Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 221 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s hatred of jurists was legendary. When young Martin was barely six months old, Luther said to him, “If you become a lawyer, I will hang you from a gallows” (WT 2, 1422). One wonders what brother Hans, aged nearly six at the time, who eventually became a lawyer having been intended for the ministry, would have made of this. Ironically Martin was to be destined for law. 35. Schwiebert, Luther and his Times, 594–602; Brecht, Luther, III, 235–44. 36. Greschat, Bucer, 245–49. The Kachelöfen were tiled and very effective heating systems, the heart of every German home, and they were soon made in religious propagandist forms, too, with tiles featuring antipapal cartoons. 37. Johann von Staupitz (and Johann Arndt), Zwey alte geistreiche Büchlein Doctoris Johannis von Staupitz weiland Abts zu Saltzbergk zu S. Peter Das Erste. Von der holdseligen Liebe Gottes. Das Ander. Von unserm H. Christlichen Glauben; Zu erweckung der Liebe Gottes…in allen Gottseligen Hertzen (Magdeburg, 1605 [VD 17 1:072800G]). 38. Reinitzer, Gesetz und Evangelium; Roper, “Martin Luther’s Body”; Roper, “Luther Relics,” in Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger, eds., Religion, the Supernatural, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2015). 39. Brown, Singing the Gospel, 1–25; Oettinger, Music as Propaganda; Veit, Das Kirchenlied . The first hymnbooks were produced in 1524; Luther wrote about forty hymns himself. 40. WT 3, 3739. 41. The emotional passage is so out of character with the factual reportage of the rest of the journal that its authenticity has been doubted; Schauerte, Dürer, 235. On the self-portraits, see Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture . 42. Dürer, Memoirs of Journeys, 55; 62–67. 43. Günzburg, The Fifteen Confederates (ed. and trans. Dipple), Third Confederate, around n.124, around n.120, three paras after n.119; Günzburg, Ein vermanung, fos. I iii (r); ii (v). As he writes: “Oh mother with a heart of stone, how faithless you are to your child. Do you think she is made of wood or iron, that she will not necessarily feel the burning desires of the flesh, just as you felt them…?” (Günzburg, Ein vermanung, fo. ii (r)). 44. Argula von Grumbach, “Wie eyn Christliche fraw des adels…,” in Grumbach, Schriften (ed. and trans. Matheson), 36–75. The letter also circulated in manuscript. 45. Grumbach, Eyn Antwort, (s.l.), 1524, fo. D ii (r); D ii (v). 46. Skinner, Foundations, 2, 3–19; Brady, German Histories, 221; Cargill Thompson, Studies in the Reformation (ed. Dugmore), 3–41; see, however, Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith, 194–95. Reluctantly, Luther did eventually move to a legal position that argued that the Electors were the equal of the emperor, and so could be resisted. He also began to see the emperor as the Pope’s agent. 47.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was deeply hurt by what he saw as a personal betrayal and retaliated with anger. On the other hand, the passionate support he received in Nuremberg contributed to the rapid spread of the theses among Germany’s educated elite. Although Nuremberg had no university itself, it was a center of trade, learning, and political power, located on the trade routes from Italy to northern Germany. When Johannes Cochlaeus penned his Brief Description of Germany in 1512, he put Nuremberg literally at the center, connecting all the different regions of the country. Luther’s Nuremberg connections—humanists, patricians, and politicians—now made his cause their own. There was even a coterie of “Augustinian diners,” including some of the most powerful men in town: “Almost the whole talk over the table was about the one Martin: they celebrate him, adore him, defend him, are prepared to endure everything for him; they recite his work…they kiss his pamphlets…eagerly they read every word of them.” 61 Originally these men had been devoted to pursuing the spirituality of Luther’s mentor and confessor Staupitz; now they gave his brilliant protégé shrewd advice and support, and created an audience for him in southern Germany. Scheurl acted as the conduit, and he and others translated the theses into German. When Luther had begun corresponding with the lawyer in January 1517, his slightly florid and obsequious tone revealed how important the relationship was to him: “I do not want you to become my friend, because this friendship will not redound to your fame, but to your harm, if the proverb be true: ‘Friends have everything in common.’ If then through this friendship everything of mine becomes yours, then you will become richer in nothing but sins, folly and disgrace.” 62 People were not just reading the theses, but acting on them. By March 1518, Luther was already writing preemptively to Lang in Erfurt in case rumors reached him that Tetzel’s Positiones (his defense of indulgences) had been publicly burned by students in Wittenberg’s market square. He himself, Luther claimed, had nothing to do with this, and he deeply regretted the offense caused to the poor salesman, whose works had in part been bought, in part simply seized and then thrown on the flames. All of which would have been more persuasive had not Luther enclosed with the letter a copy of Tetzel’s work, “seized from the flames,” so that Lang could see how the papists were raging against him. 63 The first book burnings, which were to become such a feature of the Reformation, were thus instigated not by the Roman Church but by Luther’s supporters, and it was clear where they might lead. Tetzel was already threatening that Luther himself would be burned and that he “would go to heaven in his bath shirt” within two weeks. — I T is not difficult to understand why the Ninety-five Theses caused such uproar.