* Dr. Noel Q. King is Professor Emeritus of History and Comparative Religion, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.

In the context of the study of the history of civilizations, the question arises: "Why did modern science arise in western civilization and not in the oriental?" One of the factors sometimes adduced is that western scriptures (that is, Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur’an) envisage a personal Creator who is also a Lawgiver and whose will controls the univers. In contrast, it is alleged the fundamental ancient eastern scriptures (that is, Vedas, Upanishads, the early Pali Buddhist works, the Confucian classics and the earliest books of the Taoist canon) tend not to put much emphasis on such a deity, but rather they speak of impersonal forces like karma, maya, dharma and yin and yang. It is also averred there is a different attitude to time involved; the western scriptures envisage a kind of linear time, ,starting from creation and moving towards the Last Judgment with a center-point at the Crucifixion, or at the Hegira. The oriental Scriptures are said to be based on a more vast and circular idea of time, enormous kalpas of time allow scope for samsara and billions of reincarnations. At this point, a grand ruckus can begin - of argument and counter-argument of distinction and definition. Alas – this is not the time and place to wade into it. Scholars have made some useful points which we do not accept or fully reject, but we will bear them in mind as we turn to the Sikh Scriptures.

What do the Sikh Scriptures say about Sikh beliefs concerning the processes of the Divine purposes as we can perceive them being worked out in World History? To try to answer this question in a comparative context systematically has already taken me much time and in connection with other questions of a similar character, will take such study time as I have in the rest of my life. A brief preliminary and very partial yet, I trust, reliable answer can be sketched.

The Sikh teaching shares many features with the Jewish, Christian and Islamic views outlined above. This is, of course, not because of dependency on those other Scriptures, or of the deep personal, face-to-face meeting with Islam, but because of the similarities we noted above between the thinking and utterances of true human recipients of Divine revelation and of the universal oneness of the Divine. The basic theology of Sikhism summed up in the Mul Mantra, which goes back to the first Padshah, is reiterated throughout the period of the Adi Granth and then magnificently restated in the Jaap Sahib of Padshah X. The first is a brief, superb and strong description of a personal God, One, True, the Creator, without fear, without enmity, without birth or death, self-existent, knowing by the Guru’s Grace. True at the beginning. True throughout Time. God remains the True One. The second hails the attributes and names of God in a hundred and ninety-nine jewel-faceted yet laconic verses. It is a lyrical paean of matchless beauty. He is God of millions of Indras, Lord of the Three Worlds, God is nurse to all, he destroys all. He is in the waters, the trees and mountains are his garments. God’s positive aspects are told in a fashion which covers most of the Biblical attributes of God, especially his Lordship and universal power and activity, he puts down sinners and exalts the righteous. The jealous, tribal god of the earliest strata of the Bible nowhere appears. The negative attributes are enumerated with a fluent balance and use of privatives which would have impressed the classical Greek metaphysicians. Much of the long history of the Indic theological evolution is reflected to be carefully brought into the compass of the Gurus’ teaching and taken forward in a new way. Thus God is nourisher and destroyer, he is Lord of millions of deities, he is the greatest ascetic, he beats the drum for the world dram. God wields sword and weapons, God is mother of the world, God is the love of loves. These aspects of God are reflected in the texts of the Scriptures from the last pages to the first.

It is with caution an outsider mentions an admiration for the achievement of the Xth Master in giving due place to the feminine and Shakti aspects of the Divine without falling into those snares of goddess-worship which the Hebrew Prophets and the Prophet of Islam warn against. At this juncture, I just want to mention this important point in Sikh theology, since it is one of its most dynamic features but easily misunderstood. I hope to publish a special study on the theology of the Chandi Ki Var elsewhere.

Theology, the doctrine of God, is the center of the Sikh message. Everything else is logically extrapolated from this. This is an active alive God who is ever present and acts in the world. Can we, by looking at events, begin to piece together the purposes of God for his community and the world? Just as we took the earliest theology and compared the fulfillment of it in the Xth Master, so we may see God’s purpose being enunciated at the beginning and being declared full grown by the Xth Guru. We may consider briefly some of the oldest community traditions underlying the Janam Sakhis and related narratives and come on to the Xth Mahalla’s autobiographical statements enshrined in the Dasam Granth. That the first Guru, under the impulsion of God’s command, took the message to the heart of the Islamic, that is, western world, then to the heart of the oriental world, then settled to implement its meaning as a worker and family person, indicates something of this realization. As the acorn made its way to oakhood, fulfilling, rather than mutating or evolving, its Own Being, so the Gurus one by one went forward to unfold to the community and the world the mysteries of the central sanctuary, of the Holy Book and in due course of the Khalsa. All this is very explicitly stated in the Bachitar Natak of the Xth Mahalla. He traces his arrival on the scene of humankind’s suffering in the age of Kal and his showing of the way to all, are followed by the statement that the holy Nanak’s life and work were continued in the Gurus who came after him as ‘one lamp is kindled from another’. He goes on to tell of his austerities and meditations on Hem Kunt in the Himalayas, the Immortal One told him of the failures of his predecessors, all those deities and great souls founded their own Panths and went astray.

