The main Indiana Jones trilogy is essentially a conversion narrative in which the hero never converts… which is a little strange. Why bother with that narrative if you’re not going to fulfill it? Indy also exists in a universe where all the religions are seemingly true, based on the very real powers each movie’s main artifact displays. Here is the second of three (lengthy!) posts exploring the weird religious universe that the first three Indiana Jones films create.
In my last installment, I tackled Raiders of the Lost Ark’s big relic, the Ark of the Covenant, and hopefully avoided getting zapped by the wrath of Yahweh. Now I’m inflating an improbable life raft and diving straight into the Hinduism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! I’m going to look at the ways the film uses real-life artifacts, and try my best not to talk about chilled monkey brains. I mean, come on, movie.
Temple of Doom immediately disorients us, as we hear “Anything Goes” being sung in Mandarin by a white woman with a Middle American accent—but more importantly, the film is set two years before the action in Raiders. We’re dealing with a younger Indy, and the film wastes no time in showing us our rakishly dapper hero in a white suit that is as metaphysically far from his professorial tweeds as Club Obi Wan is from Marshall College. The opening gambit adventure involves a Shanghai gangster named Lao Che, a giant diamond called The Peacock’s Eye, and the ashes of Nurhachi, First Emperor of Manchu Dynasty:
In this opening we glancingly see that Indy is just as knowledgeable about Chinese history and artifacts as the Western ones he found in Raiders. While it’s believable that a kid raised by a religious father (which Indy was, which I’ll talk about in tomorrow’s post on Last Crusade) would be able to rattle off the Hebrew Bible’s account of the Ark, it’s a little less believable that one archaeologist would be comfortable with the variety of histories and cultures that Indy seems to know. (An academic Mary Sue, perhaps?)
This younger Indy has friends all over the world who are willing to follow him into adventure, as is evidenced by the introduction of the doomed waiter and Short Round. He is also obviously more callow in this adventure than he is a few years later when he pursues the Ark. While Lao Che treats the urn with reverence and awe, Indy doesn’t seem to care even a little about the remains of the Emperor—he just wants his diamond. He also doesn’t care whether Willie Scott lives or dies, which, granted, they only just met, but it’s still problematic that he’s threatening her with cutlery. As the adventure continues, however, the film becomes a more serious fight between darkness and light. You remember how I said in the last post that Indy starts out as a jerkface? After he, Willie, and Short Round crash in the wilds of India, he has his first onscreen brush with the supernatural, and it does change him, as we’ll see…but it doesn’t convert him.
Temple of Doom, or Saivism for Westerners!
Now I should start by saying I am by no means an expert on Hinduism. As I tended to focus on Western religion, and my specific studies were in American Religious history, the development of saivism, the worship of Shiva, is about 8,000 miles outside my wheelhouse. But, here goes. The Purana Linga speaks of Shiva, the supreme god, as “signless, without color, taste or smell, beyond word and touch, without quality, changeless, motionless.” However, in order to allow Shiva’s worshipers to concentrate on something during prayer, his followers had to make him at least slightly manifest in the world. So they turned to linga:
Linga are conical stones, usually with three lines carved or painted into them. This one is part of a shine in the Kalimaam Temple of Bangalore, India. By using linga as a focal point, a worshiper can represent the god and the act of creation itself with one simple symbol. The Purana Shiva describes the deity stepping into the world from a pillar—or lingam—of fire, as proof that he is the strongest of the gods. The linga can simultaneously recall that moment, and represent active creative energy bursting into the universe, with Shiva Himself seen as an inexhaustible font of life.
Linga can also be seen, easily, as dicks. That’s how the Victorians saw them, as British repression clashed with Hindu culture in India. This is alluded to in Temple of Doom—set before World War II and the subsequent Indian uprisings that finally loosened Britain’s grasp on the world—as we learn that the big spiritual Maguffin of the film are the Sankara stones (linga) which are intricately tied to the fertility of the village.
The movie itself has a strange push and pull between respect for the Hindi culture and blatant racism. The stones themselves and the villagers, are treated well both by the film and by Indy, and it’s more in the garish excesses of the state dinner and the Thuggee cult ceremonies that the film fetishizes its Indian setting. And about those Thuggees… the Thuggee cult was historically a thieves’ guild, essentially, and had far more in common with, say, the Italian mafia than a religious cult. Thugs (The Hindi word means “thief” or “deceiver”) would infiltrate caravans, murder travelers, and make off with whatever valuables they could carry. Sometimes they’d take the children of the travellers to raise them as Thugs as well. A member could pass his position down to his son, and families spent generations within the Thug family. And about the Kali, heart-ripping part of this story? The Thugs sometimes claimed to be acolytes of Kali, but it wasn’t a requirement, and they certainly didn’t see themselves as an evil cult wrangling for world domination. And, maybe most important: Kali is not an “evil goddess.” She’s the goddess of change, one of the consorts of Shiva, and while she may be fearsome in appearance she’s not a demon in the Western sense of that word. She’s not out to get you, spiritually speaking. In fact, she’s beloved by some sects of Hinduism, being seen as a fierce, protective Mother to her devotees. She is also darkness itself:
Dancing mad with joy,
Come, Mother, come!
