Shame

Passages

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

Page 54 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [image "18., 19., and 20. Three woodcuts from 1578 illustrate the rituals involved at Wittenberg, showing the blackened faces and horned fools’ caps of the initiates. The ceremonial tools—gilded saw, pliers, ax, brush, bell, and the like—have survived from the University of Leipzig. The rituals, which also involved a mock confession, are clearly parodies of religious ceremonies, yet Luther supported their retention. Just as Staupitz joked that Luther needed the Devil, so Luther never frowned upon a ritual that captured something of the state of utter sinfulness of the Christian—and in this case, the university initiate." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_021_r1.jpg] [image "18., 19., and 20. Three woodcuts from 1578 illustrate the rituals involved at Wittenberg, showing the blackened faces and horned fools’ caps of the initiates. The ceremonial tools—gilded saw, pliers, ax, brush, bell, and the like—have survived from the University of Leipzig. The rituals, which also involved a mock confession, are clearly parodies of religious ceremonies, yet Luther supported their retention. Just as Staupitz joked that Luther needed the Devil, so Luther never frowned upon a ritual that captured something of the state of utter sinfulness of the Christian—and in this case, the university initiate." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_021_r1.jpg] 18., 19., and 20. Three woodcuts from 1578 illustrate the rituals involved at Wittenberg, showing the blackened faces and horned fools’ caps of the initiates. The ceremonial tools—gilded saw, pliers, ax, brush, bell, and the like—have survived from the University of Leipzig. The rituals, which also involved a mock confession, are clearly parodies of religious ceremonies, yet Luther supported their retention. Just as Staupitz joked that Luther needed the Devil, so Luther never frowned upon a ritual that captured something of the state of utter sinfulness of the Christian—and in this case, the university initiate. It was also transforming Luther. As he looked back on his life the year before he died, and wrote a brief autobiography as the preface to his collected Latin works, Luther remembered how important his encounter with the text of Romans had been. “Up till then it was not the cold blood about the heart,” he wrote, referring to his emotional state of melancholy, “but a single word in chapter 1[:17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed,’ that had stood in my way. For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which…I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.” Luther had tried to be a perfect monk, yet “I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience….I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”35

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Johannes Cochlaeus (“Georg Sachsen”), Hertzog Georgens zu Sachssen Ehrlich vnd grundtliche entschuldigung, wider Martin Luthers Auffruerisch vn[d] verlogenne brieff vnd Verantwortung, Dresden 1533 [VD 16 C 4323], fo. B iii (v). This pasquil went out under the name of Duke Georg of Saxony but was actually written by Luther’s long-standing enemy Cochlaeus. He repeated it in his prefatory letter to his biography of Luther, which was more widely read and appeared in 1549. The same accusation had also been made by Georg Witzel, and by Petrus Sylvius, Die Letzten zwey beschlisslich und aller krefftigest büchleyn M. Petri Sylvii, so das Lutherisch thun an seiner person… (Leipzig, 1534); Ian Siggins, “Luther’s Mother Margarethe,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978): 125–50, 132. 16. Siggins, “Luther’s Mother,” 133: He referred to it again in 1543 in On the Jews and their Lies; and see WT 3, 3838: In 1538 Luther recalled how Duke Georg called his mother a bath maid and him a wechselbalck, referring to the pamphlet written by Cochlaeus under the name of Duke Georg in 1533. 17. LW Letters, I, 145; WB 1, 239, 14 Jan. 1520, 610:20–23. 18. Topp, Historia, 8: There were of course other versions of this story. 19. Ibid., 6–32; Bergmann, Kommunalbewegung, 11–15; 33–37. 20. Topp, Historia, 10–13; see also Stadtarchiv Eisenach, Bestand Chroniken, 40:1/9:1 Chronik Joh. Michael Koch . 21. Chronik Eisenachs bis 1409 (ed. H. Helmbold), 27–40; Kremer, Beiträge . 22. WB 1, 157, 24(?), Feb. 1519, 353:29–30; WT 3, 3626; 3653. 23. Topp, Historia, 15. 24. Topp recounts the story of a statue of the Madonna and child in St. Paul’s monastery in the town, where, if one prayed before the image, Jesus would turn his back as if rejecting the sinner. But if one promised a donation to the monastery, Jesus would turn his face, and if one offered more money, he would bless the worshipper: Topp, Historia, 15. 25. LW 44, 172; WS 6, 438:18–22; WB 2, 262, Feb. 29, 1520. The discomfort about begging was long-standing: Luther later reminisced how, back at Mansfeld, with a fellow pupil, he went begging for sausage at carnival as was customary, but when a burgher teased them they fled, and the householder had to run after them with the sausages: WT 1, 137: Luther uses this story as a parable of the believer’s relationship to God; and he couples it, interestingly, with the story of his terror of the sacrament when Staupitz carried it in procession at Eisleben. 26. Brecht, Luther, I, 18. 27. The family gave so many donations to the monastery that it was locally known as the “Collegium Schalbense.” See Kremer, Beiträge, esp. 69 and 89. 28. Scherf, Bau- und Kunstdenkmale, 9. 29.

