Fear

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 270 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Shapira and Teitelbaum contemplated the Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine, they felt the same outrage and dread as, later, people felt when they heard about the Nazi death camps. This is not an exaggeration. Teitelbaum, who narrowly escaped extermination by migrating with his people to America, put the entire blame for the Holocaust on the great sin of the Zionists, who had “lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the like of which has not been seen since the world was created.… And so it is no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger.”6 These rejectionists could see nothing positive in the agricultural achievements of the Zionists, who were making the desert bloom, or the political acumen of their leaders, who were striving to save Jewish lives. This was an “outrage,” a “defilement,” and the final eruption of the forces of evil.7 The Zionists were atheists and unbelievers; even if they had been the most strictly observant of Jews, their enterprise would still be evil because it was a rebellion against God, who had decreed that Jews must endure the punishment of the Exile and must take no initiative to save themselves. For Shapira, the Land was too holy to be settled by any ordinary Jew, let alone by self-confessed Zionist rebels. Only the religious zealot who devoted his entire life to study and prayer could live there safely. Wherever there is a holy object, like Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), evil forces gather to attack it. The Zionists, Shapira explained, were simply the external manifestation of these demonic influences. The Holy Land itself, therefore, was teeming with wicked forces “which excite God’s anger and fury.” Instead of God, it was Satan that now dwelt in Jerusalem. The Zionists who “pretend to ‘ascend’ to the Land, are in fact, descending to the depths of hell.”8 The Holy Land was empty of God and had become an inferno. Eretz Israel was not a homeland, as the Zionists maintained, but a battlefield. The only people who could safely dwell there in these terrible times were not householders and farmers, but holy warriors, “zealous fearers of God,” “valiant men of war” who set out “to fight the just war for the residue of God’s heritage in the holy mountain of Jerusalem.” The whole Zionist enterprise imbued Shapira with existential terror. Teitelbaum saw the Zionists as the latest manifestation of the evil hubris that had consistently brought disasters upon the Jewish people: the Tower of Babel, the idolatry of the Golden Calf, the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE which had cost thousands of Jewish lives, and the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco. But Zionism was the heresy par excellence; this was brazen arrogance which shook the very foundations of the world. It was no wonder that God had sent the Holocaust!9

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. For Qutb, Muhammad’s career was still an archetype, a moment when the sacred and the human had come together and acted in concert. It was in the deepest sense a “symbol,” which linked the mundane with the divine. Muhammad’s life thus represented an ideal beyond history, time, and place and, like a Christian sacrament, it provided humanity with a “constant encounter” with the ultimate Reality. 18 It was, therefore, an epiphany, and the different stages of the Prophet’s career represented “milestones” that guided men and women to their God. In the same way, the term jahiliyyah could not simply refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, as in conventional Muslim historiography. “Jahiliyyah is not a period in time,” he explained in Milestones , his most controversial book. “It is a condition that is repeated every time society veers from the Islamic way, whether in the past, the present, or the future.” 19 Any attempt to deny the reality and sovereignty of God is jahili . Nationalism (which makes the state a supreme value), communism (which is atheistic), and democracy (in which the people usurp God’s rule) are all manifestations of jahiliyyah , which worships humanity instead of the divine. It is a state of Godlessness and apostasy. For Qutb, the modern jahiliyyah in both Egypt and the West was even worse than the jahiliyyah of the Prophet’s time, because it was not based on “ignorance” but was a principled rebellion against God. But in premodern spirituality, the Muhammadan archetype had been created in the ground of each Muslim’s being by means of the rituals and ethical practices of Islam.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet for all Falwell’s apparently hardheaded approach, the fundamentalists who responded to him were filled with fear. It was no use arguing with Falwell, LaHaye, or Robertson in the hope of convincing them that there was no secular humanist conspiracy. This paranoid fear of annihilation and destruction, which they shared with Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, would add urgency and conviction to their campaign. Modern society had achieved a great deal, materially and morally. It had reason to believe in its righteousness. In Europe and the United States, at least, democracy, freedom, and toleration were liberating. But fundamentalists could not see this, not because they were perverse, but because they had experienced modernity as an assault that threatened their most sacred values and seemed to put their very existence in jeopardy. By the end of the 1970s, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditionalists were poised to fight back. 9. The Offensive (1974–79) THE FUNDAMENTALIST ASSAULT took many secularists by surprise. They had assumed that religion would never again be a major player in politics, but during the late 1970s there was a militant explosion of faith. In 1978–79, the world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, which had seemed to be one of the most progressive and stable states in the Middle East. At the same time as governments