Pride

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 fact that Novgorod did not shape the destiny of Russia was ultimately thanks to the rulers of a modest settlement called Moscow, hundreds of miles to its south-east. Hitherto little noticed in the affairs of Rus’, in the later thirteenth century the ambitious rulers of Moscow began to make the most of their remoteness from Tatar interest or interference. They assiduously cultivated the Kipchak Khan, regularly visiting him and leaving their sons as hostages; right into the fifteenth century they paid tribute to the khan and customarily maintained prayers for him in the Church’s liturgy. Similarly in the late fourteenth century, when Moscow started minting its own coinage, many of its coins bore Arabic inscriptions dutifully praying for long life for the khan.27 Unsurprisingly, the princes of Moscow modelled many of their political institutions on those of Mongol society, but they also paraded their devotion to the Church traditions of Constantinople. By the fourteenth century, as their territories and influence expanded, the Tatars allowed them to take the title of Grand Prince, and across Europe rulers began hearing of this distant realm called Muscovy. Novgorod soon uncomfortably felt the rivalry of the Muscovite grand princes, while Muscovy among its various confrontations with neighbouring principalities, also fell into increasing tension with a growing power to the west, the grand princes of Lithuania.28 Of all the various powers in the Baltic region and the east to the Urals, an informed observer of east-central Europe in the late fourteenth century would have pointed to Lithuania as the most likely to emerge as supreme. The grand princes of Lithuania were the last major rulers in Europe to resist making a choice between the three great monotheisms, proudly keeping to their ancestral animist faith. They were vigorous and effective warlords who in the wake of the Mongol invasion preyed on the various shattered communities of the region, and over the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they extended their power to command the eastern European plains and mountain chains, from the Baltic eventually as far as the Black Sea. They proved as tolerant of Christians in their dominions as the Kipchak Khans had been, and the nobles (boyars) of Rus’ were as happy to accept their overlordship as they had been that of the animist or Islamic khans. The Grand Prince of Lithuania was anxious to unite as many traditions as possible in his vast domains. To his Latin-speaking elites he presented himself as ‘dux magnus Litvanorum Russiaeque dominus et haeres naturalis’ – Grand Prince of the Lithuanians and Lord and Natural Successor of the Rus’. Yet his bureaucrats spoke a ‘Ruthenian’ form of Slavonic which reflected their familiarity with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church; some of his family looked to Orthodox Christianity to sustain them, and not only many of his boyars but most

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Society’s enemies always accused Banna of having created a “state within a state.” He had indeed built a massively successful counterculture which highlighted the deficiencies of the government in a way that was clearly threatening.76 It called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions; the fact that the Society alone was able to appeal to the fellahin was also disturbing. But, more important, all the Society’s institutions had a distinctly Muslim identity. Its factories all had mosques and gave the workers time to make the required prayers; in accordance with the social message of the Koran, working conditions and pay were good; workers had health insurance and decent holidays; disputes were arbitrated fairly. The extraordinary success of the Society was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that, whatever the intellectuals and pundits claimed, most of the Egyptian people wanted to be religious. It also showed that Islam could be progressive. There was no slavish return to the practices of the seventh century. The Brothers were extremely critical of the new Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and condemned its literalistic interpretations of Islamic law, such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers.77 The Brothers had no definite notions about the kind of polity the future Islamic state should have, but they insisted that to be faithful to the spirit of the Koran and Sunnah, there must be a fairer distribution of wealth than there was in the Saudi Kingdom. Their general ideas were certainly in tune with the times: rulers should be elected (as in the early Muslim period), and, as the rashidun (“righteous”) caliphs had urged, a ruler must be accountable to the people and must not rule dictatorially. But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done.78 Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished.79

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He heaved the duffel into the room, closed the door, and walked over to me. “I’m Chip Martin,” he announced in a deep voice, the voice of a radio deejay. Before I could respond, he added, “I’d shake your hand, but I think you should hold on damn tight to that towel till you can get some clothes on.” I laughed and nodded my head at him (that’s cool, right? the nod?) and said, “I’m Miles Halter. Nice to meet you.” “Miles, as in ‘to go before I sleep’?” he asked me. “Huh?” “It’s a Robert Frost poem. You’ve never read him?” I shook my head no. “Consider yourself lucky.” He smiled. I grabbed some clean underwear, a pair of blue Adidas soccer shorts, and a white T-shirt, mumbled that I’d be back in a second, and ducked back into the bathroom. So much for a good first impression. “So where are your parents?” I asked from the bathroom. “My parents? The father’s in California right now. Maybe sitting in his La- Z-Boy. Maybe driving his truck. Either way, he’s drinking. My mother is probably just now turning off campus.” “Oh,” I said, dressed now, not sure how to respond to such personal information. I shouldn’t have asked, I guess, if I didn’t want to know. Chip grabbed some sheets and tossed them onto the top bunk. “I’m a top bunk man. Hope that doesn’t bother you.” “Uh, no. Whatever is fine.” “I see you’ve decorated the place,” he said, gesturing toward the world map. “I like it.” And then he started naming countries. He spoke in a monotone, as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Afghanistan. Albania. Algeria. American Samoa. Andorra. And so on. He got through the A’s before looking up and noticing my incredulous stare. “I could do the rest, but it’d probably bore you. Something I learned over the summer. God, you can’t imagine how boring New Hope, Alabama, is in the summertime. Like watching soybeans grow. Where are you from, by the way?” “Florida,” I said. “Never been.” “That’s pretty amazing, the countries thing,” I said. “Yeah, everybody’s got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?” “Um, I know a lot of people’s last words.” It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations. “Example?” “I like Henrik Ibsen’s. He was a playwright.” I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I’d never read any of his plays. I didn’t like reading plays. I liked reading biographies. “Yeah, I know who he was,” said Chip. “Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”

