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.

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

  the Ukrainian monk Paisii Velichkovskii produced the first Slavonic translation of this work which became standard in the Orthodox world, and which was a major force in reuniting Orthodox spirituality after the stresses and divisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, the expanding Russian Empire gained an international vision for its version of Orthodoxy. It maintained its contacts with Mount Athos, supporting monastic life on the Holy Mountain with a generosity which saw a great flowering of Russian communities there in the nineteenth century. But there was much more to the tsars’ intervention in the Ottoman Empire, as it became apparent that the hold of the Turkish sultan on his territories was beginning to weaken. During the eighteenth century, throughout the Orthodox world still ruled by Muslims in the Balkans and the East, Churches began looking with increasing hope to this great power in the north which proclaimed its protection over them, whose Church still announced itself to be the Third Rome, and which pushed its armies ever further into the lands so long languishing in the hands of the Grandsons of Hagar. Soon in its efforts to fulfil its ambitions at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire would clash with heirs of the Western Reformation, with consequences disastrous for all those drawn into the contest. It is to the West that we now return, to trace the story which led Christendom to the events of 1914.

• 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. The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The prevailing mood of dissatisfaction made it relatively easy for a small group, under the leadership of Seyyid Zia ad-Din Tabatabai, a civilian, and Reza Khan (1877–1944), the commander of the shah’s Cossack brigade, to overthrow the government. In February 1921, Zia ad-Din became prime minister, with Reza Khan as his minister of war. The British acquiesced because Zia ad-Din was known to be pro-British, and they hoped that his election would further their plans for a protectorate, which they had not abandoned entirely. But Reza Khan was the stronger of the two leaders, and he was soon able to force Zia ad-Din into exile, form a new cabinet, and become sole ruler. Reza at once began to modernize the country, and, because the people were so frustrated and ready for any change, he was able to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Reza had no interest in social reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy, and make Iran function more effectively. Any opposition was ruthlessly cut down. From the very beginning, Reza courted Soviet Russia and the United States in order to rid the country of the British, granting an oil concession to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in return for American technical advice and investment. In 1925, Reza was in a strong enough position to force the last Qajar shah to abdicate. His original intention was to establish a republic, but the ulema objected. In the Majlis, Ayatollah Muddaris declared that a republic was un-Islamic. It was tainted by its association with Atatürk, and the clergy had no wish to see Iran go the same way as Turkey. Reza had no objection to becoming shah, and was still anxious to court the clergy. He promised them that his government would honor Islam and that its legislation would not conflict with the Shariah. That done, a packed Majlis endorsed the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty. But it would not be long before Shah Reza Pahlavi would feel able to break his promise to the ulema and not only equal but even surpass Atatürk’s ruthless secularization. By the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, secularism seemed to be winning the day. There was plenty of religious activity, though the more radical movements had been cut down to size and posed no threat to the secularist leadership. But the seeds that had been sown during these years would take root when some of the limitations of this modern secularist experiment became apparent. 7. Counterculture (1925–60)