For Terror is Thy name,
Death is in Thy breath,
And every shaking step
Destroys a world for e’er.
Thou “Time”, the All-Destroyer!
Come, O Mother, come!
Who dares misery love,
And hug the form of Death,
Dance in Destruction’s dance,
To him the Mother comes.
Indy seems to come into the story with strong knowledge of Shiva, and of the Sankara Stones. (While it’s believable that an old-school archaeologist who walks the line of pure treasure hunter would at least know of the Stones, it still stretches credibility that he’s an expert in Hinduism, and as fluent in Hindi as he seems to be.) He believes the Stones can lead to “fortune and glory” and seems to view the Sankara quest in the same way he must have viewed Nurhachi’s Urn—as a path to money. (We get no indication that this younger Indy thinks artifacts belong in a museum, and we’ve already seen his willingness to make black market trades.) While he is respectful to the village elder who says, “We prayed to Shiva to help us. It was Shiva who made you fall from the sky…” he privately scoffs at the idea when Shorty asks about it, referring to it as a “ghost story.” Once he realizes he’s dealing with a Thuggee cult, however, he seems to take things more seriously. But even this is a purely materialistic fear—the cultists scare him, not their religion. When he embarks on his main adventure to discover the Thuggee ceremony, he first finds an inscription saying “Follow in the footsteps of Shiva, do not betray his truth.” “Shiva’s truth” is never defined, however, and Indy doesn’t take the time to ponder it. This proves problematic.
So, long story short: Indy wanders onto a leftover Goonies set and finds three Sankara Stones. Indy takes Sankara Stones. Sankara Stones light up like E.T.’s tummy when they’re near each other. Everyone is captured by Mola Raam, the cult leader, who holds a young Prince under his sway. Indy is forced to drink blood and undergo “the black sleep of Kali”…but only after learning that the kidnapped children are digging for the last two Sankara Stones. Lots of heart-ripping and Kali-Maaaa-ing ensues. Everyone escapes. Willie reveals that she’s capable of knocking a man out with one punch only after she’s let Indy and (like, ten-year-old) Short Round do all the fighting. The gender politics in this adventure are problematic.
Anyway, we also learn Mola Ram’s nefarious plot: “The British in India will be slaughtered. Then we will overrun the Moslems. Then the Hebrew god will fall. Then the Christian god will be cast down and forgotten. Soon Kali Ma will rule the world!”
None of this works. While there have been many, often violent, clashes between Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam in India, Hinduism has never been a proselytizing-type faith. This implies that Kali Ma doesn’t want to rule the world. I mean, she’s been around for a lonnnnng time, if she wanted to take over she would have done it by now. Plus, Mola Ram betrays not only Shiva but his basic lack of religion knowledge in this film: Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, Mola. You’ve just said the same thing three times, you redundant son of a bitch! I realize that reviving an ancient blood cult takes a lot of time, but do your homework.
Cut to rope bridge.
Now, remember that problematic moment I mentioned before? When Indy just sort of accepted the idea of “Shiva’s Truth”? Once we’re at the rope bridge this all comes to a confusing head. Indy confronts Mola Ram, and yells, “Prepare to meet Kali…IN HELL!” which, while an admittedly GREAT thing to say to a villain, makes no sense. What does Indy, a secular, pre-Ark, Western academic, mean by “Hell”? And what possible bearing could his idea have on a practicing Hindu? “Hell” in Hinduism is a realm called Naraka, and it’s usually temporary, similar to the Catholic concept of Purgatory. And while we’re on the topic, Mola will not be facing Kali there, he’ll be facing Yama, the God of Death. So Indy has just told Mola Ram “Prepare to meet [Incorrect God] in a temporary place of punishment where your soul will be readied for rebirth!”
Then it gets worse. A few minutes later, he accuses Mola Ram of “betraying” Shiva. Indy is obviously in the moral right, since Mola Ram is enslaving children, which no aspect of Hinduism would ever condone. However, he might be misunderstanding the gods. Shiva and Kali, in a certain way, are one and the same. They are complementary aspects of creation—energy and pure consciousness, not two separate, anthropomorphic entities. Only by working together can energy (“Shiva”) and pure consciousness (“Kali”) create life. Indy might be assuming that by betraying Shiva, Mola Ram would face the Fearsome Consort Aspect to pay for his crimes? But he’s still treating Shiva and Kali (neither of whom, let me remind you, preside over hell) as separate gods, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the religion.
LEAH! I hear you screaming. THIS IS UNSPEAKABLY PEDANTIC AND FOR THE LOVE OF WHICHEVER GOD YOU PREFER, WHAT IS THE POINT???
Well, here’s the point: we’ve just gone over how confused Indy is about basic aspects of Hinduism. So how is it that when he invokes Shiva, the stones begin to glow? They burn Mola Ram (they’ve never burned Indy, even when they glowed before) which causes him to fall from the bridge. Clearly someone is pissed at him. More interesting to me is this: why is the extremely Western Indy capable of wielding the stones against a follower of Kali? Since there isn’t really heresy in Hinduism, in the sense that there is in Christianity or Judaism, what does “betraying Shiva” entail? What does Indy mean by those words? And how can this non-believer recite a few Sanskrit phrases to activate the Stones and use them as weapons?
