Bewilderment

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)

  Toward the end of the Gaon’s life, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (1745–1813), a Hasidic leader in Ukraine and Belorussia, sought to effect a reconciliation, but the Gaon refused to speak with him. Indeed, the publication of Zalman’s book the Tanya (1791) inspired a new edict of excommunication. This was a pity. Zalman was evolving a new type of Hasidism known as Habad,12 which was much closer to the spirituality of the Misnagdim, since it made rational thought the starting point of the spiritual quest. Zalman was also open to some of the Enlightenment ideals, which he tried to accommodate within a mystical framework. He believed that our rational powers alone were incapable of finding God; if we relied only upon our senses—as the scientists and philosophers bade us do—the world did indeed seem empty of the divine. But the mystic could use his intuitive powers to break through to a different mode of perception, which revealed the immanent Presence in all phenomena. Zalman was not opposed to reason, but was simply making the old conservative point that rational thinking was not the sole mode of perception; reason and mystical intuition should work hand-in-hand. When Jews engaged in rational speculation and in the study of modern secular subjects, Zalman argued, they became aware of the limitations of their minds and would seek to transcend them by means of ecstatic prayer.13 Zalman encouraged his Habad Hasidim to propel themselves into a sense of transcendence by the violent gestures that the Besht had introduced. Zalman himself used to roll upon the ground until he entered a tranced state, and would dance wildly like the common people.14 But this ecstasy was rooted in study and disciplined concentration. Habad Hasidim were taught to manage their unconscious selves by descending ever deeper into their minds until they encountered, like mystics in all the great traditions, a sacred presence in the ground of their being. The conflict between Hasidim and Misnagdim intensified. Zalman was actually imprisoned in St. Petersburg for some years, when the Misnagdim denounced him to the Russian authorities as a troublemaker. But during the early years of the nineteenth century, the hostility began to abate. Both sides realized that they had more to fear from other quarters than from each other, and should, therefore, join forces to oppose these new threats. The most worrying development was the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which had just begun to penetrate Eastern European Jewry and which seemed heretical to Hasidim and Misnagdim alike.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  President Khameini had interpreted his remarks to mean that the Supreme Faqih had the right to interpret the law. Khomeini replied that this was not what he had meant. Government, he repeated, making no mention of his own rule as Faqih, did not merely have the power to interpret divine law, but was the vehicle of that law itself. Government was a crucial part of that divine rule which God had delegated to the Prophet, and had “priority over all peripheral divine orders.” It even took precedence over such “pillars” of Islam as prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the Hajj: The government is empowered to unilaterally revoke any lawful agreement ... if the agreement contravenes the interests of Islam and the country. It can prevent any matter, whether religious or secular, if it is against the interests of Islam. 30 For centuries, Shiis had insisted on a separation of spheres: the absolute mythos of religion and spirituality gave meaning to but was quite distinct from the pragmatic logos of politics. Now Khomeini seemed to be insisting that government must not be impeded in its utilitarian pursuit of the interests of the people and the greater good of Islam. Some assumed that Khomeini was referring to his own government and thought that he was promoting his doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih to a status that was superior to the “pillars” of Islam. Western observers accused Khomeini of megalomania. But Speaker Rafsanjani noted that Khomeini had not mentioned the Faqih. To the consternation of Khomeini’s most radical supporters, he suggested that by “government” Khomeini had meant the Majlis. In an extraordinary sermon on January 12, 1988, Rafsanjani gave a new interpretation of Velayat-e Faqih. God had not revealed all the laws that were needed by the ummah to the Prophet in the Koran. He had delegated his authority to Muhammad, who had become his “vice-gerent” and allowed him to use his own initiative on these secondary matters. Now Imam Khomeini, the Supreme Faqih, had delegated his authority to the Majlis, which must also make up new laws, on its own initiative. Did this mean that Iran was embracing Western-style democracy? By no means. This right to legislate did not come from the people but from God, who had passed his authority to the Prophet, to the Imams, and now to Imam Khomeini, and it was they—not the people—who gave legitimacy to the rulings of the Majlis. “So you see,” Rafsanjani argued, “democracy is present in a form better than the West,” because it was rooted in God. It was a “healthy style of government of the people, by the people, with the permission of Velayat-e Faqih.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They set up a minibus service for women students, to spare them the harassment they frequently suffered on public transport. They insisted on the segregation of the sexes in separate rows in the lecture halls for the same reason, and also advocated the wearing of Islamic dress for both men and women. The long, concealing robes were more practical in a traditional society, which did not look kindly upon Western-style dating, and where (since marriage, for economic reasons, was not an option) sexual frustration was a major problem for Egyptian youth. The jamaat also organized revision sessions in the mosques, where students could study quietly in a way that was impossible in the noisy, overcrowded halls of residence. These policies were effective. A student might wear traditional dress or join a segregated row in a lecture hall simply to avoid embarrassment, in the first instance, but at the same time she would become aware that the regime was less concerned for her well-being than the cadre of jamaat . By leaving his turbulent dormitory to study in a mosque, a student had made a small, symbolic hijrah , and learned that an Islamic setting worked far better for him. 40 Many of the students had come from rural backgrounds and a traditional, premodern society. Not only did they experience modernity in the university as alien, impersonal, and bewildering, but they were given no other intellectual tools to enable them to criticize the regime in the course of their mediocre education. Many would find that in this world, only Islam made sense. Western observers were particularly dismayed by the spectacle of women returning to the veil, which they had seen as a symbol of Islamic backwardness and patriarchy since the days of Lord Cromer. But it was not experienced in this way by those Muslim women who voluntarily assumed Islamic dress for practical reasons and also as a way of casting off an alien Western identity. Donning a veil, a scarf, and a long dress could be a symbol of that “return to the self” which Islamists were attempting with such difficulty in the postcolonial period. There is, after all, nothing sacred about Western dress per se . The desire to see all women wearing it has been construed by Islamists as a sign of that tendency to regard “the West” as the norm to which “the rest” are obliged to conform. The veiled woman has, over the years, become a symbol of Islamic self-assertion and a rejection of Western cultural hegemony.

