra literature. This created the background necessary to decipher the writings found on the famous Indus seals. The same idea had come to the great Vedic scholar and polymath Natwar Jha with whom this writer was soon to collaborate.

Indus seals and writing

Paleo map of Sarasvati

The Harappans were a literate people. They have left behind samples of writing, mostly short messages on terra cotta seals and other artifacts. These are the famous Indus (or Harappan) seals. Ever since they were first discovered, reading the script and the identification of the language have been major goals of historians. With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that the Aryan invasion theory, which had by then had hardened into a dogma, was a major obstacle to understanding the Harappan language and hence reading the writing. The AIT held that the Harappan language could not be Sanskrit but an early form of Dravidian— like Tamil. But the oldest Tamil known is only about 2000 years old, while the Harappan writing is 4000 years old. So attempts to read them as Tamil were doomed to failure though some scholars like Asko Parpola who claimed to do so were generously rewarded by Dravidian politicians.

But the identification of the Harappans as belonging to the late Vedic (Sutra) period by Sethna and the author solved the first half of the problem: the language had to be archaic Sanskrit of the Sutra period. Natwar Jha had also made significant advance in reading the script assuming the language to be Vedic Sanskrit, but our work (with Sethna) justified his assumption and gave also the historical background. It was then that this writer and Jha decided to collaborate. After two years, we published the book The Deciphered Indus Script. (See the accompanying book review.)

It is obviously too technical to go into the details of the decipherment, but it can be said that it identifies the Harappans firmly as part of the Vedic civilization, coming towards the end of it. The Harappans represent the twilight of the Vedic Age. This means the Harappans are no longer the puzzle they were supposed to be, though this puzzle was largely the making of the scholars’ dogmatic attachment to the non-existent Aryan invasion and the artificial, politically motivated Aryan-Dravidian divide. In summary, Harappan archaeology represents the material remains of the culture and civilization described in the Vedic literature.

The Harappans therefore were Vedic Harappans; both were native to India as DNA studies show. Biologically as well as culturally they were the product of a long evolutionary process. What the Indus seals and their study, of which the decipherment is a part, tell us is that the civilization of India is a continuum from Vedic times to the present, and the Harappans were an integral part of it. There were outside influences of course, but they were secondary. The same is true of the Indus (Harappan) script. It is the oldest writing known from which later Indian scripts like Brahmi, Devanagari and others evolved.

‘Harappan horse’ hysteria

Where the Sarasvati River and other data discredited the AIT, what Deciphered Indus Script did was to utterly demolish the existing version of history and replace it with one that integrated the Vedic literature with Harappan archaeology. Considering the stakes that academic Indologists in India and the West had in the status quo, some criticism and even hostility was to be expected. But the authors were not prepared for the ferocity of the personal attacks and diversionary tactics involving issues that had nothing to do with the book or the decipherment.

 The lead in this was taken by Romila Thapar in India and Harvard linguist Michael Witzel in the U.S. Where Thapar objected to our identification of Harappans as Vedic people, without refuting our arguments but questioning our ‘Hindutva’ motives, Witzel and his partner—an academic nonentity called Steve Farmer—charged us with fabricating the image of a horse on one of the seals. This was shown to be false for we produced another seal from their own work containing a horse image. It was purely a diversionary tactic: our book was about the Harappan civilization and script and not Harappan zoology. (The oft repeated claim of ‘No horse at Harappa’ is totally false. Horse remains have been found at all levels at several Harappan sites.)

 The curious thing is that this ‘critique’ of our work appeared not in any scholarly journal but the pro-Communist magazine Frontline. Leaving aside the unsoundness of their argument, their tactic of making personal attack to divert attention from the substance of the topic bespoke a new low in academic conduct. It is a measure of insecurity felt by the likes of Michael Witzel, a feeling justified by recent developments at Harvard where his department has been closed down. (And at other universities also.)

Pre-Harappan seal refers to 'Ila' (Sarasvati)

It may be noted that similar tactics of raising irrelevant issues and personal attacks were used by the very same people—Witzel and his colleagues—to expel Dr Subramanian Swamy by having his economics courses cancelled. Where the ‘Harappan horse’ was the bogey in their campaign against us, Swamy’s supposedly anti-Muslim article served as the pretext in the campaign against him. So this writer was not surprised to see such ‘bodyline’ tactics employed against Swamy, having himself been their target some ten years previously.

To return to the Vedic –Harappan unification and its ramifications, Jha and this writer were working on a follow up volume to our book when the storm broke. We felt that it was best to hold back publication until the noise died down, as any new work would not get a reasonable hearing in the hysterically anti-intellectual climate that had been whipped up by our adversaries. Tragically, Jha died in 2006 aged only 58. At about the same time, following his campaign against California school curriculum and his misadventure in drumming up Pakistani support, Witzel had been exposed as more a political propagandist than scholar. He and his colleagues now have little credibility left. As a result of all this, this writer is working to complete the book that he and Jha had been working on.

With the benefit of hindsight it can be said that Jha’s breakthrough goes far beyond the language and script of the Harappan seals. He showed also deep connections between the Harappan civilization and the Vedic literature and even the Mahabharata. One of Jha’s major discoveries was that a passage in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata serves as a link between the symbolism of Harappan iconography and an important class of Vedic texts known as Nirukta. The full implications of this are still not clear, but will be discussed in the book currently in progress.