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  64 His followers were engaged in a war against all religious rules: “I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own power.” 65 Like many radical secularists today, Frank regarded all religion as harmful. As the movement progressed, Frankists turned to politics, dreaming of a great revolution that would sweep away the past and save the world. They saw the French Revolution as a sign that their vision was true and that God had intervened on their behalf. 66 Jews had anticipated many of the postures of the modern period. Their painful brush with the aggressively modernizing society of Europe had led them into secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith. For most Jews, the path to the new world that was developing in the West led through religion, but this religion was very different from the kind of faith we are used to in the twentieth century. It was more mythically based; it did not read the Scriptures literally, and was perfectly prepared to come up with new solutions, some of which seemed shocking in their search for something fresh. To understand the role of religion in premodern society we should turn to the Muslim world, which was undergoing its own upheavals during this early modern period and evolving different forms of spirituality that would continue to influence Muslims well into the modern period. 2. M uslims: T he C onservative S pirit ( 1492–1799 ) I N 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For Jacob Rosenheim (1870–1965), the founding of Agudat was not simply a slightly regrettable necessity, as it was for the eastern Jews, but a cosmic event. For the first time since 70 CE, Jews had “a unified and will-determining centre.”75 Agudat symbolized God’s rule over Israel and should become the central organization of the Jewish world. Nevertheless, Rosenheim still felt slightly queasy about politics, and wanted Agudat to confine its activities to maintaining Jewish schools and protecting Jews’ economic rights. Younger members were more radical, and were closer in spirit to Protestant fundamentalists. Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) wanted Agudat to take the initiative and start a campaign for the reform and sacralization of Jewish society. Like the premillennialists, he could see “signs” of God’s activity in the world. The Great War and the Balfour Declaration were the “footsteps of the Messiah.” Jews must reject the corrupt values of bourgeois society, cease to cooperate with the governments of Europe, and create their own sacred enclave in the Holy Land, where they would build a theocratic, Torah-based state. Jewish history had gone awry; Jews had defected from sacred tradition; it was now time to put Jewish history back on track and, if Jews took the first step, made the exodus from the corrupt Diaspora, and returned to their original values, living according to the Torah in their Land, God would send the Messiah.76 The Jewish scholar Alan L. Mittelman notes that the early experience of Agudat shows the way fundamentalism works. It is not an immediate, knee-jerk response to modern secular society but only develops when the modernization process is fairly advanced. At first, traditionalists—like the eastern European members of Agudat—try simply to find ways of adapting their faith to the new challenge. They adopt some modern ideas and institutions, and attempt to prove that these are not alien to tradition, that the faith is strong enough to absorb these changes. But once society has become more completely secular and rational, some find its innovations unacceptable. They begin to realize that the whole thrust of secular modernity is diametrically opposed to the rhythms of conservative premodern religion, and that it threatens essential values. They begin to formulate a “fundamentalist” solution that returns to first principles and plans a counteroffensive.77 THE MUSLIMS we are considering had not yet reached this stage. Modernization was far from complete in Egypt, and had not really begun in Iran. Muslims were still either trying to absorb the new ideas in an Islamic context or adopting a secularist ideology. Fundamentalism would not appear in the Islamic world until these early stratagems had, in the eyes of some Muslims, proved to be inadequate. They would see secularism as an attempt to destroy Islam, and, indeed, in the Middle East, where Western modernity was being implemented in a foreign context, it often appeared very aggressive indeed.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This seemed clear on May 23, 1997, when Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Khatami came to the presidency in a landslide victory, gaining 22 million out of a possible 30 million votes. He immediately made it clear that he wanted to achieve a more positive relationship with the Western world, and in September 1998, he dissociated his government from the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This was later endorsed by the Faqih, Ayatollah Khameini. Khatami still finds his reforms impeded by the Council of Guardians, but his election signaled the deep desire of a large segment of the population for greater pluralism, a gentler interpretation of Islamic law, economic protection for the “downtrodden,” and more progressive policies for women.* There is no retreat from Islam. Iranians still seem to want their polity to be contained within a Shii package, which seems to have made modern values more acceptable than when they were regarded as a foreign import. It could be that if a radical religious movement is allowed its head, works through its aggressions and resentment, it can learn to interact creatively with other traditions, eschew the violence of the more recent past, and make peace with former foes. Religion becomes most violent when suppressed. This had become clear in Egypt in 1981, when the Western world was grieved to hear of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Sunni fundamentalists. Sadat had been officiating on October 6 at the parade celebrating the achievements of the 1973 war against Israel. Suddenly, one of the trucks in the parade pulled out of line just in front of the presidential stand, and when Sadat saw First Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli jump out and run toward him, he stood up, assuming that the officer wanted to salute him. But instead there was a volley of machine-gun fire. Islambouli shot round after round into the body of Sadat, even after he had himself been wounded in the stomach, shouting, “Give me that dog, that infidel!” The attack lasted only fifty seconds, but seven people besides Sadat were killed, and twenty-eight others injured. Westerners were shocked by the ferocity of the assault. They had liked Sadat. Unlike Khomeini, Sadat was a Muslim ruler they could understand. He seemed devout without being a “fanatic”; Westerners admired his peace initiative with Israel and his Open Door policy. A bevy of American and European princes, politicians, and presidents attended Sadat’s funeral. No Arab leaders came, however, and there were no crowds lining the streets. On the night of Sadat’s death, the streets of Cairo were eerily quiet. The Egyptian people did not weep for Sadat, nor did they mass, grief-stricken, around his coffin as the Iranians would later mob the corpse of Khomeini. Once again, the modern West and the more traditional societies of the Middle East were poles apart and could not share each other’s vision of events.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.54

• 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)

  Even ultra-Orthodox Jews, who seemed resolutely to turn their backs upon modern society, found that their yeshivot were essentially modern, voluntarist institutions. They adopted a novel stringency in their observance of the Torah and learned to manipulate the political system in a way that brought them more power than any religious Jew had enjoyed for nearly two millennia. 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.