After they all return to the village and the Stone is replaced in its shrine, the elder smiles at Indy, “Now you can see the miracle of the rock.” Indy replies, “Yes, I understand its power now.” But…what? So has Indy converted to Saivism? He seems to think the rock itself has power, but that really isn’t the point? Dr. Jones, you apparently live in a universe where both the God of the Hebrews and Shiva have the power to manifest in icons and defeat their enemies. This is significant.
So, rather than the straight ahead conversion narrative of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we get an action movie version of The Darjeeling Limited. A Westerner learns to be a little more spiritually open after some rough times in India, but he doesn’t commit to his journey enough to truly change his life. If we want to take the film’s chronology at face value, the Indy we meet in Raiders is nearly as cynical as the one we meet in Temple, despite having already encountered a religious relic that can exert power against evil. The only shift is that in his two later adventures the only “glory” he seems to seek is as an archaeologist, and while Marcus pays him, he’s far more invested in the idea of historical artifacts having safe homes in museums. (Perhaps this is a shift back to the idealism of his youth, which we see in the opening of Last Crusade?) However all of his adventures, East or West, opening gambit or main event, have on thing in common: Indy is only interested in the icons as historical finds, not as religious artifacts. Now, for the next film he leaves India for the Middle East, and tracks down one of the Biggest Kahuna of Christian lore—will the conversion narrative work this time?
Leah Schnelbach would almost be willing to go through the Kali MAAA ritual. How cool would it be to see your own heart? Come chant at her on Twitter!
I thought ToD was only one year before Raiders — 1935 and 1936, respectively, with Last Crusade in ’38.
And being an expert in all fields doesn’t make Indy a Mary Sue, just a standard fictional scholar. It’s generally a given that any scientist or professor in a movie or TV show is going to be an expert in any and all branches of whatever he or she studies. People tend to forget that “Mary Sue” doesn’t refer to any hypercompetent character or any guest who overshadows the main cast, since those are both pervasive fictional tropes. It’s supposed to refer specifically to instances of those tropes that are badly done, that place authorial self-indulgence and wish fulfillment over competent characterization or storytelling. The tendency to apply the label carelessly to any and every character who has even a single trait in common with a Mary Sue has reduced it to total uselessness by now, and it should probably be retired.
I disagree with the idea that this isn’t a conversion narrative. That’s exactly what it is, though it’s a secular one. Indy is converted from a selfish fortune-hunter to a compassionate champion of the oppressed. He doesn’t have to embrace an actual religion in order to become a more righteous person. Indeed, there was a recent study suggesting that people without specific religious beliefs actually tend to be more moral on average than people with religious beliefs. One can’t necessarily ascribe too much weight to a single study, but it seems pretty clear to me that religion doesn’t make people good or bad; rather, people make religion good or bad by how they choose to practice it. So to me, a conversion from selfishness to altruism is a deeper and more meaningful transformation than a conversion from atheism to theism.
But, oh, yes, the racism. This film is so terrible in its portrayal of Hinduism. First of all, why the grossout scene about eating monkey brains and eyeballs and such, when Hindus are vegetarians? That menu was more fit for Ancient Rome, it seems to me. And the equation of the Thuggee cultists with Hinduism in general was propaganda used by the British Raj to justify their rule and their imposition of Western values on India as a suppression of dangerous killers and fanatics for the good of the Indian people. (Much like how they played up the infrequent, regional, and voluntary practice of sati, widows burning themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres, as something that all Hindu widows were forced to do against their will — a myth that persisted as late as the Xena: Warrior Princess 4-part arc set in India. It was really more of an extreme ideal of piety that few actually attempted to live up to, like becoming a nun, only more irreversible.)
This, unfortunately, was a common trope in Western media portrayals of India — see, for instance, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s “The Yellow Scarf Affair,” which could easily have been a direct influence on this film, since it was also about a prominent Indian who was secretly a Thuggee cult leader (played, ridiculously, by the extremely British Murray Matheson in deeply unconvincing brownface) and who wanted to overthrow the influence of the West and restore “traditional” values. The episode unhesitatingly equated all traditional Indian culture with the murderous cult of fanatics and assumed that a good Indian was one who was completely assimilated to Western culture and values (such as the cult leader’s daughter, the only character in the episode played by an actual Indian). You could probably find plenty of other movies and shows that employed the same trope, and the problem here is that the Indiana Jones films were homages to the adventure films of the ’30s and ’40s, so they inherited some of that genre’s unfortunate cultural and racial tropes.
Well, Leah, the administration at Wheaton College apparently doesn’t understand that Christians, Muslims and Jews worship the same God either.
Christopher @1 Hindus are not all vegetarian although many are. Those who do eat meat mostly don’t eat beef as they revere cows, but they will eat chicken, lamb, goat, fish etc as long as they have been killed as quickly as possible.
