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 82 of 447 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done. 78 Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished. 79 The Society was not perfect. Because of its appeal to the masses, it tended to be anti-intellectual. Its pronouncements were often defensive and self-righteous. The Brothers’ image of the West, which stressed its greed, tyranny, and spiritual bankruptcy, had been distorted by the colonial experience. The object of Western imperialism had not simply been, as one of the Society’s spokesmen maintained, “to humiliate us, to occupy our lands and begin destroying Islam.” 80 The Society’s leaders were intolerant of dissension in the ranks. Banna insisted on absolute obedience and did not delegate responsibility sufficiently. As a result, after his death, nobody could take his place, and the Society was virtually destroyed from within by fruitless infighting. But by far its most serious and damaging failing was the emergence in 1943 of a terrorist unit known as “The Secret Apparatus” ( al jihaz al-sirri ). 81 It remained marginal to the Society as a whole. Because it was so clandestine, we have very little information about it, but in his definitive study of the Society, Richard P. Mitchell states his belief that by 1948, the unit only had about a thousand members, and that most of the Brothers had never heard of its existence until this date. 82 For the vast majority of members, social and spiritual reform was the raison d’être of the Society, and they abhorred the terrorism of the Apparatus. Nevertheless, once a movement has started killing in the name of God, it has embarked on a nihilistic course that denies the most fundamental religious values. The 1940s were very turbulent years in Egypt. It had become obvious that liberal democracy had failed, and most Egyptians were thoroughly pessimistic about the parliamentary system. Neither the British nor the Egyptian nationalists had understood that it was not possible to impose a modern system of government on a country that, as a result of superficial and too rapid modernization, was still basically feudal and agrarian. Between 1923 and 1950, all seventeen general elections were won by the nationalist Wafd party, but they were only allowed to rule five times.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By linking the devout teachers of the Moody Bible Institute with foes who were not only their political enemies but whom they regarded as satanic, the liberals had hit below the belt. The conservatives struck back, hard. The editor of the Moody Bible Institute Monthly and president of the Institute, James M. Gray, retorted that it was the pacifism of the liberals which had caused the United States to fall behind Germany in the arms race, so it was they who had jeopardized the war effort.17 In The King’s Business, a premillennial magazine, Thomas C. Horton argued that it was the liberals who were in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism which they taught in their Divinity School had caused the war and was responsible for the collapse of decent values in Germany.18 Other conservative articles blamed rationalism and evolutionary theory for the alleged German atrocities.19 Howard W. Kellogg of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles insisted that the philosophy of evolution was responsible for “a monster plotting world domination, the wreck of civilization, and the destruction of Christianity itself.”20 This acrimonious and, on both sides, unchristian dispute had clearly touched a raw nerve, and evoked a deep fear of annihilation. There was no longer any possibility of reconciliation on the subject of the Higher Criticism, which, for the conservatives, now had an aura of absolute evil. The literal truth of scripture was a matter of the life and death of Christianity itself. The critics’ attacks on the Bible would result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, the Baptist minister John Straton declared in a famous sermon entitled “Will New York City Be Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?”21 The conflict had got out of hand and it would become almost impossible to heal the rift.

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

  two branches of Christianity in fundamental disagreement with one another about their relationship with the parent Judaism: there would be a Jewish Church looking to the tradition represented by James and a Gentile Church treasuring the writings of Paul and John. In fact this is not so. There is one epistle in the New Testament which has been given James’s name, and which does represent a rather different view of the Christian life and the role of the Law from that of Paul, but otherwise all Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created. The other type of Christianity once headed by the brother of the Lord has disappeared. How did this happen? A great political crisis intervened to transform the situation. THE JEWISH REVOLT AND THE END OF JERUSALEM In 66 CE a Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine which drew its inspiration from the traditions of Jewish self-assertion and rage against outside interference which looked back to the heroic era of Judas Maccabeus (see pp. 65–6). The comforts provided by Roman rule were not enough to persuade everyone in the Jewish community that they should outweigh the constant reminder from the Roman authorities that Jews were not masters of their own destinies. The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans. The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle. The result of the revolt was in the long term probably inevitable: the Romans could not afford to lose their grip on this corner of the Mediterranean and they put a huge effort into crushing the rebels. In the course of the capture of Jerusalem, whether by accident or by design, the great Temple complex went up in flames, never to be restored; its site lay as a wasteland for centuries.79 Jewish fury accumulated at this highly unusual destruction of one of the Mediterranean world’s most renowned shrines and in 132–5 they rose again in revolt. Now the Romans erased the name of Jerusalem from the map and created a city, Aelia Capitolina. It took its name with deliberate offensiveness from a new temple of Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon as worshipped on the Capitoline Hill in Rome itself (the temple was built apparently on a site which encompassed the place of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial, although this was probably coincidental). So Aelia Capitolina was not even intended to be a Greek city; it was a Roman colony.80 After the revolt of 66–70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century. The Jewish-led Christ-followers