Mark Twain (left) and Rudyard Kipling.

Background: Rudyard Kipling (1865– 1936), born to British parents in Mumbai, was a 23-year-old journalist working for a newspaper in Allahabad, India, when he traveled to Elmira, New York, in 1889 to conduct this interview with Mark Twain. Although he enjoyed meeting Kipling, at the time Twain had no idea who he was. Soon after, however, Twain would become an admirer of Kipling’s books, often reading selections from them aloud to his family and friends. The two men stayed in touch and got together when their travels made it possible. In 1895, Twain wrote Kipling: “It is reported that you are about to visit India. This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due you. Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day. I shall arrive next January and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.” Twain and Kipling both received honorary degrees in a ceremony at Oxford in 1907.

An Interview with Mark Twain

You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar— no, two cigars— with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don’t. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward. To soothe your envy and to prove that I still regard you as my equals, I will tell you all about it.

They said in Buffalo that he was in Hartford, Conn.; and again they said “perchance he is gone upon a journey to Portland”; and a big, fat drummer vowed that he knew the great man intimately, and that Mark was spending the summer in Europe—which information so upset me that I embarked upon the wrong train, and was incontinently turned out by the conductor three-quarters of a mile from the station, amid the wilderness of railway tracks. Have you ever, encumbered with great-coat and valise, tried to dodge diversely-minded locomotives when the sun was shining in your eyes? But I forgot that you have not seen Mark Twain, you people of no account!

Saved from the jaws of the cowcatcher, me wandering devious a stranger met.

“Elmira is the place. Elmira in the State of New York— this State, not two hundred miles away;” and he added, perfectly unnecessarily, “Slide, Kelley, slide.”

I slid on the West Shore line, I slid till midnight, and they dumped me down at the door of a frowzy hotel in Elmira. Yes, they knew all about “that man Clemens,” but reckoned he was not in town; had gone East somewhere. I had better possess my soul in patience till the morrow, and then dig up the “man Clemens’” brother-in-law, who was interested in coal.

The idea of chasing half a dozen relatives in addition to Mark Twain up and down a city of thirty thousand inhabitants kept me awake. Morning revealed Elmira, whose streets were desolated by railway tracks, and whose suburbs were given up to the manufacture of door-sashes and window-frames. It was surrounded by pleasant, fat, little hills, rimmed with timber and topped with cultivation. The Chemung River flowed generally up and down the town, and had just finished flooding a few of the main streets.

The hotel-man and the telephone-man assured me that the much-desired brother-in-law was out of town, and no one seemed to know where “the man Clemens” abode. Later on I discovered that he had not summered in that place for more than nineteen seasons, and so was comparatively a new arrival.

A friendly policeman volunteered the news that he had seen Twain or “some one very like him” driving a buggy the day before. This gave me a delightful sense of nearness. Fancy living in a town where you could see the author of Tom Sawyer, or “some one very like him,” jolting over the pavements in a buggy!

“He lives out yonder at East Hill,” said the policeman; “three miles from here.”

Then the chase began— in a hired hack, up an awful hill, where sunflowers blossomed by the roadside, and crops waved, and Harper’s Magazine cows stood in eligible and commanding attitudes knee-deep in clover, all ready to be transferred to photogravure. The great man must have been persecuted by outsiders aforetime, and fled up the hill for refuge.

Presently the driver stopped at a miserable, little, white wood shanty, and demanded “Mister Clemens.”

“I know he’s a big-bug and all that,” he explained, “but you can never tell what sort of notions those sort of men take into their heads to live in, anyways.”

There rose up a young lady who was sketching thistle-tops and goldenrod, amid a plentiful supply of both, and set the pilgrimage on the right path.

“It’s a pretty Gothic house on the left-hand side a little way farther on.”

“Gothic h— — ,” said the driver. “Very few of the city hacks take this drive, specially if they know they are coming out here,” and he glared at me savagely.

It was a very pretty house, anything but Gothic, clothed with ivy, standing in a very big compound, and fronted by a verandah full of chairs and hammocks. The roof of the verandah was a trellis-work of creepers, and the sun peeping through moved on the shining boards below.

Decidedly this remote place was an ideal one for work, if a man could work among these soft airs and the murmur of the long-eared crops.

Appeared suddenly a lady used to dealing with rampageous outsiders. “Mr. Clemens has just walked downtown. He is at his brother-in-law’s house.”

Then he was within shouting distance, after all, and the chase had not been in vain. With speed I fled, and the driver, skidding the wheel and swearing audibly, arrived at the bottom of that hill without accidents. It was in the pause that followed between ringing the brother-in-law’s bell and getting an answer that it occurred to me for the first time Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India, be they never so full of admiration. And in another man’s house— anyhow, what had I come to do or say? Suppose the drawing-room should be full of people,— suppose a baby were sick, how was I to explain that I only wanted to shake hands with him?

Then things happened somewhat in this order. A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world saying:—

“Well, you think you owe me something, and you’ve come to tell me so. That’s what I call squaring a debt handsomely.”

“Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and, behold! Mark Twain had curled himself up in the big armchair, and I was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.

The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute’s thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the grey hair was an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk— this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.

Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.