• 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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Chinese Buddhist term which in turn translated the Sanskrit for liberation, one of many such familiar terms which the missionaries deployed to arouse recognition in their audiences. And in his Lord of the Universe’s discourse on almsgiving, Alopen could warm to the Lord of the Universe’s chosen theme so much that he raised the real possibility of salvation beyond those who recited the creeds of Christianity: Therefore, you who have already embraced the faith, OR you who do all kinds of meritorious deeds, OR who will walk in his way with an honest heart, shall all enter heaven and remain in that abode of happiness for ever and ever.28 All this suggests a faith which, to a degree highly unusual in Christian history, allowed itself to listen to other great interpretations of the divine. Perhaps this was inevitable. Christianity’s previous encounter with ancient, sophisticated wisdom had been with Plato and Aristotle; and that encounter had transformed it in the second century CE. Now, for the first time, it was meeting a variety of highly developed religious systems, in a situation where it had no power of coercion. Moreover, the Church of the East pushed forward its frontiers through Syrian merchants, who were renowned throughout Asia for their bargaining skills. Can it be any surprise that the result was a form of Christianity which delighted in theological give and take? The problem for the Dyophysites of China was that integration into Chinese society also meant dependence on power within it. As so often in the history of the Church of the East, the years of good fortune were comparatively brief. During the mid-ninth century the Emperor Wuzong turned against all religions which he regarded as foreign and the Church suffered accordingly. When the Tang dynasty finally collapsed in 907, the western trade routes which remained the lifeline of the Church were closed and the possibility of renewal through missions for the time being came to an end. But only for the time being. Three centuries later the accidents of history nevertheless offered a second chance for the Church of the East in China, because of its persisting ancient presence in Central Asia, and maybe in China too. Once more the Church came close to achieving what Islam was able to make permanent: winning the allegiance of successful military dynasties. The near-miss took place among the Mongols: the last in a centuries-long sequence of Central Asian nomadic peoples whose migrations shaped the history of both Asia and Europe, and, with it, the future of the Christian religion. THE MONGOLS: NEW HOPE AND CATASTROPHE

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But, true to the conservative ethos, the perfection that he envisaged was not an evolution to a new and higher state, but a return to the original pure vision of Abraham and the other prophets. It was also a return to God, the Source of all existence. But this did not mean that the mystic abjured the world. In The Four Journeys of the Soul , he described the mystical journey of a charismatic political leader. First, he must journey from man to God. Next he travels in the divine sphere, contemplating each of God’s attributes until he arrives at an intuitive sense of their indissoluble unity. Gazing thus on the face of God, he is transformed and has a new perception of what monotheism really means and an insight that is not unlike that enjoyed by the Imams. In his third journey, the leader travels back to humankind, and finds that he now sees the world quite differently. His fourth and final quest is to preach God’s word in the world and to find new ways to institute the divine law and reorder society in conformity with God’s will. 50 It was a vision that linked the perfection of society to a simultaneous spiritual development. The establishment of justice and equity here below could not be achieved without a mystical and religious underpinning. Mulla Sadra’s vision fused politics and spirituality, which had become separate in Twelver Shiism, seeing the rational effort that was essential for the transformation of society in the mundane world as inseparable from the mythical and mystical context that gave it meaning. Mulla Sadra had thus proposed a new model of Shii leadership, which would have a profound impact upon Iranian politics in our own day. The mystical political leader of Mulla Sadra’s vision would have divine insight, but that did not mean that he could impose his own opinions and religious practice on others by force. If he did that, in Sadra’s view, he denied the essence of religious truth. Sadra was vehemently opposed to the growing power of the ulema , and was especially disturbed by a wholly new idea that was gaining ground in Iran during the seventeenth century. Some ulema now believed that most Muslims were incapable of interpreting the fundamentals (usul) of the faith for themselves; because the ulema were the only official spokesmen of the Hidden Imam, ordinary folk must, therefore, select a mujtahid who had been deemed capable of exercising ijtihad (“independent reasoning”) and model their behavior on his legal rulings. Sadra was appalled by these claims of the Usulis, as the proponents of this view were called. 51 In his view, any religion that was based on such servile imitation (taqlid) was inherently “polluted.” 52 All Shiis were quite capable of understanding the traditions (akhbar) of the Prophets and the Imams, and could work out solutions for themselves, based on reason and the spiritual insights they derived from prayer and ritual.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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)