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

  K’art’li proved to be a major force in prompting hostility to Chalcedon among the Georgians. In his teenage years, the prince was sent to Constantinople as an official hostage for K’art’li’s alliance with the Roman Empire, and he was brought up at the imperial Court in the turbulent years which witnessed the abrupt twists and turns in theological supremacy around the Council of Ephesus in 431 (see pp. 225–6). He took the name Peter when he turned to the monastic life in Palestine, where, despite extensive travels around the Middle East, he spent most of his life. He briefly became a bishop in Maiuma in what is now the Gaza Strip, as well as founding the first Georgian monastery in the city of Jerusalem. A great admirer of Cyril of Alexandria, Peter was infuriated when Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, abandoned his support for Alexandrian theology (Juvenal literally crossed the floor from one party to another at the Council of Chalcedon); Peter’s reputation as an ascetic lent authority to his bitter denunciations of Chalcedon.19 His uncompromising Miaphysite views have been problematic for the later Georgian Church to square with its devotion to Peter the Iberian as one of the premier national saints – for the Georgians eventually agreed to recognize the Chalcedonian Definition, although it took until the beginning of the seventh century, long after Peter’s time.20 By contrast, the Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since. They saw its language as expressing unacceptable novelties, partly because, like the Georgians, their normal word for ‘nature’ was closely related to the Iranian root-word for ‘foundation’, ‘root’ or ‘origin’ – so any description of Christ as having two natures, even the qualified definition of Chalcedon, sounded like blasphemous nonsense to them. They took care to construct their own Armenian theological vocabulary on the basis of Greek writings from an impeccable succession of theologians from the Cappadocian Fathers to Cyril of Alexandria – all dating before the taint of Chalcedon.21 In fact, the Armenian Church was so concerned to build up an arsenal of Christian literature to guarantee its own view of orthodoxy that it undertook a sustained programme of translating classic Greek and Syriac theological manuscripts. This has proved an immense service to modern students of the ancient Church, because thanks to accidental destruction or deliberate censorship of the originals, often these Armenian translations are the only texts surviving.22 Armenian liturgy came to incorporate a distinctive feature which was a permanent reminder of the conflicts of the fifth and sixth centuries. Characteristic of Eastern Christian worship generally, used in every service, is the chanting of a plea for mercy, ‘Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us’ – the Trisagion (‘Thrice-Holy’).23 There is no

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

  element in her unpopularity, but her proposed marriage to Charlemagne (see pp. 349–50) seems to have been the last straw. From 813, the iconoclastic struggle resumed with even greater ferocity, after Emperor Leo V declared war on images and once more pulled down a key icon from the Great Palace.58 The fury of the iconophile party revealed that the Church’s reverence for the emperor remained conditional, even in Constantinople. Theodore the Stoudite (then abbot of the monastery of Stoudios, and a major reformer of monastic life) was emerging as the chief champion of icons, and he had no compunction in telling Leo ‘Your responsibility, Emperor, is with affairs of state and military matters. Give your mind to these and leave the Church to its pastors and teachers.’59 Theodore and a network of monks kept in touch with each other even after the Stoudite had been packed off into exile; they were confident of support from the Pope in the West, who remained determinedly cold to the Emperor’s conciliatory overtures. Meanwhile, iconoclasm proved no more capable of delivering military success than the armies of Empress Irene. A particularly bitter blow came in 838 with the fall to Muslim armies of the major frontier city of Amorion in Asia Minor. The loss was long remembered in Byzantine folklore and song, and one cannot help thinking that this was partly thanks to its association with the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos. It was Theophilos’s empress, Theodora, who finally reversed the iconoclastic policy, from motives which, like those of Irene, are now permanently obscured by grateful Orthodox hagiographers. Once Theophilos was dead, Theodora as regent ordered the Patriarch Methodios to restore the icons to the churches. The occasion of this restoration, the first Sunday in Lent, 11 March 843, is commemorated as one of the most significant feasts of the Eastern Church, the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. On that day icons are paraded around Orthodox churches with particular ceremony, and a document enshrining the ninth-century decision and composed about that time is solemnly read out. This Synodicon theatrically includes a list of the chief personalities who could be seen as the defenders of icons, each followed by the acclamation ‘eternal memory!’ The Empress, worried about the reputation of her son, made sure that the parallel list of those condemned in the Synodikon did not include his father, her husband, Theophilos, and that broad hint prevented any campaign of revenge attacks on iconoclasts, who continued to argue their case throughout the later ninth century, but never again enjoyed official patronage. The two iconophile empresses had effectively closed down the possibility of alternative forms of worship in the Orthodox tradition. They made veneration of icons a compulsory part of it, an essential badge of Orthodox identity (see Plate 33). They and their supporters not merely pronounced on a question of aesthetic

