Resentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Battle for God (2000)

  47 Those who were committed to reform, therefore, increasingly had to wrestle with the question: how could Muslims become part of the modern world without jettisoning their Islamic heritage? Just as Christianity had changed and was changing under the impact of modernization and enlightened thought, so would Islam in the coming decades. The question demanded urgent solution, because, as each year passed, the weakness of the Muslim world vis-à-vis the West was becoming painfully apparent. Muhammad Ali was able to withstand the sultan, but in 1840 he was forced by the European powers to relinquish his new territories in Syria, Arabia, and Greece. It was a bitter blow, from which he never fully recovered. His grandson Abbas (1813–54), who succeeded him as pasha of Egypt in 1849, hated Europe and all things Western. He was a soldier and, unlike the Ottoman reformers, had not had a liberal education. For him, the West meant exploitation and humiliation: he loathed the privileges European administrators and businessmen had won for themselves in Egypt and deeply resented the way Europeans had urged his grandfather to take on impossible projects, for their own financial advantage. He abolished Muhammad Ali’s fleet, reduced the army, and closed the new schools. Abbas was, however, also unpopular with the Egyptians and was assassinated in 1854. He was succeeded by Muhammad Said Pasha (1822–63), the fourth son of Muhammad Ali, who was the complete opposite of Abbas. A Francophile, he adopted a Western lifestyle, relished the company of foreigners, and revived the army. But by the end of his reign, even Said had become disillusioned by the sharp practices and dubious schemes of some European companies and entrepreneurs. The most spectacular of these European projects was the building of the Suez Canal. Muhammad Ali had consistently opposed any plan to link the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, fearing that it would bring Egypt once more to the attention of the European powers and lead to a new phase of Western invasion and dominance. Said Pasha was fascinated by the idea, however, and only too ready to grant a concession to his old friend the French consul, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–94), who convinced him that the Canal would enable Egypt to stand up to England and would cost Egypt nothing, since it would be built with French money. Said was naive; the concession, which was signed on November 30, 1854, was disastrous for Egypt. It was opposed by the sultan and by Lord Palmerston of England, but de Lesseps pushed on, formed his own company, and offered shares to the United States, Britain, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman empire. When these were not taken up, the pasha guaranteed them, on top of his own investment in the project. Work began in April 1859.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Khomeini’s victory showed that Islam was not destined for destruction; it could take on powerful secularist forces and win. But the Revolution filled many in the West with horror and dismay. Barbarism seemed to have triumphed over Enlightenment. For many committed secularists, Khomeini and Iran would come to typify all that was wrong—and even evil—in religion, not least because the Revolution revealed the hatred that so many Iranians felt for the West in general and America in particular. In the early 1970s, Iran seemed to be booming. American investors and the Iranian elite alike both made a great deal of money out of the new businesses and industries created by the White Revolution. The American embassy in Tehran, far from being a center of espionage (as the revolutionaries would claim) was more like a brokerage center to put rich Americans in touch with rich Iranians. 49 But—again—it was only the elite that benefited. The state had grown rich, but the people had grown poorer. There was rampant consumerism in the upper echelons of society, and corruption and deprivation among the petty bourgeoisie and the urban poor. After the oil price increase in 1973–74, there was tremendous inflation, owing to lack of investment opportunity for all but the very wealthy. A million people were unemployed, many of the smaller merchants had been ruined by the influx of foreign goods, and by 1977 inflation had even begun to affect the rich. In this climate of discontent and desperation, the two major guerrilla organizations became active, assassinating American military personnel and advisers. There was much resentment of the American expatriates in Iran, who seemed to be profiting from the disastrous mess. During these years too, the shah’s regime became more tyrannical and autocratic than ever. 50 Many disaffected Iranians looked to the ulema , who responded to the crisis in different ways. In Qum, Ayatollah Shariatmadari, the most senior mujtahid , opposed any political confrontation with the regime, though he was anxious to see the 1906 constitution restored. Ayatollah Taleqani, who had been jailed many times for demanding a strict application of the constitution and protesting against the excesses of the regime, worked alongside such lay reformers as Mehdi Bazargan and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, who wanted to see an Islamic republic in Iran but not clerical rule. Taleqani did not believe that the clergy should have any privileged role in government; he certainly did not agree with Khomeini’s vision of Velayat-e Faqih, government by a charismatic jurist. 51 But Khomeini was still a symbol of steadfast and unbowed resistance to the regime.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders.67 During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich.68 But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard. The success of the revolution had given many Americans a sense of empowerment; it had shown them that established authority was fallible and by no means invincible. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. The Jeffersonians believed that ordinary folk should also enjoy the freedom and autonomy preached by the philosophes. In the new newspapers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and other specialists were ridiculed. Nobody should have to give total credence to these so-called “experts.” The law, medicine, and religion should all be a matter of common sense and within the reach of everyone.69 This sentiment was especially rife on the frontiers, where people felt slighted by the republican government. By 1790, some 40 percent of Americans lived in territory that had only been settled by white colonists some thirty years earlier. The frontiersmen felt resentful of the ruling elite, who did not share their hardships, but who taxed them as harshly as the British, and bought land for investment in the territories without any intention of leaving the comforts and refined civilization of the eastern seaboard. They were willing to give ear to a new brand of preacher who helped to stir up the wave of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening. This was more politically radical than the first. These prophets were not simply concerned with saving souls, but worked to shape society and religion in a way that was very different from anything envisaged by the Founders.

