This project seeks to clear the misrepresentation of among Arab Muslims regarding the Indian religion. The objective is to initiate a civilizational dialogue that is built on a strong footing and which ensures that Hinduism is seen in its truest form as both a religion and culture.
The modern age is characterized as the age of civilizational dialogue and age when alliances of civilizations are being created. This obviously needs to be built on a sound understanding of various civilizations of the world. One of the greater civilizations of the past and one that is emerging more strongly in our times is the Indian civilization.
Muslims in the past have tried to make sense of the Indian civilization with all its basic constituent entities particularly its religion ever since they came in contact with it. Much of what was written about them in Arab sources by Arab theologians, however, was far removed from fact; in fact, to a large extent it was based on serious misunderstandings and misrepresentations although – with very few exceptions – not necessarily deliberate. To make matters worse, these misrepresentations got employed by Muslim theologians in their largely polemical works to bash Indian religions reduce them to a man-made concoction and dismiss them as mere superstitions.
With the civilizational gap ever decreasing, these misrepresentations have been carried forth in modern Arab writings on Indian religions and it is these very sources that are currently being taught in the universities of the Arab world in general. As if that was not enough, a harrowing phenomenon of our times has become that many Muslim Indian scholars have started using these Arab writings as their sources for a religion of their own land.