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

  constructively melded in syncretist fashion with memories of other spiritualities came a variety of new religion with various identities: among much overlap were the Vodou (voodoo) of French Haiti, the Candomblé of Portuguese Brazil, the Santería of Spanish Cuba. In turn the syntheses in America fertilized and reinvigorated African religion back in Africa: part of a continuous traffic across the Atlantic.53 That name Santería is itself instructive because, as with so many other Christian labels, it began as an insult or term of condescension — an English coinage equivalent to this Spanish word might well be ‘saintery’ — but it is now a label of pride for a form of religion constructed, like so much Iberian-African syncretism, with practical good sense. Santería is probably the variety of these syncretist religions closest to Catholicism, so that in Cuban Catholicism it is difficult to separate much Catholic practice in the parish churches from Santería, and it is really impossible to put statistics on the number of its practitioners, so all-pervasive is its influence. The great advantage of the panoply of saints which the enslaved might encounter in their confraternities was that the saints could stand in for the hierarchy of divinities who in West Africa were offered devotion in the place of the supreme creator god Olurun (who was himself too powerful to be concerned with the affairs of feeble humans). Below the creator god were also orishas, subordinate divinities in African religion connected with the whole range of human activities. Every person born might have a connection to an orisha, and it was also perfectly acceptable in Catholic practice for everyone to choose a personal patron saint; it was only natural to look for compatible attributes between sacred figures from the two worlds. The Virgin Mary could hardly be ignored in Catholicism and in the interiors of churches, and it was not a problem to identify her omnipresent image with the Taino goddess Atabey or the Yoruba orishas Oshun and Yemaya. In Cuba, Mary has never had any competitor as the national patron saint.54 Without such doubling, it would be difficult to account for the popularity of St Barbara among the altars and paintings of Cuban churches. Traditionally, Barbara had a particular concern for thunder, and latterly for gunpowder. She could thus stand in for the orisha Shangô; he duplicated her powers over thunder, and despite being male and a notorious womanizer, he had conveniently once escaped from the wrath of his cuckolded brother Ogun disguised as Ogun’s wife Oya (one can imagine the humour of the situation appealing to devotees as they lit their candles under the approving eyes of some missionary priest). In other settings, less riskily, Barbara could be identified directly with Oya.55 Equally surprising is to find St Patrick so prominent in many Vodou shrines (see Plate 61), until one remembers that he too had been a slave who had twice

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

  in the Western Church. Diocesan bureaucracies were both symptom and cause of this. Kings and noblemen in Europe saw the usefulness of competent bishops to improve their own administration and drafted them into their own governments. Often this might take a bishop away from his duties in his diocese, so his administration might have to carry on without him. Usually it did so quite successfully, but an efficient office system is rarely spiritually inspiring. Even though they generally tried to be real fathers-in-God for their dioceses, bishops were increasingly trapped in a world of fixed routine – faced with demands from pope and lay rulers, and remote figures to their flocks. In the long term, it was not a healthy development, and it bred a constant succession of tensions between clergy and people with which episcopal systems have continued to struggle – most damagingly for the Western Church in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Nevertheless, this age of growing episcopal power also left a staggering heritage of architectural beauty: the cathedrals of medieval Catholic Europe. The grandest church buildings of the Carolingian era were, as we have seen, virtually all built for the round of worship in monasteries. Given that the bishop and his diocese now had a new significance in the devotional lives of the faithful, the mother church of the diocese needed to be an outward and visible expression of that role. Very often, cathedrals were sited or resited in the expanding towns which were products of Europe’s economic growth in the period. As a result, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the cathedrals of Latin Europe were rebuilt on a huge scale, to the extent that one celebrated French historian, Georges Duby, dubbed this ‘the age of the Cathedrals’.28 It was by no means the case that great monasteries stopped building and rebuilding their great churches, but now they had rivals; on the whole, the accidents of European history, both in destruction and in well-intentioned rebuilding, have favoured the survival of medieval cathedrals rather than the most prodigious abbey churches. The archetypal specimens are in the region covered by France, although scarcely less splendid cathedrals are also to be found in England, where after 1066 Norman invaders did their best both to make a distinctive mark on the landscape and to pay off a debt of gratitude to the papacy for blessing their conquest of the realm (see pp. 382–3). Symptomatic of that Anglo-French connection is the fact that the germ of a new architectural style for both cathedrals and monasteries, eventually spreading throughout Europe, is simultaneously to be found in major churches widely separated in this once-united cultural zone: Durham Cathedral, far to the north of England, and a rebuilt royal Abbey of St-Denis to the north of Paris, both under construction in the first half of the twelfth century. In these two enormous churches and then in many others, architects began tackling the technical