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

  Russia.83 If anything saved Orthodoxy through its eighteenth-century period of unsympathetic leadership and low clerical morale, it was its profound hold over the lives and emotions of ordinary people, which contrasted with popular attitudes to state power. Russian society was exceptional in contemporary Christendom in the degree of separation between its government and its people. Authority and conformity were the watchwords of both the dynasty and the smallest village, but once local communities had paid their taxes to the tsar, raised troops for his armies, and weeded out troublemakers and criminals, they were left largely to their own devices and to their own traditions of making sense of their often desperately harsh environment.84 Woven inextricably into their common experience were the practices of religion, perhaps the only area of most people’s lives where it was possible to make genuine personal choices. Given the isolation of all Russians from much possibility of foreign influence apart from the tiny proportion who belonged to the elite, that meant some variant on Orthodox belief. 16. Imperial Russia at the Death of Peter the Great Laity who were unhappy at clerical inadequacies and repelled by innovation which could be associated with foreign influences had an alternative in the existing dissidence of the Old Believers, whose numbers and variety swelled during the eighteenth century. They preserved older traditions of worship and devotional styles which the authorities had repudiated, and their rejection of novelty was a rejection of all that they saw as not Russian. Some Old Believers refused to eat the tsars’ recommended new staple food, the potato, because it was an import from the godless West – potatoes were generally hated among the Russian peasantry on their first arrival, before their value in making vodka became apparent. ‘Tea, coffee, potatoes and tobacco had been cursed by Seven

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At first, the Ottomans were able to keep the Mamluks in check, quashing two Mamluk uprisings.14 By the late sixteenth century, however, the Ottomans were just beginning to outrun their own resources. Severe inflation led to a decline in the administration and, gradually, after several revolts, the Mamluk commanders (beys) reemerged as the real rulers of Egypt, even though they remained officially subservient to Istanbul. The beys formed a high-ranking military cadre which was able to lead a rebellion of Mamluk troops in the Ottoman army against the Turkish governor and install one of their own number in his place. The sultan confirmed this appointment and the Mamluks were able to retain control of the country, apart from a brief period toward the end of the seventeenth century when one of the Janissaries seized power. Mamluk rule was unstable, however. The beylicate was divided between two factions and there was constant unrest and internecine strife.15 Throughout this turbulent period, the chief victims were the Egyptian people. During the revolts and factional violence, they had their property confiscated, their homes plundered, and endured crippling taxation. They felt no affinity with their rulers, Turkish or Circassian, who were foreigners and had no real interest in their welfare. Increasingly, the people turned to the ulema, who were Egyptians, represented the sacred order of the Shariah, and became the true leaders of the Egyptian masses. As the conflict between the beys became more acute during the eighteenth century, Mamluk leaders found it necessary to appeal to the ulema to ensure that their rule was accepted by the people.16 The ulema were the teachers, scholars, and intellectuals of Egyptian society. Each town had between one and seven madrasahs (colleges for the study of Islamic law and theology), which provided the country with its teachers. Intellectual standards were not high. When Selim I conquered Egypt, he took many of the leading ulema back to Istanbul with him together with the most precious manuscripts. Egypt became a backward province of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans did not patronize Arab scholars, Egyptians had no contact with the outside world, and Egyptian philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and science, which had flourished under the Mamluk empire, deteriorated.17

