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.

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• From The Battle for God (2000)

  AT THE SAME TIME as Jews were struggling with the traumatic consequences of their expulsion from Spain and Muslims were establishing their three great empires, the Christians in the West were embarking on a course that would take them far from the certainties and sanctities of the old world. This was an exciting period, but it was also disturbing. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death had killed one-third of the population of Christendom, and countries of Europe had been ravaged by such interminable strife as the Hundred Years War between England and France and the internecine Italian wars. Europeans had endured the shock of the Ottoman conquest of Christian Byzantium in 1453, and the papal scandals of the Avignon Captivity and the Great Schism—when as many as three pontiffs had claimed to be the successor of St. Peter at the same time—had caused many to lose faith in the institutional church. People felt obscurely afraid, and found that they could not be religious in the old way. Yet it was also a time of liberation and empowerment. The Iberian explorers had discovered a new world; the astronomers were opening up the heavens, and a new technical efficiency was giving Europeans greater control over their environment than anybody had achieved before. Where the conservative spirit had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, the new culture of Western Christendom showed that it was possible to venture beyond the confines of the known world and not only to survive but to prosper. This would ultimately make the old mythological religion impossible, and it would seem that Western modernity was inherently hostile to faith.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But this liberation and science had come with a modern army. The Egyptians had just watched this extraordinary fighting machine inflict a devastating defeat upon the Mamluks; only ten French soldiers had been killed and thirty wounded, whereas the Mamluks had lost over two thousand men, four hundred camels, and fifty guns.31 This liberation obviously had an aggressive edge, as did the modern scientific Institut d’Egypte, whose careful researches into the history of the region had enabled Napoleon to make his proclamation in Arabic and to be reasonably conversant with the ideals and institutions of Islam. Scholarship and science had become a means of promoting European interests in the Middle East and subjecting its peoples to French rule. The ulema were not impressed. “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery, they said, to entice us. Bonaparte is nothing but a Christian, son of a Christian.”32 They were perturbed by the prospect of infidel rule. The Koran taught that as long as men and women organized their societies according to God’s will, they could not fail, yet now the Islamic forces had been soundly defeated by a foreign power. Al-Jabarti, a sheikh of the Azhar madrasah, saw the invasion as the beginning of major battles; formidable happenings; calamitous occurrences; terrible catastrophes; the multiplication of evils, … the disruption of time; the inversion of the natural order; the bouleversement of manmade conventions.33 He was experiencing that sense of the world turned upside down which has so often accompanied the onset of modernization. For all its inflated rhetoric, al-Jabarti’s dismay was not entirely misplaced. Napoleon’s invasion was the beginning of the Western control of the Middle East, which has indeed been a reversal, causing the people to revise many of their most fundamental beliefs and expectations. Napoleon gave the ulema more power than they had ever had before. He wanted to make them his allies against the Turks and Mamluks, and so gave them the highest positions in government, but the ulema could not respond in the way he wished. The Egyptians had been dominated by Mamluks and Turks for so long that direct rule was an entirely alien notion. Some refused to take the posts that he offered them, preferring the consultative role they were used to. They knew nothing about defense or the imposition of law and order, and they preferred to stick to what they knew best: the administration of religious, legal, and Islamic affairs. Most of the ulema did cooperate, however; feeling they had little choice, they stepped into the vacuum and helped to restore order, acting as mediators between the government and the people, as they had always done.34 A few led abortive revolts against the French in October 1798 and March 1800, but these were quickly put down.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Not only were thousands of lives lost, but America’s proud self-sufficiency and confidence had crumbled with the towers. Never again would people feel as safe as they did on September 10. For decades, the airplane had given people an experience of superhuman freedom, enabling them to soar high above the clouds, traveling around the world as swiftly as the gods of old. But now many are afraid to fly. They have been grounded, cut down to size, their secular wings clipped, and their confidence severely dinted. Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect, is not an original thinker. His ideology is based almost entirely on that of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian fundamentalist whose ideas are discussed in chapter eight of this book. Using Qutb’s terminology, bin Laden proclaimed that the events of September 11 showed that the world was divided into two hostile camps: one for God and the other against Him. But the world had long been split into two camps, if not in the way that bin Laden described. For decades, those who enjoy and appreciate the benefits of modernity and those fundamentalists who recoil from modern society with visceral disgust gazed at one another over an abyss of incomprehension. The September 11 atrocity simply revealed how deep that fissure of understanding was and how dangerous this division had become. This was not a clash of civilizations. Fundamentalism had always been an intra-societal