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Ayatollah Muhammad-Kazim Shariatmadari (1904–85), one of the most senior mujtahids , saved his life by promoting Khomeini to the rank of Grand Ayatollah, which made it too risky for the regime to kill him. 47 After his release, Khomeini became a hero to the people. His photograph appeared everywhere as a symbol of opposition. He had put himself on the line and given voice to the aversion that many more inarticulate Iranians had come to feel for the shah. Khomeini’s vision was flawed by the usual fundamentalist paranoia. Constantly in his speeches, he referred to a conspiracy of Jews, Christians, and imperialists, a fantasy that for many Iranians seemed credible because of the association of the CIA and Mossad with the hated SAVAK. It was a theology of rage. 48 But Khomeini enabled Iranians to express legitimate grievances in terms that they could understand. Where a Marxist or liberally inspired critique of the shah would have left the vast majority of unmodernized Iranians unmoved, everybody could understand the symbolism of Kerbala. Unlike the other ayatollahs, Khomeini did not speak in remote, academic language; his speech was direct and down-to-earth, addressed to ordinary people. Western people tended to see Khomeini as a throwback to the Middle Ages, but in fact much of his message and developing ideology was modern. His opposition to Western imperialism and his support of the Palestinians were similar to other Third World movements at this time; so was his direct appeal to the people. Eventually, Khomeini went too far. On October 27, 1964, he delivered a strong attack against the recent granting of diplomatic immunity to American military personnel and other advisers, and to the shah’s acceptance of 200 million dollars for arms. Iran, he claimed, was virtually an American colony. What other nation would submit to such indignity? An American maidservant would go virtually unpunished for a serious crime committed in Iran, whereas the case of an Iranian citizen who inadvertently ran over an American’s dog would have to come to trial. For decades foreigners had been plundering Iran’s oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people, and meanwhile the poor were suffering. He concluded: There is no redress for the Iranian people. I am deeply concerned about the condition of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation. The people should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the atrocities of last winter. The ulema should appeal for contributions for this purpose. 49 After this speech, Khomeini was deported, and eventually took up residence in the holy Shii city of Najaf. The regime was now determined to muzzle the clerics.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Even though Darwin had not intended it, the publication of the Origin did cause a preliminary skirmish between religion and science, but the first shots were fired not by the religious but by the more aggressive secularists. In England, Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95), and on the Continent, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), Jakob Moleschott (1822–93), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), popularized Darwin’s theory, touring and lecturing to large audiences to prove that science and religion were incompatible. They were, in fact, preaching a crusade against religion.92 Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. Reason, he insisted, must be the sole criterion of truth. People would have to choose between mythology and rational science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”93 Scientific rationalism was, for Huxley, a new secular religion; it demanded conversion and total commitment. “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,” he urged his audience. “And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.”94 Huxley was supported by the whole thrust of modern, progressive culture, which had achieved such spectacular results that it could now claim aggressively to be the sole arbiter of truth. But truth had been narrowed to what is “demonstrated and demonstrable,” which, religion aside, would exclude the truth told by art or music. For Huxley, there was no other possible path. Reason alone was truthful, and the myths of religion truthless. It was a final declaration of independence from the mythical constraints of the conservative period. Reason no longer had to submit to a higher court. It was not to be restricted by morality but must be pushed to the end “without regard to any other consideration.” The continental crusaders went further in their war against religion. Buchner’s best-seller, Force and Matter, a crude book which Huxley himself despised, argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything in the world had derived from a simple cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. But the large numbers of people who read this book and the huge crowds who flocked to Haeckel’s lectures showed that in Europe a significant number of people wanted to hear that science had disproved religion once and for all.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The day after the kidnapping, Shukri published a communiqué in three Egyptian newspapers, as well as in several other Muslim countries, New York, Paris, and London. He demanded the immediate release of his disciples, insisted on a public apology for the negative press the Society had received in the media, and requested the setting up of a committee to investigate the legal system and intelligence services of the regime. There was no chance that Sadat would permit any discussion of the methods of his secret police: Shukri clearly did not understand the nature of the state that he had defied. When Dhahabi’s body was discovered a few days later, Shukri and hundreds of his disciples were arrested. After a swift trial, Shukri himself and five of the leading members of the Society were executed. The press called the sect Takfir wal Hijrah (“Excommunication and Migration”), because of its rejectionist and condemnatory ideology. 36 Like so much fundamentalist theology, it sprang from the experience of rage and marginalization, but Shukri’s story reminds us that it is not always accurate to condemn such a movement as merely lunatic. Unbalanced and tragically mistaken as he was, Shukri had created a counterculture that mirrored the darker side of Sadat’s new Egypt, which was being hailed with such enthusiasm in the West. It revealed in a distorted, exaggerated form what was really going on, and expressed the alienation experienced by so many young Egyptians in a country which they no longer felt to be their own. Just as revealing, but more successful and enduring, were the jamaat al-islamiyyah, the Islamist student associations which dominated the university campuses during the presidency of Sadat. Like Shukri’s Society, the jamaat saw themselves as Qutb’s vanguard; however, they did not practice a radical withdrawal from the mainstream, but tried to create an Islamic space for themselves in a society that seemed oblivious to their needs. Egyptian universities were not like Oxford, Harvard, or the Sorbonne. They were huge, heartless, mass institutions with lamentably poor facilities. Between 1970 and 1977, the number of students rose from about 200,000 to half a million. As a result, there was appalling overcrowding. Two or three students would have to share a seat, and the lecture halls and laboratories were so packed that it was virtually impossible to hear the teacher’s voice, especially since the microphones were often broken.