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The colonized country produced raw materials for export, which were then fed into the European industrial process. In return, it received cheap manufactured Western goods, which meant that local industry suffered. In order to ensure that the new colony fit into the modern technicalized order, the police and military had to be reorganized along European lines; the financial, commercial, and productive side of the economy also had to be adapted, and the “natives” had to acquire some familiarity with modern ideas. This modernization was experienced as intrusive, coercive, and profoundly unsettling by the subject population.66 Afghani had wanted Muslims to modernize themselves and escape this transformation of their society into an inferior copy of Europe. Colonialism made this impossible. Middle Eastern lands that came under Western domination could not develop on their own terms. A living civilization had been transformed by the colonialists into a dependent bloc, and this lack of autonomy induced an attitude and habit of subservience that was profoundly at odds with the modern spirit. Inevitably, the earlier love and admiration of Europe, epitomized by Tahtawi and the Iranian reformers, soured and gave way to resentment. During Afghani’s residence in Cairo, Egypt was gradually being drawn into this colonial net, even though it never became a full colony. Khedive Ismail’s costly reforms and modernizing projects had bankrupted the country, which now depended entirely on European loans. In 1875, the khedive had been forced to sell the Suez Canal to the British, and in 1876, as we have seen, the European shareholders had taken control of the Egyptian economy. When Ismail tried to break free, Britain, acting in concert with the Ottoman sultan, deposed him, and the khedivate passed to his son, Tewfiq. In 1881, some of the officers in the Egyptian army staged a coup under the leadership of one Ahmad bey Urubi. They were joined by some of Afghani’s disciples and others who wanted modern constitutional rule in Egypt. Urubi managed to impose his government on the new khedive and after this victory was followed by a popular nationalist uprising, the British government decided to intervene to protect the interests of the shareholders. On July 11, 1882, the British navy attacked Alexandria, and defeated Urubi’s forces on September 13 at Tel el-Kebir. The British then established their own military occupation in Egypt, and even though Khedive Tewfiq was officially reinstated, it was clear that the real ruler of Egypt was the British proconsul, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Tehran, the police attacked the mourners, and there were more arrests and beatings during poetry readings held in Tehran on November 15, 16, and 25. But still there was no sign of a general uprising. In Najaf, Khomeini, who used to call Mustafa the “light of his eyes,” was silent. Meanwhile, on November 13, 1977, the shah had flown to the United States for talks with President Carter. Each day, crowds of Iranian students who were attending American universities poured into Washington to shout anti-shah slogans outside the White House. At a ceremonial dinner, Carter delivered a moving address about the importance of the special relationship between Iran and the United States, calling Iran an “island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.” 56 On December 31, Carter interrupted a journey to India by making a flying visit to Tehran, where, again, he expressed his warm support for the regime. Right up to the very end, Carter continued to express his confidence in the shah. His visit to Tehran coincided with the sacred month of Muharram, when the Kerbala tragedy was uppermost in everybody’s minds; this year, everybody was also thinking about Khomeini: the shah had just forbidden the traditional mourning ceremonies, which are usually held forty days after a death, for Mustafa Khomeini. When, at this crucial juncture, Carter made a special trip to endorse the shah’s rule, he stepped neatly into the role of the Great Satan. Americans were shocked to hear their nation described as satanic during and after the Revolution. Even those who were aware of the resentment that so many of the Iranian people had felt for the United States since the 1953 CIA coup, were repelled by this demonic imagery. However mistaken American policy may have been, it did not deserve to be condemned in this way. It confirmed the prevailing belief that the Iranian revolutionaries were all fanatical, hysterical, and unbalanced. But most Western people misunderstood the image of the Great Satan. In Christianity, Satan is a figure of overpowering evil, but in Islam he is a much more manageable figure. The Koran even hints that Satan will be forgiven on the Last Day, 57 such is its confidence in the all-conquering goodness of God. Those Iranians who called America “the Great Satan” were not saying that the United States was diabolically wicked but something more precise. In popular Shiism, the Shaitan, the Tempter, is a rather ludicrous creature, chronically incapable of appreciating the spiritual values of the unseen world. In one story, he is said to have complained to God about the privileges given to humans, but was easily fobbed off with inferior gifts.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The new toleration was an improvement on the old segregation, but it was the result not solely of the noble idealism of the Enlightenment but of the needs of the modern state. A similar pragmatism had, as we have seen, led to the constitutional acceptance of pluralism in the United States. If they were to respond effectively to the challenge of the modern world and build a prosperous society, governments had to use all the human resources at their disposal. Whatever the official religion of the state, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and secularists were all needed in the new economic and industrial programs. The fabled business acumen of the Jews was particularly desirable, and it was deemed essential to harness this asset to the benefit of the state. 18 The old prejudices remained, however. Except in France and Holland, the rights granted to the Jews were withdrawn after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) and the collapse of his empire. Jews were herded back into the ghettos, the old restrictions returned, and there were new pogroms. But the needs of the modern state eventually forced one government after another to extend full citizenship to its Jews, provided that they accepted the Faustian bargain. Those states that granted equality and citizenship to Jews, such as Britain, France, Holland, Austria, and Germany, prospered; 19 those eastern European states that did not democratize but tried to confine the benefits of modernity to an elite, fell behind. By 1870, Jewish emancipation had been achieved throughout western Europe; in eastern Europe and Russia, however, where governments used more coercive methods of abolishing Jewish separatism, millions of Jews were alienated from the modern state and clung defiantly to rabbinic and Hasidic traditions. 20 But in the first years after the original rights granted by Napoleon had been rescinded, many young Jews felt stranded and betrayed. They had received a good secular education, and were ready to take part in modern society, but were now prevented from doing so. Mendelssohn had shown them a way out of the ghetto, Napoleon had promised freedom, and they were unable to return to the traditional way of life. In their frustration, many German Jews converted to Christianity in order to assimilate to the mainstream culture. Others became convinced that if Judaism was to survive, they would have to take drastic action to prevent this stream of conversions. Two related movements developed in Germany, both of which had their roots in the Jewish Enlightenment. The Maskilim believed that they could act as a bridge from the ghetto to the modern world. They could speak good German and had gentile friends, and in public seemed perfectly attuned to the European way of life. Now some of them decided to reform the religion of Judaism itself, to make it fit more easily into the modern world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The noisy, spectacular revivals of the Second Great Awakening made a permanent impression on the distinctive political style of the United States, whose mass rallies, unabashed sentiment, and showy charisma are so bewildering to many Europeans. Like many fundamentalist movements today, these prophets of the Second Great Awakening gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited in the new states a means of making their views and voices heard by the more privileged elite. Their movements gave the people what Martin Luther King called “a sense of somebodiness,” 76 in much the same way as the fundamentalist groups do today. Like the fundamentalist movements, these new sects all looked back to a primitive order, and determined to rebuild the original faith; all relied in an entirely new way upon Scripture, which they interpreted literally and often reductively. All also tended to be dictatorial. It was a paradox in early-nineteenth-century America, as in late-twentieth-century fundamentalist movements, that a desire for independence, autonomy, and equality should lead large numbers of people to obey religious demagogues implicitly. For all his talk about enfranchisement, Joseph Smith created what was virtually a religious dictatorship, and, despite his praise of the egalitarian and communal ideals of the Primitive Church, Alexander Campbell became the richest man in West Virginia, and ruled his flock with a rod of iron. The Second Great Awakening shows the sort of solutions that many people find attractive when their society is going through the wrenching upheaval of modernization. Like modern fundamentalists, the prophets of the Second Great Awakening mounted a rebellion against the learned rationalism of the ruling classes and insisted on a more religious identity. At the same time, they made the modern ethos accessible to people who had not had the opportunity to study the writings of Descartes, Newton, or John Locke. The prophetic rebellion of these American prophets was both successful and enduring in the United States, and this means that we should not expect modern fundamentalist movements in societies that are currently modernizing to be ephemeral and a passing “madness.” The new American sects may have seemed bizarre to the establishment, but they were essentially modern and an integral part of the new world. This was certainly true of the millennial movement founded by the New York farmer William Miller (1782–1849), who pored over the biblical prophecies, and, in a series of careful calculations, “proved” in a pamphlet published in 1831 that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in the year 1843. Miller was reading his Bible in an essentially modern way. Instead of seeing it as a mythical, symbolic account of eternal realities, Miller assumed that such narratives as the Book of Revelation were accurate predictions of imminent events, which could be worked out with scientific and mathematical precision. People now read texts for information.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  were right about what God required—complete withdrawal from the world and sacrifice in every aspect of life—and I knew I was not capable of that. I was seventeen when I left Brother Terrell’s ministry for what would be the last time. There were no epiphanies, only a sense of regret and failure. I pushed these feelings away when they surfaced, and over time they turned to anger and then, to my relief, something that felt like indifference, only heavier. It was well after midnight. The bars had closed and my friends and I had taken the party to someone’s house in the country. Bodies packed every room. We were smoking and drinking and hovering over the pile of cocaine on the coffee table. Musicians ran up and down guitar scales, and somewhere in the back of the house, someone pounded out the drum solo from “Wipe Out.” We talked and talked about terribly important things. Out of that din, a clear, mellifluous voice sang: Though God slay me I will trust him I shall then come forth as gold. Everything fell away but the song. It was “Job’s God Is True,” a song Brother Terrell often sang under the tent. For I know that he is living I can feel him in my soul. I followed the sound to the front porch. A young blond woman who fronted a local band and who minutes earlier had bent over the cocaine with me sat on the porch swing, strumming her guitar and singing. I asked where she had learned the song and she told me she had attended Pentecostal churches, even tent revivals, as a kid. “There’s power there. Can’t deny that.” She looked up and smiled. I nodded and walked back inside. Over the next five years Brother Terrell and my mother drifted further apart, but she didn’t seem to realize it. After a while, only the preacher woman and her family accompanied him to the ranch, but Mama maintained he was working