• From The Lover (1984)

  When my mother and brothers come to Saigon I tell him he has to invite them to the expensive Chinese restaurants they don’t know, have never been to before. These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence. He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere. He pays. He counts out the money. Puts it in the saucer. Everyone watches. The first time, I remember, he lays out seventy-seven piastres. My mother nearly shrieks with laughter. We get up to leave. No one says thank you. No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone. My brothers never will say a word to him, it’s as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren’t solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard. This is because he adores me, but it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him, it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me. This because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man. The way my elder brother treats my lover, not speaking to him, ignoring him, stems from such absolute conviction it acts as a model. We all treat my lover as he does. I myself never speak to him in their presence. When my family’s there I’m never supposed to address a single word to him. Except, yes, except to give him a message. For example, after dinner, when my brothers tell me they want to go to the Fountain to dance and drink, I’m the one who has to tell him. At first he pretends he hasn’t heard.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Paul, if not the Book of Revelation), Protestant fundamentalism seemed to be failing as a religious movement, just as at the Scopes trial its science had proved to be defective. Indeed, their literal reading of highly selected passages of the Bible had encouraged them to absorb the Godless genocidal tendencies of modernity. MUSLIMS HAD AS YET produced no fundamentalist movement, because their modernization process was not yet sufficiently advanced. They were still at the stage of reshaping their religious traditions to meet the new challenge of modernity and using Islam to help the people understand the spirit of the new world. In Egypt, a young teacher brought the ideas of Afghani, Abdu, and Rida, whose reforms had always been confined to a small circle of intellectuals, to the more ordinary people. This in itself was a modernizing move. The older reformers had still been shaped by the conservative ethos, and, like most premodern philosophers, they had been elitists and did not consider the masses capable of abstruse thought. Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) found a way to turn their reforming ideas into a mass movement. He had had a modern as well as a traditionally religious education. He had studied at the Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, the first teachers’ training college to provide a higher education in the sciences, but Banna was also a Sufi and throughout his life the spiritual exercises and rites of Sufism remained important to him. 58 For Banna, faith was not a notional assent to a creed; it was something that could be understood only if it was lived and its rituals were carefully practiced. He knew that Egyptians needed Western science and technology; he also realized that their society must be modernized, politically, socially, and economically. But these were practical and rational matters that must go hand-in-hand with a spiritual and psychological reformation. 59 As students in Cairo, Banna and his friends were moved almost to tears by the political and social confusion in the city. 60 There was a political stalemate: the parties engaged in fruitless and vociferous debate and were still manipulated by the British, who despite Egyptian “independence” remained very much in command of the country. When Banna took up his first teaching post in Ismailiyyah in the Suez Canal Zone, where the British were ensconced, the humiliation of his people affected his very soul. The British and other expatriates had no interest in the local population, but kept a firm hand on the economy and public utilities. He was shamed by the contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the miserable hovels of the Egyptian workers. 61 For Banna, a devout Muslim, this was not merely a matter of politics. The condition of the ummah, the Muslim community, is as crucial a religious value in Islam as a particular doctrinal formulation in Christianity.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In his view, the Egyptians were an inherently backward people and needed to be colonized for their own good. Like Renan, when he compared the Muslim countries to his own more developed nation, he assumed that Europe had always been in the vanguard of progress. He did not realize that European countries such as Britain and France had once been as “backward” as the Middle East, and that he was simply looking at an imperfectly modernized country. He saw “Orientals” themselves as inherently, genetically flawed. Cromer’s achievements in Egypt were considerable. He stabilized the economy, improved irrigation in the country, and increased the market production of cotton. He abolished the corvée, the old system of forced labor, and established a competent judicial system. But this progress came at a price. Although the khedive was nominally in charge of his government, each ministry had an English “adviser” whose views invariably carried the day. Cromer believed this to be necessary. He assumed that Europeans had always been rational, efficient, and modern, while the Orientals were naturally illogical, unreliable, and corrupt. 67 Similarly, Islam “as a social system was a complete failure,” and incapable of reform or development. It was not possible to resuscitate “a body which is not, indeed, dead, and which may yet linger on for centuries, but which is nevertheless politically and socially moribund, and whose gradual decay cannot be arrested by any modern palliatives.” 68 He made it clear that this chronically retarded country would need direct British supervision for some time. The British occupation created new rifts within Egyptian society. The ulema were displaced as the educators and chief guardians of knowledge by those who had received a Western education. The Shariah courts were replaced by the European civil courts established by Lord Cromer. Artisans and small merchants were also adversely affected. A new class of Westernized civil servants and intellectuals formed a new elite, estranged from the vast majority of the people. But most damaging of all, perhaps, was the tendency of Egyptians themselves to internalize the colonialists’ negative views of the Egyptian people. Thus, Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), a disciple of Afghani, was devastated by the British occupation. He described the modern period as a “torrent of science” drowning the traditional men of religion: It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions ... and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects. 69 This corrosive sense of inferiority crept into the religious life of the colonized people, compelling a reformer such as Abdu to answer the charges of the colonialists and to prove that Islam could be just as rational and modern as any Western system. 70 For the first time, Muslims were forced to allow their conquerors to set their intellectual agenda.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Harding suggests that the Bakkers, who emphasized the endless love of God, were also evolving a folk theology of infinite forgiveness, which almost seemed to sanction sin, since it promised divine pardon beforehand.114 We have seen that in the past, an antinomian rebellion has sometimes erupted during a time of transition. The old rules and lifestyle no longer suit the changing circumstances of some of the faithful, who feel restricted and reach out for something new. They find relief in the breaking of old taboos. Some have even gone so far as to evolve a theology of “holy sin.” When the scandal which held the nation enthralled finally broke in March 1987, it appeared that something of the sort may have been going on in PTL circles. The Charlotte Observer alleged that in 1980, Jim Bakker had drugged and seduced Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, and then paid her $250,000 to keep quiet.115 On the heels of this revelation, it emerged that Tammy Faye had become so infatuated with country-and-western singer Gary Paxton that she had broken up his marriage. When the sordid truth was out, however, the Bakkers did not slink away in shame, but went public with their contrition, chattering to huge television audiences about God’s love and forgiveness. Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg had been an attempt to hold on to the restraints of the conservative, premodern religion, which had helped people to accept necessary limitations. The Bakkers’ story shows what happens when these restraints are entirely cast aside. Where other fundamentalist movements sprang from the experience of suppression, the Bakkers’ postmodern Christianity expressed the late-twentieth-century conviction that “anything goes.” With vast sums of money at their command, the Bakkers felt they could make anything happen. There were no limitations, and old categories of right and wrong could be dissolved as easily as truth and fiction in Heritage USA. That this was all a distortion of Christianity goes without saying. Then new horrors came to light. Jim Bakker resigned from PTL and asked Jerry Falwell to rescue the network by acting as temporary caretaker. Jim then turned on Jimmy Swaggart, who had brought the scandal to light, claiming that Swaggart had been plotting to take over PTL. Swaggart, for his part, had been making his own foray into antinomianism. At this time, Swaggart was probably the most successful of the televangelists. His shows were screened in 145 countries and, so he claimed, were available to half the homes on the planet. But he had taken to visiting a prostitute in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The woman, who later sold her story, made it clear that Swaggart was less interested in sex than in ritual humiliation and abasement. He also seemed to be courting self-destruction, since he knew that people had seen and recognized him at the motel and yet continued to go there until all hell broke loose. His misconduct was revealed by another minister, Marvin Gorman, whom Swaggart had attacked on his show.116