applauded the peace initiative of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, his recognition of the State of Israel, and his overtures to the West, observers noted that the young Egyptians appeared to be turning to religion. They were donning Islamic dress, casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and many were engaged in an aggressive takeover of the university campuses. In the United States, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge state and federal legislation that pushed a “secular humanist” agenda. This sudden eruption of religion seemed shocking and perverse to the secularist establishment. Instead of embracing one of the modern ideologies, which had proved so effective, these radical traditionalists quoted scripture and cited archaic laws and principles that were quite alien to twentieth-century political discourse. Their initial success seemed inexplicable; it was (surely?) impossible to run a modern state along these lines. The fundamentalists seemed engaged in an atavistic return to the past. Further, the enthusiasm and the support that these policies inspired were an affront. Those Americans and Europeans who had imagined that religion had had its day were now forced to see that not only could the old faiths still inspire a passionate allegiance, but that millions of committed Jews, Christians, and Muslims loathed the secular, liberal culture of which they were so proud.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Iran was becoming a polarized country: a few benefited from the American boom, but the vast majority were being left behind. And Iran was not unique. By the middle of the twentieth century, the societies of all the countries we are considering were being divided into two camps. Some saw the modern age as liberating and empowering; others experienced it as an evil assault. There was fear, hatred, and a barely suppressed rage. It would not be long before fundamentalists, who felt this anger acutely, would decide that it was no longer sufficient to hold aloof from society and build a counterculture. They must mobilize and fight back. 8. Mobilization (1960–74) BY THE 1960s, revolution was in the air throughout the West and the Middle East. In Europe and America the young people took to the streets and rebelled against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal system, protested against the materialism, imperialism, and chauvinism of their governments, refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. Sixties youth began doing what the fundamentalists had been doing for decades: they started to create a “counterculture,” an “alternative society” in revolt against the values of the mainstream. In many ways, they were demanding a more religious way of life. Most had little time for institutional faith or for the authoritarian structures of the monotheisms. Instead, they went to Katmandu or sought solace in the meditative or mystical techniques of the Orient. Others found transcendence in drug-induced trips, transcendental meditation, or personal transformation in such techniques as the Erhard Seminars Training (est). There was a hunger for mythos and a rejection of the scientific rationalism that had become the new Western orthodoxy. This was not a rejection of rationality per se, but of its more extreme forms. Twentieth-century science itself was cautious, sober, and highly conscious in a disciplined, principled way of its limitations and areas of competence. But the prevailing mood of modernity had made science ideological and had refused to countenance any other method of arriving at truth. During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational language and the suppression of mythos by logos.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. By this time, popularizers had brought the new ideas to the general public, and Christians discovered to their considerable confusion that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, nor the Psalms by King David; the Virgin Birth of Christ was a mere figure of speech, and the Ten Plagues of Egypt were probably natural disasters which had been interpreted later as miracles.22 In 1888, the British novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a young clergyman whose faith was so undermined by the Higher Criticism that he resigned his orders and devoted his life to social work in the East End of London. The novel became a best-seller, which indicated that many could identify with the hero’s doubts. As Robert’s wife said, “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”23 The rational bias of the modern world now made it impossible for many Western Christians to understand the role and value of myth. Faith had to be rational, mythos had to be logos. It was now very difficult to see truth as anything other than factual or scientific. There was a deep fear that these new biblical theories would undermine the basic structure of Christianity and leave nothing at all. Yet again, the void loomed. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the American Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all.”24 Discount one miracle, and consistency demanded that you reject the lot. If Jonah did not really spend three days in the belly of a whale, did Christ really rise from the tomb? asked the Lutheran pastor James Remensnyder.25 Once biblical truth had been unraveled in this way, all decent values would disappear. For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and agnosticism.26 The Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.27