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Their mission was to bring the whole of life—even those aspects that are most impure, banal, and perverse—under the canopy of the sacred. But where the Hasidim found joy and a new lightness in this task, the ecstasy of the Gush was often imbued with rage and resentment. They are men and women of the modern era. The divine is more distant, and it is more of a strain to transcend the pressing and insistent reality of the profane, which, as many now think, is all there is. Gush activists overcame their personal alienation in the secular State of Israel by attempting to wrest the land from the alien Arabs. They settled their own minds by uprooting themselves, going beyond the borders of Israel, and colonizing the long-lost land. The “return” to Eretz Israel was an attempt to retrieve a value and a state of mind that is more fundamental than the confusing present. There are obvious difficulties in this spirituality of rage and reconquista. In 1977, for the first time in Israeli history, Labor was defeated in a general election and the new right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin had always advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan, so his election seemed at first to be another act of God. This seemed clear shortly after the election, when Begin visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkaz Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him. “I felt that my heart was bursting within me,” Daniel Ben Simon, who was present at this “surrealistic scene,” recalled later. “What greater empirical proof could there be that [Kook’s] fantasies and imaginings were indeed reality.” 15 Begin was an outspoken admirer of Levinger, he liked to call Gush Emunim his “very dear children,” and often used biblical imagery when expounding his hawkish policies. After the election, the Likud government began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israel Lands Commission, declared his intention of settling one million Jews on the West Bank within twenty years. By the middle of 1981, Likud had spent $400 million in the territories and built twenty settlements, manned by some 18,500 settlers. By August 1984, there were about 113 official government settlements, including six sizable towns, all over the West Bank. Surrounded by 46,000 militant Jewish settlers, the Arabs became frightened and some resorted to violence. 16 This should have been the perfect political environment for the Gush Emunim, who received much government support. In 1978, Raphael Eitan made each West Bank settlement responsible for the security of its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from their regular army units to protect their community and police the roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They wanted to break down the barriers between secular and religious Jews. 77 Kookists were convinced that, whatever the Haredim thought, it was possible to be at once fully Orthodox and Zionist; they also insisted, against the secularists, that without a religious dimension, Zionism was incomplete. But these were difficult years. Kookists felt betrayed by the Likud government, which had expelled them from Yamit, and, by making peace with the Arabs, had stalled the redemptive process. This seemed clearer than ever when the Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah (an Arabic term meaning “a shaking off”) broke out in 1987, and eventually impelled the Labor government to sign a peace treaty which, in Kookist eyes, was even more unacceptable than Camp David, because it promised to surrender parts of the holy land of the West Bank. Increasingly, Kookists felt that they were surrounded—rather as Jews had been in the Diaspora—by a hostile gentile world, but also by their fellow Jews, who were holding them back from the fulfillment they felt to be within their grasp. As a result, the Gush’s mystical joy in the Land became an ecstasy of rage, which could on occasion erupt in terrifying violence, in the first instance against the Arabs. In the early, more hopeful days of their movement, Gush settlers declared that they had come to “help” the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and to break down the “wall of hatred” between the two peoples, though the very terms in which this offer was couched revealed implacable hostility: “We have come to cleanse you of the air of murder to which you have become accustomed,” Levinger had promised in the 1970s. 78 His behavior grew increasingly provocative. He used to walk aggressively, gun in hand, through Arab towns in the West Bank. If there had been a recent Palestinian attack on a settlement, he would lead activists in retaliatory, vigilante raids, smashing car windows or burning shops. After the outbreak of the intifadah, he said that whenever he approached Hebron, “there awakened within me raging spirits that did not give me peace.” 79 In 1988, when his car was stoned by Palestinians in Hebron, Levinger jumped out and opened fire on his assailants, killing Khaled Salah, who was simply standing by his shoe store taking no part in the stoning. Afterward, Levinger ran amok, shooting indiscriminately, overturning vegetable carts, and cursing at the top of his voice. At his trial, he stated that though he had not murdered anybody, he wished he had had “the honour of killing an Arab.” 80 Gush members had different theories about what should be done about the Arabs in Eretz Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  48 The militancy expressed deep anger. This surfaced in the utterances of the more extremist Christians in these years, who voiced many of the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the most marginalized sectors of the population. Gerald Winrod, a Baptist who organized the Defenders of the Christian Faith to combat the teaching of evolution during the 1920s, traveled in Nazi Germany during the 1930S and returned determined to expose the “Jewish menace” to the American people. At the same time, he denounced Roosevelt’s “Jewish New Deal” as satanic. With Carl McIntyre and Billy James Hargis, Winrod condemned every “liberal” trend in the United States. Fundamentalists blamed liberals of any hue, secularist or Christian, for the marginal status of the “true” Christians. They were beginning their swing to the political Right. In the nineteenth century, evangelicals had seen patriotism as idolatrous. Now it became a sacred duty to defend the American way of life. Hargis, the founder of the Christian Crusade, an anticommunist ministry, saw the Soviet Union as demonic, and battled tirelessly against what he regarded as communist infiltration: the liberal press, leftist teachers, and the Supreme Court were all, in his view, part of a conspiracy to turn America “red.” Carl McIntyre, who seceded from the Presbyterian Church to found the Bible Presbyterian Church and the Faith Theological Seminary, saw hidden enemies everywhere. The mainline denominations themselves were part of a satanic plot to destroy Christianity in America. In the 1950s, McIntyre joined Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. These extremists were not typical, but they were influential. By 1934, some 600,000 people subscribed to Winrod’s Defender Magazine; 120,000 took McIntyre’s Christian Beacon. McIntyre reached thousands more in his Twentieth Century Christian Hour, a radio program which condemned all Christians who did not subscribe to his theology of hatred, and all liberal clergy, who might seem loving and Christian to the uninformed, but who were really “atheistic, communistic, Bible-ridiculing, blood- despising, name-calling, sex-manacled sons of green-eyed monsters.” 