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

  or his successors might well have decided to make the sort of turnaround to Christianity which had seized Trdat, Constantine and Ezana. The new reign proved to be brief, as Shah Kavad died only a few months after his coup, but significant goodwill gestures to Christians and their advance into the centre of action in the empire continued. Kavad had quickly ordered that a new Catholicos should be chosen for the Church, ending a hiatus of twenty years in which Shah Khusrau had prevented the office being filled. The man singled out, Ishoyahb II, proved an outstanding diplomat of wide vision who gave official encouragement to those taking Christianity into China. He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen. Alopen was well received on his arrival in 635. The occasion was long remembered and celebrated by Chinese Christians, for it led to the foundation of the first of several monasteries in China, with official encouragement, and in no less a setting than the then Chinese imperial capital, Chang’an (now Xi’an). The library pagoda on the site of one once-celebrated monastery rebuilt a century or so later still survives in Zhouzhi, forty-five miles south-west of Xi’an (see Plate 6). Despite the site’s centuries of later use by Taoists and then Buddhists, the building still bears the Chinese name which signified both Christianity and the world of the eastern Mediterranean, Ta Qin, and although local people had always remembered its Christian origins through the centuries, their significance was not more widely recognized until the 1930s. The pagoda stands proudly on a hillside; remarkably and surely significantly, it is within easy sight of the next hill, on which stands the famous Taoist Louguan Temple, much favoured as a centre of higher education by the early Tang emperors in those years when the Church of the East flourished here. Here is a tangible link to the Chinese community of the Church of the East, which although long lost now was destined to persist over seven centuries. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, recent investigations suggest that there too one surviving ancient temple started life as a building of the Church of the East. Mongolia is yielding parallel finds. These unexpected rediscoveries may not be the last.51 There were equally promising moves for the Church of the East towards the west and Byzantium. One of Khusrau II’s most significant trophies in his campaigns against the Byzantines had been not territory but a prime Christian relic: no less an object than the True Cross, which had somehow appeared in Jerusalem in the fourth century during the city’s self-promotion as a holy place (see pp. 193–4). To the fury and humiliation of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, the Shah seized the Cross from Jerusalem when he sacked the city in 614. Yet Khusrau treated it with respect, entrusting it to his Christian wife; it

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Western observers were particularly dismayed by the spectacle of women returning to the veil, which they had seen as a symbol of Islamic backwardness and patriarchy since the days of Lord Cromer. But it was not experienced in this way by those Muslim women who voluntarily assumed Islamic dress for practical reasons and also as a way of casting off an alien Western identity. Donning a veil, a scarf, and a long dress could be a symbol of that “return to the self” which Islamists were attempting with such difficulty in the postcolonial period. There is, after all, nothing sacred about Western dress per se. The desire to see all women wearing it has been construed by Islamists as a sign of that tendency to regard “the West” as the norm to which “the rest” are obliged to conform. The veiled woman has, over the years, become a symbol of Islamic self-assertion and a rejection of Western cultural hegemony. Opting for concealment, she defies the sexual mores of the West, with its strange compulsion to “reveal all.” Where Western men and women attempt to bring the body under the control of the human will in their gyms and workouts, and cling to this life by making their bodies impervious to the process of time and ageing, the veiled Islamic body tacitly declares that it is under divine orders and oriented not toward this world but to transcendence. In the West, men and women often display and even flaunt their expensively acquired tans and finely honed bodies as a mark of privilege; Muslim bodies, concealed under layers of very similar clothing, emphasize the equality of the Islamic vision. By the same token, they assert the Koranic ideal of community over the individualism of Western modernity. In rather the same way as Shukri Mustafa’s communes, the veiled Islamic woman is a tacit critique of the darker side of the modern spirit.41

