Grief

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 55 of 263 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Kotler believed that his students kept the whole world in existence. God had created the heavens and the earth simply in order that men could study the Torah. Only if the Jewish people studied the Holy Law day and night would it fulfill its vocation. If they stopped, “the universe would be immediately destroyed.”25 It was a piety that sprang from too close a brush with total annihilation. Any secular study not only was a waste of time, but was tantamount to assimilation with the murderous gentile culture. Any form of Judaism which tried to absorb aspects of modern culture—religious Zionism, Reform, Conservative, or Neo-Orthodox—was illegitimate.26 In a world that had recently dedicated itself to the destruction of Judaism, there could be no such compromise. The true Jew must separate himself from this world and devote himself wholly to the texts. The new postwar yeshivot reflected the desperation of fundamentalist spirituality. The holy texts were all that remained from the Jews’ crushing confrontation with modernity during the twentieth century. Six million of the Jewish people had been killed; the yeshivot and Hasidic courts had all been destroyed, together with countless classics of Jewish learning; the lifestyle of the ghetto had gone forever, and with it an intimate knowledge of centuries of traditional observance; the Holy Land was being polluted by the Zionists. All that a zealous Jew could do to fill the void was to cling to the texts which preserved his last link with the divine. The destruction of the Holocaust had changed the nature of Torah study. In the ghetto world, many of the traditional rites and practices had been accepted as a “given”; there had been no alternative way of living or observing the Torah. The first generation of refugees still had that knowledge of exactly how these rites should be performed in their bones, but their children and grandchildren, who were so anxious to re-create the lost world of their murdered ancestors, were no longer so instinctively aware of this customal observance, which had never needed to be written down formally. The only way they could recover this vanishing Torah world was to comb the texts for scraps of information. From the 1950s, the yeshiva world was flooded by learned monographs describing in minute and complicated detail procedures which in pre-Holocaust Europe had seemed natural and a matter of course. Each succeeding generation would depend on such scholarship more than its predecessors.27 As a result of the destruction, Jewish life was more text-bound and reliant on the written word than ever before.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Some have found that, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, they can only see God as the suffering, impotent divinity of Zimzum, who is not in control of creation. 16 The imagery of the divine sparks trapped in matter and the restorative mission of tikkun still inspires modern and fundamentalist Jewish movements. Lurianic Kabbalah was, like all true myth, a revelation that showed Jews what their lives basically were and what they meant. The myth contained its own truth, and was at some deep level self-evident. It neither could receive nor did it require rational demonstration. Today we should call the Lurianic myth a symbol or a metaphor, but this also is to rationalize it. In the original Greek, the word “symbol” meant to throw two things together so that they became inseparable. As soon as Western people began to say that a rite or an icon was “only a symbol,” the modern consciousness, which insists upon such separations, had arrived. In traditional religion, myth is inseparable from cult, which brings eternal reality into the mundane lives of worshippers by means of ceremonies and meditative practices. Despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so crucial to the Jewish experience had it not been expressed in eloquent rituals that evoked within the exiles a sense of transcendent meaning. In Safed, Kabbalists devised special rites to reenact Luria’s theology. They would make night vigils to help them to identify with the Shekhinah, whom they imagined as a woman, wandering in distress through the world, yearning for her divine source. Jews would rise at midnight, remove their shoes, weep, and rub their faces in the dust. These ritual actions served to express their own sense of grief and abandonment, and to link them with the experience of loss endured also by the Divine Presence. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation that lies at the heart of so much human distress, but which is central to the suffering of exile. There were penitential disciplines—fastings, lashings, rolling in the snow—performed as acts of tikkun . Kabbalists would go for long walks through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah and acting out their own sense of homelessness. Jewish law insisted that prayer could have its deepest force and meaning only when performed communally, in a group of at least ten males; but in Safed, Jews were instructed to pray alone, to experience fully their very real sense of isolation and vulnerability in the world. This solitary prayer put some distance between the Jew and the rest of society, prepared him for a different type of experience, and helped him to appreciate anew the perilous isolation of the Jewish people in a world that constantly threatened its existence. 17 But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The myth of Husain had kept the passion for social justice alive in the Shiah, but his story and the story of the Imams also showed how impossible it was to implement this divine ideal in a world that could not accommodate radical change. 