Is Sikhism a mix of Hinduism and Islam?

The short version: Sikhs reject the description, and specialists, McLeod included, do not use it. Consensus The question is older and more interesting than that answer makes it sound. Guru Nānak drew on the language of both his Hindu and his Muslim neighbours and rejected the rituals and authorities of both; the scripture his successors compiled includes Muslim and Hindu-born poets, chosen and answered by the Gurus. What scholars argue over is not a Hindu–Muslim blend but Guru Nānak’s relation to the Sant poets of northern India, and whether he belonged to them or began something new.^[1]​^[2]​^[3] Majority Because the answer bears on whether Sikhs are a separate religion, the framing itself is fought over (Are Sikhs Hindus?). Political

What Guru Nānak took from his neighbours, and what he refused

Guru Nānak’s Punjab held Sufi shrines, Brahmin priests and pilgrimage, the lodges of Nāth yogīs and the songs of devotional poets from Banaras and Maharashtra, and his hymns argue with all of them by name (§1).^[2]​^[4] Consensus

The borrowing is real. He used Hindu and Muslim names for God freely, Rām, Hari, Gobind, Khudā, Allāh; he addressed qāzīs, mullās and the five daily prayers in their own vocabulary; and his hymns of the soul as a bride longing for God speak as Sant and Sufi poetry did.^[1]​^[5]​^[6] Consensus

So is the refusal. In the same hymns he rejected idols, pilgrimage, ritual purity and the authority of both Brahmin and qāzī as ways to God (§2).^[1]​^[7] Consensus His method with his neighbours was to keep their words and change what they meant: the true yogī is the one who “stays unstained in the midst of the soot”, and a sacred thread worth wearing is spun of compassion and contentment.^[8]​^[9] Consensus on the texts. J. S. Grewal, comparing his teaching with each neighbouring tradition in turn, stressed how much he set aside in each, though he preferred the Sufis’ language to the qāzīs’, and called him an originator rather than a synthesiser.^[2] Majority

“Hindu and Turk” was an old theme

The idea of a devotee standing outside both communities was not Guru Nānak’s invention. A hymn in the name of Nāmdev, preserved in the Sikh scripture, says:

ਹਿੰਦੂ ਪੂਜੈ ਦੇਹੁਰਾ ਮੁਸਲਮਾਣੁ ਮਸੀਤਿ ॥ ਨਾਮੇ ਸੋਈ ਸੇਵਿਆ ਜਹ ਦੇਹੁਰਾ ਨ ਮਸੀਤਿ ॥੪॥੩॥੭॥

hindū pūjai dehurā musalamāṇu masīti | nāme soī seviā jah dehurā na masīti ||4||3||7||

“The Hindu worships at the temple, the Muslim at the mosque; Nāmā serves the One where there is neither temple nor mosque.”^[10]

If the attribution holds, the pair of “Hindu” and “Turk” as two communities, each with its house of worship, and a third place outside both, was already the frame of devotional poetry before Guru Nānak; Kabīr’s songs use the same pair.^[11]​^[12] Majority on the attribution. A hymn of Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, takes up Kabīr’s theme and says nā ham hindū na musalamān, “I am neither Hindu nor Muslim; my body and breath belong to Allah and Rām.”^[13] Read one way, that rejects both religions; read another, it says the one God is the God of both. Each side of the modern argument quotes it.^[13]​^[14] Political

Bhāī Gurdās, writing in the Gurus’ circle in the early seventeenth century, used the same frame. The Hindus have the Ganges and Banaras, the Muslims Mecca and the Kaʿba; “they call on Rām and Rahīm: the Name is one, and they have lost their way on two roads”.^[15] Consensus on the text. In that picture Guru Nānak is not a meeting point of the two roads but the one God sent to correct them both.^[16] Consensus that this is how the Gurus’ circle saw him.

Muslim and Hindu poets in the scripture

The strongest evidence offered for a blend is the Guru Granth Sāhib itself, which contains hymns by fifteen bhagats from outside the line of Gurus: the Sufi Shaikh Farīd of Pākpattan, Kabīr, a weaver from a Muslim family, Ravidās, a leatherworker, Nāmdev and others (Who wrote the Guru Granth Sahib?).^[7]​^[17] Consensus Hymns of several of them, Kabīr and Nāmdev among them, were already copied beside Guru Nānak’s in the Goindvāl pothīs of about 1570–1572.^[18]​^[19] Majority

Pashaura Singh’s study of these hymns showed that the Gurus did not simply collect them. They selected them, set them to the scripture’s own musical modes, and in places answered them in couplets of their own.^[3] Majority The clearest case follows a couplet of Farīd’s in which he will tear his silk robe to rags and wear a blanket to find his Lord. The third Guru’s reply stands directly after it:

ਕਾਇ ਪਟੋਲਾ ਪਾੜਤੀ ਕੰਬਲੜੀ ਪਹਿਰੇਇ ॥ ਨਾਨਕ ਘਰ ਹੀ ਬੈਠਿਆ ਸਹੁ ਮਿਲੈ ਜੇ ਨੀਅਤਿ ਰਾਸਿ ਕਰੇਇ ॥੧੦੪॥

kāi paṭolā pāṛatī kambalaṛī pahirei | nānak ghar hī baiṭhiā sahu milai je nīati rāsi karei ||104||

“Why tear your silk robe and put on a blanket? Nānak, the Lord is met sitting in your own home, if your intention is true.”^[20]

The bhagats were included, on this reading, because they agreed with the Gurus, and were read through the Gurus.^[3] Majority Whether that makes the scripture a blend of Hindu and Muslim devotion, or a revelation that recognised kindred voices, is the modern argument in miniature (§3).^[7]​^[21] Political

What the scholars actually argue

The scholarly debate is not between “blend” and “not a blend”. It is over Guru Nānak’s relation to the Sant poets, and its positions are these (§1):^[1]​^[22]​^[2]​^[3]​^[23] Contested

• Within the Sant tradition. McLeod in 1968 described the Sant tradition as a synthesis drawn chiefly from Vaiṣṇava devotion and the Nāths’ yoga, with only a small Sufi element, and set Guru Nānak within it as its most coherent voice.^[1]​^[24] On his account the borrowing was mostly from the Hindu side, and Islam’s part was slight.
• A new revelation. For many Sikh scholars, the contributors to Fundamental Issues in Sikh Studies (1992) among them, tracing Guru Nānak’s ideas to predecessors reduces the founder of a revelation to one voice among many.^[22]
• Shared idiom, new institution. Grewal and Gurinder Singh Mann: Guru Nānak shared the idiom but rejected renunciation and founded a householder community, a succession and a scripture.^[2]​^[25]
• The category is the problem. John Stratton Hawley argues that a single “bhakti movement” is a twentieth-century construction, and Arvind-pal Mandair that both the reformers’ and the academics’ accounts were shaped by colonial ideas of what a “religion” is.^[23]​^[21]

Most historians now say both things: Guru Nānak shared the Sant idiom, and did what no other poet of his milieu did in naming a successor and founding a community.^[25]​^[3]​^[26]​^[27] Majority

Why the question is political

Outsiders have long described the Sikhs by their neighbours. The emperor Jahāṅgīr, in 1606, called Guru Arjan “a Hindu” who had drawn followers among Hindus and “even some ignorant, stupid Muslims”.^[28]​^[29] Consensus on the text.

In the nineteenth century the question became a fight over a boundary. Harjot Oberoi argues that before the 1870s many who revered the Gurus also kept Brahmanical rites, revered village spirits and visited the shrine of the Muslim saint Sakhī Sarvar, and that the Singh Sabhā reformers replaced that plural world with a single Khālsā identity; the reformers’ case was put most clearly in Kāhn Singh Nābhā’s Ham Hindū Nahīṅ, “We are not Hindus” (1898). J. S. Grewal and Purnima Dhavan reply that the Khālsā identity was dominant long before, and the reformers enforced an existing boundary (§8).^[14]​^[30]​^[31]​^[32] Contested Today the Sikh Rahit Maryādā defines a Sikh as one who, among other things, owes allegiance to no other religion.^[33] Consensus on the wording.

To call Sikhism a mix of two other religions is therefore not a neutral description: it bears on whether Sikhs are a religion in their own right. In India that question has a legal edge: Article 25 of the Constitution counts Sikhs as Hindus for some purposes, and Akālī leaders have objected to it from the start (§9).^[34] Political

Common misconceptions

• “Guru Nānak said ‘there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim’.” The words are the janamsākhīs’, written down a century and more later, not the scripture’s (Who was Guru Nanak?).^[35] Majority
• “Hindus and Muslims both claimed his body.” That is the janamsākhīs’ story of the flowers found under his shroud; the same story is told of Kabīr.^[35]​^[1] Consensus that it is the tradition’s.
• “The scripture includes Muslim and Hindu poets, so it merges the two religions.” The Gurus chose those poets because they agreed with them, and answered them where they did not.^[3] Majority

What the evidence cannot settle

The texts show what the Gurus took from their neighbours, what they refused, and how their circle described the result: a path to one God that neither Hindus nor Muslims, as the Gurus saw them, were walking. Whether that path is best called a new revelation, the culmination of a Sant tradition, or something else is a question of description on which scholars still differ, and on which Sikhs have their own answer.^[1]​^[22]​^[25] Contested