• From The Lover (1984)

  My hair is heavy, soft, burdensome, a coppery mass that comes down to my waist. People often say it’s my prettiest feature, and I take that to mean I’m not pretty. I had this remarkable hair cut off when I was twenty-three, in Paris, five years after I left my mother. I said, “Cut it off.” And he did. All at once, a clean sweep, I felt the cold scissors on the skin of my neck. It fell on the floor. They asked me if I wanted to keep it, they’d wrap it up for me to take away. I said no. After that people didn’t say I had pretty hair any more, I mean not as much as they used to, before. Afterwards they’d just say, “She’s got nice eyes. And her smile’s not unattractive.” On the ferry, look, I’ve still got my hair. Fifteen and a half. I’m using make-up already. I use Crème Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks, under the eyes. On top of the Crème Tokalon I put natural-color powder—Houbigant. The powder is my mother’s, she wears it to go to government receptions. That day I’ve got lipstick on too, dark red, cherry, as the fashion was then. I don’t know where I got that, perhaps Hélène Lagonelle stole it for me from her mother, I forget. I’m not wearing perfume. My mother makes do with Palmolive and eau de Cologne. • • • On the ferry, beside the bus, there’s a big black limousine with a chauffeur in white cotton livery. Yes, it’s the big funereal car that’s in my books. It’s a Morris Léon-Bollée. The black Lancia at the French embassy in Calcutta hasn’t yet made its entrance on the literary scene. Between drivers and employers there are still sliding glass panels. There are still fold-down seats. A car is still as big as a bedroom. Inside the limousine there’s a very elegant man looking at me. He’s not a white man. He’s wearing European clothes—the light tussore suit of the Saigon bankers. He’s looking at me. I’m used to people looking at me. People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year-old white girls too. For the past three years white men, too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother’s men friends have been kindly asking me to have tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club. • • • I could get it wrong, could think I’m beautiful like women who really are beautiful, like women who are looked at, just because people really do look at me a lot. I know it’s not a question of beauty, though, but of something else, for example, yes, something else—mind, for example.

