Disgust

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 23 of 90 · 20 per page

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Yes,” Scintilla broke in, “and you’ve not mentioned all of his accomplishments either; he’s a pimp too, and I’m going to see that he’s branded,” she snapped. Trimalchio laughed. “There’s where the Cappadocian comes out,” he said; “never cheats himself out of anything and I admire him for it, so help me Hercules, I do. No one can show a dead man a good time. Don’t be jealous, Scintilla; we’re next to you women, too, believe me. As sure as you see me here safe and sound, I used to play at thrust and parry with Mamma, my mistress, and finally even my master got suspicious and sent me back to a stewardship; but keep quiet, tongue, and I’ll give you a cake.” Taking all this as praise, the wretched slave pulled a small earthen lamp from a fold in his garment, and impersonated a trumpeter for half an hour or more, while Habinnas hummed with him, holding his finger pressed to his lips. Finally, the slave stepped out into the middle of the floor and waved his pipes in imitation of a flute-player; then, with a whip and a smock, he enacted the part of a mule-driver. At last Habinnas called him over and kissed him and said, as he poured a drink for him, “You get better all the time, Massa. I’m going to give you a pair of shoes.” Had not the dessert been brought in, we would never have gotten to the end of these stupidities. Thrushes made of pastry and stuffed with nuts and raisins, quinces with spines sticking out so that they looked like sea-urchins. All this would have been endurable enough had it not been for the last dish that was served; so revolting was this, that we would rather have died of starvation than to have even touched it. We thought that a fat goose, flanked with fish and all kinds of birds, had been served, until Trimalchio spoke up. “Everything you see here, my friends,” said he, “was made from the same stuff.” With my usual keen insight, I jumped to the conclusion that I knew what that stuff was and, turning to Agamemnon, I said, “I shall be greatly surprised, if all those things are not made out of excrement, or out of mud, at the very least: I saw a like artifice practiced at Rome during the Saturnalia.” CHAPTER THE SEVENTIETH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Yet while its origins had a practical purpose, the sermon hardly reads like a response to a particular incident, still less a tactical sally in a dispute within the order. 70 It shows Luther backing up his superior, but also signals how the two men differed. It employs a style that is almost a mirror version of Staupitz’s own devotional approach, for, like Staupitz he uses sensually overwhelming allegories in quick succession, but whereas the older man deploys this technique to create a sense of meditative reflection on God’s love, Luther exploits it to propel his hearer into an unbearable world of existential disgust and abandonment. The sermon takes us closer than any other testimony to the religious despair and overwhelming sinfulness that Luther felt as a monk. To make his point about envy, Luther compares the backbiter to a murderer and to a debaucher, using language that goes far beyond the biblical text to make the hearer experience revulsion. Just as the Word of God is holy seed, which conceives in the spirit purely and without violation, so by contrast the word of the backbiter is the adulterous and spurious seed of the Devil, corrupting the listener’s soul; indeed, the very name of the Devil is backbiter. 71 Backbiters are “poisoners” and “witches,” Luther says, who “bewitch” and “subvert” the ears of their listeners. 72 Just as witches can impede the sexual act and prevent conception, so the backbiter can destroy a community by poisoning relations between individuals, and he who was once loved and “embraced” is rejected. To be in good odor is to have a good reputation, which is born from without; to be in bad odor is to have a bad name, which comes from the ordure within. The backbiter does not allow the ordure of others to remain hidden but loves “to roll in it” like a pig. He is like the bird who hops about in muck so that people say, “Look how he has shit himself,” to which the best response is: “eat it yourself.” 73 In the most lurid of all the comparisons, Luther describes how backbiters are like hyenas or dogs who dig up stinking human corpses, pullulating with decay and full of worms, and bite into them—“Ugh, what a dreadful monster the backbiter is!”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In the occupation’s early days, some of the hostages had been bound hand and foot, forbidden to speak, and told that the United States had abandoned them. Later, the hostages were moved to more comfortable quarters, 6 but this type of cruelty and ill-treatment contravenes the cardinal insight of all the major confessional faiths, Islam included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion. Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and monotheists all agree that the sacred reality is not simply transcendent, “out there,” but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect. Fundamentalist faith, be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, fails this crucial test if it becomes a theology of rage and hatred. Indeed, this type of hostage-taking violates specific Islamic laws about the treatment of prisoners. The Koran demands that Muslims treat their opponents humanely. It insists that it is unlawful to take prisoners, except during the fighting of a regular war (which, in itself, rules out the taking and retention of the American hostages). Prisoners must not be ill-treated and should be released, either as a favor or for ransom, after hostilities have ended. If no ransom is forthcoming, the prisoner must be free to seek employment, so that he can pay it off himself; the Muslim to whose care he has been consigned must help the captive to raise the required sum out of his own resources. 7 A hadith attributes this directive about the treatment of prisoners to the Prophet himself. “You must feed them as you feed yourselves, and clothe them as you clothe yourselves, and if you should set them a hard task, you must help them in it yourselves.” 