Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Catholic in Kashmir
Recently I was privileged to visit the Diocese of Jammu and Srinagar in Kashmir, Northern India with a delegation from Aid to the Church in Need.
We spent some days in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas.
A Christian presence in this northenmost region of India -- whose three major centres Leh, Jammu and Srinagar have, respectively Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim majority populations -- predates the seventh-century rise of Islam.
Setting off from Leh, at an altitude of 11,500 feet we travelled to over 18,000 feet before descending to a lake, one third of which was in India and the other two thirds in Tibet.
On the way back to Leh we visited the remote village of Tankse which contains a remarkable witness to the presence of Syriac-speaking Christians in this remote spot in the ninth century.
Christians were in India long before that, of course. A well-attested Catholic tradition places St Thomas the Apostle in India in the middle of the first century.
Then around 180 AD 'Pantanus, a Stoic philosopher, was sent to India from Alexandria in Egypt by Demetrius the bishop, to preach Christ to the Brahmans and Philosophers' there, according to St Jerome.
Scattered Christian communities existed in Central Asia by the second century.
In the oldest document in Syriac relating to Christianity in central Asia written around 196 AD, we read of Christians living as far east as Bactria, which we now call Northern Afghanistan.
By 225 AD Christian communities were to be found from the Euphrates to the Hindu Kush. There were already more than twenty bishops in Persia.
In 1623 workmen in China were digging near what is today Xian and uncovered a stone more than nine feet high and three-and-a-half feet wide, covered in Chinese characters. It was a monument erected in 781 AD describing the arrival of Christian [Nestorian] missionaries in China in 635 AD.
Marco Polo, and the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, refer to the number of Christian communities they found towards and beyond the very borders of China.
In Tankse, we saw three ornate crosses and an inscription in Syriac carved on the top and sides of a free-standing boulder about twelve feet high and about thirty feet in circumference. With some difficulty I managed to clamber to the top of the smooth and precipitate stone, to view and photograph some of the crosses. I wondered how the inscription could have been carved without the use of scaffolding, as it was at an angle that made it difficult to photograph.
It reads: 'In the eight-hundredth year of the death of our Lord Jesus, the Nestorian Christians of Syria arrived at this place from Samarkand.' Samarkand at that time was the principal city of Sogdiana, known today as Uzbekistan.
One of the more famous sons of Samarkand was Barbur, the founder of the Moghul dynasty; and a well-documented presence of Christians in Kashmir dates back to the third Moghul Emperor Akbar.
In 1575 Akbar, a Muslim, invited Jesuit priests whose scholarship and integrity had impressed him, to visit his court and dialogue with Hindu and Muslim scholars about Christianity.
Three Jesuits -- Fathers Rudolph Aquaviva, Francis Henriquez and James de Nesquita -- arrived in 1579 in Fatehpur Sikri near Agra where Akbar's newly-built palace was.
Numerous other Jesuits spent time at Akbar's court in Lahore, to which he had moved it in 1598. On one occasion Father Jerome Xavier, nephew of St Francis Xavier, travelled with Akbar to the Kashmir Valley which the Emperor had beautified with exotic gardens and palaces, many of which survive to this day.
In 1602 Akbar decreed that converts to Christianity from Hinduism and Islam should have freedom of worship.
Twenty-five years later, in 1627, Father de Castro accompanied the Emperor Jehangir to Kashmir -- and the Jesuits extended their missionary activity to Tibet.
Shah Jahan, fifth Moghul Emperor [died 1666] was renowned for his palaces, forts and exotic life-style -- he built the Taj Mahal for his wife Mumtaz Mahal. He was also an inflexible Muslim, and withdrew earlier imperial protection and support from the Jesuit missionaries.
The Christian presence that had characterised the Moghul empire from Akbar to Jehangir struggled to survive. It succeeded despite daunting obstacles.
In 1715, having spent the winter in Srinagar, Jesuit Fathers Desideri and Freyre reached Leh on their way to Tibet. They wanted to set up a mission in Ladakh but Father Freyre could not endure the harsh winter climate. Eventually the two Jesuits decided to assist the Capuchin priests who were well-established in Lhasa. After five years they returned to India in 1721.
In 1745 the Tibetan ruler initiated a persecution of the Catholic missionaries there, and they were forced to withdraw to Nepal.
In 1784 the Vicariate Apostolic of the Great Moghuls was set up by Pope Pius VI, with its Vicar based at Agra.
The Prefecture Apostolic of Kafiristan [Land of the Infidels] and Kashmir was established by Pope Leo XIII in 1887. The area it comprised had been originally part of the Diocese of Lahore [now in Pakistan].
This new Prefecture of Kafiristan and Kashmir included, in 1887, Rawalpindi and the North West Frontier Province whose capital was Peshawar [both now in Pakistan], and Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas.
Kafiristan - a mountainous area in the Hindu-Kush between Afghanistan and what at that time was British Colonial India, had numerous tribes and languages and was not Muslim.
However, the region was forcibly converted to Islam by the Emir of Kabul Abd al-Rahman Khan in 1896 when he defeated the Kafir tribes, killing all who opposed him, destroying their shrines and taking their children as soldiers to Kabul.
Much of what was formerly Kafiristan is now known as Nuristan [Land of Light] and is part of Afghanistan.
By Paul Stenhohttp
://members4.boardhost.com

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