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

  been preserved for us in the rubbish pits and desert sands of Egypt.43 The order was coupled with punishment, usually imprisonment but in some cases death, for those who refused. Two later emperors, Trebonianus Gallus and Valerian, revived the policy in 252 and 257 between their many other preoccupations, and persecution was only abandoned in 260 by Gallienus, son and successor of the hapless Persian prisoner Valerian, because the empire faced so many other pressing dangers. But in the previous decade, the Christian Church had been severely damaged, not so much in terms of death and suffering, because few died outside a small group of leaders, but in terms of morale. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way. This might have been predicted, because the same thing had happened when, for instance, Pliny the Younger had arrested Bithynian Christians back in 112. It was only natural to wish to obey the emperor: that most Christians felt a deep reverence for the empire is obvious from their leading writers’ confused and contradictory statements about the limits on obedience to it.44 Moreover, the Church as a whole was not used to persecution, or certainly not a systematic campaign directed from the centre. Trouble did not end when persecution ended and the leadership began picking up the pieces. The bishops’ authority was at stake. Some bishops had followed the Lord’s command recorded in John’s Gospel to suffer martyrdom bravely and had been killed (including the Bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome). Others had followed the Lord’s precisely contradictory advice to be found in Matthew’s Gospel to flee from city to city; they included such important figures as the Bishops of Carthage and Alexandria.45 Those who had fled were likely to come in for criticism from those who had stayed and suffered for their faith; from the Roman technical legal term for someone who pleads guilty as accused in court, these steadfast Christians were termed ‘confessors’. Confessors provided the troubled Church with an alternative sort of authority based on their sufferings, particularly when arguments began about how and how much to forgive those Christians who had given way to imperial orders – the so-called ‘lapsed’. Many of the lapsed flocked to the confessors to gain pardon and re-entry to the Church, and the bishops did not like this at all. Especially important disputes broke out in Rome and Carthage over the issue of forgiveness. Faced with both defiance from some confessors and the election of a rival bishop, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage engaged in pamphlet warfare, producing statements about the role of a bishop in the Church which were long to outlive this particular dispute. He came to see authority for forgiveness of sins as vested in the bishop and he stressed that the bishop was the focus for unity in the whole Catholic Church, a successor of the

• From The Lover (1984)

  No one will break the rule. None of the girls will speak to her. The isolation brings back a clear memory of the lady in Vinh Long. At that time she’d just turned thirty-eight. And the child was ten. And now, when she remembers, she’s sixteen. The lady’s on the terrace outside her room, looking at the avenues bordering the Mekong, I see her when I come home from catechism class with my younger brother. The room is in the middle of a great palace with covered terraces, the palace itself in the middle of the garden of oleanders and palms. The same distance separates the lady and the girl in the low-crowned hat from the other people in the town. Just as they both look at the long avenues beside the river, so they are alike in themselves. Both isolated. Alone, queenlike. Their disgrace is a matter of course. Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love. That’s what it’s all about: this hankering for death. It emanates from them, from their rooms, a death so strong its existence is known all over the town, in outposts upcountry, in provincial centers, at official receptions and slow-motion government balls. The lady has just started giving official receptions again, she thinks it’s over, that the young man in Savanna Khet is a thing of the past. So she’s started giving evening parties again, the ones expected of her so that people can just meet occasionally and occasionally escape from the frightful loneliness of serving in outposts upcountry, stranded amid checkered stretches of rice, fear, madness, fever, and oblivion. In the evening, after school, the same black limousine, the same hat at once impudent and childlike, the same lamé shoes, and away she goes, goes to have her body laid bare by the Chinese millionaire, he’ll wash her under the shower, slowly, as she used to wash herself at home at her mother’s, with cool water from a jar he keeps specially for her, and then he’ll carry her, still wet, to the bed, he’ll switch on the fan and kiss her more and more all over, and she’ll keep asking again and again, and afterwards she’ll go back to the boarding school, and no one to punish her, beat her, disfigure or insult her. It was as night ended that he killed himself, in the main square, glittering with light. She was dancing. Then daylight came, skirted the body. Then, with time, the sunlight blurred its shape. No one dared go near.

