Hope

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 20 of 216 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On September 4, the last day of Ramadan, there was a massive peaceful demonstration in Tehran. The crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, and handed out flowers to the soldiers. For the first time, the army and the police did not open fire, and on this occasion—a highly significant development—the middle classes began to join in. A small group of marchers processed through the streets of some of the residential districts, shouting: “Independence! Freedom! and Islamic Government!” On September 7, a huge parade marched from North Tehran down to the Parliament building, carrying large pictures of Khomeini and Shariati, and calling for an end to Pahlavi rule and for an Islamic government. 72 Lay thinkers such as Shariati, Bazargan, and Bani Sadr had prepared the Western-educated elite for the possibility of modern Islamic rule. Even though their views were different from those of Khomeini, the middle-class liberals could see that he had grassroots support that they could never command, and were willing to join forces with him to get rid of the shah. Secularist rule had been a disaster in Iran, and they were ready to try something different. Once he had been deserted by the middle classes, it was all up for the shah, and he must have realized the danger. At 6:00 a.m. on Friday, September 8, martial law was declared and all large gatherings were banned. But the twenty thousand demonstrators who had already started to gather in Jaleh Square that morning for another peaceful rally did not know about this. When they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire and as many as nine hundred people may have died. After this massacre, the crowds raged through the streets, erecting barricades and burning buildings, while soldiers fired at them from their tanks. 73 At 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 10, President Carter called the shah from Camp David to assure him of his support, and a few hours later, the White House confirmed that this telephone conversation had taken place, reaffirmed the special relationship between the United States and Iran, and reported that though the President regretted the loss of life in Jaleh Square, he hoped that the political liberalization which the shah had just begun would continue. 74 But after the Jaleh Square massacre, not even the support of the Great Satan could save the shah. The oil workers now came out on strike, and by late October, production had dropped to 28 percent of its former level. The guerrilla groups, who had been quieter in recent years, began once again to attack military leaders and government ministers. On November 4, students pulled down the statue of the shah at the gates of Tehran University: on November 5, the bazaar closed, and students attacked the British embassy, the offices of various United States airlines, cinemas, and liquor stores. 75 This time, the army did not intervene.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Borujerdi died in March the following year, the post of Marja was not filled. A group of ulema argued that Shiism should become more democratic, and that it was not realistic to expect one man to be the Supreme Guide in this complex new world. Perhaps the new leadership should consist of several maraji , each with his own specialty. This was clearly a modernizing move, and this group of reformist ulema included several clerics who would later play a key role in the Islamic Revolution: Ayatollah Seyyed Muhammad Bihishti; the learned theologian Morteza Motahhari; Allameh Muhammad-Husain Tabatabai; and the most politically radical Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani. In the autumn of 1960, they held a series of lectures, and the following year published a volume of essays that discussed ways of bringing the Shiah up to date. The reformers were convinced that, because Islam is a total way of life, the ulema should not be so wary of intervening in politics. They did not envisage clerical rule, but believed that when they felt that the state was becoming tyrannical or indifferent to the needs of the people, the ulema should stand up to the shahs, as they had done at the time of the Tobacco Crisis and the Constitutional Revolution. They argued that the curriculum of the madrasahs should be revised, to dilute the heavy concentration on fiqh . The clergy should also rationalize their finances: at present, they relied too much on voluntary contributions, and, as the people tended to be conservative, this inhibited them from making fundamental changes. The importance of ijtihad was stressed. Shiis must come to terms with such modern realities as trade, diplomacy, and war if they were to be of real service to the people. Above all, they should listen to their students. Young people in the 1960s were better educated, and would not swallow the old propaganda. They were drifting away from religion because the vision of Shiism they had been given was lifeless and old-fashioned. Before the youth culture had fully developed in the West, the Iranian clergy were already aware of the need to revise their view of the young. Their reform movement involved only a handful of ulema; it did not reach the masses, and made no attempt to criticize the regime. It was concerned solely with the internal affairs of the Shiah. But it did lead to a great deal of discussion in religious circles and predisposed more of the clergy toward change. 42 Suddenly, however, the ulema were taken by surprise when a hitherto unnoticed cleric hit the headlines, and took a far more radical stance. By the early 1960 S , more and more students were drawn to the course in Islamic ethics taught by Ayatollah Khomeini at the Fayziyah Madrasah in Qum.