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  122 Televangelism had also become more adept at packaging and marketing Christianity. It seemed to make the God who was being banished from so much of the public sphere a dramatic and tangible presence. When they watched the Pentecostalist preacher Oral Roberts apparently healing sick and disabled people on the air, they could see the divine power at work. When they heard the hugely powerful televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who claimed to save 100,000 souls a week, hurling vitriolic abuse at Roman Catholics, homosexuals, and the Supreme Court, they felt that somebody was giving public voice to their own views. When they heard of the vast sums of money that Pat Robertson or the Bakkers could raise in their programs each week in donations, fundamentalists became convinced that God was the answer to the problems of the economy. Christians, they insisted, must give in order to get. In the Kingdom of God, according to Robertson, “there is no economic recession, no shortage.” 123 It was a truth that seemed borne out by the immense success of the top ten Christian television empires, which took in over a billion dollars each year, employed over a thousand people, and turned out a highly professional product. 124 The man of the hour, however, was Jerry Falwell. It has been estimated that during the 1960 S and 1970 S four out of every ten households in the United States tuned in to his station in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had begun his ministry there in 1956 with only a handful of members in a disused soda plant. Three years later, the congregation had grown to three times its original size, and by 1988 the Thomas Road Baptist Church had 18,000 members and sixty associate pastors. The total income of the church was over sixty million dollars per annum, and services were broadcast on 392 television channels and 600 radio stations. 125 A typical fundamentalist, Falwell wanted to build a separate, self-sufficient world. At Lynchburg, he created a school run on biblical lines; by 1976, Liberty Baptist College had 1500 students. Falwell also established philanthropical ventures: a home for alcoholics, a nursing home, and an adoption agency to offer an alternative to abortion. By 1976, Falwell regarded himself as the leading born-again broadcaster. Falwell was creating an alternative society to undercut secular humanism. From the start, he wanted Liberty College to become a world-class university; it was to be what Notre Dame was to the Roman Catholics, or Brigham Young to the Mormons. Fundamentalism had changed since Bob Jones had founded his university in the 1920s. Separation from society was no longer enough. Like other fundamentalist educators, Falwell was creating a cadre for the future, “a spiritual army of young people who are pro-life, pro-moral, and pro-America.” 126 Where Bob Jones had turned away from the secular world to prepare teachers for Christian schools, Falwell wanted to take on the secularist establishment. Liberty would train students for all walks of life and the major professions.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At Bnei Brak, the Hazon Ish presided over what Rabbi Elburg called “the world of humrot (‘stringencies’),” and taught his disciples to find the “most restrictive, stringent, and punctilious” way to observe the commandments,31 a discipline which would set them radically apart from the pragmatic ethos of modernity. This type of rigor had been frowned upon by the rabbinic establishment in the traditional Jewish communities in Europe. Rabbis had respected the scruples of people who were concerned about the finer points of the Law, but would not allow them to impose this stringency (humra) on the community as a whole, because it could become divisive. Jews who came from communities which had more rigorous standards about the slaughtering of animals would not be able to eat with a Jew who interpreted the rules more leniently. Too great a stringency could also be insulting to the great sages of the past, who had not been quite so punctilious in such matters. Rabbis had tended toward leniency in their interpretation of the Torah: a spiritual elite could not be allowed to make observance impossible for the more run-of-the-mill Jews.32 The revolutionary stringency of Bnei Brak was part of a new counterculture that the Haredim were trying to create. It set a religious standard that was diametrically opposed to the rationalized spirit of modernity, which made efficiency and pragmatism the main criteria. At a time when Reform, Conservative, and Neo-Orthodox Jews were discarding parts of the law or trying to find a more relaxed and rational religious life, the more rigorous observance of the Haredim refused to compromise with the norms of mainstream society. On his visit to Bnei Brak, Rabbi Elburg noted that it had become “a world in itself”;33 Haredi Jews were not only withdrawing from modern society, but from other, less punctilious Jews. They needed different slaughterers, shops that were stricter about kosher food, and their own ritual baths. They were cultivating a distinct identity in opposition to the temper of the times.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  While the secular and religious members of the Gush had been occupied in the establishment of their organization, a group of Kookists, with the help of the veteran settler Moshe Levinger, attempted to create a garin (a “seed,” or nucleus, for a small settlement) in a railway depot near the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. This was a sacred area for Jews: Nablus occupied the site of the biblical city of Shechem, associated with Jacob and Joshua. The settlers were attempting to re-sacralize land which, in their view, was profaned by the Palestinians. They called their settlement Elon Moreh, one of the city’s other biblical names, and tried to turn their railway depot into a yeshiva for the study of sacred texts. They also agreed to join Gush Emunim. The government tried to dislodge the settlers, since the garin was illegal, but the Gush felt no need to comply with the declarations of the United Nations that demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, since Jews were not bound by the laws of other peoples. The settlers won considerable support in Israel, while the government seemed feeble and hesitant. In April 1975, Moshe Levinger led a march of twenty thousand Jews into the West Bank. From his tent in Elon Moreh, which he called his “war situation room,” he negotiated with Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres. There was a battle with soldiers of the IDF: no shots were fired, but rocks were hurled and rifle butts used. Eventually, Peres was flown in by helicopter, confronted Levinger in his tent, and after the meeting, the rabbi stormed out, tearing his white shirt in the traditional sign of mourning. As elections were looming and Peres feared to lose the religious vote, he finally caved in and in December 1975, he agreed to accommodate thirty of the Elon Moreh settlers in a nearby army camp. Levinger was carried in a triumphal procession on the shoulders of cheering youths.8 A thin, balding man, with a straggling beard, thick glasses, and a gun perpetually slung over his shoulder, Levinger had become a new kind of Jewish hero. For some, the Settler was beginning to rank alongside the Zaddik, the Torah scholar, and the Hasid. He also won the support of secularists. “Levinger symbolizes the return of Zionism,” maintained the veteran and self-confessed terrorist Geula Cohen. “He is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank]. He is the leader of the Zionist revolution.”9

