ASKhalsa1

It would be no exaggeration to say that Sikhi, of all the world's major religions, stands quite apart from the rest in that it is the most egalitarian (supportive of the equality of men and women, highborn and lowborn, all races) and one of the least obstructive in the path of the scientific method and intellectual discussion, in that our Guru Sahibaan (themselves keen religious and political commentators, and critical thinkers) did not conceive any creation myths or make flagrantly untrue statements about the nature of reality. At the end of every Ardas in every Gurdwara around the world we pray for Sarbat Da Bhalla, the good of all mankind. It seems to me that if the greater part of mankind could be brought into the Sikh fold, the world would be a better place and all mankind would be better off. How can this even be argued given everything our faith stands for? Every progressive value which all the cultures of the world have just happened upon in the last century or so has been institutionalized in the Sikh Panth since the 1500s. So why do we not attempt to spread the message of Sikh more actively? There is an abundance of parchaaraks who direct their sermons towards other Sikhs, but I know of none who set out to convert non-Sikhs. I believe this is because many Sikhs appear to be under the misapprehension that Sikhi does not permit missionary work or proselytization. That any Sikh could continue to believe this when Guru Nanak himself, on his four great Udaasis, actually set out to spread his message and acted as a 'missionary' to the fullest extent of that word, I think beggars belief. Are we so scared of offending other people's beliefs, many of which are backward and actually harmful, that we will deny to everyone the teachings of a faith that has the potential to be one of the most profound forces for good in the world today? Why shouldn't we have missionaries who seek to convert other people from other religions, and why should we sit on our hands and leave the world vulnerable to the retrograde preachments of predatory Christian and Muslim missionaries? Am I violating any principles of Gurbani for thinking this way?

Secrets are the privilege of the unknown and the obscure. Nothing about you stays hidden for long once you're famous, people are very keen to know everything about individuals in the public eye, such as Gagandeep Singh; On the other hand, someone as inconsequential as I am will have many, many secrets, which nobody will ever know, because nobody really cares enough to find out about them

Atheist, hard-drinker, and chain smoker though he was, I bloody adore the Hitch. May he rest in peace.

The reason for the inclusion of the tales and exploits of Hindu myths in Sri Dasam Granth Sahib is simply to make use of their allegories, and the opportunities they present for metaphor. Guru Sahib used the stories of Krishan Avtaar and Chandi Di Vaar etc, because they were the only stories which he knew for a certainty that most people had encountered. Martin Luther King deployed a similar tactic during the Civil Rights movement, using Biblical stories as metaphors to illustrate his argument because the Bible was the only book he could be sure that most of his audience had read. Hindu myths, across history, have lost their distinctly religious flavour and have instead become more akin to folk-tales among the peoples of India than the overtly religious stories as which they began. Guru Granth Sahib Ji states that Devte exist in certain realms (of course it doesn't say that the guises in which the Hindus choose to present them, namely polycephalyic and multi limbed, are true), but explicitly refutes the idea that these deities should be worshiped. The gods and demi-gods of Hindu myth are just as possessed of negative qualities as we ordinary humans are.

Jammu and Kashmir was taken for the Lahore Durbar in 1808. Maharaja Ranjit Singh however made the mistake of allowing control of the province to the treacherous Gulab Singh Dogra, who during the Anglo Sikhs wars went over to the East India Company. It also bears mentioning that even when the Sikhs were the overlords of northwestern India, they were still surrounded and vastly outnumbered by Muslims, who constituted approximately 70% of the Sikh Empire's population (Hindus 20%, Sikhs just 10%). But I agree, the Sikhs missed out on an opportunity. In 1783 Jassa Singh Ahluwalia had reached entered the gates of Delhi, and established himself in the Red Fort. If he had just remained there rather than made a treaty with the Mughals and left, the history of our people from then on would have been very different. Our history is a tragic tapestry of missed opportunities. We could have ruled the whole of India for god's sake. Sikh leaders cosying up to these Ahmadiyyas, and indeed other Muslims, doesn't surprise me in the least. In the decades post-1984, the anti-Hindu sentiment of certain Sikh groups has caused them to retreat from one enemy into the arms of another. For instance, our misguided brothers in the militant/shaheed outfits establishing training camps in Pakistan, ie. enemy territory. Talk about what the Hindus did in 1984, have we forgotten what these people have been doing to us since the very genesis of our religion? It seems the more we try to distance ourselves from the Hindus, the more we become like the fundamentalist Muslims. I'm not sympathetic to the failed, experimental patchwork that is the nation of India, but my dislike for it didn't stop me from feeling revolted when Simranjit Singh Mann started shouting 'Pakistan Zindabaad' after it recognised the Anand Karaj. Sikhs cannot trust anyone in the subcontinent, not the Indians and not the Muslims. The Brahmins and the Mullahs would both love to see us on our knees. We should have no complete trust in anyone but ourselves. Panth Khalsa should trust Panth Khalsa alone.

