Disappointment

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 72 of 189 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Further, even without the disastrous mistakes of the Egyptian rulers, these weaker Islamic countries could not become “modern” in the same way as the Europeans or the Americans, because the modernizing process in these non-Western lands was fundamentally different. In 1843, the French writer Gérard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city. Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.… What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French.51 The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad Ali and Ismail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence: Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated. The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role.52 The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation.

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

  inscribed in Greek characters – informal scratches on pottery for the most part – but even more significantly, these finds are outnumbered by survivals of Cyrillic script – on pots, seals, tally sticks, sword blades.8 So the Rus’ and their Slavonic-speaking subjects were in touch not merely with Greeks, but with Bulgarian Christians, who with the encouragement of their rulers were at this time creating a Christian literature in a language and script which could be understood far to the north of their own lands. It was against this background of contacts increasingly more about trade and less about violent plunder that in 957 a Rurikid princess, Olga, paid a ceremonial visit to Constantinople from Kiev. She was currently regent for her son Sviatoslav and the purpose of her visit was to complete her conversion to Christianity by receiving baptism. With ostentatious symbolism, Olga took the Christian name Yelena, after the reigning Byzantine empress, Helena. Her visit was a moment for the Byzantines to savour, and the occasion was written up in loving detail by Helena’s husband, the Emperor Constantine VII, in his manual of imperial Court ceremonial – with one curious omission: he forgot to describe the baptism. That silence suggests that the expectations of the Byzantines and Olga from the visit were not in step, and her subsequent action indicates disappointment. She turned to the powerful Latin Roman Emperor Otto I to supply an alternative Christian mission, presumably to put diplomatic pressure on Constantinople, but once more expectations do not seem to have matched, and Otto quickly became lukewarm about her overture. Her son was not impressed by her incomplete efforts and, once he was in full control of his dominions, would not follow her into Christianity.9 Sviatoslav had his own imperial ambitions, which led him to take an aggressive interest in the Christian khanate of Bulgaria. This brought him disaster. When Sviatoslav’s armies overran Bulgaria, the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimisces reacted with his own invasion and annexation of Bulgaria, and the Rurikid prince died on his retreat homewards in 972. Sviatoslav’s son and successor, Vladimir, now had no choice but to come to terms with Constantinople’s military success, yet the new intimacy between his world and theirs also gave him a chance to exploit the internal struggles of the Byzantine imperial family. When the young Basil II succeeded John Tzimisces in 976, Basil faced rivals for the throne, including his co-emperor, who was his younger brother. To secure his position, he turned to the Prince of Kiev for substantial troop reinforcements, trading a promise of marriage to his sister, the imperial Princess Anna – a transaction regarded as demeaning an emperor’s lawfully born daughter, and actually forbidden in regulations drawn up by his grandfather Constantine VII. Otto II of Saxony had already failed to secure the

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

  11 The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900–1200) ABBOTS, WARRIORS AND POPES: CLUNY‘S LEGACY For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town walls, and three church spires in its skyline. Yet the place is haunted by an absence, the nature of which becomes clear if one seeks out the most imposing of those church spires in the town centre, to find it topping a very peculiar building, a monumental empty Romanesque domed hall, soaringly and at first sight bafflingly tall in proportion to its floor area. To enter this medieval elevator shaft of space is to realize that it was part of something much bigger. It is in fact one single transept from what was between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries the largest church building in the world (see Plate 13). The church’s ancient splendour made it a symbol of all that the French Revolution hated and, after a mob sacked it in 1790, the shell was sold to a building contractor, who took three decades to pull it down, all except this sad, towering remnant. The Emperor Napoleon had a stud farm built over much of the empty site. Until those dismal years, the prodigious church proclaimed the importance of the abbey which had created it. At the beginning, Cluny Abbey had not been unique. Its foundation in 909–10 coincided with a new phase in the constant urge to renewal in Western monastic life, but in character it differed little from the monasteries which the Carolingian reforms had produced. Bishops and aristocrats still thought that the best way to battle against monastic complacency and corruption was to devote huge resources in land and wealth to the creation of ever more splendid Benedictine houses. In the same era England witnessed a burst of parallel activity, vigorously supported by an expanding monarchy, and it might have been thought that England would lead European reform, as it had once led missions into northern Europe. The English were now precociously united under a single king. From

