Podcasts about muslim hindu

As dawn's gentle light unfurls over the vibrant tapestry of Southeast Asia, a profound journey unfolds at the crossroads of ancient spiritual wisdom and the cutting-edge realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Authored by a traveler who has navigated the disciplined paths of a Catholic private school and emerged as a staunch agnostic, this article delves into the diverse spiritual landscapes of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in Malaysia and Singapore. It's inspired by an experience akin to the serene awakening under the Bodhi Tree - a profound sense of love and unity felt amidst the congregation of a Sunday church service, evoking a deep spiritual connection. Each visit to the church, a haven of human emotions, paints a vivid contrast: the rich tapestry of faith, hope, and community within its walls stands in beautiful juxtaposition to the precise, algorithmic world of AI, much like the contrast between a tranquil Zen garden and the dynamic flow of a bustling city. This duality sparks a contemplation as deep as the meditative insights of Buddha: How does the mystical essence of faith reconcile with the concrete reality of AI? The intense wave of collective emotion experienced within the church, akin to a moment of enlightening clarity, offers a unique lens to view the enigmatic convergence of spirituality and technology. This article is not merely a contrast of the old and the new; it's an exploration of the intricate dance between enduring spiritual beliefs and the rational world of AI, akin to the harmonious balance of Yin and Yang. From echoing church chants to a firm agnostic viewpoint, the narrative investigates how different faiths are responding to the challenges and opportunities presented by AI. It traverses a rich, multicultural, and interfaith landscape, exploring diverse responses: from Islam's fluid integration of science and faith, to Hinduism's philosophical embrace of technology within its spiritual ethos, and Buddhism's mindful distinction between the spiritual and the scientific, echoing the search for the Middle Way. The aim is to resonate with the dialogues within these communities, seeking insights as profound and transformative as the Buddha's journey to enlightenment. What can the evolving relationship between faith and AI unveil about the future of spirituality in a technologically advanced world? As a steadfast agnostic observer, deeply moved by the spiritual harmony and unity witnessed, this article invites readers on a journey of introspection and enlightenment. It seeks to discover the symphonic interplay between the divine and the digital, where the rush of transcendent love meets the steady rhythm of technology, in one of the most intriguing intersections of our time. Let's set our prayer wheel in motion and begin exploring! Science Meets Scripture: A Historical Overview As we traverse the historical landscape where the realms of religious faith and scientific inquiry intersect, we encounter a rich and diverse mosaic of perspectives, each distinct in its cultural and philosophical roots. This journey through time uncovers a multifaceted dialogue between various faiths and their approaches to scientific advancements, painting a vivid tableau of diversity, harmony, and thoughtful contemplation. Within the Islamic world, the relationship with science is often seen as a dance of synchronized rhythms, punctuated by occasional discordant notes, particularly in areas such as the theory of evolution. This complex interplay resembles a garden of diverse flora, where different plants representing religious doctrine and scientific exploration coexist, some in harmony and others in subtle contrast, reflecting a nuanced understanding of their coexistence. Hinduism offers a contrasting kaleidoscope of interwoven hues, where the vibrant colors of science and religion blend seamlessly. This fusion is akin to a confluence of rivers, where spiritual currents and scientific streams merge and enrich one another. Th...

Dr. Joel Finkelstein of NCRI (USA) explains his findings on the agendas and culprits behind the violence between Muslims and Hindus in places like Leicester (UK). This is the second of a multi-part series with Rajiv Malhotra. Snakes in the Ganga - http://www.snakesintheganga.com Varna Jati Caste - http://www.varnajaticaste.com The Battle For IIT's - http://www.battleforiits.com Power of future Machines - http://www.poweroffuturemachines.com 10 heads of Ravana - http://www.tenheadsofravana.com To support Infinity Foundation's projects including the continuation of such episodes and the research we do: इनफिनिटी फ़ौंडेशन की परियोजनाओं को अनुदान देने के लिए व इस प्रकार के एपिसोड और हमारे द्वारा किये जाने वाले शोध को जारी रखने के लिए: http://infinityfoundation.com/donate-2/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rajivmalhotrapodcast/support