@2 I was just thinking about the same incident, Aeryl. But despite being a church-goer myself, I don’t see the logic of what the Wheaton faculty is saying–if we Christians are monotheists, how can we argue that Moslems worship the wrong god or a different god? Jews, Christians and Moslems all consider themselves children of Abraham, after all. You can argue that one group or the other worships in a more appropriate way (as people have been doing for centuries), but we all seek to serve the same Creator.
Regarding the topic of Indy, when I first watched The Temple of Doom, I didn’t know enough of the Hindu religion to know what hash the movie was making of its subject matter. Instead, it seemed to think it more important to be true to the many pulp fictional adventures that were set in India back in the ’30s. Like Indy in the movie, these stories tended to draw bits and pieces from Hinduism, but then to fit those pieces into a Christian sensibility. Lucas and Spielberg did far better with Jewish and Christian topics in the other two movies (and better with “Chariot of the Gods” type of flying saucer aliens in the fourth Indy movie, for that matter).
@4/AlanBrown: Just FYI, it’s preferred these days to spell it “Muslim.” The way “Moslem” is pronounced by English speakers happens to sound like an Arabic word for “oppressor” and is thus considered derogatory by many, so it’s fallen out of use.
To me it suggests that Indy lives in a universe with a lot of magic implements that people don’t understand, and have built mutually incompatible religions about. NOT that any of those religions is exactly “true”.
@6/ad: I was thinking the same thing. Just because Indy knows these objects have power of some sort, that doesn’t mean he automatically believes the myths that have been created to explain that power. I mean, the Sun has plenty of power, but that doesn’t mean we should believe in Ra or Apollo. Volcanoes are powerful, but that doesn’t prove that Hephaistos or Pele is real. As an archaeologist, Indy would know that different cultures have invented different stories and metaphors to explain natural forces and connect them to their worldviews and value systems. The same would logically be true for supernatural forces. Indy could accept that the Ark or the Sankara Stones or the Grail have some paranormal power associated with them, but he wouldn’t necessarily accept that the myths and stories people used to explain that power were literally true. He’d see it as a mystery worthy of further study, as any scientist would.
Except I don’t recall seeing him very interested in researching the origin of those powers. Wasn’t he just interested in sticking the Ark in a museum?
Some years ago I watched this movie with a friend who was a devout Hindu. Although a vegetarian himself, he found the banquet scene super obnoxious, not because meat was served but because it obscured the very sophisticated cuisine of many, many Indian courts. But he thought the big problem of depictions of India in American pop culture (we watched lots of movies) wasn’t only the misunderstanding of Hinduism, but that there’s a big difference between a religious culture & individual piety. American film-makers, he thought, were completely clueless about that.
@8/lordmagnusen: A museum is a research institution, not just a warehouse. Museums employ scholars and experts who study the artifacts in their collections.
#7: This is a key point. The theory of “how magic works” in these films isn’t in fact faith-based — it’s a sort of inversion of Clarke’s Law, relying on the premise that any sufficiently advanced magic will be indistinguishable from technology.
That is, if you believe that magic operates on a fundamentally technological basis, it’s not faith that matters, it’s following the rules that are set before you even if you don’t fully understand what those rules are. Thus, Belloq and Indy are assuming that following the rules of a given ritual — reading the words and performing the actions specified in the material available to them — will produce the effect that that ritual is supposed to invoke. It’s a perfectly reasonable approach to take for someone who assumes that “magic” is simply technology that we modern humans simply don’t know enough about yet. Indy would tell you that a Jeep looks just as magical to a primitive tribesman; the tribesman observes him turning a key and operating various controls in a particular order, and presto, the Jeep moves as if by magic.
@6 & 7 That’s a good point!
@10 – Chris: Yes, I know what museums are. But just by mentioning he’s taking it to a museum I don’t get the feeling he’s planning to have it studied. I could be wrong, as it’s been a long time since I’ve watched the Indy movies.
Some Hindus have a dislike for this film’s depiction of Hinduism – the depiction is woefully inaccurate given the care taken with other cultures in cinema – I think I expected more from Spielberg, a man who went to such pains to show the potential outcome of prejudice with Schindler’s List. I think he expressed some regret about Temple of Doom’s cultural authenticity if I remember. I only know this because I remember the fuss Hindutva type nationalists tend to make about every perceived slight to Hinduism – although I have no particular sympathy for them, as they seem just as intent on turning Hinduism into something it isn’t, like a monolithic organized religion, that resents competitors.