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

  moment nevertheless when, in continuing to observe the Sabbath, it explicitly separated itself from the devotional practice of the Church it knew best, the Miaphysite Church of Alexandria. The Council of Däbra Mitmaq was a triumph for the Negus himself, the zenith of one of the most prosperous and self-confident eras in the empire’s existence. His last years were troubled, as (in a pattern which would be repeated in Ethiopian history) this exceptionally talented man descended into paranoia and obsessive brutality. He became a recluse; his drive to regulate his Church, his hostility to any Judaism beyond the extent of his own ordinances and his determination to eradicate traditional non-Christian religion all led him into a spree of punishment killings. Among the victims accused of betraying their Christian faith were one of his wives and several of his children, flogged to death. After the Negus’s own death, the movement away from the wider Church might have proceeded further, as powerful voices continued to question the role of the Egyptian abun in the Church, but in 1477 a further council of the Church presided over by his son reaffirmed this ancient link with the Patriarch of Alexandria. The fifteenth century thus set patterns and boundaries for Ethiopian Christianity which survived into modern times. Yet those links to a wider Catholicity were still to a Christianity which rejected the Roman imperial Church’s conclusions at Chalcedon. This was a matter of great significance when the wider world erupted into the remoteness of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, during one of the worst tests and most terrible times in its history (see pp. 711–12). The Western bishops at the Council of Florence had not expected to hear of a king of Ethiopia called Zar’a Ya’qob, but they did know (or thought they knew) of a priest-king in the East called Prester John. Since the twelfth-century Crusades had first brought intensified contacts between Europe and the Middle East, there had been tales of this mighty Christian ruler who would be an ally for hard-pressed Latin Europeans against the threat of Islam. Some placed him in India, others, vague about geography beyond their own world, further north in Asia – this drew on the reality of Muslim defeats by Mongol khans in twelfth- century Central Asia who were in fact adherents of Buddhism, a religion which meant nothing to western Europeans. Friar William of Rubruck, one of the few to know better, had commented sourly in the 1260s that the stories about Prester John were all the fault of the Nestorians (Dyophysites), who were prone to ‘create big rumours out of nothing’.61 At the Council of Florence in 1441, it was the reality of Ethiopia, a remote but powerful Christian monarchy south beyond Egypt, that encouraged new European excitement about Prester John. Prester John went on prompting

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  His extraordinary popularity might have shown a perceptive observer that Iranians might well follow a cleric in political matters far more enthusiastically than they would any layman. Kashani and Khomeini knew each other well, but in fact the two men were very different. Where Khomeini would be utterly disciplined and single-minded in pursuit of an objective, Kashani was much more erratic, willing to jump on any bandwagon, and some of his schemes were morally indefensible. He had been imprisoned by the British for pro-German activities in 1943: the iniquities of the Nazis were less important, in Kashani’s eyes, than the fact that they might help the Iranians to get rid of the British. 103 Kashani also had links with the Fedayin-e Islam, and when one of them tried to assassinate the shah in 1949, Kashani was sent into exile. From Beirut, he threw in his lot with the National Front party, issuing a fatwa in July 1949 in favor of the nationalization of oil. In 1950, Kashani was permitted to return to Iran and received another hero’s welcome. The crowds started to assemble at Mehrabad Airport the evening before his arrival. Musaddiq, whose National Front had just made large gains in the elections because of the oil issue, joined the welcoming party of senior ulema; when Kashani alighted from his plane, the din was so tumultuous that the official speech in his honor had to be abandoned, and when he began his journey to his Tehran home, the crowds became delirious, sometimes even lifting his car off the road. 104 The fourth crucial event of these years was the oil crisis, 105 which flared in 1953, when the prime minister, Ali Razmara, a supporter of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was assassinated by the Fedayin. Two days later the Majlis recommended that the government nationalize the oil industry, and Musaddiq became premier, replacing the shah’s candidate. Iranian oil was nationalized, and, even though the International Court at The Hague ruled in favor of Iran’s right to nationalize its own resources, British and American oil companies joined in an unofficial boycott of Iranian oil. In Britain and the United States, the media portrayed Musaddiq as a dangerous fanatic, a thief (even though he had always promised compensation), and a communist, who would hand Iran over to the USSR (even though Musaddiq was a nationalist who wanted to free Iran from all foreign control). In Iran, however, Musaddiq was a hero, rather as Nasser would be after he nationalized the Suez Canal. He began to arrogate more power to himself at the shah’s expense. When he demanded control of the armed forces in July 1952, the shah dismissed him, but there were massive popular riots in Musaddiq’s favor, which alarmed the royalists, since it suggested that Iranians were on the verge of demanding republican rule.

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

  monarchy of England, with a precociously centralized government which eventually fell like a ripe plum into the grateful hands of Norman carpetbaggers in 1066. The ideology of this remarkable kingdom was fuelled by the way in which Bede had depicted a single race called the English; his book, after all, was called ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the gens Anglorum’ – ‘people of the Angli’. Bede gave this ‘people’ a pride in their common and special identity, paradoxically based on their common loyalty to Rome. Pope Gregory I rather than Augustine is the hero of Bede’s tale of the conversion of the English. Bede called not Augustine but Gregory the ‘Apostle’ of the English; and he was not creating this image, but reflecting a continuous veneration in England for Gregory.38 In Bede’s own day, the rest of western Europe would have considered this Gregory-mania a case of English eccentricity, for Gregory had actually ended his papacy under something of a cloud, unmourned by the people of Rome. The first life of Gregory was written by an Englishman in the early eighth century in the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby, and it was two centuries after Gregory’s death before Rome caught up with his cult, enshrining the Pope alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as one of the ‘Big Four’ theologians of the earlier West, the four Latin Doctors.39 It may be that the popularity of pictures of the Latin Doctors in medieval English churches – a favourite and of course appropriate subject for portrayal on pulpits – stemmed from the thought that one of the Doctors was Pope Gregory, who could be considered an honorary Englishman. This ‘Englishness’ can be considered one of the most lasting and unexpected consequences of Augustine’s mission, and the way that Bede told its story: the English achieved a political unity which, by contrast, the equally fervently Christian Irish never envisaged or sought for themselves until much later. Bede’s narrative reflected the fact that the Church in England had already secured its unity under Roman obedience before the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms united. The crucial decade was the 670s, when a couple of councils of English bishops made decisions for the whole Church in the various kingdoms of England, first at Hertford in 673 and then at Hatfield in Yorkshire in 679.40 Hertford gave shape and discipline to the English Church, beginning to set up a single system of written law for it to operate under, at a time when no king in England contemplated such an idea. At Hatfield, the bishops supported the Pope’s condemnation of the continuing Byzantine efforts to conciliate Miaphysites, and also gave their assent to the ‘double procession’ of the Spirit from Father and Son, that proposition of Augustine’s which so infuriated the Byzantine Church. A paradoxical feature of these vigorous Anglo-Saxon affirmations of Western Latin theology was that the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding over the

