Christianity, Islam and yoga How far can you stretch?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2015/06/christianity-islam-and-yoga

Jun 24th 2015, 7:42 BY B.C



YOGA has been in the news a lot recently. As colleagues have written, the establishment of International Yoga Day, celebrated for the first time last Sunday was a significant milestone for India's "soft power" and on balance, a personal success for Narendra Modi, the prime minister who led 37,000 people in a display of the spiritual exercise.

Yoga also generates headlines in countries far from India, both because of its widespread appeal and the mixed feelings (to put it mildly) that it engenders among followers of the world's monotheistic faiths.

Malaysia and Iran stand out as Muslim countries where yoga is both quite popular and controversial. In 2008, when Malaysia's supreme Islamic authority told Muslims to eschew the practice, this was widely greeted with dismay as a symptom of a hardening theological line in a country where many faiths have to rub along. Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the (devoutly Muslim) prime minister at the time, later specified that it was permissible to do the exercises as long as people held off from Hindu chanting.

In Western nations which are historically Christian but increasingly diverse in their approach to things spiritual, the very ambivalence of yoga (call it flexibility if you like) is one of its selling points. Depending on which school of yoga you follow and how far you go, it can be a way of limbering up the body and easing tensions, or it can involve the pursuit of extra-ordinary spiritual experiences, culminating in samadhi, variously described as union with, or absorption into, ultimate reality. It is agreed that yoga has its roots in the Hindu tradition, and that it constitutes one of the main schools of Hinduism; but it can of course be practised as a physical and even mental discipline by people who are ignorant of, or even mildly resistant to the teachings of Hinduism. That point is made defensively by many Western yoga teachers, and with dismay by purist advocates of the Hindu path.

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