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

  So it appeared in the 390s that the future lay with a Christian empire under strong rulers like Theodosius and strong bishops like Ambrose: a culmination of God’s plan for the world and the beginning of a golden age, the vision of Constantine’s historian Eusebius of Caesarea finally realized. This turned out to be a mirage. The Western Empire was overwhelmed by a series of invasions of ‘barbarian’ tribes from beyond the northern frontier; the most humiliating blow of all was the capture and sack of the city of Rome itself by a Visigoth army led by Alaric in 410. Sixty-six years later, mercenary troops of the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus deposed him and came to a conveniently vague arrangement with the emperor in Constantinople, recognizing him as sole emperor. By that time, most of what had been the Western Roman Empire was under the control of barbarian kings, and although the Byzantines did go on to recapture much of the western Mediterranean, they did not hold on to those conquests for long. All this was the background to a long process of disengagement and separation within the imperial Church between East and West. The Western Latin Church now added to Damasus’s assertion of its tradition and Ambrose’s demonstration of how it could outface worldly power by finding a theologian who would give it its own voice and shape its thinking down to modern times: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. AUGUSTINE: SHAPER OF THE WESTERN CHURCH Augustine was a Latin-speaking theologian who had little interest in Greek literature, only came to the Greek language late in life, read virtually nothing of Plato or Aristotle, and had very little influence on the Greek Church, which in fact came to look with profound disapproval on one aspect of his theological legacy, a modification of the Nicene Creed (see pp. 310–11).28 By contrast, his impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example, Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes. He is one of the few writers from the early Church era some of whose work can still be read for pleasure, particularly his remarkable and perhaps too revealing self-analysis in his Confessions, a gigantic prayer-narrative which is a direct conversation – I–Thou – with God. His life was played out against the background of the rise, final splendour and fall of the Christian Western Empire, but apart from these great political traumas, his life’s work can be seen as a series of responses to conflicts both internal and external. The first struggle was with himself. Who did he want to be and how would he