49 Fundamentalism was becoming a religion of rage, but, as in Haredi Judaism, this rage was rooted in deep fear. This was evident in the premillennialism that became a hallmark of the movement during this period. By the Second World War, only premillennialists still called themselves “fundamentalists”; other conservative Christians, such as Billy Graham, preferred to call themselves “evangelicals”: the duty of saving souls in this rotten civilization demanded some degree of cooperation with other Christians, whatever their theological beliefs. Fundamentalists proper, however, insisted on separatism and segregation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Eventually, Khomeini went too far. On October 27, 1964, he delivered a strong attack against the recent granting of diplomatic immunity to American military personnel and other advisers, and to the shah’s acceptance of 200 million dollars for arms. Iran, he claimed, was virtually an American colony. What other nation would submit to such indignity? An American maidservant would go virtually unpunished for a serious crime committed in Iran, whereas the case of an Iranian citizen who inadvertently ran over an American’s dog would have to come to trial. For decades foreigners had been plundering Iran’s oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people, and meanwhile the poor were suffering. He concluded: There is no redress for the Iranian people. I am deeply concerned about the condition of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation. The people should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the atrocities of last winter. The ulema should appeal for contributions for this purpose. 49 After this speech, Khomeini was deported, and eventually took up residence in the holy Shii city of Najaf. The regime was now determined to muzzle the clerics. After Khomeini’s departure, the government began to appropriate the religiously endowed properties (awqaf) and brought the madrasahs under stricter bureaucratic control. As a result, by the late 1960s, the number of theological students had markedly declined. 50 In 1970, Ayatollah Riza Saidi was tortured to death for objecting to a conference to promote American investment in Iran, and for denouncing the regime as a “tyrannical agent of imperialism.” Thousands of demonstrators poured onto the streets in Qum, and in Tehran, outside Ayatollah Saidi’s mosque, a huge crowd gathered to listen to an address by Ayatollah Taleqani. 51 At the same time, the government attempted to create a form of “civil Islam,” obedient to the state: a Religious Corps was established, composed of lay graduates from the theological faculties of the secular universities, to work closely with the new Department of Religious Propaganda for Rural Areas. These “mullahs of modernization” would explain the White Revolution to the peasants, promote literacy, build bridges and reservoirs, and vaccinate livestock. It was a transparent attempt to undermine the traditional ulema. 52 But the shah was also anxious to sever the connection between Iran and the Shiah. In 1970, he abolished the Islamic calendar, and the following year there were lavish celebrations in Persepolis to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the ancient Persian monarchy. Not only was this a tasteless demonstration of the immense gap that now existed between rich and poor in Iran, but it was a very public assertion of the regime’s desire to found its identity on Islam’s pre-Islamic heritage. If Iranians lost Islam, they would lose themselves. That was the message of the charismatic young philosopher Dr.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  49 The current rulers of Egypt, Faraj declared, were worse than the Mongols. The Mongol codes had, at least, contained some Jewish and Christian legislation, but the legal system of Egypt today was based on the “laws of unbelief,” created by infidels and imposed on the Muslim people by the colonialists. 50 The rulers of this age are in apostasy from Islam. They were raised at the tables of imperialism, be it Crusaderism, or Communism or Zionism. They carry nothing from Islam but their names, even though they pray and fast and claim to be Muslims. 51 The students who had occupied the Saladin Mosque in 1980 had also compared Sadat to the Mongol rulers. Faraj’s ideas do not seem to have been confined to a small group of extremists. By the 1980s, they were in the air and were widely discussed. Faraj admitted that in Islamic law, jihad had been defined as a collective duty. It was not up to an individual to wage a holy war, but was a decision that could only be taken by the community as a whole. But, Faraj insisted, this law only applied when the ummah was under attack from external enemies. The situation today was far more serious, because the infidels had actually taken over in Egypt. Jihad, therefore, had become a duty for every single Muslim who was capable of fighting. 52 The whole complex tradition of Islam had thus narrowed to a single point: the only way to be a good Muslim in Sadat’s Egypt was to take part in a violent holy war against the regime. Faraj answered questions that were troubling his young disciples. Even though they were planning an assassination, Jihad members wanted to behave as morally as possible. Was it acceptable to tell lies in order to conceal their plans? What about the possibility of killing innocent bystanders as well as the guilty rulers? In Egypt, where family authority is very important, younger members wanted to know if it was all right to take part in the conspiracy without asking their parents’ permission. 53 There was obviously concern about undertaking a jihad against Sadat before Jerusalem had been liberated from Israel: which should take priority? Faraj replied that the jihad for Jerusalem should be led only by a devout Muslim leader, not by an infidel. He also revealed a fatal confidence in God’s direct intervention. Once a truly Islamic state had been established, Jerusalem would automatically revert to Muslim rule. 54 God had promised in the Koran that if Muslims fought the unbelievers, “God will chastise them by your hands, and will bring disgrace upon them, and will succour you against them.” 55 From a literal reading of this text, Faraj concluded that if Muslims took the initiative, God “will then intervene [and change] the laws of nature.” Could militants expect miraculous help? Faraj tragically answered “yes.” 56 Observers were puzzled that there was no follow-up to Sadat’s assassination.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  83 Other fundamentalists who came to be prominent in Moral Majority, such as Tim LaHaye and Greg Dixon, had also founded superchurches, enjoyed considerable autonomy, and would fear no censure from a denomination. They already had close links with one another: they were nearly all Baptists and members of the Baptist Bible Fellowship. The Moral Majority did not confine itself to fundamentalists. The leaders wanted to cooperate with other people who shared their views on ethical and political issues, and create a forum for all the conservatives of America. If the new group was to make a significant impact, it needed the support of like- minded Roman Catholics, Pentecostalists, Mormons, Jews, and secularists, since only 15 to 20 percent of the population of the United States were evangelical Protestants. 84 For the first time, driven by pragmatic considerations, fundamentalists felt compelled to lay aside their separatism, leave their enclaves, and embrace the pluralism of modern life. This was reflected in the leadership. Falwell, LaHaye, Dixon, and Bob Billington were fundamentalists, but Paul Weyrich was Jewish, and Howard Phillips and Richard Vignerie were Catholics. This pluralism cost them some Christian fundamentalist support: Bob Jones II, for example, called Falwell “the most dangerous man in America.” 85 But, in fact, popular support for Moral Majority remained predominantly Protestant. Grassroots sympathy was centered in the South, and the movement had little appeal outside WASP circles. Conservative Catholics could endorse Moral Majority’s position on abortion and homosexual rights, and tax relief for independent schools, but many could not forget the fundamentalists’ traditional hatred of Roman Catholicism. By the same token, Jews, black Baptists, and Pentecostalists would be repelled by the racism of some of the most prominent leaders and patrons of the movement. Senator Jesse Helms, for example, was a committed opponent of the civil rights movement. 86 The message of Moral Majority was not new. It was declaring war on the liberal establishment and fighting a battle for the future of America. Members were convinced that the civilization of the United States must be religious, and its policy dictated by the Bible. At present, America was degenerate. After the Second World War, a secularist elite, centered on the East Coast, had dominated political and cultural life. These liberals had become what Jerry Falwell called “an immoral minority.” Conservatives should not see themselves as a reactionary, marginal group. In fact, they represented the majority, and they must fight to preserve traditional values. “There are millions of us—and only a handful of them,” claimed Tim LaHaye. 87 “We have together with the Protestants and Catholics enough votes to run this country,” Pat Robertson told an audience. “And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.” 88 During the late 1970s and early 1980s, some fundamentalists were beginning to modify the old premillennial pessimism.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I wanted to kill—my elder brother, I wanted to kill him, to get the better of him for once, just once, and see him die. I wanted to do it to remove from my mother’s sight the object of her love, that son of hers, to punish her for loving him so much, so badly, and above all—as I told myself, too—to save my younger brother, my younger brother, my child, save him from the living life of that elder brother superimposed on his own, from that black veil over the light, from the law which was decreed and represented by the elder brother, a human being, and yet which was an animal law, filling every moment of every day of the younger brother’s life with fear, a fear that one day reached his heart and killed him. I’ve written a good deal about the members of my family, but then they were still alive, my mother and my brothers. And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them. • • • The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less—I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it. Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but, strangely, in advance.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Bitterness increased in the early 1960s, when the shah’s rule became more autocratic and cruel. There seemed to be a double standard. America proudly proclaimed its belief in freedom and democracy, but warmly supported a shah who permitted no opposition to his rule, and denied Iranians fundamental human rights. After 1953, Iran became a privileged American ally. As a major oil-producing country, Iran was a prime market for the sale of American services and technology. Americans looked upon Iran as an economic goldmine, and, over the years, the United States repeated the old political patterns used by the British: strong-arm tactics in the oil market, undue influence over the monarch, demands for diplomatic immunity, business and trade concessions, and a condescending attitude toward the Iranians themselves. American businessmen and consultants poured into the country and made a great deal of money. There was a glaring discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of most Iranians; they lived isolated from the people, and since most worked under contracts associated with the throne, they became fatally associated with the regime. It was a shortsighted, self-interested policy that would eventually cast the United States in a demonic light. Iran was becoming a polarized country: a few benefited from the American boom, but the vast majority were being left behind. And Iran was not unique. By the middle of the twentieth century, the societies of all the countries we are considering were being divided into two camps. Some saw the modern age as liberating and empowering; others experienced it as an evil assault. There was fear, hatred, and a barely suppressed rage. It would not be long before fundamentalists, who felt this anger acutely, would decide that it was no longer sufficient to hold aloof from society and build a counterculture. They must mobilize and fight back. 8. Mobilization (1960–74) BY THE 1960s, revolution was in the air throughout the West and the Middle East. In Europe and America the young people took to the streets and rebelled against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal system, protested against the materialism, imperialism, and chauvinism of their governments, refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. Sixties youth began doing what the fundamentalists had been doing for decades: they started to create a “counterculture,” an “alternative society” in revolt against the values of the mainstream. In many ways, they were demanding a more religious way of life. Most had little time for institutional faith or for the authoritarian structures of the monotheisms. Instead, they went to Katmandu or sought solace in the meditative or mystical techniques of the Orient.