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

  island as an icon painter, but he exploited the fact that Crete was still a colonial possession of the Republic of Venice to travel west and establish a career first in Venice, then in Rome and finally in Spain – though there is little evidence that he ever paid more than lip service to Western Catholicism. As he travelled, his style became more and more individual, leaving behind the tranquillity of the icon for stormily dramatic effects, his pictures full of glancing, restless light and brooding shadow, the figures often ghostly and elongated. This suited the dramatic tastes of some Western patrons, but throughout his long life of artistic productivity, the painter continued to inspire as much bewilderment as admiration – indeed, he still does. The only way that the Italians and Spaniards could find Theotokopoulos a meaningful place in their culture was to emphasize his otherness: they simply called him ‘the Greek’. El Greco’s wanderings far from his birthplace are a symptom of the way in which Orthodox culture could not now harbour any radical innovation in artistic style: the West found him difficult enough. The Ottomans’ treatment of Christian Constantinople followed patterns familiar since the earliest Arab conquests. A remorselessly increasing total of the main churches became mosques. Hagia Sophia was naturally among them, its domed skyline transformed by an unprecedented array of four minarets, and a century and a half after the conquest its magnificence inspired the then Sultan to build an equally gargantuan Islamic rival nearby, the Blue Mosque, deliberately built on the site of the old imperial palace and boasting even more minarets. Stretching away from this promontory of the city, a score of new mosques built over the following centuries paid their own architectural tribute to Eastern Christianity’s lost and greatest church with their domes and semi-domes. The famous Stoudite monastery, with its venerable liturgical and musical tradition, was closed as soon as the city fell and nothing but the church building remained, turned like Hagia Sophia into a mosque; so now both the models for liturgical practice throughout the Orthodox world had vanished.54 Throughout former Byzantine territories, as in Constantinople itself, the churches left in the hands of the Christians had to be lower in external profile than any nearby mosques, and church bells or clappers to summon congregations to worship were banned. This was part of an inexorable transformation of the landscape. The towers and extrovert façades of Christian churches were gradually dismantled, while the public presence of icons in wall niches and shrines – the architectural small change of a Christian world – faded away from the roadsides. As the traveller approached communities from villages to cities, minarets now dominated the horizon of roofs, just as the sound of worship was now the muezzin’s call rather than the Christian clanging summons to prayer.55

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When they returned to university life, students tried to reproduce some of this experience on campus. They set up a minibus service for women students, to spare them the harassment they frequently suffered on public transport. They insisted on the segregation of the sexes in separate rows in the lecture halls for the same reason, and also advocated the wearing of Islamic dress for both men and women. The long, concealing robes were more practical in a traditional society, which did not look kindly upon Western-style dating, and where (since marriage, for economic reasons, was not an option) sexual frustration was a major problem for Egyptian youth. The jamaat also organized revision sessions in the mosques, where students could study quietly in a way that was impossible in the noisy, overcrowded halls of residence. These policies were effective. A student might wear traditional dress or join a segregated row in a lecture hall simply to avoid embarrassment, in the first instance, but at the same time she would become aware that the regime was less concerned for her well-being than the cadre of jamaat. By leaving his turbulent dormitory to study in a mosque, a student had made a small, symbolic hijrah, and learned that an Islamic setting worked far better for him.40 Many of the students had come from rural backgrounds and a traditional, premodern society. Not only did they experience modernity in the university as alien, impersonal, and bewildering, but they were given no other intellectual tools to enable them to criticize the regime in the course of their mediocre education. Many would find that in this world, only Islam made sense.

