Reincarnation is understood in connection with someone who is no longer living.

• It is believed that the “soul, consciousness or the spirit comes back into a baby’s body.”

By Zeenat Khan

Here was a time I would reject those

Who were not my faith!

But now, my heart has grown capable

Of taking on all forms.

It is a pasture for gazelles.

An abbey for monks.

A table for the Torah.

Kaaba for the pilgrim.

My religion is love.

Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take…?

That shall be the path of my faith.

–Ibn Arabi, Sufi poet and philosopher, 12th century.

I haven’t seriously thought about the theories of reincarnation/rebirth or metempsychosis since my days at the University of Rhode Island. Nonetheless, I find this to be a nuanced topic. I had grown up in a somewhat conservative Muslim family believing the doctrine of reincarnation is not compatible in Islam. “The principle belief in Islam is that there is only one birth on this earth. Doomsday comes after death and will be judged…” In my experience, most Islamic Schools of thought reject the idea of being born again. Islamic teachings talk about the concept of Resurrection but not Reincarnation. Death is the forgone conclusion of our earthly life – end of our human existence.

At the University of Rhode Island, during one spring semester I took a class on Comparative Religion. It was an elective course and a prerequisite for graduation. The class was taught by Professor Moon Kim. I might have been an exception along with the Moroccan kid who hadn’t read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse in High School. The limited exposure I had on the world’s major religions and other beliefs was only through Social Studies class in grade school. Religion, whether similar to Islam or not, therefore remained an enigma to me. This theme, i.e., other religions, was to be explored several years later in college. I had read about other religions in courses on Oriental Studies and Western Philosophy as a way of exploring the conundrum. The Comparative Religion class turned out to be one of the most fully interactive classes that I took in my student days as I had discovered there is wisdom to be learned from other religions.

In my adult life, I didn’t think that I would be reflecting about the spiritual and philosophical phenomenon such as reincarnation during a metro ride to DC this past Tuesday. Throughout the ride, like most people I was checking my phone where there are about a hundred articles that I had saved in the last five years but did not get around to reading those.

Khim Hang, 74, sits in her bedroom with a cow which she believes is her reborn husband in Kratie province, Cambodia, July 18, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Samrang Pring

A 2017 article about the unusual story of 74-year-old Khim Hang in Cambodia’s northeastern province caught my attention. Khim became a widow a year before. She is convinced that after her husband Tol Khut’s death, he has been reincarnated in a five-month-old calf. That belief has now made her a national and social media sensation. In an interview with the Reuters she said, “When I went to see a medium, his soul came in and said ‘I am your husband,’ then I noted that he (the calf) licked my hair, then my neck, then kissed me so that made me believe that he is my husband.” She further added, “I believe that he (the calf) is my husband because whatever he does when he goes upstairs… it is in exactly the same way as he (my husband) did when he was alive.”

A video that accompanies the article shows how the calf climbs the stairs with an ease of a human in a one-story wooden house. When inside the house it is fed, washed and allowed to sleep in the dead man’s bed on top of handmade quilts with Khut’s favorite fluffed pillow. The room is decorated with Tol Khut’s framed picture and memorabilia. It also watches television just the way Tol Khut used to before sleep. When it is sent out for grazing, her son Tol Vande stands guard as the family wants no harm to come to the calf. All of Khim’s children also believe it to be none other than their father.

Khim was being treated in her area as sort of a celebrity. Every day, about hundred villagers show up at her doorstep to witness and film this alleged miracle. Some people came to witness a sensation. Skeptics came just to feed their curiosity. Others are in doubt seeing such a thing can really happen where Tol Khut’s soul transferred into a cow. The idea that a person remains alive after death and moves to another host or species can be mind boggling to some. In Khim’s case it is a cow. Seeing the cow climbing the steps my old professor Imtiaz Habib (late) for sure would cry out in disbelief and say, “Jesus Christ!” (This was his favorite expression when it came to showing wonderment, frustration, approval, or displeasure).

After the transmigration, the Kim Hang story took more of a bizarre turn after she had married this calf in a ceremony. The weirdest thing is since the marriage she had been sharing the same bed with the cow. “I will keep him and take care of him for my entire life,” Hang said. She has also requested her children “to take care of her reincarnated ‘husband’ after her death and perform the same religious funeral for the bovine as that of a human when it dies.”