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

  was a characteristic substitution in iconoclast art. The Cross meant a great deal to iconoclasts: it was a symbol not merely of Christ’s death and resurrection, but of the conquest of the Churches in the East by Islam and the loss to Arab armies of Jerusalem together with Heraclius’s painfully recovered True Cross (see pp. 253–4).43 Crosses from this period still lurk in shadowy form under later figural mosaics in other churches besides Hagia Eirene. The iconoclast emperors of the eighth century enjoyed a run of luck in their military campaigns, which must for the time being have vindicated their policies. They do seem to have been riding a widespread mood in Eastern Christianity, as is indicated by church mosaics excavated in what had now become Umayyad- and Abbasid-ruled Palestine. Some of these mosaics have been carefully altered to replace figured by non-figured designs. The dates of the original mosaics help to date the alterations to the decades beyond the second quarter of the eighth century – so the changes are contemporary with the iconoclastic campaigns of Leo’s dynasty, but they are to be found beyond the Byzantine frontiers.44 Equally, we know of a rather earlier iconoclastic movement beyond the north- east frontier of the empire in Armenia.45 What is also clear is the high level of destruction; there are very few surviving icons in the Byzantine world dating before this period, the most notable collection being those preserved beyond the reach of the emperors at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai. However much popular support there was for iconophobia, the iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. The policy caused deep offence in Rome, driving popes into increasingly close alliance with the Frankish monarchy (see p. 350). In the emperors’ own dominions, it provoked much anger, bitterly dividing Byzantium during its continuing military emergencies. It is not surprising that monks were prominent in the iconophile opposition, because Constantine V was not merely a vigorously opinionated man, passionately fond of secular theatre and music, but he was also contemptuous of the monastic way of life. He took measures to restrict monasticism and executed a number of iconophile monks; one was whipped to death in Constantinople’s Hippodrome.46 His reward for this was his bad press in Byzantine historiography, despite his military achievements and the fact that he did much to rebuild Constantinople after a sequence of natural disasters. Far away in St Sabas’s monastery in Palestine, beyond the imperial frontiers, the greatly respected John of Damascus (see pp. 263–4), after a lifetime contemplating and criticizing Islam at close quarters, saw the developing conflict as a familiar struggle. If Muslims despised the veneration of the Cross, he asked in his dialogue with a straw-man Muslim opponent, how did they justify the veneration of a black stone in the Ka’aba?47 John proved one of the most

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Bible colleges and the fundamentalist universities created during these years were, like the Haredi yeshivot, separatist citadels. Fundamentalists felt that their faith was imperiled; they had been displaced from the center of American life, and were taught to regard themselves as “outside the gate.”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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was in this context of internal conflict that, on February 14, 1989, four months before his death, Khomeini issued his fatwa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie. In his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had created what many Muslims regarded as a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, which presented him as a lecher, a charlatan, and a tyrant, and—most dangerously—suggested that the Koran had been tainted by satanic influence. It was a novel that brilliantly expressed the giddy confusion of the postmodern world, where there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily defined identity. The passages that gave offense were the recorded dreams and fantasies of a deracinated Indian film star, who is suffering a breakdown and has interiorized the anti-Islamic prejudices of the West. The blasphemy was also an attempt to cancel the clinging relics of the past and to achieve an independent identity, free of old shibboleths. But many Muslims experienced this portrait of Muhammad as profoundly wounding. It seemed a violation of something sacred to their own Muslim personae. Dr. Zaki Badawi, one of Britain’s most liberal Muslims, told The Guardian newspaper that Rushdie’s words were “far worse to Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter.” So internalized was the Prophet by the practices of Islam in every Muslim’s being, that the novel was “like a knife being dug into you or being raped yourself.”34 There were riots in Pakistan, and the novel was ceremonially burned in Bradford, England, where there was a large community of Muslims of Indian and Pakistani origin, who objected to the British blasphemy laws that punished only insults to Christianity, and were aware of widespread prejudice in England against Islam. On February 13, Khomeini saw the Pakistani police open fire on the demonstrators and concluded that the novel must be evil. His fatwa commanded Muslims all over the world “to put to death Salman Rushdie and his publishers, wherever they are found.”