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

  persecution petered out rather inconclusively, as the Roman authorities felt that they had better things to do than to try and wipe out a group of troublesome fanatics. One little instance of this untidiness is preserved among the papers of a highly cultivated and conscientious Roman provincial administrator, the younger Pliny, writing to his equally urbane and thoughtful emperor, Trajan. Pliny, newly appointed about 112 to sort out the chaotic affairs of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor, found among a host of other problems a strong and aggressive body of Christians, which was emptying the temples and ruining local trade by following Paul’s old recommendation and boycotting sales of meat previously offered in sacrifice. Pliny rounded up Christians who had been anonymously denounced to him and he interrogated under torture some who appeared important, but he was puzzled as to what to do next with people who seemed to him deluded but comparatively harmless. He asked for advice from Trajan, whose reply was soothing but hardly much help, since his most definite advice was to ignore anonymous denunciations about anyone, ‘a very bad example and unworthy of our time’.19 There must have been many encounters like this in the first and second centuries, and there was no central organization in what persecution there was. It came about as the result of some personal initiative, like the pogrom unleashed in Rome in the 60s CE by the increasingly unbalanced Emperor Nero (Christians were not the only victims of his megalomaniac caprice), or the angry response of some local provincial governor to a particular outbreak of trouble. At the end of the second century, this random response began to change because of the sheer visibility of Christianity around the empire. By then, it had established itself throughout the Mediterranean world and into the Middle East. It is impossible to estimate the numbers of converts involved; Pliny’s experience in Bithynia would suggest that in Asia Minor at least, right at the beginning of the second century, Christians could form an economically significant part of the population. That likelihood of a precocious Christian presence there is reinforced by the prominent part played by Asia Minor in the theological ferment already discussed (see Ch. 4) and by archaeological finds which show that during the third century Christians in Asia Minor were putting up blatantly Christian tombstones, presumably in public places – generations before the appearance of similar openly Christian material in provincial settings elsewhere.20 Beyond Asia Minor, Christian communities were probably quite small, particularly in the West outside Rome, and even there their numbers were dwarfed by the immense scale of the city. What was impressive, and increasingly noticed by non-Christians, was not so much the numbers of any one community but the geographical spread of the Church throughout the empire and