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Students in the science, engineering, and mathematics faculties are still drawn to the more extreme groups. They find that a stringent Muslim lifestyle gives them a viable alternative to the secularist option, helps them to make the difficult transition from a rural to a modern urban culture, and gives them a sense of authenticity and belonging. 64 It also provides them with a community, something which is more difficult to achieve in modern society but which is a crucial human need. They are not seeking to turn the clock back but are looking for new ways to apply the Islamic paradigm, which served Muslims well for centuries, to current conditions. The deep discontent which erupted so horribly in the assassination of Sadat still simmers beneath the surface, after two decades of Mubarak’s limited liberalization and partial implementation of democracy. The difference now is that the Islamists are much more organized. Patrick Gaffney, the American Arabist, revisited Minya in 1991 and noted that the crowds performing the noon prayers every Friday in the main street outside the tiny fundamentalist mosque were much more disciplined than they had been in the 1970s. Gone was the old ragged and disorderly defiance. Many of the participants were in their thirties and forties; they wore a uniform white jala-biyyah and the correct Islamic head covering. They gave the impression of forming a distinct and focused subculture, with its own direction and identity. Gaffney also noted a huge new government building housing the offices of the Ministry of the Interior, which was meant to symbolize the massive power of the state. An emblem of control in a former trouble spot, it seemed to have nothing to do with the dedicated Islamists, who were oriented to Mecca rather than Cairo. 65 Two realms existed side by side in Egypt in a schizophrenic rift that shows no sign of healing. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is war between the “two nations.” Periodically, there are reports of arrests and shoot-outs between the police and the most extreme Muslim groups. Where the majority of Islamists are content with a fundamentalist separation from secular society, a small minority resort to terror. Since 1986, there have been politically motivated attacks on Americans, Israelis, and prominent Egyptians. In 1987, Islamists shot Hasan Abu Bawha, a former minister of the interior, and Nabawi Ahmed, the editor of the weekly journal al-Mussawar . In October 1990, they killed the Speaker of the Egyptian parliament, Rifaat Mahjub, and gunned down the determined secularist Faraj Foda in 1992. That year saw the first Islamist attacks on European and American tourists.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Amin was not the first to see the veil as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Islam. When the British arrived, they were appalled by the practice, even though most Western men at this date derided feminism, wanted their own wives securely at home, and opposed the education and enfranchisement of women. Lord Cromer was typical in this respect: he was one of the founders in London of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, yet in his monumental book on Egypt, he expressed great concern about the status of Muslim women.79 Their degraded state was a canker that began its destructive work early in childhood, as infants perceived the oppression of their mothers, and had eaten into the whole system of Islam. The practice of veiling was the “fatal obstacle” that prevented Egyptians from attaining that “elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization.”80 Missionaries also lamented the catastrophic influence of the veil, which, they believed, buried a woman alive and reduced her to the status of a prisoner or a slave. It showed how greatly the people of Egypt needed the benevolent supervision of the Western colonialists.81 Amin had accepted this somewhat cynical European assessment of veiling at face value. There is nothing feminist about Tahrir al-Mara. Amin presented Egyptian women as dirty and ignorant; with such mothers, how could Egypt be anything other than a backward, lazy nation? Did Egyptians imagine that the men of Europe, who have attained such completeness of intellect and feeling that they were able to discover the force of steam and electricity,… those souls who daily risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and honor above the pleasures of life,… these intellects and these souls that we so admire,… would have abandoned veiling after it had been in use among them if they had seen any good in it?82 Not surprisingly, this sickly sycophancy inspired a backlash. Arab writers refused to accept this estimate of their society, and in the course of this heated debate the veil turned into a symbol of resistance to colonialism. And so it has remained. Many Muslims now consider the veil de rigueur for all women, and a sign of true Islam. By using feminist arguments, for which most had little or no sympathy, as part of their propaganda, the colonialists tainted the cause of feminism in the Muslim world, and helped to distort the faith by introducing an imbalance that had not existed before.83