About this time I became aware that he was discussing the copyright question. Here, so far as I remember, is what he said. Attend to the words of the oracle through this unworthy medium transmitted. You will never be able to imagine the long, slow surge of the drawl, and the deadly gravity of the countenance, the quaint pucker of the body, one foot thrown over the arm of the chair, the yellow pipe clinched in one corner of the mouth, and the right hand casually caressing the square chin:—

“Copyright? Some men have morals, and some men have— other things. I presume a publisher is a man. He is not born. He is created— by circumstances. Some publishers have morals. Mine have. They pay me for the English productions of my books. When you hear men talking of Bret Harte’s works and other works and my books being pirated, ask them to be sure of their facts. I think they’ll find the books are paid for. It was ever thus.

“I remember an unprincipled and formidable publisher. Perhaps he’s dead now. He used to take my short stories— I can’t call it steal or pirate them. It was beyond these things altogether. He took my stories one at a time and made a book of it. If I wrote an essay on dentistry or theology or any little thing of that kind— just an essay that long (he indicated half an inch on his finger), any sort of essay— that publisher would amend and improve my essay.

“He would get another man to write some more to it or cut it about exactly as his needs required. Then he would publish a book called Dentistry by Mark Twain, that little essay and some other things not mine added. Theology would make another book, and so on. I do not consider that fair. It’s an insult. But he’s dead now, I think. I didn’t kill him.

“There is a great deal of nonsense talked about international copyright. The proper way to treat a copyright is to make it exactly like real-estate in every way.

“It will settle itself under these conditions. If Congress were to bring in a law that a man’s life was not to extend over a hundred and sixty years, somebody would laugh. That law wouldn’t concern anybody. The man would be out of the jurisdiction of the court. A term of years in copyright comes to exactly the same thing. No law can make a book live or cause it to die before the appointed time.

“Tottletown, Cal., was a new town, with a population of three thousand— banks, fire-brigade, brick buildings, and all the modern improvements. It lived, it flourished, and it disappeared. To-day no man can put his foot on any remnant of Tottletown, Cal. It’s dead. London continues to exist. Bill Smith, author of a

book read for the next year or so, is real-estate in Tottletown. William Shakespeare, whose works are extensively read, is real-estate in London. Let Bill Smith, equally with Mr. Shakespeare now deceased, have as complete a control over his copyright as he would over his real-estate. Let him gamble it away, drink it away, or— give it to the church. Let his heirs and assigns treat it in the same manner.

“Every now and again I go up to Washington, sitting on a board to drive that sort of view into Congress. Congress takes its arguments against international copyright delivered ready made, and— Congress isn’t very strong. I put the real-estate view of the case before one of the Senators.

“He said: ‘Suppose a man has written a book that will live for ever?’

“I said: ‘Neither you nor I will ever live to see that man, but we’ll assume it. What then?’

“He said: ‘I want to protect the world against that man’s heirs and assigns, working under your theory.’

“I said: ‘You think that all the world has no commercial sense. The book that will live for ever can’t be artificially kept up at inflated prices. There will always be very expensive editions of it and cheap ones issuing side by side.’

“Take the case of Sir Walter Scott’s novels,” Mark Twain continued, turning to me. “When the copyright notes protected them, I bought editions as expensive as I could afford, because I liked them. At the same time the same firm were selling editions that a cat might buy. They had their real estate, and not being fools, recognized that one portion of the plot could be worked as a gold mine, another as a vegetable garden, and another as a marble quarry. Do you see?”

What I saw with the greatest clearness was Mark Twain being forced to fight for the simple proposition that a man has as much right to the work of his brains (think of the heresy of it!) as to the labour of his hands. When the old lion roars, the young whelps growl. I growled assentingly, and the talk ran on from books in general to his own in particular.

Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.

“I haven’t decided,” quoth Mark Twain, getting up, filling his pipe, and walking up and down the room in his slippers. “I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honour and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.”

Here I lost my reverence completely, and protested against any theory of the sort, because, to me at least, Tom Sawyer was real.
“Oh, he is real,” said Mark Twain. “He’s all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book”; then, turning round, “because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.”

“Do you believe that, then?”

“I think so. Isn’t it what you call Kismet?”

“Yes; but don’t give him two joggles and show the result, because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.”
He laughed— a large, wholesome laugh— and this began a dissertation on the rights of a man to do what he liked with his own creations, which being a matter of purely professional interest, I will mercifully omit.

Returning to the big chair, he, speaking of truth and the like in literature, said that an autobiography was the one work in which a man, against his own will and in spite of his utmost striving to the contrary, revealed himself in his true light to the world.
“A good deal of your life on the Mississippi is autobiographical, isn’t it?” I asked.

“As near as it can be— when a man is writing to a book and about himself. But in genuine autobiography, I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself.

“I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine— a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions— a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie— and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine. He did it. The manuscript would have made an octavo volume, but— good, honest man that he was— in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.

“It is not in human nature to write the truth about itself. None the less the reader gets a general impression from an autobiography whether the man is a fraud or a good man. The reader can’t give his reasons any more than a man can explain why a woman struck him as being lovely when he doesn’t remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. And the impression that the reader gets is a correct one.”

“Do you ever intend to write an autobiography?”

