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Hinduism is NOT a Semitic Religion

For two centuries, missionaries, Orientalists, and colonial officials have tried the same crude trick: they judged Hinduism through Semitic categories and declared it lacking. They demanded to know, Where is your prophet? Where is your one sacred book? Where is your unalterable creed? And when Hindus answered that their faith has no single founder, no closed canon, no frozen revelation, these same critics called it “polytheistic confusion,” “idolatry,” “primitive superstition.”

This is not scholarship—it is the arrogance of the desert mind. The Semitic imagination cannot comprehend a religion that grows rather than obeys, that evolves rather than ossifies. So instead of recognizing Hinduism for what it is, they forced it into their own template, as though the Bible or Qur’an were the universal yardstick of religion.

Take the British Orientalists. William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and Max Müller studied Sanskrit texts and yet could not resist the temptation to turn Hinduism into a “Bible-centered” faith. They elevated the Vedas into something they called the “Hindu scripture,” ignoring the fact that Hindus had never treated the Vedas as a closed canon. They looked for a “Hindu Moses” in Manu, or a “Hindu Luther” in Śaṅkara. They spoke of the “fall” of Hinduism from an imagined Vedic purity, mimicking the Christian story of Eden. They wanted Hinduism to be a Semitic religion in disguise—because that was the only model they understood.

Then came the missionaries. To them, Hinduism was “idolatry” because it did not fit the Semitic prohibition of images. They railed against temple worship, unable to see that the murti is not a “statue of God” but a living presence in which the infinite becomes accessible. They accused Hindus of superstition because they could not find a prophet’s name on the cover of a single book. They mistook plurality for chaos, diversity for corruption, and debate for disunity. In their poverty of imagination, they called India’s richest tradition a failure simply because it was not a mirror image of their own.

But Hindus answered. Thinkers like Swami Vivekananda, Dayananda Saraswati, and later Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan exposed the fraud. They showed that Hinduism was not a religion of one book but a civilization of many paths. Vivekananda thundered at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago: “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” That single line shattered the Semitic monopoly on salvation. Dayananda returned to the Vedas but without closing the door to new interpretation. Radhakrishnan reminded the West that Hinduism was “not a creed but a quest.”

And yet the disease lingers. Even today, Western academics and Indian secularists try to jam Hinduism into Semitic molds. They demand a single “Hindu doctrine.” They speak of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” where none exist. They try to reduce a civilization-wide process into a neat box labeled “religion,” as though it were a desert sect. In doing so, they commit the same colonial sin: they use alien categories to define what cannot be determined by them.

The truth is plain: Semitic parameters—prophet, book, revelation, orthodoxy—cannot capture Hinduism. They can only distort it. Hinduism is not a relic of revelation but a living river of thought and practice. It has no pope, no fatwa, no final word. It is vast enough to contain skeptics and saints, ritualists and philosophers, poets and mystics, all under one canopy. It has endured precisely because it is not brittle like the faiths of the desert.

To force Hinduism into Semitic categories is not only wrong, it is colonial violence against the truth. The West has always needed Hinduism to look like its own mirror—so it could dismiss it as inferior. But Hinduism is not a failed version of their faith. It is something bigger: an open-ended civilization, a growing process, a tradition that has outlived conquerors, colonizers, and critics alike. Their parameters cannot define it, because it is precisely what those parameters fear most: a religion that refuses to be frozen in time.

Hinduism is not a Semitic faith in disguise. It is the world’s most enduring answer to the Semitic mistake.