• From The Lover (1984)

  She knows she’s capable of it, that sometimes, those times I’ve mentioned, you can get anything you like out of her, she can’t refuse us anything. I say, Don’t worry, they weren’t expensive. She asks where. I say it was in the rue Catinat, marked-down markdowns. She looks at me with some fellow feeling. She must think it’s a good sign, this show of imagination, the way the girl has thought of dressing like this. She not only accepts this buffoonery, this unseemliness, she, sober as a widow, dressed in dark colors like an unfrocked nun, she not only accepts it, she likes it. The link with poverty is there in the man’s hat too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow. All around her are wildernesses, wastes. The sons are wildernesses, they’ll never do anything. The salt land’s a wilderness too, the money’s lost for good, it’s all over. The only thing left is this girl, she’s growing up, perhaps one day she’ll find out how to bring in some money. That’s why, though she doesn’t know it, that’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile. Her mother won’t stop her when she tries to make money. The child will say, I asked him for five hundred piastres so that we can go back to France. Her mother will say, Good, that’s what we’ll need to set ourselves up in Paris, we’ll be able to manage, she’ll say, with five hundred piastres. The child knows what she’s doing is what the mother would have chosen for her to do, if she’d dared, if she’d had the strength, if the pain of her thoughts hadn’t been there every day, wearing her out. In the books I’ve written about my childhood I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don’t know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It’s the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travail of my whole life. I’m still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  So internalized was the Prophet by the practices of Islam in every Muslim’s being, that the novel was “like a knife being dug into you or being raped yourself.” 34 There were riots in Pakistan, and the novel was ceremonially burned in Bradford, England, where there was a large community of Muslims of Indian and Pakistani origin, who objected to the British blasphemy laws that punished only insults to Christianity, and were aware of widespread prejudice in England against Islam. On February 13, Khomeini saw the Pakistani police open fire on the demonstrators and concluded that the novel must be evil. His fatwa commanded Muslims all over the world “to put to death Salman Rushdie and his publishers, wherever they are found.” At the Islamic Conference the following month, the fatwa was condemned by forty-four out of the forty-five member countries as un-Islamic. It is not permissible in Islamic law to sentence an offender without trial, nor to apply Muslim law in a non-Muslim country. The fatwa was yet another distortion of Islam. Mulla Sadra, one of Khomeini’s chief spiritual mentors, had been adamantly opposed to any such inquisitorial violence and coercion. He had insisted upon freedom of thought. Muslim outrage sprang, yet again, from a conviction that Islam had received a deadly blow; the years of suppression, denigration, and secularist attack had scarred Muslim sensibilities. The fatwa was an act of war, and was experienced as such by secularists and liberals in the West, who felt that their most sacred values had been violated. For them, humanity—not a supernatural God—was the measure of all things; men and women must have the freedom to fulfill their potential in their pursuit of artistic excellence. Muslims, for whom the sovereignty of God is the supreme value, could not accept this. The Rushdie affair was a clash of two irreconcilable orthodoxies; neither side could understand the viewpoint of the other. Different groups, living in the same country, were diametrically opposed to one another and in a state of potential war. This polarization between religious and secularists became clear when Khomeini died in June 1989. In the West, Khomeini was regarded as the enemy, and people were bewildered to see the unfeigned grief of the Iranians at his funeral. The mob surged around his coffin with such passion that the corpse fell out; it was as though they wanted to keep the Imam with them forever. However, the Islamic Republic did not fall apart after his death. Indeed, it showed signs of greater flexibility.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It is because He, be blessed, decided that He could no longer take the desecration of His Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him, so He ordered the State of Israel to be, which is a total contradiction of the Diaspora. 98 God’s name was desecrated every time a Jew was beaten or raped by a gentile: “When the Jew is humiliated, God is shamed! When the Jew is attacked—it is an assault upon the Name of God!” But the opposite was also true. Violent retaliation was kiddush ha-Shem, a sanctification of God’s name: “A Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums, this is kiddush ha-Shem.” 99 This ideology inspired a Kahanist, Baruch Goldstein, to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25, 1994. He acted to avenge the massacre of the fifty-nine Jews murdered by Palestinians on August 24, 1929. This act of revenge led to an escalation of Islamically inspired terror in the territories and in Israel itself. The Palestinians had not been caught up in the religious renewal that had seized the Muslim world after 1967. Their response to the Arab defeat was political, secularist, and nationalist. Yasir Arafat reorganized the Palestine Liberation Organization and initiated a campaign of guerrilla action, terrorism, and diplomacy to find a solution to the Palestinian problem. This was a decisively secular movement. But after the PLO nationalists were suppressed in the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin founded an Islamic movement which he called Mujamah (“Congress”), which initiated the type of welfare program that was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1987, Mujamah had established a charitable empire in the Strip, consisting of clinics, drug-rehabilitation programs, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Koran classes, supported by zakat (the Islamic tax), by the oil-rich Gulf states, and by Israel, which hoped to undermine the PLO by supporting Mujamah. For Yasin at this point was not interested in armed struggle against Israel. He was a reformer, who wanted to bring the fruits of modernity to the refugees of Gaza in an Islamic setting. He was also contending for the soul of Palestine against the nationalists: the cultural identity of the Palestinian people, he believed, should be Muslim rather than secular. The popularity of Mujamah showed that many Palestinians agreed. They were proud of Arafat, but his secularist ethos only made perfect sense to an elite who had the benefit of a modern Western education. 100 Quite different was the ideology of Islamic Jihad, an underground network of cells similar to the Jihad organization in Egypt.