dispute. As if to underline this fact, the American Christian fundamentalists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson almost immediately proclaimed that the tragedy had been a judgment of God for the sins of the secular humanists in the United States—a viewpoint that was not far removed from that of the Muslim hijackers. In the afterword of this book, I pointed out that fundamentalism was not going to disappear; that it was part of the modern scene, and that it was a reality we had to learn to deal with. The history of fundamentalism shows that this militant piety does not fade away if we ignore it. It is no good pretending that the fundamentalist threat does not exist, or dismissing fundamentalism with secularist disdain as the preoccupation of a few deluded crazy people. History also shows that attempts to suppress fundamentalism simply make it more extreme. It was clear that we had to learn how to decode the fundamentalist imagery so that we could understand what fundamentalists in all three faiths were trying to express, because these movements expressed an anxiety and disquiet that no society could safely ignore. Since September 11, it has become more urgent than ever to comprehend the fundamentalist movements that in many parts of the world are becoming more extreme.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The obvious defects of his thought sprang from his desperation. Afghani was convinced that the Islamic world was about to be wiped out by the imperialistic West. While he was living in Paris during the 1880s, he encountered the new scientific racism in the work of the philologist Ernest Renan (1823–92), and the two men debated the place of Islam in the modern world. Renan believed that the Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic were corrupt and an example of arrested development. They lacked the progressive, developmental qualities inherent in “Aryan” linguistic systems, and could not regenerate themselves. In the same way, the Semitic races had produced no real art, commerce, or civilization. Islam was especially incompatible with modernity, as witness the obvious inferiority of the Muslim countries, the decadence of their governments, and the “intellectual nullity” of the Muslims themselves. Like the peoples of Africa, the population of the Islamic world was mentally incapable of scientific rationalism, and unable to form a single original idea. As European science spread, Renan confidently predicted, Islam would wither away and would, in the near future, cease to exist.64 It is not surprising that Afghani feared for the survival of Islam, or that he tended to overemphasize the scientific rationality of the Muslim vision. A new defensiveness had crept into Muslim thought, in response to a very real threat. The stereotypical and inaccurate view of Islam in the work of such modern thinkers as Renan would justify the colonial invasion of the Islamic countries. Colonialism sprang from the needs of Europe’s expanding capitalist economy. Hegel had argued that an industrialized society would be compelled to expand “in order to search around outside itself among other peoples … for consumers and thereby for the necessary means of subsistence.” This quest for new markets would “also provide the soil for colonization toward which the fully developed bourgeoisie is pushed.”65 By the end of the century, the colonization of the Middle East was well under way. France had conquered Algeria in 1830, and Britain, Aden nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, the Sudan in 1889, and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the territories of the moribund Ottoman empire between France and England, in anticipation of victory in the First World War. This colonial penetration was a severe shock, which meant, in effect, the destruction of the traditional lifestyle of those countries, which were reduced immediately to secondary status.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  63. Gershom Scholem, “The Crypto-Jewish Sect of the Donmeh,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 147–66. 64. Saying Number 2152, quoted in Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 130. 65. Saying Number 1419, in ibid. 66. Ibid., 136–40. 2. Muslims: The Conservative Spirit (1492–1799) 1. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago and London, 1974), II, 334–60. 2. Ibid., III, 14–15. 3. Ibid., II, 406–7. 4. Ibid., III, 107–23. 5. Johannes Sloek, Devotional Language (trans. Henrik Mossin; Berlin and New York, 1996), 89–90. 6. Koran 80:11. The text of the Koran used for this book is that of Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Quran (Gibraltar, 1980). 7. Koran 35:24–26. 8. Koran 2:100; 13:37; 16:101; 17:41; 17:86. 9. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam I, 320–46, 386–89. 10. Ibid., II, 560; III, 113–22. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Oxford, 1962), 25–36. 11. John Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History,” in John Esposito (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York and Oxford, 1983). 12. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1970), 350–54; Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, II, 470–71. 13. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, I, 383–409, 416–36; II, 194–98; Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (trans. W. Trask; London, 1970), 10–29; 78–79. 14. P. M. Holt, “The Pattern of Egyptian Political History from 1517 to 1798,” in P. M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic (London, 1968), 80–82. 15. Ibid., 82–86. 16. Araf Lufti al-Sayyid Marsot, “The Role of the Ulema in Egypt During the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, 264–65. 17. Gemal el-Din Shayyal, “Some Aspects of Intellectual and Social Life in Eighteenth-Century Egypt,” in Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, 117–23. 18. Araf Lufti al-Sayyid Marsot, “The Ulema of Cairo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Niddi R. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East Since 1500 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972), 154. 19. Marsot, “The Role of the Ulema During the Early Nineteenth Century,” 267–69. 