I always suspected that the film’s issues basically arise from attempting to understand Hinduism, a religion fundamentally different from “revealed” religions like Christianity and Islam (i.e. it’s not even one religion, but technically a huge cornucopia of related religious ideas), in a Judeo-Christian way. Kali is, in some forms of iconography, a goddess of destruction, accompanied by violent imagery, to make an esoteric point about the transience of things, or destroying ignorance, or to show an uncontrolled weapon of the Gods that Shiva needs to pacify, or whatever – but someone raised on a diet of fantasy Dark Lords and other Lucifer-analogues thinks “ah, so if she wears human skulls, she must be the analogue of the Devil, in this culture – I’ll make her into some kind of Baphomet-style secret cult, like out of a gothic horror”. Obviously a more cultured person familiar with comparative religion, Jungian psychology, or European pre-Christian religion, or East Asian theology, etc, would realize that destruction is not always a negative image associated with a Lucifer/Set corrupt rebellion figure or dualistic Satan/Ahriman dark lord figure or a personification of chaos like Tiamat/Typhon/Apophis, and would find some better Indian antagonist, like an ancient asura/rakshasa/demon or something of that ilk.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett – Actually, Sati was a real problem in British India. Yes, it was used by the British to justify cultural paternalism, no doubt. But it was also every bit as real as the problem of, say, forced marriage or genital mutilation in many parts of the world today, or foot-binding, etc, in the past. It was voluntary in theory – but when surrounded by a pressurizing society and family structure, like many aspects of culture, I don’t doubt that it could be transformed into something else entirely. People don’t seem to get this; a cultural practice which is “voluntary” in theory (says the apologists), but unofficially policed through unspeakable violence and social isolation, may as well be compulsory. Technically an Indian woman can do as she likes, and Indian law thankfully agrees with her – but in practice attitudes mean she can be gang raped for being in the wrong place, and an authority figure can get away with saying “she deserved it”, due to prevailing attitudes. You have to ask yourself if these things are hypocritical by accident or design? Does anyone have a vested interest in maintaining this fiction?
Cultural conservatives will always tend to argue these things are a “misrepresentation” of their culture or whatever, and point to their status as voluntary – this is where I think you indirectly got your impressions on sati – from conservatives or reformists wanting to clear the good name of every historical error. But ultimately, what is more honest? To continue excusing such things in hope of a liberal reformation, or to simply outlaw them, as the Chinese nationalists did with stuff like foot binding? And if it were the British in India’s case, would that be wrong?
At least in India’s case, as in the case of Japan and China before, these things really are just cultural practices, with no basis in any kind of scripture. I wish all the best to reformers in the Muslim world, but fear they will have a much harder time banning things that were “revealed as the final testament of god”.
Oh, and on topic:
Why should Indy convert after seeing the Ark melt some Nazis? Or a stone burn someone? The film makes it clear he (wisely) does not know what is going on in the universe, and refuses to speculate that the Hebrew/Hindu/Christian legends are 100% true just because a box can put on an impressive light show. Who knows where the power of the Ark comes from? Did the Hebrews even know? No. They just wrote what they thought. That is infinity more honest than coming across a phenomenon he can’t explain, and then assuming it is proof of some culturally-contextual religion. Indy is bit of an old school philologist, judging by his knowledge of language/culture – so he will know that humans have had literally thousands of religions; and thus also know it’s unlikely any one was more right than the others.
@14/LingaRaja: I got my “impressions” from being a history major and taking courses on Indian and other non-Western history. So I was exposed to ideas from various different factions with different agendas, and was trained as a history major to approach them all skeptically and weigh them against each other instead of blindly accepting one or the other. Certainly there’s room for debate about which perspectives on a historical phenomenon or process are more accurate. But given that my Indian history professor, Barbara Ramusack, is noted for her work on women’s issues in Indian history, I find it unlikely that she would have taught me to embrace an anti-feminist interpretation of sati. Naturally there are points to consider on both sides, but as with most things, the truth lies somewhere between the extreme views of the cultural traditionalists on one side and the colonialist “reformers” on the other. As you say, both groups are simply serving their own agendas, and I’ve always considered agendas to be inimical to understanding the facts.
As for the Muslim world, there have been plenty of times and cultures in history when Islamic communities were progressive, tolerant, and inclusive, like the Ottoman Empire in its heyday. It’s happened before, so there’s no reason it can’t happen again. There was a time about a millennium ago when it was the Islamic Middle East that was the modernist, scientifically progressive, culturally and religiously tolerant part of the world and Western Europe that was the impoverished hellhole torn apart by tribal and sectarian warfare and militant religious fundamentalism. People’s religion doesn’t define their morality; rather, their morality defines how they approach their religion.
@14 – LingaRaja: What care taken in Hollywood with other cultures? Non US cultures are basically always grossly misrepresented in Hollywood movies and TV (even non white US cultures are misrepresented).
@@@@@ ChristopherLBennett: “As for the Muslim world, there have been plenty of times and cultures in history when Islamic communities were progressive, tolerant, and inclusive, like the Ottoman Empire in its heyday. It’s happened before, so there’s no reason it can’t happen again. There was a time about a millennium ago when it was the Islamic Middle East that was the modernist, scientifically progressive, culturally and religiously tolerant part of the world and Western Europe that was the impoverished hellhole torn apart by tribal and sectarian warfare and militant religious fundamentalism.”
I do hope you are right about that, but my trust in that has been shaken in recent years. I started off as someone who had a remarkably unbiased view of human progress; embodying Roddenbury-like ideas of progressiveness that you are familiar with. But, at some point or another, some scholar or another arguing for the other view of history – i.e. that human cultures are not equal, but that differing inter-subjective ides have differing outcomes – shook that idea.