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Islamic jamaat on the campuses during the late 1970s was a youth movement which helped young men and women to articulate their frustration and confusion. It often spilled over into violence. The jamaat were the least aggressive of the Egyptian Islamic movements during the 1970S, but some of the more militant leaders would resort to strong-arm tactics on occasion to get control of the campus. The American Arabist Patrick Gaffney made a study of the Jamaah al-Islamiyyah at the new University of Minya in Upper Egypt, where the student body was still undeveloped and the small Islamic cadre had few rivals. They began by establishing special places as Islamic zones: a bulletin board, a section of the cafeteria, or the shady spots on lawns. By 1977, by dint of bullying to deter rivals, the Islamists had gained control of the student union. They made a mosque in the shared grounds of the Colleges of Art and Education, where students had to congregate between classes. The Islamists took the place over, spreading prayer mats, amplifying the prayers over a loudspeaker, and bearded youths occupied the area at all times, studying the Koran. 46 This aggressive encroachment into secular space can be seen as a crude attempt to reconstruct Islam and implant it in a Westernized world. The Islamists of Minya refused to accept the universal expansion of Western civilization and were trying to change the map. Like the adoption of Islamic dress, the conversion of a profane space into a mosque constituted a rebellion against a wholly secularized way of life. For almost a century, Egyptians, like other people in the developing world, had been deemed incapable of creating history and establishing a modern society on their own terms. Now the Islamists were making something happen, on however small a scale. They were protesting against the centrality of the Western viewpoint, and pushing their own out of the margins and into the limelight once more. Like the civil rights or ethnic movements, like feminism or environmentalism, the student Muslim organizations were struggling to reassert an identity, values and issues which they felt had been repressed by industrial modernity, and to emphasize the vitality of the local and particular over against the uniformity of the global society imposed by the West. Like other postmodern movements, it was an act of symbolic decolonization, an attempt to de-center the West, and demonstrate the fact that there were other possibilities for humanity.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As Sadat moved ever closer to the West and made peace with Israel (which was regarded by Islamists as the alter ego of America in the Middle East), a rupture with the regime became almost inevitable. At Minya the students became more violent. They vandalized churches, attacked students who refused to wear Islamic dress, and, in February 1979, occupied the municipal government building for a week. When the police closed down one of their mosques, the students held the Friday community prayer in the middle of the street on an important bridge, holding up traffic. Next they took over University City, the student resident block, and held thirty Christian students as hostages. Two days later, a thousand troops arrived to quell the uprising. 47 Until 1977, Sadat had supported the jamaat al-islamiyyah, but the events at Minya changed his mind. On April 14, 1979, he visited Upper Egypt and addressed the faculties of the Universities of Minya and Asyut: the government would no longer tolerate this abuse of religion. In June, the General Union of Egyptian Students was banned, and its assets were frozen. But the jamaat were too strongly entrenched to disappear. At the end of the Ramadan fast, they held huge rallies in the major cities of Egypt. In Cairo, fifty thousand Muslims gathered in prayer outside the presidential Abidin Palace, tacitly reminding Sadat that he must rule according to God’s law. The distinguished Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi was flown in from the Gulf to address the crowds. He reminded Sadat, who was currently devoting much attention to the preservation of the mummy of Ramses II: Egypt is Muslim, not pharaonic ... the youth of the jamaat islamiyyah are the true representatives of Egypt, and not the Avenue of the Pyramids, the theatre performances, and the films.... Egypt is not naked women, but veiled women who adhere to the prescriptions of divine law. Egypt is young men who let their beards grow.... It is the land of al-Azhar! 48 Repression and coercion had their usual effect. The Islamist students now redoubled their efforts to turn the campuses into Islamic bastions; there were more attacks on cinemas, theaters, Christians, and unveiled women. They also began to spread the word outside the universities. There was now a state of open warfare against the regime and its secularized ethos. The jamaat were not allowed to regroup, and many of their members joined the new secret cells dedicated to a more violent jihad. These events all took place against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. While Sadat, in his attempt to draw closer to the West, spoke proudly of the shah as his friend, Islamic militants in Egypt gloried in the reports of the Iranian revolutionaries who were bringing the shah down.