The headline of this article is a bunch of fluffy, incorrigible idealism. These Ahmadiyya Muslims who visited the temple belong to a group that exists on the very margins of Islam. Its adherents are regarded as base heretics even by other Muslims, as with the Sufis. Sunni Islam is the particular variety of the faith practiced with most frequency in the area. I live in the area to which this article pertains, I can attest that things are not very good between the Sikhs and the Sunni (Pakistani/Somali) Muslims. Not very bad, it has to be said, but not positive either. This is unlikely to change.

Lol, absolutely agreed. It's such a twisted irony that so many poor English guys fawn over coconut Asian girls thinking they're exotic beauties and mysterious jungle princesses when these sorts of women deliberately act in such a way as to distance themselves from their roots and their people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to inter-racial marriages, but this obsessive pro-miscegenation that is sweeping modern society is still worrying. I don't know if you ever saw a Channel 4 documentary presented by a Hindu woman and so called scientist named Aarathi Prasad? This woman, herself involved in an interracial relationship, argued that mixed race children were physically and intellectually superior to children sired by parents of the same race. Does this not reek of Nazi/ Third Reich eugenics theory? If a white guy attempted to produce a documentary maintaining that thoroughbred whites were the creme-de-la-creme of the human race, there would be outrage. But Prasad's tripe is of precisely the same nature and liberals are applauding it. This is the fruit of today's hyper-multiculturalism.

You know if one were to meet Gurinder Chadha face to face, I doubt they could come away from the meeting saying that the woman knew very much about Sikhi. She is typical in this way of Western bohemian, bourgeois 'Asian' women, who know little of their own people save stereotypes and generalizations which they laugh about with their equally bohemian and bourgeois white friends. This phenomenon of self-hating subcontinental women is acquiring a worrying pace, and women like Gurinder Chadha are helping to perpetuate it. My father's sister is a doppelganger of Chadha. She married a white guy and is convinced she is now better than the rest of us. We call her 'Coconut Pooji'. As for why Hindu and Sikhs are relegated to the backseat in the British press, it is because the media in the UK has always bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of Muslims. And since the media considers us all practically the same thing (we are all called 'Asians' as though we are a single people) it considers that by giving Muslims time, this should be enough to placate the rest of us, what with us being proud 'Asians' and all. I'm sure you haven't failed to notice that whenever a gang of Muslim males rapes a white girl somewhere in this country, the media, without exception, always report that gangs of 'Asian' men are guilty of the systematized violation of young white girls. In this way, an entire subcontinent, composed of Sikhs, Hindus, Tamils, Sri Lankans etc are implicated in the crimes committed by members of a very particular group.

What does salvation mean to me? I suppose Sant Baba Waryam Singh Ji Ratwara Wale put it best in his telling of the Sakhi of Pir Buddhu Shah and Guru Gobind Singh Ji. Pir Ji asked the Guru, "how shall I become one with God?", to which Guru Sahib replied "as night merges with day". The implication being that night never merges with day, when one begins, the other ends. When all notion of 'I' ends, there is only God. The painting is rubbed blank, leaving only the canvas. Jkvlondon Ji expressed this very same sentiment very concisely and neatly. But I think your question misses the point of my argument. This isn't an issue of labels. I am not deriding those who call themselves Muslims or uplifting those who consider themselves Sikh. This matter is entirely one of doctrine and content. The fact of the matter is that many of the teachings of Islam stand in direct opposition to so much of what our Gurus taught us to believe in, for instance, the equality of all people, abhorrence of empty ritual, and opposition to forceful prozelytization. Yes, if a religion teaches good precepts, it can lead one to God, but I don't believe Islam does. Or for that matter, the Bible.