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.” The charter was launched on November 12, 2009, in sixty different locations throughout the world; it was enshrined in synagogues, mosques, temples, and churches as well as in such secular institutions as the Karachi Press Club and the Sydney Opera House. But the work is only just beginning. At this writing, we have more than 150 partners working together throughout the globe to translate the charter into practical, realistic action. But can compassion heal the seemingly intractable problems of our time? Is this virtue even feasible in the technological age? And what does “compassion” actually mean? Our English word is often confused with “pity” and associated with an uncritical, sentimental benevolence: the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines “compassionate” as “piteous” or “pitiable.” This perception of compassion is not only widespread but ingrained. When I gave a lecture in the Netherlands recently, I emphatically made the point that compassion did not mean feeling sorry for people, but the Dutch translation of my text in the newspaper De Volkskrant consistently rendered “compassion” as “pity.” But “compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. The first person to formulate the Golden Rule, as far as we know, was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE), who when asked which of his teachings his disciples could practice “all day and every day” replied: “Perhaps the saying about shu (“consideration”). Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” This, he said, was the thread that ran right through the spiritual method he called the Way (dao) and pulled all its teachings together. “Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).” A better translation of shu is “likening to oneself”; people should not put themselves in a special, privileged category but relate their own experience to that of others “all day and every day.” Selected titles available from Karen Armstrong In the Beginning Jerusalem The Battle for God A History of God The Case for God The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  We have seen that after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Kookists in Israel had been convinced that the Jewish people were engaged in a war against the forces of evil. The war had been a warning; redemption was under way, but if the government was determined to promote policies that would impede the messianic process, they themselves must take the initiative. Somewhat to their surprise, they had found secularist allies, who did not share the vision of Rabbi Kook, but who were equally determined to hold on to every inch of occupied territory. People who were neither Kookists nor observant Jews, such as the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, or the nuclear physicist and ultranationalist Yuval Ne’eman, were willing to work with the religious Zionists to secure the occupied territories for Israel. In February 1974, a group of rabbis, hawkish young secularists, Kookists and other religious Zionists who had served in the IDF and fought in Israel’s wars formed a group which they called Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” Shortly afterward, they put together a position paper outlining their objectives. The Gush would not be a political party, competing for seats in the Knesset, but a pressure group, working to bring about “a great awakening of the Jewish people towards full implementation of the Zionist vision, realizing that this vision originates in Israel’s Jewish heritage, and that its objective is the full redemption of Israel and the entire world.” 1 Where the early Zionists had cast religion aside, the Gush insisted on rooting their movement in Judaism. Where secular members of the Gush could interpret the word “redemption” in a looser, more political sense, the religious activists who had adopted Rabbi Kook’s holistic vision were convinced that messianic redemption had already begun, and that unless the Jewish people were settled in the whole of Eretz Israel there would be no peace for the rest of the world. From the start, Gush Emunim posed a challenge to secular Israel. The position paper emphasized the failure of the old Zionism. Even though Jews were engaged in a fierce struggle for survival in their land, we are witnessing a process of decline and retreat from the realization of the Zionist ideal, in word and deed. Four related factors are responsible for this crisis: mental weariness and frustration induced by the extended conflict; the lack of challenge; preference for selfish goals; the attenuation of Jewish faith. 2 It was the last cause—the weakening of religion—which, in the view of the religious members of the Gush, was crucial. Divorced from Judaism, Zionism, they believed, could make no sense. At the same time as the Kookists sought to conquer the occupied territories from the Arabs, they were also engaged in a war against secular Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy. At first, Shabbetai wanted nothing to do with Nathan’s fantasy, but gradually he was won over by the power of the young rabbi’s eloquence, which, at least, gave him some explanation for his peculiarities. On May 28, 1665, Shabbetai declared himself to be the Messiah, and Nathan immediately dispatched letters to Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna announcing that the Redeemer would soon defeat the Ottoman sultan, end the exile of the Jews, and lead them back to the Holy Land. All the gentile nations would submit to his rule. 51 The news spread like wildfire, and by 1666, the messianic ferment had taken root in almost every Jewish community in Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Iran. There were frenzied scenes. Jews started to sell their possessions in preparation for the voyage to Palestine, and business came to a standstill. Periodically, they would hear that the Messiah had abolished one of the traditional fast days, and there would be dancing and processions in the street. Nathan had given orders that Jews were to hasten the End by performing the penitential rituals of Safed, and in Europe, Egypt, Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Amsterdam, Poland, and France Jews fasted, kept vigil, immersed themselves in icy water, rolled in nettles, and gave alms to the poor. It was one of the first of many Great Awakenings of early modernity, when people instinctively sensed the coming of major change. Few people knew much about Shabbetai himself and fewer still were conversant with Nathan’s abstruse kabbalistic vision; it was enough that the Messiah had come and that at long last hope was at hand. 52 During these ecstatic months, Jews experienced such hope and vitality that the harsh, constricted world of the ghetto seemed to melt away. They had