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  86 Unlike the Egyptian ulema, who had retreated defensively into the world of the madrasahs, the Iranian ulema were often in the vanguard of change and would continue to have a decisive role in forthcoming events. In December 1905, the governor of Tehran gave orders that the feet of several sugar merchants be beaten for refusing to lower their prices as ordered by the government. They claimed that the high import duties made their high prices necessary. A large group of ulema and bazaaris took sanctuary in the royal mosque of Tehran, until ejected by the agents of Prime Minister Ain al-Dauleh. At once, a significant number of mullahs followed Tabatabai into one of the major shrines, whence they demanded that the shah establish a representative “house of justice.” The shah agreed and the ulema returned to Tehran, but when the prime minister showed no signs of fulfilling this promise, rioting broke out there and in the provinces, and popular preachers denounced the government from the pulpits, stirring up the common people. Finally, in July 1906, the mullahs of Tehran staged a mass exodus to Qum, while some 14,000 merchants took refuge in the British legation. Business came to a halt, while the protesters demanded the dismissal of Ain al-Dauleh and the establishment of a majlis (“representative assembly”), and the more knowledgeable reformers began to discuss a mashruteh (“constitution”). 87 The Constitutional Revolution was initially successful. The prime minister was dismissed at the end of July, and the first Majlis, which included a significant number of elected ulema, opened in Tehran in October. A year later, the new shah, Muhammad Ali, signed the Fundamental Law, which was modeled on the Belgian constitution. This required the monarch to ask the approval of the Majlis in all important matters; all citizens (including those who belonged to a different faith) enjoyed equality before the law, and the constitution guaranteed personal rights and freedoms. There was a flurry of liberal activity throughout Iran. The First Majlis gave new freedoms to the press, and immediately satirical and critical articles began to be published. New societies were formed, there were plans for a national bank, and new municipal councils were elected. The brilliant young deputy for Tabriz, Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, led a left-wing, democratic party in the Majlis, while the mujtahids, Ayatollah Tabatabai and Seyyed Abdallah Behbehani, led the Conservative party, which managed to include some clauses in the constitution to safeguard the status of the Shariah.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He used to leave his pulpit during class, coming, as it were, “off the record,” and would sit on the floor beside his students, openly criticizing the government. But in 1963, Khomeini suddenly broke his cover, and speaking from his pulpit, in his official capacity, began a sustained and outright attack upon the shah, whom he portrayed as the enemy of Islam. At a time when nobody else dared to speak out against the regime, Khomeini protested against the cruelty and injustice of the shah’s rule, his unconstitutional dismissal of the Majlis, the torture, the wicked suppression of all opposition, the shah’s craven subservience to the United States, and his support of Israel, which had deprived Palestinians of their homes. He was particularly concerned about the plight of the poor: the shah should leave his splendid palace and go and look at the shantytowns in South Tehran. On one occasion, he is said to have held a copy of the Koran in one hand, and a copy of the 1906 constitution in the other, and accused the shah of violating his oath to defend them. Reprisals were swift and inevitable. On March 22, 1963, the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Sixth Imam (who had been poisoned by Caliph al-Mansur in 765), SAVAK forces surrounded the madrasah , and attacked it, killing a number of students. Khomeini was arrested and taken into custody. 43 It was inept and self-destructive of the regime to choose that date to make its move. Constantly, in the course of the long struggle with Khomeini, the shah seemed to go out of his way to cast himself as a tyrannical ruler and the enemy of the Imams. Why did Khomeini choose this moment to speak out? Throughout his life, he had practiced the mystical disciplines of irfan , as taught by Mulla Sadra. For Khomeini, as for Sadra, mysticism and politics were inseparable. There could be no social reformation of society unless it was accompanied by a spiritual reformation. In the very last testimony he made to the people of Iran before his death, Khomeini begged them to continue to study and practice irfan , a discipline which the ulema had tended to neglect. For Khomeini, the mystical quest associated with mythos must always accompany the practical activities of logos . People who met Khomeini were always struck by his obvious absorption in the spiritual. His withdrawn demeanor, inward-looking gaze, and the studied monotone of his delivery (which Westerners found repellent) were easily recognizable by Shiis as the mark of a “sober” mystic. Where some Sufis and mystical practitioners were known as “drunken” mystics because they surrendered to the emotional extremes that are often unleashed in the course of this interior journey, the “sober” mystic cultivated an iron self-control as a means of keeping extremity at bay. Mulla Sadra had described the spiritual progress of a leader (imam) of the ummah .

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Instead of seeing the Jewish state as a savior, he referred bleakly to the “terrible and awful” time in which the Haredim now lived. The wars that worried the rabbi were not the Arab-Israeli wars, but the long battle waged by the Zionists against religion. “The wars we are fighting [against those who oppose tradition] did not begin today; they began already at the time of the First World War, and only the Master of the Universe knows what else is expected,” the rabbi said with great emotion. But the outcome was not in doubt: “The Jew cannot be destroyed. He may be killed, but his children will continue to cleave to the Torah.” Bad enough that they were cast as the enemy; but, to their dismay, Laborites had to hear their sacred institutions and themselves denounced as not merely un-Jewish but positively anti-Jewish. “Is Labor something holy?” asked the rabbi derisively. “Have they not separated themselves from the past, and seek a new Torah?” These kibbutzniks were no better than gentiles; they did not even know what Shabbat or Yom Kippur was. How could such people be trusted to decide “critical and essential matters facing the Jewish people?” There could be no deal with Labor politicians. “When they are in the Knesset, they are not interested in strengthening religiosity. To the contrary, they seek to pass laws that will destroy the Jewish religion.” 