Hamblin & Peterson: Jainism is rooted in nonviolence

When in the 1960s Martin Luther King was considering what methods to use to attain civil rights for black Americans, his choice of nonviolent civil disobedience was in part influenced by Gandhi's successful nonviolent rebellion against British rule in India some 20 years earlier. Gandhi, of course, had derived his ideas of nonviolence from the ancient Indian religious traditions, and the father of Indian nonviolence was Mahavira. Indirectly, then, the course of the American civil rights movement was decisively influenced by the teachings of a 2,500-year-old Indian ascetic and mystic. This represents a classic example of a remarkable phenomenon in the history of religions — the fact that religious beliefs can transcend culture, language, time and space, transforming the world we live in across thousands of years and thousands of miles.

"Practical men," John Maynard Keynes once said, "who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Likewise, even many unbelievers have been influenced more than they know by religious thinkers whose names they probably wouldn't recognize.

Daniel C. Peterson, professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University, is editor-in-chief of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative and a blogger for Patheos. William Hamblin is a professor of history at BYU and co-author of "Solomon's Temple: Myth and History." Their views do not necessarily represent those of BYU.