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.

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• 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.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of the Jewish nation had been responsible for the train of events leading up to the death of Jesus, it had been the Temple establishment of Sadducees, but the Pharisees come in for far more abuse recorded by the Gospel writers, often in the mouth of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus seems to have resembled the Pharisees in much of his teaching and outlook. When the Gospels were compiled in the last decades of the first century, the descendants of the Pharisees, the leaders at Jamnia, were a living force, unlike the Sadducees, and many Christian communities had become strongly opposed to them. John’s exalted Christ, echoing the exaltation of Christ in the writings of Paul, is emancipated from any concern for Jewish sensibilities about his identity, and in John’s picture of Jesus’s life, ‘the Jews’ repeatedly and often menacingly prowl around the Jesus story as if they had no organic connection with the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.83 The growing coherence in Judaism, the narrowing in variety of Jewish belief, meant that by the end of the first century CE a break between Christianity and Judaism was more and more likely: a symptom of that is John the Divine’s readiness to replace the Temple with the Lamb Jesus.84 In many communities, the break probably occurred two or more decades earlier. Christ-followers had taken a decisive step away from Judaism by offering worship specifically to Jesus: there was no precedent in the tradition for this in Judaism, even though Jews had commonly recognized and celebrated the existence of supernatural beings like angels or the personified Wisdom of God.85 Moreover, at some very early stage, Christians celebrated their main worship on a different day: the day following the Jewish Sabbath. Many Christian cultures refer to it by its pagan Roman name, Sunday, but in many languages other than English it is called the Lord’s Day, as it was the day on which the Lord had risen from the dead, according to the accounts in the Gospel Passion narratives.86 And central to worship for Christians was that meal in which they shared bread and wine. By the beginning of the second century at least, we find Ignatius, leader or ‘bishop’ in the Christian community of Antioch, calling this ‘Eucharist’.87 In everyday life, the Roman imperial authorities unwittingly encouraged the process of separation between Jews and Christians by imposing a punitive tax in place of the voluntary contributions which Jews had once paid to the Jerusalem Temple. For Roman bureaucrats, therefore, it became important to know who was and was not a Jew. Despite all the Jewish rebellions, tax-paying Jews continued to enjoy a status as an officially recognized religion (religio licita). In fact, despite the brutality with which Rome crushed various Jewish rebellions both in Palestine and beyond, it is remarkable that the Romans continued to regard Judaism with such respect and forbearance – most notably in adopting the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Jonathan Mayhew was convinced that “great revolutions were at hand,” when a series of earthquakes occurred simultaneously in various parts of the world in November 1755; he looked forward to “some very remarkable changes in the political and religious state of the world.” 44 Mayhew instinctively saw the imperial struggle during the Seven Years War between Protestant Britain and Catholic France over their colonial possessions in America and Canada in eschatalogical terms. It would, he believed, hasten the Second Coming of Christ by weakening the power of the Pope, who was Antichrist, the Great Pretender of the Last Days. 45 New Lights also saw America as fighting on the front line of a cosmic battle with the forces of evil during the Seven Years War. It was at this time that Pope’s Day (November 5) became an annual holiday, during which rowdy crowds burned effigies of the Pontiff. 46 These were frightening and violent times. Americans still looked to the old mythology to give their lives meaning and to explain the tragedies that befell them. But they also seemed to sense impending change and, as they did so, developed a religion of hatred, seeing France and the Roman Catholic Church as satanic and utterly opposed to the righteous American ethos. 47 As they cultivated these apocalyptic fantasies, they seemed to feel that there could be no redemption, no final deliverance, no liberty, and no millennial peace unless popery was destroyed. A bloody purge would be necessary to bring this new world into being. We shall find that a theology of rage would frequently be evolved in response to dawning modernity. Americans could sense that transformation was at hand, but they still belonged to the old world. The economic effects of the Seven Years War led the British government to impose new taxes upon the American colonists, and this provoked the revolutionary crisis that resulted in the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775. During this protracted struggle, Americans started the painful process of making that radical break with the past that was central to the modern ethos, and their religion of hatred would play a major role in this development. The leaders of the Revolution—George Washington, John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, for example—experienced the revolution as a secular event. They were rationalists, men of the Enlightenment, inspired by the modern ideals of John Locke, Scottish Common Sense philosophy, or Radical Whig ideology. They were deists, and differed from