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The last stand at Yamit may have been an unconscious stratagem to deny a terrible truth. The Great Awakening that the Kookists had so confidently expected had not taken place; maybe Redemption was not, after all, imminent? How could a state which made such craven territorial concessions be holy? The religious members of the Gush were experiencing “the great disappointment” of a messianic hope, which could lead to more desperate measures. Despite their best endeavors, the Gush could not make God’s politics work in the real world. Shortly before the withdrawal from Sinai, Rabbi Kook died, which increased this sense of abandonment. No single figure emerged as Kook’s undisputed successor, and the movement split. Some advocated patience, prayer, and a new focus on education to revive the true spirit of Israel. Others were ready for violence. BEGIN WAS NOT ALONE in encountering religious opposition to Camp David. Anwar Sadat, his Egyptian opposite number, had met with the Muslim opposition in that country. Sadat’s peace initiative made him beloved and admired in the West, but, even though the peace was popular with many sectors of society, Egyptians felt more ambivalent about their president. Despite the catastrophe of the Six Day War, Nasser had been greatly loved by most of the people. Sadat never inspired the same affection. He had always been regarded as a lightweight politically, and on first coming to power in 1971, he had had to defeat an attempted palace coup against him. The comparative success of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 did much to establish Sadat’s legitimacy, however.23 Having proved himself on the battlefield and restored Arab confidence, he was able to take his people into the peace process, which, he believed, would help Egypt and repair relations with the West.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Princeton was not typical. Where the Hodges and Warfield were beginning to define faith as correct belief and putting great emphasis upon doctrinal orthodoxy, other Protestants, such as the veteran abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), were taking a more liberal line. 21 Dogma, in Beecher’s view, was of secondary importance, and it was unchristian to penalize others for holding different theological opinions. Liberals were open to such modern scientific enterprises as Darwinism or the Higher Criticism of the Bible. For Beecher, God was not a distant, separate reality but was present in natural processes here below, so evolution could be seen as evidence of God’s ceaseless concern for his creation. More important than doctrinal correctness was the practice of Christian love. Liberal Protestants continued to emphasize the importance of social work in the slums and cities, convinced that they could, by their dedicated philanthropy, establish God’s Kingdom of justice in this world. It was an optimistic theology that appealed to the prosperous middle classes who were in a position to enjoy the fruits of modernity. By the 1880s, this New Theology was taught in many of the main Protestant schools in the northern states. Theologians such as John Bescon in Evolution and Religion (1897) and John Fiske in Through Nature to God (1899) were convinced that there could be no enmity between science and faith. Both spoke of the divine as immanent in the world; every throb in the pulsing life of the universe revealed God’s presence. Throughout history, the spiritual perceptions of human beings had been evolving, and now humanity was on the brink of a new world, in which men and women would finally realize that there was no distinction between the so-called “supernatural” and the mundane. They would realize their profound affinity with God and live in peace with one another. Like all millennial visions, this liberal theology was doomed to disappoint. Instead of achieving greater harmony, American Protestants were discovering that they were profoundly at odds. Their differences threatened to tear the denominations apart. The chief bone of contention at the end of the nineteenth century was not evolution but the Higher Criticism. Liberals believed that even though the new theories about the Bible might undermine some of the old beliefs, in the long term they would lead to a deeper understanding of scripture. But for the traditionalists, “Higher Criticism” was a scare term. It seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with the modern industrialized society that was sweeping the old certainties away.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Nathan, after a period of intense depression, adapted his theology. The redemption had begun, he explained to his disciples, but there had been a setback, and Shabbetai had been forced to descend still further into the realm of impurity and take the form of evil himself. This was the ultimate “holy sin,” the final act of tikkun.55 Shabbateans, those who remained true to Shabbetai, responded to this development in different ways. Nathan’s theology was very popular in Amsterdam: now the Messiah had become a Marrano, clinging in secret to the core of Judaism, while conforming outwardly to Islam.56 Those Marranos who had long had trouble with the Torah looked forward to its imminent demise, once redemption was complete. Other Jews believed that they must continue to observe the Torah until the Messiah brought about full redemption, but that he would then institute a new Law which would contradict the old in every respect. A small minority of radical Shabbateans went further. They could not bring themselves to go back to the old Law, even on a temporary basis; they believed that Jews must follow their Messiah into the realm of evil and become apostates too. They converted to the mainstream faith—Christianity in Europe, and Islam in the Middle East—and remained Jewish in the privacy of their own homes.57 These radicals also presaged a modern Jewish solution: many Jews would assimilate with gentile culture in most respects, but would privatize their faith, keeping it in a separate sphere.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This, of course, was admirable, but it posed a problem. Human beings need meaning and mythos, but they also need hard, rational logos, too. In premodern society, these two spheres had both been seen as indispensable. But just as myth could not be explained in rational or logical terms, it could not be expressed in practical politics. This had been difficult, and had sometimes resulted in a de facto separation of religion and politics. The theology of the Imamate had suggested that there was an incompatibility between the mystical vision and the hardheaded pragmatism that is required of a head of state. Khomeini sometimes blurred the crucial distinction between mythos and logos. As a result, some of his policies were disastrous. The economy suffered from the sudden sharp fall in oil revenue after the hostage crisis and from the lack of sound state investment. The ideological purges deprived state departments and industry of competent management. By antagonizing the West, Iran had forfeited essential equipment, spare parts, and technical advice. By 1982, inflation was high, there was a severe shortage of consumer goods, and unemployment had risen to 30 percent of the general population (50 percent in the cities).21 The hardships suffered by the people were embarrassing to a regime that, for religious reasons, had put social welfare at the top of its original agenda on coming to power. Khomeini did his best for the poor. He set up the Foundation for the Downtrodden to relieve the distress of those who had suffered most under the Pahlavis. Islamic associations in the factories and workshops provided workers with interest-free loans. In the rural areas, Construction Jihad employed young people in building new houses for the peasants, and in agricultural, public health, and welfare projects, especially in the war zones. But these efforts were offset by the war with Iraq, which had not been of Khomeini’s making. Khomeini was aware of the tension between the mystical and the practical. He understood that a modern state needed popular participation and a fully representative government. As the West had discovered in the course of its own modernization, this was the only type of polity that worked in an industrialized, technicalized society. His theory of Velayat-e Faqih had been an attempt to provide modern political institutions with an Islamic context that would give them meaning to the people. The Supreme Faqih and the Council of Guardians would give the elected Majlis a mystical, religious significance that a Muslim people, who could not relate to the Western secularist ideal, needed: Velayat-e Faqih was thus an attempt to provide a mythical foundation for the practical activities of parliament, and contain the modern within a traditional vision. But Khomeini had evolved the theory of Velayat-e Faqih in a madrasah in Najaf. What sounded good on paper, as it were, proved to be problematic when put into practice in Iran. This became apparent as early as 1981, and the difficulty continued to exercise Khomeini for the rest of his life.22