64 But this no longer applied in the modern world. Iranians were experiencing change to an alarming degree; they could not respond to the old rites and symbols in the same way. Shariati was attempting to reformulate Shiism so that it could speak to Muslims in this deeply altered world. Shariati insisted that Islam was more dynamic than any other faith. Its very terminology showed its progressive thrust. In the West, the word “politics” derived from the Greek polis (“city”), a static administrative unit, but the Islamic equivalent was siyasat , which literally meant “taming a wild horse,” a process implying a forceful struggle to bring out an inherent perfection. 65 The Arabic terms ummah and imam both derived from the root amm (“decision to go”): the Imam, therefore, was a model who would take the people in a new direction. The community (ummah) was not simply a collection of individuals but was goal-oriented, ready for perpetual revolution. 66 The notion of ijtihad (“independent judgment”) implied a constant intellectual effort to renew and rebuild; it was not, Shariati insisted, the privilege of a few ulema , but the duty of every Muslim. 67 The centrality of hijrah (“migration”) to the Muslim experience implied a readiness for change, and an uprooting that kept Muslims in touch with the newness of existence. 68 Even intizar (“waiting for the return of the Hidden Imam”) suggested a constant alertness to the possibility of transformation and implied a refusal to accept the status quo: “It makes [man’s] responsibility for his own course, the course of truth, the course of mankind, heavy, immediate, logical, and vital.” The Shiism of Ali was a faith that compelled Muslims to stand up and say “No!” 69 The regime could not permit this kind of talk, and in 1973 the husainiyyah was closed down. Shariati was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. He then endured a period of internal exile in Iran, before being permitted to leave the country. His father recalled that one night during this period, he heard Shariati weeping as he bade farewell to the Prophet and Imam Ali before his death. 70 In 1977, Shariati died in London, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents. Shariati prepared the educated, Westernized Iranians for an Islamic revolution. He was as pivotal a figure for intellectuals during the 1970s as Al-e Ahmad had been in the sixties.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the beginning of 1977, however, the regime relaxed somewhat and appeared to bow to public pressure. Jimmy Carter had been elected to the presidency of the United States the previous year, and his human rights campaign, plus a damning report from Amnesty International about the state of Iran’s courts and prisons, may have inclined the shah to make some concession to the prevailing discontent. There was little real change, but the censorship laws were eased and a flood of literature hit the market revealing frustration in nearly every sector of society. The students were angry about government interference in the universities; farmers protested about the agricultural imports, which had increased the poverty in the countryside; businessmen were worried about inflation and corruption; lawyers protested against the decision to downgrade the Supreme Court.53 But there was still no call for revolution. Most of the ulema in Iran followed the lead of Shariatmadari and maintained the traditional quietist line. It was not the clergy but the writers of Iran who made the most eloquent protest against the government in 1977. From October 10 to 19, in the Goethe Institute in Tehran, about sixty leading Iranian poets and writers read their work to thousands of adults and students. SAVAK did not interrupt these poetry recitals, despite their outright hostility to the regime.54 It seemed as though the government was learning to accommodate peaceful protest. But the new era did not last long. Not long after the poetry meetings, the shah clearly felt that matters were getting out of hand. A number of known dissidents were arrested and on November 3, 1977, Khomeini’s son Mustafa died mysteriously in Iraq, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents.55 Yet again, the shah had cast himself in the role of Yazid. Khomeini was already surrounded by a Shii aura and had begun to seem a little like the Hidden Imam in his exile; now, like Imam Husain, his son had been killed by a tyrannical ruler. All over Iran, the people gathered to mourn Mustafa Khomeini, weeping and beating their breasts in the traditional manner. In Tehran, the police attacked the mourners, and there were more arrests and beatings during poetry readings held in Tehran on November 15, 16, and 25. But still there was no sign of a general uprising. In Najaf, Khomeini, who used to call Mustafa the “light of his eyes,” was silent.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In traditional religion, myth is inseparable from cult, which brings eternal reality into the mundane lives of worshippers by means of ceremonies and meditative practices. Despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so crucial to the Jewish experience had it not been expressed in eloquent rituals that evoked within the exiles a sense of transcendent meaning. In Safed, Kabbalists devised special rites to reenact Luria’s theology. They would make night vigils to help them to identify with the Shekhinah, whom they imagined as a woman, wandering in distress through the world, yearning for her divine source. Jews would rise at midnight, remove their shoes, weep, and rub their faces in the dust. These ritual actions served to express their own sense of grief and abandonment, and to link them with the experience of loss endured also by the Divine Presence. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation that lies at the heart of so much human distress, but which is central to the suffering of exile. There were penitential disciplines—fastings, lashings, rolling in the snow—performed as acts of tikkun. Kabbalists would go for long walks through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah and acting out their own sense of homelessness. Jewish law insisted that prayer could have its deepest force and meaning only when performed communally, in a group of at least ten males; but in Safed, Jews were instructed to pray alone, to experience fully their very real sense of isolation and vulnerability in the world. This solitary prayer put some distance between the Jew and the rest of society, prepared him for a different type of experience, and helped him to appreciate anew the perilous isolation of the Jewish people in a world that constantly threatened its existence.17 But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy. The midnight rituals always ended at dawn with a meditation upon the final reunion of the Shekhinah with Ein Sof and, consequently, the end of the separation of humanity from the divine. The Kabbalist was instructed to imagine that every one of his limbs was an earthly shrine for the Divine Presence.18 All the world religions insist that no spirituality is valid unless it results in practical compassion, and Lurianic Kabbalah was true to this insight. There were severe penances for faults that injured others: for sexual exploitation, for malicious gossip, for humiliating one’s fellows, and for dishonoring parents.19

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To break the deadlock with the Council of Guardians, the energetic Speaker of the Majlis, Hojjat ol-Islam Hashemi Rafsanjani, urged Khomeini to use his authority as Supreme Faqih to get the Land Bill passed. The constitution gave the Faqih final say on all Islamic matters, and he could overrule the decision of the Council of Guardians. Khomeini could, Rafsanjani suggested, cite the Islamic principle of maslahah (“public necessity”), which allowed a jurist to legislate “secondary ordinances” about issues not directly provided for in the Koran and the Sunnah, if the welfare of the people demanded it. But Khomeini did not wish to do this. He was beginning to realize that the position of the Supreme Faqih could weaken the authority of the institutions that the Islamic republic needed if it was to survive in the modern world. He was an old man. If he kept intervening and overturning the decisions of government institutions on the basis of his personal charisma, the Majlis and Council would lose their credibility and integrity, and the Islamic constitution would not survive his death. The impasse between the Council and the Majlis continued. Khomeini tried to shame the ulema by pointing to the example of the Iranian children who were dying every day as martyrs in the war with Iraq. These child martyrs show the moral dangers of translating a mystical insight into practical policy. From the moment war was declared, adolescents had crowded into the mosques begging to be sent to the front. Many of them came from the slums and shantytowns and had been radicalized during the Revolution. Afterward, they found their inevitably dull and grim lives an anticlimax. Some had joined the Foundation for the Downtrodden or worked for Construction Jihad, but this could not compare with the excitement of the battlefield. Iran was technically ill-equipped for the war; there had been a population explosion, and the youth formed the majority group in the country. The Foundation for the Downtrodden became the nucleus of an army of twenty million young people who were eager for action. The government passed an edict which allowed male children from the age of twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They would become the wards of the Imam, and could be assured of a place in paradise in the event of their death. Tens of thousands of adolescents, wearing crimson headbands (the insignia of a martyr), poured into the war zone. Some cleared minefields, running ahead of the troops and often getting blown to pieces. Others became suicide-bombers, attacking Iraqi tanks kamikaze-style. Special scribes were sent to the front to write their wills, many of which took the form of letters to Imam Khomeini, and spoke of the light he had brought into their lives and of the joy of fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”25

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The destruction of the Holocaust had changed the nature of Torah study. In the ghetto world, many of the traditional rites and practices had been accepted as a “given”; there had been no alternative way of living or observing the Torah. The first generation of refugees still had that knowledge of exactly how these rites should be performed in their bones, but their children and grandchildren, who were so anxious to re-create the lost world of their murdered ancestors, were no longer so instinctively aware of this customal observance, which had never needed to be written down formally. The only way they could recover this vanishing Torah world was to comb the texts for scraps of information. From the 1950s, the yeshiva world was flooded by learned monographs describing in minute and complicated detail procedures which in pre-Holocaust Europe had seemed natural and a matter of course. Each succeeding generation would depend on such scholarship more than its predecessors. 27 As a result of the destruction, Jewish life was more text-bound and reliant on the written word than ever before. There was a new stringency in fundamentalist Judaism. By the 1960s, Rabbi Simla Elberg, then visiting Bnei Brak, noted that an “extensive revolution in the entire alignment of the religious life” was taking place there. The Jews in the “city of Torah” were observing the commandments far more rigorously than ever before. 