D:\New Books\Ernest Trumpp & Mc
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION O thou that buttest the high mountain, seeking to dislodge it with thy horns, take pity, not on the mountain but on thy head Sheikh Ahmed Al-Aawi: Al-Balagh There is a Buddhist legend narrated by Rumi in one of his famous stories which aptly describes the attitude of some arrogant intellectuals towards Sikhism. Sikhism is for them is an elephant, which a group of blind men touch, and each describes it according to the part of the body his hands had touched; to one the elephant “appeared like a throne, to another like a fan or like a pillar. But none was able to imagine what the whole animal was like. From Dr Ernest Trumpp, a fanatic Christian missionary of nineteenth-century to Dr William Hewat McLeod, a leading light of Batala-Berkley Christian Missionary group of the twentieth-century critics of Sikhism, and from Swami Dayanand leader of Anti-Sikh Arya-Samaj Hindu-cult to a host of turbanned and bearded communists, atheists, agnostics, opportunists, bearing the name “Singh”, there have been a number of spiritually blind, intellectually corrupt, highly conceited writers and scholars who have described Sikhs and Sikh ism in a manner, no ordinary person with even a rudimentary intellectual honesty and historical insight can ever comprehend or describe. Sikhism offers many points of attraction, many subline doctrines of universal interest, many moral and spiritual values for which Sikhs and their faith are admired all over the world. The aesthetic beauty, the poetry and music 2 which forms the backbone of Sikh Scriptures, and the mystical dimensions of the profound spiritual experiences of Sikh Prophets, recorded in their own authentic and canonized sacred works, is a vast field of study for all seekers of Truth and honest exponents of Sikh religion.
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