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It had been a perilous moment. Not only would the bombing of the Dome of the Rock have ended the peace process, it would almost certainly have resulted in a war in which, for the first time, the whole Muslim world would have joined forces against Israel. Strategists in Washington agreed that, in the context of the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States, Israel, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock could well have sparked World War III.90 The specter of nuclear catastrophe did not trouble these extreme Kookists, however. They were convinced that by instigating an apocalypse here on Earth, they would activate powers in the divine world and “oblige” God to intervene on their behalf and send the Messiah to save Israel.91 This was kabbalistic thinking gone mad. It is a terrifying example of the fundamentalist tendency to use mythology as a blueprint for action. On the practical level, there was nothing irrational about the conspirators’ plans. Livni had been trained as an explosives expert in the IDF. He had studied the Haram al-Sharif meticulously for two years, and purloined a large quantity of explosives from military camps in the Golan Heights. He had manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings.92 They were entirely ready for the attack. All that stopped them was that they could find no rabbi who was willing to sanction their plan. The Dome of the Rock plot represented an abdication of reason, a reliance upon the miraculous, and a nihilism that could have entirely destroyed the Jewish state. This catastrophic messianism exhibited the death wish that has long been part of the modern experience. It was also self-destructive in that it badly damaged the credibility of Gush Emunim, which never recovered the admiration it had won in certain sectors of the Israeli public during its golden age.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Some people would write articles, others make speeches, but in the last resort, they must be prepared for armed struggle. 10 Never before had jihad figured so centrally in official Islamic discourse. The militancy of Mawdudi’s vision was almost without precedent, but the situation had become more desperate since Abdu and Banna had tried to reform Islam and help it to absorb the modern Western ethos peacefully. Some Muslims were now prepared for war. One of the people most profoundly affected by Mawdudi’s work was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953, was imprisoned by Nasser in 1954 and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, and witnessed the brutality of the regime toward Islamists. 11 His experiences in Nasser’s camps scarred him and his ideas became far more radical than Mawdudi’s. Qutb can be called the founder of Sunni fundamentalism. Almost all radical Islamists have relied upon the ideology that he developed in prison, 12 but he had not always been hostile to Western culture or an extremist. Qutb had studied at the Dar al-Ulum college in Cairo, where he fell in love with English literature and became a man of letters. He was also a nationalist and a member of the Wafd party. He did not look like a firebrand, being small, soft-spoken, and not physically strong. But Qutb was a devoutly religious man. By the age of ten he had memorized the whole of the Koran, and it remained the lodestar of his life, but as a young man his faith sat easily with his enthusiasm for Western culture and secular politics. By the 1940s, his admiration of the West had worn thin, however. The colonial activities of Britain and France in North Africa and the Middle East had begun to sicken him, as did Western support for Zionism. 13 A period of study in the United States was also a disillusioning experience.

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

  reign, wrote scornfully of Italos’s inept use of Greek. But there were more long- term issues at stake. Psellos and Italos were keenly interested in using Classical texts, particularly Plato, to illuminate Christianity. That aroused the same sort of fears which had dogged the Patriarch Photios in his enthusiasm for pre-Christian literature and philosophy (see p. 457). This same mood had surfaced in the anti- intellectualism of Symeon the New Theologian. How far could philosophy be of use to Christians? The confrontation persisted. It claimed a fresh victim in a pupil of Italos, the theologian Eustratios, Metropolitan Bishop of Nicaea, who wrote commentaries on works of Aristotle. Eustratios had taken care to disassociate himself from the views of Italos, and the Emperor Alexios had specifically commissioned him because of his scholarship to prepare arguments against the Miaphysite theology of Armenian subjects of the empire. Yet the very fact that Eustratios used Classical dialectic in the manner of Aristotle to construct his case aroused hostility from his fellow clergy and, after a trial in 1117, the Emperor had him suspended from office. Interest in Plato and Aristotle did not die away in Constantinople, and the Komnenian age was notable for the diversity and variety of its literature – but as far as mainstream theology was concerned, a great contrast developed with the Latin West. On the eve of Western Europe’s rediscovery of Aristotelian dialectic in scholasticism’s creative exploitation of Classical learning (see pp. 398–9), the Byzantine authorities were turning away from the same intellectual resources. That mood intensified in some quarters of the Church to cause further disruption in the fourteenth century.10 The recurrent Byzantine pattern of centralized recovery followed by disintegration began another cycle with the death in 1180 of the greatnephew of Alexios, Manuel I Komnenos, after nearly four decades on the throne. Over the next half-century, the sequence of attempted seizures of power, rebellions and conspiracies came at a rate of around two a year.11 The chaos provided an obvious opportunity for the Balkan and central European provinces of the empire to rebel and break away. Once more Bulgaria became an independent kingdom, Serbia also established itself as a monarchy under the long-lived Grand Župan (Prince) Stefan Nemanja (reigned 1166–96), while the King of Hungary overran the westernmost territories of the empire. Even so, most of the various self-promoted rulers in the Balkans continued to look to Constantinople for cultural models to dignify their regimes, giving out titles and offices which reflected the pattern of the Byzantine Court. When an independent Bulgarian patriarchate was established in the early thirteenth century in T’rnovo, then the capital of the Bulgarian kingdom, the city began being called the ‘Third Rome’ after Old and New Rome. It was a title which much later in the sixteenth century