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  During these grim years, there were two important religious developments. Nadir Khan had tried unsuccessfully to reestablish the Sunnah in Iran; as a result, the leading ulema left Isfahan and took refuge in the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala in the Ottoman region of Iraq. At first this seemed a setback, but in the long term it proved a gain for the ulema. In Kerbala and Najaf, they achieved still greater autonomy. They were out of the shahs’ reach politically, and financially independent, and gradually they became an alternative establishment, superbly placed to challenge the court.55 The second major change of the period was the victory of the Usulis, achieved by the somewhat violent methods of the eminent scholar Vahid Bihbehani (1705–92), who defined the role of ijtihad with great clarity, and made its use obligatory for jurists. Any Shiis who refused to accept the Usuli position were outlawed as infidels, and opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. There was fighting in Kerbala and Najaf, and some Akhbaris died in the struggle. The mystical philosophy of Isfahan was also banned, and Sufism was suppressed so savagely that Bihbehani’s son, Ali, was known as the Sufi-slayer. But, as we have seen, coercion in religious matters is usually counterproductive; mysticism went underground and would continue to shape the ideas of dissidents and intellectuals who fought the status quo. Bihbehani’s victory was a political victory for the Iranian ulema. The Usuli position was popular with the people during the turbulent years of the interregnum, since it provided them with a source of charismatic authority that brought some measure of order. The mujtahids were able to step into the political vacuum and would never lose their power with the people. But Bihbehani’s victory, achieved by tyrannical means, was a religious defeat of sorts, since it was far removed from the behavior and ideals of the Imams.56