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

  above a high hill, is still only accessible by scaling the cliff face clinging to a cable. Such troubles, and the near-obliteration of Ethiopia’s historical record from the time of Gudit and before, make any attempt to reconstruct Ethiopian Christian history speculative, and a junk heap of romantic misconceptions demands a degree of critical ruthlessness in dealing with what evidence we have. The fragmentary truth looks remarkable enough. At some periods Ethiopia was almost completely cut off from other Christians and might even have been without any abun sent from Alexandria to link it to the worldwide apostolic succession of bishops. Its available theological literature was selective and haphazard in character – so the Ethiopians came to treat the book known as I Enoch as part of the scriptural canon when it had lost respectability anywhere else, and indeed I Enoch played a special part in Ethiopian tradition by providing material for the foundation for the royal epic, the Kebra Nagast (see p. 244).49 Naturally prominent was a Miaphysite doctrinal anthology, named the Qerellos after the main content extracted from the works of Cyril of Alexandria, but despite this link with one part of the wider Christian world, it was small wonder that the preoccupations and character of Ethiopian faith developed on very individual (not to say eccentric) lines. It was the Ethiopians, for instance, who meditated on various Coptic apocryphal accounts of Pontius Pilate and decided that the Roman governor who presided over Christ’s crucifixion should become a Confessor of the Church, to be celebrated in their sacred art and given a feast day in June and a star place in the liturgy at Epiphany, the greatest feast of the year, when the priest intoned a phrase from the Psalms which was also an echo of his words: ‘I will wash my hands in innocence’. The Copts and Ethiopians did not forget Pilate’s complicity in the death of Christ, but in retelling his story they made him realize the full extent of his guilt, and they brought a symmetry to his fate by making him die on a cross, like the trio whom he had killed at Golgotha on the day that the sun hid its face. Thus Ethiopia’s royal Church found a unique way of assuaging the prolonged Christian embarrassment that the life of Christ had been played out far from the contemporary institutions of worldly power.50 It is to a new dynasty, the Zagwe kings (1137–1270), that Ethiopian Christianity attributes a cluster of Christian monuments which are as haunting and astonishing as the earlier stelae of Aksum: the twelve churches of the Zagwe capital city of Lalibela, cut from the living rock (see Plate 9). What is now a small rural town was renamed after a Zagwe king who reigned at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to whom these extraordinary buildings are attributed. In fact, they must have taken much longer to construct than Lalibela’s reign alone; some may be much earlier and may have survived the havoc

• From The Lover (1984)

  There aren’t many people at the Fountain on a weekday. I dance with him, with my younger brother. I don’t dance with my elder brother, I’ve never danced with him. I was always held back by a sense of danger, of the sinister attraction he exerted on everyone, a disturbing sense of the nearness of our bodies. We were strikingly alike, especially in the face. The Chinese from Cholon speaks to me, he’s on the brink of tears, he says, What have I done to them? I tell him not to worry, it’s always like that, even among ourselves, no matter what the circumstances. I’ll explain when we are together again in the apartment. I tell him my elder brother’s cold, insulting violence is there whatever happens to us, whatever comes our way. His first impulse is always to kill, to wipe out, to hold sway over life, to scorn, to hunt, to make suffer. I tell him not to be afraid. He’s got nothing to be afraid of. Because the only person my elder brother’s afraid of, who, strangely, makes him nervous, is me. Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another. When you’re being looked at you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning. The word conversation is banished. I think that’s what best conveys the shame and the pride. Every sort of community, whether of the family or other, is hateful to us, degrading. We’re united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves. My mother didn’t foresee what was going to become of us as a result of witnessing her despair. I’m speaking particularly of the boys, her sons. But even if she had foreseen it, how could she have kept quiet about what had become her own essential fate? How could she have made them all lie—her face, her eyes, her voice? Her love? She could have died. Done away with herself. Broken up our intolerable community. Seen to it that the eldest was completely separated from the younger two. But she didn’t. She was careless, muddle-headed, irresponsible. All that.

