Sikh History
Development of a World Religion
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Sikhs are followers of Guru Nanak (b. 1469) and his nine successors (known as Gurus). Nanak had been raised in a Hindu family of the trading caste in a village near Lahore in modern day Pakistan, but experienced a mystical conversion around the age of twenty-nine or thirty which, according to him, revealed the nature of the True God and required him to spread a message of unity and love.
Some reports of his early life indicate that he was long inclined to mystical beliefs and the he spent quite a lot of time with local Fakirs. He appears to have had little interest in mundane, temporal affairs and spent most of his time in meditation and religious contemplation.
After his conversion experience, Nanak traveled across India and even further, visiting cities like Baghdad, Medina and Mecca, in an attempt to learn more about people's religious traditions. After about twenty years, he returned and took to leading his new followers in the teachings he had received from God and writing down his ideas in the form of hymns.
Nanak did have his forerunners when it came to attempts at harmonizing Islam with Hinduism. One was Ramananda, a poet who lived during the first half of the fifteenth century in the region around Barnas. He attempted to combine the teachings of Vaishnavism with Islamic monotheism. Some of his writings were later incorporated in the Adi Granth he said that God is everywhere and in every person's heart.
Another forerunner was Kabir, a student of Ramananda, who died around the year 1518. Nearly 1,000 verses of poetry were included in the Adi Granth where he taught that all men should worship the one true God who lies at the heart of human religion. Like the Sikhs, he denied that rituals like the worship of idols or pilgrimages had any ability to provide salvation.
One of Nanak's principle goals seem to have been to eliminate things like ritualism, ceremonies, self-mortification, and pilgrimages from religion. For Nanak, genuine salvation only comes through of a combination of grace and works. As a result of this, Sikhism is sometimes referred to as a type of Indian "Protestantism," because Nanak reacted to some of the same aspects of Hinduism and Islam which caused the Protestant Reformation in Christianity.
Sikhs remained a persecuted minority until, under the leadership of Rnjit Singh (1780-1839), they managed to take political control in the Punjab region and created a powerful, militaristic kingdom. When they challenged British power, however, they found themselves unable to effectively fight the British army and their kingdom was annexed in 1849. The British treated the Sikhs much better than the Mughal emperors did and actively recruited them into the police and military, allowing the Sikhs to adopt a more positive attitude to these new rulers.
Membership:
Sikhs today number somewhere around 20 million, almost all of whom can be found
in the Punjab region of India. Although they make up only about two percent of
the population of India, their involvement with politics and the military has
assured them a disproportionate influence on affairs in India. About four million
Sikhs live outside of India in a diaspora driven largely by economic success.
This has not only made Sikhism a world religion, it has also begun to cause
tension as Sikhs who are born abroad no longer accept the same traditions and
ideas as those who continue to live in India.
However, many Sikhs - especially those in the West - are becoming more and more "nominally" rather than devoutly Sikh. Some only attend religious services during holy days instead of on a regular schedule, for example. Thus, one problem facing Sikh religious leaders is the prospect of Sikhism in the West losing its distinctiveness and, in the East, even being absorbed by Hinduism, leaving only the most militant forms of Sikhism behind.
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