Fight Theology for 22nd May 2025, 253rd Birth Anniversary of Raja Rammohun Roy

Rabindranath Tagore wrote of Raja Rammohun Roy that if Bharat struggles to find itself, it will keep looking out for Rammohun. Truly, in everyday life of India i.e. Bharat, we keep referring to Raja Rammohun Roy. Most pertinent of all times is now, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Baisaran, Phulwama. The fight against terrorism cannot be resolved by an act of war of one country on the other because in this, entire nations and races are bracketed into its religious adherence. Just as all Hindus cannot be massacred in order to stop Sati because Sati is practiced only by Hindus, all Muslims cannot be killed to eliminate terrorism because all terrorists are Muslims. Hence, arguments of Rammohun against Sati may well be used to diminish and demolish Islamic terror.

It is not true that every Hindu woman who lost her husband jumped live into the burning pyre; and in fact, only a nano fraction of the population committed this suicide for martyrdom. It was also true that most Hindus did not enjoy such feats, cringed and nauseated whenever drums beat to screams and shrieks of a woman burning alive and yet, no Hindu, even the most educated ones such as Radhakanta Deb and Kashinath Tarkabaagish who valiantly fought for western education also moved up as far as the Privy Council to bring Sati back. This is because, Sati represented the pinnacle of purity of the Hindu Shastras. Hence to criticize Sati would be to undermine the purity of Hinduism.

Much is the same for the terrorist and this is why no Muslim can ever imagine of criticizing the cruelest bout of killing. Just as one had to stand outside the shastric Hinduism to attack Sati, similarly only those born as Muslims but not live as Muslims or adhere to the faith will be able to find fault with terrorism. This is because like Sati, terrorism too is steeped in ideologies of religious purity. You cannot attack terrorism without attacking the core of Islam and if you do so, then you would, necessarily stand outside Islam. This is the crux of why terrorism will continue to bother us as long as Islamic ideals are not questioned.

Rammohun dissected and deconstructed the Shastras, demolishing the core of its ideals, and resurrected the religion with a whole new peak of a Vedic flavour of the Advaita. The Divine was now a force of Nature, it could be of any religion, and it belonged to the Pope as much as it belonged to Newton. In his book, Tuhfat, the earliest work on anthropology of religion, Rammohun argues that religion should occupy the region of the mind’s wonderment and curiosity those which were yet unsolved by the ever progressive scientific discovery; like the Puritanical Revolution in science, for Rammohun, science and religion should not be separate and that there should not be any element of faith and belief in either.

Islam must die for terror to be eliminated. The terrorist is one who fights for his religion, deploying its ideals to eliminate the faithless and kill to release his victims into the eternal dhimmi. The opening lines of the kalma that there is no God but Allah is atrocious to human reason, and offensive even for the staunchest among the monists. A fight against terror must be at the level of theology; a fight that Rammohun waged and won against both Hindu as well as Christian theology. That fight must now be fought against Islamic theology.

Rammohun qualified as the zabardast maulavi at the young age of 14 at the Patna madrashah. Though he fought Hindus and Christians alike, Buddhists and Jews, Parsis and Armenians on the side, as far as he could access them, he toyed with the idea of another treatise on Islam. Since Islam was then at its liberal best, synergized with other faiths raising no conflict with any hue of belief despite how removed it was from its own tenets, there was less of a need to pay attention to it. But now, one needs to deconstruct the faith badly; for only then like Sati, Islamic terror will be construed as being backward and foolish and not progressive and fit for our times.

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7Indira Majumdar, Krishna Sengupta and 5 others