  Tawhid would also heal the alienation of the West-toxicated Iranians. Shariati insisted on bazgasht beh khishtan, a “return to the self.” Where the Greek spirit was characterized by philosophy, and the Roman spirit by art and militarism, Iran’s archetypal self was religious and Islamic. Where the rational empiricism of the West concentrates on what is, the Orient seeks the truth that shall be. If Iranians tried to conform too closely to the Western ideal, they would lose their identity and assist in their own ethnicide.58 Instead of glorying in the ancient Persian culture like the shah, they should celebrate their Shii heritage. But this could not be a superficial or a purely notional process. Muslims needed the rituals of their faith to transform them at a deeper level than the rational. In his beautiful monograph Hajj, Shariati reinterpreted the ancient cult connected with the Kabah and the pilgrimage to Mecca, which perfectly epitomized the conservative spirit, so that they could speak to Muslims in the rapidly changing world of modernity. In Shariati’s book, the pilgrimage became a journey to God, not unlike the fourfold interior journey described by Mulla Sadra. Not everybody is capable of mysticism, which requires a special talent and temperament, but the rites of the hajj are accessible to all Muslim men and women. The decision to embark on the pilgrimage—a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most Muslims—represents a new orientation. Pilgrims must leave their confused and alienated selves behind. While making the seven circumambulations around the Kabah, the immense crush of the thronging crowds, Shariati explained, caused the pilgrim to “feel like a small stream merging with a big river”: the pressure of the crowd squeezes you so hard that you are given a new life. You are now part of the People; you are now a Man, alive and eternal.… Circumambulating around Allah, you will soon forget yourself.59 Egotism was transcended in this union with the ummah and a new “center” had been attained. During the night vigil on the plain of Arafat, the pilgrims exposed themselves to the light of the divine knowledge, and must now prepare to reenter the world and struggle against the enemies of God (a jihad represented by the ritual stoning of three pillars at Mina). Then the hajji was ready to return to the world with the spiritual consciousness that was indispensable to the social struggle to create a just society, which is incumbent upon every Muslim. The rational effort involved in this depends upon, and is given meaning by, the spirituality evoked in the cult and the myth.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As we shall so often find, religion often provides the means that get people through the painful rite of passage to modernity. Thus, ministers in many of the mainline churches (even the Anglicans) Christianized the revolutionary rhetoric of such populist leaders as Sam Adams. When they spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, this made sense of Adams’s fiery denunciations of the corruption of the British officials. 51 The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of the establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When revolutionary leaders spoke of “liberty,” they used a term that was already saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth of a Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the transformation of the world. 52 Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), president of Yale University, spoke enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in “Immanuel’s Land,” and of America becoming “the principal seat of that new, that peculiar Kingdom which shall be given to the saints of the Most High.” 53 In 1775, the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war could only hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his glorious Kingdom in America: liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present crisis was preparing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order. For Provost William Smith of Philadelphia, the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.” 5 4 But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also used the language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the settlement of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity. 55 Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.” 56 The rational pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the motherland. The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian eschatology gave meaning to the revolutionary struggle and helped secularists and Calvinists alike to make the decisive, dislocating severance from tradition. So did the theology of hatred that had erupted during the Seven Years War. In rather the same way as Iranians would later call America “the Great Satan” during their Islamic Revolution, British officials were portrayed as being in league with the devil during the revolutionary crisis.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was a very modern message. Like Shariati, Khomeini was trying to prove that Islam was not a medieval faith but had always championed values that the West thought it had invented. But Islam had been infected and weakened by the imperialists. People wanted to separate religion and politics on the Western model, and this had perverted the faith: “Islam lives among the people as if it were a stranger,” Khomeini lamented. “If somebody were to present Islam as it truly is, he would find it difficult to make people believe him.”72 The Iranians were in the grip of spiritual malaise. “We have completely forgotten our identity, and have replaced it with a Western identity,” Khomeini used to say. Iranians had “sold themselves and do not know themselves, becoming enslaved to alien ideals.”73 He believed that the way to heal this alienation was to create a society based entirely on the laws of Islam, which were not only more natural for Iranians than the imported law codes of the West, but were of sacred origin. If they lived in a divinely ordered milieu, impelled by the law of the land to live exactly as God intended, they themselves and the meaning of their lives would be transformed. The disciplines, practices, and rituals of Islam would create within them the Muhammadan spirit that was the ideal for humanity. For Khomeini, faith was not a notional acceptance of a creed, but an attitude and lifestyle that embodied a revolutionary struggle for the happiness and integrity that God intended for humanity. “Once faith comes, everything follows.”74