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

  occupied the Church for the next five centuries and the answers then hammered out have often been contested since. Rather than see the questions as a problem, Paul and the communities to whom he was writing would no doubt have said that all he was doing was trying to express a reality which they had found in their midst. Indeed, one of Paul’s motives for writing to the Church at Corinth was that they were celebrating their experience of the Spirit in ways which he found imprudent; he sent them an extended health warning on this theme (I Corinthians 14), particularly the practice of speaking ecstatically in unknown ‘languages’. The power of the Spirit was like a volcano under the community, showing itself in forms ranging from such spectacular displays to the everyday. The Spirit might perfect or express our prayers with sighs too deep for words, yet might also use us like ventriloquists’ dolls, making us echo Jesus’s cry to his Father, Abba!, and make it our own.70 In one of the earliest stories in the Book of Acts (2.1–13), it took over the reconstituted Twelve Apostles and made them speak the languages of all those who heard, on the Jewish feast which was known by Hellenized Jews as Pentecost. Eighteen centuries later, Christians would remember that first Pentecost of the Church and make something new of it (see pp. 912–13). Entering Paul’s theological world in his letters is rather like jumping on a moving merry-go-round: the point of entry hardly matters. It is an intensely painted set of portraits of how a Christian community works and what a Christian community signifies – but one has to remember that it is only one vision of Christian community. It has curiously little interest in the life and teaching of its founder, concentrating instead on the effect of his death and resurrection in God’s cosmic plan. The individual, living in Christ, is never his own person. Love, participation, indwelling bind all together: such relationships transcend the usual human bonds of marriage, family ties or social status, which are allowed to survive precisely because they are irrelevant to the categories of the new age to come. The Christian future was to present many alternative situations and possibilities. THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND REVELATION Paul was not alone in his development of a Christ message which strayed away from Jesus’s own emphases. Some very similar themes are to be found in the fourth Gospel, John, which is thought to have been written rather later than the Synoptic Gospels, some time around the turn of the first and second centuries CE. Perhaps it should be seen as a fruitful meditation on the tradition which the

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

  dissolutions of monasteries were taking place (see p. 628). At least one prominent monk among the Non-Possessors, Nil’s disciple Vassian Patrikeev, urged that bishops should be put in charge of all Church lands, including those of the monasteries, which would have made Church wealth more readily available assets for the grand prince. Unlike his hero Nil Sorskii, Vassian really did argue for tolerance for religious dissidents.53 Given that conjunction of ideas, it is not surprising that there were such bitter cries of heresy among the Possessors against both Judaizers and Non-Possessors; it was a convenient emphasis which may have helped to pull the grand princes into line behind their cause. The Possessors were naturally also careful to stress their reverence for the God-given power of the monarch. Much of what the sixteenth-century Muscovite Church leadership condemned was simply the energy of popular devotion, creatively extending or modifying the liturgy to suit local needs, or experiencing its own unregulated encounters with the divine. This undergrowth of religious life could never wholly be contained by official weeding. After the mid-sixteenth century, the Church hierarchy deliberately restricted the number of those newly officially canonized as saints, and the candidates whom they chose tended to be drawn safely from the upper ranks of society. Into the vacuum poured a myriad of local cults, some of which became much more than local; so in 1579 it was the daughter of an ordinary soldier who discovered the hiding place in the newly Muscovite city of Kazan of an icon which became one of Russia’s most revered images of the Mother of God.54 And still the Holy Fools postured and agreeably shocked society with their consecrated antics. A sixteenth-century example of the breed, Vasilii (Basil) the Blessed, has been so centrally honoured in Russian devotion that the image of Moscow now most familiar worldwide is that of the church in Red Square containing his shrine, the Cathedral of the Intercession, now commonly known as St Basil’s Cathedral. Appropriately it is an extraordinary culmination of Russian architectural posturing, and in it also lie the bones of a second and rather more obscure Holy Fool, Ioann ‘Big Cap’, whose speciality apart from his outsize head was apparently intimidating people with gnomic innuendoes.55 IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE NEW PATRIARCHATE (1547-98) That anarchic fools should be honoured in Red Square is remarkable, because the Church of the Intercession was commissioned by the man who came to symbolize the dismal extremity of what Muscovite autocracy might mean: Ivan