“If I do, it will be as other men have done— with the most earnest desire to make myself out to be the better man in every little business that has been to my discredit; and I shall fail, like the others, to make my readers believe anything except the truth.”
This naturally led to a discussion on conscience. Then said Mark Twain, and his words are mighty and to be remembered:—

“Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Treat your conscience as you would treat anything else. When it is rebellious, spank it— be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I have reduced mine to order. At least, I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I have killed it from over-severity. It’s wrong to kill a child, but, in spite of all I have said, a conscience differs from a child in many ways. Perhaps it’s best when it’s dead.”
Here he told me a little— such things as a man may tell a stranger— of his early life and upbringing, and in what manner

he had been influenced for good by the example of his parents. He spoke always through his eyes, a light under the heavy eyebrows; anon crossing the room with a step as light as a girl’s, to show me some book or other; then resuming his walk up and down the room, puffing at the cob pipe. I would have given much for nerve enough to demand the gift of that pipe— value, five cents when new. I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desired the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.
Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was an investiture of the Star of India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-studded jewel, all complete. If hereafter, in the changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall to cureless ruin, I will tell the superintendent of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put his hand on my shoulder; and he shall give me a room to myself and a double allowance of paupers’ tobacco.

“I never read novels myself,” said he, “except when the popular persecution forces me to— when people plague me to know what I think of the last book that every one is reading.”

“And how did the latest persecution affect you?”

“Robert?” said he, interrogatively.

I nodded.

“I read it, of course, for the workmanship. That made me think I had neglected novels too long— that there might be a good many books as graceful in style somewhere on the shelves; so I began a course of novel reading. I have dropped it now; it did not amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect on me was exactly as though a singer of street ballads were to hear excellent music from a church organ. I didn’t stop to ask whether the music was legitimate or necessary. I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am speaking of the grace and beauty of the style.

“You see,” he went on, “every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way.

You have my private opinion about that book. I don’t know what my public ones are exactly. They won’t upset the earth.”
He recurled himself into the chair and talked of other things.

“I spend nine months of the year at Hartford. I have long ago satisfied myself that there is no hope of doing much work during those nine months. People come in and call. They call at all hours, about everything in the world. One day I thought I would keep a list of interruptions. It began this way:—

“A man came and would see no one but Mr. Clemens. He was an agent for photogravure reproductions of Salon pictures. I very seldom use Salon pictures in my books.

“After that man another man, who refused to see any one but Mr. Clemens, came to make me write to Washington about something. I saw him. I saw a third man, then a fourth. By this time it was noon. I had grown tired of keeping the list. I wished to rest.

“But the fifth man was the only one of the crowd with a card of his own. He sent up his card. ‘Ben Koontz, Hannibal, Mo.’ I was raised in Hannibal. Ben was an old schoolmate of mine. Consequently I threw the house wide open and rushed with both hands out at a big, fat, heavy man, who was not the Ben I had ever known— nor anything like him.

“‘But is it you, Ben?’ I said. ‘You’ve altered in the last thousand years.’

“The fat man said: ‘Well, I’m not Koontz exactly, but I met him down in Missouri, and he told me to be sure and call on you, and he gave me his card, and’— here he acted the little scene for my benefit— ‘if you can wait a minute till I can get out the circulars— I’m not Koontz exactly, but I’m travelling with the fullest line of rods you ever saw.’”

“And what happened?” I asked breathlessly.

“I shut the door. He was not Ben Koontz— exactly— not my old school-fellow, but I had shaken him by both hands in love, and . . . I had been bearded by a lightning-rod man in my own house.

“As I was saying, I do very little work in Hartford. I come here for three months every year, and I work four or five hours a day in a study down the garden of that little house on the hill. Of course, I do not object to two or three interruptions. When a man is in the full swing of his work these little things do not affect him. Eight or ten or twenty interruptions retard composition.”

I was burning to ask him all manner of impertinent questions, as to which of his works he himself preferred, and so forth; but, standing in awe of his eyes, I dared not. He spoke on, and I listened, grovelling.

It was a question of mental equipment that was on the carpet, and I am still wondering whether he meant what he said.
“Personally I never care for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now, for instance, before you came in”— he pointed to an encyclopædia on the shelves— “I was reading an article about ‘Mathematics.’ Perfectly pure mathematics.

“My own knowledge of mathematics stops at ‘twelve times twelve,’ but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful. That mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So do I. Get your facts first, and”— the voice dies away to an almost inaudible drone— “then you can distort ’em as much as you please.”
Bearing this precious advice in my bosom, I left; the great man assuring me with gentle kindness that I had not interrupted him in the least. Once outside the door, I yearned to go back and ask some questions— it was easy enough to think of them now— but his time was his own, though his books belonged to me.

I should have ample time to look back to that meeting across the graves of the days. But it was sad to think of the things he had not spoken about.

In San Francisco the men of The Call told me many legends of Mark’s apprenticeship in their paper five and twenty years ago; how he was a reporter delightfully incapable of reporting according to the needs of the day. He preferred, so they said, to coil himself into a heap and meditate until the last minute. Then he would produce copy bearing no sort of relationship to his legitimate work— copy that made the editor swear horribly, and the readers of The Call ask for more.

I should like to have heard Mark’s version of that, with some stories of his joyous and variegated past. He has been journeyman printer (in those days he wandered from the banks of the Missouri even to Philadelphia), pilot cub and full-blown pilot, soldier of the South (that was for three weeks only), private secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor of Nevada (that displeased him), miner, editor, special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, and the Lord only knows what else. If so experienced a man could by any means be made drunk, it would be a glorious thing to fill him up with composite liquors, and, in the language of his own country, “let him retrospect.” But these eyes will never see that orgy fit for the gods!