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Immediately, Hirsch established secondary and elementary schools in which both Jewish and secular subjects were studied, with financial aid from the Rothschild family. As Hirsch pointed out, it was only in the ghetto that Jews had neglected the study of philosophy, medicine, and mathematics. In the past, Jewish thinkers had sometimes taken a leading role in the intellectual life of the mainstream culture, particularly in the Islamic world. In the ghetto, Jews had been separated from nature and they had, perforce, neglected the study of the natural sciences. Judaism, Hirsch was convinced, had nothing to fear from contact with other cultures. Jews should embrace as many modern developments as they could, but without becoming as iconoclastic as the Reformers. 2 9 As a young man, Hirsch had published Nineteen Letters of Ben Uzziel (1836), which made a moving plea for more orthodox observance, but he blamed the rigid traditionalists, who shunned modernity, for the widespread defections to Christianity and to Reform. He did not subscribe to their fundamentalist literalism either. Jews, he believed, should seek out the hidden, inner meaning of the various commandments by means of careful study and research. Laws that made no rational sense could serve as reminders. The practice of circumcision, for example, called to mind the duty to keep the body pure; the prohibition against mixing meat and milk symbolized the need to preserve the divine order in creation. All the laws must be observed because they built character and, by making Jews holy, enabled them to fulfill their moral mission to humanity. Hirsch’s middle road became known as Neo-Orthodoxy. His career shows, yet again, the voluntary nature of religious orthodoxy in the modern world. Where once tradition had been taken for granted, now Jews had to fight and argue in order to become Orthodox. I N E GYPT AND I RAN , Muslims had an entirely different experience of the modernizing West. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he inaugurated a new phase in the relations of East and West. His plan was to establish a base in Suez, whence he could harass Britain’s sea-lanes to India and also, perhaps, attack the Ottoman empire from Syria. This meant that Egypt and Palestine became a theater in the war for world domination between England and France. It was a European power game, but Napoleon presented himself to the Egyptians as the bearer of progress and enlightenment.