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

  who also found themselves victims of enslavement by Europeans (see p. 714 and Plate 61).16 Patrick and his successors as bishops in Ireland faced a society very different even from the fragmented state of mainland Europe after the empire had disintegrated. The island had no central authority, or (importantly) any memory of one, and instead there was a large collection of groupings (tuatha) headed by dynastic leaders. Their power over kin and clients was based both on their ability to provide defence against other dynastic leaders and to intercede with supernatural powers for the prosperity of crops and cattle. To call these leaders kings may be misleading, since there could have been anything between 150 and 200 of them in the island at any one time. No Christian episcopate had previously had to cope with anything like this since the Church had first formed its alliance with the powerful. In puzzling out how the situation might become fruitful, the bishops realized that the Church could be rooted in Irish society by founding monasteries and nunneries.17 Patrick already spoke with pride of the ‘sons and daughters of Scottic [Irish] chieftains … seen to become monks and virgins of Christ’.18 That association with chieftains proved a way of providing for monastic foundations: in the state of Irish legal custom, it would have been impossible to provide for independent estates for monastic maintenance, as was the norm in the former empire, so monasteries became part of the joint estate of great families. As a result, there grew a network of Christian communities intimately involved in the life of each local dynastic grouping, fostering Christian life throughout the island all the more powerfully because monasteries were so enmeshed in the pride and pre- Christian traditions of each tuath. There was nothing fixed or enduring about many tuatha, and reflecting the itinerant character of much of Irish society, the Church developed the peculiar phenomenon of roving ecclesiastical families, in whom priesthood and care of churches descended from one generation to another; they carried with them in their migrations the stories of their founding saints, spreading the same cult to widely separated parts of the island.19 A surprising number of early Christian buildings can still be seen in the west of Ireland and its remote Atlantic islands, mostly monastic sites: drystone-built, straggly collections of cells and halls within enclosures, like the homes of the leaders who had provided for them. Also pleasingly numerous in survival and staggering in their extravagant beauty and sophistication are the art objects which served the sacred life of these communities: manuscripts illuminated and written in a beautiful and individual Latin script, bronze bells, metal crosiers, lovingly preserved despite the violent and destructive later history of Ireland because they became relics associated with early saints, just as important as their

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

  1620s, they learned of its rediscovery (on a site now unknown, but very possibly that of the identifiable Ta Qin monastery in Zhouzhi (see Plate 7). Dated 781, surmounted by dragons and a cross and bearing inscriptions in Chinese and Estrangela, it is a silkily expressed commemoration of imperial favour shown towards the Christians since 635, culminating in their present protector, General Guo Ziyi. Besides its detailed if inevitably politically selective account of that history, it boldly recites a statement of Christian faith in Chinese, commendations of the faith, and poetry in praise of the triune God and of Christ ‘divided in nature’, with allusions to imperial literature which stake a bold claim for Christianity as the best expression of the universe’s underlying principle, the Tao. With the stele’s proud enunciation of various ecclesiastical dignitaries alongside emperors and imperial officials, there could be no better symbol of the integration of the Dyophysite Christian community into imperial life. The first and last visual impression that it leaves in its present setting in Xi’an’s ‘Forest of Stelae’ is just how alike are all the other monuments around it.27 There are many more traces of the Church of the East’s real attempt to explain the Christian message in terms which would make sense to people in this alien culture. From their first arrival in China, Christians seemed to have realized that it would be a good strategy to use language familiar to Chinese from Taoism, as the stele from 781 now at Xi’an witnessed. Taoism, after all, had a vision of the original goodness of human nature which was congenial to Dyophysites emphasizing the whole humanity of Christ’s separate human nature alongside his divinity. Yet Dyophysite Christians were also ready to model themselves on another faith which the Chinese recognized as having come from beyond their borders, but which was by now well established and widely respected: Buddhism. So Alopen and his successors presented their faith in the form of sutras, discourses in Buddhist style, and they had no inhibitions in presenting Buddhism as a form of truth, albeit one which needed extending. So Alopen, drawing on the specialized titles of honour of the Buddhists, had written in his Jesus Messiah Sutra: All the buddhas as well as kinnaras and the superintending-devas and arhans can see the Lord of Heaven. No human being, however, has ever seen the Lord of Heaven … All the buddhas flow and flux by virtue of this very wind, while in this world, there is no place where the wind does not reach. Here, there seems to be a real attempt to suggest that the teachings of Buddhism are in a literal sense inspired by the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere in his Discourse on the oneness of the Ruler of the Universe, Alopen observed that, thanks to the Devil, ‘[i]t has become impossible for a human being to understand the truth and attain “liberation from sorrow”’ – the latter phrase simply being a