Indeed, Muhammad, and it seems, Allah, didn't even consider the dangers of passing down a revelation entirely through the medium of oral tradition, which is notoriously susceptible to corruption. One would think an omnipotent God would be aware of this danger and would instruct his messenger to act in order to prevent it. But as is apparent from the Koran, Allah must have thought this concern was not as important as the injunctions to commit atrocities against women and unbelievers. Whether or not the Koran today is exactly as it was in the early days of Islam, the revelations could not have acquired such a sanguinary character in the short hundred years or so before the Koran was actually written down, unless some of that character was present in the first place. It is very difficult to make significant alterations to a text which most people know by heart without arousing ire or opposition. By the time Muhammad died, pretty much the whole of Arabia had been brought beneath the sway of the new religion. Thus, Arab motives and Islamic motives became synonymous. Islam lent a new zeal and fanaticism to the expansionist urges of the Arabs Nor would I be so quick to discount the importance of the Hadith in the practice of Islam. A religion and its tenets are not necessarily entirely summed up in the flagship scripture of the faith. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji for instance offers no commentary on the maintenance of kes, the rehat maryada, or amrit sanchaar. But only a fool would dispute that these principles are integral to Sikhi. These mandates may instead be found in old rehitnamas, which occupy a roughly equivalent status in Sikhi to that of the Hadith in Islam. The most reliable Hadith today was written by Bukhari about one and half centuries after Muhammad. Bukhari, over the course of his endeavors, collected 300,000 hadith. He ruled that 200,000 of these were entirely unsubstantiated, and that another 90,000 were slightly dubious. So thorough and devout a man can't justly be suspected of not having done his research. The 10,000 hadiths which he deemed accurate, should not therefore be discounted lightly.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh, A lot of modern Sikhs are very quick to extol their opinions that Sikhism equates all the major religions of the world to rivers flowing into a single ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism#Sikhism In other words all religions, when properly followed, can lead one to God. Aside from this metaphor being nauseating for its sentimentality, the idea that two faiths with completely different and usually contradictory precepts can both yield the same spiritual pay dirt strikes me as being utterly fanciful. It also betrays an ignorance of the religions with which Sikhi is being equated. Take Muhammad, as an instance of a prophet from another religion. Some members of our Panth consider that both the Prophet of Islam and our own Gurus were all sent by the same God in order to enlighten the masses, that both these parties are composed of the messengers of God. However it is made explicitly clear in the Quran, which was supposedly revealed to Muhammad by Allah himself, that he would be the very last prophet in history to the exclusion of all others that came after him. This includes our own Guru Sahibaan: "Muhammad is... the Apostle of God, and the Seal of the Prophets (The Quran, Surah 33:40). As a "seal" closes a letter, so does Muhammad close the line of prophethood. Therefore if we accept Muhammad as a prophet we must by definition accept his revelation (all of which came directly from Allah through the supposed intercession of the Angel Gabriel), and in lending any credence to the idea that he is the last messenger of God, we are in effect denouncing our own Guru Sahibaan as pretenders. We cannot possibly believe in both the Gurus and Muhammad. Either Muhammad was right and our Gurus were liars, or our Gurus are right and Muhammad was a liar. I very much doubt that any of us inclines towards the former. Secondly, how can it be argued that both Islam and Sikhi both lead to salvation when the two of them advocate completely different and antithetical ways of attaining it? In Sikhism, as the members of the Sangat here will well know, one is instructed that rituals such as fasting, pilgrimages, circumcisions are wholly unimportant and of no consequence. One who wishes to attain Mukhta is counselled to avoid these things. But in Islam, fasts, pilgrimages and rituals are of the utmost importance, and are actually said to be necessary if one wishes to go to heaven (two of the so called five pillars of the faith being predicated on ritual). To summarise, is it possible for Muhammad to have been sent by the very same God who sent our own Guru Sahibaan, when the first party's message excludes and contradicts that of the latter?