Wahi: The Supernatural Basis of Islam

Koenraad Elst

1. The yogic view of the Quranic trance

In discussing Islam, most non-Muslims and ex-Muslims tend to focus on the negative achievements of Islam, such as Islamic mistreatment of women and unbelievers. However, we should realize that in its essence, Islam is only secondarily an ethical system with a characteristic record of conduct. In the first place it is a belief system, a truth claim. The Islamic religion stands or falls with the truth or untruth of two assertions: (1) there is no God but Allah, the Creator of the universe; and (2) Mohammed is the final spokesman of Allah, who through him passed on to mankind a series of messages assembled in the Quran. This Quranic communication is understood to have been a constant process of "revelation" from AD 610, when Mohammed was 40, until his death in AD 632.

The first belief is a theological claim which Islam has in common with some other monotheistic religions, and which, if subjected to cunning interpretation, could even be reconciled with some schools of polymorphous-theistic Hinduism (the wise call the one True One by many names). The second belief, by contrast, is the truly defining truth claim of Islam, setting it apart from every other religion: the prophethood of Mohammed.

In this essay, originally published as a series of articles in the on-line monthly Kashmir Herald in autumn-winter 2002-2003, we will discuss some non-Islamic views of this core assertion of Islam. The present chapter will focus on the Hindu view of Mohammed's prophethood.

Before the colonial age, there was hardly any Hindu evaluation of Mohammed's prophetic claims, nor even of Islamic doctrine in general. The first detailed criticism of Islam, and in particular of the Quran, was written by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Vedic reform movement Arya Samaj in 1875. He mainly lambasted the contradictions, irrational beliefs and inhumane injunctions in Islamic scripture. Later Arya Samaj criticism of the Prophet typically focused on his dictatorial and immoral personal behaviour (e.g. Rajpal's Rang�l� Ras�l, about Mohammed's sex life), not on the source of his revelations.

The basis of Islam is the belief that Mohammed regularly went into a state of trance (wahi) and heard a voice dictating Allah's own words. In recent years, Hindu students of Islam have invoked the eyewitness testimony of Moha�mmed's contemporaries in support of their own skeptical rejection of the Prophet�s claim of receiving div�ine messages: "The Meccans stood firm by their gods; their faith in the gods was not at all shaken by Muham�mad's attacks. Allah reports: 'When it was said unto them, There is no God save Allah, they were scornful, and said: Shall we forsake our gods for a mad poet?' (Q.37:36/35) 'And they mar�vel that a warner from among themselves had come. They say: This is a wizard, a char�la�tan.' (Q.38:4/3) " (S.R. Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2, 2nd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1993, p.334)

It was probably Swami Vivekananda who first connected the questionable nature of Mohammed's leadership with the nature of his prophethood. Mohammed had to be ruthless in imposing adherence to his belief in his own divine mission because this belief could not stand on its own, based as it was on a delusion. If your neighbour, whom you have known for years as an ordinary businessman, tells you one day that he is hearing God�s voice and that you have to obey his divine instructions from now on, you would not readily give in to his demand, would you? Instead, you would certainly wonder what had happened to him. So, Vivekananda offered one hypothesis of what had happened to Mohammed so as to make him believe in his own selection as God�s sole living spokesman.

The specifi�cal�ly Hindu contr�i�b�ution to our understanding of the Quranic revelation is to bring in the yogic experience. As an example of how yogic practice can go wrong, war�ning against the dangers of ex�peri�men�ting with yoga wit�hout com�pet�ent guidance, Vivekananda mentioned Mo�ham�med: "The yogi says there is a great danger in stumbling upon this state. In a good many cases, there is the danger of the brain being deranged, and, as a rule, you will find that all those men, however great they were, who had stumb�led upon this super�consci�ous state without underst�anding it, groped in the dark, and generally had, along with their know�ledge, some quaint superstition. They opened themsel�ves to hal�lucin�ations. Mohammed claimed that the Angel Gabriel came to him in a cave one day and took him on the heavenly horse, Burak, and he visi�ted the heavens.