a taste of something entirely different, and life for many of them would never be the same again. They glimpsed new possibilities, which seemed almost within their grasp. Because they felt free, many Jews were convinced that the old life was over for good. 53 Those Jews who came under the direct influence of either Shabbetai or Nathan showed that they were ready to jettison the Torah, even though that would mean the end of religious life as they knew it. When Shabbetai visited a synagogue wearing the royal robes of the Messiah, and abolished a fast, uttered the forbidden name of God, ate nonkosher food, or called women to read the Scriptures in the synagogue, people were enraptured. Not everybody succumbed, of course—in each community, there were rabbis and laymen who were appalled by these developments. But people of all classes, rich and poor, accepted Shabbetai and seemed to welcome his antinomianism. The Law had not saved the Jews and seemed unable to do so; Jews were still persecuted, still in exile; people were ready for new freedom.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Throughout we have seen that religion has often helped people to adjust to modernity. Shabbateanism, Quakerism, Methodism, and Islamic mysticism helped Jews, Christians, and Muslims prepare for major change, and gave them a context in which they could approach the new ideas. Americans who had no time for the deism of the Founding Fathers of the republic were prepared for the revolutionary struggle by the Great Awakening. Muslims also developed an appreciation for such modern ideals as the separation of religion and politics by means of the dynamic of their own spirituality. Indeed, in Europe, too, secularism and scientific rationality were both at first seen as new ways of being religious. Some of the more recent movements we have considered have also been modernizing. Hasan al-Banna, Shariati, and even Khomeini all sought to bring Muslims to modernity in an Islamic setting that was more familiar to them than the imported ideologies of the West. Only thus could they “return to themselves” and help those who had perforce been left out of the modernizing process to make sense of such institutions as representative government and democratic rule. This was also an attempt to relocate modernity within the ambit of the sacred. Premodern religion had always seen mythos and logos as complementary. Islamic reformers would site the pragmatic tasks of government within a religious and mystical framework. This was also part of the fundamentalist rebellion against the hegemony of the secular. It was a way of bringing God back into the political realm from which he had been excluded. In various ways, fundamentalists have rejected the separations of modernity (between church and state, secular and profane) and tried to re-create a lost wholeness. Religious Zionists were “revolting against the revolt” of the secularist Zionists, who had declared their independence of religion. They wanted to have more God and more Torah in the Holy Land than had been possible in the Diaspora. Khomeini and Shariati both insisted that it was impossible to exclude the sacred from politics; Qutb condemned the Godlessness of the secularist regime in Egypt, which he designated jahili. Those who had not fully imbibed the secular rationalism of modernity were still aware of the Unseen dimension of existence and wanted it reflected in the polity. They did not see why that should make them less modern, though they tacitly recognized that this would mean a break with some of the old conservative aspects of premodern religion. The fundamentalist reformation of the faith meant that an activism that had hitherto been seen as irreligious was now presented as crucial. Religious Zionists and fundamentalist Christians and Muslims all insisted on the need for dynamism and revolutionary transformation in keeping with the forward thrust and pragmatic drive of modern society.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But in 1967, history took a hand. On Independence Day 1967, some three weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War, Rabbi Kook was delivering his usual sermon at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva. Suddenly he emitted a sobbing scream, and uttered words that completely broke the flow of his speech: “Where is our Hebron, Shechem, Jericho and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?” 88 Three weeks later, the Israeli army had occupied these biblical cities which had previously been in Arab hands, and Rabbi Kook’s disciples were convinced that he had been inspired by God to make a true prophecy. By the end of this short war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The holy city of Jerusalem, which had been divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was now annexed by Israel and declared to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Once again, Jews were able to pray at the Western Wall. A mood of exultation and near-mystical euphoria gripped the entire country. Before the war, Israelis had listened on their radios to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea; now they were unexpectedly in possession of sites sacred to Jewish memory. Many of the most diehard secularists experienced the war as a religious event, reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea. 89 But for Kookists the war was even more crucial. It seemed conclusive proof that Redemption was indeed under way and that God was pushing history forward to its final consummation. The fact that no Messiah had actually appeared did not worry the Gahelet; they were moderns, and perfectly prepared to see the “Messiah” as a process rather than a person. 90 Nor were they disturbed that the “miracle” of the war had a perfectly natural explanation: the Israeli victory was entirely due to the efficiency of the IDF and the ineptitude of the Arab armies. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides had predicted that there would be nothing supernatural about the Redemption: the prophetic passages that spoke of cosmic wonders and universal peace referred not to the Messianic Kingdom in this world but to the World-to-Come. 91 The victory convinced Kookists that it was now time to mobilize in earnest. A few months after the victory, rabbis and students held an impromptu conference at Merkaz Harav to find ways of foiling the plan of the Labor government to relinquish some of these newly occupied territories in exchange for peace with their Arab neighbors. For Kookists, the return of even one inch of the sacred land would be a victory for the forces of evil. And they found, to their surprise, that they had secular allies. Shortly after the war, a group of distinguished Israeli poets, professors, retired politicians, and army officers had formed the Land of Israel Movement to prevent the government from making any territorial concessions.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  62 Shariati was not entirely fair to the Usuli doctrines of “Safavid Shiism.” They had arisen in response to a particular need, and, though they had always been controversial, they had expressed the spirituality of the premodern age, which could not permit the individual too much freedom. 63 But the world had changed. Iranians who had been affected by the Western ideals of autonomy and intellectual liberty could no longer submit to the rulings of a mujtahid as their grandparents had done. Conservative spirituality had been designed to help people accept the limitations of their society and submit to the status quo. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Luria was not a writer, and during his lifetime his teachings were known to very few people. 13 But his pupils recorded his teachings for posterity and others spread them in Europe. By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement, the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews at this time. 14 It did so not because it could be proved rationally or scientifically, since it obviously could not. It clearly contradicted Genesis in almost every particular. But a literal reading of Scripture is, as we shall see, a modern preoccupation, springing from the prevalence of the rational over the mythical consciousness. Before the modern period, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all relished highly allegorical, symbolic, and esoteric interpretations of their sacred texts. Since God’s Word was infinite, it was capable of yielding a multitude of meanings. So Jews were not distressed, as many modern religious people would be, by Luria’s divergence from the plain meaning of the Bible. His myth spoke to them with authority because it explained their lives and provided them with meaning. Instead of Jews being a marginalized people, thrust out of the modern world that was coming into being, their experience was in tune with the most fundamental laws of existence. Even God suffered exile; everything in creation had been displaced from the very beginning; divine sparks were trapped in matter, and goodness was forced to struggle with evil—an omnipresent fact of life. Further, Jews were not rejects and outcasts, but central actors in the redemptive process. The careful observance of the commandments of the Torah, the Law of Moses, and special rites evolved in Safed could end this universal exile. Jews could thus help to effect the “restoration” (tikkun) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jewish people to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state. 15 This myth has continued to be important to Jews. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But, as Leila Ahmed points out in Women and Gender in Islam, these women were attempting to return, like so many Muslim reformers of the past, to the “true Islam” of the Koran and the Sunnah, rather than to the medieval fiqh of al-Azhar. They believed that “true Islam” preached equality and justice to all, women included. But Ahmed agrees that they could be vulnerable to cooption by the patriarchal establishment, and notes that when an Islamic regime comes to power, this has generally led to a deterioration in the status of women. 43 When things are not going well, it is easy to quell incipient discontent by giving males more control over their women. Nevertheless, it remains true that Islamic dress does not always indicate a submissive female heart. The Turkish scholar Nilufar Göle argues that veiled women are often militant, outspoken, and well-educated. 44 Many veiled women took an active and sometimes a heroic role in the new fundamentalist offensive. Ahmed also points out that in Egypt, Islamic dress is not a return to the past. There was nothing traditional about the clothes that many women preferred in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a new fashion, resembling Western styles (apart from the long sleeves and skirts) rather than the garb worn by their grandmothers. Indeed, it could be seen as a “halfway house” and as the uniform of transition to modern society. More and more women than ever before had started to receive a higher education during these years. A large number of the women who opted for Islamic dress in the universities were among the first members of their family to have advanced beyond basic literacy; they often came from a rural background. Their dress was, therefore, a “modern” version of the clothes worn by the women in their family. When they encountered the alarming modernity of the big city—its cosmopolitanism, aggressive consumerism, inequalities, violence, and overcrowding—they could easily have been overcome. Their dress proclaimed their upward mobility, but it also provided some continuity with what they had worn before. An Islamic identity and the community that went with it enabled them to make what could have been a traumatic rite of passage more easily and peacefully. We have seen that in the past, religion has helped people to cross over from a conventional to a more modern lifestyle and ideology. Islamic dress, for both men and women, could be another of these stratagems. 45 All transitions are painful, however.