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The campaigns continued; feeling escalated to such a point that any attempt at mediation only made matters worse. When the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), a peaceable man and one of the most influential American clergymen of the time, pleaded for tolerance in a sermon delivered at the Baptist Convention of 1922 (later published in The Baptist as “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”), the rancor of the response showed the visceral disgust that these liberal ideas inspired.27 It spread to other denominations. After the sermon, there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist camp: the more conservative Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and the Salvation Army rallied to the fundamentalist cause. Even Methodists and Episcopalians, who had remained aloof from the controversy, were challenged by the conservatives in their ranks to define and make obligatory “the vital and eternal truths of the Christian religion.”28 By 1923, it looked as though the fundamentalists would indeed win and that they would rid the denominations of the liberal danger. But then a new campaign caught the attention of the nation and eventually brought the whole fundamentalist movement into disrepute. In 1920, the Democratic politician and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) had launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges. In his view, it was not the Higher Criticism but Darwinism that had been responsible for the atrocities of the First World War.29 Bryan had been impressed by two books which claimed to establish a direct link between evolutionary theory and German militarism: Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power (1918) and Vernon L. Kellogg’s Headquarter Nights (1917), which included interviews with German officers who described the influence that Darwinism had allegedly played in persuading the Germans to declare war. Not only had the notion that only the strong could or should survive “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history,” Byran concluded, but “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible.”30 At the same time, in his book Belief in God and Immortality, Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba produced statistics that “proved” that a college education endangered religious belief. Darwinism was causing young men and women to lose faith in God, the Bible, and other fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Bryan was not a typical fundamentalist; he was not a premillennialist nor did he read scripture with the new stringent literalism. But his “research” had convinced him that evolutionary theory was incompatible with morality, decency, and the survival of civilization. When he toured the United States with his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism,” he drew big audiences and received extensive media coverage.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But because the understanding of such disciplined ways of arriving at a more intuitive knowledge had been neglected in the West since the advent of modernity, the sixties quest for spirituality was often wild, self-indulgent, and unbalanced. There were flaws too in the visions and policies of the religious radicals, who were beginning to organize their own offensive against the secularization and rationalism of modern society. The fundamentalists were beginning to mobilize. They had often experienced modernity as an aggressive onslaught. The modern spirit had demanded freedom from the outmoded thought patterns of the past; the modern ideal of progress had entailed the elimination of those beliefs, practices, and institutions that were deemed to be irrational and, therefore, retarding. Religious establishments and doctrines had often been key targets. Sometimes, as in the case of the liberals at the time of the Scopes trial, the weapon had been ridicule. In the Middle East, where modernization was more problematic, the methods had been more brutal, involving massacre, despoliation, and the concentration camp. By the 1960s and 1970s, many religious people were angry and were determined to fight the liberals and secularists who had, they believed, oppressed and marginalized them. But these religious radicals were men of their time. They would have to fight with modern weapons and devise a modern ideology. Ever since the American and French revolutions, Western politics had been ideological; people had engaged in mighty battles for the Enlightenment ideals of the Age of Reason: liberty, equality, fraternity, human happiness, and social justice. The Western liberal consensus believed that with education, society and politics would become more rational and united. The secular ideology, a way of mobilizing people for the battle, was a modern belief system which justified the political and social struggle and gave it a rationale.1 In order to appeal to as many people as possible, an ideology was expressed in simple images that could often be reduced to such slogans as “Power to the People!” or “Traitors within!” These highly simplified truths were thought to explain everything. Ideologists believe that the world is in a parlous state, find reasons for the current crisis, and promise to find a way out. They direct the attention of the people to a group that is to blame for the world’s ruin, and to another group that will put things right. Since in the modern world, politics can no longer be an entirely elitist pursuit, the ideology must be simple enough to be grasped by the meanest intelligence, in order to gain the support of the people as a whole.

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

  known, complete with the story of Francis preaching to the birds. Evidently when Franciscan friars fled the city, never to return, the chapel with its homage to a very newly minted Western saint was comprehensively consigned to oblivion.23 One can understand the depth of the feelings which went into that act if we consider the arrogance with which the Greek Church had been treated in some of the new Latin enclaves. In the Latin Kingdom of Cyprus, the suppression of Greek Church organization and general harassment of Greeks who used their traditional liturgy reached a nadir in 1231, when thirteen Greek monks were burned at the stake as heretics for upholding their traditional rejection of the Western use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and thus casting doubt on the validity of Latin Eucharists. The fact that this outrage took place during the breakdown of royal Cypriot authority in a civil war among the Latins hardly excuses it, and one can understand why a synod of the Oecumenical Patriarch defiantly denied validity to the Latin Eucharist two years later.24 And it was during the thirteenth century that yet another issue was added to the sense of theological alienation between Greeks and Latins: the Western Church’s elaboration of the doctrine of Purgatory (see pp. 369–70). When friars began expounding this doctrine in various theological disputations in the East, the Greeks with whom they were arguing correctly recognized the origins of the doctrine in the theology of Origen, and that was enough to make Latin talk of Purgatory seem a dangerous reversion to his heretical universalism.25 Even though Constantinople was restored to Byzantine control in 1261, the empire’s political unity, that fundamental fact of Byzantine society from Constantine the Great onwards, never again became a reality. Trebizond and Epiros continued in independence; many of the Latin lords clung on in their new enclaves in Greece, and the Venetians were only finally dislodged from the last of their eastern Mediterranean acquisitions, Crete, in 1669. An emperor was back in his palace in Constantinople, but few could forget that for all Michael Palaeologos’s evident talent as military leader, ruler and diplomat, he had supplanted, blinded and imprisoned his young ward, John IV, in order to become emperor. After alienating many influential leaders in the Church and society by this act of cruelty, Michael VIII further infuriated a large number of his subjects by his steadfast pursuit of unity with the Western Latin Church, which he regarded not merely as a political necessity to consolidate imperial power, but as a divinely imposed duty. The hatred which his policy aroused pained and baffled him; the union of the Churches which his representatives carefully negotiated with the Pope and Western bishops at the Council of Lyons in 1274 was repudiated soon after his death.26