20. Ibid., 270; Daniel Crecelius, “Nonideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulema to Modernization,” in Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufis, 172. 21. Crecelius, “Nonideological Responses,” 167–72. 22. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, III, 126–41, 158–59. 23. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 41–44. 24. Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History,” 37, 39–42; Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, III, 160–61; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 37–38. 25. R. S. O’Fahey, “Pietism, Fundamentalism and Mysticism: An Alternative View of the 18th and 19th Century Islamic World”; lecture delivered on November 12, 1997, at Northwestern University. 26. Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shii Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1985), 27–33.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Hence the duty of segregation. Just as the Torah separates sacred from profane, light from darkness, milk from meat, and Sabbath from the rest of the week, so the righteous must keep themselves apart. The renegades would never return to the fold; by living and praying separately from these wicked Jews, the true Haredim were simply expressing physically the onto-logical gulf that existed between them at a metaphysical level. But this fearful vision meant that, living as they were in the midst of satanic evil, every detail of the lives of the faithful had cosmic importance. Matters of dress, methods of study, even the cut of the beard, must be absolutely correct. Jewish life was gravely imperiled, and any innovation was utterly forbidden: “Care should be taken that the right lapel overlaps the left, so that the right hand of the Most High, ‘the right hand of the Lord uplifted,’ in its exalted Love (hesed), predominates over the left side, which represents Power (din), the strength of the Evil Impulse.”12 Where Protestant fundamentalists had sought to fill the void by seeking absolute certainty in stringent doctrinal correctness, these anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox sought certainty in a minute observance of divine law and customary observance. It is a spirituality that reveals almost ungovernable fear which can only be assuaged by the meticulous preservation of old boundaries, the erection of new barriers, a rigid segregation, and a passionate adherence to the values of tradition. This rejectionist vision is utterly incomprehensible to Jews who regard the Zionist achievement as wondrous and salvific. This is the dilemma that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all had to face in the twentieth century: between the fundamentalists and those who adopt a more positive attitude to the modern secular world there is an impassable gulf. The different groups simply cannot see things from the same point of view. Rational arguments are of no avail, because the divergence springs from a deeper and more instinctual level of the mind. When Shapira, Teitelbaum, and Margolis contemplated the purposeful, pragmatic, and rationally inspired activities of the secular Zionists, they could only see them as godless and, hence, as demonic. When later they and their followers heard about the rationalized, practical, and ruthlessly directed activities of the Nazis in the death camps, they experienced them as similar to the Zionist enterprise. Both revealed the absence of God, and were, therefore, satanic and nihilistic, destructively trampling upon every sacred value that these Haredim held dear. To this day, the placards and graffiti on the walls of an anti-Zionist district in Jerusalem equate the political leaders of the State of Israel with Hitler. To an outsider, such an equation is shocking, false, and perverse, but it gives us some idea of the profound horror that secularism can inspire in the heart of a fundamentalist.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were to be “soldiers in the Rebbe’s army,” who would fight “without concessions or compromise” to ensure that true Judaism would survive. Their struggle would pave the way for the coming of the Messiah. 36 Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the most far-reaching and imaginative of these new Jewish responses to modernity. It was not a monolithic movement. Zionist leaders drew on quite varied currents of modern thought: nationalism, Western imperialism, socialism, and the secularism of the Jewish Enlightenment. Even though the Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), which sought to establish a socialist community in Palestine, would ultimately become the dominant Zionist ideology, the Zionist enterprise also relied heavily upon capitalism. Between 1880 and 1917, Jewish businessmen invested millions of dollars in the purchase of land from Arab and Turkish absentee landlords who had estates in Palestine. Others, such as Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) and Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), became political lobbyists. Herzl saw the future Jewish state as a European colony in the Middle East. Still others did not want a nation-state, but saw the new homeland as a cultural center for Jews. Many feared an impending anti-Semitic catastrophe; in order to save the Jewish people from extermination, they must prepare a safe haven and refuge. Their terror of annihilation was not of a moral or psychological void, but a realistic assessment of the murderous potential of modernity. The Orthodox were appalled by the Zionist movement in all its forms. There had been two attempts to create a form of religious Zionism during the nineteenth century, but neither had received much support. In 1845, Yehuda Hai Alkalai (1798–1878), a Sephardic Jew of Sarajevo, had tried to make the old messianic myth of the return to Zion a program for practical action. The Messiah would not be a person but a process that “will begin with an effort of the Jews themselves; they must organize and unite, choose leaders, and leave the land of exile.” 