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Interfaith understanding of India’s “great soul”, Mahatma Gandhi: By Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi

Interfaith understanding of India’s “great soul”, Mahatma Gandhi

The “great soul” of India, Mahatma Gandhi beautifully combined religion as mystical path with peace, pluralism and conflict resolution.

His concern was to offer a model for religious observance that simultaneously creates tolerance. Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of lived religion was both altruistic and pluralistic. Today, we need to examine it as a model for our contemporary societies bringing together people across the myriad faiths and traditions.

In 1905 Mahatma Gandhi declared that “the time had passed when the followers of one religion could stand and say, ‘ours is the only true religion and all others are false’.” In another place he said, “God’s grace and revelation were not the monopoly of any race or nation.” For Gandhi, Truth is a reality larger than any one .

Throughout the human history, religion, as an ideology, has played havoc across the world, causing bloody wars, fanaticism, hatred and intolerance. Mahatma Gandhi has rightly pointed out that “ideology tends to separate, while religion means enlightenment of the mind together with belief, contentment, tranquillity of the heart, sensitivity in conscience and perception through the real experience”.

Throughout the human history, religion, as an ideology, has played havoc across the world, causing bloody wars, fanaticism, hatred and intolerance. But the very entity, when professed and practiced as a spiritual path to eternal salvation, contributed to great civilizations with a commitment to progression, peace and conflict resolution.

Thus, Gandhi Ji’s view of interfaith understanding was that undeniably that religion, as a mystic path, has had large share in cultivating humane gestures-unconditional love, humility, interpersonal repentance and reconciliation. This is precisely why mystics attach more importance to the articulation of huquq-ul-ibad (rights of human beings over each other) than even huquq-ul-lah (God’s rights).

In fact, mystics in any religion do not belong to any particular creed or political ideology. They rather profess that all creeds, faiths and religions are different paths, which ultimately converge at the same goal. Mahatma Gandhi focuses on the very common ground for his Hinduism-based peace activism and interfaith dialogue. He believes that the goal of mysticism within the world faith traditions is not simply to destroy materialism. Rather, it is the dialogue of sprit and mind which is well-embedded in all religions.

He further elucidates that, regardless of how a follower implements his/her faith in the daily life, there are, generally, believers who unanimously accept the universal values such as love, respect, forgiveness, mercy and freedom exalted by religion. “Most of them are accorded the highest precedence in the messages brought by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, as well as in the messages of Buddha and even Zaratushtra, Lao-Tzu, Confucius and the Hindu scholars,” he writes.

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