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  95 Amital was articulating a theory which had much in common with the fundamentalism that was then emerging in Egypt and Iran. God had permitted the Yom Kippur War to warn the Jews to return to themselves. It had been a reminder of true values to “West-toxicated” Israel. As such, it was part of the messianic process, a holy war against Western civilization. But the tide had turned. The war also revealed that it was not just the Jews who were struggling to survive. In this life-or-death conflict, Amital believed, the gentiles were also fighting their final battle. The revival and expansion of the Jewish state had shown them that God was in control, that there was no room for Satan, and that Israel had succeeded in turning back the forces of iniquity. Israel had conquered the Land; all that remained to be done before the Redemption was to purge the last relics of the Western secular spirit from the souls of Jews, who must return to their religion. The war had sounded the death knell of secularism. The Kookists were now ready to mobilize and become more politically active in the struggle—a struggle against the West which sought to restrain Israeli expansionism, against the Arabs, and against the secularism which the West had spawned in Israel. THERE WAS a similar readiness among Protestant fundamentalists in the United States. The chaos of the 1960s, with its permissive youth culture, sexual revolution, and the promotion of equal rights for homosexuals, blacks, and women, seemed to shake the very foundations of society. Many were convinced that this cataclysm, plus the tumult in the Middle East, could only mean that Rapture was nigh. Ever since the Revolution, American Protestantism had been divided into two warring camps, and for some forty years, the fundamentalists had been creating their own separate world, which rejected the modern ethos of secularists and liberal Christians alike. They saw themselves as outsiders, but in fact they represented a large constituency of Americans who resented the cultural hegemony of the eastern, secularist establishment, and who felt more at home with the conservative religion of the fundamentalists. They had not yet mobilized to form a political movement to redeem American society, but by the end of the 1970s, the potential was there, and fundamentalists were becoming conscious of their power. In 1979, the year that fundamentalists staged their comeback, George Gallup’s national poll showed that one out of every three of the American adults questioned had experienced a religious (“born-again”) conversion; nearly 50 percent believed that the Bible was inerrant, and over 80 percent saw Jesus as a divine figure. The poll also revealed that there were about 1300 evangelical Christian radio and television stations, which had an audience of about 130 million and made profits estimated from $500 million to “billions” of dollars. As a leading fundamentalist, Pat Robertson, proclaimed during the 1980 election: “We have enough votes to run this country!”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Rida’s salafiyyah movement was not a slavish return to the past. Like other reformers at an early stage of the modernization process, he was trying to absorb the learning and values of the modern West by placing them within an Islamic context. He wanted to establish a seminary where students could be introduced to the principles of international law, sociology, world history, the organization of religious institutions, and Western science, at the same time as they studied Islamic jurisprudence. In this way, a new class of ulema would emerge, who, unlike the scholars at the Azhar (whom Rida considered to be hopelessly behind the times), would truly be men of their time, able to exercise an innovative ijtihad that was faithful to tradition. One day, one of these new ulema might become the modern caliph. 84 Rida was no fundamentalist; he was still trying to effect a marriage between Islam and modern Western culture instead of creating a counterdiscourse, but his work would influence the fundamentalists of the future. Increasingly, toward the end of his life, Rida drew away from the Egyptian nationalists. He did not think that secularism was the answer. He was appalled by Atatürk’s atrocities. Was this what happened when the state became the supreme value and there was nothing to restrain a ruler from pragmatic but cruel policies to further the interests of the nation? Rida believed that in the Middle East—if not in the Christian West—persecution and intolerance were due to the decline of religion. 85 At a time when many of the leading thinkers of Egypt were turning away from Islam, Rida came to believe that the modern Muslim states needed the restraints of religion as much as, if not more than, they had ever done before. If in Egypt, people had come to believe that the “secret” of Europe’s success was nationalism, Iranians in the early years of the twentieth century believed that this “secret” was constitutional government. At this point, like many Egyptians, Iranians wanted to be like the West. In 1904, Japan, which had recently adopted constitutional rule, inflicted a stunning defeat upon Russia. It was not long since Japan had been as ignorant and backward as Iran, the reformers argued, but now, thanks to its constitution, it was on the same level as the Europeans and could beat them at their own game. Even some of the ulema had become convinced of the need for representational government to curb the despotic rule of the shahs. As Sayyed Muhammad Tabatabai, a liberal mujtahid, explained: we ourselves had not seen a constitutional regime. But we had heard about it, and those who had seen the constitutional countries had told us that a constitutional regime will bring security and prosperity to the country. This created an urge and an enthusiasm in us.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The overcrowding was especially difficult for women students, many of whom had come from a traditional background and found it intolerable to be crammed up against young men on the benches or in the buses that conveyed the students back to their equally crowded halls of residence. Learning was by rote and success in the examinations required the mechanical regurgitation of the lecture notes and manuals issued by the professors. The humanities, law, and the social sciences were known as “garbage faculties,” and virtually written off. Whatever their personal inclinations, able students would be forced to study medicine, pharmacology, odontology, engineering, or economics, or else resign themselves to being taught by the worst professors and to having even less chance of a reasonable job after graduation. In this setting, the students were not trained to think creatively about the problems of humanity or of society. Instead, they were required to absorb information passively and soullessly. Their introduction to modern culture was chronically superficial, therefore, and left their religious beliefs and practices entirely untouched. 