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Fundamentalism is not going to disappear. In America, religion has long shaped opposition to government. Its rise and fall has always been cyclical, and events of the last few years indicate that there is still a state of incipient war between conservatives and liberals which has occasionally become frighteningly explicit. In 1992, Jerry Falwell, who still adheres to the old-style fundamentalism, announced that with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Satan had been let loose in the United States. Clinton, Falwell thundered, was about to destroy the military and the nation by letting “the gays” take over. Executive orders permitting abortion in federally funded clinics, research on fetal tissue, the official endorsement of homosexual rights, were all signs that America “had declared war against God.” 131 In 1993, the war claimed casualties. On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stormed David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, because he was said to be stockpiling arms. In fact, though like many Texans the Branch Davidians (an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists) had an impressive arsenal, they seemed to have no plans for revolutionary action against the government. The offensive was designed to demonstrate the power and legitimacy of the United States government, but it backfired. It led to the compound’s being besieged by the FBI, the burning of the Davidian buildings, and the deaths of eighty men, women, and children. What had actually been demonstrated was the government’s ignorance of the sect, its powerlessness before the besieged Davidians, and its tragic inability to control events. On their side, more extreme Christians are certainly preparing to fight the secular government. Christian Identity, a fascist group, has not been mentioned in this book because it has left fundamentalism far behind, and, indeed, disapproves of fundamentalism. Members of Identity hate the idea of Rapture, which they believe has emasculated American religion: they want to be there to fight the forces of evil during Tribulation. Viciously anti-Semitic, they hate the fundamentalists’ support for Zionism, which they regard as a great sin. In their view, the Jews have usurped the title of Chosen People from the Aryan race, and now they have stolen the Holy Land, which should have remained under a British mandate. They do not believe that the wars of the Last Days will be fought in the Middle East, but in America. They predict a new holocaust in which the white race and the United States will be annihilated. They are, therefore, preparing themselves for the catastrophe.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1902, William Bell Riley founded the Northwestern Bible School, and in 1907, the oil magnate Lyman Stewart established the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Conservatives who felt outmaneuvered by the liberals in the mainline denominations were beginning to band together. The first Prophecy and Bible Conferences were held during the last years of the nineteenth century. Here conservative Protestants could gather to read the Bible in a literal, common-sense manner, cleanse their minds of the Higher Criticism, and discuss their premillennial ideas. They were starting to establish a distinct identity, and during the increasingly crowded conferences became aware of their potential as an independent force. The creation of a special, unique identity was a natural response to the modern experience. The newly industrialized northern cities were a melting pot. By 1890, four out of every five New Yorkers were either new immigrants or the children of new immigrants. 31 At the time of the Revolution, the United States had been an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. Now the WASP identity seemed about to be obliterated by the “Papist” flood. Unfortunately, the quest for a distinct identity often goes hand-in-hand with the development of a terror of the stereotyped “other” against whom people measure themselves. A paranoid fear of conspiracy would continue to characterize the response to the upheavals of modernization, and would be especially evident in the fundamentalist movements created by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all of which would cultivate a distorted and often pernicious image of their enemies, who were sometimes depicted as satanically evil. American Protestants had long hated Roman Catholics, and had also feared conspiracies of deists, Freemasons, and Mormons, who were all, at one time or another, believed to be undermining the Christian fabric of society. In the late nineteenth century, these anxieties flared again. In 1887, the American Protective Association was formed and became the nation’s largest anti-Catholic body, with a membership that may have reached 2,250,000. It forged “pastoral letters,” supposedly from American Catholic bishops, urging their flocks to murder all Protestants and overthrow the heretical government of the United States. In 1885, Josiah Strong published Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis , which listed the “Catholic threat” as the most destructive danger faced by the nation. Giving Catholics the vote would make America vulnerable to satanic influence; already the United States had suffered an immigration of Romanists that was twice as large as that of the invasion of the Goths and Vandals which had brought down the Roman empire in the fifth century. Americans were cultivating fantasies of utter ruin; paranoid conspiracy theories enabled them to pin their nameless and amorphous dread onto concrete enemies and thus helped to make it manageable. 32 I N E UROPE , the conspiracy fears linked to the creation of a distinct identity took the form of a new, “scientific” racism, which would not reach the United States until the 1920s.