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For centuries, there had been a partnership between the ulema and the ruling elite in Egypt. Muhammad Ali had severed that relationship and abruptly inaugurated a new secularism. It had no ideological backing but had been imposed as a political fait accompli. In the West, people had had time to adapt to the gradual separation of church and state, and had even created a spirituality of the mundane. For most Egyptians, however, secularization remained alien, foreign, and incomprehensible. There had been similar modernizing reforms in the Ottoman empire, but in Istanbul there was a greater awareness of the ideas that lay behind the great Western transformation. Ottomans became diplomats in Europe and mixed with European statesmen in the sultan’s court. During the 1820s and 1830s, a generation had grown up conversant with the modern world and committed to the reform of the empire. The father of Ahmed Vefik Pasha, who later became the Grand Vizier, had worked in the Turkish embassy in Paris; Ahmed himself read Gibbon, Hume, Adam Smith, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Mustafa Resid Pasha had also been trained in Paris and studied politics and literature there. He became convinced that the Ottoman empire could not survive in the modern world unless it became a centralized state, with a modern army and a new legal and administrative system, which recognized the equality of all citizens. Christians and Jews must no longer be dhimmis (“protected minorities”), but must enjoy the same status as Muslim citizens. The prevalence of these European ideas made it easier for Sultan Mahmud II to inaugurate the Tanzimat (“regulations”) in 1826. These abolished the Janissaries, began the modernization of the army, and introduced technical innovations. At first, the sultan thought that this would be enough to halt the accelerating decline of the empire, but the relentless advance of the European powers and their economic and political penetration of Islamic territories gradually made it clear that more fundamental changes were essential. 46 In 1839, Sultan Abdulhamid, at the instigation of Resid Pasha, issued the Gülhane decree, which ostensibly left Islamic law intact, but made the absolute monarchy of the sultan dependent upon a contractual relationship with his subjects. It looked forward to a fundamental change in the empire’s institutions, which must be run more systematically and efficiently. Over the next three decades, central and local government was reorganized, and criminal and commercial codes and courts were established. In 1856, the Hatti Humayun decree granted full citizenship to religious minorities. But this inevitably led to conflict with the ulema , who saw these innovations as undermining the Shariah.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Napoleon’s invasion was the beginning of the Western control of the Middle East, which has indeed been a reversal, causing the people to revise many of their most fundamental beliefs and expectations. Napoleon gave the ulema more power than they had ever had before. He wanted to make them his allies against the Turks and Mamluks, and so gave them the highest positions in government, but the ulema could not respond in the way he wished. The Egyptians had been dominated by Mamluks and Turks for so long that direct rule was an entirely alien notion. Some refused to take the posts that he offered them, preferring the consultative role they were used to. They knew nothing about defense or the imposition of law and order, and they preferred to stick to what they knew best: the administration of religious, legal, and Islamic affairs. Most of the ulema did cooperate, however; feeling they had little choice, they stepped into the vacuum and helped to restore order, acting as mediators between the government and the people, as they had always done. 34 A few led abortive revolts against the French in October 1798 and March 1800, but these were quickly put down . They remained bewildered by the French. They could not understand Napoleon’s Enlightenment ideology of freedom and autonomy. A world of difference now divided Egyptians and Europeans. When Jabarti visited the Institut d’Egypte, he admired the enthusiasm and scholarship of the French scientists, but did not know what to make of their experiments. He was particularly bemused by the hot-air balloon. There was no place in his mental universe for such a thing and he simply could not see it in the same way as a European, who had two hundred years of empirical science behind him. “They have strange things and objects,” he recorded afterwards, “which show effects which our minds are too small to comprehend.” 35 In 1801, the British managed to throw the French out of Egypt; at this point, the British were committed to preserving the integrity of the Ottoman empire and so they returned Egypt to the Turks, making no attempt to establish British rule in Egypt. But the takeover was chaotic. The Mamluks refused to accept the new Turkish governor from Istanbul, and for over two years, Mamluks, Janissaries, and the Albanian garrison sent by the Ottomans fought each other and terrorized the population. During the confusion, a young Albanian officer called Muhammad Ali (1769–1849) seized control. Weary of the confusion and disillusioned by the incompetence of the Mamluks, the ulema supported him. Under the remarkable alim Umar Makram, the ulema led a popular uprising against the Turks and sent a delegation to Istanbul requesting that Muhammad Ali be confirmed as pasha, or governor, of Egypt.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Galileo was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his own somewhat belligerent temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. Religious people did not instinctively reject science in the early modern period. When Copernicus first presented his hypothesis in the Vatican, the Pope approved it, and Calvin had no problem with the theory. The scientists themselves saw their investigations as essentially religious. Kepler felt himself possessed by “divine frenzy” as he revealed secrets that no human being had ever been privileged to learn before, and Galileo was convinced that his research had been inspired by divine grace.11 They could still see their scientific rationalism as compatible with religious vision, logos as complementary to mythos. Nevertheless, Copernicus had initiated a revolution, and human beings would never be able to see themselves or trust their perceptions in the same way again. Hitherto, people had felt able to rely on the evidence of their senses. They had looked through the outward aspects of the world to find the Unseen, but had been confident that these external appearances corresponded to a reality. The myths they had evolved to express their vision of the fundamental laws of life had been of a piece with what they had experienced as fact. The Greek worshippers at Eleusis had been able to fuse the story of Persephone with the rhythms of the harvest that they could observe for themselves; the Arabs who jogged around the Kabah symbolically aligned themselves with the planetary motions around the earth and hence felt in tune with the basic principles of existence. But after Copernicus a seed of doubt had been sown. It had been proved that the earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed; that the planets only appeared to be in motion because people were projecting their own vision onto them: what had been assumed to be objective was in fact entirely subjective. Reason and myth were no longer in harmony; indeed, the intensive logos produced by the scientists seemed to devalue the perceptions of ordinary human beings and make them increasingly dependent upon learned experts. Where myth had shown that human action was bound up with the essential meaning of life, the new science had suddenly pushed men and women into a marginal position in the cosmos. They were no longer at the center of things, but cast adrift on an undistinguished planet in a universe that no longer revolved around their needs. It was a bleak vision, which, perhaps, needed a myth to make the new cosmology as spiritually meaningful as the old.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In the United States, it seems that some members of the Christian Right have gone beyond the fundamentalism of the 1970s. In the last chapter of this book, I discussed the movements of Reconstructionism and Christian Identity, which have left Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority far behind. These are a form of post-fundamentalism, which is more frightening, intransigent, and extreme. In the same way, the hijackers seem to represent some sinister new development in Islamic fundamentalism. While bin Laden speaks in the traditional fundamentalist idiom of Sayyid Qutb, the hijackers, whom bin Laden, in Qutbian terms has described as “vanguard,” could herald a wholly new type of fundamentalism, something that we have not seen before. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker who was driving the first plane, was a near-alcoholic and was drinking vodka before he boarded the aircraft. Ziad Jarrahi, the alleged Lebanese hijacker of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was also a drinker and frequented the nightclubs of Hamburg. The hijackers also enjoyed the clubs and women of Las Vegas. As this information emerged, I became aware that something very odd was happening. Muslims are forbidden by their religion to drink alcohol. The idea that a Muslim martyr could go to meet God with vodka on his breath is as bizarre a thought as that of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish fundamentalist who gunned down twenty-nine Muslims in the Great Mosque of Hebron in 1994 and was himself killed during the attack, enjoying a breakfast of bacon and eggs before carrying out the action. No devout Muslim, or Jew, would dream of indulging in this kind of behavior. Most fundamentalists live strictly orthodox lives, and alcohol, nightclubs, and loose women are aspects of the jahiliyyah , the ignorant, godless barbarism that Muslim fundamentalists, following Sayyid Qutb’s instructions, have vowed not only to abjure but also to eliminate. The hijackers seem to have gone out of their way not only to disobey the basic laws of the religion they have vowed to defend but to also trample on the principles that motivate the traditional fundamentalist. In these pages, I have described various antinomian movements in which people deliberately violate the most sacred norms in times of acute distress and change. These include the seventeenth-century Messiah figure, Shabbetai Zevi, his disciple Jakob Frank, and the revolutionary prophets of seventeenth-century England, who all advocated a form of “holy sin.” The times were so desperate that something entirely new was required. Old values no longer applied; there had to be a new law, and a new freedom that could only be achieved by a flagrant disavowal of the old norms. I have also shown that there is an inbuilt nihilism in the more extreme forms of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists in all three faiths have cultivated fantasies of destruction and annihilation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They remained bewildered by the French. They could not understand Napoleon’s Enlightenment ideology of freedom and autonomy. A world of difference now divided Egyptians and Europeans. When Jabarti visited the Institut d’Egypte, he admired the enthusiasm and scholarship of the French scientists, but did not know what to make of their experiments. He was particularly bemused by the hot-air balloon. There was no place in his mental universe for such a thing and he simply could not see it in the same way as a European, who had two hundred years of empirical science behind him. “They have strange things and objects,” he recorded afterwards, “which show effects which our minds are too small to comprehend.”35 In 1801, the British managed to throw the French out of Egypt; at this point, the British were committed to preserving the integrity of the Ottoman empire and so they returned Egypt to the Turks, making no attempt to establish British rule in Egypt. But the takeover was chaotic. The Mamluks refused to accept the new Turkish governor from Istanbul, and for over two years, Mamluks, Janissaries, and the Albanian garrison sent by the Ottomans fought each other and terrorized the population. During the confusion, a young Albanian officer called Muhammad Ali (1769–1849) seized control. Weary of the confusion and disillusioned by the incompetence of the Mamluks, the ulema supported him. Under the remarkable alim Umar Makram, the ulema led a popular uprising against the Turks and sent a delegation to Istanbul requesting that Muhammad Ali be confirmed as pasha, or governor, of Egypt. The sultan agreed and there was huge excitement in Cairo. A French observer wrote that the enthusiasm of the crowds reminded him of the French Revolution.36 This was the ulema’s finest hour. Muhammad Ali had secured their support by promising that he would make no changes in Egypt without consulting them first. Everybody assumed that the status quo had been restored and that, after the upheavals of the previous few years, life could at last return to normal.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  An equally telling, if less poignant, case was that of Juan da Prado, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1655 and must often have meditated upon Da Costa’s fate. He had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, but it seems that as early as 1645 he had succumbed to a Marrano form of deism. Prado was neither a brilliant nor a systematic thinker, but his experience shows us that it is impossible to adhere to a confessional religion such as Judaism by relying solely on reason. Without a prayer life, a cult, and a mythical underpinning, Prado could only conclude that “God” was simply identical with the laws of nature. Yet he continued his underground activities for another ten years. For him, “Judaism” seems to have meant fellowship, the close bonding he experienced in a tight-knit group which gave meaning to his life, because when he arrived in Amsterdam and fell afoul of the rabbis there, he still wanted to remain within the Jewish community. Like Da Costa, Prado had for years maintained his right to think and worship as he chose. He had his own idea of “Judaism” and was horrified when he encountered the real thing. Prado voiced his objections loudly. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone? What was this God? Was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause, rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, nonsensical laws? Prado became an embarrassment. The rabbis were trying to reeducate the New Jews from Iberia (many of whom shared Prado’s opinions) and could not tolerate his deism. On February 14, 1657, he was excommunicated. Yet he refused to leave the community. It was a clash between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. From their own perspectives, both Prado and the rabbis were correct. Prado could make no sense of traditional Judaism, had lost the mythical cast of mind, and had never had the opportunity to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the faith by means of cult and ritual. He had always had to rely on reason and his own insights, and could not abandon them now. But the rabbis were also right: Prado’s deism bore no relation to any form of Judaism that they knew. What Prado wanted to be was a “secular Jew,” but in the seventeenth century that category did not exist, and neither Prado nor the rabbis would have been able to formulate it clearly. It was the first of a series of clashes between a modern, wholly rational worldview on the one hand, and the religious mind-set, formed by cult and myth, on the other.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Christians were becoming divided: some followed the philosophes and tried to demystify and rationalize their faith; others jettisoned reason altogether. This was a worrying development that was especially marked in the American colonies. One of the repercussions of this split would be the development of fundamentalism in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years, most of the colonists, except the Puritan New Englanders, had been indifferent toward religion; it seemed as though the colonies were becoming almost entirely secularized by the end of the seventeenth century.34 But during the early eighteenth century, the Protestant denominations revived, and Christian life became more formal in the new world than in the old. Even such dissenting sects as the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, which had all originally rejected ecclesiastical authority and insisted on the right to follow their own leadings, set up Assemblies in Philadelphia that kept a sharp eye on the local communities, supervised the clergy, vetted the preachers, and snuffed out heresy. All three denominations flourished as a result of this coercive but modernizing centralization, and numbers increased dramatically. At the same time, the Church of England was established in Maryland, and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York City, Boston, and Charleston.35 But while on the one hand there was a move for greater control and discipline, there was also a vehement, grassroots reaction against this rationalized restraint. Conservative religion had always seen mythology and reason as complementary; each would be the poorer without the other. This had also been the case in religious matters, where reason was often allowed to play an important, if subsidiary, role. But the new tendency to sideline or even to jettison reason in some of the new Protestant movements (a development that can be traced back to Luther) led to a disturbing irrationality. The Quakers were so called because, in the early days, they would often express their religious transports so vehemently: they were known to tremble, howl, and yell, making—an observer noted—the dogs bark, the cattle run madly about, and the pigs scream.36 The Puritans, radical Calvinists who had started by opposing what they deemed the “popery” of the Church of England, also had an extreme, tumultuous spirituality. Their “born-again” conversions were often traumatic; many experienced an agony of guilt, fear, and paralyzing doubt before the breakthrough, when they sank blissfully into the arms of God. Their conversion gave them great energy and enabled them to play leading roles in early modernity. They were good capitalists and often good scientists. But sometimes the effects of grace wore off and Puritans suffered a relapse, falling into chronic depressive states and in a few cases even committing suicide.37

