Religion’s Specificity to Culture
Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
In different ages and in different societies, whenever a people have gone astray, fallen into immorality, and oppressed the weak, reformers have arisen to defy and admonish them. Their good words towards reforming the society later became the codes of religion, and the reformers were termed as saints, guru, or prophets. Thus, it is said that religious phenomena are cultural-specific with their own challenges, experiences, and the meaning they generate in the lives of individuals.
As for culture, each one of this is sui generic, one-of-a-kind, irreducible to make the meanings of one culture commensurate with the meanings of another. In this backdrop, we would look into a few religions to find how they attest to this fact.
When human life began, Nature ruled and its writ ran all over: on the lands, in the seas, and over the skies. Unfortunately, whatever writs ran most of them were against the humans. The humans arrived at the conclusion that nature in all its manifestations is not only alive but also godly. From every star in the sky and from every stone on the earth emanated signs of a presence. To make the forces of nature kindly, man’s primary instinct compelled him to worship them. Thus, arose a number of mythological religions like Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Hinduism, each the product of its own environment.
Hinduism is perhaps the oldest religion surviving to this day, and its polytheism is also the product of the factors mentioned above. Additionally, as South Asia and its contiguous areas were a vast forestland, Hinduism’s central ground became the forest. Its legends, traditions, and tenets belonged to that environment. Therefore, animals like cow, elephant, snake, monkey, rat, peacock, and crow became sacred and worthy of worship. Coconut became Sriphala or “god’s fruit”, and rice assumed spiritual and ritual significance. Peepal tree, Tulsi plant and Kanwal flower acquired sacredness. In the Bhagvad Geeta, the deified-god Krishna says, “I am the Peepal tree among the trees”. Another human-god, Ramchandra, had to be banished for fourteen years only to the forest (bun baas). To scare the ferocious animals or to befriend the unsuspected animals for hunting, the forest dwellers used to camouflage themselves by painting their faces, whose imprint we find in modern days on the foreheads of many; the more clever the more deserving the marks. As the primitive people had no implement to dig deep to inter the dead, there was the risk of them being despoiled by scavengers. They, therefore, thought appropriate to burn them with wood, available aplenty in the forest.
In the all-pervading religious environment of India, the two religions, Buddhism and Jainism, which emerged in the middle of the first century BC, also could not free themselves from the embrace of Hinduism, although they discarded the caste system and worship of mythological gods. One of the basic tenets of Hinduism is Samsara or the cycle of rebirths. So both of them advocate this philosophy as well as another Hindu theosophy in respect of cosmology. Both of them believe that time and the universe are eternal without a beginning and an end, and that the universe is transient.
Yet another type of beliefs that exists today does not see gods as the source of supernatural power but spirits. In this way, the beliefs of the natives of the North American hemisphere and their religious practices are much alike those of primitive societies. In the vast wilderness, only nature had been their company. They viewed most aspects of nature, both visible and invisible, like the sun, moon, rivers, lightning, and disease as animate. In addition, they believed in spirits such as Windigo, a man-eating giant; Mishi-pishew, the Great Lynx; and Memegivesi, dwarfed men who lived inside cliffs and paddled canoes. Deeming the spirits to be responsive to human entreaty they invoked them through rituals and employed charms to bring luck. A prominent mode to establish personal contact with the supernatural world was through the rite of ‘Vision Quest’. After passing a few days at a secluded spot, such as the top of a high hill or a special platform erected upon a tree, or the attic of a house, they were generally successful in receiving a vision in their dreams in which a spirit appeared and became the dreamer’s guardian for life.
Like other primitive religions, Shinto relates primarily to the country of Japan, which, they believe, was created by the gods as the center of the world. The descendants of gods were both the ruling monarchs and the general populace. This is why it has created in the people an intense love of the country, worship of the ancestors, and obedience to the monarch, and Shinto has remained native to that country. Like all other primitive religions, the Japanese too saw a god in every kind of force or natural object, calling their country “the Land of the Gods.” It evolved finally into a creed, called Shinto, meaning “The Way of the Gods.”