28 This effort to obey the law more fully than had been possible in previous ages was heroic: it was a way of incarnating the divine in a world that had been brutally emptied of God. The Haredim of Bnei Brak were finding new ways of being punctilious and exact about such questions as diet and purification, even if this made their lives more difficult. The Hazon Ish had set the tone in the 1930s, when he first arrived in Palestine. A group of religious Zionists had approached him with a query. They wanted to observe Jewish agricultural law in their settlement, and to farm the Holy Land according to the Torah. Did that mean that every seven years they should let their fields lie fallow, as the law enjoined? 29 To observe this “sabbatical year” would obviously cause great hardship and was a practice utterly opposed to the techniques of modern agriculture, which were designed for maximum efficiency. Rabbi Kook had found a legal loophole for the settlers, but the Hazon Ish was adamantly opposed to such leniency (kula) . The challenge, he said, lay precisely in the difficulty. The law demanded that the farmer sacrifice his prosperity for a higher good.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Spanish Jewry was destroyed. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen, went into exile. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews all over the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE , when the Jews lost their land and were forced into exile in scattered communities outside Palestine, known collectively as the Diaspora. From that time on, exile was a painful leitmotif of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 came at the end of a century that had seen the ejection of Jews from one part of Europe after another. They were deported from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Augsburg in 1439, from Bavaria in 1442, and from the crown cities of Moravia in 1454. Jews were expelled from Perugia (1485), Vicenza (1486), Parma (1488), Milan and Lucca (1489), and Tuscany in 1494. Gradually the Jews drifted east, establishing, as they thought, a foothold for themselves in Poland. 7 Exile now seemed an endemic and inescapable part of the Jewish condition. This was certainly the conviction of those Spanish Jews who after the expulsion took refuge in the North African and Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire. They were used to Muslim society, but the loss of Spain—or Sefarad, as they called it—had inflicted a deep psychic wound. These Sephardic Jews felt that they themselves and everything else were in the wrong place. 8 Exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. The world of the exile is wholly unfamiliar and, therefore, without meaning. A violent uprooting, which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world, snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, and plunges us permanently in an alien environment, can make us feel that our very existence has been jeopardized. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent questions about the problem of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God. The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Thus on February 18, forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds of mourners, led by the ulema and bazaaris, swarmed onto the streets of major Iranian cities to weep for the dead. Women students, many of whom wore the veil to dissociate themselves from the regime, and chadored women from the bazaar often led the processions, as if to challenge the police to fire directly at them. The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted.66 Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd.67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.”68 The word for martyr, shaheed, meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology.69

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Only that for my beloved Gennie, pain had become enough of a reason not to stay. And our friendship had not been able to alter that. I remembered Gennie’s favorite lines in one of my poems. I had found them doodled and scrawled along the margins of page after page of the notebooks which she had entrusted to my care in the movies that Friday afternoon. and in the brief moment that is today wild hope this dreamer jars for I have heard in whispers talk of life on other stars. None of us had given her a good enough reason to stay here, not even me. I could not escape that. Was that the anger behind her great closed eyes? The skin of Gennie’s cheek was hot and rough under my fingers. Why what? You know why . Those were the last words Gennie ever said to me. Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go. I mustn’t let her go. Two dozen empty capsules. Sitting through the movie twice. Standing on the corner waiting for the 14th Street bus. I should never have left her. But it was getting dark already. Scared of another whipping for getting home too late. Come home with me, Gennie. Not caring any more what my mother would say to that. Gennie, angry with me. Telling me to go away. I went . Don’t go, Gennie, don’t go. By Monday afternoon Genevieve was dead. I called the hospital from Hunter. I walked out of the building and went home, leaving my books behind, wanting to be alone. My mother opened the door. She put one arm around me as I walked into the kitchen. “Genevieve’s dead, Mother.” I sat down heavily at the table. “Yes, I know. I called her father to see if there was anything we could do, and he told me.” She was looking into my face. “Why didn’t you tell us it was suicide?” I wanted to cry—even that little piece was gone. “It’s her father himself said so. Do you know anything about it? You can tell me, I’m your mother, after all. We won’t say anything more about your lying this time. Did she talk to you about it?” I put my head down on the table. From there I could see out the kitchen window, slightly open. The woman across the air shaft was fixing food. “No.” “I’ll fix you some tea. You mustn’t be upset too much by all this, dear heart.” My mother turned, rubbing the edge of the tea strainer dry, over and over again. “Look, my darling child, I know she was your friend and you feel bad, but this is what I been cautioning you about. Be careful who you go around with.

