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Islam and Buddhism
By Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf — International Islamic University Malaysia
Historically and theologically, the Qur ’ an and the Muslims have engaged primarily in discussion and dialogue with other Semitic religions. This is understandable, considering those religions ’ interconnections and relationships. Muslim engagements with the Asian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism are largely the result of commercial relations, immigration, and political interactions between the worlds of Islam and Asia.
This paper examines Islam ’ s view of Buddhism as a non-theistic tradition, the history of relations between these two traditions, themes and issues in Muslim–Buddhist dialogue, and the implications of such dialogue for the contemporary religious scene. While Muslims and Buddhists have coexisted in different parts of the world, their exchange has been largely political, military and economic, instead of doctrinal, and only a few scholars have studied the relations between the two traditions in any detail( Berzin 2007 : 225, 251).
Islam and Buddhism first came into contact in central Asia ( Foltz 1999 ) and later in south and southeast Asia (al-Attas 1963 ). These early encounters were followed, in some instances, by the conversion of Buddhists to Islam, as happened in central and maritime southeast Asia. Yet there were also other regions where Buddhists and Muslims continued to exist side by side, as in India, Tibet, and parts of mainland southeast Asia.
Despite the long record of Muslim–Buddhist interaction, such contact is at the present either nonexistent or rare, largely due to the strong trend of reified interpretations of religion in the contemporary world – interpretations which in turn overlook the historical exchanges that took place between these religions during the Age of the Silk Road (400 BCE–1400 CE) and the Age of Commerce (1450–1680 CE).
Encounters between Islam and Buddhism are as old as Islam itself ( Yusuf 2003 ). The first encounter between Islam and Buddhist communities took place in the middle of the seventh century CE in East Persia, Transoxiana, Afghanistan and Sindh ( Fyre 2012 ). Historical evidence indicates that early Muslims extended the Qur ’anic category of ahl al-Kitab (“people of the book” or revealed religion) to Hindus and Buddhists ( Ikram 1965 : 11; MacLean 1997 : 40–41; Vajda 2012 ; Wink 1990 1: 193–194).
During the second half of the eighth century CE, central-Asian Muslims translated many Buddhist works into Arabic. Arabic titles such as Bilawhar wa Budhasaf and Kitab al-Budd are clear evidence of Muslim learning about Buddhism ( Goldziher and Lewis 1981 : 141) Signifi cantly, in spite of his awareness that idols of the Buddha were objects of reverence and worship, Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995 CE), the author of al-Firhist , observes that :
These people [Buddhists of Khurasan] are the most generous of all the inhabitants of the earth and of all the religionists. This is because their prophet Budhasf [Bodhisattva] has taught them that the greatest sin, which should never be thought of or committed, is the utterance of “No.” Hence they act upon this advice; they regard the uttering of “No” as an act of Satan. And it is their very religion to banish Satan. (Muhammad ibn Abi Yaqub Ishaq Ibn al-Nadim 1971 : 407; see also Yusuf 1955 : 28) There is also evidence of central-Asian Buddhist influence on Muslims in the succeeding period. One possible source of this may lie in the Barmak family, who were descendants of Buddhist monks and governors in the non-Muslim regions during the early Abbasid caliphate, which ruled the greater part of the Islamic world for five centuries (750–1258 CE). It is noteworthy that the Buddhist monastery of Naw Bahar near Balkh, in addition to other Iranian monasteries, remained under the supervision of the Barmak family ( Bulliet 1976 : 140–145; Foltz 1999 : 100; Xinru Liu 2011 : 55–81).
We find vestiges of several Buddhist beliefs and practices among the Muslims of central Asia. For example, during the Samanid dynasty, which ruled Persia during the ninth and tenth centuries CE, the madrasahs devoted to Islamic learning were modeled after Buddhist schools in eastern Iran. ( Foltz 1999 : 100). The pondoks or pasenterens, Muslim religious schools of southeast Asia, seem also to have been influenced by the Hindu and Buddhist temple schools of the region. The celebrated historian and Qur ’anic exegete, Abu Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 923 CE), who was born in northern Persia, mentions that Buddhist idols were brought from Kabul to Baghdad in the ninth century CE. It is also reported that Buddhist idols were sold in a Buddhist temple next to the Makah mosque in the market of the city of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan ( Foltz 1999 : 100). There is a common misunderstanding that Islam wiped out Buddhism by means of conversion and persecution. Marshall Hodgson comments:
Probably Buddhism did not yield to Islam so much by direct conversion as by a more insidious route: the sources of recruitment to the relatively unaristocratic Buddhism – for instance, villagers coming to the cities and adopting a new allegiance to accord to their new status – turned now rather to Islam than to an outdated Buddhism. The record of the massacre of one monastery in Bengal, combined with the inherited Christian conception of Muslims as the devotees of the sword has yielded the widely repeated statement that the Muslims violently “destroyed” Buddhism in India. Muslims were not friendly to it, but there is no evidence that they simply killed off all the Buddhists, or even all the monks. It will take much active revision before such assessments of the role of Islam, based largely on unexamined preconceptions, are eliminated even from educated mentalities. ( Hodgson 1977 : 557)
Further encounters between Islam and Hindu-Buddhist civilization took place in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The Islam of this region had a conspicuously mystic orientation, and the Muslims who first brought Islam to Indonesia and then to Malaysia and southern Thailand during the twelfth–fifteenth centuries CE were largely Sufi mystics. In religious terms, this led to a meeting between the Hindu view of moksha (liberation) through the Hindu notion of monism, the Buddhist notion of Dhamma (Truth) through the realization sunyata (emptiness), and the Islamic concept of fana’ (the passing away of one ’s identity by its merging into the Universal Being) as expounded in the monotheistic pantheism of the Sufi s. Gradually there emerged a syncretic culture, particularly in Java and other parts of southeast Asia, giving rise to a version of Islam that was mystical, fluid and soft ( Gordon 2001 ; Shih 2002 ).
