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Then the guide showed us the Shiva Lingam, “for male, vertical, and for female, like a saucer,” saying this abstract presentation perhaps served better to express the Hindu idea of divinity.
The line between god and human idols appeared even more blurred among the Jains, who established their religion to reform Hinduism. The Jains worship their 24 Jina (of Tirthankaras) who are “fordmakers,” that is acting as “ford” to help the Jain community across the "river of human misery". Especially revered is the 24th Jina. His sculpture adorned the new Jain Temple in Khajuraho which I visited.
The sacred text Ramayana is about Rama, and Mahabharata is about Krishna. The 9TH reincarnation of Vishnu is Buddha.
The Hindu resurgence in India, on the other hand, has produced many new statutes of the gods they worship. Just outside Delhi in the famous Birla Garden there were two such anthropomorphic divine sculptures. One was Vishnu’s 7th reincarnation as Rama, with quiver and arrows, standing alongside his consort Sita.
In Cordoba, Spain, I also saw the evidence of the same phenomenon after the Catholic kings defeated the Islamic rulers of the land in 13th century. The vast Great Mosque that used to be in Cordoba, having been converted by Iberia’s Andalusian Umayyad caliphs from the original Visigothic Christian Church, has since been reconverted into a Roman cathedral, Our Lady of Assumption. The Catholic conquistadors followed this example a few decades later in Peru. As I noticed in my visit, they had turned Coricancha, the major temple of the vanquished Incas in Cusco into a church, Santo Domingo.
However, the screen across the front of the Mosque built in 1230 used the Arabic lettering which combined the later, more advanced heavy square Kufic and the intricately interwoven Tughra scripts. These are all the first examples of calligraphy in sandstone in India.
The calligraphy I saw in the Quwwat-ul-Islam Complex also makes a contribution to understanding the history of the Islamic domination of India which lasted for another 600 years. The earlier gateways to the Mosque, on the east and north, have inscribed lintels in Naksh, an Arabic script developed in the 10th century.
As recorded in the Mosque’s north gateway, its construction was completed within a mere six years after the Ghurs arrived. Not surprising in such urgent projects, the materials used for the mosque came from 27 demolished Hindu temples, as the main eastern entrance records.
The ancient superhighways, with their multitude of tributaries, which were the conduit of many exchanges of goods and ideas between the Persian and Chinese civilizations, did not have any specific name.
I noted in the Museums of Tashkent and Samarkand that Uzbekistan has appropriated the legacy of many as its own. Thus, among its favorite sons are: Rudaki who is considered to be “the founding father” of Persian poetry; Al-Khorezmi” who invented algorithm, which is his namesake; “Avicenna” whose Qanun had been the standard medical textbook in Europe for half a millennium until the 19th century; and Farabi, the greatest of all Muslim philosophers, who was the channel for transmitting the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle to the modern world.
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