Being unhappy with many of the ideas and practices of his native Jewish faith, Jesus had started preaching a new doctrine: the loving Fatherhood of God where no one was chosen. He was a Semite, a scion of Abraham, and what he preached was the continuation of Abraham’s, i.e., the existence of one God. Later, however, another culture had its effect on Christianity, which brought forth Jesus’ Godhood. The concept of Jesus being divine was planted in a culture which itself had belief in the plurality of gods. When Jesus had started his mission, a ruthless Jewish persecutor of the followers of Jesus was Saul of Tarsus, who later became famous as St Paul. He played the part in making Jesus son of God because, as he claimed, God revealed his Son to him in a vision (Galatians 1:16). In the Bible, (Philippians 2: 11) Paul says, “Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. Paul had never met Jesus. When Paul was rejected by the followers of Jesus, he turned towards the Greeks. “The Greeks worshipped a myriad of gods. They did not mind increasing the number of gods, but opposed the affirmation of the Divine Unity, which negated any other object of worship. It soon became evident that Paul was prepared to compromise the teaching of Jesus in order to make it acceptable to them. . . This shift of emphasis from Jesus as a Prophet to the new image of Christ, who was Divine, enabled the intellectuals in Greece and in Rome to assimilate what Paul and those who followed him were preaching into their own philosophy. Their view of existence was a tripartite one, and with the Paulinians’ talk of ‘God the Father’ and ‘the son of God’ it only needed the instatement of the Holy Ghost to have a Trinity which matched up with theirs” (Ahmad Thomson and Muhammad Ata ur-Rahim, For Christ’s Sake, pp. 4 & 7). Christ became the Logos of Plato, and finally the Trinity became the basic tenet of the Christianity. This Christianity, coming out of Greek culture, was not acceptable to many, and disputes arose later. However, people were made to accept Jesus as the Son of God by the decree of the Council of Nicaea, convened under the command of Emperor Constantine in 325 AD.
Coming to Islam, we may now look at the cultural setup of the pre-Islamic Arabia. In the harsh climate where daily life was mixed up with sands, dunes, and cattle, the society was bound to be tribal in character. The members of a tribe lived together, shared with each other their scant resources, and suffered equally in times of hardship. This ethos of brotherhood gave birth to the concept of muruwwah, which has various meanings like avenging the wrong done to the tribe, courage to fight for it, protecting the weak and endurance in suffering. The virtues that such a wilderness produced were, therefore, mutual assistance, hospitality, bravery, and magnanimity. In the sixth century AD Makkah had turned into a prosperous town and the most important religious and economic center of Arabia.
The social consequences of urbanization and prosperity too were profound. The old traditions of mutual assistance, respect and solidarity had waned. The practice of muruwwah was fast vanishing, and now the people cared less for the poor, widows, and orphans. The hedonistic pursuits, which are sine qua non of prosperity and urbanization, became abundantly present. People indulged themselves in gambling, orgies of wine drinking and all sorts of promiscuity and lewdness accompanied with violence and bloodshed. It was a world of social injustices and religious confusion, an age of moral darkness, commonly referred to as jahiliya.
In their religious beliefs, the pagan Arabs with their mythological backdrop revered sacred places, such as springs, wells, groves, peculiar rock formations and ancestral grave sites, as the wandering Israeli tribes had done earlier. They believed that spirits of nature dwelt in such places. The spirits, who possessed dynamism, also assumed personalities, human shapes and names, whom they called jinn, in the same way as the North Americans saw the spirits in the snow-filled wilderness. Sometimes, even a shapeless stone was worshiped as sacred because they thought it to have descended from the heaven. They found the existence of the Total Being in an idol. With their belief in the supreme God, whom they called Al-Lah, they worshipped a number of lesser gods for intercession with the Highest Being. There the holiest shrine with an ancient building, called Ka’bah, contained an unusual black stone, deemed to have come from Adam’s time and re-fixed by Abraham. It was the depository of more than three hundred idols of various tribes, who performed annual pilgrimage to the site. They offered sacrifices to the idols and circumambulated the holy precincts before and after performing a journey. An unusual feature of their religious tradition was that the tribes did not maintain priests. Worship was an individual matter. Instead, they had poets who, with a highly stylized and formalized form of poetry, eulogized and celebrated their triumphs and lamented their defeats. Poetry had become the hallmark of the Arabian culture.
The Qur’an has thus been revealed with full poetic rhythm to have the same effects on the society. In this way, we find that Islam is also no exception in respect of its being involved in the issues mentioned above. According to Robert Redfield, an American anthropologist, the Qur’an, “has the content it has because it arose among the Arabs not Chinese people”. The Qur’an itself acknowledges its cultural specificity and seems to address initially the habitants of Macca and around: “Thus have We sent by inspiration to thee an Arabic Qur'an: that thou mayest warn the Mother of Cities (Makkah) and all around her, and warn (them) of the Day of Assembly, of which there is no doubt…” (42:7).
Anyway, religion’s adventures know no bound. Born on the dirt-floor of a hut, it has always trodden the king’s palace.
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