This interview was originally published in The Pioneer (Allahabad), circa 1890.

India is a post-colonial state, even a Nehruvian state, is one of Mr. Khilnani’s central themes in his book The Idea of India. This state has existed only since 1947, with frontiers and institutions largely as the British had left them. Even the Indian Constitution owes much to the 1935 Government of India Act. As he observes, the Indian experience has shown that democracy is compatible with Asian cultures— at least with the Indian culture. At least some of the credit should go to the hierarchical power sharing built into caste. After all, every state is a hierarchical system or it is anarchy.

Book on caste as a dynamic system

It is now some 20 years since Naipaul and Khilnani penned their studies of India. In that time there have been major developments in the national scene, notably the continuing downward spiral of the Congress (predicted by Mr. Khilnani); the return to power of the Congress at the head of the coalition in the UPA government seems to be a temporary reprieve. The Congress fortunes were artificially boosted by the performance in two southern states— Congress in Andhra Pradesh and its ally DMK in Tamil Nadu. This now is in decline, especially in Tamil Nadu.

A more significant development is the long term trend in caste politics. Recent elections including the just concluded state elections in U.P., Punjab and others suggest that voting patterns no longer strictly follow caste patterns. Or we should perhaps say that caste has changed in response to the democratic experience and no longer fits into the pattern prescribed by vote bank calculus.

Shortly before his death in 1999, sociologist M.N. Srinivas edited a book he called Caste: Its twentieth century avatar. In a lengthy introduction Srinivas, India’s greatest sociologist and the foremost student of the role of caste in society observed that caste is a dynamic system and should not be treated as fixed for all time. But this was how caste and Hindu society in general were portrayed and analyzed by Western scholars and Indians who took their cue from them. A feature of the post-Nehru and post-Indira era was the emergence of caste and community based politics and political parties. This was captured by Srinivas in the phrase ‘vote bank’— a term he coined in 1955. As C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) noted, caste politics was a Congress creation.

In all this, there was an implicit assumption that caste and community loyalties remain frozen and can always be tapped for votes. An often ignored fact is that caste parties like the SP and the BSP only capitalized on the caste and community based political paradigm (or vote bank politics) introduced and institutionalized by the Congress. They did not innovate it. C. Rajagoplachari (Rajaji), a critic of Nehru and a true liberal, had observed as far back as 1963:

“What the Congress Party does speaks far louder than its preaching. Communalism is at the root of all the decisions of the Congress Party… Instead of allowing and encouraging a natural synthesis of castes and communities in a developing continent, the coming together is directed to be brought about through political affiliation to Congress and through that means alone. The result is instead of casteism disappearing, a new and worse caste has been created— the caste of the ruling party.”

This is what Professor Khilnani also notes—winning elections in pursuit of power became the be-all and end-all of the Congress leadership, everything else became secondary. This was a natural corollary of Nehru’s idea of nationalism as democratic expression through elections. Rajaji was remarkably prescient when he predicted: “…this new caste has come to be worse type of the old feudal tyrannies and caste dominations. Corruption and disintegration are the natural corollaries of this domination of a new caste.” Nehru’s idea of the nation as a democratic state must bear a share for this.

Even Rajaji, for all his vision and experience failed to foresee the dominance of the party and the nation not by a new caste but a nouveau riche family headed by a European woman with no record of service to the nation, or experience in public life and her feudal court. Nehru’s nationalism was buried for good when the Congress in 1998 surrendered itself and the nation to Sonia Gandhi. For the moment, she had won the “contest for the ownership of the state” as Khilnani puts it, and all the perks and privileges that go with it while giving little in return. Narrowing nationalism to mean democratic pursuit of power led to this subversion of democracy aided by the accident of marriage.

How would Nehru have reacted to this? We have a pointer. When the last Maharaja of Holkar died, Nehru refused to allow his son to succeed to the largely ceremonial title because his mother was an American. Was this because Nehru was a xenophobic chauvinist as those questioning Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s fitness for constitutional office have been called? Ever since Mrs. Sonia Gandhi gained control of the government in 2004, corruption has indeed increased manifold. The degradation of Nehru’s India reached a new depth when the ‘distinguished economist’ Manmohan Singh used his position as prime minister to bailout Mrs. Gandhi’s business associate, the Italian swindler Ottavio Quattrocchi.

M.N. Srinivas, the pre-eminent figure in Indian sociology

Another development is the bankruptcy of Nehruvian secularism to the point it is now all but a dirty word. Nehru himself started the debasement by introducing the Haj Bill in 1959 for providing financial subsidies to Muslims going on Haj Pilgrimage. (The idea of Haj subsidy goes against the principle of secularism as well as the teachings of Islam.) During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi introduced the word ‘secularism’ into the Indian Constitution without defining it. Ever since that sorry day, ‘secularism’ has been invoked in the service of vote bank politics— to justify the unjustifiable (like the betrayal of Shah Bano and the abandonment of victims of atrocities in the name of ‘personal law’ like Imrana who was forced to live as the second wife of her rapist father-in-law.) At the same time, the nightmare scenario of communal polarization feared by Mr. Khalnani in his 2003 Introduction has not come to pass. On the other hand, an unusual degree of communal harmony has prevailed even in the face of attacks by Islamic terrorists on Indian sites, including temples in Varanasi and Ahmedabad.