If Europe’s relative success is indeed just down to it’s unique luck and material success; such as some kind of Jared Diamond type argument, then you are absolutely right. If however, events like the enlightenment, could not have happened in another culture, due to different cultural mores, this makes all the subsequent progress – from worker’s rights, to the abolition of slavery, to feminism – seem far more than just inevitable in all cultures. It would mean that a person would have to actively subvert their culture, and destroy unjust traditions, to achieve similar success. Not kowtow and respect it uncritically. This is what Meiji Japan did. I think Saudi Arabia lagging them by 100 years, and being home to a revealed religion, as opposed to a loosely defined animist/Buddhist religion, might not be an accident.
At first glance, why should a Muslim polity have any more trouble than a Christian polity, in being home to the enlightenment? Both had problems with sectarianism, slavery, religious policing, etc. Arguably, the west started out worse. Yet, the Quran, as you know justifies slavery in the context of war – the Christian Bible, (of which half does not even need to be adhered to by Christians; including those famous Leviticus quotes we atheists love to pull out), simply does not speak conclusively on the issue; and since Christians only have to follow the example of Christ, there is a pretty compelling argument that it does not support this. Does this inter-subjective idea have any bearing on their relative history of abolition, or none at all? The Quran, and to a greater extent, the Hadiths, justify murdering individuals for adultery; indeed the prophet Muhammed did it with his own hand, if we are to believe the Hadiths – the Christian Christ, saved a woman from being stoned to death, by shaming the executioner’s mob (according to their legends). I also note the Buddha, like Christ, never pelted anyone’s head in, nor, executed some 600 prisoners of war, as both the Quran and Hadiths refer to. What precedent does this set for future generations? The Quran claims to be the final revealed truth, and unaltered words of god; the Hebrew prophets don’t claim this. I am quite in agreement with you, that a person’s morality will define their approach to religion. But the relative ease with which one can throw away things they find reprehensible, without being called an “apostate”, and set upon by those around them, must surely have a bearing? Wouldn’t it be easier to just bin it off? To abandon the offensive thing, instead of trying to desperately twist it to fit your good conscience?
Do I think that this is having some kind of effect on the ability of the middle east to deal with modernity? Well, I wouldn’t have thought so in the past. But, well, looking as ISIS this past couple of years, and the amount of recruits they gain here in the EU, I’m beginning to suspect that genuine progress requires that people rid themselves of religion, not constantly seek to write apologetic and reverential excuses for it. Wasn’t that actually a big part of what Star Trek was trying to argue? How many times did Kirk come across a culture that was in denial, and show the necessity of intellectual honesty to their progress?
Or, in short, didn’t the Islamic Golden Age basically come about, through contempt for Islam? Liberal caliphs, emirs and sultans basically throwing away those things they didn’t agree with? If so, is reverence in our own time perhaps sending the wrong message entirely?
@17:”LingaRaja: What care taken in Hollywood with other cultures? Non US cultures are basically always grossly misrepresented in Hollywood movies and TV (even non white US cultures are misrepresented).”
And even Anglo-European US cultures are frequently grossly distorted. Cf, for example, numerous films and television shows that depict the New England Puritans as burning witches (Witches in both Old and New England were hanged, not burned).
I guess I was speaking relatively :-) Japanese culture for example has been distorted in Hollywood, but not quite like Temple of Doom, with it’s chilled monkey brain… I look back on everything from Mitchum in The Yakuza, through Shogun, to modern stuff like The Last Samurai, which while ridiculously romanticized, was materially and historically, as accurate as any ‘white’ history film, on say medieval England.
Like Christopher said, most Hindu castes/tribes/sects/etc are vegetarian, let alone up for eating offal from a primate lol. Then again, maybe they had read about how some extreme subsets of sadhus eat human flesh from funerary grounds (or is that giving too much credit to the writers?)
@18/LingaRaja: The idea that the Enlightenment is some uniquely European invention is ethnocentric hogwash. The Enlightenment was strongly influenced by ideas from China and the Middle East (such as the Confucian notion that the obligation of the ruler is to serve the good of the people rather than merely the leader’s own wealth and power), and many of the Enlightenment-era founders of the United States were inspired by the culture of the Iroquois Confederacy and other Native Americans.
Historically, the most progressive cultures are the least monolithic ones, the ones that are most open to economic, cultural, and technological exchange with other cultures. New ideas tend to emerge from crossroads of civilizations, such as the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean for much of history, or from frontier regions where cultures are interacting dynamically, such as colonial America, or from regions that engage in active trade and bring back knowledge and innovations from other parts of the world, such as Europe over the past six or seven centuries. It’s not unique to any one culture, it’s the product of their interaction.