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  70 Survival was still the major objective of the Haredim. Their attitude to the gentile world had hardened since the 1960s. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 had led to a new consciousness of the Holocaust, which made the Haredim even more determined to keep their distance from goyische culture and those secular Jews who participated in it. They saw themselves at war with modern civilization and had nothing to say to the gentiles or to those Jews, secular or religious, who did not share their view of Judaism. Once again, the experience of suppression and persecution had led to a narrowing of religious horizons and to new emphasis on ideological conformity. Increasingly, Haredim had neither the language nor the concepts to relate in any meaningful way outside the yeshivot or the Hasidic courts. 71 They felt as estranged from their Israeli neighbors as their ancestors had felt from the gentiles in the Diaspora. Yet their new awareness of the Holocaust had made them hyperconscious of the vulnerability of Judaism. In order to preserve the Torah, they were willing to enter the political process. Their attitude had been well expressed by a member of Edah Haredis in 1950: We are weak; the strong instruments are in the hands of our opponents; separated and divided, we stand against storms that threaten to annihilate us, God forbid. Laws that injure our inmost being will make our situation tragic and unbearable. We must therefore maintain our guard and repulse the attacks against us from within the government. 72 But in the 1950s, conditions were not right. Agudat Israel had broken with the Labor government in 1952 on the issue of drafting women into the IDF, and had not been represented in the Knesset since. But after the Likud victory in 1977, Agudat became a member of the coalition government. The Moetzet G’dolay ha-Torah (Council of Torah Sages), the advisory body of Agudat, thus brought elderly rabbis, whom the Zionists had mentally consigned to the scrap heap of history, close to the centers of power. But the old hostility between Hasidim and Misnagdim, muted for decades, surfaced once again in the council; they began to see one another as rivals, in competition for the same funding. This led to the emergence of new Haredi parties and new political players. Rabbi Eliezer Schach, for example, head of the Ponovez Yeshiva and leader of Lithuanian Jewry in Israel, became worried about the influence of the Sephardic Jews, who had immigrated to Israel from the Arab countries after 1948. Many of the Sephardics were coming under the influence of the Hasidic members of Agudat Israel, and Schach feared that this increased Hasidic constituency would draw funds away from the Misnagdic yeshivot .

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  My main source of spirituality is study. When I immerse myself in the sacred texts, whatever they happen to be, I live moments of awe and wonder and transcendence. This is one of the common experiences of the twentieth century. People don’t want to leave their own traditions, but they are reaching out instinctively to other faiths. Our society is becoming more and more global, and religious pluralism is one aspect of it. JK: And yet the fundamentalists you write about in The Battle for God would be aghast at the idea of religious pluralism, wouldn’t they? KA: Some people feel very threatened by pluralism, and they want to assert their identity more strongly than ever before, out of fear, by erecting new barriers. Fear is at the heart of fundamentalism—the fear of losing yourself. But you can’t escape modernity. Ironically, the very stance of choosing to be a fundamentalist is a modern stance, and most of the fundamentalist ideologies could not have taken root in a time other than our own. A Christian who reads the Bible from a fundamentalist point of view, for example, is reading it in a way that would have been impossible prior to the invention of printing and widespread literacy. The Ayatollah Khomeini, too, was a man of the twentieth century, innovative and revolutionary, and his politics were typical Third World politics—anti- imperialist and antiAmerican. Like any modern politician, he appealed directly to the people, and he overturned centuries of Shiite tradition. JK: The final chapter of The Battle for God is titled “Defeat?” What do you intend to say about the future of fundamentalism with that provocative question mark? KA: Fundamentalism cannot be defeated, and, in a sense, fundamentalists have won a great victory. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was generally assumed that religion would never again play a role in great events. Today, however, no government can ignore it. Israel began as a defiantly secular state, for example, but now the Prime Minister of Israel must go hat in hand to the religious parties to make a government. In Egypt, Islamic fundamentalism is as popular today as Nasserism was in the 1960s. Even in the United States, politicians have to flaunt their born-again credentials. At the height of the Lewinsky scandal, we saw President Clinton attending a prayer breakfast and weeping and saying he had sinned. But, on another level, fundamentalism represents a defeat for the religious traditions that fundamentalists are fighting to preserve, because they tend to downplay compassion, which all the world faiths insist is the primary religious virtue, and overstress the more belligerent and intolerant aspects of the tradition. At the root of fundamentalism are nihilism, hopelessness, and despair.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Believes in the removal of American patriotism, and the free-enterprise system, disarmament, and the creation of a one-world socialistic government. 