Urbanization and better communications like satellite TV and mobile telephones are bringing about rapid changes in caste and its role in society. The results of the last several elections—not just the latest—suggest that voters are looking beyond caste in selecting leaders. In 2007, Mayavati came to power in U.P. on the back of a caste coalition. But her failure to rise above caste considerations and poor performance resulted in a resounding defeat five years later. The victorious leader, the 37 year-old Akhilesh Yadav appealed to all constituencies and emphasized effective governance and development.

If recent results are any indication, the days of the Congress party are numbered. The not-so-youthful Crown Prince Rahul Gandhi has shown himself to be singularly inept and unequal to the task of reviving the party’s fortunes, but no alternative is in sight. Family monopoly has come back to haunt the party. As the U.P. election was getting close, a comedy of errors was enacted with Rahul’s sister Priyanka accompanied by her little children hitting the campaign trail soon followed by her husband Robert Vadra. Neither had any experience in public life but felt qualified because of the family connection. Anywhere else it would be called nepotism but the Indian media described it as dynastic charisma. But the Indian voter who showed he was capable of looking beyond caste showed himself capable of seeing through dynastic pretensions also. You cannot fool all the people all the time.

Only time will tell whether this is a harbinger of things to come. Caste has two faces— social and political. As India becomes increasingly urbanized, and urban ideas make their way into the villages, the social aspect of caste may be diffused by economic and educational developments. This is already happening among educated urbanites. Politically, caste may not altogether disappear but may continue to serve in its age old role of ensuring that no one group becomes oppressive by cornering all the resources. In short, it brings us back to Srinivas’s observation that caste is an essential feature of Indian society, but not something frozen in time or space.

An important concept that Srinivas introduced was Sanskritization. By this he meant all sections of society seek status and upward mobility by imitating elite groups. This is evident in urban areas, especially in areas containing new immigrants from rural areas, but television and mobile phones may begin to see the phenomenon work in rural areas as well.

Future: broadening the horizons of political thought

As Professor Khilnani rightly points out the sustainability of India’s democracy rests on its ability to preserve its internal diversity and assimilate new ideas. This has never been in doubt going back to Vedic times. Threats to diversity of societies have come only from exclusivist ideologies like Christianity (in Goa), Islam and Marxism and in whatever garb operating in the guise of ‘universalism’. (In our own time, we need look no further than Tibet, Pakistan and Bangladesh.)

He also remarks that nationalism and national identity cannot be confined to the borders of India, and Indians should accept the reality that Western political idiom and methodology will be applied to non-Western societies as well including India. Mr. Khilnani goes on to observe: “It has been a far from universally happy experience. But neither side can escape its consequences. The future of Western political theories will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom large.” He also notes that in questions relating to Indian identity “categories and terms of Western political thought are essential to all judgments. This is not out of a conviction that the ideas of Western politics themselves represent the summit of human thought and feeling.”

Of course not, and one is grateful for the acknowledgement. The twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first are littered with the wreckage of applying Western political thought to non-Western societies— from Vietnam to Iraq. This raises an important question: is Western political thought—and humanities in general—capable of shedding its insularity by reaching out to pluralistic traditions— say Vedantic and Confucian?

As seen by a non-specialist, the academic discipline devoted to their study will have little to show until Western political thinkers acquire the humility to acknowledge their errors and change if not discard their theories as workers in the exact sciences (like this writer) are forced to do. Since the social sciences lack the built-in checks and balances of the exact sciences, we only know when they are wrong after the damage is done— and this damage can be monumental as in Vietnam and Iraq later. There is no testing their theories in the laboratory. Even after the catastrophe, as in Vietnam, there is more heat than light.

Simply acknowledging error like Robert McNamara’s mea culpa after Vietnam is of no value; the issue is the method not the man. Unless there is a mechanism for making such lessons of history integral part of the discipline itself, there is no assurance that the folly will not be repeated in another place and time— as it was in Iraq. This means there will be no progress, but only ad-hoc interpretations and misinterpretations until they are forgotten in a generation and a new adventure in folly is embarked upon.

The eerie similarity between the so-called Second Gulf of Tonkin Incident (August 4, 1964) that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War and the more recent fabrication of evidence for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as pretext for attacking Iraq does not inspire confidence either in the judgment of political thinkers or the soundness of their theories. As far back as 1995, Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap told his American counterpart Robert McNamara that the now infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident never happened.

This is not the full story, for doubts were expressed within hours of the claim of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf. These came from eyewitnesses like U.S. naval officers and a reconnaissance pilot, and were reported to the Defense Secretary McNamara. Even President Lyndon Johnson admitted as early as 1965 that there may have been no attacks on U.S. ships. But that did not stop the escalation of the war. So, what was driving it? A political doctrine called the ‘Domino Effect’; it held that the fall of one country to the Communists would inevitably lead to the fall of its neighbor to Communism and so on. There was never any evidence, much less proof.

If anything, the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union followed by its collapse in the neighboring countries can be used to argue a Reverse Domino Effect. This has happened before— after Napoleon in the nineteenth century and the fall of the Third Reich in the twentieth. Can we build a theory of action and reaction based on these analogies— that every domino effect is followed by a reverse domino effect? Or how about the latest received wisdom— Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Is there any way of testing it? Are civilizations like billiard balls— indistinguishable and all acting and reacting in the same way?