You seem to be assuming that the way Saudi Arabia is now is the way it’s always been since the beginnings of Islam. That’s just the myth its fundamentalist factions like to promote. As I said, a few hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire (which ruled most of the modern Middle East) was arguably the most scientifically and intellectually progressive, socially liberal, religiously inclusive society in the Western world. Much like the United States today (or, well, maybe less so today than in the past, sadly), its subjects considered themselves as Ottomans first and members of their own ethnic or religious groups second. The modern ethnic and religious strife in the Mideast is largely the result of European interference over the past two centuries. After WWI, the European victors forcibly dissolved the Ottoman Empire (violating their promise that they wouldn’t do so if the Ottomans surrendered) and drew new national boundaries arbitrarily and with no regard for indigenous cultural or ethnic distinctions, manufacturing new conflicts as a result. Then the Eastern European anti-Semitic movement got involved and started spreading its bigotry to a part of the world that had historically always been far more tolerant of Judaism than Europe had been (despite the self-serving claims of current factions that the Arab-Israeli conflict is some ancient, eternal struggle). The rise of Islamist fundamentalism over the past few generations has been a response to the heavy hand of Western imperialism. Since modernizing leaders in the region, seeking Western approval, tended to link modernization with the aggressive suppression of religious freedom and cultural identity, it provoked the emergence of fundamentalist nationalism as a counter-reaction. So the fundamentalism of modern Saudi or Iranian or other societies is not the continuation of the way they’ve always been, it’s a historically recent change arising in response to the harm inflicted on the society by overly aggressive modernization and Western cultural imperialism.
You’re twisting and cherrypicking the facts about Islam to fit a preconceived ideological view which is totally illegitimate. ISIL does not represent Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity. ISIL is a kleptocratic movement, a bunch of gangsters using religious rhetoric as an excuse to seize power and plunder wealth and murder people they don’t like. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are fanatical cults no more legitimate than the Branch Davidians or Heaven’s Gate. Osama bin Laden falsely claimed to be an Islamic scholar, but he was no more qualified to issue fatwas than I am to issue Supreme Court rulings. These groups are fringe cults co-opting the pretense of religious purity as excuse to gain power over people. They are not legitimate representatives of their professed faith in any way, and their ideologies are grotesque, self-serving distortions.
@16:”As for the Muslim world, there have been plenty of times and cultures in history when Islamic communities were progressive, tolerant, and inclusive, like the Ottoman Empire in its heyday.”
Let’s be careful about romanticizing things.Even during its golden epoch , there were lots of unpleasant aspects to the Ottoman Empire . Cf things like the the killing of approx. 40,000 Shia under Selim I in the early 16th century.
“There was a time about a millennium ago when it was the Islamic Middle East that was the modernist, scientifically progressive, culturally and religiously tolerant part of the world and Western Europe that was the impoverished hellhole torn apart by tribal and sectarian warfare and militant religious fundamentalism.”
And religious intolerance and fundamentalism could also be found in the Medieval Muslim world. Cf, for example, the Almohad Caliphate’s (1121-1269) repressive stance towards Jews (Maimonides himself was forced to flee their rule).
Yeah, not even relatively can you speak about Hollywood taking care of representing other cultures. Sure, there have been improvements in later years, but if there’s something typical of Hollywood, it’s screwing up foreign cultures (and even historical white Anglo ones, as Trajan mentions).
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett :
I ask this in the kindest of ways, but… aren’t you just proving what I am asking? I know full well the effect of Confucianism and the Iraquois and Middle Eastern scientific texts on the enlightenment. In other words, Europeans threw out what they didn’t like of their culture, and of Christianity; adopting innovations from pagans in China and North America. Just as Arabs had, up to a point. They didn’t resist other cultures – they embraced them. But they were arguably able to do so much more than contemporaries in the middle east, precisely because Christian European culture was so malleable, and ultimately, disposable. Now how did Ottoman Turkey or Moorish North Africa react to the new innovations coming their way? Tolerance up to a point; and then breaking point when the sharia was threatened. It took an atheist; Ataturk, to reform Turkey – he consciously rejected the Arabic script in favor of the Roman script; even consciously replaced the Adhan with a Turkish, instead of Arabic, litany; enforced French-style secularism by decree. Most of this blasphemous. Why did he feel the need? Why did the Meiji regime feel the need in Japan to adopt things like the modern army in favor of the samurai class? They had to break the power of traditionalists and apologists, or perish.
I’m not trying to write a polemic, I’m genuinely interested in your opinion on the subject – and also I am arguing all of this as a devil’s advocate – I am genuinely open to a change of mind. But, when you say that I’m cherry picking from Islam, couldn’t I accuse you of the same thing? We both know the Ottomans were horrific practitioners of slavery at the height of their cultural enlightenment. They kidnapped children from the Balkans, and then used those said children to fight wars against the villages they had kidnapped them from – a machine that when looked at from a distance resembles the worst kind of automated violence; emotionally as disturbing as the atlantic slave trade. You didn’t address the individuals points I made about what Islam, Christianity and Buddhism regard as correct in regard to that issue and others. I understand that you could argue “times were different”, but that is very much an application of subjectivity in regards to what is compassionate.
We also know that the middle east’s period of cultural enlightenment was not only the product of Muslims, but also atheists, agnostics, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Druze, Buddhists, Hindus, and maybe pagans (certainly their beloved Plato and Aristotle had been pagan). Yet it is called the Islamic Golden Age, or Arab Golden Age, and not the Islamic-Christian-Agnostic-Hindu-Jewish golden age, or Perso-Arab-Indo-Chinese-Greek-Afghan golden age or whatever. I find double standards oftentimes in history; things which are rightly criticized and consigned to ridicule in western culture are forgiven in others. I don’t think this should be the case, because most western countries are today, not western ‘ethnically’, they are in fact composed of citizens of many different backgrounds, myself included. And what will happen, when young white children are educated about everything wrong in their culture, but their equal fellow citizens, sitting beside them are not educated about the Armenian Genocide, the Ming Dynasty killings of the Miao, the Caste System, the Islamic Slave Trade, or any other event of human folly in other cultures? History in a country like mine, now needs to be much more global, and about humanity in general.