"But with all that, Mohammed spoke some wonderful truths. If you read the Koran, you find the most wonder�ful truths mixed with supersti�tio�ns. How will you expl�ain it? That man was inspi�red, no doubt, but that inspi�rat�ion was, as it were, stum�bled upon. He was not a trained Yogi, and did not know the reason of what he was doing. T�hink of the good Mohammed did to the world, and think of the great evil that has been done thro�ugh his fanatic�ism! Think of the millions massacred through his teachi�ngs, mothers bereft of their children, children made orphans, whole countries destroyed, mil�lions upon mil�lions of people killed! (...) So we see this danger by studying the lives of great teach�ers like Moham�mad and others. Yet we find, at the same time, that they were all inspi�red. Whene�ver a prophet got into the super�conscious state by heighte�ning his emotional nature, he brought away from it not only some truths, but some fanaticism also, some super�st�ition which injured the world as much as the greatness of the teaching help�ed." (Vivekananda: Complete Works, vol.1, p.184, from his book Raja Yoga, Ch.7: "Dhyana and Samadhi")

Mental disturbance as a consequence of meditative experiments had already been named as the cause of the Quranic revelations by Gisbertus Voetius, a 17th-cen�tury Dutch Calvinist theologi�an who trained missiona�ries for conversion work in Indonesia (discussed in Karel Steenbrink: Dutch Colo�nia�lism and Indonesian Islam. Contacts and Conflicts 1595-1950, Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1993). Protestants who had abolished monastic institutions and were scornful of the ascetic practices of Catholic and Orthodox monks, liked to point out such dangers, and their warning seemed to apply to the case of Mohammed as well.

Most yoga manuals emphatically warn against wrongly prac�tising the techni�ques of Hatha Yoga, which are very powerful whet�her used properly or in disregard of the concomitant rules. Yogic masters can relate anec�dotes of pupils or collea�gues who spurned the precautions and prac�tised dangerous forms of pr�n��y�ma ("breath control" or "control of the vital energies") till they im�paired their nerve sys�tems. One well-known written testimony of the painful and lasting effects of erratic yogic practice is given by Gopi Krishna in his well-known book Kun�dalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man. (1967, still available in many Indian and overseas editions). Arya Samaj leader Vandematharam Ramachandra Rao told me of one case invol�ving a friend of his who inflicted brain damage on himself and died of a stroke as a consequence of improper pr�n�y�ma prac�tice. Likewise, the Taoist energy-steering system of Qigong comes with the same warning and similar anecdo�tes. Many mystic phenomena the world over come about as cases of stumbling upon certain states of conscious�ness, which may lead to some kind of "e�nlig�htenment" but also to serious delusions. The most typical among these is megalo�mania, witness the self-importance of the assorted gurus and messiahs in the modern cult scene.

Hindu yogis claim to have left these dangerous mind games behind because their fore�bears have developed a safe and sound method laid down in such clas�sics as Patan�jali's Yoga Sutra. Ram Swarup (Hindu View of Chris�tianity and Islam, Voice of India, Delhi 1993, p.45-46) argues that the methodical and systematic "science of yoga" has a substantial qualitative edge over other forms of mysticism or mediumi�sm. From this angle, it is unfair -- even if fashionably in tune with the "equal truth of all religions" doctrine -- to put yoga in one class with the ex�periments of Shamans taking hal�lucinoge�nic plants, or with the uninvited voice-hearing ex�perien�ces of Mohammed.

In recent years, Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel have further developed Swami Vivekananda's position on the nature of Quranic revelatio�n. Ram Swarup has elaborated on the yogic theory of samadhi (enstasis) states of different levels of purity, which allows for states of high concentration tainted by delusion (Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, p.107). S.R. Goel has pointed out the similarity between Mohammed�s experiences and that of other men who combined a susceptibility to convulsive trance states with a great charisma and strategic ability, most notably Chengiz Khan (Goel, ed.: The Calcutta Quran Petition, 3rd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1999, p.238-249; with reference to Ibn Ish�q: S�rat Ras�l All�h, tra. Alfred Guillaume: The Life of Mohammed, OUP Karachi, p.104/150-107/154).

They conclude that the Pagan Arabs had every right to reject Mohammed's claims, born from a deluded conscio�usness and then propagated on a war footing, but that they made the one mistake which history does not forgive, viz. the mistake of being defeated. However, "the fact that they failed to unders�tand the ways of Moham�med and could not match his mailed fist in the final round, should not be held against them. It was neither the first nor the last time that a democratic society suc�cumbed in the face of deter�mined gangsteri�sm. We know how Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung succeeded in our own times." (Goel: Hindu Temples, vol.2, 2nd ed., p.272)

As far as I can see, the foregoing constitutes the single most radical criticism of Islam available in the world. Chris�tian critics, no matter how fierce, usually appreciate at least Mohammed's monotheism, which does not impress these Hindu auth�ors. They are also inhibited in criticizing the deluded nature of Mohammed�s �revelations�, as they profess a belief in the divine revelations to the Old Testament prophets. Though "irreverent" and "demytho�lo�gi�zing" are among the most spec�ious words of praise in the review columns of modern newspapers, few people have the stomach for something as ir�reverent and demytholo�gizing as the Hindu revivalist analysis of the Prophet's mission.