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In March 1979, the government established five regional councils on the West Bank with the power to levy taxes, supply services, and employ workers. Gush members usually had key roles, even though they now supplied only 20 percent of the West Bank settlers. 17 They had become in effect state officials, but their years of confrontation had made the Gush skeptical of government, however friendly, and after the Likud victory, members established Armana (“Covenant”) to organize and unify their own settlement activities, and Moetzet Yesha, a council of Gush settlements, to give them some independence. The Gush were right to be skeptical, for the honeymoon with Likud was short. On November 20, 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his historic journey to Jerusalem to initiate a peace process and, the following year, Begin and Sadat signed the Camp David Accords. Israel would return the Sinai peninsula, conquered in 1967, to Egypt and, in return, Egypt recognized the State of Israel and guaranteed security along their common borders. The Accords looked forward to a “Framework for Peace,” possible future negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the “representatives of the Palestinian people” about the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On both sides, Camp David was a pragmatic agreement. Egypt got important territory back, and Israel gained a measure of peace. The Sinai was not sacred land; it was not included within the borders of the Promised Land described in the Bible. Begin had always been adamant that there was no question of returning the West Bank to the Arabs; he was also confident that the Framework for Peace discussions would never happen, since no other Arab state would countenance them. On the day the Camp David treaty was signed, Begin announced that the government would establish twenty new settlements on the West Bank. This did not appease the religious Zionists, the Gush Emunim, or the Israeli right in general. On October 8, 1979, the new Tehiya (“Renaissance”) party was officially launched, with the blessing of Rabbi Kook, to fight Camp David and prevent further territorial concessions. Religious and secular radicals now worked together in the same political party. In 1981, the Kookist and former Gahelet member Haim Drukman founded his own Morasha (“Heritage”) party to press for more West Bank settlement. For the Gush, Camp David was no peace. They pointed out the etymological connection between the words shalom (“peace”) and shlemut (“wholeness”): true peace meant territorial integrity and the preservation of the complete land of Israel. There could be no compromise. As Gush rabbi Eleazar Waldman explained, Israel was engaged in a battle against evil, on which hung the fate of the entire world: The Redemption is not only the Redemption of Israel, but the Redemption of the whole world.

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

  conversos: former Muslims were known as Moriscos) remained a perennial object of worry, to be scrutinized for doubtful loyalty in any time of heightened tension, despite their theoretical shared membership of the Body of Christ. Even when they were long-established Christians and had rejected all connection with Judaism, ‘Old Christians’ found a new reason for hating them: they were now eligible rivals for positions of power in Church and commonwealth. In return ‘New Christians’ were furious that their genuinely held faith and loyalty to the Crown should be questioned, and their fury occasionally erupted into violence.51 Such tensions remained particularly lively in Castile, the area still on the front line against Islam. Isabel’s hold on the Castilian throne had initially been shaky, and her early political calculations established strategies through what became a long reign: first a new assault on Judaism, and later, after Granada’s fall in 1492, a parallel assault on Islam.52 The agent of her campaign was a newly constituted version of an inquisition, a body not previously present in Castile. Although it imitated the many local inquisitions which had investigated heresy in Europe since the thirteenth century (see pp. 407–8), now it was organized by the monarchy, and after complicated royal haggling with Pope Sixtus IV between 1478 and 1480 to create its legal framework, it settled down to work against ‘Judaizers’ in the kingdom of Castile, burning alive around seven hundred between 1481 and 1488. In the middle of this came another momentous development: Pope Sixtus finally yielded to royal pressure in 1483 and appointed the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as Inquisitor-General of all Fernando and Isabel’s peninsular dominions. When Granada fell, Isabel gave Jews in Castile the choice of expulsion or conversion to Christianity. The excuse was yet another blood-libel accusation, this time from Toledo in 1490, that Jews had murdered a Christian boy, who has become known to his devotees as the Holy Child of La Guardia and was later attributed the significant name Cristóbal – Christ-bearer. Perhaps 70,000 to 100,000 Jews chose to become refugees abroad rather than abandon their faith, forming a European-wide dispersal which has been called Sephardic Judaism (since the Jews had applied the Hebrew word Sefarad to Spain). Yet more Jews chose to convert rather than leave their homes, and the authorities were determined that their conversion should not be a token one.53 By contrast, at first there was an official agreement to allow the continued practice of Islam in Granada, but harassment by the Church authorities led to rebellion. In 1500 this provided the excuse for Isabel to insist on conversion of all Granada’s Muslims to Christianity; she extended this requirement throughout Castile two years later. For the time being, King Fernando stood faithful to his coronation oath to preserve the liberties of his remaining Islamic subjects (mudéjars), but the