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For Shariati, Islam must be expressed in action. The timeless realities that the Shiis learned to see at the core of existence must be activated in the present. The example of Imam Husain at Kerbala should, Shariati believed, be an inspiration to all the oppressed and alienated people in the world. Shariati was disgusted by the quietist ulema, who had locked themselves away in their madrasahs and had, in his view, distorted Islam by making it a purely private creed. The period of the Occultation should not be a period of passivity. If the Shiah followed Husain’s example and led all the people of the Third World in a campaign against tyranny, they would compel the Hidden Imam to appear.60 But the ulema had ruined the religious experience for young Iranians, bored them to distraction, and driven them into the arms of the West. They saw Islam in purely literal terms, as a set of clear directives to be followed to the letter, whereas the genius of Shiism was its symbolism. This taught Muslims to see all earthly reality as “signs” of the Unseen.61 The Shiah needed a Reformation. The original Shiism of Ali and Husain had been obliterated in Iran by what Shariati called “Safavid Shiism.” An active, dynamic faith had been converted into a privatized, passive affair, whereas the disappearance of the Hidden Imam meant that the mission of the Prophet and the Imams had in fact passed to the people. The period of the Occultation was thus the age of democracy. The ordinary people should no longer be in thrall to the mujtahids and forced to imitate (taqlid) their religious behavior, as Safavid Shiism required. Each Muslim must submit to God alone and take responsibility for his own life. Anything else was idolatrous and a perversion of Islam, turning it into a lifeless observance of set rules. The people must elect their own leaders; they must be consulted, as the principle of shurah demanded. By their consensus (ijmah), they would give legitimacy to the decisions of their leaders. There should be an end of clerical control. Instead of the ulema, the “enlightened intellectuals” (raushanfekran) should be the new leaders of the ummah.62

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1981, the Majlis proposed some important land reforms, which would ensure a fairer distribution of resources. Khomeini sympathized with this move, which would be beneficial to the people, even though it contradicted the letter of the Shariah. He could also see that unless Iran was able to achieve this type of basic reform, it would remain feudal and agrarian, and any modernization would be superficial. But the Land Reform Bill ran into difficulties. According to the constitution, all legislation had to be passed by the Council of Guardians, who had the right to reject laws which they deemed un-Islamic. Many of the ulema on the Council had large landholdings, and when they were presented with the bill, they exercised their right of veto, citing the Shariah laws to support their decision. Khomeini tried to reason with them. The clergy, he said, “should in no way interfere in matters for which they are not qualified.” This “would be an unforgivable sin, because it will lead to the nation’s mistrust of the clergy.”23 The clergy understood religion and fiqh, but not modern economics; the Islamic republic must be a modern state, which required specialists to work within the field of their expertise. But the deadlock continued. The Council of Guardians refused to budge on the issue, so Khomeini tried a more spiritual approach. In March 1981, he told a group of clerics: “One should not expect, without having been reformed himself, to attempt to reform another.” The clergy could not bring the people back to Islam if they were themselves crippled by selfishness and locked in futile power struggles. Every single one of the ulema must overcome this egotism that was impeding the Islamic development of the country. The solution was to “reach a stage where you … overlook yourself.” “When there is no self to contend with,” Khomeini concluded, “there is no dispute, no quarrel.”24 This sprang directly from Khomeini’s practice of mystical irfan; as the seeker approaches God, he gradually divests himself of his selfish desires until he is able to behold the transforming vision of God. But the dynamic of modern politics is very different from spiritual contemplation. The ulema of the Council of Guardians remained deaf to Khomeini’s plea. Politics usually attracts men and women with a heightened sense of self. Modern governmental institutions work by means of a balance of competing interests, not by this kind of self-effacement. When he had evolved his theory of Velayat-e Faqih, Khomeini had believed that the ulema on the Council of Guardians would assert the mystical, hidden (batin) values of the Unseen; instead, they seemed mired, like most ordinary mortals, in the materialism of the zahir.