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  None of this could be immediately perceived by the rational understanding upon which the Marranos had perforce relied all their lives. This type of mythical and cultic observance was alien and unknown. Some of the New Jews, Orobio complained, had become “unspeakable atheists.”33 They were, to be sure, not atheists in our twentieth-century sense, because they still believed in a transcendent deity; but this was not the God of the Bible. The Marranos had developed a wholly rational faith, similar to the deism later fashioned by Enlightenment philosophes.34 This God was the First Cause of all being, whose existence had been logically demonstrated by Aristotle. It always behaved in an entirely rational way. It did not intervene in human history erratically, subvert the laws of nature by working bizarre miracles, or dictate obscure laws on mountaintops. It did not need to reveal a special law code, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This was the sort of God that human reason naturally tends to envisage, and in the past Jewish and Muslim philosophers had in fact produced a very similar deity. But it never went down well with believers generally. It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed, as it could contemplate nothing short of perfection. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow. For that you needed the mythical and cultic spirituality that was unfamiliar to the Marranos. Most of the Marranos who returned to the faith in Amsterdam were able to one degree or another to learn to appreciate halakhic spirituality. But some found the transition impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had been born into a converso family and educated by the Jesuits, but then found Christianity oppressive, cruel, and composed entirely of man-made rules and doctrines that seemed to bear no relation to the Gospels. Da Costa turned to the Jewish scriptures and developed a highly idealized, rationalistic notion of Judaism for himself. When he arrived in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, he was shocked, or so he claimed, to discover that contemporary Judaism was just as much a human construct as Catholicism.

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

  282).46 In the end the results for Byzantium were illusory. The problem throughout the council was not new: the Latins were not prepared to make any substantial concessions even on the limited range of issues debated – the Filioque clause (this simple Latin word or three Greek words occupied discussions for six months), Purgatory, the use of unleavened bread, the wording of the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist and the powers of the papacy. Nevertheless, the emperor, worn down by the incessant wrangling and isolated by the death of the much-respected patriarch during the council proceedings, agreed to a formula of union in 1439. When he returned to Constantinople the following year, it proved impossible to gain any unanimity as to whether the city would accept the deal. For many Byzantines, there seemed little point in accepting what looked like a fresh humiliation after yet another Western army gathered by the Pope went down to defeat at Varna on the Black Sea in 1444. After that, there was little hope left for the survival of ‘the City’. Yet still in 1452 the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos, eventually decided publicly to proclaim the union in Hagia Sophia: the pope’s name was now included in the diptychs, the official lists of those for whom the Church prayed, both living and dead. That only intensified the quarrels which had raged in the city over the previous twelve years, and the deal never gained any wider recognition in the East. Far to the north, Muscovy had already repudiated it, in a move of great significance for the future of Russian Orthodoxy (see p. 518). Now there were only months left before the Ottomans closed in on Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine had at best eight thousand soldiers to defend it against Sultan Mehmet II’s besieging army of more than sixty thousand, backed by many more miscellaneous supporters.47 To call it a struggle of Muslims against Christians would ignore the fact that the majority of those fighting for the Sultan were Christian mercenaries. The ancient walls were not breached. The crucial Ottoman breakthrough into the city was only possible because the Byzantines’ Genoese general, Giovanni Giustiniani, badly wounded in fighting outside the city wall, insisted that one gate should be unlocked to let him back into the city and down to his ship. When an entrance had thus fatally been offered, the Ottoman forces poured in after his retreating party. The Emperor by contrast fought on until he was cut down – exactly how or where is uncertain, but the Ottomans made sure that they secured his corpse. The previous day, the packed congregation in Hagia Sophia had ‘cried out … wailed and moaned’ as the Emperor took his leave with due traditional ceremony from his last reception of the sacrament, before preparing himself for battle. On this final day, 29 May 1453, matins was still in progress in