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

  for ceremonies such as baptism and ordination which is known as the Liturgy of Addai and Mari. That lends it an association with those whom the Syrian Church reveres as its founders, but there is little doubt that it was the form of eucharistic prayer used in the Church of Edessa and it may be as early as the late second century. Nothing else preserved from anywhere in the Christian world has survived the austere scrutiny of modern liturgical scholars, to be authenticated as a form of worship that would have been familiar to very early Christians week by week.70 It is a rare privilege to have been welcomed as I was to a congregation of exiled Christians from Baghdad in their refuge in Damascus, still mourning those murdered in the latest agonies of the Syriac Church, and to know that words were being solemnly sung as so many centuries ago they had first been chanted in Edessa: Your majesty, O Lord, a thousand thousand heavenly beings worship, and myriad myriads of angels, hosts of spiritual beings, ministers of fire and spirit with cherubim and holy seraphim, glorify your name, crying out and glorifying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, God almighty, Heaven and earth are full of his glories’… Since Syrians lived either side of the shifting frontier between Rome and its eastern neighbours, the Church was naturally as liable to spread eastwards as westwards. At the beginning of the third century, Bar-Daisan could speak of Christian communities in the sprawling regions of Central Asia which now form such ex-Soviet Republics as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while from further south Christian graves have been found on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf which can be dated to the mid-third century. The Parthians showed little hostility to this new religion, but there was a significant shift with the founding of the Sassanian Empire in the 220s; the first restored shah, Ardashir, was the grandson of a high priest of the Zoroastrian faith and a Zoroastrian restoration became a keynote of the new empire’s drive to restore Iranian tradition.71 Relations between episcopal Christians and Manichaeans were tense enough, but that was because they had much in common in the role which they assigned to Jesus Christ. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity. Like Manichaeism, it was a dualist faith, but it was not the dualism which led Manichees and gnostics to regard the world and matter as evil. The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being, in which the world created by the ‘Wise Lord’ (Ahura Mazda) was the forum for a struggle between the creator and an uncreated ‘Evil Spirit’ (Ahriman). The Zoroastrians’ experience of the world was therefore shot through with divinity; Zoroastrians made animal sacrifices to Ahura Mazda and paid reverence to fire. They despised Christian and Manichaean asceticism, which were developing in Syria just as the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I woke the next day as I always did, with the image of my mother’s face fixed in my mind, only this time it didn’t recede. She looked at me through the car window, then the door opened and we tumbled into her. I buried my face in her neck and wept into her hair. “You’re here. You’re really here.” Gary climbed all over her. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he called again and again. “Yes, yes, I’m really here. It’s okay. It’s okay now.” That morning in Baton Rouge Mama promised she would never leave again. By the time the revival ended, she had changed her mind. “It’s just for two or three months, kids. There’s no one to play for the revivals right now, and until we find someone, I have to do it.” She said it broke her heart to leave us, and I believe it did. She cried and cried as she climbed into the backseat of someone’s old black Chevy. My brother, a quiet, easygoing kid, fell apart as the car drove away. He climbed the chain-link fence and when someone pulled him down, he kicked and flailed and cut his legs on the pointed metal pieces at the top. Blood ran in small streams down his legs as he raced the length of the fence howling, “No,” his mouth stretched into a wide, red o, like the entrance to a fun house. My mom’s face, framed in the car’s rear window, wore a look of surprise. Her arm waved from side to side, good- bye, good-bye. I watched the car grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared into that thin space where heaven and earth meet. The End-Time 1966–2001 SUPPOSE YOU BREAK THIS WORLD TO BITS, ANOTHER MAY ARISE. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1843, the French writer Gérard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city. Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.… What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French. 