37 Twenty years later, Zvi Hirsch Kallischer (1795–1874), a Polish Jew, made exactly the same point in his Devishat Zion (“Seeking Zion,” 1862). Alkalai and Kallischer were both attempting to rationalize the ancient mythology and, by bringing it down to earth, were secularizing it. But to the vast majority of devout, observant Jews, any such idea was anathema. As the Zionist movement gained momentum during the last years of the nineteenth century, and achieved an international profile in the big Zionist conferences held in Basel, Switzerland, the Orthodox condemned it in the most extreme terms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Awakening had shaken everybody up, and henceforth even the Old Lights were ready to ascribe apocalyptic significance to current events. Jonathan Mayhew was convinced that “great revolutions were at hand,” when a series of earthquakes occurred simultaneously in various parts of the world in November 1755; he looked forward to “some very remarkable changes in the political and religious state of the world.”44 Mayhew instinctively saw the imperial struggle during the Seven Years War between Protestant Britain and Catholic France over their colonial possessions in America and Canada in eschatalogical terms. It would, he believed, hasten the Second Coming of Christ by weakening the power of the Pope, who was Antichrist, the Great Pretender of the Last Days.45 New Lights also saw America as fighting on the front line of a cosmic battle with the forces of evil during the Seven Years War. It was at this time that Pope’s Day (November 5) became an annual holiday, during which rowdy crowds burned effigies of the Pontiff.46 These were frightening and violent times. Americans still looked to the old mythology to give their lives meaning and to explain the tragedies that befell them. But they also seemed to sense impending change and, as they did so, developed a religion of hatred, seeing France and the Roman Catholic Church as satanic and utterly opposed to the righteous American ethos.47 As they cultivated these apocalyptic fantasies, they seemed to feel that there could be no redemption, no final deliverance, no liberty, and no millennial peace unless popery was destroyed. A bloody purge would be necessary to bring this new world into being. We shall find that a theology of rage would frequently be evolved in response to dawning modernity. Americans could sense that transformation was at hand, but they still belonged to the old world. The economic effects of the Seven Years War led the British government to impose new taxes upon the American colonists, and this provoked the revolutionary crisis that resulted in the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775. During this protracted struggle, Americans started the painful process of making that radical break with the past that was central to the modern ethos, and their religion of hatred would play a major role in this development.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.”107 There were 600 humanist senators, congressmen, and cabinet ministers, some 275,000 in the American Civil Liberties Union. The National Organization for Women, trade unions, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, and all colleges and universities were also “humanist.” Fifty percent of the legislators were committed to the religion of secular humanism.108 America, which had been founded as a Bible-based republic, had now become a secular state, a catastrophe, John Whitehead (president of the conservative Rutherford Institute) attributed to a gross misreading of the First Amendment. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed, Whitehead believed, to protect religion from the state, not vice versa.109 But now the humanist judges had made the state an object of worship: “The state is seen as secular,” he argued, but “the state is religious, because its ‘ultimate concern’ is the perpetuation of the state itself.” Secular humanism, therefore, amounted to a rebellion against God’s sovereignty, and its worship of the state was idolatrous.110 Not only had the conspiracy completely infiltrated American society, but it had also conquered the world. For the fundamentalist writer Pat Brooks, the secular humanists formed “a huge conspiratorial network” which was “fast approaching its goal of bringing in a ‘new world order,’ a vast world government that would reduce the world to slavery.”111 Like other fundamentalists, Brooks saw the enemy as omnipresent, and pursuing its objective relentlessly over a long period. He saw it at work in the Soviet Union, on Wall Street, in Zionism, in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve System. The cabal that was masterminding this international conspiracy included the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Kissinger, Brzezinski, the shah, and Omar Torrijos, the former Panamanian dictator.112 This terror of secular humanism was as irrational and as ungovernable as any of the other paranoid fantasies we have considered, and sprang from the same fear of annihilation. The Protestant fundamentalists’ view of modern society in general and of America in particular was as demonic as that of any Islamist. For Franky Schaeffer, for example, the West was about to enter

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

  on the grounds that their content was too warlike and might give the Goths ideas.80 It was not a stratagem crowned with success: the Goths remained enthusiastic for war, as the Roman Empire was to find out to its cost, and they came to see their theological difference from the imperial Church as an expression of their racial and cultural difference. When they eventually occupied large sections of the former Western Empire, they kept their faith intact and unsullied by Nicene Christianity for a long time (see pp. 323–4). Arianism might well have formed the future of Western Christianity. It will be immediately obvious, even from this brief summary of the Arian entanglement, how much imperial politics now affected Church affairs; but the emperors were deeply involved not so much because of their own religious convictions (though these might play a significant part), but because so many other people cared so much about the issues. Naturally clergy