• 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 1970 S , 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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  was infuriated by the terms which the Catholics laid down, since they gave no role to the Oecumenical Patriarch. In an open letter written even before the final deal was signed, he condemned ‘the chief leaders of our faith, tempted by the glories of this world and blinded by their desire for pleasures’ and menacingly added, ‘When the salt has lost its savo[u]r it should be cast out and trampled underfoot.’65 Passions ran very high: in 1623 the combative-spirited Greek Catholic Archbishop of Polock, Josaphat Kuncewicz, was murdered because, among other affronts, he had refused to allow Orthodox faithful who rejected the union to bury their dead in the parish graveyards which the Greek Catholics had taken over. Twenty years later the Pope declared him a martyr and beatified him; he is now a saint.66 Meanwhile, as the Church of the Union fissured, in 1632 the Polish monarchy had given in to reality. A new king, Władyslaw IV, needed both to secure his own recognition from his elector-nobles and to consolidate the loyalty of his subjects in the face of a Muscovite invasion. To the fury of Rome but to the relief of moderates on both sides, he recognized the independent Orthodox hierarchy once more in ‘Articles of Pacification’. From now on there were two hierarchies of Ruthenian Orthodox bishops side by side, one still Greek Catholic and loyal to Rome, the other answering to a metropolitan in Kiev in communion with Constantinople.67 The Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev newly elected after this agreement in 1633 was a happy choice: Peter Mohyla. He came from one of the leading princely families in Moldavia, beyond the Commonwealth’s borders to the south. With a Hungarian mother and experience of university study in France at the Sorbonne, he had the wide vision which the Orthodox Church of Kiev needed at this time. Like Prince Konstantyn Ostroz’kyi before him, he cherished the hope that there could be a true union of Churches which would go beyond what he saw as Roman aggression: the Union of Brest, he remarked tartly, ‘was not intended to save the Greek religion but to transform it into the Roman faith. Therefore it did not succeed.’68 Mohyla’s vision was of a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which would become the supporter of a newly invigorated Orthodoxy: he was decidedly cool towards Muscovy and the claims of the patriarch in Moscow. He knew a great deal about Western Catholicism, and although he was especially familiar with the contemporary methods and writings of the Society of Jesus, he also produced a translation into contemporary literary Ukrainian of that Western devotional classic of the fifteenth century, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, adapting it to his own Orthodox concerns, and diplomatically concealing the name of the original author to avoid the wrath of his Orthodox fellow clergy.69 One of Mohyla’s most important and lasting achievements was the foundation