105 This list, which seems to have been compiled from the first and second Manifestos of the American Humanist Society (1933 and 1973), an organization of little influence, could, nevertheless, be described as a reasonably accurate description of the liberal mind-set that evolved during the sixties. But in the way of most ideologies, it was, of course, also a caricature and an oversimplification of liberalism. Not all liberals who desire sexual equality or the equal distribution of wealth are atheists. Liberals who believe in gay rights would never sanction incest. No liberal would agree that there is “no right, no wrong”; instead they believe that there needs to be some revision of the moral strictures of the past. A desire to achieve a coming-together of previously hostile nation-states, in such organizations as the European Union or the United Nations, by no means implies a desire for “one-world socialistic government.” But the list is useful in showing how values which many liberal Christians and secularists alike would regard as self-evidently good (such as concern for the poor or for the environment) were regarded by fundamentalists as manifestly evil. It would appear that there were “two nations” in the United States at this time in rather the same way as in Iran or Israel. Modern society seemed to have become polarized in such a way that it was increasingly difficult for people in the different camps to understand one another. Because the subcultures were so isolated and separatist, many may not even have realized that there was a problem. But Protestant fundamentalists did not regard this definition of secular humanism as a caricature. They saw secular humanism as a rival religion, which had its own creed, its own objectives, and a distinctive organization. They drew support for this belief from a footnote to the Supreme Court judgment Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), which explicitly listed “secular humanism” among those world religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God,” such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Ethical Culture. 106 Fundamentalists would use this later to argue that the beliefs and values of the “secular humanism” practiced by the government and the legislators should be outlawed from public life as firmly as conservative Protestantism. It would, however, be a mistake to regard this fundamentalist preoccupation with secular humanism as a ploy, or as an ingeniously concocted distortion designed to discredit the liberal attitude. The term “secular humanism” and all that it stands for filled fundamentalists with visceral dread. They saw it as a conspiracy of evil forces that, in the words of Tim LaHaye, one of the chief and most prolific fundamentalist ideologues, was “anti-God, antimoral, anti-self-restraint, and anti-American.” Secular humanism was run by a small cadre which controlled the government, the public schools, and the television networks, in order to “destroy Christianity and the American family.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The army was Muhammad Ali’s chief concern. He needed it if he was to achieve his objectives, since throughout his career he had to hold his own against the British on the one hand and the Ottoman Turks on the other. The only way the Turks could tolerate Muhammad Ali’s creation of a semi-autonomous state was by calling on his superior fighting machine in Ottoman campaigns: against the Wahhabis in Arabia, or to quell the Greek revolt (1825–28). But in 1832, his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Palestine, inflicting crushing defeats on the Turkish army and creating for his father an impressive imperium in imperio. The Egyptian army had, of course, been built on the French model. Muhammad Ali had tried to imitate the discipline and efficiency he had observed in Napoleon’s army, and he had indeed created a force that was able to cut through a numerically superior army with ease. But this achievement also involved a brutal assault upon his subjects. At first, Muhammad Ali had recruited and trained some 20,000 conscripts from the Sudan, whom he had housed in a vast barracks in Aswan. But the Sudanese simply could not adapt. Many turned their faces to the wall and died, despite the best efforts of the army doctors (trained in Muhammad Ali’s medical school in Abou Zabel) to save them. The pasha was thus forced to conscript the fellahin, dragging them from their homes, families, and fields. They usually had no time to make adequate arrangements, and their families were often left destitute, the women forced into prostitution. The possibility of conscription to an utterly alien military life filled many of the fellahin with such terror that they frequently resorted to self-mutilation, cutting off their own fingers, pulling out teeth, and even blinding themselves.41 An efficient fighting force was created, but at a terrible human cost. Not only were the fellahin themselves damaged by conscription, but agriculture suffered when the men were torn away from the land. Every positive reform had a downside. Muhammad Ali’s economic policies encouraged European trade to penetrate Egypt, but at the expense of local industry. By becoming the sole monopolist in Egypt, the pasha virtually destroyed the indigenous merchant class.42 He invested a great deal on much-needed irrigation works and water communications, but the working conditions of the laborers in the corvée were so bad that 23,000 are said to have died.43 The old social systems were being brutally dismantled, yet the premodern, conservative lifestyle and beliefs of the vast majority of Egyptians remained unchanged. Two societies—one, consisting only of the military and administrative personnel, modernized, and the other unmodernized—operating on entirely different norms, were gradually emerging in modern Egypt.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  However, at the time, the pamphlets caused little critical interest, and the tone was neither radical nor particularly militant. 