were passionately involved, and it is difficult to disentangle their righteous longing to assert the truth from their consciousness that the clerical immunities and privileges granted Christian clergy by Constantine and his successors were only available to those who had succeeded in convincing the emperors that they were the authentic voice of imperial Christianity. The play of forces was in more than one direction: emperors had no choice but to steer the Church to preserve their own rule, while few in the Church seem to have perceived the moral dangers involved when mobs took up theology and armies marched in the name of the Christian God. It may seem baffling now that such apparently rarefied disputes could have aroused the sort of passion now largely confined to the aftermath of a football match. Yet quite apart from the propensity of human beings to become irrationally tribal about the most obscure matters, we need to remember that ordinary Christians experienced their God through the Church’s liturgy and in a devotional intensity which seized them in holy places. Once they had experienced the divine in such particular settings, having absorbed one set of explanations about what the divine was, anything from outside which disrupted those explanations threatened their access to divine power. That would provide ample reason for the stirring of rage and fear. MIAPHYSITES AND NESTORIUS The entanglement of politics, popular passion and theology is even more painfully apparent in a new set of disputes which go under the name of the Miaphysite or Monophysite controversy. In these, the focus of theological debate shifted away from the relationship of Son to Father, as in Arianism, or of Spirit

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

  a wider appropriation of Byzantine pretensions: Ivan married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor and adopted the double-headed eagle once the symbol of Byzantine imperial power. Occasionally he would even use the title ‘Emperor’ – Tsar in Russian, in an echo of the imperial ‘Caesar’.42 There was an urgent purpose to this hasty donning of imperial clothes. Measures needed to be taken to prepare for the end of the world, at a time when God had seen fit to destroy the former empire in Constantinople. In both Byzantium and West Asian Islam, much faith was placed in calculations that the seventh millennium since creation was about to be completed; this meant that the Last Days were due in the year equivalent to mid-1492-3 in the Common Era. It was such a firm conviction in educated Muscovite circles that the Church did not think to prepare any liturgical kalendars for the years after 1492; these kalendars were essential guides to knowing when the movable feast days of Orthodoxy should be celebrated in any given year. Given the absence of any end to the world in 1492, the task had to be hastily undertaken by Metropolitan Zosima himself. But as is usually the way with the non-appearance of the End Times, the disappointed made the best of their disappointment. God’s mercy in sparing Muscovite society confirmed that he approved of the arrangements which Church and emperor were making for its future governance; it strengthened Muscovites in their sense of a divine imperial mission specifically entrusted to their polity.43 Church-building flourished as it had done in western Europe in the wake of that successfully negotiated millennium End Time in 1000 (see p. 365): more stone churches were built in Russia during the sixteenth century than in the whole of the previous history of Rus’.44 This festival of church-building spanned complementary impulses. On the one hand, there was a gleeful reassertion of tradition. The grand princes encouraged their architects to scrutinize what survived from the pre-Tatar Kievan past and reproduce it, as in the rebuilt Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, actually designed in the 1470s by an Italian, but on the strict orders of his patron, Ivan III, conscientiously looking to the models of the already venerable Dormition cathedrals in Kiev and Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma. On the other hand, architects struck out in new directions, to emphasize the triumph of Orthodoxy in what was now the only major Orthodox Church not under an alien yoke, either Muslim or Western Catholic. Exuberant adaptations of the Byzantine style emerged – in the same era during which churches in the captive Greek Orthodox world ceased to dominate the landscape of their now Ottoman environment, Russia’s churches aggressively bristled with gables and domes. The gables were named kokoshniki because of their resemblance to peasant women’s headdresses – a metaphor which identified the Church with its

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  WE CANNOT BE RELIGIOUS in the same way as our ancestors in the premodern conservative world, when the myths and rituals of faith helped people to accept limitations that were essential to agrarian civilization. We are now oriented to the future, and those of us who have been shaped by the rationalism of the modern world cannot easily understand the old forms of spirituality. We are not unlike Newton, one of the first people in the Western world to be wholly imbued by the scientific spirit, who found it impossible to understand mythology. However hard we try to embrace conventional religion, we have a natural tendency to see truth as factual, historical, and empirical. Many have become convinced that if faith is to be taken seriously, its myths must be shown to be historical and capable of working practically with all the efficiency that modernity expects. An increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe, which has experienced such tragedy during the twentieth century, have rejected religion. For those who see reason as providing the sole path to truth, this is a principled and honest position. As scientists would be the first to insist, rational logos cannot address questions of ultimate meaning that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing to say. Hence, there is a void at the heart of modern culture, which Western people experienced at an early