51 The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad Ali and Ismail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence: Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated. The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role. 52 The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation . For the vast majority of the people, who were not involved in the process, it was also an experience of alienation. A “modern” city, such as Muhammad Ali’s Cairo, was built on entirely different principles from those that gave meaning to the indigenous towns of Egypt. As Gilsenan points out, tourists, colonialists, and travelers have often found Oriental cities confusing and even frightening: the unnamed and unnumbered streets and twisting passages seem to have no order or orientation; Westerners get lost and can make no sense of their surroundings. For most of the colonized peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, the new Westernized cities were equally incomprehensible, and bore no relation to their instinctive sense of what a city should be. They frequently felt lost in their own country. Many of these superimposed Westernized cities surrounded the “old town,” which, in comparison, looked dark, threatening, and outside the rationally ordered modern world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The shahs tried to counter these objections by appealing to the popular religion of the masses, especially by associating themselves with the mourning ceremonies for Husain. They had their own rawda-khans, who recited the epic accounts of the Kerbala tragedy every day; they built a royal stage in Tehran for the performance of the annual passion play (taziyeh) commemorating Husain’s death, which took place on five consecutive nights during the sacred month of Muharram in the great court of the royal palace. The battle between Husain and Yazid was enacted, the deaths of the Imam and his sons depicted, and, on the night of the fast-day of Ashura, the anniversary of the Kerbala disaster, there was a grand procession, in which effigies of the martyrs (complete with lifesize representations of their shrines and whole choirs of children) were carried through the streets, while the common people followed, beating their breasts. Throughout Muharram, all the mosques were festooned in black drapery, and in the public squares, booths were erected for the rawda-khans, who chanted the dirge mournfully and loudly. By this date, there were a number of celebrated rawda-khans in the country who competed with one another for preeminence.

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

  the Yemeni city of Najrān (now in south-west Saudi Arabia), attracted by an existing Christian community, and the city became a major centre for Miaphysite Christianity. In 523 or 524 its population suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of their overlord, Yusuf as’ar Yath’ar of the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar; in the previous century, his family had converted to Judaism and his campaigns were expressions of his own militant zeal for recreating Israel in Arabia. King Kaleb of Ethiopia, already provoked by Yusuf’s killing of Ethiopian soldiers, forcefully intervened across the Red Sea after this outrage and defeated and killed Yusuf.34 With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad (see pp. 255–9). The memory of the end of the Marib dam, when Sheba’s gardens were replaced ‘with others that yielded bitter fruit’, was still traumatic enough to win a mention in Muhammad’s revelations in the Qur’an, where the disaster was described as a punishment from God for Sheba’s faithlessness.35 But before we meet the new prophet and the impact of his faith on the world, we must turn to the other dissidence against Chalcedon: the Church of the East, the Dyophysite heirs of Theodore of Mopsuestia. THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451–622) At the time of the Council of Chalcedon, with Nestorius declared a non-person despite the council’s quiet acceptance of much of his theology, matters looked dire for defiant Dyophysites. They had no power base in the Byzantine Empire comparable to Miaphysite Alexandria, and even eastwards beyond the imperial frontier there was no secure refuge for them among Syrian Christians in the Sassanian Empire. The mid-fifth century saw renewed pogroms of Christians by the Zoroastrian authorities. In the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The ulema certainly experienced the dawn of modernity as destructive. They had been a power in the land when Muhammad Ali became governor. He wooed them, made them promises, and for three years there was a honeymoon period between the pasha and the clergy. In 1809, however, the ulema lost their traditional tax-exempt status, and Umar Makram urged them to oppose Muhammad Ali and force him to rescind the new taxes. But the ulema had rarely shown a united front, and the pasha was able to lure a significant number into his own camp. Makram was exiled and with him went the last opportunity for the ulema to oppose Muhammad Ali. His departure was also a defeat for the ulema as a class. As a Muslim, Muhammad Ali was careful to pay lip service to the religious scholars and the madrasahs, but he systematically marginalized them, and divested them of any shred of power. He deposed sheikhs who defied him and, as a result, Jabarti says, most ulema acquiesced in the new policies. He also starved them financially. By seizing the revenues of the religiously endowed properties (awqaf), he took away the ulema’s principal source of income. By 1815 a large number of the traditional Koran schools were in ruins. Sixty years later, the Islamic establishment was in desperate financial straits. There were no stipends for teachers, and mosques could no longer afford to support their prayer leaders, muezzins, Koran reciters, and caretakers. The great Mamluk buildings had deteriorated, and even the Azhar was in a wretched state.44 In the face of this