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

  devotion to the papacy and their memory of how Augustine had brought them their faith. Even though Rome had done little of substance since Gregory to launch missions into new lands, the Anglo-Saxon missionaries were very fond of quoting the sections of Gregory’s letters to Augustine which discussed ways of converting the heathen, and in that they set a pattern which still persists.47 Celtic missionaries were less enthralled than the English by the mystique of Rome – they were hardly unique in western Europe in that – but they still cherished Latin as the language of the Church, and it is noticeable how many of the newly founded churches across Saxony were dedicated to St Peter.48 The eighth and ninth centuries were a period in which the papacy was intent on asserting its dignity and special place in God’s purpose, a mood not unconnected with the reality of its fragile position between two potentially threatening secular powers in Italy, Lombards to the north and Byzantines to the south. Matters might have turned out differently, for in the seventh century, after a certain froideur in the era of Gregory the Great, papal contacts with Byzantium could be regarded as consolidating: eleven out of eighteen popes in the period 650–750 had a Greek or Eastern background.49 There was still a sense among ordinary Christians and ordinary clergy that they were part of a single Mediterranean-wide Church. One proof positive of that is the way that, during the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, fragments of Greek liturgical hymns and psalms were incorporated into various western Mediterranean worship traditions, often without even translating them into Latin, in a variety of settings, from Spain to Italy – Rome itself, Milan, Benevento.50 One long-standing cause of theological alarm in Rome was neutralized in 680–81, when Constantinople hosted yet another major council of the Church (reckoned as the sixth held there). It finally reaffirmed the imperial Church’s commitment to the decisions of Chalcedon against any attempt to placate Miaphysites in the empire, ending the so-called ‘Monothelete’ controversy (see pp. 441–2). Roman representatives joined Eastern bishops in condemning as heretical four Patriarchs of Constantinople and, more reluctantly, one former Roman pope, Honorius; his name was discreetly inserted in the middle of the list of patriarchs to minimize Roman embarrassment.51 Yet the Roman delegates at Constantinople would not have forgotten that the Monothelete clashes also produced one of the most appalling abuses of Byzantine power in 649, when Pope Martin I was arrested by imperial officials for presiding over a council in Rome opposing the Emperor’s Monothelete theology. He died in remote exile in the Crimea in wretched circumstances, which have led him to be recognized as the last pope to die as a martyr – this time, uniquely at the hands of a Christian emperor. Such frictions meant that

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

  Certainly Ezana’s coins witness to a conversion no less dramatic and personal than Constantine’s: they change motifs from traditional symbols of a crescent and two stars to a cross. Ezana has left a surviving inscription in Greek announcing his renunciation of his status as son of the Ethiopian war god, putting himself instead under the care of the Trinity.An energetic monarch determined to secure immortal memory in this world as in the next, Ezana was responsible for beginning a tradition of monumental religious sculpture in the city of Aksum which is breathtaking, though now difficult to interpret: scores of monolithic stelae (upright monoliths) imitating tower-like buildings with multiple doors and windows. Some of them are immense: one, probably originally more than a hundred feet high and which may have fallen down almost as soon as it was put up, is among the biggest single stones ever quarried in the ancient world.27 There is no good reason to doubt the story that it was also Ezana who made contact with the Church in Alexandria, asking no less a divine than Bishop Athanasius to supply his people with a bishop. Thus from a very early date comes that peculiar Ethiopian arrangement which persisted for sixteen hundred years, as late as 1951: the presiding bishop (abun) in the Church of Ethiopia was never a native Ethiopian, but an import from the Coptic Church hundreds of miles to the north, and there was rarely any other bishop present in the whole country.28 6. Ethiopia, Eastern Arabia, the Red Sea and Egypt This has meant that the abun rarely had much real power or initiative in a Church to which he came usually as an elderly stranger with a different native language. Authority was displaced elsewhere, to monarchs and to abbots of monasteries; monasticism seems to have arrived early in the Church in Ethiopia and quickly gained royal patronage. Around these leaders are still numerous hereditary dynasties of non-monastic clergy who, over the centuries, might swarm in their thousands to seek ordination on the abun‘s rare visits to their area. The education of these priests, deacons and cantors might not extend far beyond a detailed knowledge of how to perform the liturgy, but that was a formidable intellectual acquisition in itself. They were ordinary folk who thus shaped their religion into that of a whole people rather than simply the property