stage of their scientific revolution. Pascal recoiled in dread from the emptiness of the cosmos; Descartes saw the human being as the sole living denizen of an inert universe; Hobbes imagined God retreating from the world, and Nietzsche declared that God was dead: humanity had lost its orientation and was hurtling toward an infinite nothingness. But others have felt emancipated by the loss of faith, and liberated from the restrictions it had always imposed. Sartre, who acknowledged the God-shaped hole in modern consciousness, argued that it was still our duty to reject deity, which negated our freedom. Albert Camus (1913–60) believed that rejecting God would enable men and women to concentrate all their attention and love upon humankind. Others put their faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, looking forward to a future in which human beings will become more rational and tolerant; they venerate the sacred liberty of the individual instead of a distant, imaginary God. They have created secularist forms of spirituality, which bring them insight, transcendence, and ecstasy, and which have developed their own disciplines of mind and heart.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Afghani’s religious vision was, therefore, fueled by the fear of annihilation that we have found to be a common response to the difficulties of modernity. He believed that it was not necessary to take on a European lifestyle in order to be modern. Muslims could do it their way. If they merely copied the British and French, superimposing Western values on their own traditions, they would lose themselves. They would simply be bad reproductions, neither one thing nor the other, and thus compound their weakness.55 They needed modern science and would have to learn it from Europe; however, this was in itself proof, he argued, “of our inferiority and decadence. We civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans.”56 Afghani had put his finger on a major difficulty. Where Western modernity had succeeded in large part by pursuing innovation and originality, Muslims could only modernize their society by imitation. The modernizing program had an inherent and inescapable flaw. Afghani had, therefore, perceived a real problem, but his solution, which sounded attractive, was not feasible because it expected too much of religion. He was correct in his prediction that a loss of cultural identity would result in weakness, malaise, and anomie. He was also right to argue that Islam must change in order to deal creatively with these radically new conditions. But a religious reform could not of itself modernize a country and stave off the Western threat. Unless Egypt could industrialize, develop a vibrant modern economy, and transcend the limitations of agrarian civilization, no ideology could bring the country to the same level as Europe. In the West, the modern ideals of autonomy, democracy, intellectual freedom, and toleration had been as much a product of the economy as of the philosophers and political scientists. Events would shortly prove that no matter how free and modern Egyptians might feel themselves to be, their economic weakness would make them politically vulnerable and dependent upon the West, and this humiliating subservience would make it even harder for them to cultivate a truly modern spirit.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  First, it is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at one time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning, and even satanic to a fundamentalist. If a patient brought such paranoid, conspiracy-laden, and vengeful fantasies to a therapist, he or she would undoubtedly be diagnosed as disturbed. The premillennial vision, which views some of the most positive institutions of modernity as diabolic, harbors genocidal dreams, and sees humanity as rushing toward a horrific End, is a clear indication of the dread and disappointment that modernity has inspired in many Protestant fundamentalists. We have seen the nihilism that can inform the fundamentalist program. It is impossible to reason such fear away or attempt to eradicate it by coercive measures. A more imaginative response would be to try to appreciate the depth of this neurosis, even if a liberal or a secularist cannot share this dread-ridden perspective. Second, it is important to realize that these movements are not an archaic throwback to the past; they are modern, innovative, and modernizing. Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of premodern spirituality. Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih was a shocking and revolutionary overturning of centuries of Shii tradition. Muslim thinkers preached a liberation theology and produced an anti-imperialist ideology that was in tune with other Third World movements of their time. Even ultra-Orthodox Jews, who seemed resolutely to turn their backs upon modern society, found that their yeshivot were essentially modern, voluntarist institutions. They adopted a novel stringency in their observance of the Torah and learned to manipulate the political system in a way that brought them more power than any religious Jew had enjoyed for nearly two millennia.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In the light of what came later, the emphasis placed on sexuality was significant. The New Christian Right was just as concerned about the position of women as the Islamists, but theirs was a far more frightened vision. The women’s liberation movement filled fundamentalist men and women alike with terror. For Phyllis Schlafly, one of the Roman Catholic leaders of Moral Majority, feminism was a “disease,” the cause of all the world’s ills. Ever since Eve disobeyed God and sought her own liberation, feminism had brought sin into the world and with it “fear, sickness, pain, anger, hatred, danger, violence and all varieties of ugliness.”91 The proposed Equal Rights Amendment was a government plot to create higher taxes, Soviet-style nurseries, “and the federalization of all remaining aspects of our life.”92 For Beverley LaHaye, feminism was “more than an illness”; based on Marxist and humanist teachings, “it is a philosophy of death.