Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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still sell it there and in some other centres around the world. At first it seemed to be the greatest possible compliment. Gradually however I began to worry. When I visited some communities my own words were coming back at me. With plant photography one must take great care never to break or destroy anything that is being photographed. How much greater care should one take with a living religion (especially one that is declining numerically at a great rate)? Should you affect the people you study? Can you get too close to your ‘field’? Is it fanciful to think that you can avoid having an impact? What is the impact of a group of students going to a mosque or temple? Does it change an act of worship if there is an ‘audience’ of outsiders watching?

Using the right words

There are numerous debates about the meaning of key terms such as ‘religion’, ‘culture’, ‘race’, etc. This section is not about these important terms (a useful book for that is Taylor 1998), but rather it is concerned with terms that raise religious issues.

The first is to do with translations for key religious concepts. An obvious one is: should one write ‘Allah’, or ‘God’? My vocabulary changes according to the audience. With Zoroastrians and students I use ‘Ahura Mazda’ (Pahlavi: Ohrmazd) rather than ‘God’. The danger is of unconsciously importing Christian notions into the concept of the ultimate. However, if talking to the general public or perhaps in a lecture that is not essentially about theology the word ‘God’ may be appropriate, otherwise there are so many technical words that the listener (or reader) will switch off. But there are some technical words that it is essential to use because their obvious equivalent Western term would give a misleading impression. For example the terms ‘spirit and flesh’ are inappropriate for the Zoroastrian concepts of menog and getig. The menog is the invisible, intangible, the realm of the soul, getig is the visible and tangible world, but the getig world is not a subordinate or ‘lower’ world; it is almost the fulfilment of the menog – it is its manifestation. There is nothing of the Hellenistic ‘spirit and flesh’ dualism. A Zoroastrian could never make the connection ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ for the getig world is the Good Creation of Ohrmazd. Misery, disease and death are the assault of the evil force, Ahriman, on the Good Creation; human duty is to fight evil and protect the Good Creation so that at the renovation menog and getig will come together to form the best of all possible worlds. Zoroastrians do not use the term ‘the end of the world’ for that would be Ohrmazd’s defeat; instead they refer to the ‘renovation’, the time when all will be restored or refreshed and again becomes perfect as it was before the assault of evil. ‘Spirit and flesh’ therefore involve a different cosmology from menog and getig.

Sometimes scholars use Christian terms for concepts or practices in order to help the reader but it can lead to misrepresentation. For example, Zaehner uses the word ‘sacrament’ to describe one of the higher Zoroastrian ceremonies, the Yasna in which the haoma (soma in Hinduism) plant is pounded with pestle and mortar. The ceremony is led by two priests and can be performed at a time of death or for blessings. Laity may attend but rarely do so for the priests offer it on their behalf. This is Zaehner’s description of the rite:

The Haoma … is not only a plant … it is also a god, and the son of Ahura Mazdah. In the ritual the plant-god is ceremonially pounded in a mortar; the god, that is to say is sacrificed and offered up to his heavenly Father. Ideally Haoma is both priest and victim

– the Son of God, then offering himself up to his heavenly Father. After the offering

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priest and faithful partake of the heavenly drink, and by partaking of it they are made to share in the immortality of the god. The sacrament is the earnest of everlasting life which all men will inherit in soul and body in the last days. The conception is strikingly similar to that of the Catholic Mass.

(Zaehner 1959: 213)

Of course the Catholic convert, Zaehner, intended this as a very respectful account of the rite. But it bears no resemblance whatever to the Zoroastrian understanding of the ritual. There is a huge danger in failing to see the religion through the insider’s spectacles.

An earlier writer, J. H. Moulton, is another good example of well-intentioned scholarly misrepresentation of another religion. Moulton was a Professor of New Testament Studies but took a keen interest in Zoroastrianism. He was also a Methodist Minister. In his Hibbert Lectures in 1912, he applied contemporary Protestant methods of Biblical scholarship to the study of Zoroastrianism. He applied the contemporary assumption that religions are divided between the priestly or prophetic forms; the former being associated with superstition and the latter with visionary, personal religious experience. He argued that since Zoroaster was clearly a prophet he could not have been a priest, so when Zoroaster refers to himself as a priest (which he explicitly did) then Moulton concluded he must have been speaking metaphorically. He concluded:

That Zarathushtra is teacher and prophet is written large over every page of the Gathas [the poetic passages deriving from Zoroaster himself]. He is perpetually striving to persuade men of the truth of a great message, obedience to which will bring them everlasting life … He has a revelation … There is no room for sacerdotal functions as a really integral part of such a man’s gospel; and of ritual or spells we hear as little as we expect to hear …

(p. 118)

A traditional Zoroastrian (or a Catholic Christian for that matter) would not make such a distinction between priestly and prophetic religion. These are but two examples of a widespread trend to impose Western ways of thinking, or methods of analysis, on nonWestern phenomena. Misrepresentation does not arise only from prejudice against a religion, but can come equally from the well-intentioned scholar. Many scholars find it helpful to draw a typology of religions and these can be useful in classifying data, but they can also result in trying to fit data into a false dichotomy; it has to be ‘either this, or that or that’, etc. It rarely allows for ‘this and that’ – in Moulton’s case either a prophet or a priest, but Zoroaster could be described as ‘both … and’.

Some of the most common words used in writing about religion are inappropriate or at least demand substantial clarification. ‘Praying’ and ‘prayers’ are words used in many religions, for example, in Christianity and Zoroastrianism. But the activities they refer to are somewhat different. In Western Christianity, prayers are in the vernacular and it is thought important to know what the words mean. Be the prayers intercessions or thanksgiving, there is an element of conversation with God. Prayers in Zoroastrianism are rather different. They should be in the ancient ‘scriptural’ Avestan language in which it is believed Zoroaster prayed to Ohrmazd. It does not matter if the worshipper does not understand them, indeed orthodox Parsi priests in India argue that it is unhelpful to understand the words, for if you do then you think about what they mean and thereby limit yourself to mere human conceptual thought. By praying in

18â Why study religions?

Avestan one seeks to share something of the visionary experience of the prophet, the purpose of prayer is to achieve direct experience of Ohrmazd in a trance-like state.

There are numerous terms in common usage which have presuppositions that merit questioning. The term ‘faith community’ implies that ‘faith’, i.e. a set of beliefs, is what defines a community and that is a Christian and intellectual understanding of the ‘other’. For Jews and Parsis religion is to do with identity, a question of community boundaries, it is to do with who or what you are, something that is in the blood, the genes. For Parsis in particular, identity, far more than any set of beliefs, is what matters. For Muslims also it is a questionable term, since ‘just’ believing is inadequate, Islam is a way of life.

Another term in common usage which can cause religious offence is ‘Old TestaÂment’. Orthodox Jews object to it for it implies old, redundant, replaced. Most say that they have become accustomed to this Christian abuse of their scripture. Their preferred term though is ‘Hebrew Bible’. The usual Christian reaction is to point out that a part (but only a very small part) is in Aramaic. But should students of religion use terms and phrases that can cause religious offence? The question becomes sharper when the word is used in the naming of university departments, of academic societies and books.

Conclusion

Whether one is religious or not, the study of religions is a key to understanding other cultures; religions have been powerful forces throughout history in any country, sometimes working for good and sometimes working to destroy. They have inspired some of the greatest and most noble of acts; equally they have inspired some of the most ruthless brutality. They have been the patrons – and the destroyers – of arts and cultures. But they are central to much social and political history. Scholars who have left religions out of their pictures when writing about various societies, be they Hindus in Britain or Muslims in America, are excluding a key element from their study. It is essential to know the values, ideals and priorities of those from another culture or religion with whom one comes into contact. Globalization makes such contact with ‘the other’ common. Religions might be compared to diamonds; they have many facets; they can be seen from many angles, but the pictures are too complex for any one writer to see the whole. This book looks at a range of approaches to these diamonds.

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Bhugra, D. 1996, Psychiatry and Religion: Context Consensus and Controversies, London: Routledge. Coward H., Hinnells, J. R. and Williams, R. B. (eds) 2000, The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain,

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Suggested reading

Hadad, Y. Y. 1991, The Muslims of America, New York: Oxford University Press. Hinnells, J. R. (ed.) 2007, Religious Reconstruction in the South Asian Diaspora, BJP.

Hinnells J. R. (ed.) 2010, A New Handbook of the World’s Living Religions, London: Penguin, especially the last four chapters.

Lewis, P. 2007, Young, British and Muslim, London and New York: Continuum.