• From The Lover (1984)

  And I, according to my elder brother’s strategy, I’m not supposed to repeat what I’ve just said, not supposed to ask again, because that would be wrong, I’d be admitting he has a grievance. Quietly, as if between ourselves, he says he’d like to be alone with me for a while. He says it to end the agony. Then I’m still not supposed to catch what he says properly, one more treachery, as if by what he said he meant to object, to complain of my elder brother’s behavior. So I’m still not supposed to answer him. But he goes on, says, is bold enough to say, Your mother’s tired, look at her. And our mother does get drowsy after those fabulous Chinese dinners in Cholon. But I still don’t answer. It’s then I hear my brother’s voice. He says something short, sharp, and final. My mother used to say, He’s the one who speaks best out of all the three. After he’s spoken, my brother waits. Everything comes to a halt. I recognize my lover’s fear, it’s the same as my younger brother’s. He gives in. We go to the Fountain. My mother too. At the Fountain she goes to sleep. In my elder brother’s presence he ceases to be my lover. He doesn’t cease to exist, but he’s no longer anything to me. He becomes a burned-out shell. My desire obeys my elder brother, rejects my lover. Every time I see them together I think I can never bear the sight again. My lover’s denied in just that weak body, just that weakness which transports me with pleasure. In my brother’s presence he becomes an unmentionable outrage, a cause of shame who ought to be kept out of sight. I can’t fight my brother’s silent commands. I can when it concerns my younger brother. But when it concerns my lover I’m powerless against myself. Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absent-minded expression of someone who stares into space, who has other things to think about, but who just the same, as the slightly clenched jaws show, suffers and is exasperated at having to put up with this indignity just for the sake of eating well, in an expensive restaurant, which ought to be something quite normal. And surrounding the memory is the ghastly glow of the night of the hunter. It gives off a strident note of alarm, like the cry of a child. No one speaks to him at the Fountain, either. We all order Martells and Perrier. My brothers drink theirs straight off and order the same again. My mother and I give them ours. My brothers are soon drunk. But they still don’t speak to him. Instead they start finding fault. Especially my younger brother. He complains that the place is depressing and there aren’t any hostesses.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  31 Yet again, as had happened in the West, the needs of the modern state had propelled Iran toward a democratic polity, but this time it came in an Islamic package to which the people could relate and link with their own Shii traditions. Rafsanjani had probably gone beyond his brief, but Khomeini seemed pleased. In the spring elections of 1988, he merely asked the people to support the Majlis, making no mention of the clergy. The people, who were longing for economic reconstruction, did not miss this implied rebuke, and the ulema lost half their seats. In the new Majlis, only 63 out of the 270 members had received a traditional madrasah education. 32 Again, Khomeini seemed pleased with the results. He also gave the green light to the more pragmatic politicians who, in the winter of 1988, sought to amend the constitution. In October, he insisted that the ulema must not be permitted to impede the progress of the country. The reconstruction program should be led by “experts, in particular, cabinet ministers, the appropriate Majlis committees,... scientific and research centers,... inventors, discoverers and committed specialists.” 33 Two months later, he allowed a committee to convene to revise the constitution. The more radical Islamists, who saw any dilution of Velayat-e Faqih as a betrayal of the revolution, were dismayed, but the pragmatists seemed to be winning the day, with the Imam’s approval. It was in this context of internal conflict that, on February 14, 1989, four months before his death, Khomeini issued his fatwa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie. In his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had created what many Muslims regarded as a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, which presented him as a lecher, a charlatan, and a tyrant, and—most dangerously—suggested that the Koran had been tainted by satanic influence. It was a novel that brilliantly expressed the giddy confusion of the postmodern world, where there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily defined identity. The passages that gave offense were the recorded dreams and fantasies of a deracinated Indian film star, who is suffering a breakdown and has interiorized the anti-Islamic prejudices of the West. The blasphemy was also an attempt to cancel the clinging relics of the past and to achieve an independent identity, free of old shibboleths. But many Muslims experienced this portrait of Muhammad as profoundly wounding. It seemed a violation of something sacred to their own Muslim personae. Dr. Zaki Badawi, one of Britain’s most liberal Muslims, told The Guardian newspaper that Rushdie’s words were “far worse to Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Lord Cromer was a typical colonialist. In his view, the Egyptians were an inherently backward people and needed to be colonized for their own good. Like Renan, when he compared the Muslim countries to his own more developed nation, he assumed that Europe had always been in the vanguard of progress. He did not realize that European countries such as Britain and France had once been as “backward” as the Middle East, and that he was simply looking at an imperfectly modernized country. He saw “Orientals” themselves as inherently, genetically flawed. Cromer’s achievements in Egypt were considerable. He stabilized the economy, improved irrigation in the country, and increased the market production of cotton. He abolished the corvée, the old system of forced labor, and established a competent judicial system. But this