9 But during the Great War, an element of terror entered conservative Protestantism and it became fundamentalist. Americans had always had a tendency to see a conflict as apocalyptic, and the Great War confirmed many of them in their premillennial convictions. The horrific slaughter, they decided, was on such a scale that it could only be the beginning of the End. These must be the battles foretold in the Book of Revelation. Three big Prophecy Conferences were held between 1914 and 1918, where participants combed through the Scofield Reference Bible to find more “signs of the times.” Everything indicated that these predictions were indeed coming to pass. The Hebrew prophets had foretold that the Jews would return to their own land before the End, so when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging its support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the premillennialists were struck with awe and exultation. Scofield had suggested that Russia was “the power from the North” 10 that would attack Israel shortly before Armageddon; the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state ideology, seemed to confirm this. The creation of the League of Nations obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16:14: it was the revived Roman empire that would shortly be led by Antichrist. As they watched world events, the premillennial Protestants were becoming more politically conscious. What had been in the late nineteenth century a purely doctrinal dispute with the liberals in their denominations, was becoming a struggle for the future of civilization. They saw themselves on the front line against satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. The wild tales of German atrocities circulating during and immediately after the war seemed to prove to the conservatives how right they had been to reject the nation that had given birth to the Higher Criticism. 11 Yet this vision was inspired by deep dread. It was xenophobic, fearful of foreign influence seeping into the nation through Catholics, communists, and Higher Critics. This fundamentalist faith shows a profound recoil from the modern world. Conservative Protestants had become extremely ambivalent about democracy: it would lead to “mob rule,” to a “red republic,” to the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.” 12 Peace-keeping institutions, such as the League of Nations, would henceforth always be imbued with absolute evil in the eyes of the fundamentalists. The League was clearly the abode of Antichrist, who, St. Paul had said, would be a plausible liar whose deceit would take everybody in. The Bible said that there would be war in the End-times, not peace, so the League was dangerously on the wrong track. Indeed, Antichrist himself was likely to be a peacemaker. 13 The fundamentalists’ revulsion from the League and other international bodies also revealed a visceral fear of the centralization of modernity and a terror of anything resembling world government.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs, we can let the hostages go.4 This was a policy dictated not by the mythos of Islam, despite Khomeini’s fiery rhetoric, but a piece of pragmatic logos. Nevertheless, the crisis also changed Khomeini’s own profile. Instead of remaining a practical politician, he became, in his own view, the leader of the ummah in its struggle against Western imperialism; the word “revolution” acquired an almost sacred value in his speech, on a par with conventional Islamic terminology: he alone was able to take a stand against the most powerful imperialist power in the world and reveal the limits of its might. At the same time, the hatred of Iran and Islam that the crisis not unnaturally unleashed throughout the world made Khomeini more aware than ever of the fragility of the Revolution, threatened as it was by enemies within and without. Between late May and mid-July 1980, four separate coups against the regime were discovered, and until the end of the year, there were constant street battles between secularist guerrillas and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. The confusion and terror of these days was increased by the proliferation all over Iran of so-called revolutionary councils, which the government was unable to control. These komitehs executed hundreds of people for such “un-Islamic behavior” as prostitution or having held office under the Pahlavis. The emergence of such local bodies after the collapse of a central power seems a universal characteristic of revolutions designed to reconstruct society. Khomeini condemned the excesses of these komitehs, which, he declared, contravened Islamic law and undermined the integrity of the Revolution. But he did not disband them and was, eventually, able to bring them under his aegis, control them, and make them a grassroots support for his regime.5 Khomeini also had to face war with Iraq. On September 20, 1980, the forces of Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, invaded southwest Iran, with the encouragement of the United States. This meant that the social reforms planned by Khomeini had to be put on hold. Throughout this period, the American hostages served a purpose. Only when they had outgrown their usefulness were the hostages released, on January 20, 1981 (the inauguration day of the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  LIKE EGYPT, Israel was also becoming a more religious country. This was nowhere more evident than in the political rise of the Haredim during the 1980s. A minority of the ultra-Orthodox Jews continued to regard the State of Israel as inherently evil, “a pollution that encompasses all other pollutions, a complete heresy that includes all other heresies.”68 “In its very essence, Zionism utterly denies the essentials of our faith,” wrote Yeramiel Domb in the Neturei Karta newsletter in 1975. “It is an absolute denial that reaches down to the very depths, the very foundations, the very roots.”69 But most of the Haredim did not go so far; they simply saw the state as having no religious significance and regarded it with utter indifference. This neutrality enabled them to take part in the political process. The Hasidim could even see their political work in a religious light, as a redemption of the divine sparks trapped in the secular institutions of the state. By pressing for such religious legislation as the banning of pork, or promoting more stringent Sabbath observance, they could make Israeli society more open to the possibility of messianic transformation. The Lithuanian Misnagdim had a more pragmatic attitude. They had entrenched themselves more deeply than ever in the yeshiva world, and used the state to buttress their own institutions. They were entirely uninterested in questions of state, of defense, of domestic or foreign policy; their sole criterion for the support of one party rather than another was the amount of funding and political backing it was willing to devote to the yeshivot.70 Survival was still the major objective of the Haredim. Their attitude to the gentile world had hardened since the 1960s. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 had led to a new consciousness of the Holocaust, which made the Haredim even more determined to keep their distance from goyische culture and those secular Jews who participated in it. They saw themselves at war with modern civilization and had nothing to say to the gentiles or to those Jews, secular or religious, who did not share their view of Judaism. Once again, the experience of suppression and persecution had led to a narrowing of religious horizons and to new emphasis on ideological conformity. Increasingly, Haredim had neither the language nor the concepts to relate in any meaningful way outside the yeshivot or the Hasidic courts.71 They felt as estranged from their Israeli neighbors as their ancestors had felt from the gentiles in the Diaspora. Yet their new awareness of the Holocaust had made them hyperconscious of the vulnerability of Judaism. In order to preserve the Torah, they were willing to enter the political process. Their attitude had been well expressed by a member of Edah Haredis in 1950:

• From Action (2014)

  If someone is coming on a bit strong for your tastes (how you determine this is, as with most things related to sex, subjective), tell them to alter what they’re doing, or to stop, if you prefer. If you’re all right with the former, pull away by a few inches and say something like “Do that [more slowly, or gently, or however you’d like them to change it], please.” No matter what that directive is, don’t couch it in language like “I don’t think I want to do that yet” if you’re sure you don’t want to do that yet. You don’t have to water down what you know in your heart/parts to be true, and your boundaries are not up for renegotiation unless you say, and mean, that they are. In one of my frenches of yore, nothing much was “happening” that wasn’t kissing, on the surface, but the Francophile in question had me pressed up against a wall and I wasn’t into it, even though I was otherwise enjoying making out with her. Getting specific about what wasn’t working for me righted that weirdness: “Hey, can you back up a little?” goes a long way, and not in the sexually figurative sense. She got the message that I wanted to SLOW RIDE, TAKE IT EASY in that instance, although we had hooked up in rough, restrictive, and generally raunch-as-hell ways before. When others have rammed their tongues down my esophagus, which has happened a solid throatful of times in my life, saying, “Can you be gentler, please?” has been similarly effective. If you say, “I like it when you slow down,” and then that person doesn’t, I advise you to bail—and this advice extends to all kinds of sexual contact. First and most important: Physically separate yourself from this person, since your safety comes first, regardless of whatever they’re doing to imply the contrary. Then, if you feel comfortable doing so, let them know why you’re bailing. They should be aware that their supremely jerk-esque behavior is the reason they’re about to be alone. Then, unless you have anything more you’d like to say, just leave.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He is the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed books King David, Moses: A Life, and The Harlot by the Side of the Road. JK: Your very first book, Through the Narrow Gate, is a memoir of your experiences as a nun. What convinced you to enter a convent? KA: Very few of our motivations are simple and clear and pure, and what drew me to the religious life was a complex decision. There certainly was a religious desire—I did want to find God. Of course, there were other less noble reasons, too—I was only seventeen years old, and the whole mess of adolescent confusion was certainly a factor. I was very shy, believe it or not, and I was very scared about how I was going to cope in the big wide world. The convent seemed something familiar. I thought I’d become so holy and wise that I would transcend these confusions and lose myself in a sort of being called God and become saintly and happy. But that didn’t happen. If you’re just seeking to escape yourself, you’re not going to stay very long because in the convent you are confronted with yourself twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. JK: What prompted you to leave the convent? KA: Why I left is equally complicated. I didn’t want to leave at all. I was really frightened to leave. I wasn’t thinking, Now I can wear beautiful clothes and fall in love and be free. I left with real dread. I had missed the 1960s, and I came out into an entirely transformed world. But I knew that I had to do it. I knew I wasn’t going to be a very good nun. Some women can live a life of complete chastity and still become mature; a life in which they never make any decisions themselves and always obey, and have no personal possessions. But only a few women had done that, and I knew that I wasn’t one of them. I knew it wasn’t for me. I had to go. JK: Using the definition of fundamentalism that you offer in The Battle for God, was your stay in the convent a fundamentalist experience? KA: Yes, in the sense that it was a deliberate attempt to turn my back on the modern world. And there is certainly a sense in which the convent was an embattled community at odds with the world outside—ours was not to wonder why, ours was to do and die. But there were differences, too. A lot of fundamentalists are angry and about to declare war on the world. We never got to that stage. We were in retreat from the world. JK: You have been remarkably prolific as an author since leaving the convent.