For further details on how to attend the New Culture Forum's Tory Conference Fringe event with guest speaker Nick Timothy in Birmingham on Monday 3rd October, please email: contact@newcultureforum.org.uk On this week's #NCFNewspeak Peter Whittle and Emma Webb discuss: * the Muslim-Hindu sectarian violence that threatens to rip Leicester apart * Britain's obesity crisis, and * PayPal's attack on free speech, as the payment platform freezes the accounts of the Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young and his Daily Sceptic news site. ------------------- SUBSCRIBE: If you are enjoying the show, please subscribe to our channel on YouTube (click the Subscribe Button underneath the video and then Click on the Bell icon next to it to make sure you Receive All Notifications) AUDIO: If you prefer Audio you can subscribe on itunes or Soundcloud. Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-923838732 SUPPORT/DONATE / JOIN OUR MEMBERSHIP SCHEME The NCF Channel is still very new and to continue to produce quality programming we need your support. Your donations will help ensure the channel not only continues but can grow into a major online platform challenging the cultural orthodoxies dominant in our institutions, public life and media. You can join our membership scheme or donate in a variety of ways via our website: http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk It is set up to accept one time and monthly donations. JOIN US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Web: http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk F: https://www.facebook.com/NCultureForum/ I: https://www.instagram.com/newculturef... Y: http://www.youtube.com/c/NewCultureForum T: http://www.twitter.com/NewCultureForum (@NewCultureForum)

Whether you’re Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish…. P0RN affects us all. Here’s how I quit as a man of faith. ⚡Tired of relapsing? Free Training at https://www.spartan-integrity.com/

On this edition of Parallax Views, famed Egyptologist (or as she puts it "recovering Egyptologist") Dr. Kara Cooney of UCLA joins us to explore her fascinating book The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. Dr. Cooney describes herself as a recovering Egyptologist in order to consider the ways in which the cultural phenomena of Egyptomania may have a dark side that romanticizes and uncritically celebrates power. We discuss this as well as the parallels between King Ramsey II and Donald Trump, Orientalism, universalism vs. particularism, the problem of the Ancient Aliens narrative about the Pyramids (and why the Pharaohs would like that view), ancient Egypt's superiority complex and exceptionalism, the Pyramids as a weapon of the mind utilized by the kings, power and images, the Confederate Statues debate and how we can relate it to The Good Kings, the lamentations of the dead that take place in upper Egypt, who were the ancient people of Egypt beyond the Pharaohs (for example those who actually built the pyramids), the concept of Ma'at (related to truth and order) in ancient Egypt and its personification as a goddess, David Graeber and The Dawn of Everything, Pharaohs and authoritarianism (and autocracy), the Supreme Court and religion, and much, much more! Dr. Kara Cooney in front of one of the Pyramids in Egypt In the second segment of the show, Dr. Amineh Hoti, executive director of the Centre for Dialogue and the co-founder of the first Action and Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relation at the University of Cambridge, joins us to discuss her fascinating new book Gems and Jewels: The Religions of Pakistan. Like her father, previous Parallax Views guest Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Dr. Hoti has sought to bridge the gap of understanding between the East and West by fostering interfaith dialogue and understanding between different cultures and their religions. In this conversation we discuss such issues as Islamophobia and its impact; Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrianism (and the Parsi faith), Hindus, and other non-Muslim religious communities in Pakistan; Dr. Hoti's experiences teaching students who began as intolerant towards faith different than their own; Dr. Hoti's overcoming of cultural misogyny, chauvinism, and sexism and how Islam is for education of both women and men; the Sufi saint and poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai; how interfaith dialogue strengthens faith rather than degrading it; the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the effect it had on both the Muslim community and humanity as a whole; misunderstandings about Pakistan and the stereotypes of "the Other"; Sufism; the Orientalist romanticization of Sufism in the West; Ahuru Mazda, Zoroastrianism, and the misperception of the Parsi community as "fire worshippers" in Pakistan; Taxila and the deep roots of Buddhism in Pakistan;  the Sikh community in Pakistan, the importance of Pakistan to Sikhism, and the story of Baba Guru Nanak; the temples; the temples of the Sindh province of Pakistan; Katas Raj Temples and the body of emerald green water beside it; meeting the Christians of Pakistan in Karachi at the St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas Day; the Sufi saints of Pakistan and writings like the Kashf Al-Mahjub; the love stories of Sufism; how the media presents religious communities to each other and how it leads to monolithic views of those religious communities; the Abrahamic God in Islam; Muslim-Hindu unity; the United Nations and the concept of soft speech vs. hate speech; and much, much more! The Katas Raj Temples and the body of emerald, green water beside it