… Radical feminists are self-destructive and are trying to bring about the death of an entire civilization as well.” It was up to Christian women to take active steps to move their husbands back to center stage and reeducate themselves in the ethos of feminine self-sacrifice. It was their duty “to save our society,” bringing “civilization and humanity to the twenty-first century.”93 The conflation of feminism with the other evils that had long haunted the fundamentalist imagination is evidence of conspiracy fear. They associated the integrity and even the survival of their society with the traditional position of women.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Islamists such as Afghani, Abdu, Shariati, and Khomeini wanted to use Muslim ingredients to bake their own distinctive and modern cake. But it has been hard for some Westerners, who no longer think in a religious way, to appreciate this resurgence of faith, especially when it has expressed itself violently and cruelly. Frequently, modern society has become divided into “two nations”: secularists and religious living in the same country cannot speak one another’s language or see things from the same point of view. What seems sacred and positive in one camp appears demonic and deranged in the other. Secularists and religious both feel profoundly threatened by one another, and when there is a clash of two wholly irreconcilable worldviews, as in the Salman Rushdie affair, the sense of estrangement and alienation is only exacerbated. It is an unhealthy and potentially dangerous situation. Fundamentalism is not going away. In some places it is either going from strength to strength or becoming more extreme. What can the liberal, secular establishment do to build bridges and avert the possibility of future battles? Suppression and coercion are clearly not the answer. They invariably lead to a backlash and can make fundamentalists or potential fundamentalists more extreme. Protestant fundamentalists in the United States became more reactionary, intransigent, and literal-minded after their humiliation at the Scopes trial. The most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism surfaced in Nasser’s concentration camps, and the shah’s crackdowns helped to inspire the Islamic Revolution. Fundamentalism is an embattled faith; it anticipates imminent annihilation. Not surprisingly, Jewish fundamentalists, be they Zionist or ultra-Orthodox, are still haunted by fears of holocaust and anti-Semitic catastrophe. Repression has bitten deeply into the souls of those who have experienced secularization as aggressive, and has warped their religious vision, making it violent and intolerant in its turn. Fundamentalists see conspiracy everywhere and are sometimes possessed by a rage that seems demonic. And yet, attempting to exploit fundamentalism for secular, pragmatic ends is also counterproductive. Sadat courted the Muslims of Egypt and wooed the jamaat al-islamiyyah to give legitimacy to his regime and build his own power base. Israel supported HAMAS initially, as a way of undermining the PLO. In both cases, the attempt to manipulate and control recoiled tragically and fatally on the secularist state. A more just and objective appraisal of the meaning of these religious movements must be sought. First, it is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at one time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out.

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

  IV, known to anglophone history as ‘the Terrible’.56 Even by the poisonous standards of the Muscovite Court, few rulers have had an experience of brutality in their formative years appalling enough to equal Ivan’s. A puppet ruler at the age of three on the sudden death of his father, Vasilii III in 1533, he experienced the probable death by poisoning of his mother when he was eight, after she had imprisoned, tortured and murdered a variety of dynastic rivals; at the age of thirteen he managed to secure the beating to death of the prince who had seized power after his mother, and who had humiliated him and his handicapped but much-loved younger brother. This was the beginning of a lifetime of exercising power through terror which intensified when the years of regency ended and Ivan assumed full power in 1547.57 It was not surprising that Ivan graduated from childhood sadism towards animals to the bestial treatment of anyone who might be regarded as getting in his way, and of many who were entirely innocent of any such possibility. The only countervailing influence during his unlovely upbringing was the Metropolitan Makarii, a ‘Possessor’ monk and a noted painter of icons, who did his best to recall the boy to the meaning of the Christian faith which he practised. As a result of the Metropolitan’s intervention, and Ivan’s frequent visits to the great holy places of Muscovy, the Grand Prince’s career of tyranny, murder and power-seeking was shot through with an intense and justified concern for the welfare of his soul. It was also probably Makarii who prompted Ivan to be crowned in 1547 as Tsar, in a now permanent augmentation of the title of Grand Prince, although naturally Ivan retained the old title to emphasize his place as heir to all Rus’. Now there was a self-promoted Christian emperor in the East to rival the seven-centuries-old self-promotion of Charlemagne and his successors in the West. For the first dozen or so years of his reign, the new tsar was intent, like many of his fellow European monarchs, on building up his personal power against any other power base in his dominions, but he ruled with the assistance of a competent set of advisers and set about a rational reordering of the temporal and Church government of Muscovy, codifying laws, reorganizing the army and presiding over that major reforming Church council ‘of the Hundred Chapters’ in 1551 which, among its other measures, elevated the art of Andrei Rublev into a universal standard (see pp. 521–2). One can only speculate how Ivan, after taking such an active role in Church affairs, would have reacted to Pope Pius IV’s invitation to him in 1561 to send representatives to the Pope’s parallel contemporary reforming Council at Trent; the Tsar never got to hear about it. The Catholic Poles, horrified at the prospect that their Muscovite enemies might receive any sort of hearing at Trent, blocked two successive papal envoys from