8 For Shiis, who venerate Imams who were held hostage in a foreign land by a tyrannical government for its own pragmatic ends, hostage-taking should be especially repugnant. Holding hostages in this way may have made political sense, but it was neither authentically religious nor Islamic. Fundamentalism is an embattled faith and sees itself fighting for survival in a hostile world. This affects and sometimes distorts vision. Khomeini, as we have seen, suffered from the paranoid fantasies that afflict so many fundamentalists. On November 20, 1979, shortly after the hostages were first taken, several hundred armed Sunni fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia occupied the Kabah in Mecca and proclaimed their leader as Mahdi. Khomeini denounced this sacrilege as the combined work of the United States and Israel. 9 This type of conspiracy thinking commonly emerges when people feel imperiled. The outlook was bleak in Iran. There was growing disillusion with the regime, despite Khomeini’s personal popularity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Unlike the monk from Wittenberg, however, Eck had experience in politics. He had been chosen to participate in the disputation about usury that took place in Augsburg in 1514–15. This was an issue of immense importance to the rich merchant families of southern Germany, as Church doctrine continued to prohibit the taking of interest on risk-free money loans altogether. Money was different from other commodities, Thomas Aquinas had argued, because it was not consumed when it was used. Charging interest was therefore sinful because it was fraudulent: If the borrower had the use of the capital and then repaid it, he would be charged twice if he had to pay interest. Such arguments had led to moneylending being concentrated among the Jews and associated with evil. But the new complex money economy that developed in the sixteenth century linked money to securities, which meant that it was no longer simply “used”; moreover, Church restrictions created difficulties for big merchants like the Fugger family in Augsburg, whose long-distance trade required the movement of money. Eck was entrusted by Conrad Peutinger, who had himself married into a prominent merchant house, with the task of finding a way forward. Eck championed an interest rate of 5 percent, which he regarded as reasonable, and developed a theological argument that took account of the new environment in which risk could be minimized and finance made available globally. It was an important intellectual departure that broke free of the economic thinking that had been dominated by the ethics of usury. Eck also defended monopolies, as firms tried to gain complete control of particular commodities. Copper was one such commodity, and the Nuremberg merchants attempted to command its price by dominating the output of the mines in Mansfeld and elsewhere.12 Eck’s work ensured him the patronage of the Fuggers, and placed him squarely on the side of the merchants and capitalists of the day. A man with wide interests, fascinated by the world beyond Europe, he toyed with writing a book about the customs of the recently discovered West Indians and in 1518 he translated a work on the Sarmatians, an Iranian nomadic people, which he dedicated to Jakob Fugger.13 Luther, on the other hand, with his mining background, was deeply opposed to the ethics of capitalism and the new kinds of economic practice, which the poor in particular blamed for their misery. He would have been familiar with Eck’s views, and the fact that he had seen the Fuggerhäuser with his own eyes when he debated there with Cajetan would have done little to endear Germany’s new economic masters to him.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Worn out by all his troubles, Ascyltos commenced to nod, and the maid, whom he had slighted, and of course insulted, smeared lampblack all over his face, and painted his lips and shoulders with vermillion, while he drowsed. Completely exhausted by so many untoward adventures, I, too, was enjoying the shortest of naps, the whole household, within and without, was doing the same, some were lying here and there asleep at our feet, others leaned against the walls, and some even slept head to head upon the threshold itself; the lamps, failing because of a lack of oil, shed a feeble and flickering light, when two Syrians, bent upon stealing an amphora of wine, entered the dining-room. While they were greedily pawing among the silver, they pulled the amphora in two, upsetting the table with all the silver plate, and a cup, which had flown pretty high, cut the head of the maid, who was drowsing upon a couch. She screamed at that, thereby betraying the thieves and wakening some of the drunkards. The Syrians, who had come for plunder, seeing that they were about to be detected, were so quick to throw themselves down besides a couch and commence to snore as if they had been asleep for a long time, that you would have thought they belonged there. The butler had gotten up and poured oil in the flickering lamps by this time, and the boys, having rubbed their eyes open, had returned to their duty, when in came a female cymbal player and the crashing brass awoke everybody. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD. The banquet began all over again, and Quartilla challenged us to a drinking-bout, the crash of the cymbals lending ardor to her revel. A catamite appeared, the stalest of all mankind, well worthy of that house. Heaving a sigh, he wrung his hands until the joints cracked, and spouted out the following verses, “Hither, hither quickly gather, pathic companions boon; Artfully stretch forth your limbs and on with the dance and play! Twinkling feet and supple thighs and agile buttocks in tune, Hands well skilled in raising passions, Delian eunuchs gay!” When he had finished his poetry, he slobbered a most evil-smelling kiss upon me, and then, climbing upon my couch, he proceeded with all his might and main to pull all of my clothing off. I resisted to the limit of my strength. He manipulated my member for a long time, but all in vain. Gummy streams poured down his sweating forehead, and there was so much chalk in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you might have mistaken his face for a roofless wall, from which the plaster was crumbling in a rain. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [image "67. This edition of Luther’s Sermon on Usury, published in 1520, included an image of a Jew, implying that usurers were Jews. The Jew says, “Pay up, or give interest, because I desire profit.”" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_079_r1.jpg] [image "67. This edition of Luther’s Sermon on Usury, published in 1520, included an image of a Jew, implying that usurers were Jews. The Jew says, “Pay up, or give interest, because I desire profit.”" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_079_r1.jpg] 67. This edition of Luther’s Sermon on Usury, published in 1520, included an image of a Jew, implying that usurers were Jews. The Jew says, “Pay up, or give interest, because I desire profit.” Throughout the 1530s casual anti-Semitic stories and remarks were a staple of Luther’s table conversation, with his guests complaining, for example, that there were more than thirty Jews at Torgau, or that Frankfurt was full of them; in 1531 Luther could write to Amsdorf that it was vain to baptize Jews, because they are rascals.23 There was discussion, too, of the scandalous case of a noblewoman living in Wittenberg who married a Jew who was already married with four children. With the permission of the Elector, her relatives carried out vigilante justice and stabbed the man to death. Luther acted as godparent to the child she had conceived with her Jewish husband and believed her to be a good woman who had been deceived, and he seems not to have expressed any scruples about how the matter had been settled.24 When Josel of Rosheim, the first national leader of the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire, asked Luther in 1537 to intervene with the Elector to allow the free movement of Jews in Saxony, Luther refused to see him. Instead he wrote a letter insisting that he had advocated good treatment of the Jews only so that they could be brought to the Messiah, and not “so that they should be strengthened and made worse in their error through my favor and advancement.”25 He ordered them to “read how you treated your King David and all pious kings, yes, the holy prophets and people, and don’t treat us heathens as dogs,” positioning the Jews as the enemies of the Old Testament heroes and repeatedly invoking Jesus as the Messiah who had been crucified by the Jews. He followed that the next year with a short tract titled Against the Sabbatarians: Letter to a Good Friend, which, as he put it, simply “poured out of the quill” in response to the rumors that the Jews in Moravia were starting to win converts.26 A place where political division made it possible for many different religions to be tolerated, Moravia was one of the few areas where even Anabaptists found refuge. Luther argued that the Jews were a people who had been punished by God for 1,500 years, since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, because they did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther had argued that priests who lived with concubines ought to be allowed to marry, and in the spring of 1521 the Wittenberg graduate and university rector Bartholomäus Bernhardi had been the first to do just that, in public.17 However, in 1520 Luther had not included monks like himself in his musings about marriage because they had made special vows of chastity of their own free will. Now, in Wittenberg, matters were moving apace as Karlstadt attacked monastic vows, first in a set of theses for debate, then in longer writings in both Latin and German. Luther not only read these tracts, but discussed them in letters to Melanchthon.18 Then in early September 1521, he penned a first short set of theses for discussion within Wittenberg. He soon added others, which were published in early October, but Luther did not complete his own full tract on vows until November.19 If earlier in the Reformation it had been Karlstadt learning from Luther, now Karlstadt was forcing the pace. For a work advocating marriage, Karlstadt’s tract is strangely anti-erotic, even antisexual. He does not mince his words in the Latin text, however: Monks only manage celibacy, he argues, by committing the sin of Moloch—that is, masturbation—shedding seed on the ground, or on their robes, and that is worse than fornication or adultery. Karlstadt’s pamphlet evokes the horror of frustrated lust, making the reader feel revolted by the sexual perversions to which it gives rise. He names some of these “beastly sins”—“I say that there are some young nuns and monks who commit sins (I lay them upon their conscience and into their hearts and shall keep silent on account of my shame) which are weightier than bestiality”—but in its German version the tract stops short there, leaving the reader to imagine the worst.20 Karlstadt is fascinated by the flows that come out of the body, with women’s menses and with men’s—and women’s—“seed”: At the time, it was believed that both men and women had to release seed for conception to take place. Regarding marriage as a “medicine” for the ills of sexual lust, he concludes that the bishops should drive all priests to marry, because this is the remedy designed by God for concupiscence. The only thing stopping them from marrying, he claims, is avarice—one of the seven deadly sins, and one to which sixteenth-century society was particularly sensitive. But the financial costs of having a married clergy would indeed turn out to be a major issue for the new Church.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WS 30, 2, 160–97, Eine Heerpredigt wider den Türken . 11. See LW 43, Admonition to Prayer Against the Turks, 1541; WS 51, 374–411. As late as 1543 he called for prayer in Wittenberg because the Turks were sent as punishment for Christians’ sin: StadtA Witt, 17 [Bc], Vermanung an de Pfarrher inn der Superattendentz der Kirchen zu Wittemberg, 1543, which went out under the names of Luther and Bugenhagen. 12. WS 30, 2, 196 a:23–24. 13. WS 30, 2, 193 a:3–5; and see 2, 198–208, Vorrede to Libellus de ritu et moribus Turcorum, 1530, of three pages. 14. See WS 30, 2, 189 a–190 a; 191 a:25–6; 190 a:13–14. 15. LW 43, Admonition to Prayer Against the Turks, 1541; WS 51, 577–625. In 1542, he translated and republished an old medieval Dominican work about the Turks, the refutation of the Quran by Brother Richard, which, having seen a poor Latin translation of the Quran, he now considered to be accurate. WS 53, 273–388, Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi . 16. WS 53, 561, Introduction; Francisco, Luther and Islam, 211–17. 17. WB 10, 3802, Oct. 27, 1542, 162:35–36; 163:78–79. WS 53, 561–772, for the preface Luther wrote to Bibliander’s edition of Robert of Ketton’s Latin translation of the Quran. See also Harry Clark, “The Publication of the Quran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma,” Sixteenth Century Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 3–12; Hartmut Bobzins, “Aber itzt…hab ich den Alcoran gesehen Latinisch…Gedanken Martin Luthers zum Islam,” in Medick and Schmidt, eds., Luther zwischen den Kulturen . 18. WS 53, 566, Introduction. His final publication against Islam was a sermon given on Jan. 31, 1546, shortly before he died, where he inveighed against the Pope, the Jews, and Islam (WS 51, 148–63). Here he argued that Islam simply would not accept a God who was also human, who was a father, and “gave us his son” (152:18). Once again, the central issue for Luther was the incarnation, God becoming flesh. 19. LW 45, 200; WS 11, 314–36, Daß Jesus Christus ein geborner Jude sei, 315:3–4. See, on Luther’s writings against the Jews, Kaufmann, Luthers “Judenschriften”; Kaufmann, Luthers Juden; Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 246–68; Oberman, Roots of Anti-Semitism; Osten-Sacken, Martin Luther und die Juden. 20. On Luther’s personal contacts with Jews, which were not extensive, see Kaufmann, Luthers Juden, 32–47. On the tract, see Prien, Luthers Wirtschaftsethik, 69. 21. LW 45, 229; WS 11, 336:14–19. 22. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 252–56. Nirenberg brilliantly points out that it had been traditional to provide an allegorical reading of the Old Testament as prefiguring the New, but “by moving it to the literal level, Luther made the engagement both sharper and more exclusive” (253). See, for example, LW 10, “Lectures on Psalms,” 93 (Psalm 9); 254 (Psalm 55); 351 (Psalm 69); WS 3, 88–91; 313–16; 441–2. 23. WT 3, 3512. So, for example, WB 6, 1998, before Feb. 9, 1531, 427:1; the letter is in Latin but this breaks into German.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  XIXI’m so goddamn tired of spinach. I called Dr. Livengood after the match and told him about my nose. He said I wasn’t getting enough iron and that I should eat spinach and cream of wheat. I can’t eat cream of wheat because it’s too much bulk, so I’m eating spinach. God, I hate it. I’ve got spinach breath, my teeth are turning green, and I’ve become estranged from my own stools, they’re so ugly and malodorous. And it’s only been two days. One good thing, though: I’ve only had one bloody nose. Dad accidentally whacked me with a cold turkey leg as he was getting it out of the fridge. I was standing behind him, reminiscing about what an eating orgy Christmas vacation used to be for me, then WHAM—I get this big, brown, greasy turkey leg right square on my beleaguered schnozzola. It only bled a little. Dad was really sorry. I pretended to attack him to get at the turkey leg and he pretended to beat me with it. Carla laughed and Katzen ran downstairs to her bear. I was about semigory with blood and turkey grease when Kuch and Otto came to pick me up to run. We ran early tonight so we could get plenty of sleep. The turkey smell was so luscious I hated to wash my face. The bus leaves for Missoula at five tomorrow evening. When I got back I banged the door open with a shoulder block and stood in the doorway kicking snow off my boots. We put new weather stripping on the doors this winter. You have to be Larry Csonka to open the things. “How ya doin’?” Dad asked. He sat by the fire reading Time in poor light. “Fine, Dad,” I replied, shaking the ice out of my hair. Instead of running I walked home from the park, so the melted snow froze on me. I grabbed the towel that I tuck around the neck of my rubber sweat suit and wiped my head and face. Carla came upstairs. She walked very slowly because Katzen was perched on her shoulder, peeking precariously through the swirls of her hair. “How about some spinach?” Carla asked. “No, thanks,” I replied. “I don’t need that much iron. I wouldn’t want to rust before I wrestle Shute.” I whipped downstairs and took a quick shower and returned in a clean pair of old sweat pants. Carla sat on the floor in front of the fire and Katzen slept curled on Dad’s Time in his lap. Between the fragrance of the Christmas tree and the pine-scented candle I gave Carla, the living room smelled like the woods. Dad was trying to push some Christmas candy on Carla. He’s a great one for lots of goodies at Christmastime. It’s like the old thing about the poor kid who makes good and wants his family to have the stuff he didn’t. In Dad’s case the cliché is real.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had also acknowledged the new religious mood in the Middle East, and, though the Muslim Brothers remained in prison, Nasser began to lard his speeches with Islamic references once again. These two tendencies became more marked under Sadat. In 1972, he dismissed the 1500 Soviet advisers installed by Nasser, and, after the Yom Kippur War, announced a new policy designed to bring Egypt into the capitalist world market. He called this new economic initiative infitah (“Open Door”). 24 Sadat, however, was no economist and Egypt’s financial problems, always an Achilles’ heel, were exacerbated by infitah . It certainly opened Egypt up: foreign currency and foreign imports poured into the country. Western investors were wooed by advantageous tax deals, and Egypt did become closer to the United States. Open Door also benefited a small percentage of the rising bourgeoisie, and a few Egyptians made a great deal of money. But the vast majority suffered. Inevitably, Egyptian businesses could not cope with this foreign competition; there was corruption, and the ostentatious consumerism of the elite aroused intense disgust and discontent. The young especially felt alienated. Only about 4 percent of them could expect a decent job; the rest had to survive on very meager public-sector salaries, which they were forced to supplement by moonlighting in their spare time, working—often ineptly—as taxi drivers, plumbers, and electricians. Decent accommodation was prohibitively expensive, and this meant that a young couple often had to wait for years before they could marry and set up house together. Their only hope was emigration. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were forced to leave home for long periods to find work in the wealthy oil states, where they could earn a good salary, send money to their families, and save for the future. Peasants also joined this exodus to the Gulf, returning only when they had enough money to build a house or buy a tractor. 25 Infitah endeared Sadat to the West, but it meant that most Egyptians simply could not afford to live in their own country, and were forced into exile. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  59 Egotism was transcended in this union with the ummah and a new “center” had been attained. During the night vigil on the plain of Arafat, the pilgrims exposed themselves to the light of the divine knowledge, and must now prepare to reenter the world and struggle against the enemies of God (a jihad represented by the ritual stoning of three pillars at Mina). Then the hajji was ready to return to the world with the spiritual consciousness that was indispensable to the social struggle to create a just society, which is incumbent upon every Muslim. The rational effort involved in this depends upon, and is given meaning by, the spirituality evoked in the cult and the myth. For Shariati, Islam must be expressed in action. The timeless realities that the Shiis learned to see at the core of existence must be activated in the present. The example of Imam Husain at Kerbala should, Shariati believed, be an inspiration to all the oppressed and alienated people in the world. Shariati was disgusted by the quietist ulema, who had locked themselves away in their madrasahs and had, in his view, distorted Islam by making it a purely private creed. The period of the Occultation should not be a period of passivity. If the Shiah followed Husain’s example and led all the people of the Third World in a campaign against tyranny, they would compel the Hidden Imam to appear. 60 But the ulema had ruined the religious experience for young Iranians, bored them to distraction, and driven them into the arms of the West. They saw Islam in purely literal terms, as a set of clear directives to be followed to the letter, whereas the genius of Shiism was its symbolism. This taught Muslims to see all earthly reality as “signs” of the Unseen. 61 The Shiah needed a Reformation. The original Shiism of Ali and Husain had been obliterated in Iran by what Shariati called “Safavid Shiism.” An active, dynamic faith had been converted into a privatized, passive affair, whereas the disappearance of the Hidden Imam meant that the mission of the Prophet and the Imams had in fact passed to the people. The period of the Occultation was thus the age of democracy. The ordinary people should no longer be in thrall to the mujtahids and forced to imitate (taqlid) their religious behavior, as Safavid Shiism required. Each Muslim must submit to God alone and take responsibility for his own life. Anything else was idolatrous and a perversion of Islam, turning it into a lifeless observance of set rules. The people must elect their own leaders; they must be consulted, as the principle of shurah demanded. By their consensus (ijmah), they would give legitimacy to the decisions of their leaders. There should be an end of clerical control. Instead of the ulema, the “enlightened intellectuals” (raushanfekran) should be the new leaders of the ummah.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This inspired some of the most extreme Kookists to take revenge. Menachem Livni, a settler at Kiryat Arba, and Yehuda Etzion, a veteran Gush settler, planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them, so that they should be living reminders of the consequences of anti-Jewish terror. When he heard the news, Rabbi Haim Drukman exclaimed in rapture: “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!” 88 Most Israelis, however, were horrified by this attack, which, in the event, only maimed two of the targeted mayors. They were even more disgusted when they learned that for Livni and Etzion this act of terror was just a sideline. In April 1984, the government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground in Israel which had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world. During the Six Day War in 1967, the IDF had conquered and taken East Jerusalem and the Old City from Jordan, and, a few days after the war, Israel had annexed these districts and, in defiance of the international community, had declared Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. It was a controversial decision, since in 1947 the United Nations had declared that Jerusalem should be an international zone, and after the Six Day War had demanded that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied during the hostilities, including Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been a Muslim city since 638, apart from a brief period of Crusader rule (1099–1187); Jerusalem, which Muslims call al-Quds (“the Holy”) is the third-holiest city in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock, which was completed in 691, was the first major Muslim monument ever built and was believed to mark the spot where Abraham offered his son to God in sacrifice; later tradition had it that the Prophet Muhammad had made a mystical ascent to heaven from this rock. This place is also deeply sacred in the Jewish world, since the Dome is on the Temple Mount, thought to be the site of the Temple built by King Solomon. For centuries, however, there had been no tension between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem; Jews had come to believe that their Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, could only be rebuilt by the Messiah, so they had no designs on the area, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif (the Most Noble Sanctuary).