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Ninety percent of the population who were involved in agriculture were ignored; traditional farming methods continued and remained unproductive. There was no fundamental reform of society. Reza was not in the least interested in the plight of the poor, and, while the army got fifty percent of the budget, only four percent was spent on education, which remained a privilege for the rich. 95 As in Egypt, two nations were developing in Iran, who were, increasingly, unable to understand each other. One “nation” comprised the small Westernized elite of the upper and middle classes, who had benefited from Reza’s modernization program; the other “nation” consisted of the vast mass of the poor, who were bewildered by the new secular nationalism of the regime, and relied more than ever upon the ulema for guidance. But the ulema themselves were reeling under the impact of Reza’s secularization policy. He hated the clergy and was determined to curb their considerable power in Iran. His Iranian nationalism tried to cut out Islam altogether, and was based on the ancient Persian culture of the region. Reza tried to suppress the Ashura celebrations in honor of Imam Husain (recognizing their revolutionary potential), and Iranians were forbidden to go on the hajj to Mecca. In 1931, the scope of the Shariah courts was drastically reduced. The clergy were permitted to deal only with questions of personal status; all other cases were referred to the new civil courts. For over a century, the ulema had enjoyed almost unrivaled power in Iran. Now they watched their power systematically cut down to size, but, after the assassination of Mudarris, most of the clergy were too afraid to protest. 96 Reza’s Laws on the Uniformity of Dress (1928) show both the superficiality and the violence of this modernization process. Western dress was made obligatory for all men (except the ulema , who were allowed to wear their cloaks and turbans, on condition that they pass a state examination admitting them to clerical status) and, later, women were forbidden to wear the veil. His soldiers used to tear off women’s veils with their bayonets, and rip them to pieces in the streets. 97 Reza wanted Iran to look modern, despite the underlying conservatism, and was prepared to go to any lengths to achieve this. During Ashura, in 1929, the police surrounded the Fayziyah Madrasah in Qum, and when the students spilled out into the street, they stripped them of their traditional clothes and forced them into Western garb. Men particularly disliked wearing the wide-brimmed Western hats, because they prevented their making the ritual prostrations during prayer. In 1935, there was an ugly incident at the shrine of the Eighth Imam in Mashhad, when the police fired on a crowd who had staged a demonstration against the Dress Laws.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  After he defeated the Mamluk cavalry in the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, he issued a proclamation in Arabic in which he promised to liberate Egypt from foreign rule. For centuries, Mamluks from Circassia and Georgia had exploited the people of Egypt, but now this tyranny was at an end. He was no latter-day Crusader, he assured the ulema , whom he knew to be the representatives of the indigenous Egyptians. Anybody who believed that he had come to destroy their religion should be assured that I have come to restore your rights, which have been invaded by usurpers—that I adore God more than the Mamelukes and that I respect the Prophet Muhammad and the Noble Koran. Tell them that all men are equal before God—that intelligence, virtue, and science, are the only distinctions between them. 30 But this liberation and science had come with a modern army. The Egyptians had just watched this extraordinary fighting machine inflict a devastating defeat upon the Mamluks; only ten French soldiers had been killed and thirty wounded, whereas the Mamluks had lost over two thousand men, four hundred camels, and fifty guns. 31 This liberation obviously had an aggressive edge, as did the modern scientific Institut d’Egypte, whose careful researches into the history of the region had enabled Napoleon to make his proclamation in Arabic and to be reasonably conversant with the ideals and institutions of Islam. Scholarship and science had become a means of promoting European interests in the Middle East and subjecting its peoples to French rule. The ulema were not impressed. “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery, they said, to entice us. Bonaparte is nothing but a Christian, son of a Christian.” 32 They were perturbed by the prospect of infidel rule. The Koran taught that as long as men and women organized their societies according to God’s will, they could not fail, yet now the Islamic forces had been soundly defeated by a foreign power. Al-Jabarti, a sheikh of the Azhar madrasah , saw the invasion as the beginning of major battles; formidable happenings; calamitous occurrences; terrible catastrophes; the multiplication of evils, … the disruption of time; the inversion of the natural order; the bouleversement of manmade conventions. 33 He was experiencing that sense of the world turned upside down which has so often accompanied the onset of modernization. For all its inflated rhetoric, al-Jabarti’s dismay was not entirely misplaced.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Jews became full citizens of the republic in 1657; they were not confined to enclosed ghettoes, as they were in most European cities. The Dutch appreciated the Jews’ commercial expertise, and Jews became prominent businessmen, mingling freely with gentiles. They had a vigorous social life, an excellent educational system, and a flourishing publishing industry. Many Jews undoubtedly came to Amsterdam for its social and economic opportunities, but a significant number were eager to return to the full practice of Judaism. This was not easy, however. The “New Jews,” who had come from Iberia, had to be reeducated in a faith about which they were largely ignorant. The rabbis had the challenging task of guiding them back, making allowances for their real difficulties without compromising the tradition. It is a tribute to them that most Jews were able to make the transition; despite some initial tension, they found that they enjoyed their return to the ancestral faith. 30 A notable example was Orobio de Castro, a doctor and professor of metaphysics, who had lived in Spain as a secret Judaizer for years. He had been arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, had recanted, and taught medicine in Toulouse as a fake Christian. Finally, weary of deception and a double life, he had arrived in Amsterdam in the 1650s to become a forceful apologist for Judaism and an instructor of other returning Marranos. 31 Orobio, however, described a whole class of people who found it very difficult to adjust to the laws and customs of traditional Judaism, which seemed senseless and burdensome to them. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as Orobio himself had done. But, Orobio reported impatiently, “they are full of vanity, pride and arrogance, confident that they are thoroughly learned in all subjects.” They think they will lose credit as erudite men if they consent to learn from those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws, and so they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand. 32 These Jews, living for decades in religious isolation, had been forced to rely on their own rational powers. They had had no liturgy, no communal religious life, and no experience of the ritual observance of the “sacred laws” of the Torah. When they finally arrived in Amsterdam and, for the first time, found themselves in a fully functioning Jewish community, they were not unnaturally bewildered. To an outsider, the 613 commandments of the Pentateuch seemed arbitrary and arcane. Some of the commandments had become obsolete, because they related to the farming of the Holy Land or the Temple liturgy and were not applicable in the Diaspora.

