Essays on Marxism and Asia by Murzban Jal

Author:Murzban Jal [Jal, Murzban]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Political Science, World, Asian
ISBN: 9781000479577
Google: NoM_EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-24T02:47:26+00:00

So instead of the ideology of the primacy of religion as religion we have the transformation of religion into a peculiar type of ‘Asian secularism’ that absorbs the idealist traditions of Asian religions into a modern capitalist ethic. Whilst we had discourses like those of Ananda Coomaraswamy followed by René Guénon, who had perfected this type of neo-idealist thinking and for whom a mythical-spiritual ‘East’ was essentially different from a materialist, rationalistic and hedonistic ‘West’, the Parsis did not oppose the European life-world to the Asian ones. Even the Ilm-e-Khshnoom, whose basic claim is orthodox and which chide Parsi studies that emerged in the middle of the 19th century as a sort of Western conspiracy, are themselves extremely Westernised people who make regular trips to the USA.

What Parsi ideology has done is blended European with Parsi and Indian ideas. However, the Parsis also took the basic precepts of Indian spiritualism, which as Coomaraswamy once said, searched for ‘the Idea’ that lay behind concrete things,22 thereby making meaningless the intrinsic details of the deva/asura conflict. For instance it is the same Parsi sect, the Ilm-e-Khshnoom, that has said that the Hindu ‘Om’ is the abbreviation of the Parsi God, Ahura Mazda. Since one could not be a slave of ‘the imperialism of categories’ (to borrow Ashis Nandy's term), categories borrowed from the ‘West’, to be precise from Protestantism,23 the discourse of the early conflict between the early Hindus and Parsis was simply meaningless. The peculiar manufacture of Indian spiritualism in the 19th century, particularly through the agencies of organisations like the Theosophical movement (which synthesised various faiths of the world), meant that the Parsis could safely negotiate their ideology and religious practices without provoking the Hindus. The Parsis of the late 19th century could then construct a moral order independent of political theology, or in the sense used by the French constitutionalists, Holyoake and Bradlaugh, construct a wall of separation between religion and the state, as well as participating in the discourses of sarva dharma samabhava or the equality of all religions.

I would like to point out further ironies in Parsi history and how a ‘forgetfulness of history’, as Nietzsche once called it, is extremely important in negotiating history. Now it is well known that the world is confronted by the spectre of political Islam. Yet what is forgotten is that this type of spectral discourse was born, especially the contemporary Iranian politics of the committee of the clerics (Velayat-e Faqif), with the first Sasanian monarch, the ‘good’ Parsi, Ardasīr Papakan, who in his doctrine of the brotherhood between religion and kingship institutionalised state theology in Iran.24 What the Parsis do is deliberately forget this part of their history. Instead they re-invent themselves by asking the following question: ‘What thus was Zarathushtra's contribution to world history?’ The votary of Zarathushtra would now agree with Nietzsche and thus say: recognising ‘the struggle between good and evil (as) the actual wheel in the workings of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself’.

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