On this edition of Parallax Views, Ambassador Akbar S. Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., joined Parallax Views for an enlightening and uplifting conversation about how the golden age of Islamic philosophy can show us a bridge that exists between East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim. Amb. Ahmed's latest book deal with this specific subject and is entitled The Flying Man, Aristotle, and the Philosophies of the Golden Age of Islam: Their Relevance Today. Amb. Ahmed has written a number of books, including The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam and Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization among others, have attempted to deal with questions related to Islamic in modernity, relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, and attempting to foster understand between cultures and interfaith dialogues. His latest book is no exception and discusses a number of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals including the physician Avicenna and his "Flying Man" thought experiment among others. Amb. explains how these figures from Islamic culture cross-pollinated with Western thought and how their ideas were often in line with those of the Enlightenment and the humanist tradition. He also notes how "New Atheists" like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry have a blind-spot in regards to their dismissal of the Islamic world's contributions to culture, from philosophy to art. In addition to disccussing all of this, Amb. Ahmed and I also discuss his attempt to chronicle the life and significance of the Pakistani statesman Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who could be considered the George Washington of modern Pakistan. In this regard, Amb. Ahmed tells us a little about the origins and troubles with the cinematic biopic of the statesmen, simply known as Jinnah, which starred the late world-renowned British actor Christopher Lee (Sarumon the White in the Lords of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies; Count Dooku in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones; the title character in a number of the Hammer Studios Dracula films) in the lead role. Amb. Akbar talks about the negative portrayal of Jinnah in the Ben Kingsley-starring Gandhi, misconceptions he sees many as having about Jinnah, and his thoughts about Pakistan, India, and Muslim-Hindu unity. Along with all of this, Amb. Ahmed briefly comments on the situation of Afghanistan as someone who extensively studies the Pashtun people there. *CORRECTION: In this episode I neglected to mention that Ambassador Ahmed was co-scriptwriter with Jamil Dehlavi for Jinnah rather than the sole writer. Then in the second segment of our show, Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and its Inequality.Org joins us to discuss his decades-spanning work investigating the problem of global wealth inequality and how that inequality has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Chuck describes how he was "born on third base" to a wealthy family (the Oscar-Mayer meatpacking family to be exact) and how it gave him a "front row seat" to the problem of wealth inequality. We discuss what the ultra-wealthy are and aren't, wealth taxes, common arguments against taxing the ultra-wealthy, the World Economic Forum and Davos, wealth inequality as a cause of political polarization and social destabilization, the problem with charity as a fix for global wealth inequality, and much, much more! "‘This gift list is completely disconnected from the reality of our society': Here are the most charitable billionaires in America" by Leslie Albrecht - MarketWatch -2/8/22 "REPORT: Gilded Giving 2020: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy" by Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery - 7/28/20 "Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers" by Chuck Collins - 10/18/21 "Taxing extreme wealth could lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty" by Chuck Collins - CNN - 1/19/22

