How Religion Amplified Darkness in Europe and Middle East, With Lessons for India
India must learn from history else it is doomed to repeat it
On August 5, 2020, the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Minister of India’s largest state laid the foundation stone of a grand Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, at the exact same site where a mosque stood erected since the 16th century. As Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath performed the groundbreaking ceremony amidst chants of Vedic hymns, blaring of conches and unmistakable chants of Jai Shree Ram by the assembled Hindu saints, one couldn’t help but wonder what message was being communicated by the two heads of State presiding over a religious ceremony.
Although the Indian subcontinent has previously seen religion and politics combining into a deadly mixture that spilled blood during the Partition of 1947, this is the first time in independent India that religion is being championed and deployed for political gains by those ruling the nation. Even the deeply polarising Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s, which resulted in the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya where the Ram Mandir is now being built, was helmed by an Opposition party which, despite its ability to mobilise the masses, had limited constitutional legroom to alter the secular character of the nation. The difference is that now, the same Opposition party is the ruling party of India, with an absolute majority in the Parliament and an ever greater zeal to implement its agenda of transforming India into a Hindu nation-state.
As the BJP marches on with its majoritarian juggernaut, it is worthwhile to look at similar experiments done elsewhere, where religion dictated the politics and government of the day, and what consequences it had on the progress and well-being of the people.
The European Dark Ages
Two thousand years ago, the Roman Empire was the dominant cultural and geopolitical force in Europe. Under its patronage, majestic buildings were constructed, extensive road networks and bridges crisscrossed the vast expanse of the Empire, art and literature flourished, and scientific systems like the Julian Calendar and Roman numerals were invented. But by the turn of the fifth century, the Empire began to decline, owing to a series of factors both unfortunate and inevitable. By that time, Christianity had become an influential school of thought in the region, with the Church controlling large swathes of land and finances, and civil officials swearing allegiance to the religion. Hence, when Rome finally fell in 476 AD, the enormous power vacuum got filled in by the Roman Catholic Church.
Gradually, the Church began to dictate all aspects of life: from governance where the clergy held important positions of power, to one’s everyday social life which started to revolve around the Church, and to one’s private life which began to be controlled by the tenets emerging from the Church’s interpretation of Christianity. The decisions of what was right and wrong were left to the representatives of the Divine — the Pope, the Bishops and the Priests of the Church — who displayed an inherent bias against women and Jews. Female education was not encouraged, and women were often given harsh punishments for their Sins. Similarly, Jews, widely seen as responsible for the death of Christ, were not treated equally as Catholics and were not allowed to purchase land. By the 11th century, the Church even began to lead military wars or Crusades, mostly against the Muslim invaders of Jerusalem but sometimes against non-Catholic Christians as well.
Feudalism emerged as the main economic system under the Church’s rule, under which small peasants were granted farm lands in exchange for obligations such as military service for rich aristocrats and lords. The amount of papers and publications created during this period came down significantly, which is also why modern historians call these the Dark Ages as it is very difficult to study and know about this era. Dominated by faith over reason, this period is sometimes also referred to as the Age of Faith.
The Church maintained the belief that everything was pre-written and revealed to us via the Christian Bible, including the age of the earth, the history of humanity as well as how to live according to divine will. Hence, any new idea or scientific concept deemed antithetical to the prevailing beliefs was denounced as heresy and brutally punished, the most famous example being Galileo who was forced to give up his heliocentric theory of the solar system under threat of inquisitional torture.
By the 14th Century, some thinkers started to question the corruption and abuse of power by the Church. The catastrophic Black Death pandemic between 1347–1352, where millions of people perished due to bubonic plague, also casted a heavy shadow of doubt on the claimed omnipotence and omniscience of the Church. Combined with peasant revolts against feudalism across Europe, the Protestant Reforms of the 16th Century as well as the revival of rational thinking, the power of the Church upon the lives of ordinary people began to decline, and soon the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. Scientific discoveries in mechanics and electromagnetism sprouted, inventions like the printing press and the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, and Renaissance artists began to resurrect the lost glory of the Roman Empire in their paintings and architecture.
One important thing to note here is that many of the scientists and Renaissance artists were Catholics and deeply religious. In the years that followed, the Church continued to play a pivotal role in people’s lives. But it was its decoupling with governance, law and order, as well as its reduced hegemony over one’s rational thinking that led to prosperity and wealth in the Western world.
Darkness in the Islamic world
During the time when Europe was submerged under the Dark Ages, the Middle East glided above a sea of knowledge and creativity. The period from 8th century till 13th century witnessed the Islamic Golden Age, an era of unprecedented advances in art, science, literature, poetry and architecture.
The foundation of the Islamic Golden Age was laid on large volumes of Greek and Sanskrit texts translated into Arabic. Baghdad became the epicentre of a wide-scale movement in the Arab world wherein numerous works of Mathematics, medicine and astrology were translated and used to advance agriculture, healthcare and navigation in the region. Slowly, it spurred original scientific thinking among Muslim philosophers who started to produce scholarly works of their own.
This advent of rationalism was enabled by the earlier kings of the ruling Abbasid caliphate, who wholeheartedly supported the spirit of inquiry and discovery. They believed that the Holy Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, thereby dismissing any notion of rivalry between science and Islam. Such state patronisation made possible works such as the Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals) by Al-Jahiz in the 9th century which explored a theory similar to Darwin’s evolution, the Kitab al Manazir (Book of Optics) by Ibn al-Haytham in 1021 which explained that vision occurs when light deflects off an object and then passes into one’s eye, and the Al Qanun fil-Tibb (the Canon of Medicine) by Ibn Sina in the 10th century which was a monumental medical encyclopaedia that was used as the primary text for European medical courses for a long time.
