Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest religion, according to many scholars, with roots and customs dating back more than 4,000 years. Today, with about 900 million followers, Hinduism is the third-largest religion behind Christianity and Islam. Roughly 95 percent of the world’s Hindus live in India. Because the religion has no specific founder, it’s difficult to trace its origins and history. Hinduism is not a single religion but a compilation of many traditions and philosophies.
Hinduism Beliefs
Some basic Hindu concepts include:
• Hinduism embraces many religious ideas. For this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as a “way of life” or a “family of religions,” as opposed to a single, organized religion.
• Hindus believe in the doctrines of samsara (the continuous cycle of life, death, and reincarnation) and karma (the universal law of cause and effect in their beliefs).
• One principle of the religion is the idea that people’s actions and thoughts directly determine their current life and future lives.
• Hindus revere all living creatures and consider the cow a sacred animal.
• Hinduism is closely related to other Indian religions, including Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.
Origins of Hinduism
Most scholars believe Hinduism started somewhere between 2300 B.C. and 1500 B.C. in the Indus Valley, near modern-day Pakistan. But many Hindus argue that their faith is timeless and has always existed.
Unlike other religions, Hinduism has no one founder but is instead a fusion of various beliefs.
Hinduism and Islam
Islam refuses the idea that says God resembles creatures.however, since the seventh-century Islamic conversion of Arab merchants settled in coastal Indonesia and South Asia. The ancient Persians originated the term Hindu for “those beyond the Indus River,” referring to a population, not a religion. In 711 Muslim Arab armies arrived in Sind, and in 1001 Mahmud of Ghazna initiated a series of Turkish incursions from Afghanistan throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain. Although these invaders and their various indigenous enemies occasionally defined one another in terms of religion, they more commonly differentiated themselves through ethnicity. Religious sites were more likely to be destroyed for political and economic purposes than because of religious animosity. In both Indonesia and South Asia, conversion of Hindus to Islam occurred most often through conviction, as Sufis inculcated a native interest in Islam by bridging local and Islamic beliefs and practices, while the development of Muslim-dominated states encouraged conversion for status advancement.
While South Asians remained predominantly Hindu, Indonesians became overwhelmingly Muslim by the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British rule in India heightened political tensions through policies that defined and enumerated religious communities as competing constituencies. The nationalist movement aroused Muslim anxiety when it promoted the Hindu majority’s interests (e.g., cow protection) and employed Hindu symbols (e.g., India as mother goddess as they claim).
Apprehensive of Hindu cultural and religious hegemony, many Muslims supported Islamic reform movements (e.g., the Deobandis) and political parties (e.g., the Muslim League, which supported the establishment of the Muslim state of Pakistan in 1947 ).
The religious nationalism of South Asian political groups increasingly threatens to sacrifice shared local cultures for polarized national politics. In India, the meteoric rise of the BJP and similar organizations has encouraged a hardening of anti-Muslim sentiment among rural and urban dwellers alike. In response to the demand that the very definition of “Indian” be “Hindu” and the claim that all who resist such identification are unpatriotic, many contemporary Indian Muslims respond with a more demonstrative Indian nationalism and an increasingly austere vision of Islam
