Download PDF | Johan Elverskog - Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road-University of Pennsylvania Press (2010).
345 Pages
INTRODUCTION
I was ordered to fight all men until they say “There is no god but Allah.” —Prophet Muhammad’s farewell address , The ascetic Gotama roars his lion’s roar, in company and confidently, they question him and he answers, he wins them over with his answers, they find it pleasing and are satisfied.
—Mahasihanada Sutta, Digha Nikaya
THE BUDDHIST MONASTERY Of Nalanda was founded in northeast India in the early fifth century. Over time it became the premier institution of higher learning in Asia and, much like leading universities today, Nalanda had a world-renowned faculty working on the cutting edge of the theoretical sciences and a student body drawn from across the Buddhist world.'
This prestige also brought with it ample gifts from the rich and powerful. Not only had local rulers in northeast India bequeathed entire villages to help finance the running of Nalanda, but the king of Sumatra had also offered villages for the monastery’s endowment,” and a special fund had been created to support students specifically from China. At its peak Nalanda had an extensive faculty teaching a diverse student body of about three thousand on a beautiful campus composed of numerous cloisters with lofty spires that “resembled the snowy peaks of Mount Sumeru.”? Then suddenly the serenity of this Buddhist institution was shattered. In the fall of 1202, Muslim soldiers on horses rode in and hacked down teachers and students where they stood. The once majestic buildings were left in ruins.‘ The savagery was so great it signaled the end of the Dharma in India.
This powerful story has been told countless times. Today it is ubiquitous, being found in everything from scholarly monographs to travel bro-chures. Indeed, by its sheer pervasiveness, this one episode has in many ways come to encapsulate and symbolize the entire thirteen-hundred-year history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction. And on account of this, whenever the topic of Buddhism and Islam is ever mentioned it almost invariably revolves around the Muslim destruction of the Dharma.°
This is problematic for many reasons, not the least being that the story of Nalanda is not true. For example, not only did local Buddhist rulers make deals with the new Muslim overlords and thus stay in power,° but Nalanda also continued as a functioning institution of Buddhist education well into the thirteenth century.” One Indian master, for example, was trained and ordained at Nalanda before he traveled to the court of Khubilai Khan.*® We also know that Chinese monks continued to travel to India and obtain Buddhist texts in the late fourteenth century.’
Indeed, contrary to the standard idea promoted by the above story that Nalanda’s destruction signaled the death of Buddhism, the fact is that the Dharma survived in India at least until the seventeenth century.'° Or, in other words, Buddhists and Muslims lived together on the Asian subcontinent for almost a thousand years.
Why is this not better known? There are numerous possible explanations for this and they range from Buddhist prophecies of decline to the problems of contemporary scholarship.'' However, rather than addressing such concerns, one can begin simply with the power of story. As noted above, the destruction of Nalanda offers us a clear-cut narrative with good guys and bad.
It avoids entirely the complex shades of gray that most often color the messy fabric of history. And this is certainly what the Buddhist historians who cobbled together this story wanted to do as they tried to make sense of the Dharma’s demise in India.'? Indeed, rather than exploring the complex economic, environmental, political, and religious history of India, or simply the Buddhist tradition’s own failings, it was clearly much easier to simply blame the Muslims.
In this regard the Buddhists established a precedent that was to subsequently drive South Asian history.'> The British, for example, used the same claims of Muslim barbarity and misrule in order to justify the introduction of their supposedly more humane and rational form of colonial rule.'* In turn, while Indian nationalists questioned the moral righteousness and glory of the British Raj, they nevertheless continued with the historical model of blaming the Muslims.
The humiliating imposition of colonial rule was thus not the result of Indian weakness per se, but rather the fault of the effeminate and voluptuous Mughals.'> And this view is readily perpetuated in the rhetoric of today’s Hindu nationalists who want to re-create some imagined Hindu utopia by eradicating all traces of Islam in India, by violence if necessary.'¢
This pervasive anti-Muslim view is, of course, not unique to medieval Buddhist and contemporary Hindu historiography. It has also been a part of the Jewish and Christian tradition ever since Muhammad received God’s final revelation through the angel Gabriel in the early seventh century. Many have also argued that the modern western construction of itself as the paragon of righteousness was often done at the expense of Islam. Yet even though such “orientalism” has been roundly critiqued by decades of scholarship, these earlier views persist.'’
Indeed, the valiant attempt of contemporary scholars and museum curators to overturn these stereotypes by means of books and lavish museum exhibits highlighting Muslim tolerance and periods of Islamic exchange with Christian Europe has not really been able to diminish our “orientalist fear.”'® Of course, today’s contemporary geopolitical environment may not be conducive to such a reevaluation no matter how necessary it may actually be.
Thus if we take into consideration all of these disparate strands it is perhaps not at all surprising that the story of Nalanda and the attendant one of Islam destroying Buddhism are so readily accepted. To many they just make sense. Moreover, they fit our preconceptions about these two religious traditions. While Buddhism is a good, rational, post-Enlightenment philosophy, Islam is an inherently violent and irrational religion.'®
Indeed, in the popular imagination there are probably no two traditions more different than Buddhism and Islam. One is synonymous with peace, tranquility, and introspection, the other with violence, chaos, and blind faith. One conjures up images of Himalayan hermitages and Japanese rock gardens, the other primitive and dirty villages with burqa-clad women. And while Buddhism is seen as modern, its teachings even in tune with the most cutting-edge science,”° Islam is backward, its teachings and punishments redolent of the Middle Ages.?!