This Spring of Science in the Islamic world also fed its knowledge back to Europe, which ultimately became the basis for its revival in the later years. Today, English words such as “algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith, coffee, and lemon” all trace their origins to Arabic, reflecting Islam’s contribution to the West. But this spring didn’t last for long. Owing to geopolitical tensions in the Abbasid caliphate, as well as threats from the Christian Crusades and Mongol invasions, the Arab rulers gradually began to turn inwards, narrowing the space for inquiry and reason. The state support turned from the Mu’tazalite philosophy of rationality towards the much more conservative Ash’arite school of thought. The later Abbasid kings began to believe that the Koran was unchallengeable and that everything was pre-ordained by Allah, the one true God — which, as a philosophy, is starkly similar to that of the Catholic Church during the European Dark Ages.
By the 11th century, some Mu’tazalite scholars started to face persecution and their works publicly burnt as punishment for questioning their faith and God. At the same time, Ash’arite philosophers gained prominence while opposing any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. The most notable among such traditionalist scholars was al-Ghazali who, in the late 11th century, criticised the use of rationality in the matters of Islam, and called for the inquisitive Greek and Aristotelian philosophy to be restricted as per the Islamic perspectives of science. His debilitating influence on freedom of thought had a cascading effect on the production of original scientific work in the Middle-East, and soon the Ash’arite philosophy became the dominant force especially among Sunni Muslims (who were and are still far greater in number compared to Shias). The upcoming Abbasid caliphs and dynasties like the Seljuks, Mamluks and Ottomans displayed little enthusiasm towards scientific research and development, and when the Mongols finally invaded Baghdad in 1258, it became just the final nail in the coffin of the glorious but short-lived Islamic Golden Age.
Lessons for India
While Europe managed to come out of the hegemonic influences of religion, the Middle-East has unfortunately not yet recovered from the myopia and rigidity of thought due to the prevailing view that religion and God must not be questioned. Today, for roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, only two scientists from Muslim countries have won Nobel Prizes in science, just 1 percent of the world’s scientific literature is contributed by Muslim majority countries, and there are only two universities from the Middle-East in the top 200.
Such examples of darkness in Europe and Middle-East ring alarm bells for another great civilisation of the East — India.
Once a cradle of spirituality, philosophy and advancements in mathematics, astrology and medicine, the Indian subcontinent too strayed away from its path and descended into casteism and superstition, thanks to a very narrow and crooked reading of religious scriptures, as well as due to scathing attacks by Turkish invaders and British colonisers. While India witnessed its own Renaissance in the 19th century when reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Savitribai Phule and Swami Vivekananda propounded a more open, tolerant and equitable vision of Hinduism, the gains made during such movements appear to have been limited. Today, while there are laws to tackle caste and gender-based discrimination, another version of Hinduism is being espoused by powerful authorities which threatens to take us back to the dark days.
Initially developed to counter the aggressive Christian missionaries and Islamic zealots, Hindutva calls for creating a homogenous Hindu nation-state which shall be governed based on a Dharmic value system and where all other religions would be subjugated to the Hindu way of living and praying. Such imposition of one faith over others is unprecedented in a country as culturally rich and diverse as India, where people from different backgrounds have lived and worked together for centuries. While promoting the tenets of Hinduism and the achievements of our ancestors is definitely constructive, shrinking the space for all other religions and cultures and suffocating them out of existence will surely rip apart the unity and stability of India.
Today, religion is being used to segregate, discriminate and rule over a population which belongs to a myriad of cultures and traditions. While on one hand we have a number of powerful right-wing organisations which propound the ideals of Hindutva, there is also a mushrooming of conservative organisations from minorities which call for an imposition of rigid religious systems like the Sharia. Laws such as the CAA have been enacted which institutionalises discrimination based on faith. A Hindu priest accused of promoting violence against Muslims is serving as the Chief Minister of India’s largest state and is on the cusp of running for the office of the Prime Minister.
India doesn’t need the narrow-mindedness and intolerance of any religion dominating its polity and people. The need of the hour, instead, is to spur scientific thinking, achieve the goals of ending poverty and hunger, and tackle the biggest challenges faced by humanity like climate change.
Religion is a matter of intimate, deep personal belief and faith. Just like the Renaissance artists, many of today’s top scientists and thinkers are deeply religious too. Religion in one’s personal life as such doesn’t hamper progress or peace. But, when religion is made the sole identifier of an individual, and is used to encourage close-mindedness, compliance, and a feeling of superiority over other religions, things generally tend to go south, just as history has shown.
Hopefully, the people of India take a cue from the failures of the European and Middle-Eastern civilisations, and understand that mixing religion with politics is an extremely counterproductive idea.
(I’ve written a novel exploring the relationship between politics and religion in modern India. It’s called Fireflies from the Future, and is available on Amazon. Do check it out.)
References:
- https://learnodo-newtonic.com/roman-achievements
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire#Rise_of_Christianity,_possible_decline_of_the_armed_forces
- https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Church/
- https://study.com/learn/lesson/middle-ages-events-timeline.html#:~:text=With%20the%20end%20of%20the,the%20spread%20of%20the%20plague.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
- https://medium.com/the-history-inquiry/did-the-mongols-destroy-islam-df0ce87e0f98
- https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
- https://www.quora.com/What-caused-the-end-of-the-Islamic-Golden-Age
- https://thewire.in/books/mustafa-akyols-reopening-muslim-minds-seeks-to-right-the-wrongs-in-the-muslim-world-today
- https://leverageedu.com/learn/study-abroad-14-arab-universities-in-the-top-500-news-2023-07/
- https://www.culturopedia.com/modern-hindu-renaissance/