@21:”As I said, a few hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire (which ruled most of the modern Middle East) was arguably the most scientifically and intellectually progressive, socially liberal, religiously inclusive society in the Western world.”
Again, let’s be careful of romanticization. Muslim historians have seldom regarded the Ottoman Empire as marking some kind of cultural/scientific high-point for Islam. And I don’t think that anyone would argue that it was ahead of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries (the epoch of Newton, Francis Bacon, Leibniz, Descartes, Galileo, Robert Hooke, Kepler, John Napier, Huygens, etc)
Allah and Yahweh are NOT the same! Islam DOES NOT worship the same God as Judaism and Christianity!
And, Temple of Doom is set ONE YEAR before Raiders – not two.
@26/J-M: Dead wrong. You need to read up on religious history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions
There was a time about a millennium ago when it was the Islamic Middle East that was the modernist, scientifically progressive, culturally and religiously tolerant part of the world and Western Europe that was the impoverished hellhole torn apart by tribal and sectarian warfare and militant religious fundamentalism.”
What sectarian warfare was there in Western Europe a millennium ago?
I got my “impressions” from being a history major and taking courses on Indian and other non-Western history.
Given that one of those impressions is apparently that Hindus are all vegetarians, I suspect you may have dozed off from time to time in your lectures. And that you’ve never been to India. Or met an Indian. Or been to an Indian restaurant.
@28/ajay: “What sectarian warfare was there in Western Europe a millennium ago?”
Seriously? You’ve never heard of the Crusades? Those were largely waged against rival Christian sects and Jews as much as against Muslims. (And don’t split hairs about the dates — I was rounding.)
And obviously not all Hindus are vegetarians, but the point is that Spielberg was perpetuating racist Raj-era tropes about India as a primitive, savage culture that needed to be tamed and Westernized for its own good. If you want to get holier-than-thou toward someone’s portrayal of India, go talk to Spielberg and his writers.
I assume you are referring to the Albigensian Crusade, very nasty.
I wouldn’t say that the Crusades count as warfare in Western Europe. They were waged around the eastern Med and the Baltic. Nor would I say that they were wars “largely waged as much against rival Christian sects and Jews as much as Muslims”. That’s a distortion of the record. They were mainly waged against Muslim empires and various pagan kingdoms.
Except for the Albigensian Crusade. That was in France against a heretical sect that is much idealized today but was actually rather unpleasant. Not quit as unpleasant as what was done to them by the orthodox granted. But of course the contemporary Islamic world was not free of sectarian strife either, or plain old dynastic and tribal strife.
It might be noted that, rounding the other way, one gets the Pre-Arthurian British isles — and the expansion of the then-Christian Roman Empire into what was then “pagan” territory. Three specific conflict-clusters to note:
# Irish/Roman interaction
Though not usually regarded as “war”, there was a good deal of both political and martial skirmishing involved in the transition of Ireland from “pagan” culture to Roman Catholic governance. For an admittedly fictional but useful treatment, look at the “Sister Fidelma” historical mysteries bylined to Peter Tremayne (pen name for respected Celtic scholar Peter Beresford Ellis).
# the Matter of Arthur proper
No matter which major strand of Arthurian lore you pick, the King Arthur legend describes what amounts to a religious conflict, between the forces of pagan magic (Morgan le Fay, Nimue, the Green Man, etc.) and those of Roman Christianity (the Grail Quest legends, and those where Arthur is overtly the unifier of Christian Britain against the Saxons).
# Viking raids and invasions south from Scandinavia
We don’t usually regard these as sectarian, but it’s not necessarily wrong to look at them in that context — consider, after all, the degree to which Norse raiding activity targeted wealthy Christian religious installations (monasteries, churches, etc.). And Viking/Norse folklore has a fairly strong war-glorifying component (see particularly the legends of the Valkyrie). Or, looked at from another angle, it wouldn’t be wrong to regard the long history of conflict between Norse and Celtic cultures as being essentially “sectarian” , given the degree to which both groups were motivated by acting-out of pre-Christian religious beliefs.
….
Angling back toward the actual post/thread topic, though — per the recent exchange at #26/#27, Christopher is entirely correct in grouping Islam with Christianity and Judaism as part of the line of Abrahamic religions, aka “Peoples of the Book”(s). That said, I don’t quite see how we jumped from Islam in #26/#27 to Hinduism (not in the Abrahamic line, but most relevant to Temple of Doom) in #28-#30 and back to Islam (and Christianity) in #30-#33. Except, perhaps, as illustrations of the point — equally applicable to all three faiths — that each faith has among its avowed followers a great variety of individual sects, some of which tend not to stand up well against comparison to the theological ideals on which they purport to be based.