No institution of the Indian subcontinent has been argued over as much as caste. For its defenders it is a frame of duty (dharma) inherited from the Vedas, a division of labour that gives every person a place. For its…
Month: October 2026
Chapter 84. The Upanishadic Turn: Atman, Brahman, Karma and the Renouncers
The Upanishads close the Vedic canon. Van Voorst notes that they are “also known as the Vedanta (End of the Veda)” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, “Overview of Structure”]. In them the outward sacrifice gives way to inquiry…
Chapter 83. Sacrifice and Its Masters: Vedic Ritual, the Brahmanas and the Priestly Order
The Vedic hymns were not freestanding poetry. They were the spoken part of a sacrificial system, and the people who controlled that system came to hold a position in Indian society that no other priesthood has kept so long. This…
Chapter 82. From the Indus Cities to the Vedic Hymns: Origins and the Aryan Question
Part 9 begins on the Indus plain. An urban civilisation flourished and vanished there, and a body of orally transmitted hymns later appeared that became Hinduism’s oldest scripture. How the two relate is among the most politically charged questions in…
Chapter 81. After the Seal: Babism, the Baha’i Faith, Ahmadiyya, Black American Islam, and Keshe’s ‘True Koran’
Qur’an 33:40 calls Muhammad khatam an-nabiyyin, the “seal of the prophets”. Most Muslims read the verse as closing revelation. Every movement in this chapter reopened that question in some way: by announcing a “gate” to a hidden Imam, a new…
Chapter 80. Revival, Reform and Revolt: Wahhabism, Salafism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic
From the eighteenth century onward, Islamic reform movements became political projects: a desert kingdom, a mass brotherhood, a clerical republic and a transnational jihad. The sources for this history differ in kind. Karen Armstrong writes a sympathetic scholarly survey. Kim…
Chapter 79. Gunpowder Empires: the Safavid Twelver State, the Ottomans, the Mughals and the End of the Caliphate
Between 1500 and 1700 three Muslim states used firearms and centralised bureaucracies to rule more tightly than any earlier Islamic polity. Karen Armstrong calls the period “Imperial Islam (1500-1700)”. She argues that these empires, unlike the Abbasid court, “all had…
Chapter 78. The Mystical Path: Sufism, the Orders and Their Western Afterlife
Sufism (tasawwuf) appears in the library’s sources in two forms at once. It is an interior discipline aimed at the annihilation of the ego in God, and it is a social institution of lodges, masters and orders that held Islamic…
Chapter 77. Esoteric Shi’ism: Ismailis, Fatimids, Nizari ‘Assassins’, Druze and Alawites
Twelver Shi’ism withdrew from politics to wait for a Hidden Imam. The “Sevener” line did the opposite. It produced a secret missionary network, a counter-caliphate in Cairo, a mountain state in Iran whose ruler abolished the religious law, a new…
Chapter 76. Law and Theology: the Madhhabs, Mutazila, Ash’ari, Hanbali and the Philosophers
Between the Abbasid revolution of 750 and the tenth century, Sunni Islam acquired the intellectual architecture it still has today: four recognised schools of law, a dominant theological method (Ash’arism), a philosophical tradition (falsafa) that was pushed out of the…