76 The significance of that evening in Yad Eliahu Stadium did not lie simply in the fact that Rabbi Schach, alone and unaided, appeared effortlessly to have swung the balance in favor of Likud, but that it marked the extraordinary journey of the Haredim from a despised out-group to the heart of power. The occasion also showed that there were “two nations” in Israel, who scarcely understood one another’s language and shared none of the same concerns. It also revealed the deep hatred that inspired the piety of so many of the Haredim, a rage directed not merely against gentiles, but also against their fellow Jews. The extreme religious Zionists and members of Gush Emunim were also ready for a fight. They were rebels, mounting what they saw as a revolution against secular nationalism on the one hand, and Orthodoxy on the other. Life had changed drastically for Jews. They felt that there was no need for Jews to be constricted by the traditions belonging to the Diaspora, because the messianic age had begun. This was the first major outbreak of Jewish messianism since Shabbetai Zevi. At that time, too, Jews had felt in transition and believed that they were about to experience unprecedented change. But where Shabbateans had rebelled against the restrictions of the ghetto, Gush members felt territorially circumscribed. They were as obsessed with boundaries as the Shabbateans, and though they focused chiefly on the frontiers of Eretz Israel, they were also fighting a battle to define the limits and borders of Judaism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The government closed the madrasah, and its silent, empty courtyards remained a potent symbol of the shah’s fundamental hostility to any murmur of protest and his opposition to religion. 52 Increasingly, in the popular imagination, he was identified with Yazid, the enemy of the faith, the murderer of the martyr Husain, and the enemy of Khomeini, whom the people now called their Imam. At the beginning of 1977, however, the regime relaxed somewhat and appeared to bow to public pressure. Jimmy Carter had been elected to the presidency of the United States the previous year, and his human rights campaign, plus a damning report from Amnesty International about the state of Iran’s courts and prisons, may have inclined the shah to make some concession to the prevailing discontent. There was little real change, but the censorship laws were eased and a flood of literature hit the market revealing frustration in nearly every sector of society. The students were angry about government interference in the universities; farmers protested about the agricultural imports, which had increased the poverty in the countryside; businessmen were worried about inflation and corruption; lawyers protested against the decision to downgrade the Supreme Court. 53 But there was still no call for revolution. Most of the ulema in Iran followed the lead of Shariatmadari and maintained the traditional quietist line. It was not the clergy but the writers of Iran who made the most eloquent protest against the government in 1977. From October 10 to 19, in the Goethe Institute in Tehran, about sixty leading Iranian poets and writers read their work to thousands of adults and students. SAVAK did not interrupt these poetry recitals, despite their outright hostility to the regime. 54 It seemed as though the government was learning to accommodate peaceful protest. But the new era did not last long. Not long after the poetry meetings, the shah clearly felt that matters were getting out of hand. A number of known dissidents were arrested and on November 3, 1977, Khomeini’s son Mustafa died mysteriously in Iraq, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents. 55 Yet again, the shah had cast himself in the role of Yazid. Khomeini was already surrounded by a Shii aura and had begun to seem a little like the Hidden Imam in his exile; now, like Imam Husain, his son had been killed by a tyrannical ruler. All over Iran, the people gathered to mourn Mustafa Khomeini, weeping and beating their breasts in the traditional manner. In Tehran, the police attacked the mourners, and there were more arrests and beatings during poetry readings held in Tehran on November 15, 16, and 25. But still there was no sign of a general uprising.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But the Redemption of the world depends upon the Redemption of Israel. From this derives our moral, spiritual, and cultural influence over the entire world. The blessing will come to all of humanity from the people of Israel living in the whole of its land. 18 But it appeared to be impossible to implement this mythical imperative in a world run along pragmatic, secular lines. However hawkish or biblical Begin’s rhetoric, he had no intention of letting mythos interfere with the practical logos of politics. From the very beginning, efficiency and effectiveness had been the watchwords of the modern spirit. Absolute principles had to be accommodated to practical political considerations and policies. Begin had to remain in good odor with the United States, which wanted the peace process. This would always be one of the main problems for fundamentalists who tried to battle for God in the modern political world. Gush Emunim did make some gains during these years. In 1978, a French graduate of the Sorbonne and Merkaz Harav, Shlomo Aviner, set up the Ateret Cohanim (“Crown of Priests”) yeshiva in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem. The yeshiva overlooked the Temple Mount, now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, the third- holiest place in the Islamic world, and the yeshiva’s purpose was the study of texts relating to the priestly cult and sacrifices in the biblical Temple, in preparation for the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of the Temple on its ancient site. Since a new Jewish Temple would mean the destruction of the Muslim shrine, the founding of the yeshiva was itself provocative, but Ateret Cohanim also initiated a settlement project in the Old City of Jerusalem, which Israel had annexed, in defiance of the international community, in 1967. The yeshiva began secretly to purchase Arab property in the Muslim quarter and to reconstruct old synagogues there in order to establish a strong Jewish presence in Arab Jerusalem. 19 The second gain made during these years occurred in 1979, when Gush Emunim challenged a ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court that ordered their new settlement of Elon Moreh, southeast of Nablus, to be dismantled. Gush Emunim threatened civil war and a hunger strike, and eventually, at the end of January 1980, the cabinet set up a special committee to find means of safeguarding existing settlements and to create new opportunities within the constraints imposed by the Supreme Court. On May 15, the government announced a five-year plan to establish fifty-nine new settlements in the West Bank. 20 But despite these isolated successes, Gush Emunim’s glory days were over. The new peace was popular with the Israeli public and in 1982, the Gush suffered a serious defeat. To comply with the Camp David Accords, Israel had evacuated the settlement of Yamit, a thriving secular town built by the Labor government on the shores of the Sinai.