Such fatuous arguments are not limited to political science. The world is yet to recover from the recent global financial collapse. It was entirely man-made; its dangers were predictable and predicted, but economists went ahead with their creations anyway, giving themselves ‘Nobel Prizes’ even as they ruined national economies (and lives). The paradox is that the same people who were responsible for the catastrophe continue to be in charge of the global financial system.

This is incomprehensible to a student of the exact sciences (like this writer). No scientist could maintain his or her standing after a blunder of such magnitude. Also worth noting is the fact that a scientific error rarely has global consequences on this scale. Even space disasters, like those involving the Challenger and Columbia later are purely local events. They are thoroughly investigated and remedial steps are taken. These may not be perfect but at least the awareness is there. (This is based on this writer’s personal experience.)

This seems rarely to happen in the social sciences. There is some breast beating, but soon it is business as usual. Discredited ideas are allowed to continue until history in the form of the same folly is repeated. Are there to be no corrective mechanisms built into the system as we have in the exact sciences? A basic question that we must be prepared to face is— can the humanities ever be made free of human folly?

My relentless search took me to numerous sources, with all kinds of explanations. Some praised, Islam, specifically Shiite Islam, to high heaven and presented their evidence in support of the adulation, never mind the fact that even Shiite Islam is fractured into no less than one hundred different sects.

I found the house of Muhammad fractured so extensively that there was no way any one of them could represent what Muhammad launched. The Sunnis, for instance, consider all Shiites as infidels and the Shiites label Sunnis as betrayer of Muhammad’s faith and his household.

One interesting version I encountered has to do with how Islam was born in the first place. It is an enchanting account, narrated to me by a greatly learned agnostic who confessed disaffection for religions in general. This is what he told me about the role Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, played in what he called, birthing Islam. Here is gist of my conversation with the man, from the notes I scribbled, mostly in answers to my questions.

“Leopards have spots,” he said at one point “to deceive their prey and devour them.” People don’t have spots. They have something much more effective in getting them what they want. Their brain is a big deceptive machine. So, depending on any situation, the brain can devise a scheme in an attempt to secure what it wants. Not always successfully, because the other brain it is trying to deceive may not fall for the scheme. But, people try anyway. It is the best tool they have for getting what they want. And as they keep using this deceptive machine, they get better at using it and as they get better they are rewarded more and are likely to keep on using it further.”

“Forgive me sir,” I interrupted, “Are you using your machine right now answering my questions? Telling me the truth or deceiving me for your own purposes?”

“I ignore your rudeness,” he said, “but let me explain. Islam is fraud and deception. To begin with ‘Islam’ does not mean ‘peace.’ I’m not Arab, but I know the language as well as any educated Arab. ‘Islam’ comes from the root word ‘taslim’ which means surrender. Surrender to whom, you may ask? To Allah. Who is Allah? The lord of the universe, there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his sole emissary for now and eternity, they say. And their rallying cry is Allah-u-Akbar. They deceptively translate that as meaning God is Great. It literally means, Allah is the greatest. The word for great is kabir. Akbar is the superlative of the word and means greatest. It is an exclusionary supremacist claim. It rejects our Persian lord Ahuramazda and the gods of other people.”

“I must learn Arabic to read these things on my own. My father always tells me I should find things for myself. I am not questioning what you are telling me. But I also know you disapprove of Islam, perhaps for good reasons. And from what I have seen, there is not much I find agreeable in Islam.”

“Yes, yes. One must use his own good judgment as lamp to his feet in life’s journey. I am glad you intend to find things for yourself. Let me tell you a gem from the Christian Bible. It says, ‘by their fruit shall ye know them.’ Muslims are the fruits of Islam. What they believe and practice is the best evidence condemning the belief.”

“Not all Muslims are bad, sir.”

“Yes. There are always exceptions. I am speaking about the big picture. The overall evilness of this belief and its devastating negative impact on all of us. Give you one example. The Quran ordains, ‘Al rejalo qavamoon ala al nesa.’ Men are rulers over women, it means. Now, what benevolent creator would ordain creators of human life as subservient chattel to men, I ask you? This Islam thing is cooked up by chauvinistic misogynist men for the benefit of men. And you can see that in all their Sharia law where women are worth one half of men, they receive less inheritance, and on and on and on. Study it for yourself, as your wise father had admonished you.”

“Thank you sir, I intend to do just that. But if Islam is such a bad thing and a big fraud, why have it endured for so long, why billions adhere to it, and why it is even thriving?”

“For one, millions of professionally paid agents of this chauvinistic male-serving, women-enslaving fraud, all of them men, are busy around the clock and all over the world promoting it by any and all means that seem to work. Often customizing what they claim to be the word for word dictates of Allah to suit their objective. They Keep the fraud going and make it thrive so that these unscrupulous agents, the mullahs and imams, can keep on leading their charmed life on the back of the ignorant masses. A huge factor working in their favor is people’s death anxiety and the concern about what becomes of them after they die. The Islam fraud addresses this paramount existential dread craftily and with great success. You do as Allah commands and you will end up for immortal life in his unimaginably glorious sensuous paradise. You fail to do so and your abode is the indescribably horrific hell from which you shall never escape.