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Even though a ruler such as Nasser outwardly professed Islam, his words and actions proved that he had in fact apostatized. Muslims were duty-bound to overthrow such a government. He now looked back to the life and career of the Prophet to create an ideology that would mobilize a dedicated vanguard in a jihad to turn back the tide of secularism and force its society to return to the values of Islam. Qutb was a man of the modern world, and he would create a compelling logos, but he was also profoundly aware of the world of myth. He respected reason and science but did not see them as the sole guides of truth. During his long years in prison, at the same time as he evolved his new fundamentalist ideology, he worked on a monumental commentary on the Koran, which showed his spiritual awareness of the ineffable and the unseen. No matter how rational the human intellect became, he wrote, it was constantly swimming in “the sea of the unknown.” All philosophical and scientific developments certainly constituted progress of a sort, but they were simply glimpses of permanent cosmic laws, as superficial as the waves “in a vast ocean; they do not change the currents, being regulated by constant natural factors.” 16 Where modern rationalism concentrated on the mundane, Qutb still cultivated the traditional discipline of looking through the earthly reality to what was beyond time and change. This mythical, essentialist mentality, which saw worldly events as reflecting more or less perfectly eternal, archetypal realities, was crucial to his thought. Its apparent absence in the United States had disturbed him. When Qutb gazed at modern secular culture, like other fundamentalists he saw a hell, a place utterly drained of sacred and moral significance, which filled him with horror. Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media! And add to all this, the system of usury which fuels man’s voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law. 17 He wanted Muslims to revolt against this secular city, and to restore a sense of the spiritual to modern society. Qutb saw history mythically. He did not approach the Prophet’s life like a modern, scientific historian, seeing these events as unique and located in a distant period. He had been a novelist and a literary critic, and knew that there were other ways of arriving at the truth of what had really happened.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had also acknowledged the new religious mood in the Middle East, and, though the Muslim Brothers remained in prison, Nasser began to lard his speeches with Islamic references once again. These two tendencies became more marked under Sadat. In 1972, he dismissed the 1500 Soviet advisers installed by Nasser, and, after the Yom Kippur War, announced a new policy designed to bring Egypt into the capitalist world market. He called this new economic initiative infitah (“Open Door”). 24 Sadat, however, was no economist and Egypt’s financial problems, always an Achilles’ heel, were exacerbated by infitah. It certainly opened Egypt up: foreign currency and foreign imports poured into the country. Western investors were wooed by advantageous tax deals, and Egypt did become closer to the United States. Open Door also benefited a small percentage of the rising bourgeoisie, and a few Egyptians made a great deal of money. But the vast majority suffered. Inevitably, Egyptian businesses could not cope with this foreign competition; there was corruption, and the ostentatious consumerism of the elite aroused intense disgust and discontent. The young especially felt alienated. Only about 4 percent of them could expect a decent job; the rest had to survive on very meager public-sector salaries, which they were forced to supplement by moonlighting in their spare time, working—often ineptly—as taxi drivers, plumbers, and electricians. Decent accommodation was prohibitively expensive, and this meant that a young couple often had to wait for years before they could marry and set up house together. Their only hope was emigration. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were forced to leave home for long periods to find work in the wealthy oil states, where they could earn a good salary, send money to their families, and save for the future. Peasants also joined this exodus to the Gulf, returning only when they had enough money to build a house or buy a tractor. 25 Infitah endeared Sadat to the West, but it meant that most Egyptians simply could not afford to live in their own country, and were forced into exile. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At this writing, twenty years after the Moral Majority initiated this type of political activism, it is not easy to assess its long-term effectiveness. There is evidence that more committed Christians vote than before, especially in the South, but this type of negative campaigning can sometimes backfire. When Christian Right supporter Linda Chavez called her liberal opponent in the Maryland mid-term elections in 1986 a communist and a child-murdering lesbian, for example, this may have contributed to her defeat. 102 The efforts of fundamentalists and other conservatives in 1998–99 to impeach President Bill Clinton because of his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent alleged perjury also proved counterproductive. The spectacle of the President having to answer intimate questions about his sexual behavior and the inevitable trivialization of political discourse that this involved caused widespread revulsion, and possibly resulted in a liberal backlash in Clinton’s favor. Nevertheless, the fact that at the height of the scandal the President felt it necessary to address a breakfast meeting of the religious leaders of the United States and tearfully confess that he had sinned showed that politicians could no longer treat the conservative views of the faithful with secularist disdain. By the end of the twentieth century, religion was a force to be reckoned with in North America. The United States had come a long way since the Founding Fathers had promoted the secular humanism of the Enlightenment. Since the Revolution, the Protestants of America had used religion as a way of protesting against the policies and conduct of the liberal establishment; the fundamentalist campaigning