37 The jamaat produced few books or pamphlets, but an article written for al-Dawah in 1980 by Isam al-Din al-Aryan sums up their main ideas. Sayyid Qutb was clearly an inspiration; the jamaat believed that it was time for Egyptians to shake off the Western and Soviet ideologies that had dominated the country for so long, and return to Islam. Egypt was still in effect controlled by infidels, and there could be no true independence unless there was a great religious awakening. 38 The jamaat did not confine themselves to the discussion of ideas, but applied the Islamic ideology creatively and practically to their own circumstances. In 1973, the students began to set up summer camps in the major universities. 39 They studied the Koran, prayed together at night, and listened to sermons about the Golden Age of Islam, the career of the Prophet, and the four rashidun. By day, there were sporting activities and classes in self-defense. For a few weeks, the students lived, thought, and played in a wholly Islamic setting. It was, in a sense, a temporary hijrah, a migration from mainstream society to a world where they could live out the Koran and experience for themselves its impact on their lives. They learned what it was like to live in an environment which really did endorse the teachings of scripture. The camps gave them a taste of an Islamic utopia, in marked contrast to the inauthentically Muslim life of the regime. Preachers and speakers discussed the bitter disappointment of the modern experiment, which may have worked beautifully in Europe or America, but which only worked to the advantage of the rich in Egypt. When they returned to university life, students tried to reproduce some of this experience on campus.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In a world in which small groups will increasingly have powers of destruction hitherto confined to the nation-state, it has become imperative to apply the Golden Rule globally, ensuring that all peoples are treated as we would wish to be treated ourselves. If our religious and ethical traditions fail to address this challenge, they will fail the test of our time. So at the award ceremony in February 2008, I asked TED to help me create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion that would be written by leading thinkers from a variety of major faiths and would restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life. The charter would counter the voices of extremism, intolerance, and hatred. At a time when religions are widely assumed to be at loggerheads, it would also show that, despite our significant differences, on this we are all in agreement and that it is indeed possible for the religious to reach across the divide and work together for justice and peace. Thousands of people from all over the world contributed to a draft charter on a multilingual website in Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, and English; their comments were presented to the Council of Conscience, a group of notable individuals from six faith traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism), who met in Switzerland in February 2009 to compose the final version: “The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women • to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; • to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; • to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; • to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity; • to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Eventually Shabbetai’s behavior became too much for the Jews of Smyrna, and he had to leave the city in 1650. He then began a fifteen-year period, which he later called his “dark years,” during which he wandered through the provinces of the Ottoman empire, going from one city to another. He told nobody about his messianic vocation and may have abandoned the very idea of a special mission. By 1665 he was longing to free himself of his demons and become a rabbi. 48 He had heard about a gifted young Kabbalist in Gaza who had set himself up as a healer, and set off to visit him. This Rabbi Nathan had already heard about Shabbetai, probably when both men, then unknown to each other, had lived in Jerusalem at the same time. Something about Shabbetai’s “strange acts” must have lodged in Nathan’s imagination, because, shortly before the arrival of his visitor, he had received a revelation about him. He had recently been initiated into Lurianic Kabbalah, and had made a retreat just before Purim, locking himself away, fasting, weeping, and reciting the Psalms. During this vigil, he had seen a vision of Shabbetai and heard his own voice crying aloud in prophecy: “Thus saith the Lord! Behold your Savior cometh. Shabbetai Zevi is his name. He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against my enemies.” 49 When Shabbetai actually turned up on his own doorstep, Nathan could only see this as a miraculous confirmation of his prophetic vision. How could Nathan, a brilliant thinker, have imagined that this sad, troubled man was his Redeemer? According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the soul of the Messiah had been trapped in the Godless realm created in the original act of Zimzum; from the very beginning, therefore, the Messiah had been forced to struggle with the evil powers of the “other side,” but now, Nathan believed, thanks to the penitential disciplines of the Kabbalists, these demonic forces were beginning to lose their hold on the Messiah. From time to time, his soul soared free and he revealed the New Law of the messianic age. But victory was still incomplete, and from time to time the Messiah fell prey once more to the darkness. 50 All this seemed to fit perfectly with Shabbetai’s personality and experience. When he arrived, Nathan told him that the End was nigh. Soon his victory over the forces of evil would be complete and he would bring redemption to the Jewish people.