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1899, Abdu became the mufti of Egypt, the country’s chief consultant in Islamic law, and was determined to reform traditional religious education. He was convinced that madrasah students should study science in order to take a full part in modern society. At the time, the Azhar was, in Abdu’s view, an example of everything that was currently wrong with Islam: it had turned its back on the modern world and become a defensive anachronism. But the ulema resisted the reforms Abdu tried to implement. Since the time of Muhammad Ali, they had experienced modernization as a destructive assault, which had reduced God’s influence in politics, law, education, and the economy. They would continue to resist any attempt to force them into the modern world and, unlike the Iranian ulema, fell seriously out of touch with the world outside the madrasah. Abdu had little success with them. He managed to modernize the administration of the Azhar and to improve the salaries and working conditions of the teachers. But ulema and students alike were fiercely opposed to any attempt to introduce modern secular subjects into the curriculum.76 Faced with such opposition, Abdu became dispirited. In 1905, he resigned as Mufti, and died shortly afterward. The struggles of both Abdu and Afghani show how difficult it was to adapt a faith that had come to fruition in the conservative period to the entirely different ethos of the modern world. They were both aware—and rightly so—of the dangers of too rapid secularization. Islam could provide much-needed continuity at a time of dislocating transformation. Egyptians were becoming strangers to one another, and those who had been Westernized were often alienated from their own culture. They were truly at home in neither the East nor the West, and, without the mythical and cultic practices which had once given life meaning, they were beginning to descend into the void that lay at the heart of the modern experience. The old institutions were being destroyed, but the new ones were strange and imperfectly understood. Abdu and Afghani were still nourished personally by the old spirituality. When they insisted that religion must be rational, they were closer to Mulla Sadra than to European rationalists and scientists, who discounted all religiously acquired truth. When they insisted that reason was the sole arbiter of truth and that all doctrines must be capable of rational proof, they spoke as practicing mystics. Shaped by conservative norms, they saw reason and intuition as complementary. But later generations, who had imbibed more of the spirit of Western rationalism, would find that reason alone could not yield a sense of the sacred. This loss of transcendent meaning would not be counter-balanced, as in the West, by the benefits of liberation and independence, because, increasingly, it was the West that set the agenda—even in religious matters.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Each year TED (the acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design), a private nonprofit organization best known for its superb conferences on “ideas worth spreading,” gives awards to people whom they think have made a difference but who, with their help, could make even more of an impact. Other winners have included former U.S. president Bill Clinton, the scientist E. O. Wilson, and the British chef Jamie Oliver. The recipient is given $100,000 but, more important, is granted a wish for a better world. I knew immediately what I wanted. One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect; yet religion, which should be making a major contribution, is seen as part of the problem. All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, “Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,” or in its positive form, “Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.” Further, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody—even your enemies. Yet sadly we hear little about compassion these days. I have lost count of the number of times I have jumped into a London taxi and, when the cabbie asks how I make a living, have been informed categorically that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric. There has been much flagrant abuse of religion in recent years. Terrorists have used their faith to justify atrocities that violate its most sacred values. In the Roman Catholic Church, popes and bishops have ignored the suffering of countless women and children by turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse committed by their priests. Some religious leaders seem to behave like secular politicians, singing the praises of their own denomination and decrying their rivals with scant regard for charity. In their public pronouncements, they rarely speak of compassion but focus instead on such secondary matters as sexual practices, the ordination of women, or abstruse doctrinal formulations, implying that a correct stance on these issues—rather than the Golden Rule—is the criterion of true faith. Yet it is hard to think of a time when the compassionate voice of religion has been so sorely needed. Our world is dangerously polarized.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Suez Canal had given Egypt a wholly new strategic importance, and the European powers could not allow its total ruin. To safeguard their interests, Britain and France imposed financial controls on the khedive, controls which threatened to become political. Muhammad Ali had been correct in his fear that the Canal would jeopardize Egyptian independence. European ministers were appointed to the Egyptian government to supervise its financial dealings, and when Ismail dismissed them in April 1879, the chief powers of Europe—Britain, France, Germany, and Austria—united against him, and put pressure on the sultan to dismiss the khedive. Ismail was succeeded by his son Tewfiq (1852–92), a well-meaning young man, but it was obvious that he was a mere puppet of the powers. Hence he was unpopular with both the people and the army. When the Egyptian officer Ahmad bey Urubi (1840–1911) staged a revolution in 1881, demanding that Egyptians be appointed to more senior posts in the army and government, and managed to gain administrative control of the country, Britain stepped in and established a military occupation. Ismail had dreamed of making Egypt part of Europe; he managed only to make it a virtual European colony. Muhammad Ali had been cruel and utterly ruthless; his successors were naive, greedy, and shortsighted. But, in fairness, they were pitting themselves against insuperable odds. First, the type of civilization they were attempting to emulate was something entirely new. It was not surprising that these men, with their very limited experience of Europe, were slow to grasp that a few military and technological reforms would not suffice to make them a “modern” nation. The whole of society would have to be reorganized, an independent industrial economy set on a sure footing, and the traditional conservative spirit replaced by a new mentality. Failure would be expensive, because Europe was by this time too powerful. The powers could force Egypt to finance the building of the Suez Canal and yet deny it ownership of a single share. The so-called “Eastern Crisis” (1875–78) had already shown that one of the great powers of Europe (Russia) could penetrate to the heart of Ottoman territory and be checked only by a threat from other European countries, not by the Turks themselves. Even the great Ottoman empire, the last stronghold of Muslim power, no longer controlled its own provinces. This became painfully apparent in 1881 when France occupied Tunis, and in 1882 when Britain occupied Egypt. Europe was invading the Islamic world and beginning to dismantle the empire.