of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other members of the Christian Right was simply a late-twentieth-century manifestation of this tendency. As a result of all these Christian efforts, the sacred plays a far greater role in the political life of the United States than in such countries as Britain and France, where a politician would be damaged by the display of overt and emotional religiosity. National politics aside, it is also true that some of the greatest victories of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s were at the local level. In 1974, for example, Alice Moore, wife of a fundamentalist minister in Kanawa County, West Virginia, led a campaign against the “secular humanist slant” of school textbooks, which implied that the Bible was a myth, were critical of authority, and presented Christianity as hypocritical and atheism as intelligent and attractive. Christians withdrew their children from the schools, and picketed them. Moore displayed the long American Protestant tradition of distrust of the experts. Who should control the schools in Kanawa County: “the people who live here, or the educational specialists, the administrators, the people from other places who have been trying to tell us what is best for our children?” 103 In January 1982, the local Christians of St.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  54 This was all very dangerous, however. Lurianic Kabbalah was a myth; it was not intended to be translated into practical political programs in this way, but to illuminate the internal life of the spirit. Mythos and logos were complementary but entirely separate spheres and had different functions. Politics was in the domain of reason and logic; myth gave it meaning but was not intended to be interpreted as literally as Nathan had interpreted the mystical vision of Isaac Luria. Jews may have felt powerful, free, and in control of their destiny, but their circumstances had not changed. They were still weak, vulnerable, and dependent upon the goodwill of their rulers. The Lurianic image of the Messiah wrestling with the powers of darkness was a powerful symbol of the universal struggle against evil, but when the attempt was made to give the image concrete embodiment in a real, emotionally unstable human being, the result could only be disastrous. And so indeed it proved to be. In February 1666, Shabbetai set out, with Nathan’s blessing, to confront the sultan, who had understandably been much alarmed by this wild Jewish enthusiasm and, with reason, feared an uprising. When Shabbetai landed near Gallipoli, he was arrested, taken to Istanbul, brought before the sultan, and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. To the horror of Jews all over the world, Shabbetai chose Islam. The Messiah had become an apostate. That should have been the end of the matter. The vast majority recoiled in disgust from Shabbetai and, in shame, returned to their normal life and to the full observance of the Torah, anxious to put the whole sorry business behind them. But a significant minority could not give up this dream of freedom. They could not believe that their experience of liberation during those heady months had been an illusion; they were able to come to terms with an apostate Messiah, just as the first Christians had been able to accommodate the equally scandalous idea of a Messiah who had died the death of a common criminal. 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.

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

  back in 313 had proclaimed general toleration. That had been a reaffirmation of traditional Roman practice, with the one great exception of Christianity, which had leapt from persecuted to favoured religion. Now ‘Catholic’ Christianity was given monopoly status, not just against its own Christian rivals but against all traditional religion: ancient priesthoods lost all privileges and temples were ordered to be closed even in the most remote districts. The process began with a decree in Constantinople in 380, but politics intervened to accelerate the new situation. In 392 a barbarian general of the Roman army named Arbogast backed a coup d’état in which the legitimate Western emperor, Valentinian II, was murdered and replaced with a modest and competent academic of traditionalist sympathies named Eugenius. Moves to restore honour and equal treatment to the old religions had not got very far when, in 394, Theodosius intervened from the East and destroyed the usurping regime. His conclusion, naturally enough, was that his policy, already launched in the East, should be extended throughout the empire. The Olympic Games were no longer celebrated after 393. Further decrees after his death banned non-Christians from service in the army, imperial administration or at Court.78 This was backed up by ruthless action: some of the most beautiful and famous sacred places of antiquity went up in flames, together with a host of lesser shrines. Monks were prominent agitators in the crowds which exulted in the destruction, and dire consequences are always likely to follow rampaging mobs. Perhaps the most repulsive case was the death in 415 of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, so well respected for her learning that she had overcome the normal prejudices of men to win pre-eminence in the Alexandrian schools. Christian mobs were persuaded that she was instrumental in preventing the Prefect of Egypt from ending a quarrel with Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, so she was dragged from her carriage, publicly humiliated, tortured and murdered. The perpetrators went unpunished. It was a permanent stain on the episcopate of Cyril and few Christian historians have had the heart to excuse it.79 Nearly fifteen hundred years later, the breezy Anglican clerical novelist Charles Kingsley used Hypatia’s story to annoy Roman Catholics, casting them in a none-too-veiled parallel in the role of the intolerant Alexandrian killers. Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished – among the ‘barbarian’ tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals. Eusebius of Nicomedia had proved that he was not merely a politician with short-term goals when he had encouraged a mission to the Goths, led by one of their own called Ulfila. Ulfila translated the Bible into his native language, though he omitted to translate the Books of Kings