Ankita is Hindu and her husband is Muslim and recently had an interfaith wedding. She is also a physical therapist and wellness coach  who encourage women to reach their fitness goals and step outside their comfort zone in the weight room. We talk about her relationship and how they make it work, SA diet and exercise habits, and ways for women to reach their own goals! Follow Ankita on IG @ankick_it or check out @thebossbodyrevolution DishaMazepa.comSHOP: Disha Mazepa Designs on Etsy***Sign Up for Happy Mail (my newsletter!) at Patreon.com/BWWPS ***Be sure to SUBSCRIBE & LEAVE US A REVIEW if you enjoyed the show. Follow me on Instagram @Disha.MazepaLike the show on FB here. Music by: Crexwell Episodes available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Overcast.Support the show (http://Patreon.com/BWWPS)Support the show (http://Patreon.com/BWWPS)

British made Hindus and Muslims fight and and encouraged Muslims to demand Pakistan, said PPSSC Mohan Bhagwat ji. However, Dr. Ambedkar said that by their very faith, a mussulman can never accept India as his motherland, and Veer Savarkar said that this 'third party syndrome' of the British being responsible for Muslim-Hindu divide is a Congress superstition that led to many of its errors. Sanjay Dixit tries to find out which of these 3 are correct!

Imran Mushtaq, of Pakistan, and Deacon Michael Russo, of Pennsylvania join Jim Hanink, Mario Ramos-Reyes, and Christopher Zehnder concerning Christian life in Pakistan. 1. Could you please tell us a bit about yourself and your family?2. What is daily life like in your village?3. We understand that Christians in Pakistan face many obstacles. Could you explain them for us?4. Do Pakistani courts deal fairly with cases of attacks on Christians?5. What role does the law against blasphemy play in Pakistan?6. Have you ever had any helpful discussions with Muslim neighbors? With Muslims you knew in school?7. Recently Pope Francis has engaged Muslims in what seems to be fruitful dialogue. Are there any initiatives for Christian-Muslim dialogue in Pakistan?8. Are there any initiatives for Muslim-Hindu dialogue in Pakistan?9. How do the people of Pakistan see the threat of terrorism?10. What can Christians in the West do to help the Christians of Pakistan?

Meet Hina Husain, 32 year old living in Canada, here to tell us her life story, especially a major part of her life that involves marriage. Hina had a very nontraditional marriage, because she did not get married to a Pakistani man, or a Muslim man, as most Pakistani girls do. She married an Indian Hindu man, named Sai, who she met nearly 10 years ago. In the rest of this episode Hina tells us the story of how she met Sai, how they began dating and the relationship progressed, how her family reacted to her decisions, what it's like to be in an inter-faith marriage and many other side topics along the way. Disclaimer: This episode contains strong adult themes compared to the majority of our episodes, as well as strong language / swearing which has not been censored in order to preserve the story. Some of the content may be offensive from an Islamic or religious standpoint. Our intent by airing this episode is not to support or promote any actions taken by the characters in the story, though we do recognize their rights to make those choices safely, but to continue our goal of sharing as many Pakistani voices and stories from around the world as possible. Real voices, real stories.Follow Hina- Blog: https://hinah.contently.com/- Twitter: @HinaTweetsNow- Instagram: @hina_exploresOn her blog you can also find the VICE article which she reffered to during the episode.

The second episode in a series exploring the dynamic of Hindu/Muslim relationships features a woman who grew up in an inter-religious household with a Pakistani Muslim mother and an Indian Hindu father. Yet, she believes a majority of Hindu/Muslim relationships will not succeed. Tune in to find out why she chose to identify as Muslim and what her thoughts on the topic as a "product" of a Muslim/Hindu relationship.