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On December 2, as Muharram approached, Khomeini gave orders that instead of holding the usual passion plays, rawdahs, and processions in honor of the martyrdom of Husain, the people should demonstrate against the regime. The radical potential of these pious ceremonies had reached its apotheosis. On the first three nights of Muharram, men put on white shrouds to symbolize their readiness for martyrdom, and ran through the streets, defying the government curfew. Others shouted anti-shah slogans through loudspeakers from the rooftops. The BBC claimed that seven hundred people were killed by the police and army in these few days alone. 76 On December 8, six thousand people gathered at the Behest-e Zahra cemetery in south Tehran, where many of the revolutionary martyrs were buried, crying “Death to the shah!” In Isfahan, twenty thousand people marched through the streets, and then attacked banks, cinemas, and a block of flats inhabited by American technicians. On December 9, on the eve of Ashura, Ayatollah Taleqani, who had just been released from prison, led a magnificent peaceful march, which wound through the streets of Tehran for six hours; between 300,000 and a million and a half people took part, walking quietly, four abreast. There were other peaceful demonstrations in Tabriz, Qum, Isfahan, and Mashhad. 77 On Ashura itself, there was an even bigger march in Tehran, lasting eight hours, in which almost two million people participated. The demonstrators carried green, red, and black flags (symbolizing, respectively, Islam, martyrdom, and the Shiah) interspersed with banners reading “We will kill Iran’s dictator!” and “We will destroy Yankee power in Iran!” There was growing confidence that, united as never before, the people of Iran would really manage to get rid of the Pahlavi state. 78 Many felt as though Imam Husain himself was leading them into battle that Ashura, and that Khomeini was directing them from afar, like the Hidden Imam. 79 At the end of the demonstration, a resolution was passed: Khomeini was invited to become the new leader of Iran, and Iranians were urged to band together until the shah was overthrown. 80 Three days later, the army tried to organize pro-shah demonstrations, and clashes between the revolutionaries and the military became more violent. The shah made a last effort at appeasement, appointing Shahpour Bakhtiar, a known liberal, to form a constitutional government; the shah promised that he would dismantle SAVAK, release political prisoners, and make fundamental changes in his economic and foreign policy. But this came a year too late; the people had heard too many promises made under duress to give these latest offers credence. Khomeini declared December 30 (which, according to the Islamic calendar, was the first anniversary of the Qum massacre) to be a day of mourning. There were more deaths in Mashhad, Tehran, and Qazrin; pictures of these latest martyrs were displayed alongside portraits of Khomeini. On December 23, when soldiers tore up pictures of Khomeini in Mashhad, there was a skirmish, and twelve civilians were killed.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come. 9 Other peoples who have felt that their world has been destroyed by the onset of modernity would also evolve millennial hopes. But messianism is problematic, because, until now, every single messianic movement that has expected an imminent Redeemer has been disappointed. The Sephardic Jews avoided this dilemma by finding a more satisfying solution. They developed a new mythos. A group of Sephardics had moved from the Balkans to Palestine, where they settled in Safed in Galilee. There was a tradition that when the Messiah came, he would reveal himself in Galilee, and the Spanish exiles wanted to be the first to greet him. 10 Some of them came to believe that they had found him in a saintly, sickly Ashkenazic Jew, Isaac Luria (1534–72), who settled in Safed and was the first to articulate the new myth. He thus founded a form of Kabbalah that still bears his name. We moderns would say that Luria created this myth; that he was so perfectly attuned to the unconscious desires and fears of his people that he was able to evolve an imaginative fiction that brought comfort and hope not only to the exiles in Safed but to Jews all over the world. But we would say this because we think primarily in rational terms and find it hard to enter into the premodern mythical worldview. Luria’s disciples did not perceive him as having “made up” his creation myth; instead, as they saw it, the myth had declared itself to him. To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the mythos made perfect sense. It revealed or “unveiled” a truth that had been evident before but which spoke with such power to the condition of Jews in the early modern period that it acquired instant authority.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  71 These new preachers railed against the aristocracy, the establishment, and the learned clergy. They emphasized the egalitarian tendencies of the New Testament, which stated that in the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God sent his insights to the poor and unlettered: Jesus and the Apostles had not had college degrees. Religion and politics were part of a single vision. With his flowing hair and wild, glittering eyes Lorenzo Dow looked like a modern-day John the Baptist. He would see a storm as a direct act of God, and relied on dreams and visions for his insights. A change in the weather could be a “sign” of the approaching End of Days; he claimed the ability to foretell the future. He seemed, in sum, to be the antithesis of the new world of modernity. Yet he was likely to begin a sermon with a quotation from Jefferson or Thomas Paine, and like a true modernist, he urged the people to throw off the shackles of superstition and ignorance, cast off the authority of the learned establishment, and think for themselves. It seemed that in the new United States, religion and politics were two sides of a single coin and spilled easily into each other, whatever the Constitution maintained. Thus Elias Smith first experienced a political conversion during Jefferson’s presidential campaign, when he became a radical egalitarian. But he then went on to found a new and more democratic church. Similarly, James O’Kelly had fought in the revolution and been held prisoner by the British. He had been thoroughly politicized, wanted a more equal church, and seceded from mainstream Christianity to found his own “Republican Methodists.” When Barton Stone broke with the Presbyterians, he called his secession a “declaration of independence.” Alexander Campbell (1788–1866), who had received a university education, cast off his Scottish Presbyterianism when he migrated to America, to found a sect that approximated more closely to the egalitarian Primitive Church. 