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

  problem, but even Christians could not understand how a heretical Arian like the Goth Alaric had been allowed to plunder Catholic Rome. Part of the Christian response was to argue from history. Paulus Orosius, a Spanish protégé of Augustine, wrote a History against the Pagans, designed to show from a brief survey of all world history that there had been worse disasters in pre-Christian times and that the coming of Christ had made all the difference to the peace of the world. However, Orosius’s work seems thin stuff indeed compared with the response which Augustine was making at the same time: The City of God (De Civitate Dei). It was his most monumental work and it took him thirteen years from 413 to write. Augustine starts with a consideration of Roman history and ridicules the old gods, but his preoccupation quickly becomes wider than the single disaster for Rome, or even the whole canvas of Roman history. It turns to the problem at the centre of Augustine’s thought: what is the nature and cause of evil, and how does it relate to God’s majesty and all-powerful goodness? For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, though to understand why this should happen is ‘like trying to see darkness or hear silence’.38 It was understandable that the ex-Manichee should thus distance himself from the notion previously at the centre of his belief, that evil was a positive force constantly struggling for mastery with the force of light, but as a definition of evil it has often been criticized. On a visit to Auschwitz- Birkenau or the killing fields of Campuchea, it is difficult not to feel that, in human experience at least, pure evil is more than pure nothingness; nor does Augustine seek to explain how a being created flawless comes to turn towards evil – in effect, to create it from nothing.39 Only halfway through the work, at the end of fourteen books, does Augustine explicitly begin to take up the theme of two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’.40 All the institutions which we know form part of a struggle between these two cities, a struggle which runs through all world history. If this is so, the idea of a Christian empire such as Eusebius of Caesarea had envisaged can never be a perfect reality on earth. No structure in this world, not even the Church itself, can without qualification be identified as the City of God, as biblical history itself demonstrated from the time of the first murderer: ‘Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes.’ Though this remains his principle, Augustine is occasionally incautious in expression, and does indeed identify the visible

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

  still standing, incorporated in a modest medieval church building on the edge of the ancient city. It is worth realizing that bishops were not then treated like troubleshooters or roving ambassadors; they were there because a flock was there to be led.30 Nor is it likely that Bishop Liudhard ministered simply to a tiny expat Frankish colony, for one curious fact must strike anyone reading the letters of Gregory to Augustine preserved by Bede. Certain purple passages on the subject of conversion are always quoted from them, but in reality a large proportion of Gregory’s attention is taken up with discussing sex – to be more specific, ritual impurity. Gregory argued at great length against people who had been perplexing Augustine because of their strong opinions about what constituted sexual uncleanness among their contemporaries. These rigorists wanted to borrow Old Testament exclusions from participation in the Temple liturgy and apply them to pregnant women and the sexual relations of married couples. Clearly such troublesome people were Christians, since non-Christians would have no interest in and presumably no knowledge of the Old Testament. The Roman missionaries were facing difficulties because they were coming up against a significant body of well-informed local Christians with different standards from themselves.31 Only a few decades before the arrival of Augustine, the balance of power through lowland England had still been not with Saxon warlords but with Celtic British. Certainly the British population had not been wiped out or driven to the far west, as historians have often in the past assumed, but had stayed put, while proving rather more able and willing to learn Anglo-Saxon than the Anglo-Saxons were capable of learning Celtic languages (plus ça change).32 Many of these Britons would be Christian to some degree: Christianity did not come as a startling novelty to the inhabitants of lowland England in 597. So what was different about Augustine’s mission? Chiefly, but crucially, its emphasis on Roman obedience. OBEDIENT ANGLO-SAXONS AND OTHER CONVERTS (600–800) Augustine’s missionary party tried to turn Canterbury into Rome and Kent into Italy. They built a monastery in Canterbury dedicated to Rome’s premier saints, Peter and Paul, and that monastery (later rededicated to the missionary Augustine) stood outside the Roman walls of the Kentish capital, just like Rome’s basilicas of St Peter and St Paul; Clovis had done the same thing outside Paris (see p. 325). The cathedral church which they also founded out of the ruins of a Roman church was dedicated as Christ Church, in direct imitation of the