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

  to the Trinity as a whole, as in the views of the Pneumatomachi. Now the argument was about the way in which Christ combined both human and divine natures – that issue which the ultra-Athanasian Apollinaris had already raised, to his eventual misfortune. Behind the theological debate lay several hidden agendas which were as much to do with power politics as with theology. Once Jerusalem had been eliminated, the Church in the eastern Mediterranean had looked to two great cities, Antioch in Syria and Alexandria, the seats of major ‘metropolitan’ bishops or patriarchs with jurisdiction over other bishops. Now added to this was the new power of the Bishop of Constantinople, which the bishops in more long-standing Churches resented, particularly as Constantinople preened itself on the title ‘the new Rome’, and had made sure that this was officially affirmed at the council in 381, to general annoyance. Three times in seventy years after the Council of Constantinople, successive Bishops of Alexandria contributed to the downfall of successive Bishops of Constantinople.81 Since the Bishopric of Jerusalem had also greatly benefited from its promotion under Constantine and his mother as a centre of pilgrimage (see pp. 193–5), the Bishops of Jerusalem had ambitions to match their guardianship of the greatest shrine of the Saviour. All these four cities would therefore be jostling for power at the same time as they fought to establish what the most adequate view of Christ’s humanity and divinity might be. Alongside them was the Bishop of Rome, increasingly assertive of his charismatic position as successor of Peter (see pp. 290–94), yet also generally slightly marginal to the cut and thrust of Greek theological debate in the eastern Mediterranean.The basic theological differences lay between Alexandrian and Antiochene viewpoints. Theologians do not always behave like successfully trained sports teams, but there were clear differences in approach between Christian scholars in the two cities; we have already noted the greater literalism of Antiochene comment on the text of the Bible (see p. 152). At issue once more was the question of Christology: that three-centuries-old puzzle of how a human life in Palestine could relate to a cosmic saviour, or more exactly be a single person who was both human and cosmic saviour. Now the Arian controversy had been settled by asserting that Christ was of one substance with the Father, what did that say about his human substance – as seen in his tears, his anger, his jokes, his breaking of ordinary bread and wine in an upper room? How far should one distinguish the human Christ from the divine Christ? Successive theologians associated with Antioch offered their own answer, first Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, and then his student Theodore, a forceful and subtle theologian, and a native Antiochene, who became Bishop of Mopsuestia (now dwindled to a small Turkish village called Yacapinar).

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

  enclosed monastic order because Ignatius passionately wanted to affirm the value of the world, and believed that it was possible to lead a fully spiritual life within it. He had after all seen more of the world than most Europeans, in wanderings as far as London and Jerusalem. During the 1540s, Ignatius delicately finessed the Society’s constitution so that it was clearly understood that the Superior-General and not the pope was responsible for directing Jesuit mission policy.14 Jesuits were very determined to keep their own identity. They resisted amalgamation with Carafa’s Theatines, even though in many ways they resembled that organization. When Carafa became Pope Paul IV on the death of Marcellus III in 1555, he was intent on settling many old scores, especially against remnants of the Spirituali like the Society of Jesus. He began remodelling it into a conventional religious order, but fortunately for the Jesuits, the pontificate of this choleric and vindictive old man proved brief. In the wake of that trauma came a quiet reshaping of the Society for the service of the Church. Central was a new stress on a mission which seemed urgent after the Peace of Augsburg had recognized the existence of Lutheranism in 1555 (see p. 644). In a revised statement of purpose in 1550, the Society had added to ‘propagation of the faith’ the idea of ‘defence’ – that is, confronting Protestants. The programme this implied was accelerated after Ignatius Loyola’s assistant Jerónimo Nadal visited Germany in 1555. Protestantism’s dominance there profoundly shocked him, and convinced him that the Society must devote itself to reversing the situation. This represented a major change in direction: Nadal, prominent in Jesuit rebranding, now deliberately promoted the idea that the Society had been founded to combat the Reformation.15 COUNTER-REFORMATIONS AFTER TRENT: ENGLAND, SPAIN AND THE MYSTICS The Jesuits thus moved into an era which can truly be styled ‘Counter- Reformation’, the aftermath of the Council of Trent’s final session. Paul IV had refused to summon the council, disinclined to share decisionmaking with others, so Trent was not convened between 1552 and 1562, by which time Pope Paul had been safely dead for three years. By the end of 1563 it had completed its work, producing a coherent programme for a Catholicism conveniently labelled ‘Tridentine’, from the Latin name for Trent. The work was sealed with a uniform catechism of the Catholic faith, and a uniform liturgy: this uniformity of worship had no precedent in the history of the Western or indeed any other branch of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Abdu had been initially drawn into Afghani’s circle by his love of mystical religion (irfan) , which, he used to say, was “the key to his happiness.” 71 But Afghani had also introduced Abdu to the Western sciences and, later, Abdu read Guizot, Tolstoy, Renan, Strauss, and Herbert Spencer. Abdu felt quite at home in Europe and enjoyed the company of Europeans. Like Afghani, he was convinced that Islam was compatible with modernity and argued that it was an eminently rational faith, and that the habit of taqlid was corrupting and inauthentic. But, also like Afghani, Abdu was committed to rational thinking from within a mystical perspective. It was not as yet emancipated from the spirituality of the old world. Eventually, Abdu quarreled with Afghani about politics. He believed that Egypt needed reform more than revolution. He was a deeper thinker than his master, and could see that there could be no shortcut to modernization and independence. Instead of joining Afghani in his dangerous, pointless schemes, he wanted to rectify some of Egypt’s immense problems by means of education, and in 1888 he was allowed to return. He became one of the most beloved men in the country, remained on good terms with both Egyptians and British, and became a personal friend of both Lord Cromer and the khedive. By this time there was considerable frustration in the country. At first, many educated Egyptians had been forced to admit that, unwelcome as the British occupation undoubtedly was, Lord Cromer ruled the country far more efficiently than Khedive Ismail had done. But by the 1890s, relations with the British had deteriorated. The British officials were often of lower caliber than before and made less effort to cement relations with the Egyptians. They created their own privileged colonial enclave in the Gezira district. Egyptian civil servants found that their promotions were blocked by young Britons, and there was resentment of the privileges accorded the British and other foreigners by the Capitulations, which exempted them from the law of the land. 72 More and more people listened to the fiery rhetoric of the nationalist Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who called for the immediate evacuation of the British. Abdu regarded Kamil as an empty demagogue. He could see that before Egyptians were able to run a modern independent state, they would have to deal with some serious social problems, which had been exacerbated by the occupation. In Abdu’s view, secularist ideas and institutions were being introduced far too rapidly into a deeply religious country. The people were not being given time to adapt. Abdu greatly respected the political institutions of Europe, but did not think they could be transplanted wholesale into Egypt. The vast mass of the people simply could not understand the new legal system; its spirit and scope were quite alien to them.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Their mission was to bring the whole of life—even those aspects that are most impure, banal, and perverse—under the canopy of the sacred. But where the Hasidim found joy and a new lightness in this task, the ecstasy of the Gush was often imbued with rage and resentment. They are men and women of the modern era. The divine is more distant, and it is more of a strain to transcend the pressing and insistent reality of the profane, which, as many now think, is all there is. Gush activists overcame their personal alienation in the secular State of Israel by attempting to wrest the land from the alien Arabs. They settled their own minds by uprooting themselves, going beyond the borders of Israel, and colonizing the long-lost land. The “return” to Eretz Israel was an attempt to retrieve a value and a state of mind that is more fundamental than the confusing present. There are obvious difficulties in this spirituality of rage and reconquista . In 1977, for the first time in Israeli history, Labor was defeated in a general election and the new right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin had always advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan, so his election seemed at first to be another act of God. This seemed clear shortly after the election, when Begin visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkaz Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him. “I felt that my heart was bursting within me,” Daniel Ben Simon, who was present at this “surrealistic scene,” recalled later. “What greater empirical proof could there be that [Kook’s] fantasies and imaginings were indeed reality.” 15 Begin was an outspoken admirer of Levinger, he liked to call Gush Emunim his “very dear children,” and often used biblical imagery when expounding his hawkish policies. After the election, the Likud government began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israel Lands Commission, declared his intention of settling one million Jews on the West Bank within twenty years. By the middle of 1981, Likud had spent $400 million in the territories and built twenty settlements, manned by some 18,500 settlers. By August 1984, there were about 113 official government settlements, including six sizable towns, all over the West Bank. Surrounded by 46,000 militant Jewish settlers, the Arabs became frightened and some resorted to violence. 16 This should have been the perfect political environment for the Gush Emunim, who received much government support. In 1978, Raphael Eitan made each West Bank settlement responsible for the security of its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from their regular army units to protect their community and police the roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment.