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

  right.31 This was a moment when the immense conquests of Genghis and his successors might have promoted an official Dyophysite Christianity throughout Asia from the Black Sea to the China Sea. During the thirteenth century, the Turkic people in Inner Mongolia known as the Önggüds mostly became Christian, including their royal family, and they remained so for more than a century. As a result of Genghis’s carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China. Under Kublai Khan, Dyophysite Christians returned to the centre of power in China. After nearly three centuries in which their presence had been scarcely perceptible, they revealed themselves from generations of outward profession of other Chinese religions which had official favour. Yet the old pattern repeated itself. The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. It still had yet to interest more than a minority of Chinese. It is perhaps appropriate that the only apparent modern linguistic survival of the Syriac missions in the Far East is the word for ‘tomb’, qavra, used by the Turco-Mongol people known as the Uyghur, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.32 So in neither of its great missionary ventures did the Church of the East achieve enough indigenous support to make an open stand against whatever the emperor decreed. By the time that a new wave of Western Latin Christians arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century, Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared – at least in public. What has become evident in recent years in the countryside beyond the former imperial capital Xi’an, around that extraordinary survival the Ta Qin monastery pagoda, is the likelihood that a consciousness of the Christian tradition and even a Christianity disguised as Taoism did persist. After the Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this small area became and remains a stronghold of rural Chinese Catholicism, Catholic parish churches now peppering the skyline as they might do in southern Europe. Maybe this was not the only place in China which was home to such a survival. Maybe secret Christians remained to welcome the first Western missionaries, as they did in later centuries after later persecutions, and there are many remarkable possibilities still to be investigated in the history of Chinese Christianity.33 The Mongols’ conquests turned west as well. They finally shattered the power

