Berkley Center

In much scholarly writing on religion it is taken for granted that different world religions constitute separate traditions with their own authoritative discourses and practices. The scholarly practice of dividing the domains of expertise in religion to correspond to different religious traditions such as “anthropology of Islam” or “anthropology of Christianity” ends up posing the issue of religious pluralism in terms of two or more fully constituted religious traditions encountering each other. The issue then gets rendered as that of promoting understanding between comprehensive worldviews that are incommensurate with each other and finding ways of “tolerating” differences.

The issue of religious difference, when posed in these terms, suffers from a particular form of presentism by taking the anxieties articulated in Europe about the increasing presence of Muslims within its own boundaries to be equivalent to the experience of religious difference itself. This clash of civilizations perspective, first popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s, has been refined in later writings but nevertheless forms an underlying assumption behind prescriptions on how to promote religious tolerance. Instead, paying attention to other contexts (both historical and contemporary) in which the presence of an interreligious milieu was taken to be the normal condition of life can help us broaden our conceptual repertoire for thinking about ways of being in the world that are both singular and multiple. These ways of being, in which the life of the other was engaged at different scales of social life, did not eliminate conflict across followers of different religions, but these conflicts were part of a more complex understanding of what it was to live in and inherit a multi-religious milieu.

A paradigmatic way of positing the issue of religious difference in contemporary societies starts with the assumption of clear fault lines in which a modern sensibility that is flexible and open to multiplicity confronts a more rigid sensibility encompassed by the word “fundamentalism.” Consider this diagnostic statement by David Held and Henrietta Moore:

“[Fundamentalism] has no time for multiple identities, complex allegiances, and cultural ambiguity. The fault lines running through contemporary society divides those who call themselves guardians of tradition to reassert themselves and those who accept and welcome cultural diversity and seek dialogue and minimum rules of coexistence so that all can live peacefully without resort to violence and coercion.”

In this formulation, there are no conceptual challenges either with regard to the collapse of such categories as “fundamentalism” and “guardians of tradition” or to the subjectivities that are assigned to these categories. But if these are the kind of subjectivities encountered in the contemporary world, then a theory of the subject that does not take it as fully formed must ask: what are the historical conditions that might account for the continuities or ruptures produced under new conditions of modernity? Pious intentions notwithstanding, one might ask along with Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood whether a secular mode of regulating differences might have unintended consequences in producing the very subjectivities signaled by such terms as “traditional” or “fundamentalist” within the discourse of modernity. How might the direction of “solutions” offered to the challenge of religious diversity within modern polities, such as the cultivation of “workable cosmopolitanism” or “civic inclusion” be altered if we were to take alternate modes of engagement with the other into account?

We might be able to expand our understanding of religious diversity by looking at “tradition” and “modernity” through a different lens than that p­rovided by these dominant discourses. The first example is from a letter—Zafar-namah (The Epistle of Victory) that Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs and the founder of the Khalsa order, wrote to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb after the evacuation of his warriors from Andanpur fort in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the subsequent battle of Chamkaur in Punjab in which a large number of Sikh warriors were massacred. Why call his letter an Epistle of Victory at precisely the moment of defeat? The key to the text is what Guru Gobind Singh isolates as the moment of defeat for the Mughal emperor, alluding to the fact that Aurangzeb had betrayed an oath, duly recorded on a copy of the holy Qur'an with his signature and sent to the Guru, promising free passage to his band of warriors if he evacuated the Anandpur fort.

The letter read: “I don’t have trust even equal to a drop (of water) in your Generals. They were all telling lies. (…) You neither follow the teachings of Islam nor do you understand its meaning. You do not know the ways of the Lord nor you have any faith in the Prophet Mohammed.”

Particularly fascinating here is the ability of a Sikh leader to fault an emperor not because the emperor is a Muslim, but because he is not a good Muslim. The expressions of sorrow, complaint, and betrayal come from criteria honed in a shared world, in which the ability to cohabit comes not from contractual agreements and rules of cohabitation, but from the assumption that another religion allows possibilities for a follower to be a good or bad Muslim. Judgment here is premised on criteria that have come to be shared by the process of living together.

The ability to project words across different religions comes from drawing upon a shared vocabulary, but one neither infinitely stretchable nor immune from being misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented. For instance, though Guru Gobind Singh starts with verses of praise for the one god, all the words used are adjectives that would be recognized in both Muslim and Sikh (or Hindu) forms of speech—such as paravrardigar (sustainer) or rahim (merciful) or words for scripture such as ahl-e-kitab (the divine tablet). There is an avoidance of specific proper names in this text—so god is not referred to as Allah.

All these examples raise fascinating issues of translation across religions and how absorption of categories or genres from a neighboring religion expands the potential of one’s own religious experience. These issues arise within a milieu of cohabitation of different religions in which both antagonism and attraction form the texture of relationships.

Another example illuminated the waxing and waning of solidarities and antagonism that marked the relations between religious experiences of different communities rather than standing enmities or alliances between them. Distinguished historian Shaid Amin provides a marvelous account of such nomadic forms of solidarities by stitching together various narratives through which Ghazi Miyan, a warrior-saint of North India, finds a footing among both Hindus and Muslims. Ghazi Miyan is actually absent from the historical record, though he is popularly believed to have been a nephew of the well-known Sultan Mahmud, who invaded India 17 times. What substitutes for the historical record, Amin shows, is a hagiography by the Sufi saint Abdur Rahman Chishti, entitled Mirat-i-Masudi – purporting to be the life story of Salar Masud, later also known by the epithets of Ghazi Miyan or the more affectionate Balle Miyan (diminutive form), Dulhe Bhai (the bridegroom). The latter, names of endearment, appear in the popular culture of North India as the story of his exploits gets absorbed in a variety of forms such as children’s ditties and women’s songs and forms of devotional worship, especially by women seeking his blessings or making votive offerings for the birth of a son. Amin shows how the figure of Ghazi Miyan encompasses within itself many contradictory attributes. He is seen as the killer of kafirs (infidels) who wages a war against idolatry. Perversely, it seems, he embraces the company of a dog, considered impure in Islam. He is also the protector of cows and dies on the way to his wedding because he heeds the call for help by village women against cow rustlers. Amin’s work beautifully weaves together the contradictory impulses of speaking of Muslims as invaders and destroyers of temples, as well as protectors of cows and brothers to women. Amin shows the ability in these stories to distinguish those who combined conquest with an attraction and attachment to local cultural milieus and those who were simply marauders.

The work of popular culture here creates figures through which a contradictory history of the relation between Hindus and Muslims might be inherited. Instead of the idea of syncretism, which would imagine mixtures between elements of two fully constituted bounded entities, Amin suggests that a kind of consent was given to the presence of the other. In doing so, even antagonisms could be absorbed within more fundamental agreements about openness to the experience of the local milieu by those who came as warriors and conquerors as well as by the original settlers who recognized a certain kinship of affects across religions.

These complex renderings of what it was to inhabit a milieu composed of different religious traditions cannot provide the kind of policy prescriptions through which religious differences are sought to be contained and regulated, in the public sphere in modern polities. They do however point to different regions of the imaginary through which the life of the other might be engaged in everyday life, such that the inevitable conflicts and betrayals within a cultural milieu might yet be contained not through a cultivated “tolerance” but by allowing these unhappy moments to be absorbed in the everyday, acknowledging the diverse ways in which “life” knits disparate “lives” together in mutual attraction and antagonism.