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

  conscious of the harassment which their founder had suffered in Spain; indeed no Jesuit has ever sat on an inquisitorial tribunal, leaving that duty to the various orders of friars. Ignatius and his successors played their hand through those turbulent and dangerous years with consummate skill and remarkable creativity. They more or less sleepwalked into one of their future chief occupations, secondary and higher education. They quickly set up ‘colleges’ in certain university towns, originally just intended as lodging places for student members of the Society. Unfortunately, potential lay benefactors were not excited by the inward-looking reference of such projects, which was an incentive for the Society to think about expanding the colleges’ roles. By the 1550s, city authorities across Europe were scrabbling to secure de luxe school facilities like the first Jesuit experiments in Spain and Sicily. Although Jesuit education was proudly proclaimed as free of charge (the Society put a huge and increasingly professional effort into fundraising to ensure this), their limited manpower was concentrated on secondary education. It was very difficult for children of the poor to get the necessary primary grounding to enter schools at such an advanced level; so without any single policy decision, a Jesuit educational mission emerged to secure the next generation of merchants, gentry and nobility – in other words, the people who mattered in converting Europe back to Catholic obedience. In time, Jesuits allied with another unconventional religious organization, the Ursulines, and steered Ursuline energies towards parallel female education, which was obviously problematic for males to undertake. It was a fruitful cooperation, which did not end the Ursulines’ ability to mark out for themselves new initiatives in charitable and educational work.13 The Jesuits created a highly unusual form of the religious life: while keeping tight central control through their Superior-General, they had no regular decision-making community gatherings corporately ‘in chapter’, or a daily round of communal worship, gathering ‘in choir’ in church. Moreover they refused to require a distinct dress or habit for members, nor were they even necessarily ordained, despite the fact that their core tasks, preaching and hearing confessions, were the same as the orders of friars. It was not surprising that the Society soon attracted resentment from friars for what could be regarded as wilful selectivity from past disciplines – Jesuits did not always help themselves by their patronizing attitude to other organizations, an unfortunate side effect of the fact that they were very well trained and mostly very clever. Whatever their faults, their non-clerical style (given that laymen were among their numbers) did address the excessive pretensions of clergy which had provoked much of the passion behind the Protestant revolution. They did not wish to become an