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  More modern, however, and a sign of things to come was the Society of Jesus, founded by the former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1555), which embodied the efficiency and effectiveness that would become the hallmark of the modern West. Ignatius was determined to exploit the power of mythos practically. His Jesuits did not have time for the lengthy contemplative disciplines evolved by John of the Cross. His Spiritual Exercises provided a systematic, time-efficient, thirty-day retreat, which offered every Jesuit a crash course in mysticism. Once the Christian had achieved a full conversion to Christ, he should have his priorities right and be ready for action. This emphasis on method, discipline, and organization was similar to the new science. God was experienced as a dynamic force that propelled Jesuits all over the world, in rather the same way as the explorers. Francis Xavier (1506–52) evangelized Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) China. Religion had not yet been left behind in early modern Spain. It was able to reform itself and exploit the dawning insights of modernity to further its own reach and vision. Early modern Spain was, therefore, part of the advance guard of modernity. But Ferdinand and Isabella had to contain all this energy. They were trying to unite kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and separate, and had to be welded together. In 1483 the monarchs had established their own Spanish Inquisition to enforce ideological conformity in their unified realm. They were creating a modern, absolute state, but did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammeled intellectual freedom. The state inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word whose Greek original meant “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone world; it was a modernizing institution, employed by the monarchs to create national unity.3 They knew very well that religion could be an explosive and revolutionary force. Protestant rulers in such countries as England were equally ruthless to their own Catholic “dissidents,” who were seen similarly as enemies of the state. We shall see that this kind of coercion was often part of the modernizing process. In Spain, the chief victims of the Inquisition were the Jews, and it is the reaction of the Jewish people to this aggressive modernity that we shall consider in this chapter. Their experience illustrates many of the ways in which people in other parts of the world would respond to modernization.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They called their settlement Elon Moreh, one of the city’s other biblical names, and tried to turn their railway depot into a yeshiva for the study of sacred texts. They also agreed to join Gush Emunim. The government tried to dislodge the settlers, since the garin was illegal, but the Gush felt no need to comply with the declarations of the United Nations that demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, since Jews were not bound by the laws of other peoples. The settlers won considerable support in Israel, while the government seemed feeble and hesitant. In April 1975, Moshe Levinger led a march of twenty thousand Jews into the West Bank. From his tent in Elon Moreh, which he called his “war situation room,” he negotiated with Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres. There was a battle with soldiers of the IDF: no shots were fired, but rocks were hurled and rifle butts used. Eventually, Peres was flown in by helicopter, confronted Levinger in his tent, and after the meeting, the rabbi stormed out, tearing his white shirt in the traditional sign of mourning. As elections were looming and Peres feared to lose the religious vote, he finally caved in and in December 1975, he agreed to accommodate thirty of the Elon Moreh settlers in a nearby army camp. Levinger was carried in a triumphal procession on the shoulders of cheering youths. 8 A thin, balding man, with a straggling beard, thick glasses, and a gun perpetually slung over his shoulder, Levinger had become a new kind of Jewish hero. For some, the Settler was beginning to rank alongside the Zaddik, the Torah scholar, and the Hasid. He also won the support of secularists. “Levinger symbolizes the return of Zionism,” maintained the veteran and self-confessed terrorist Geula Cohen. “He is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank]. He is the leader of the Zionist revolution.” 9 Elon Moreh, now renamed Kedamim, was finally established during the season of Hanukkah, the festival that celebrates the liberation of Jerusalem by the Maccabees from the Seleucids in 164 BCE and the rededication of the Temple. In the mythology of Gush Emunim, the garin became a new Hanukkah, a divine breakthrough, and a victory for God. It was a formative moment: the tide seemed to have turned; secular Zionism had been forced to submit to the divine will. Levinger had put history back on track. The years 1974–77 marked the golden age of the Gush. Members toured the country, giving lectures and recruiting young men and women, secularists as well as religious, who were prepared to settle in the territories.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Despite the militant imagery that characterized the Society from the first night of its existence, Banna always insisted that he had no intention of staging a coup or seizing power. The Society’s chief aim was education. He believed that when the people had absorbed the message of Islam and allowed it to transform them, the nation would become Muslim without a violent takeover. At the very beginning, Banna formulated a six-point program, which revealed his debt to Afghani, Abdu, and Rida’s salafiyyah reform movements: (1) the interpretation of the Koran in the spirit of the age, (2) the unity of Islamic nations, (3) raising the standard of living and achievement of social justice and order, (4) a struggle against illiteracy and poverty, (5) the emancipation of Muslim lands from foreign dominance, and (6) the promotion of Islamic peace and fraternity throughout the world.67 Banna did not intend his Society to be violent or radical, but was principally concerned with the fundamental reform of Muslim society, which had been undermined by the colonial experience and cut off from its roots.68 Egyptians had become accustomed to thinking themselves inferior to Europeans, but there was no need for this. They had fine cultural traditions too that would serve them better than any imported ideologies.69 They should not have to copy the French or Russian revolutions, because the Prophet Muhammad had already proclaimed the need for liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice 1300 years before.69 The Shariah suited the Middle Eastern environment in a way no foreign law code could. As long as Muslims imitated other people, they would remain “cultural mongrels.”70 But first the Brothers and Sisters had to reacquaint themselves with Islam. There was no shortcut to freedom and dignity; Muslims would have to rebuild themselves and their society from the ground up. Over the years, Banna evolved an efficient, modern system, constantly subject to review and self-appraisal, to achieve this. In 1938, members were divided into “battalions,” each consisting of three groups—one for workers, one for students, and one for businessmen and civil servants. The groups met once a week to spend the night together in prayer and spiritual instruction. By 1943, when this system had not brought in the harvest of recruits that had been hoped for, the “battalions” were replaced by “families,” each of which had ten members and was a unit, responsible for its actions. The family members would meet once a week, and keep each other up to the mark, ensuring that everybody observed the “pillars,” and kept clear of gambling, alcohol, usury, and adultery. The family system stressed the bonding of Muslims at a time when Egyptian society was fragmenting under the pressures of modernization. Each family belonged to a larger “battalion,” which kept it in touch with headquarters.71