According to witnesses, a victim of the recent attacks in Mumbai called out, “Why are you doing this to us?” as gunmen lined people up on the twentieth floor of the Hotel Oberoi.
“Remember Babri Masjid?” one of the gunmen responded, invoking the sixteenth-century mosque erected by India’s first Muslim emperor, and sacked by Hindu extremists in 1992. “Remember Godhra?” another gunman yelled, referring to a town in the Indian state of Gujarat where sectarian rioting broke into anti-Muslim violence in 2002.
As a Muslim daughter of India, I remember. Like the Mumbai attacks, both incidents underscored a divide between Hindus and Muslims. They also remind us that future is bleak not just for the security of India but the world if we cannot find peace between the two faiths. After Christianity, Islam is the world’s largest religion and the fastest growing; Hinduism is the world’s third-largest religion. To me, reconciliation starts with Muslims accepting Durga (pictured), Shiva, and the family of other Hindu deities as legitimate manifestations of God capitalized.
It wasn’t always this way with me. An immigrant to America at the age of four, I grew up with “Allah” as my only name for the divine, and I inherited a mocking disdain for Hinduism rooted at the birth of Islam, when the Prophet Muhammad challenged polytheists of his era. In the year 630, he had returned to the city of Mecca from exile and destroyed the idols at the Kaaba, the black-cubed building once venerated by pagan tribes, now the focal point of the hajj pilgrimage. Of course, Hindus don’t think of themselves as either idolaters or polytheists, but Muslims have long believed they are, which is where the problems between the two religions begin.
In New Jersey, the mother of my Muslim pal Humaira banned her from befriending Hindus. During a summer visit back to India, I heard my cousin mock a Hindu temple off Mumbai’s Marine Drive. Outside the city, I averted my glance at each roadside mandir, or temple, for fear my eyes would pay homage to the deities within. Even as an adult, I winced when my yoga teacher in Brooklyn started chanting Sanskrit prayers.
But in 2000, on assignment to write a book about the ancient practice of Tantra, I journeyed through Hindu temples from Kathmandu to the highest reaches of the Himalayas and the furthest waters of the Andaman Nicobar islands, embarking also on journey to the furthest corners of my identity.
In Kathmandu, Vishnu Uncle, guru to a friend’s family, led me by the hand through a sea of worshippers praying at the Hindu temple Pashupathinath. Because of the mutual intolerance of Muslims and Hindus, I pretended to be a Hindu to gain entry. In New Delhi, Chawla Aunty, the wife of another friend, took me into the sacred space of her personal mandir, a nook below the stairs in her house where she meditated every day. In the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, I rode a Hero Honda Splendor motorcycle on a pilgrimage through the shakti piths, temples devoted to goddess energy. Along the way, I meditated on the image of the tiger-riding goddess Durga as she came toward me, painted on the fronts of oncoming trucks. Putting hundreds of miles on my motorcycle without a tumble, I wanted to shout: “I am Durga!”
What I learned was that the deities of Hinduism were points of meditation that captured different strengths that we, as humble human beings, could aspire to reflect—not unlike the ninety-names names attributed to Allah by Muslims. I learned there was little that separated the devotion of folks like Chawla Aunty and Vishnu Uncle from my Muslim aunties and uncles.
Back in the United States, I challenged another interpretation of Islam; this one said that I, as a woman, had to sit in a secluded balcony of the local mosque. Having traveled through Hindu temples freely, I realized that gender segregation in places of worship was a medieval practice—and not required by my faith. One day, a Saudi Ph.D. student of engineering stood at the pulpit, and my heart shook with anger at the words that came from his mouth. He railed against the “filthy polytheist.” To me, it was an unconscionable indictment, out of prejudice, of the devotees I had met on my journey.
And in this I am not alone: Abdullah Saeed, a scholar at the University of Melbourne, argues that the Islam “censures religious exclusionism,” noting the Qur’an says, “We have assigned a law and a path to each of you ... so race to do good: you will all return to God.”
Now, in my home, I have my Muslim prayer rug, but I embrace other sources of inspiration in the “race to do good.” Every night, my six-year-old son Shibli chants, “Ommmmm” or “peace” sitting “crisscross, applesauce” before treasured statues of Buddha. In a refrain our world would do well to practice, he tells me, “All gods are good.”
Asra Nomani, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal for fifteen years, is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is a visiting scholar in the practice of journalism at Georgetown University, leading the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigation into the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl.