72 Still more radical was Joseph Smith (1805–44), who was not content to read the Bible, but claimed to have discovered an entirely new scripture. The Book of Mormon was one of the most eloquent of all nineteenth-century social protests, and mounted a fierce denunciation of the rich, the powerful, and the learned. 73 Smith and his family had lived for years on the brink of destitution, and felt that there was no place for them in this brave new republic. The first Mormon converts were equally poor, marginalized, and desperate, perfectly ready to follow Smith in an exodus from and symbolic repudiation of the United States.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Religious people too were making similar attempts to build a new vision on fundamentals. The most prescient realized that it was impossible for fully modernized people to be religious in the old way. The conservative spirituality, which had helped people to adjust to essential limitations and to accept things as they were, would not help people in this iconoclastic, future-oriented climate. The whole tenor of their thought and perception had changed. Many in the West, whose education had been entirely rational, were not equipped for the mythical, mystical, and cultic rituals that had evoked a sense of transcendent value in the past. There was no going back. If they wanted to be religious, they would have to develop rites, beliefs, and practices that spoke to them in their radically altered circumstances. In the early twentieth century, people were trying to find new ways to be religious. Just as people in the first Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE) had found that the old paganism no longer worked in the new conditions of their period and had evolved the great confessional faiths, so too, in this second Axial Age, there was a similar challenge. Like any truly creative enterprise, the search for modern (and, later, for postmodern) faith was supremely difficult. The quest continues; as yet, no definitive or even very satisfactory solution has emerged. The religiosity that we call “fundamentalism” is just one of these attempts. The Protestants of the United States had been aware for some time of the need for something new. By the end of the nineteenth century, the denominations were polarized, but the crisis of the 1890s, which had seen heresy trials and expulsions, seemed to have passed. Liberals and conservatives in the early years of the century were both involved in the social programs of this so-called Progressive Age (1900–20), which attempted to deal with the problems arising from the rapid and unregulated development of industry and city life. Despite their doctrinal quarrels, Protestants in all the denominations were committed to the progressive ideal, and cooperated together in foreign missions and campaigns for Prohibition or improved education.3 Despite the immense difficulties they faced, most felt confident. America had been “Christianized,” wrote the liberal theologian Walter Rauschenbusch in 1912; it only remained now for business and industry to be transformed by “the thought and spirit of Christ.”4

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

  formerly established metropolis of the Jews in Palestine is the city of God is not only base, but even impious – the mark of exceedingly petty thinking’ – a remarkably risky statement in view of the enthusiasm of his imperial patrons for the Jerusalem project.17 One has to remember that Eusebius was bishop of a neighbouring Palestinian city, Caesarea, and the metropolitan (presiding bishop) within the whole province of Palestine, so he was not inclined to look favourably on his junior episcopal colleague’s archaeological good fortune and all that stemmed from it. His comments continued to be echoed by such diverse major figures of the later fourth century Church as the brilliant preacher Bishop John Chrysostom, the scholar Jerome and the monk-theologian Gregory of Nyssa, who, after some unfortunate experiences when visiting the city, commented sourly that pilgrimage suggested that the Holy Spirit was unable to reach his native Cappadocia and could only be found in Jerusalem.18 That for many people was of course precisely and triumphantly what it did suggest. Scepticism was generally drowned out by the eagerness of people seeking an exceptional and guaranteed experience of holiness, healing, comfort – increasingly a self-fulfilling prophecy as the crowds swelled, to the delight of the souvenir traders and night-time entertainment industry in the Holy City.19 There was now a proliferation of relics of the wood of the Cross. Earlier the usual Christian visual symbol for Christ had been a fish, since the Greek word for ‘fish’, ichthys, could be turned into an acrostic for the initial letters of a Greek phrase, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’, or similar devotional variants. Now the fish was far outclassed not only by the new imperial Chi-Rho monogram referring to the same word, but also by the Cross. Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.20 Pilgrimage, from having played a seemingly minor role in Christian life, was now launched as one of its major activities. The life of Judaism had once revolved around one great pilgrimage: to Jerusalem. For Christians, Jerusalem would be only the principal star of a galaxy of holy places that has never since ceased to proliferate. Shrines have come and gone, but some, like Jerusalem itself, or Rome in the West, have never lost their appeal to the Christian faithful. Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection. Already in the 380s the Jerusalem liturgy had arrived at a state of elaboration lovingly described by an exotic visitor, Egeria, a member of one of the first western European communities of nuns, who had travelled all the way from the Atlantic coast of Spain (we are