India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 is a good read and I recommend it. But the author, Richard Eaton, is not a guru or a sheikh, and should not be taken as such. A comment Eaton makes offhand several times is that the conflict between Turks and Indians should not be understood in confessional terms. […]
Tag: Religion
Getting beyond the nerd understanding of religion
Since about 2006 I’ve had to write the same post again and again due to the nature of my audience: religion is not the purview of technically oriented nerds, and technically oriented nerds just don’t “get” it intuitively. This is something that is relevant to me personally, because I am myself a technically oriented nerd, […]
Why Hinduism is not inchoate paganism
An individual, who I have come to conclude is a troll after further comments (they are banned), mentioned offhand that Hinduism and/or Hindu identity is reactive Islam and the British, and that its origins are in the 19th century. This is a common assertion and presented recently by one of our podcast guests. I myself […]
Ram temple
Thanks to readers of this weblog I know something is going on with Ayodha in India today. Two stories I read. First, Slate, a liberal American publications, Why a Giant Hindu Deity Is Appearing in Times Square on Wednesday. Second, Al Jazeera, India: Modi to lay Ayodhya temple foundation to push Hindu agenda. I don’t […]
Looking to the east: a different secularism than the West
Why Hagia Sophia, Turkey And The Charismatic Figure Of Erdogan Bristle With Resonances For India: The Hagia Sophia reconversion ultimately points to the failure of the Kemalist project of top-down secularism. Much like the state secularism of nationalist authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Iran, Iraq etc had failed to lead to the secularisation of the wider […]
On Being Hindu in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan
Most readers of this weblog will already know this story. Far more than I do at least: Construction work at Hindu temple site in Islamabad halted. This part jumped out at me: The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), an ally of Prime Minister Khan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf recently opposed the construction of the temple by claiming that […]
Resilience in the face of religious change
Recently my friend Josiah Neely mentioned offhand how in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon argued that one reason paganism couldn’t reverse the tide of Christianity is that once a society or individual became Christian and ceased pagan practice, there wasn’t a good roadmap on how to reembrace the old traditions. In […]
The gods of place
Two books recently have made me wonder about the insights into the development of religion and culture in the Indian subcontinent. The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity explicitly makes an analogy to local Hindu gods and shrines to allow us to conceptualize what pre-Christian Roman religion was like. The whole city was […]
Cultural evolution at work!
‘God Will Protect Us’: Coronavirus Spreads Through an Already Struggling Pakistan: And the extremist clerics who often heckle or march against the civilian government, with the tacit approval of the military, are refusing to help. They largely ignored Mr. Khan’s call to limit Friday prayer gatherings. And even after the military deployed to try to […]
The rise of Islam after 1500 in the Indian subcontinent
For me, Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, is the best analysis of the peculiar spatial distribution of religion in South Asia today. This is not because Eaton’s work is without flaw, or beyond reproach. It is because few have made as concerted an effort to analyze this issue in […]