The Whole Caboodle Of Karma Is A Huge Deception
By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
1 October 2025
I love Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi Saheb’s nice and well-argued pieces but somehow I'm unable to reconcile to his article, Karma, Reincarnation and Avatārvāda in Indian Sufism: A Spiritual Symbiosis & Synthesis!; While there's no denying the fact that not just Indian Sufis, even Iranian and Arab Sufis were influenced by Vedant, Upanishad, Karma, Reincarnation and Avtaarvaad, this whole theory of Karma is too fatalistic, even fatuous, to be convincing and credible.
The concept of karma is often used to justify victim blaming. The system of karma and reincarnation implies that bad things happen to seemingly good people because they did something in a past life to 'deserve it'. The victim has accrued a karmic debt in past lives and is paying for it in the present one. If I punch you in the face, you must have deserved it, else the universe would have prevented me from doing it. I may be adding on to my own karmic debt by hitting you, but still, you must have deserved it. If you accept Karmic theory then whatever is happening is preordained. Karma entails one or more than one life before the existing life. You've no memory of those lives. What good or bad you did in previous birth/s cannot have a bearing on the current birth because there's no memory or tangible link to those lives and births.
So, how can those births and the deeds in the past lives affect us now? In fine, this is all humbug. Moreover, the law of karma is considered dubious due to the lack of scientific evidence for a cosmic moral system, the challenge of universal definitions of "good" and "bad," and its potential conflict with the concepts of free will and the principle of spiritual grace found in other faiths. Critics also point to how the idea of karma can be psychologically harmful, leading to guilt, shame, and a sense of fear, and can foster a self-serving application of the principle, where people attribute positive outcomes to their own good karma but suffering in others as deserved punishment.
The same can be said about reincarnation and Avtaarvaad. I don't want to hurt Mr Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi Saheb who belongs to a Sufi lineage. I'm sure he knows that early Sufis on the sub-continent also had a role in spreading Islam. Those early Sufis incorporated oriental concepts like Karma and Reincarnation. The whole process is called acculturation. Christian missionaries did the same thing when they included Hindu and oriental religious practices and symbols in order to Christianise the gullible masses.
All sane and sensible Hindus have discarded Karmas, Avtaarvaad and all that jazz. They were used by the Sufis and missionaries for spreading their respective religions. The Sufis were Muslims. They may have been quite liberal but their indoctrination was unmistakably Islamic and in the whole shebang of Islamic Tasawwuf, Karmas, Reincarnation and Rebirth don't fit in. No doubt, the Sufis were also clever people who knew how a new faith (read Islam) could be effective and acceptable to the non-Muslims when laced with the totems of the old faith. Missionaries have been indulging in the same charade right from the beginning. Humans love all fanciful spiritual terms because they've the power to flummox the masses and bamboozle even the educated ones. Karma is the latest buzzword that intrigues all those who're pseudo-spiritualists.
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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian.
URl: https://www.newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/caboodle-karma-deception/d/137052
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