Yet as with the whole enterprise of orientalism and the construction of Islam as innately evil, this image of Buddhism as the perfect spirituality for the modern age is also a Western fantasy, or construction, of the nineteenth century. In fact, it was during those heady days of empire and modernity that Buddhism came to be conceived as the philosophy that could solve all the world’s problems.”
This modern Buddhism had many authors, from British colonial off-cials to Asian nationalists and German philosophers to Russian Theosophists.”? All, however, agreed that this tradition shorn of rituals, doctrines, and communal structures was clearly the spiritual philosophy for the age of secular humanism. Of course, such a philosophy was not what Buddhists in Asia actually practiced.
They had apparently lost touch with the true teachings of the Buddha and instead descended into a nightmarish morass of ritualism and superstition. That this story coincided neatly with Protestant apologetics**—namely, the teachings of Jesus being deformed by pagano-papism and then redeemed by Martin Luther—as well as nineteenth-century debates about Aryans and Semites was not coincidental, and certainly provided a powerful narrative arc.” It also made Buddhism, the meditative path for individual liberation, the very antithesis of Islam.
With this in mind it makes sense why so few question the story of Nalanda’s destruction. It is a perfect story with the requisite and wellknown actors playing their appropriate roles. Moreover, in recent years this story has not simply been some event long lost in the fog of history, or an abstract frame with which to map and order the chaotic progression of history, but rather a concrete reality. During the month of March in 2001, it played out on television screens around the world when the Taliban used tanks and anti-aircraft weapons to demolish the colossal Buddha statues of Bamiyan (figures 1 and 2).
This wanton act of destruction not only reenacted the story of Nalanda, but also reaffirmed all of our stereotypes. What better image could one have to encapsulate Buddhist-Muslim history than a group of fanatical Muslim militants senselessly mauling the peaceful and passive representations of the Buddha in the name of Islam? That is invariably how it was presented in the international media. Little thought, however, was given to the possible historical contingencies shaping this event; much less the fact that the statues had until then somehow survived thirteen-hundred years of Muslim rule.”*
This was another of those inconvenient facts that somehow muddied the story. It was perhaps better not to think about it since, if one did, it opened the door for the whole messy reality of history to come rushing in, and this could very well challenge, possibly even shatter, the conventional narrative that has been told these last one thousand years.
Shining a light on the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction is precisely the aim of this book. To this end the following history moves beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries shaping the conventional history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction. Its focus is thus not on India but the so-called Silk Road, or more precisely Inner Asia, the wide swath of territory stretching from Afghanistan to Mongolia. And instead of dwelling on the early period and the imagined demise of Buddhism it covers the interaction of these two traditions up through the nineteenth century.
Moreover, to provide the story a structure the chapters are arranged chronologically and to create a narrative drive each chapter is focused on a thematic issue. These separate issues provide not only a framework through which to organize the material, but also opens up the meeting of the Buddhist and Muslim worlds to larger theoretical concerns.
The first chapter explores the earliest contact between Buddhists and Muslims (ca. 700-1000 c.z.) through the lens of trade and the linkage between religious thought and economic regimes. The second chapter takes the same time period as its focus but moves beyond the economy of salvation in order to explore how these two traditions tried to understand each other.
Chapter 3 moves beyond this early period to the time of the Mongol empire (ca. 1100-1400 c.£.) and investigates Buddhist-Muslim interaction in relation to cross-cultural artistic production. Chapter 4, on the other hand, moves away from the realm of art and the Mongol empire and investigates instead the political and economic background of the post-Mongol period (ca. 1400-1650 c.£.) and the conflicts it engendered between the Buddhist and Muslim worlds. Finally, Chapter 5 explores Buddhist-Muslim interaction during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) as seen through the issue of religious foodways.
By presenting Buddhist-Muslim history in this way the hope is not to simply reveal an overlooked chapter of human history. The aim in what follows is to use the meeting of these two traditions in order to explore three interlocking themes. The first of these, and indeed the essential thread that runs throughout what follows, is the question of what happened when Buddhists and Muslims actually came into contact with one another.
In particular, how were both of these traditions transformed as a result of this encounter? Moreover, by exploring the meeting of two traditions that are not often paired together in this way it is also the aim of this work to challenge some of the conventional divisions that shape our understanding of the world—such as the notion of East-West, and Middle East—East Asia, as well as the modern phenomenon of the nation-state—all with the aim of exploring how these conceptualizations potentially distort historical realities.
And finally, by situating the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction in terms of everyday activities, such as making money and cooking, I hopeto generate new insights about not only the fraught intersection between religious thought and human life, but also the actual possibilities of crosscultural understanding within such a meeting. Whether these goals are achieved in what follows I will leave to the reader. Though I do hope what follows is not only a good story, but also reveals how rather than being diametrically opposite Buddhism and Islam are actually very much the same.
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