“Huge promises of goodies both in this as well as the next are reserved for men including pleasure objects women. Four wives and as many concubines as a man desires and can afford. What to women get, if they are servile to men and satisfy them? They will be also admitted to paradise. No specific goodies for them in paradise. Perhaps even there they must continue to service men’s lust. Not a bad fraud launched by Muhammad and perpetrated by hook or crook by a bunch of his savage follower men.”

At this point the man was foaming at the mouth. Stopped and took a long breath. I held my peace.

“Woman, you challenge what Allah ordains? Be obedient woman. Or your eternal punishment is confinement to Allah’s indescribably dreadful hell. Every day you will be placed in that dungeon of horror in the burning oven, then you will be placed for ravenous snakes, vampires, scorpions, tarantulas to devour your flesh and gnaw your bones in slow excruciatingly painful manner. The next day, reconstituted, you will be tormented in the same manner. For how long, you ask? For eternity. How long is eternity? If an eagle brushes its wings on a mountain 100,000 meter high, once every one 100,000 years, the time it takes to wear that mountain to sea level is one moment of eternity.”

“Sir, I am glad I am not a woman, if all this is true.”

“Find out for yourself. Every word I say is true. Right from their very own authoritative sources, the Quran and the Hadith.

“Islam is the greatest gift that Muhammad bequeathed on charlatan men to exploit the masses of fools. For as long as there are donkeys, there are those who would ride them, is our apt Persian metaphor that explains why the cast of Muslim clergy is so intent at keeping the donkeys they have and doing all they can to get more donkeys with fresh legs and strong backs to continue with their joyride.”

“Then why is it that people don’t wake up to this charade that has been going on for centuries, Sir?” I asked.

“It is sad, but true,” shook his head from side to side in bewilderment and continued, “People, more often than not, buy into any useless, fraudulent, and even harmful offering as long as it seems to provide them with a degree of relief. Many resort to mood and mind altering drugs, smoke the accursed opium, inject heroin, and much more even knowing full well how harmful they are. People seek relief from pain while they do many things to attain pleasure.

“Islam hooks people on a deadly habit forming psychological dope. You do exactly as you are told and your helper and protector will be none other than Allah, the one and only creator of this awe-striking universe. You prosper in this life and your rewards in the next life are guaranteed to exceed your highest fancy. If things don’t seem to go well for you in this world, don’t you worry and develop doubt. Because there is wisdom in it for you and you will be recompensed beyond your greatest expectations. Woe unto you if you ever betray the faith of Allah by leaving it or in any way violating its precepts. Death would only be the means of transporting you to his hell for eternal torment.”

“What exactly is what you call psychological dope, and how people get hooked on it, sir?”

“The main ingredients of Islam dope are the Quran, the Hadith, and the purported life conduct of Muhammad. As is the case with chemical dopes, the main composition can be cut or adulterated to various degrees to achieve the desired effect. The dope can be spiked, for instance, by other powerful ingredient or cut by inert fillers to moderate its action, depending on what suits the peddler — the clergy. It is through this process of customization that numerous Islamic sects and hundreds of sub-sects have emerged. Hence, there is that coalescing core of Islam that is shared by all while each sect retains the version peddled by their own clergy.”

“I am studying hard to learn Arabic so that I can read the Quran in its original and other Islamic records to find more about this movement. I am puzzled about how it got started and what made it thrive. You already explained to me how Islam has endured for so long. The clergy with vested interest keeps it going. I tend to believe that. But, how did it really get started, honorable?”

“It is a long story. You study it for yourself. I’ll give you a short synopsis. Khadija, a very rich widow in her forties became enamored by the illiterate orphan Muhammad and married him. Muhammad was in his twenties and worked for her. The young Muhammad was afflicted with a form of mental disorder that induced seizers and made him see thinks and hear voices. He, Muhammad, would frequently retreat to a cave outside of Mecca and remain secluded there for long periods of time. While in the cave he would often experience mental upheaval and imagine he had all kinds of visitations by jinns. Khadija aimed to reassure her young troubled husband that he was indeed being communicated from God. She also took the young husband to her Christian relatives where Muhammad came in contact with Biblical teachings.”

“Was Khadija Christian?”

“No one is sure. There are different accounts on that point. The fact is that she did try to comfort her young husband and she did expose him to relatives who were staunch Christians. And that is where Muhammad obtained much material for his Quran.”

“That is very interesting.”

“More interesting and hugely despicable is the work of the treacherous Salman Farsi, Muhammad’s sidekick, so to speak. This man was greatly learned in the teachings of our ancient faith as well as those of Jews and Christians. He is the one who doctored much of Muhammad’s sayings into what eventually became the Quran.

“The Quran, the supposed word for word of Allah had several versions that popped up after Muhammad’s death. The third Caliph, Osman, picked the one he liked and ordered the rest burned. Thus, Osman, a political wheeler-dealer, became the real decider of what was the real Quran. Obviously the version he liked.”

“Do I understand you are saying Islam was born by Khadija’s encouragement and the machinations of other men?”

“Yes, that’s basically sums it up. But, as I said, it is a long sad story that cannot be fully addressed in a short session. I admire your taking time and looking into it for yourself to your own satisfaction. It is an enormous job that exacts a great effort. Yet, it is something that each one of us has to do to find truth.”