more orthodox Christians in their view of revelation and the divinity of Christ. They conducted a sober, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power, moving only slowly and reluctantly toward revolution. They certainly did not see themselves as fighting a cosmic war against the legions of Antichrist. When the break with Britain became inevitable, their goal was practical and limited to terrestrial objectives: the “united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At first, it was assumed that Khomeini would secure their immediate release and command the students to withdraw, as he had before. To this day, it is not clear whether Khomeini knew of the students’ decision to invade the embassy beforehand. In any case, for some three days he kept a low profile. But when Bazargan realized that he could not get Khomeini’s support for the evacuation of the embassy, he recognized his political impotence and resigned on November 6, together with the foreign secretary, Ibrahim Yazdi. Rather to their own surprise, the students, who had expected their siege to last only a few days, found that they had spearheaded a major confrontation between Iran and the United States. Khomeini and the Islamic Revolutionary Republic threw their support behind the students. The huge publicity surrounding the hostage crisis worldwide gave Khomeini a new assertiveness. In the event, even though the women hostages and black Marine guards were released, the remaining fifty-two American diplomats were held for 444 days and became an icon of Iranian radicalism. For Khomeini, the hostages were a godsend. By focusing attention on the Great Satan, an external enemy, their capture and the post-revolutionary hatred of America that ensued united Iranians behind Khomeini during a period of internal turbulence. The departure of Bazargan removed, at a stroke, the most vociferous opponent of the draft constitution, and weakened the strength of the opposition. Accordingly, the new constitution was passed in the December referendum with an impressive majority. Khomeini saw the hostage crisis simply in terms of his own domestic situation. As he explained to Bani Sadr, his new prime minister, at the outset: This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs, we can let the hostages go. 4 This was a policy dictated not by the mythos of Islam, despite Khomeini’s fiery rhetoric, but a piece of pragmatic logos. Nevertheless, the crisis also changed Khomeini’s own profile. Instead of remaining a practical politician, he became, in his own view, the leader of the ummah in its struggle against Western imperialism; the word “revolution” acquired an almost sacred value in his speech, on a par with conventional Islamic terminology: he alone was able to take a stand against the most powerful imperialist power in the world and reveal the limits of its might. At the same time, the hatred of Iran and Islam that the crisis not unnaturally unleashed throughout the world made Khomeini more aware than ever of the fragility of the Revolution, threatened as it was by enemies within and without.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This is part of the fundamentalists’ dilemma. They often feel fascinated and drawn toward the very modern achievements from which they recoil in horror. 20 The Protestant fundamentalists’ portrayal of Antichrist, the charming, plausible deceiver, shows something of the same conflict. There is a tension in the fundamentalist vision of modernity that can be explosive. As Blau indicated, the piety of the anti- Zionists is one of principled “hatred” and hatred often goes hand-in-hand with unacknowledged love. Haredim feel rage when they contemplate the State of Israel. They do not kill, but to this day they throw stones at cars in Israel whose drivers break the law by traveling on the Sabbath. Sometimes they will attack the house of a fellow Haredi who has failed to live up to the expected standard by, say, owning a television set or permitting his wife to dress immodestly. Such acts of violence are seen as kiddush hashem, “sanctification of God’s Name,” and a blow against the forces of evil that surround the Haredim on all sides and threaten to devour them. 21 But it is not impossible that these violent assaults are an attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts. These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. 22 Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely with the state. Their determined withdrawal from the State of Israel reminds the less zealous Haredim, who often feel a lack of integrity and authenticity in their cooperation with the Jewish state, that no matter how powerful and successful Israel has become in worldly terms, Jews are still in a state of existential exile and can take no legitimate part in the political and cultural life of the modern world. This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters displaying scantily clad women advertising swimwear, they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Apostles in every diocese. It was another stage in the discussion which Ignatius, Clement and Irenaeus had begun. In Rome the argument was mainly over whether there could be any forgiveness at all for those who had lapsed. The priest Novatian, a hardliner on this issue, opposed the election of his colleague Cornelius as bishop, since Cornelius held that forgiveness was possible at the hands of a bishop. The Church in Rome was bitterly divided as to whom to support. Cyprian and Cornelius, who had arrived at similar conclusions about the powers of a bishop, allied with each other and the supporters of Novatian found themselves an isolated minority. Matters became worse when, in their initial enthusiasm, the Novatianists started making new Christian converts in North Africa as well as in Rome. When many of their sympathizers decided that the division had gone too far, and the newly baptized applied to rejoin the Catholic Church in communion with Cyprian and Cornelius, Carthage and Rome were faced with the problem of deciding the terms. Was Novatianist baptism valid? Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome’s growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence. In the end, North Africa and Rome agreed to differ on the issue of baptism, the North Africans saying that valid baptism could take place only within the Christian community which is the Church, the Romans saying that the sacrament belonged to Christ, not to the Church, and that therefore it was valid whoever performed it if it was done in the right form and with the right intentions. Comparative peace then descended on the Church for several decades, and it is likely that the steady expansion of Christian numbers was one significant factor in the decline of traditional religious institutions during that period (see p. 168). In 272 the Church even called in the Emperor Aurelian for legal support in a long-running effort to evict the obstinate deposed Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who had refused to end his occupation of the cathedral church complex in Antioch: the first recorded imperial intervention in Christian affairs. Nevertheless there followed the most serious bout of persecution yet, designed to wipe out Christianity in the empire, led by the reforming Emperor Diocletian.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The myth contained these pragmatic activities and gave them meaning; myth could also serve as a corrective, and remind men and women of values, such as compassion, that transcended the pragmatic considerations of reason. An earthly reality could become a symbol of the divine, but was never itself holy; it pointed beyond itself to where reason could not go. But Kook had overridden these distinctions and created what some might call idolatry. Can an army be “holy” when it is often obliged to do terrible things, such as killing the innocent with the guilty? Traditionally, messianism had inspired people to criticize the status quo, but Kook would use it to give absolute sanction to Israeli policy. Such a vision could lead to a nihilism that denies crucial values. In making the State of Israel holy and its territorial integrity supreme, Kook had succumbed to the very temptation responsible for some of the worst nationalist atrocities of the twentieth century. Rabbi Kook the Elder’s inclusive vision, which had reached out to other faiths and to the secular world, had been lost. Kook the Younger was filled with burning hatred of Christians, of the goyim who interfered with Israeli ambitions, and of the Arabs. 87 There had been wisdom in the older vision, which had seen reason and myth as complementary though separate. There was great danger in Kook the Younger’s yoking of the two together. The Gahelet did not take this view, however. Rabbi Kook’s holistic ideology made Zionism a religion, and was just what they had been looking for. They became full-time students at Merkaz Harav, and put this obscure yeshiva on the map of Israel. They also made Kook a sort of Jewish pope, whose decrees were binding and infallible. These young men became Kook’s cadre and would become the leaders of the new fundamentalist Zionism: Moshe Levinger, Yaakov Ariel, Shlomo Aviner, Haim Drukman, Dov Lior, Zalman Melamed, Avraham Shapira, and Eliezar Waldman. In Merkaz Harav during the 1960s, they planned an offensive designed to win the nation back to God and to make the secular state realize its religious potential. Instead of the dialectical synthesis of secular and religious envisaged by Kook the Elder, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda expected an imminent takeover of the secular by the divine. For all their enthusiasm, however, the Gahelet could do no more than plan. There was nothing they could effectively do to settle the whole land or to change the heart of the nation.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  history suddenly found himself confronted with subjects who appealed to a higher principle than his power. The dissidents were of course used to doing so, but the Emperor had not expected such ingratitude after he had ended the Great Persecution. If he knew nothing else about the Christian God, he knew that God was One. Oneness was in any case a convenient emphasis for the emperor who had destroyed Diocletian’s Tetrarchy to replace it with his own single power, but there is more to the annoyance and apprehension apparent in Constantine’s official correspondence than cynical political calculation. Anything which challenged the unity of the Church was likely to offend the supreme One God, and that might end his run of favour to the Emperor. Faced with petitions from the Donatists, in 313 Constantine made a decision of great significance for the future. Rather than make a judgement for the Christians with the help of the traditional imperial legal system, as the non-Christian Emperor Aurelian had once done before him (see p. 175), he would use the expertise of Church leaders, asking them to bring the matter ‘to a fitting conclusion’.53 So he adapted the North African Church’s well-established practice of submitting disputes to councils of bishops, with the difference that now for the first time they were gathered from right across the Mediterranean.Constantine’s first summons of a council was to Rome, in 313. The Donatists ignored the result, since it went against them; so Constantine tried again the following year, this time summoning an even more widely recruited council to the city of Arles in what is now southern France. The bishops, travelling on imperial passes, even included three from the remote province of Britannia, one of the first indications of Christian activity in that island. Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church’s first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors. Most Donatists stayed out and stayed loyal to their own independent hierarchy, nursing new grudges against the North African Church, which remained in communion with the rest of the Christian Mediterranean Churches and which thus arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African Christianity for centuries until the Church there faded away (see p. 277). The councils of Rome and Arles were thus not a promising precedent, but over the next century the use of councils to resolve Church disputes became firmly established as a mechanism of Church life. It represented a notable concession by the commander of Rome’s army to the officers of God’s army,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Their main job was to make sure that their members registered for the vote, were taught how to use their vote correctly, and were able to get to the polls. They held rallies to explain the need for activism, and to educate the people in lobbying and the preparation of newsletters; they also taught them how to influence the media. Christians were exhorted to stand for public office, at however lowly and local a level. Liberals and secularists gradually became aware of a vociferous born-again presence in public life. In the course of the next decade, militant Christians began to colonize mainstream institutions. In 1986, Pat Robertson even made a bid for the presidency. Christians began to be a thorn in the side of some politicians. For years, public action committees had targeted candidates for office who, in their view, promoted undesirable policies. They had issued “report cards,” making their ideas public property. Now Christian activists began to target candidates who voted the “wrong” way on the gun laws, funding for abortion clinics, or the Equal Rights Amendment. To hold the wrong views on defense, school prayer, or gay rights was to be anti-family, anti-America, and anti-God. At first, the fundamentalist activists tended to be inept, but gradually they learned to play the modern political game. They were preachers and television presenters and not natural politicians, but they did achieve some success. Their most notable achievement was probably the blocking of the Equal Rights Amendment. It was necessary that thirty-eight states vote for the amendment in order to procure the necessary two-thirds majority, and by 1973 thirty states had voted for it. 101 But the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly and the campaigning of local Christian Right activists halted the amendment’s momentum: Nebraska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Dakota would all reverse their previous endorsements. Otherwise, the Moral Majority did not manage to change either federal or state legislation, even on such issues as school prayer and abortion. In Arkansas and Louisiana, however, bills were passed to ensure that the literal teachings of Genesis were given equal time with Darwinian evolution in the school curriculum. This apparent lack of success did not worry Christian activists, however, who pointed out that their long-term objective was to build an ultraconservative majority in both chambers of Congress. Once that had been achieved, the reforms that they wanted would take place as a matter of course.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Life was slowly becoming secularized in Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, despite the intensity of its religious drive, was secularizing too. The reformers claimed to be returning, conservative-wise, to the primary source, the Bible, but they were reading Scripture in a modern way. The reformed Christian was to stand alone before God, relying simply on his Bible, but this would not have been possible before the invention of printing had made it feasible for all Christians to have a Bible of their own and before the developing literacy of the period enabled them to read it. Increasingly, Scripture was read literally for the information it imparted, in much the same way as modernizing Protestants were learning to read other texts. Silent, solitary reading would help to free Christians from traditional ways of interpretation and from the supervision of the religious experts. The stress on individual faith would also help to make truth seem increasingly subjective—a characteristic of the modern Western mentality. But while he emphasized the importance of faith, Luther rejected reason vehemently. He seemed to sense that reason could, in the coming dispensation, be inimical to faith. In his writings—though not in Calvin’s—we can see that the old vision of the complementarity of reason and mythology was eroding. In his usual pugnacious way, Luther spoke of Aristotle with hatred, and loathed Erasmus, whom he regarded as the epitome of reason, which, he was convinced, could only lead to atheism. In pushing reason out of the religious sphere, Luther was one of the first Europeans to secularize it.6 Because, for Luther, God was utterly mysterious and hidden, the world was empty of the divine. Luther’s Deus Absconditus could not be discovered either in human institutions or in physical reality. Medieval Christians had experienced the sacred in the Church, which Luther now declared to be Antichrist. Nor was it permissible to reach a knowledge of God by reflecting on the marvelous order of the universe, as the scholastic theologians (also objects of Luther’s simmering rage) had done.7 In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics. Because