Reincarnation is understood in connection with someone who is no longer living. It is believed that the “soul, consciousness or the spirit comes back into a baby’s body.” How does one explain a baby cow as a reincarnation of a human at the death of the soul? Would the skeptics say Khim was so grief stricken that she had lost grip on reality? As a result, could she have invented such a strange story? Or perhaps like most Buddhists and some Hindus she firmly believes that after death, the soul or the spirit comes back into a different body?

Can one conclude that perhaps Khim is so fearful of her own mortality that she sees the manifestation of her dead husband in the calf? Or is she under hypnosis to believe the cow as the dead husband? Such spiritual queries cannot provide any black-and-white answers as religion for the most of us is based on faith. As a committed Muslim, who respects opposite views and other religions, I can only contemplate the great questions about life, existence, and after life without trying to offer an answer.

Reincarnation is normally considered an “eastern” concept because of its philosophical approach. Most cultures around the world seem to have a mystical attitude to the concept of reincarnation. One can trace back the idea that goes back to 3,000 years ago in India and Greece. It is believed that for two centuries during a fusion of two cultures commonly termed as Indo-Greek Kingdom, a Greek king in India had embraced Buddhism.

In Hinduism, reincarnation is the belief that the soul after physical death begins a new life in a body that may be human, animal or other living beings. It depends on the excellence of actions performed in the previous life. This process of death and rebirth governed by karma is known as Samsara. If someone has done a lot of good deeds, she/he is born into a new life that is similar to the previous one they have left behind. “As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from childhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death.” This concept finds support in the Rigvedaas well as Bhagavad Gita.

Buddhists, as they follow the teachings of Buddha see the universe and all life as part of a cycle of eternal change. Buddhists believe that a person is “continually reborn, in human or non-human form, depending on his or her actions in a previous life.” They are released from this cycle only when they reach nirvana, which may be attained by achieving good karma. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation or rebirth is slightly different from others. There is no “eternal soul,” “spirit,” or “self,” but only a “stream of consciousness,” that connects “life with life.” In Sanskrit, the process is called Punarbhava meaning “becoming again.”

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha had taught a distinct concept of rebirth constrained by the concepts that there is no irreducible Atman tying the two lives together which is different from the concept in Hinduism where everything is connected. The evolving consciousness upon death becomes one of the contributing causes for the arising of a new collection. “At the death of one personality, a new one comes into being, much as the flame of a dying candle can serve to light the flame of another. The consciousness in the person is neither identical to nor entirely different from that in the deceased but the two forms a causal continuum or stream.”

The idea of reincarnation in Cambodia, a predominantly Buddhist nation (95 percent) may be traced to its Hindu and Buddhist rules for centuries. Before Cambodians embraced Buddhism there was Hinduism. Though Hinduism is not directly practiced there, it has influenced some of the Buddhist practices as they have incorporated some of the Hindu beliefs. Many Buddhists do not believe that death is the end of a life but rather as the end of one cycle to be continued to the next. In Buddhism, there is acceptance that “all life/being evolves in a successive cycle of birth, old age, sickness, death and rebirth/reincarnation.”

Last night I read a post by a born and raised Muslim woman who had to answer a question asked by a non-Muslim. The question was: What do the Muslims think of another religion?

“Muslims, like many other people following their religion, whatever it is, believe that all religions are corrupted and wrong, except Islam.”

“They know nothing about Judaism and Christianity, yet, they think they do, but their knowledge is a mere idea shaped from within a Muslim perspective. They think Judaism is a falsified corrupted religion, and the same about Christianity. They think both these religions are corrupted forms of Islam which is the true religion revealed to all the prophets. Sunnis think Shiites aren’t really Muslims, and some would also think the same of Sufis. Muslims think Eastern religions like what the West calls Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism to be polytheistic primitive ignorant religions of people worshipping statues and cows pointlessly.”

“This is due to a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, which I think can be the burden of many people from different religious backgrounds when they were raised to accept things without question and told they’re the best because God is on their side.”

As another Muslim woman in the 21st century do I support her three-part answers? No, of course not. She cannot speak for all Muslims. She can only speak about her impression about other religions as sees fit. Opinions are always based on personal judgements. Respecting the religions of others is one of the most fundamental things a person can be taught in a family. Reluctantly, I agree with part-three of her statement as it carries some degree of validity. In some Muslim households children do grow up believing such misinterpretations. The family I grew up in was free of religious prejudices and implicit bias against other races and religion. As a result, with all honesty I can say I would rather sing along with Ibn Arabi, “…my heart has grown capable of taking on all forms. Whichever the route love’s caravan shall take, that shall be the path of my faith.”