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

  will establish their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith.’53 This is the first surviving formulation of an idea of apostolic succession in Christian ministry. The Corinthians listened and restored their old leaders, so it was also the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church: a moment with much significance for the future of Christianity generally. Clement actually took as given the twofold order of bishop/presbyter, which can also be seen in the Didachē, even though most sources are agreed in regarding him as Bishop in Rome. Another tract from Rome, not much later than the time of Clement, the book by Hermas known as the Shepherd, also talks of a collegiate ministry of presbyter-bishops, even though the final version of the Shepherd was written when Hermas’s brother Pius was Bishop of Rome. This suggests that a twofold and threefold view of ministry could coexist; yet the elevation of one leading bishop figure above other presbyters was virtually complete by the end of the second century. One powerful force in this development was the prestige enjoyed in all parts of the Church by the seven letters written to various Churches and to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. They relate to his journey from Antioch to Rome following his arrest just after 100 CE and were written in the certain expectation (indeed joyful hope) that he would die as a martyr.54 In these letters Ignatius spoke much of his concern at what are recognizable as forms of gnostic belief, including docetic views of Christ’s Passion. To combat this, he emphasized the reality of both Christ’s divinity and his humanity, which he saw best expressed in the Church’s continuing celebration of the Eucharist. But how could this doctrine be guaranteed? Ignatius pointed to what he saw as a standard of doctrine set by the beliefs affirmed by the Church in Rome, which he knew would be the city of his martyrdom; it is worth noting that he made no mention of the Bishop of Rome, simply of the Church. He linked with this the role in each community of the bishop, who should be the one person in every place responsible for handing on the faith and guarding against deviation. The bishop, after all, presided at the Eucharist and should be the automatic source of authority: ‘You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ [followed] the Father … Let no one do anything apart from the bishop that has to do with the Church. Let that be regarded as a valid Eucharist which is held under the bishop or to whomever he entrusts it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the whole [katholikē] Church.’55 The cynical might say that it was easy for Ignatius to take this line, since there was already one bishop in Antioch and his name was Ignatius. Noticeably, a letter written by his correspondent and fellow martyr Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Immediately, crowds gathered at the spot and walked toward the soldiers, led by young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives. The army began to retreat, the soldiers firing at the ground to keep the people at bay. The next day, tens of thousands went back onto the streets to protest against these killings.81 By mid-January, it was all over. Prime Minister Bakhtiar negotiated the shah’s departure, which, to save face, was declared to be only temporary. The royal family flew to Egypt, where Sadat took them in. Bakhtiar tried to stall the Revolution by ordering the release of political prisoners, dismantling SAVAK, refusing oil to Israel and South Africa, and promising to review all foreign contracts and to make major cuts in military expenditure. Again, it was too late. The crowds were clamoring for the return of the man they called their Imam, and on February 1, 1979, Bakhtiar was forced to allow Khomeini to return. Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran was one of those symbolic events, like the storming of the Bastille, which seem to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, inside and outside Iran, it was a dark moment, a triumph of superstition over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, who had long feared that Islam was about to be annihilated, it seemed a luminous reversal. For some Iranian Shiis, Khomeini’s return seemed a miracle, and inevitably, it resembled the mythical return of the Hidden Imam. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds shouted for “Imam Khomeini,” confident that a new age of justice had dawned. Senior mujtahids, such as Ayatollah Shariatmadari, were incensed by this use of the title of Imam, and it was firmly and officially stated that Khomeini was not the Hidden Imam. But whatever the official line, for millions of the Iranian masses, Khomeini was an Imam until the day he died. His life and career seemed clear evidence that the divine was present and active in history after all. Like the Revolution itself, Khomeini seemed to make an ancient myth an actual reality.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Indeed, the publication of Zalman’s book the Tanya (1791) inspired a new edict of excommunication. This was a pity. Zalman was evolving a new type of Hasidism known as Habad, 12 which was much closer to the spirituality of the Misnagdim, since it made rational thought the starting point of the spiritual quest. Zalman was also open to some of the Enlightenment ideals, which he tried to accommodate within a mystical framework. He believed that our rational powers alone were incapable of finding God; if we relied only upon our senses—as the scientists and philosophers bade us do—the world did indeed seem empty of the divine. But the mystic could use his intuitive powers to break through to a different mode of perception, which revealed the immanent Presence in all phenomena. Zalman was not opposed to reason, but was simply making the old conservative point that rational thinking was not the sole mode of perception; reason and mystical intuition should work hand-in-hand. When Jews engaged in rational speculation and in the study of modern secular subjects, Zalman argued, they became aware of the limitations of their minds and would seek to transcend them by means of ecstatic prayer. 13 Zalman encouraged his Habad Hasidim to propel themselves into a sense of transcendence by the violent gestures that the Besht had introduced. Zalman himself used to roll upon the ground until he entered a tranced state, and would dance wildly like the common people. 14 But this ecstasy was rooted in study and disciplined concentration. Habad Hasidim were taught to manage their unconscious selves by descending ever deeper into their minds until they encountered, like mystics in all the great traditions, a sacred presence in the ground of their being. The conflict between Hasidim and Misnagdim intensified. Zalman was actually imprisoned in St. Petersburg for some years, when the Misnagdim denounced him to the Russian authorities as a troublemaker. But during the early years of the nineteenth century, the hostility began to abate. Both sides realized that they had more to fear from other quarters than from each other, and should, therefore, join forces to oppose these new threats. The most worrying development was the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which had just begun to penetrate Eastern European Jewry and which seemed heretical to Hasidim and Misnagdim alike. The Haskalah was the creation of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the brilliant son of a poor Torah scholar in Dessau, Germany, who, at the age of fourteen, had followed his favorite teacher to Berlin. There he fell in love with modern secular learning and, at prodigious speed, mastered German, French, English, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy.