Is Kaba a Shivmandir ?
Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal has arrested a 17 year old kid for posting on facebook that Kaba is a Shiva Mandir.
What is the truth in this claim ? Sadhana Team brings the facts.
Kaba was always a Pagan temple before Islam and Muhammad.
Hubal (Arabic: هُبَل) was a god worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia, notably by Quraysh at the Kaaba in Mecca. His idol was a human figure, believed to control acts of divination, which was in the form of tossing arrows before the statue. The direction in which the arrows pointed answered questions asked of the idol. The origins of the cult of Hubal are uncertain, but the name is found in inscriptions from Nabataea in northern Arabia (across the territory of modern Syria and Iraq). The specific powers and identity attributed to Hubal are equally unclear. [Source]
Hubal was a moon God. A lot of Gujarati merhcants travelled to Mecca for trade. These Hindu merchants stayed in Hubal's temple. Given that Shiva wears a moon and Somnath is a famous Gujarati temple these Hindu traders might have naturally felt that Hubal was a Shiva itself. It is common for Hindus to put similar Gods in the equivalence class based on the symbolism.
Dr. Koenraad Elst has some thoughts on this matter.
The pre-Islamic religion was also largely star worship (next to ancestor worship and the worship of special stones like the Black Stone in Mecca’s Ka’ba). Thus, the three Meccan goddesses of Satanic Verses fame, al-Lāt, al-Uzza and al-Manāt, are roughly the Sun, Venus and the Moon. The Ka’ba was dedicated to the moon-god Hubal, and housed a stone fallen from heaven.
Stars were explicitly recognized as gods by prominent philosophers like Socrates and Plato. Some dissident freethinkers however, like the philosopher Anaxagoras and the playwright Aristophanes, thought stars were only burning rocks. After Christianization, when all divinity was invested in an extra-cosmic Supreme Being, the planets were desacralized and reduced to cogwheels in a cosmic machinery set in motion by the Creator and operated by his angels. Though numerically, a large part of humanity now espouses this desacralizing view, it is rather exceptional in the history of religions. The association of gods with stars was pretty universal.
Muslims themselves see Hubal as an evil God.
Islam teaches Muslims to have contempt for Hubal. Hubal's idol was not respectfully archived by Muhammad but brutally destroyed just like his followers all over the world. Osama Bin Laden compared USA to Hubal after the attacks on 9/11.
By contrast, in Islamic iconoclasm, the goal was to destroy the “idolatrous” religion of which the Murtis were an expression. The destruction of Murtis and the demolition of Mandirs had the purpose of destroying Hinduism or whichever the Pagan religion behind some given Murtis was. When Mahmud Ghaznavi was done destroying the Somnath temple, he did not mean to let Shiva worship resume at the site, not as long as he was militarily in a position to prevent it. While Yasovarman installed the abducted Vishnu Murti for worship, Mahmud Ghaznavi would have the captured Murtis destroyed, or worked them into lavatory walls or into floors in order the humiliate them -- not so much the Murtis themselves but the religion they represented. In destroying the Somnath Shivalingam, he meant to destroy Shiva worship.
Violation of Hindu Human rights
Islamists have demanded that teenager be stoned to death as per the barbaric Shariah law. The boy is locked up in a police station in Rudrapur.
The trigger is an offensive facebook post denigrating a Muslim shrine by a teenager living at Rudrapur, a small hamlet under Baduria police station’s jurisdiction. The teenager was picked up by the police in the wee hours of Monday, but the Islamists are demanding that the police hand him over to them so that he can be stoned to death as per the Sharia which recommends this form of barbaric punishment for blasphemy. Mobs shouting incendiary religious slogans have laid siege to the Basirhat thana which, incidentally, hosted an iftar party a few days ago — where they suspect the teenager has been lodged.
Arresting a teenager for his right to free speech is a gross violation of his human rights and deserves condemnation from all spheres of the society. This only proves that Hindus in India do not have free speech and the constitution of India is essentially anti-Hindu.