“The Creator is one, and He cannot be known through images or forms.”
— Ram Mohan Roy[verifiable: theme of Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (1809), Persian with Arabic preface; English wording to be checked against a translation]
Commentary
This theme organises Ram Mohan Roy's earliest major work, the Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, which he composed in Persian with an Arabic preface and addressed to readers across religious lines. The argument rejects the worship of images and insists on the unity and incomprehensibility of the Creator, drawing on Islamic monotheist language and Vedanta sources in equal measure. Sophia Dobson Collet, in The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy (1900), presents the Tuhfat as the foundation of his mature religious position and notes the care with which he framed his criticisms for a mixed readership. David Kopf, in The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (1979), argues that the work anticipated the later Brahmo emphasis on a rational and scriptural monotheism. The idiom of images and their rejection has a long history in Indian and Islamic polemic, and Roy's use of it was deliberately comparative. The English sentence given here is a rendering of a theme, and the Persian and Arabic text should be consulted for exact wording.
Commentary
This theme organises Ram Mohan Roy's earliest major work, the Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, which he composed in Persian with an Arabic preface and addressed to readers across religious lines. The argument rejects the worship of images and insists on the unity and incomprehensibility of the Creator, drawing on Islamic monotheist language and Vedanta sources in equal measure. Sophia Dobson Collet, in The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy (1900), presents the Tuhfat as the foundation of his mature religious position and notes the care with which he framed his criticisms for a mixed readership. David Kopf, in The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (1979), argues that the work anticipated the later Brahmo emphasis on a rational and scriptural monotheism. The idiom of images and their rejection has a long history in Indian and Islamic polemic, and Roy's use of it was deliberately comparative. The English sentence given here is a rendering of a theme, and the Persian and Arabic text should be consulted for exact wording.