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

  Aztecs or Ottomans were as sovereign as Fernando and Isabel. If so, Pope Alexander had no right to grant sovereignty in America to Spaniards in 1493, at the same time as he perfectly legitimately granted them exclusive rights to preach the Gospel. Such reasoning (coming from an Iberian Catholic tradition which had already put the pope firmly in his place) was a clear denial of that idea of universal papal monarchy which had originally fuelled Western Christendom’s unity in the twelfth century. Vitoria’s discussions had a wider application. He was pioneering the concept of a system of international law, based on the older idea of ius gentium (‘the law of peoples/nations’), the legal principles applicable to humans everywhere. His assertions heralded the end of belief in the crusade as a means of extending Western Christendom, just when Europe began a wider mission to spread its particular brand of Christianity throughout the world. The question would soon arise as to whether Western Christianity was completely identical with authentic Christianity, but there was more to the development of international law than this. Western European political thought was to develop a relativistic concept of dealing with other cultures and other political units – eventually without reference to their religious beliefs or any sense that one religion was superior to another. Vitoria would have profoundly disapproved of this development, but it emerged as a consequence of Iberian worldwide adventures. Christian mission nevertheless proceeded backed by military force: first in Central America including modern-day Mexico, which remained the flagship Spanish territory and was therefore styled New Spain, and later in South America. In large part because of the friars’ scruples, there was no systematic intention to obliterate pre-Christian structures in government and society: a number of peoples allied with the Spaniards against their neighbours, or came to a deal with the newcomers, and preserved autonomous forms of government. Much destruction resulted not from Spanish arms but from a much more devastating weapon which Westerners did not even realize they possessed, the diseases they were carrying. No major native American kingdom succumbed to the Spaniards before disease took hold, but once it had, the effect was crippling, and maybe half the population of the Americas died in the first wave of epidemics. That in itself was a powerful argument to bewildered and terrified people that their gods were useless and that the God of the conquerors had won. It has been estimated that by 1550 around ten million people had been baptized as Christians in the Americas. Another informed and sobering estimate is that by 1800 indigenous populations in the western hemisphere were a tenth of what they had been three centuries before.8

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

  confidence in Protestant northern Europe. Despite the intentions of most of its practitioners, when its privileging of reason was united with Baconian insistence on observation, the alliance of natural philosophy with the wisdom of an esoteric past was gradually abandoned, calling into question mainstream Christian authority. Other forces besides the empiricism of Francis Bacon converged on this development. JUDAISM, SCEPTICISM AND DEISM (1492–1700) Doubt is fundamental to religion. One human being sees holiness in someone, something, somewhere: where is the proof for others? The Old Testament is shot through with doubt, although in its stories doubters often feel God’s wrath, as when Adam and Eve doubted the reasons which God gave for not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Jesus Christ could be kinder to doubters – for instance, to his own disciple Thomas, who doubted the Resurrection until Christ challenged him to touch and be sure. And human beings have commonly liked a good laugh at what they hold most dear. But a distinctive feature of modern Western culture, and through it any Christianity exposed to the spread of Western culture, has come to be an inclination to doubt any proposition from the religious past, and to reject the assumption that there is a special privilege for one sort of religious truth. How may we account for this extraordinary development? The greatest question mark set against Reformation and Counter-Reformation Christianity was posed by the continuing existence of Judaism, a separate and much disadvantaged religion within the bounds of Christendom. The 1490s had brought the greatest single disaster for the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem back in 70 CE, their official expulsion from the Iberian peninsula and the creation of a ‘Sephardic’ diaspora (see pp. 585–91). The Portuguese were never as single-minded as the Spaniards either in expulsions or in efforts to achieve proper conversions, although after a serious ‘converso’ rebellion, the Portuguese monarchy did set up its own imitation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1536. In consequence, a cosmopolitan crypto-Jewish community developed, adopting Portuguese customs and language while travelling, and settling in western Europe wherever it seemed safe. Portuguese Sephardic Jews prospered, usually through trade, but also through practising that usefully marginal profession medicine and sometimes teaching in the less rigidly exclusive or more unwary universities and colleges – the municipal Collège de Guyenne in the great French port of Bordeaux proved particularly significant in mid-