He grew up with a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, but his grandmother was a Christian. How did these different worlds live together? Can these world-views coexist? Arun Kumar joins Karl Gessler for this week's podcast to share his story of growing up in India with millions of gods and goddesses and how he discovered the only way to real life.Leave a Comment, ask a question, and get FREE music!https://www.karlgessler.com/contactShow Your Love! Become a Podcast Partner!Patreon.com/karlgesslerTHE KARL GESSLER BAND VLOG:http://bit.ly/KarlGesslerFamilyTHE GOSPEL FOR PLANET EARTH YOUTUBE CHANNELhttp://bit.ly/THEGOSPELFORPLANETEARTHShare your thoughts on today's discussion and join the larger conversation on our Gospel For Planet Earth facebook page.www.facebook.com/TheGospel4earthSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/karlgessler)

J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellows lecture Prof. Tony K. Stewart 27 Oct 2016 Satya Pīr has been for scholars one of the most puzzling figures in Bengali religious history: for Muslims a Sufi saint and for Hindus none other than Satya Nārāyaṇ. The index to their truly puzzling nature is the fact that in spite of their ubiquity—his manuscript and print literature in Bangla is second in size only to the voluminous output prompted by Kṛṣṇa Caitanya—there have been virtually no serious attempts to understand the religious and cultural work of these stories. For the last two centuries these boundary-crossing tales have been uniformly dismissed as derivative rubbish from the perspective of those writing the heroic nationalist literary histories that were secular in ideal, but Hindu in orientation; as heretical by the conservative reforming factions of Faraizi and Salafi Islam; as syncretistic confusion by both foreign and local Orientalists; and demonstrative of a bastard language called dobhāṣī (Bangla combined with Persian and Urdu) by prominent Bengali linguists—all of which served to relegate the tales to the Victorian and Bengali bhadralok élitist (and more recently Marxist) curio cabinet of naïve folktales suitable only as entertainment for the masses. The effect is to hide these tales from the official record of Bengal’s literary production, even though centuries later they continue to enjoy wide popularity and the enjoined worship is still routinely performed. Apart from the obvious contemporary sectarian chauvinism, the underlying key to this almost panicked rejection by élites is the fact that Satya Pīr is of fictional character. He appears nowhere in the historical record of Persian chronicles or copperplate inscriptions and only officially as a mythic figure in the British gazetteers. As a first step in making these tales make sense, I propose that we approach them for what they are: fictional hagiographies. The methodological strategies used to interpret hagiography or religious biography can be applied equally to these narratives of Satya Pīr and Satya Nārāyaṇ, but because of their fictional or mythic nature, the tales unravel something of the intractable problems all hagiographies present to historians of religion.  Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. 

J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellows lecture Prof. Tony K. Stewart 10 Nov 2016 The early modern Bangla tales of the legendary or mythic pīrs are romantic narratives that speak to the often strange and puzzling encounters between Hindus, especially Vaiṣṇavs, and Muslims, primarily Sufis. They bring together foreigners and locals, courtiers and country bumpkins, in encounters ripe with a myriad of misunderstandings and false assumptions regarding religion, rituals, and those that practice them. They seek to establish the functional equivalence of religious practitioners, their rituals, and the contours of belief through the vehicle of the generic romance. One of the most popular figures is Baḍa Khān Gājī, who from atop his Arabian stallion commands an army of twenty-five thousand tigers, and wages a successful war against Dakṣīn Rāy, an overlord who rides his own personal tiger and counters with his militia of twenty-five thousand crocodiles (both troops mustered through the interventions of the goddess Caṇḍī). Mānik Pīr, who is famous as a veterinarian, especially for cows, is as irascible as any meditating yogī and demonstrates much the same kind of destructive and beneficent power in his encounters with those who fail to show a proper respect, especially greedy merchants and arrogant brahmins. Olābibī, matron of cholera and other water-borne diseases, teams up with Śitalā, goddess of smallpox, cowpox, and skin diseases such as warts, wens, and eczema. And most widely known, Satya Pīr, carrying both the Qur’ān and Bhāgavat Purāṇ, rescues his followers from penury, while helping women to set right the world after the idiotic actions of their men have confounded the proper order. All of these tales are rife with phantasmagoria equal to anything found in the Arabian Nights, with flying horses, celestial nymphs playing pranks, theriomorphic births, talking birds, and men transmogrified into goats to serve as breeding stock. As Todorov suggests, these fantastic romances produce a special kind of incredulity, a disbelief or suspension of belief that has resulted in their classification as light entertainment for the masses and dismissed as neither Hindu nor Muslim. But I wish to argue that these Muslim texts are undertaking a very serious cultural work that is not possible within the available genres of Islamic history, theology, and law. These texts explore the subjunctive, not in the sense of the way the world should be, but how it might be imagined, how it might come to be. The work of these texts is to explore how an Islamic cosmology might accommodate itself to and then appropriate the predominately Hindu cosmology encountered in the Bangla-speaking world of the early-modern period. Each narrative operates according to a logic of ‘what if . . .’ Perhaps surprisingly, I argue that parody is the critical mechanism by which Islam in these tales is gradually transformed into a distinctly Bengali Islam, that can account for its Hindu, especially Vaiṣṇav, counterpart.  Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. 