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

  then became a prime bargaining counter in diplomacy when the new Sassanian Queen Boran, recognizing reality in the wake of Heraclius’s successful counterattacks, sought a peace settlement with Byzantium. The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb, and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of his Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of Chalcedonian bishops. The treaty was a triumph for Heraclius too, for it enabled him to parade his relic back in what remained of Byzantine Jerusalem after its comprehensive trashing by the Sassanian armies.52 This climax of peace between the two traditional enemy great powers in fact proved a sad irrelevance to the future. Kavad II’s murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of shortlived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghassānids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassānids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Truth must be capable of logical, scientific demonstration. Miller was treating the mythos of Scripture as though it were logos , and he and his assistant Joshua Hines constantly stressed the systematic and scientific nature of Miller’s investigations. 77 The movement was also democratic: anybody could interpret the Bible for him or herself, and Miller encouraged his followers to challenge his calculations and come up with theories of their own. 78 Improbable and bizarre as the movement seemed, Millerism had instant appeal. Some 50,000 Americans became confirmed “Millerites,” while thousands more sympathized without actually joining up. 79 Inevitably, however, Millerism turned into an object lesson in the danger of interpreting the mythos of the Bible literally. Christ failed to return, as promised, in 1843, and Millerites were devastated. Nonetheless, this failure did not mean the end of millennialism, which became and has continued to be a major passion in the United States. Out of the “Great Disappointment” of 1843, other sects, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, appeared, adjusted the eschatological timetable, and, by eschewing precise predictions, enabled new generations of Americans to look forward to an imminent End of history. At first this new, rough, and democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer and more uneducated classes. but during the 1840s, Charles Finney (1792–1875), a pivotal figure in American religion, brought it to the middle classes. He thus helped to make this “evangelical” Christianity, based on a literal reading of the Gospels and intent on converting the secular nation to Christ, the dominant faith of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century. 80 Finney used the uncouth, wild methods of the older prophets, but addressed lawyers, doctors, and merchants, urging them to experience Christ directly, without the mediation of the establishment, to think for themselves and rebel against the hegemony of the learned theologians in the denominations. He also urged his middle-class audiences to join other evangelicals in the social reform of society. 81 After the Revolution, the state had declared its independence of religion and, at the same time, Christians in all the denominations began to withdraw from the state. There was disillusion and disenchantment with the Revolution, which had not managed to usher in the millennium after all. Protestants began to insist on preserving their own religious “space,” apart from the deist republican government. They were God’s community and did not belong to the federal establishment. Protestants still believed that America should be a godly nation, and public virtue was increasingly seen as nonpolitical 82 ; it was better to work for the redemption of society independently of the state, in churches, schools, and the numerous reform associations which sprang up in the northern states during the 1820s, after the Second Great Awakening. Christians started to work for a better world. They campaigned against slavery and liquor, and to end the oppression of marginalized groups.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As American business and culture took root, Egypt began to seem alien and Westernized to many Egyptians. Sadat was also becoming estranged from many of his people. He and his wife, Jihan, had a glitzy Western lifestyle, were frequently seen entertaining foreign celebrities and film stars, were known to drink alcohol, and lived in luxury in their numerous magnificent rest-houses, refurbished at the cost of millions of dollars, isolated from the hardship endured by most of the population. This accorded ill with Sadat’s carefully cultivated religious image. In the Sunni tradition, a good Muslim ruler is commanded not to separate himself from the people, but to live simply and frugally, and to ensure that the wealth of society is distributed as fairly as possible.26 By calling himself “the Pious President” in an attempt to align himself with the new religious mood in the country, and by encouraging the press to photograph him in the mosques, with a prominent “ash mark” on his forehead to show that he prostrated himself five times daily in prayer, Sadat inevitably invited Muslims to make unflattering comparisons between his own actual behavior and the ideal. Yet, on the surface, Sadat was good to religion. He needed to create an identity for his regime that was different from Nasser’s. Since the time of Muhammad Ali, Egyptians had repeatedly tried to enter the modern world and find their own niche there. They had imitated the West, adopted Western policies and ideologies, fought for independence, and tried to reform their culture along modern European lines. None of these attempts had been successful. Like the Iranians, many Egyptians felt that it was time to “return to themselves” and create a modern but distinctively Islamic identity. Sadat was happy to capitalize upon this. He was attempting to make Islam a civil religion on the Western model, firmly subservient to the state. Where Nasser had persecuted Islamist groups, Sadat appeared to be their liberator. Between 1971 and 1975, he gradually released the Muslim Brothers who had been languishing in the prisons and camps. He relaxed Nasser’s strict laws controlling religious groups, and allowed them to meet, preach, and publish. The Muslim Brotherhood was not allowed to reestablish itself as a fully functioning political society, but the Brothers could preach and establish their own journal, al-Dawah (“The Call”). There was much mosque-building and more air time was given over to Islam. Sadat also courted Islamic student groups, encouraging them to wrest control of the campuses from the socialists and Nasserites. Nasser had tried to suppress religion and found that this coercive policy was counterproductive. It had led to the rise of the more extreme religiosity promoted by Sayyid Qutb. Now Sadat was attempting to co-opt religion and use it for his own ends. This would also prove to be a tragic miscalculation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  What is your writing life like? KA: I work alone here in my house in London, I work at the library, and I write all the time. I write longhand and then I type the manuscript. It slows down the writing but I think it’s a good thing to write more slowly. I am not just a Luddite, forsaking all machinery—I am an epileptic due to a birth injury, and I am worried about the effects of sitting in front of a computer screen all day long. But I am finally getting a computer because the fact is that they are not making typewriters anymore, and soon the only place you’ll find them is in antique shops. When I’m not writing, I also do a little lecturing and a bit of teaching at the Leo Baeck College in London, but that’s a tiny part of my year. I teach Christianity, but there’s a Dominican priest at the college who thinks I’m not Christian enough to teach the whole course. JK: Your books range from biographies of St. Paul (The First Christian) and Muhammad (Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet) and Buddha (Buddha) to studies of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (A History of God and Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths). The Battle for God, for example, focuses on fundamentalism in all three Bible-based religions. What interests you in the study of so many different and disparate faiths? KA: It was the different expressions of faith that drew me back to religion. After I came out of the convent, I was sick to death of religion and I thought that I had completely finished with it. I’d had a bad experience of religion, and I was literally nauseated by it. It’s like a bad sexual experience at an early age that can skew you forever. My early books were written in a spirit of great skepticism. Then I made a trip to Jerusalem to make a documentary on St. Paul, and there I encountered Judaism and Islam as living faiths, vibrant and independent, and yet interconnected with my own. I was intrigued and enthralled, and I realized I had to look into it. The study of Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity showed me that there was a lot in the monotheistic tradition that I had never encountered and could really relate to, and it drew me back to a greater appreciation of what my own religion was trying to do. I always tried to present the monotheistic religions in a triple vision by trying to see them all as valid ways to God. JK: Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic? KA: No, I would call myself a freelance monotheist.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet Nuri expressed a minority view. Most of the mujtahids at Najaf supported the constitution, and would continue to do so. They rejected Nuri’s plea for a Shariah state on the grounds that it was not possible to implement law correctly without the direct guidance of the Hidden Imam. Yet again, the spiritual insights of the Shiah promoted a secularization of the polity, and still regarded state power as incompatible with religion. Many clergy had been disgusted by the growing corruption of the court and by the economic insecurity of the government which had led the Qajars to grant unacceptable financial concessions to foreigners and to take out expensive loans. They had seen that this shortsighted behavior had led in Egypt to military occupation. It seemed clearly preferable to limit the oppressive policies of the Qajar state by means of the constitution.92 This point of view was expressed forcibly by Shaykh Muhammad Husain Naini (1850–1936), in his Admonition to the Nation and Exposition to the People, which was published in Najaf in 1909. Naini argued that representative government was the next best thing to the Hidden Imam; to set up an assembly capable of restraining a despotic ruler was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah. A tyrannical ruler was guilty of idolatry (shirk), the cardinal sin of Islam, because he arrogated to himself divine power and behaved as though he were God himself, lording it over his subjects. The prophet Moses had been sent to destroy the power of Pharaoh, who had oppressed and enslaved his people, and force him to obey the commands of Allah. In the same way, the new Majlis with its panel of religious experts must ensure that the shahs obey God’s laws.93 The most lethal opposition to the new constitution, however, came not from the ulema but from the new shah, who, with the help of a Russian Cossack brigade, led a successful coup in June 1908 and closed the Majlis; the most radical Iranian reformers and ulema were executed. But the popular guard in Tabriz held out against the shah’s forces and, with the help of the Bakhtiari tribe, staged a countercoup the following month, unseated the shah, and put his minor son, Ahmad, on the throne with a liberal regent. A Second Majlis was elected, but, as in Egypt, this fledgling parliamentary democracy was cut down to size by the European powers. When the Majlis tried to break the stranglehold that Britain and Russia had long had on Iranian affairs by appointing a young American financier, Morgan Shuster, to help them reform Iran’s ailing economy, Russian troops advanced on Tehran and closed the Majlis in December 1911. It was three years before the Majlis was permitted to reconvene, and by that time, many had become embittered and disillusioned. The constitution had not been the panacea they had hoped for, but had simply thrown the fundamental impotence of Iran into cruel and clear relief.