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The mystical political leader of Mulla Sadra’s vision would have divine insight, but that did not mean that he could impose his own opinions and religious practice on others by force. If he did that, in Sadra’s view, he denied the essence of religious truth. Sadra was vehemently opposed to the growing power of the ulema, and was especially disturbed by a wholly new idea that was gaining ground in Iran during the seventeenth century. Some ulema now believed that most Muslims were incapable of interpreting the fundamentals (usul) of the faith for themselves; because the ulema were the only official spokesmen of the Hidden Imam, ordinary folk must, therefore, select a mujtahid who had been deemed capable of exercising ijtihad (“independent reasoning”) and model their behavior on his legal rulings. Sadra was appalled by these claims of the Usulis, as the proponents of this view were called.51 In his view, any religion that was based on such servile imitation (taqlid) was inherently “polluted.”52 All Shiis were quite capable of understanding the traditions (akhbar) of the Prophets and the Imams, and could work out solutions for themselves, based on reason and the spiritual insights they derived from prayer and ritual.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Qutb’s experience in prison convinced him that religious people and secularists could not live at peace in the same society. When he looked around his prison, recalled the torture and execution of the Brothers, and reflected upon Nasser’s avowed determination to cast religion to one side, he could see all the hallmarks of jahiliyyah, which, like Mawdudi, he defined as the ignorant barbarism that was forever and for all time the enemy of faith, and which Muslims, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who had fought the jahili (ignorant) society of Mecca, were bound to fight to the death. Yet Qutb went much further than Mawdudi, who had only seen the non-Muslim world as jahili. By the 1960s, Qutb was convinced that the so-called Muslim world was also riddled with the evil values and cruelty of jahiliyyah. Even though a ruler such as Nasser outwardly professed Islam, his words and actions proved that he had in fact apostatized. Muslims were duty-bound to overthrow such a government. He now looked back to the life and career of the Prophet to create an ideology that would mobilize a dedicated vanguard in a jihad to turn back the tide of secularism and force its society to return to the values of Islam. Qutb was a man of the modern world, and he would create a compelling logos, but he was also profoundly aware of the world of myth. He respected reason and science but did not see them as the sole guides of truth. During his long years in prison, at the same time as he evolved his new fundamentalist ideology, he worked on a monumental commentary on the Koran, which showed his spiritual awareness of the ineffable and the unseen. No matter how rational the human intellect became, he wrote, it was constantly swimming in “the sea of the unknown.” All philosophical and scientific developments certainly constituted progress of a sort, but they were simply glimpses of permanent cosmic laws, as superficial as the waves “in a vast ocean; they do not change the currents, being regulated by constant natural factors.”16 Where modern rationalism concentrated on the mundane, Qutb still cultivated the traditional discipline of looking through the earthly reality to what was beyond time and change. This mythical, essentialist mentality, which saw worldly events as reflecting more or less perfectly eternal, archetypal realities, was crucial to his thought. Its apparent absence in the United States had disturbed him. When Qutb gazed at modern secular culture, like other fundamentalists he saw a hell, a place utterly drained of sacred and moral significance, which filled him with horror.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  True to the disciplines of the conservative age, Kook did not intend his myth to become an ideology, to be a blueprint for action. In any case, he had very few followers, and in his own lifetime was regarded as something of a crank. Kook put forward no political solution to the pressing problems of Zionist activity in Palestine. God had everything in hand. Kook’s mythos simply enabled his followers to see what was really going on. Kook seemed utterly indifferent to the political form the future Jewish state should take. “As for me, my main concern is the spiritual content, grounded in holiness,” he wrote to his son, Zvi Yehuda (1891–1981). “It is clear to me that, no matter how matters develop on the governmental level, if the spirit is strong it can lead to the desired goals, for with the sublime manifestation of free, shining holiness, we shall be able to illuminate all the paths of government.”71 In the present, unredeemed age, politics were corrupt and cruel. Kook was “disgusted with the terrible iniquities of ruling during the evil age.” Fortunately, Jews had not been able to take an active political role since they had lost the Holy Land in 70 CE and gone into exile; until the world had been morally and spiritually transformed, Jews should stay out of politics. “It is not for Jacob to engage in government, as long as it entails bloodshed, as long as it requires a knack for wickedness.” But very soon, “the world will be refined,”72 and when that happened, Jews could put their minds to the type of polity and practical policies they wished to implement. “Once the Lord’s people are established on their land in some definite way, they will turn their attention to the [geo]political realm, to purifying it of its dross, to cleansing the blood from its mouth and the abominations from between its teeth.”73 In the premodern world, myth was not supposed to be translated into practical action; that was the job of logos and—in Kook’s scheme—of the pioneers. Kook still felt that, in the present dispensation, religion and politics were incompatible, a conviction that had acquired the force of a taboo in the Orthodox world. The Zionists, who had cast off religion, were doing all the practical work.