Hindu Contemporary Religious Reformist Movements: a Comparative Study of Vivekananda’s and Muttahari’s Views

There might be diverse modern schools of reform in any religion. This paper categorizes modern Hindu and Muslim religious thinkers into three groups based on their traditionalist and modernistic concerns. First group are those with futuristic modern thoughts who give more weight to the future and attempt to make old religions compatible to the modern world and present modern religion deserving modern man. They are after making religion serve better the temporal life. Second group are those with traditionalist concerns, who put more weight to the past and try to make modern world compatible to the old religion and make an appropriate world for traditional religions. They are after a religious world. Third group of reformist religious thinkers are who follow a moderate look at both the past and future. They try to make a balance between temporal world and religion. For each group many members can be mentioned. However, this paper mainly focuses on a comparative study of the opinions and thoughts of the two most distinguished contemporary figures Vivekananda from Hindu and Mutahhari from Islamic worlds.