mundane reality was utterly opposed to the spiritual, church and state must operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere of activity.8 Luther’s passionate religious vision had made him one of the first Europeans to advocate the separation of church and state. Yet again, the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In his usual pugnacious way, Luther spoke of Aristotle with hatred, and loathed Erasmus, whom he regarded as the epitome of reason, which, he was convinced, could only lead to atheism. In pushing reason out of the religious sphere, Luther was one of the first Europeans to secularize it. 6 Because, for Luther, God was utterly mysterious and hidden, the world was empty of the divine. Luther’s Deus Absconditus could not be discovered either in human institutions or in physical reality. Medieval Christians had experienced the sacred in the Church, which Luther now declared to be Antichrist. Nor was it permissible to reach a knowledge of God by reflecting on the marvelous order of the universe, as the scholastic theologians (also objects of Luther’s simmering rage) had done. 7 In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics. Because mundane reality was utterly opposed to the spiritual, church and state must operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere of activity. 8 Luther’s passionate religious vision had made him one of the first Europeans to advocate the separation of church and state. Yet again, the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious. Luther’s separation of religion and politics sprang from his disgust with the coercive methods of the Roman Catholic Church, which had used the state to impose its own rules and orthodoxy. Calvin did not share Luther’s vision of a Godless world. Like Zwingli, he believed that Christians should express their faith by taking part in political and social life rather than by retreating to a monastery. Calvin helped to baptize the emergent capitalist work ethic by declaring labor to be a sacred calling, not, as the medievals thought, a divine punishment for sin. Nor did Calvin subscribe to Luther’s disenchantment of the natural world. He believed that it was possible to see God in his creation, and commended the study of astronomy, geography, and biology. Calvinists of the early modern period would often be good scientists. Calvin saw no contradiction between science and scripture. The Bible, he believed, was not imparting literal information about geography or cosmology, but was trying to express ineffable truth in terms that limited human beings could understand. Biblical language was balbative (“baby talk”), a deliberate simplification of a truth that was too complex to be articulated in any other way. 9 The great scientists of the early modern period shared Calvin’s confidence, and also saw their researches and discussions within a mythical, religious framework. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) believed that his science was “more divine than human.” 10 Yet his theory of a heliocentric universe was a devastating blow to the old mythical perception.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  72 Lay thinkers such as Shariati, Bazargan, and Bani Sadr had prepared the Western-educated elite for the possibility of modern Islamic rule. Even though their views were different from those of Khomeini, the middle-class liberals could see that he had grassroots support that they could never command, and were willing to join forces with him to get rid of the shah. Secularist rule had been a disaster in Iran, and they were ready to try something different. Once he had been deserted by the middle classes, it was all up for the shah, and he must have realized the danger. At 6:00 a.m. on Friday, September 8, martial law was declared and all large gatherings were banned. But the twenty thousand demonstrators who had already started to gather in Jaleh Square that morning for another peaceful rally did not know about this. When they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire and as many as nine hundred people may have died. After this massacre, the crowds raged through the streets, erecting barricades and burning buildings, while soldiers fired at them from their tanks. 73 At 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 10, President Carter called the shah from Camp David to assure him of his support, and a few hours later, the White House confirmed that this telephone conversation had taken place, reaffirmed the special relationship between the United States and Iran, and reported that though the President regretted the loss of life in Jaleh Square, he hoped that the political liberalization which the shah had just begun would continue. 74 But after the Jaleh Square massacre, not even the support of the Great Satan could save the shah. The oil workers now came out on strike, and by late October, production had dropped to 28 percent of its former level. The guerrilla groups, who had been quieter in recent years, began once again to attack military leaders and government ministers. On November 4, students pulled down the statue of the shah at the gates of Tehran University: on November 5, the bazaar closed, and students attacked the British embassy, the offices of various United States airlines, cinemas, and liquor stores. 75 This time, the army did not intervene. By this date, the Iraqi government, responding to pressure from Tehran, had expelled Khomeini from Najaf and he had taken up residence in Paris. Here he was visited by a delegation from the recently revived National Front, who issued a statement that both they and Khomeini were committed to restoring the 1906 constitution.