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

  accounts of his movement, we glimpse a man who was strikingly like Francis, who gained support from several Italian bishops, and who had no traceable heretical associations. The problem was that he came late in the day to the foundation of orders of friars. Dominicans and Franciscans treated him as unwelcome competition; a major council of the Church at Lyons in 1274 decided to suppress ‘all forms of religious life and the mendicant Orders’ founded after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. While many Franciscans furiously debated among themselves about the justice of the council’s narrowing of religious possibilities, the Order of Apostles actively resisted suppression and in 1290 its members were collectively condemned by the Pope. Soon afterwards, the Church started burning them.22 Segarelli and his order were not alone in their misfortunes. For all their founder’s personal friendship with cardinals and even with one pope, Francis’s followers included crowds who were more part of the wild underworld of thirteenth-century religion than of the establishment. His movement split between those who wished to remodel the order to make it more like the Dominicans, and ‘Spirituals’ who wished to reject all property, and by implication all ordered society, on the basis that Christ and his Apostles had no private possessions – that nagging truth embedded in the Gospels, which the Apostle Paul had first considered a problem (see p. 113). The Spirituals took up the teachings of a mystically minded south Italian Cistercian abbot of the previous century, Joachim of Fiore, whose broodings on the course of human history had convinced him that it was divided into three ages, dominated in turn by Father, Son and Holy Spirit; he thought that the third Age of the Spirit would begin in 1260 and would see the world given over to the monastic life.23 Joachim’s prophecies caused great excitement: in 1254, fifty years after his death and on the eve of the 1260 deadline, one ultra-enthusiast Franciscan proclaimed in Paris that Joachim’s writings had replaced the Old and New Testaments as the ‘Eternal Evangel’ envisioned in the Book of Revelation (14.6). It was after all in 1260 that the flagellant movement first appeared in Europe. Joachim’s thought continued to fascinate a great variety of Christians and ex-Christians down to modern times, including W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence. Those who listen to the vapid rock anthem ‘The Age of Aquarius’ are catching a last echo of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot whose vision was of a dawning new age.24 The wilder sections of the Spirituals became increasingly mixed up in the battles between popes, kings of France and Holy Roman Emperors; eventually Pope John XXII, a strong-minded and not always admirable cleric, was driven in 1318 to condemn the Spirituals as heretical. Four of them were burned at