onslaught, the ulema of Egypt became cowed and reactionary. Their traditional consultative role in the government was taken by the new foreign elite of administrators, most of whom had little respect for local tradition. The ulema were left behind in the march for progress, and the pasha left them alone with their books and manuscripts. Since opposition had become impossible, the ulema turned their backs on change, entrenching themselves in their scholarly traditions. This would continue to be the chief ulema stance in Egypt. They did not regard modernity as an intellectual challenge but experienced it instead as a series of odious and destructive regulations, as theft of their power and wealth, and as an agonizing loss of prestige and influence.45 When Muslims in Egypt came into contact with the new Western ideas, therefore, they would find no guidance from the clergy, and would look elsewhere for help. For centuries, there had been a partnership between the ulema and the ruling elite in Egypt. Muhammad Ali had severed that relationship and abruptly inaugurated a new secularism. It had no ideological backing but had been imposed as a political fait accompli. In the West, people had had time to adapt to the gradual separation of church and state, and had even created a spirituality of the mundane. For most Egyptians, however, secularization remained alien, foreign, and incomprehensible.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Spanish reconquista of the old Muslim territories of al-Andalus was a catastrophe for the Jews of Iberia. In the Islamic state, the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been able to live together in relative harmony for over six hundred years. The Jews in particular had enjoyed a cultural and spiritual renaissance in Spain, and they were not subject to the pogroms that were the lot of the Jewish people in the rest of Europe.4 But as the Christian armies gradually advanced through the peninsula, conquering more and more territory from Islam, they brought their anti-Semitism with them. In 1378 and 1391, Jewish communities in both Aragon and Castile were attacked by Christians, who dragged Jews to the baptismal fonts and forced them, on pain of death, to convert to Christianity. In Aragon, the preaching of the Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) regularly inspired anti-Semitic riots; Ferrer also organized public debates between rabbis and Christians that were designed to discredit Judaism. Some Jews tried to evade persecution by voluntarily converting to Christianity. They were officially known as conversos (“converts”), though the Christians called them Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse which some of the converts adopted as a badge of pride. The rabbis warned Jews against conversion, but at first the “New Christians,” as the conversos were called, became wealthy and successful. Some became high-ranking priests, others married into the best families, and many achieved spectacular success in commerce. This brought new problems, since the “Old Christians” resented the upward mobility of the new Jewish Christians. Between 1449 and 1474, there were frequent riots against the Marranos, who were killed, had their property destroyed, or were driven out of town.5 Ferdinand and Isabella were alarmed by this development. The conversion of the Jews was not drawing their united kingdom together but instead causing fresh divisions. The monarchs were also disturbed to hear reports that some of the “New Christians” had lapsed, returned to the old faith, and lived as secret Jews. They had, it was said, formed an underground movement to entice other conversos back into the Jewish fold. Inquisitors were instructed to hunt out these closet Jews, who, it was thought, could be recognized by such practices as refusing to eat pork or to work on Saturday. Suspects were tortured until they confessed to infidelity, and gave information about other secret “Judaizers.” As a result, some 13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during the first twelve years of its existence. But in fact many of those who were thus killed or imprisoned, or had their property confiscated, were loyal Catholics who had no Judaizing tendencies at all. The experience not unnaturally made many of the conversos bitter and skeptical of their new faith.6

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

  modern martyrs for the faith in a manner more familiar in the early days of the Roman Empire, and the Oecumenical Patriarch secured their remains for his Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The Vilnius martyrs were not forgotten, and by the early fifteenth century they became a sign of the Christian unity of Constantinople and Muscovy. When in 1411 Emperor John VIII Palaeologos married a daughter of Vasilii II, Grand Prince of Muscovy, he sent Moscow a splendid specimen of the liturgical vestment known as a sakkos as a gift for Metropolitan Photios. It still exists, and it pointedly bears images of the Lithuanian martyrs alongside those of the Emperor and the Grand Prince.32 By that time, the design was a symbol of how the conflict between Muscovy and Lithuania had eventually been resolved. The course of the contest between Lithuania and Muscovy long swayed unpredictably. In 1352, with the outrage of the three martyrs still fresh in his mind, the Oecumenical Patriarch rejected Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania’s nominee