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow Prof. Tony K. Stewart 31 Jan 2017 In 1287 bs [=1879/80 ce] a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnāmār punthi by the highly productive scholar Garībullā, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblīs), also called Saytān. The bulk of this fictional text is an interrogation of Iblich regarding the nature of his followers and their actions. The text is prefaced in its opening verses with a somewhat uneasy statement about the nature of the book and whether it was even appropriate to compose such a text it in the vernacular Bangla, a move that immediately draws attention to the language of the text itself and its intended audience. The opening section moves from one language conundrum to another until the attentive reader begins to realize that the fact one is reading the text in Bangla suggests that question and those that followed were actually moot, a set up for something else. Soon, the logic of the argument makes clear that such a conversation between the always untruthful Iblich and the always truthful Muhammad could only happen in a fiction—and it is perfectly fine to write fiction in Bangla. This move to fiction immediately alters the approach of the reader, who is rewarded with humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytān’s lackeys, parodies of the standard ’aḥādīth literatures regarding proper conduct—everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni (Hanbalite) mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society. (This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, the Asian Studies Centre at St. Anthony’s College, and the History Faculty.) Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow Prof. Tony K. Stewart 16 Feb 2017 A number of Bangla tales dedicated to the fictional or mythic holy men (pīrs) and women (bibīs) in the Muslim community have circulated widely over the last five centuries alongside the tales of their historical counterparts. They are still printed and told today, and performed regularly in public, especially in the Sunderbans, the mangrove swamps in the southern reaches of Bangladesh and West Bengal. Among them are figures such as the itinerant veterinarian Mānik Pīr, the tamer of tigers Baḍakhān Gājī and his female counterpart Bonbibī, and the matron of cholera Olābibī. Because of the way they defy the strictly demarcated categories that have come to define Hindu and Muslim in the last two centuries, Orientalist scholars, conservative Muslim factions, linguists, and literary historians have until recently rejected or ignored altogether this group of stories as as purely entertaining with no religious, linguistic, or literary merit. I argue that not only are these fictions religious, they create an important space within the limiting strictures of Islamic theology, history, and law that allows people to exercise their imagination to investigate alternative worlds. These texts simultaneously offer a critique of religion and society through their parodies, rather than articulating doctrine or theology. Because they are fictions, any approach to their religiosity must use hermeneutic strategies suited to the literary world in which they operate. But the imagination exercised in these tales is not unlimited, rather the parameters of the discursive arena in which they operate—the imaginaire—can be defined by two types of presuppositions and two types of intertextuality that both enable and constrain what is possible to express. Using the example of the tales of the conflict between Dakṣiṇ Rāy and Baḍakhān Gāji, and the later appropriation by Bonbibī, we can identify not only the structures of the imaginaire, but the processes by which different authors several centuries apart construct and inhabit that discursive space for their own distinct religious purposes. Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.