Allah : The manifestation of Rudra

Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 CE in Mecca at a time when the Arabian peninsula was manifested with warring tribes. Prophet was orphaned at a very young and spent his childhood with various relatives. After growing up, he started working as a diplomat, and around the age of 40, started getting very concerned with the prevalent social problems of his times. He began to spend a lot of time praying to God for guidance in a cave called Hira in Mount Jabal al-Nour, near Mecca. During one of these prayers, the angel Gabriel appeared before him and started revealing to him the verses of the Quran. These revelations continued till the end of Prophet's life. The Quran is a compilation of these revelations, considered to have come straight from God, and so unquestionable and unchangeable. Since the first revelation of the Quranic verses in 610 CE, the religion of Islam has spread far and wide, largely through the use of force, and as on today controls large parts of Asia and Africa, and is now making inroads into Europe and America, through terror financing and other channels. 

The purpose of Islam is to demolish all false beliefs about God, and establish the right path towards Him. In Islamic thought, God is not just about inner experience, but also about the manners and  social customs. Islam seeks to control every single aspect of a believer's life, and leaves no room for personal opinion and disagreement. As verse 33:36 of the Quran says, "It is not for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter, that they should [thereafter] have any choice about their affair. And whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger has certainly strayed into clear error." The time and place of Quran's revelation to Muhammad have played a very crucial role in the way Islam has developed. During that time, Arabic people were largely idolators and highly opposed to Islam's idea of a formless God. Also, Quran is not accommodative of other beliefs and customs.  And so, it was natural for there to be a huge conflict between Muhammad and the other powerful people of Arabia. This led to the commencement of an ever lasting war for the establishment of peace and righteousness. A person may be right in his/her views, but if s/he thinks thats the only valid path and everyone else is wrong, it is highly unlikely that s/he will be able to live peacefully with anyone else. As BR Ambedkar once said, "The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity."

Does this mean that Muhammad was a bad person? Does this mean that Quran was his own imagination, since such a violent ideology could not have come from God? One option for civil society is to start hating this violent ideology and discredit it as being evil. But that may not be a wise or even a correct opinion. As Swami Vivekananda said in his lecture on Muhammad, "These old people were all messengers of God. I fall down and worship them; I take the dust of their feet. But they are dead! ... And we are alive. We must go ahead!" If something has the power to bind so many people for so many centuries, it must have a Divine power behind it and cannot be just a creation of an ordinary man. Interestingly, Vedic philosophy provides a possible explanation for the phenomenon of Islam and ways to control its destructive tendencies. Quran may consider non-believers to be kaafirs, but Vedic philosophy is all embracing and applies to all humans and all societies. In some sense, Vedas provide the most general scientific understanding of human experience and mystical powers of the universe.

In Vedic philosophy, the supreme power of the God is divided into three categories : Creation, Maintenance and Destruction. Creation is associated with Brahma, Maintenance with Vishnu and Destruction with Shiva. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are not three separate Gods, but three different manifestations of the same one God. All these three are equally important aspects of the universe. Only when the old ways are destroyed can the new ways take their place. One could perhaps think of it as the annihilation and creation operators of Quantum Mechanics! And maintenance would be akin to the space-time propagation operator. Now, each of these three categories of God's power also have further subdivisions into myriad forms based on preponderance of specific qualities. Although Shiva is the Lord of destruction, He can take the form of a peaceful Adi Yogi who came down to earth for the spread of Yoga, or also the form of Rudra, who is known to be the most frightening one. In the Rig Veda, the Rudra is described as being extremely terrifying and fierce like a formidable wild beast. According to the Puranas, the purpose of Rudra is to destroy all false beliefs and bring all humans under one common umbrella, which is what Allah also aims to achieve through Islam.

The Puranas contain lot of stories about various forms of Gods and Goddesses. And one interesting thing to note is that these various forms are brought into existence to achieve a noble cause, but soon they loose control and start causing harm to the world they were created to protect. This is something like the law of inertia, or manifestation of tamas. Even Rudra, which is a form of Shiva, which came into existence to destroy evil soon looses control and even starts destroying that which is good and needs to be preserved. This is unfortunately what is happening with Islam as well. It was created to bring sense to the warring Arabic tribes, but has now itself become a collection of warring tribes as we can see with whats happening in the middle eastern Islamic world. So how can we control this  destructive energy of the Rudra? Vedas and Puranas offer three different ways of doing it.

Firstly, the Rudra form of Shiva can be controlled by propitiating the peaceful form of Shiva, the Adi Yogi. Hopefully, the widespread interest in Yoga and Ayurveda will have a calming effect on Rudra and it will slowly calm down and recede into a corner. Secondly, the maintenance aspect of God's power, Vishnu, also has powers to control Shiva. And in the modern world this manifests through science and economics. It is well known that the trading communities within Muslims are largely peaceful and happily coexist with other cultures and belief systems. Thirdly, and most importantly, Rudra can be controlled through Kali, the Divine Mother! In the Puranas, Kali and Shiva have an interesting relation with each other. When Kali goes out of control, it is Shiva who controls Her. And when Shiva goes out of control, it is Kali who controls Him. What does Kali mean in the context of Islam? It basically means the upliftment of Muslim women and providing them equal opportunities of education, employment and social liberties. There is unfortunately an attempt in liberal circles to make hijab and burqa fashionable, without these people realising that it is a form of subjugation and not freedom of choice. There is also hardly any voice among liberal circles about the atrocities committed on Muslim women due to various provisions of Shariah (Islam law), eg. Triple Talaq. If Islam has to come out of its fierce form and get milder, it is very important for non-Muslim legislators to enforce these civil reforms wherever possible. If we wait for Islam to reform itself from within, that is never going to happen, as we can learn from these Puranic stories.