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  evaluation, the punitive award to the bank remained anchored on the loss it had sustained, but the award to the burned child increased, reflecting the outrage evoked by negligence that causes injury to a child. As we have seen, rationality is generally served by broader and more comprehensive frames, and joint evaluation is obviously broader than single evaluation. Of course, you should be wary of joint evaluation when someone who controls what you see has a vested interest in what you choose. Salespeople quickly learn that manipulation of the context in which customers see a good can profoundly influence preferences. Except for such cases of deliberate manipulation, there is a presumption that the comparative judgment, which necessarily involves System 2, is more likely to be stable than single evaluations, which often reflect the intensity of emotional responses of System 1. We would expect that any institution that wishes to elicit thoughtful judgments would seek to provide the judges with a broad context for the assessments of individual cases. I was surprised to learn from Cass Sunstein that jurors who are to assess punitive damages are explicitly prohibited from considering other cases. The legal system, contrary to psychological common sense, favors single evaluation. In another study of incoherence in the legal system, Sunstein compared the administrative punishments that can be imposed by different U.S. government agencies including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. He concluded that “within categories, penalties seem extremely sensible, at least in the sense that the more serious harms are punished more severely. For occupational safety and health violations, the largest penalties are for repeated violations, the next largest for violations that are both willful and serious, and the least serious for failures to engage in the requisite record-keeping.” It should not surprise you, however, that the size of penalties varied greatly across agencies, in a manner that reflected politics and history more than any global concern for fairness. The fine for a “serious violation” of the regulations concerning worker safety is capped at $7,000, while a violation of the Wild Bird Conservation Act can result in a fine of up to $25,000. The fines are sensible in the context of other penalties set by each agency, but they appear odd when compared to each other. As in the other examples in this chapter, you can see the absurdity only when the two cases are viewed together in a broad frame. The system of administrative penalties is coherent within agencies but incoherent globally. Speaking of Reversals “The BTU units meant nothing to me until I saw how much air- conditioning units vary. Joint evaluation was essential.” “You say this was an outstanding speech because you compared it to her other speeches. Compared to others, she was still inferior.” “It is often the case that when you broaden the frame, you reach more reasonable decisions.” “When you see cases in isolation, you are likely to be guided by an emotional reaction of System 1.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Dr. Zaki Badawi, one of Britain’s most liberal Muslims, told The Guardian newspaper that Rushdie’s words were “far worse to Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter.” So internalized was the Prophet by the practices of Islam in every Muslim’s being, that the novel was “like a knife being dug into you or being raped yourself.” 34 There were riots in Pakistan, and the novel was ceremonially burned in Bradford, England, where there was a large community of Muslims of Indian and Pakistani origin, who objected to the British blasphemy laws that punished only insults to Christianity, and were aware of widespread prejudice in England against Islam. On February 13, Khomeini saw the Pakistani police open fire on the demonstrators and concluded that the novel must be evil. His fatwa commanded Muslims all over the world “to put to death Salman Rushdie and his publishers, wherever they are found.” At the Islamic Conference the following month, the fatwa was condemned by forty-four out of the forty-five member countries as un-Islamic. It is not permissible in Islamic law to sentence an offender without trial, nor to apply Muslim law in a non-Muslim country. The fatwa was yet another distortion of Islam. Mulla Sadra, one of Khomeini’s chief spiritual mentors, had been adamantly opposed to any such inquisitorial violence and coercion. He had insisted upon freedom of thought. Muslim outrage sprang, yet again, from a conviction that Islam had received a deadly blow; the years of suppression, denigration, and secularist attack had scarred Muslim sensibilities. The fatwa was an act of war, and was experienced as such by secularists and liberals in the West, who felt that their most sacred values had been violated. For them, humanity—not a supernatural God—was the measure of all things; men and women must have the freedom to fulfill their potential in their pursuit of artistic excellence. Muslims, for whom the sovereignty of God is the supreme value, could not accept this. The Rushdie affair was a clash of two irreconcilable orthodoxies; neither side could understand the viewpoint of the other. Different groups, living in the same country, were diametrically opposed to one another and in a state of potential war. This polarization between religious and secularists became clear when Khomeini died in June 1989. In the West, Khomeini was regarded as the enemy, and people were bewildered to see the unfeigned grief of the Iranians at his funeral. The mob surged around his coffin with such passion that the corpse fell out; it was as though they wanted to keep the Imam with them forever. However, the Islamic Republic did not fall apart after his death. Indeed, it showed signs of greater flexibility. Even though the fatwa had, like the Hostage Crisis, incurred the enmity of the West, Iran seemed to be moving closer to the Western spirit. The new constitution, which was passed on July 9, 1989, showed a marked move toward a more secular, pragmatic style of government.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The southern states were much more conservative than the North at this point, and there were too few liberals in the southern denominations to warrant a fundamentalist campaign. But southerners were worried about the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was an example of the “colonization” of their society by an alien ideology, and bills were introduced in the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas to ban the teaching of Darwinian theory. The anti-evolution laws in Tennessee were particularly severe, and to put them to the test and strike a symbolic blow for freedom of speech and the First Amendment, John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, confessed that he had broken the law when he had once substituted for his school principal in a biology class. In July 1925, he was brought to trial, and the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist lawyer and campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). At the request of Riley and other fundamentalist leaders, William Jennings Bryan agreed to support the law. Once Darrow and Bryan became involved, the trial ceased to be simply about civil liberties, and became a contest between God and science. The Scopes Trial was a clash between two utterly incompatible points of view. 31 Both Darrow and Bryan were defending crucial American values; Darrow was for free speech, and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary people, who had long been leery of the influence of learned experts and specialists. Bryan’s political campaigns had all championed the common man. A review of In His Image (1922), Bryan’s answer to Darwin, claimed that he was “the spokesman for a numerically large segment of the people who are for the most part inarticulate. In fact, he is almost the only exponent of their ideas who has the public ear. They are part of the body politic and by no means negligible or to be regarded solely with derision as ‘lunatic fringe.’ ” 32 This was undoubtedly true, but unfortunately Bryan was not able to articulate these inchoate and ill-informed anxieties adequately at the trial. Where Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that science must have to express itself and advance, Bryan, the Presbyterian and Baconian, insisted that, in the absence of definite proof, people had a right to reject an “unsupported hypothesis” such as Darwinism because of its immoral effects. Where Scopes himself treated the whole trial as a farce, Darrow and Bryan were in deadly earnest, and fighting for values that each considered sacred and inviolable. 33 But when Darrow put Bryan on the stand, his merciless cross-examination exposed the muddle-headed and simplistic nature of Bryan’s views.