The Guru accepted the Divine command, confident that God’s will must be victorious in the world as long as God grants help. Thus he was born as a human, without fear or enmity, he proclaims the message.

We have, then, in Sikhism an exceedingly dynamic theology as well as a strong doctrine of the purposes of God in World History to be worked out through the Guru. There is much in common with the counterpart teachings in Christianity and Islam, but, in some fundamental ways, the Sikh teaching goes beyond and in others profoundly differs. It must especially be remembered that the tenth Master made the Granth, the Sangat and Khalsa the Guru. That is, the work and purpose continues in and through the symbiosis of Book and community.

When the three systems, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism, met there has been much fruitful interaction, but it is the head-breaking clashes which most come of mind. Akbar or Dara Shikoh as sufis could actually come very close and gain Sikh support. Aurangzeb could behead a Guru in Chandni Chowk and Farrukh Siyar seven hundred Sikhs near the Qutb Minar. The Xth Padshah had suffered the loss of his four sons at the hand of a Muslim governor and was one day to face the attack of a Pathan assassin, yet he had the greatness to be prepared to advise both Aurangzeb and Bahadur Shah. On the side of the Islamic legalists, it is possible to consider whether the place where the Sikhs are in contact with them is dar-al-Islam or dar-al-harb, their status varies with this decision. Sikhs can vary from being Kafirs to being treated as a kind of ahl al-kitab. Accommodations can be made. Thus in the pre-Partition Punjab, Muslim and Sikhs had lived and worked together in much cultural amity. When my mixed platoon of Mussulmans and Sikhs gathered at Chaklala to go to Burma, they sang Bhale bhale bhalya together, they ate dhal and roti in the Guru ka langar as in the forests of the Arakan Yoma, Sikh soldiers held a Gur purb. Were the same people killing each other in 1947? In the cities of English-speaking North America, Sikhs and Muslims cooperate in great friendship. Undoubtedly the two groups will see more and more of each other and it is good for us to have studied how to recognize the potentialities and avoid the dangers.

The Christians have much in their Scriptures which demands recognition of virtue, good-will and peaceful co-existence with others. Though some have always been friendly, from the days of Constantine there have been some whose practice has been otherwise at times. When they came into the Punjab, and indeed since they first heard of the Sikhs at the time of the execution of Banda’s brave Seven Hundred, they had much admiration and recognition for them. British military men were not by any means Christians as such though they might nominally belong to the Queen’s religion by the law of England established. But there was a most interesting, little recognized factor in the early history of the British Punjab. In those early days, a number of officers and civilians had been affected by the Evangelical revival and had blended with this a curious revival of the English Puritan New Model Army idea of the soldier who is a sincere and practicing Christian. (It was nothing new to Cromwellian times for Christians in the Roman army in the third and early fourth centuries had been decisive in proving Diocletian’s last Great Persecution futile). These young officers in the Punjab immediately understood and appreciated the Sikh soldier-saint ideal. Though they were not sufficiently magnanimous to incorporate the armies of the Khalsa, they encouraged Sikhism in the Indian Army in a way which, according to Khushwant Singh, had a permanent effect on the twentieth-century forms of Sikhism.

Nor is it sufficiently taken to heart that "western" civilization is now post-modern and post-Christian. The new world culture, unless properly handled, can be the deadly enemy of family, basic morals and honesty, and traditional religion. Christianity is potentially as much out in the cold as anyone else. If properly handled, our culture can be made a servant of our best values held in common.

In their day the Gurus, the Hebrew sages and the Christian teachers did their best to work out God’s purpose in History and to further it. Sikhism with its ever-present guidance and grace, manifest through sangat, Khalsa and Granth, is singularly well equipped to meet the challenges of World History and to work out God’s purpose as the Gurus envisaged it.

The natural working out of this purpose as visualized by the Hebrew Prophets was cruelly frustrated by genocides perpetrated by the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Syrian and the Roman governments. Whenever it was resumed, it was met by ghettoization, Inquisition and holocaust. The Christian vision went forward only after a wholesale readaptation of Christianity from Judaic culture to Romano-Hellenism, then to western Europeanism. It remains to see what she can do about transforming herself in the face of a culture which is more than partly her own spawning. Islam has presented a hard legalistic carapace and an inviting inner mystical spirituality and present life which has enabled her to survive Umayyads, Abbasids, Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids, the French as well as the British and the Dutch colonialists. I watch with bated breath as she deals with the spirit of Hollywood.

The Sikhs now are facing decisions more difficult than any they have faced before, in what form to allow their basic thinking to go ahead into the outer world, how much of that outer world to allow into their hearts and minds. However, the promise of true Gurus’ guidance cannot fail. May the deficiencies and insensitivities of this paper be forgiven and themselves serve a greater purpose.