“It was idolatry to take pride in belonging to a particular religious tradition rather than concentrating upon Allah himself.”

The Idolatry of Sectarian Pride: A Qur''anic and Advaitic Perspective

It was idolatry to take pride in belonging to a particular religious tradition rather than concentrating upon Allah himself names a central Qur'anic concern: that communal or sectarian identity can itself become a rival god, displacing the absolute sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of direct submission (islam) to Him. In this sense, the attitude of some Muslims who claim an exclusive monopoly of the Truth and brand the rest of humanity as kafir replicates precisely the sectarian chauvinism that the Qur'an criticizes and that Karen Armstrong identifies in her reading of Muhammad's return to the religion of Abraham.

Hanifiyyah and the Critique of Sectarian Pride

Armstrong's account of hanifiyyah highlights Muhammad's conviction that the prophets' original message was not an ethnic or sectarian badge but total submission to God. The Qur'an's insistence that Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian ... but a hanif and a muslim deliberately refuses to sacralize any later communal label as ultimate; what is ultimate is Abraham's pure orientation to God alone. In this light, pride in belonging to a named tradition—Muslim, Jew, or Christian—becomes idolatrous when it functions as an autonomous source of worth, distinct from and even over against God's universal lordship. Armstrong therefore can summarize Muhammad's stance by saying that Muslims driven from Mecca by intolerance must avoid all exclusivity and refrain from stridently insisting that they alone had the monopoly of truth.

The Qur'anic warning against those who divided their religion and became sects further underlines that such fragmentation and mutual anathematizing mark a fall back into jahiliyyah, a mentality of ignorance and fanaticism rather than a higher spiritual station. Here sectarianism itself is treated as a quasi-idol: a human boundary that claims divine authority even as God reserves ultimate judgment to Himself. To take pride in a confessional label as if it guaranteed truth, regardless of moral and spiritual reality, is thus to associate something else with Allah in practice, even if one condemns shirk in theory.

Takfir, Monopoly of Truth, and Hidden Idolatry

In classical Islamic discourse, takfir (declaring another a kafir) was hedged with grave warnings because misapplied excommunication usurps a prerogative of God, who alone knows the ultimate state of hearts. When contemporary Muslims casually dismiss all non-Muslims—and often fellow Muslims of other schools—as kafir, they invert Qur'anic humility before divine judgment into a humanly controlled map of salvation, investing their own group boundary with a kind of absolute, godlike authority. This is the hidden idolatry to which Armstrong's formulation points: the community's self-image replaces God as the true object of trust and ultimate loyalty.

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi's insistence that the essence of Religion is to know God and that denial of the fundamental unity (advaita) between Creator and creation is an escape of the ego[7] helps clarify the psychological and spiritual dynamics at work here. When belonging to a religious camp becomes an end in itself, ego subtly displaces God; the individual clings to separateness and superiority instead of seeking union with the divine reality that transcends all man-made divisions. In this frame, the declaration that only one's own group possesses Truth, while others are irredeemably outside, looks less like zeal for God and more like the ego's refusal to become the Ocean by surrendering into the larger unity of divine awareness.

Advaita, Realization, and the Relativizing of Labels

Sahaja Yoga's language of kundalini awakening and becoming One with the awareness of God articulates in experiential terms what many Sufi and non-dual strands within Islam and other traditions have also maintained: authentic realization relativizes outer labels because the seeker discovers a direct, interior connection with the divine source. For Shri Mataji, all genuine revelations—whether attributed to Christ, Krishna, or Muhammad—converge on the demand that you have to become One with God, and resistance to this demand is traced to the desire to preserve a separate, egoic personality. In such a perspective, insisting that salvation is coextensive with a sociological identity (e.g., Muslims alone) is a refusal of advaita: a way of clinging to duality and difference under the guise of piety.

The state of nirananda, described as a joy beyond duality, one personality in which there's no duality left—it's advaita, offers a suggestive counterpoint to sectarian pride. Here religious identity is fulfilled, not by excluding others, but by being absolutely the Spirit, so integrated that the oppositions of us and them lose their power to define the self. If Last Judgment is understood, as Shri Mataji suggests, as a present process of inner sorting through kundalini awakening—where each person is invited to actualize their latent connection with God—then external classifications (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, kafir) become secondary to the question of whether one has in fact realized this union.

Qur'anic Pluralism and Ethical Humility

Armstrong notes that the Qur'an recognizes that every community had its own specially revealed din, and counsels Muslims, when attacked by People of the Book, to respond with ?ilm—patience, forbearance—and the modest reminder that God knows best what you are doing. This ethos conflicts sharply with a triumphalist narrative in which Muslims loudly claim exclusive possession of Truth while consigning others to damnation, because it presupposes that ultimate religious evaluation lies with God, not with human polemicists. The move back to the religion of Abraham, who had not belonged to an exclusive cult but simply surrendered to God, is thus also a move away from defining faith in terms of group boundaries and toward defining it as an existential posture of submission.

Such a posture does not deny that beliefs and practices matter; rather, it insists that their ultimate value depends on how far they mediate and express a genuine orientation to Allah Himself. In this light, the idolatry Armstrong names is precisely the absolutizing of secondary means (names, institutions, inherited identities) at the expense of the living relationship they are meant to foster. To reduce the vast mystery of divine reality to a single community's self-image is to divide the religion and forget that the Prophet is told to disassociate himself from those who turn faith into competing factions.

Toward a Non-Idolatrous Muslim Self-Understanding

The critique of sectarian pride does not require relativizing all truth-claims or collapsing real doctrinal differences; rather, it calls Muslims to hold their conviction in the Qur'an and Muhammad with spiritual humility, recognizing that even true doctrine becomes idolatrous when it serves ego and exclusion instead of surrender and mercy. A non-idolatrous Muslim self-understanding would therefore affirm Islam as hanifiyyah—pure orientation and submission to Allah—while refusing to equate Allah's grace and presence with formal membership in the Muslim ummah alone. It would discourage casual takfir, cultivate ?ilm in engagements with other communities, and focus ethical energy on realizing the yoga then kshema—union with God and the well-being that flows from it—rather than on policing the boundaries of identity.

In convergence with Shri Mataji's emphasis on becoming absolutely the Spirit, such an outlook would treat spiritual realization—awakening to God's presence, manifest in peace, compassion, and inner nirananda—as the true criterion of religious authenticity, leaving final judgment to Allah. When Muslims live from this center, pride in belonging to a particular tradition is transfigured into gratitude for a path that leads beyond itself, and the temptation to treat others as kafir becomes harder to sustain, since the same divine Ocean calls to all human beings from within their own hearts and histories.

8. References