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Americans had been mistrustful of centralized government since the Revolution, and had often used religion to voice their distaste for the secularist establishment. Fundamentalists were particularly outraged by the Supreme Court decisions banning obligatory worship in public schools on the grounds that this violated the “wall of separation” that Jefferson had decreed should divide religion and politics. Secularist judges had come to the conclusion that it was unconstitutional for the state to sponsor a program of prayer in its schools, even if this did not involve funds derived from taxes, and even if the worship was voluntary and nondenominational. Rulings to this effect were passed in 1948, 1952, and 1962. In 1963, the Supreme Court also banned Bible readings in public schools, quoting the religion clause of the First Amendment. During the 1970S, the Court passed a series of judgments declaring that any law would be struck down (1) if it intended to promote the cause of religion, (2) if its consequence, regardless of its intention, was the advancement of religion, and finally (3) if it entangled government in religious affairs. 100 The Court was responding to the increasing pluralism of American culture; it declared that it had nothing against religion, but insisted that it be confined to the private domain. These rulings were secularizing but could not be compared to the aggressive attempts of either Nasser or the shah to marginalize religious faith. Nevertheless, fundamentalists and evangelical Christians alike were outraged by what they regarded as a Godless crusade. They did not believe that religion could be legitimately cordoned off and limited in this way, because Christianity’s demands were total and should be sovereign. They were offended that the Court was willing to extend the principle of the “free exercise” of faith (demanded by the First Amendment) to religions that were not even Christian, and incensed by the judges’ principled determination to put all faiths on the same level. This seemed tantamount to saying that their religion was false. The ruling that religion be confined to private life seemed even more outrageous to fundamentalists, when it was combined with what seemed an excessive and unprecedented intrusion of the Court into the private sphere. When the Internal Revenue Service threatened to withdraw charitable tax- exempt status from certain fundamentalist colleges on the grounds that their rules contravened public policy, it seemed an act of war on the part of liberal society. Only fundamentalists, it appeared, were not allowed “free exercise” of the principles of their faith. In the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court endorsed IRS rulings against Goldsborough Christian Schools in North Carolina, which did not admit Afro-Americans, and Bob Jones University, which was not segregationist but which banned interracial dating on campus, claiming that it was forbidden by the Bible.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Islam, he declared, was a revolutionary ideology that was similar to Fascism and Marxism, but there was an important difference. 8 The Nazis and Marxists had enslaved other human beings, whereas Islam sought to free them from subjection to anything other than God. A true ideologist, Mawdudi saw all other systems as irredeemably flawed. 9 Democracy led to chaos, greed, and mob rule; capitalism fostered class warfare and subjected the whole world to a clique of bankers; communism stifled human initiative and individuality. These were the usual ideological oversimplifications. Mawdudi skirted over details and difficulties. How would Islamic shurah differ in practice from Western-style democracy? How would the Shariah, an agrarian law code, cope with the political and economic difficulties of the modern industrialized world? An Islamic state, Mawdudi argued, would be totalitarian, because it subjected everything to the rule of God; but how would that differ in practice from dictatorship, which, Mawdudi rightly insisted, was condemned by the Koran? Like any ideologist, Mawdudi was not developing an abstruse scholarly theory, but issuing a call to arms. He demanded a universal jihad, which he declared to be the central tenet of Islam. No major Muslim thinker had ever made this claim before. It was an innovation required, in Mawdudi’s eyes, by the current emergency. Jihad (“struggle”) was not a holy war to convert the infidel, as Westerners believed, nor was it purely a means of self-defense, as Abdu had argued. Mawdudi defined jihad as a revolutionary struggle to seize power for the good of all humanity. Here again, Mawdudi, who developed this idea in 1939, shared the same perspective as such militant ideologies as Marxism. Just as the Prophet had fought the jahiliyyah, the ignorance and barbarism of the pre-Islamic period, so all Muslims must use all means at their disposal to resist the modern jahiliyyah of the West. The jihad could take many forms. Some people would write articles, others make speeches, but in the last resort, they must be prepared for armed struggle. 10 Never before had jihad figured so centrally in official Islamic discourse. The militancy of Mawdudi’s vision was almost without precedent, but the situation had become more desperate since Abdu and Banna had tried to reform Islam and help it to absorb the modern Western ethos peacefully. Some Muslims were now prepared for war. One of the people most profoundly affected by Mawdudi’s work was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953, was imprisoned by Nasser in 1954 and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, and witnessed the brutality of the regime toward Islamists. 11 His experiences in Nasser’s camps scarred him and his ideas became far more radical than Mawdudi’s.