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  19 Howard W. Kellogg of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles insisted that the philosophy of evolution was responsible for “a monster plotting world domination, the wreck of civilization, and the destruction of Christianity itself.” 20 This acrimonious and, on both sides, unchristian dispute had clearly touched a raw nerve, and evoked a deep fear of annihilation. There was no longer any possibility of reconciliation on the subject of the Higher Criticism, which, for the conservatives, now had an aura of absolute evil. The literal truth of scripture was a matter of the life and death of Christianity itself. The critics’ attacks on the Bible would result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, the Baptist minister John Straton declared in a famous sermon entitled “Will New York City Be Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?” 21 The conflict had got out of hand and it would become almost impossible to heal the rift. In August 1917, William Bell Riley had sat down with A. C. Dixon (1854–1925), one of the editors of The Fundamentals , and the revivalist Reuben Torrey (1856–1928) and decided to form an association to promote the literal interpretation of scripture and the “scientific” doctrines of premillennialism. In 1919 Riley held a massive conference in Philadelphia, attended by six thousand conservative Christians from all the Protestant denominations, and formally established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA). Immediately afterward, Riley escorted fourteen speakers with a troupe of Gospel singers on a superbly organized tour of the United States, which visited eighteen cities. The liberals were entirely unprepared for this onslaught, and the response to the fundamentalist speakers was so enthusiastic that Riley believed that he had launched a new Reformation. 22 The fundamentalist campaign was perceived as a battle. Constantly, the leaders used military imagery. “I believe the time has come,” wrote E. A. Wollam in the Christian Workers Magazine , “when the evangelistic forces of this country, primarily the Bible Institutes, should not only rise up in defense of the faith, but should become a united and offensive power.” In the same issue, James M. Gray agreed, calling for the need “for an offensive and defensive alliance in the Church.” 23 At a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920, Curtis Lee Laws defined the “fundamentalist” as one who was ready to regain territory which had been lost to Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” 24 Riley went further. This was not just an isolated battle, “it is a war from which there is no discharge.” 25 The fundamentalists’ next objective was to expel the liberals from the denominations. Most of the fundamentalists were either Baptists or Presbyterians, and it was here that the fiercest battles were fought.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. No criticism of or opposition to the government was permitted. Khomeini’s relationship with the other Grand Ayatollahs deteriorated during 1981, and there was virtually a state of war between the radical Islamists, who wanted a complete return to Shariah law on the one hand, and the secularists and laymen on the left. On July 22, 1981, Bani Sadr, who had been president for only a year, was deposed and fled to Paris. On June 28, Khomeini’s chief clerical ally, Ayatollah Bihishti, and seventy-five members of the Islamic Revolutionary party were killed in a bomb attack on the party headquarters.11 Until this point, Khomeini had preferred to give laymen the top jobs, but in October, he permitted Hojjat ol-Islam Ali Khameini to become president. Clerics were now in a majority in the Majlis. By 1983, all political opposition to the regime had been suppressed. The Mujahedin-e Khalq went underground after the departure of Bani Sadr; the National Front, the National Democratic party (led by Musaddiq’s grandson), and Shariatmadari’s Muslim People’s Republican party had all been disbanded. Increasingly, Khomeini called for “unity of expression.”12

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  These were frightening times for the people of the West on both sides of the Atlantic. The Reformation had been a fearful rupture, dividing Europe into viciously hostile camps. Protestants and Catholics had persecuted one another in England; there had been a civil war in France between Protestants and Catholics (1562–63), and a nationwide massacre of Protestants in 1572. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had devastated Europe, drawing in one nation after another, a power struggle with a strong religious dimension which killed any hope of a reunited Europe. There was political unrest also. In 1642, England was convulsed by a civil war that resulted in the execution of King Charles I (1649) and the establishment of a republic under the Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, its powers were curtailed by Parliament. More democratic institutions were painfully and bloodily emerging in the West. Even more catastrophic was the French Revolution of 1789, which was succeeded by a reign of terror and a military dictatorship, before order was restored under Napoleon. The French Revolution’s legacy to the modern world was Janus-faced: it promoted the benevolent Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but it also left a memory of malignant state terrorism, which has been equally influential. In the American colonies also, the Seven Years War (1756–63), in which Britain and France fought one another over their imperial possessions, raged down the eastern coast of America with fearful casualties. This led directly to the War of Independence (1775–83) and the creation of the first secular republic of the modern world. A more just and tolerant social order was coming to birth in the West, but this was only achieved after almost two centuries of violence.