for metropolitan, and instead he chose a Muscovite closely related to the princely house. Diplomatic pressure on the Byzantine emperor from Lithuania’s ally the Republic of Genoa (by now a major force sustaining Constantinople’s fragile prosperity) then secured Olgerd a consolation prize in the shape of a metropolitan bishopric specifically consecrated for Lithuania alone. This was a controversial move which did not endure, but within a few years the undoubted fact that the metropolitan based in Moscow never took any personal interest in the western territories of the former Rus’ led to Constantinople making a different appointment: a separate metropolitan for the region of Galicia, a former province of Kievan Rus’ which had been annexed by the kingdom of Poland in 1349. From 1375 to 1378 there were even two rival Metropolitan Bishops of Kiev, both appointed by the Oecumenical Patriarch, but at the solicitation of Muscovy and Lithuania respectively: a strange if temporary anticipation of the Great Schism of Popes which was about to erupt in the Latin Church of the West (see p. 560).33 The Orthodoxy of western Kievan Rus’ was steadily diverging in character from that of Muscovy and the east, to the extent that it should be given a distinctive name as the Ruthenian Church. The decisive factor in the contest came from the west. In his international diplomacy, the Grand Prince of Lithuania naturally had to consider Latin Christendom as well as the Orthodox world, far more than was necessary for the Grand Prince of Muscovy. Amid the steady expansion of Lithuanian frontiers, the Latin Christian Teutonic Knights were a continuing source of annoyance and harassment to the Lithuanians, continually crusading against the godless grand prince, and in the process helping themselves to a number of attractive territories and towns along the Baltic (see p. 387). By the second half of the fourteenth

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

  The final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 had an ambiguous resonance in Moscow. To lose the holy places of Constantinople was a bitter blow, but the catastrophe did leave a useful vacuum in Orthodox leadership, for which the Muscovite leadership had been preparing over the previous century. Church and Court cooperated very closely in an increasingly autocratic system which presented the Grand Prince as the embodiment of God’s will for the people of Rus’. The Grand Prince was effective in disposing of competitors: in 1478 he annexed the city-state of Novgorod, which had the effect of eliminating the model of a merchant republic from Russian society. The Hanseatic League regarded this annexation as a watershed in its relations with the East: it permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners. In a land where resources were perpetually scarce and the urge of the monarch to expand his dominions and power was consistently strong, the grand princes sought to gain as much control as they could over exploitable assets of manpower and finance. The Church hierarchy aided them by preaching the holiness of obedience to the prince with a thoroughness and zest which had little precedent in Byzantium, let alone Western Latin Christendom; but bishops and abbots did not forget that the Church had its own view of its destiny and purpose. The tension between these two agendas had a long future within Russian Orthodox Christianity. The growing power of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the immense reverence paid to Sergei in the pilgrimage cult which began very shortly after his death in 1392 were not unconnected with the close ties which Sergei had developed to the Grand Prince of Muscovy, ties which were later strategically magnified by his hagiographers. It was said that he had blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi when the Prince decided to attack his Tatar overlord; a victory in battle followed for Muscovy at Kulikovo in 1380. The reality of the blessing is dubious, and the victory was not such a turning point as it looked in subsequent Muscovite chronicles, but such doubts do not diminish the part that the narrative of the events played in constructing a new history for the Muscovite principality. During the fifteenth century, narratives of great saints of the Church lent their subjects’ authority to the growing concentration of power in the hands of the grand princes.41 Moscow’s subservience to the Tatars was quietly forgotten: gone were the prayers for a Tatar khan which Muscovite coins had once borne, and in a wholesale rewriting of history, Muscovy’s clerical chroniclers recast the Tatars as perpetual enemies of Muscovy. Two years after the annexation of Novgorod, Grand Prince Ivan III formally announced an end to the tribute which he and his predecessors had paid to the khans for two centuries. This was part of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted. 66 Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd. 67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.” 68 The word for martyr, shaheed , meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology. 69 In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multiparty system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Western-educated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah! Burn him!” 70 Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored. 71 But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died.