progress came at a price. Although the khedive was nominally in charge of his government, each ministry had an English “adviser” whose views invariably carried the day. Cromer believed this to be necessary. He assumed that Europeans had always been rational, efficient, and modern, while the Orientals were naturally illogical, unreliable, and corrupt.67 Similarly, Islam “as a social system was a complete failure,” and incapable of reform or development. It was not possible to resuscitate “a body which is not, indeed, dead, and which may yet linger on for centuries, but which is nevertheless politically and socially moribund, and whose gradual decay cannot be arrested by any modern palliatives.”68 He made it clear that this chronically retarded country would need direct British supervision for some time. The British occupation created new rifts within Egyptian society. The ulema were displaced as the educators and chief guardians of knowledge by those who had received a Western education. The Shariah courts were replaced by the European civil courts established by Lord Cromer. Artisans and small merchants were also adversely affected. A new class of Westernized civil servants and intellectuals formed a new elite, estranged from the vast majority of the people. But most damaging of all, perhaps, was the tendency of Egyptians themselves to internalize the colonialists’ negative views of the Egyptian people. Thus, Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), a disciple of Afghani, was devastated by the British occupation. He described the modern period as a “torrent of science” drowning the traditional men of religion: It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions … and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects.69 This corrosive sense of inferiority crept into the religious life of the colonized people, compelling a reformer such as Abdu to answer the charges of the colonialists and to prove that Islam could be just as rational and modern as any Western system.70 For the first time, Muslims were forced to allow their conquerors to set their intellectual agenda.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The same could be said of his activism. Afghani rightly pointed out that Islam was a faith that expressed itself in action. He liked to quote the Koranic verse: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition, unless they change their inner selves.”62 Instead of retreating into the madrasahs, Muslims must become involved in the world of politics if they wanted to save Islam. In the modern world, truth was pragmatic; it had to be shown to work in the physical, empirical realm, and Afghani wanted to prove that the truth of Islam could be just as effective as the Western ideologies in the world of his day. He realized that Europe would soon rule the globe, and was determined to make the Muslim rulers of his day aware of this danger. But Afghani’s revolutionary schemes were often self-destructive and morally dubious. None of them bore fruit, and they led simply to official curtailment of his activities. He was expelled from Egypt for anti-government agitation in 1879, from Iran in 1891, and, though he was subsequently allowed to reside in Istanbul, he was kept under close surveillance by the Ottoman authorities. The attempt to convert religious truth into a program for political action runs the risk of nihilism and disaster, and Afghani laid himself open to the charge of “using” Islam in a superficial way to back up his ill-thought-out revolutionary activism.63 He had clearly not integrated the religious imperative with his politics in sufficient depth. When, in 1896, one of his disciples, at his urging, assassinated Nasir ad-Din Shah, Afghani violated one of the central tenets of all religion: respect for the absolute sanctity of human life. He had made Islam look not only inefficient and bizarre but also immoral.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  God created this state not for the Jew and not as a reward for his justice and good deeds. It is because He, be blessed, decided that He could no longer take the desecration of His Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him, so He ordered the State of Israel to be, which is a total contradiction of the Diaspora.98 God’s name was desecrated every time a Jew was beaten or raped by a gentile: “When the Jew is humiliated, God is shamed! When the Jew is attacked—it is an assault upon the Name of God!” But the opposite was also true. Violent retaliation was kiddush ha-Shem, a sanctification of God’s name: “A Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums, this is kiddush ha-Shem.”99 This ideology inspired a Kahanist, Baruch Goldstein, to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25, 1994. He acted to avenge the massacre of the fifty-nine Jews murdered by Palestinians on August 24, 1929. This act of revenge led to an escalation of Islamically inspired terror in the territories and in Israel itself. The Palestinians had not been caught up in the religious renewal that had seized the Muslim world after 1967. Their response to the Arab defeat was political, secularist, and nationalist. Yasir Arafat reorganized the Palestine Liberation Organization and initiated a campaign of guerrilla action, terrorism, and diplomacy to find a solution to the Palestinian problem. This was a decisively secular movement. But after the PLO nationalists were suppressed in the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin founded an Islamic movement which he called Mujamah (“Congress”), which initiated the type of welfare program that was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1987, Mujamah had established a charitable empire in the Strip, consisting of clinics, drug-rehabilitation programs, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Koran classes, supported by zakat (the Islamic tax), by the oil-rich Gulf states, and by Israel, which hoped to undermine the PLO by supporting Mujamah. For Yasin at this point was not interested in armed struggle against Israel. He was a reformer, who wanted to bring the fruits of modernity to the refugees of Gaza in an Islamic setting. He was also contending for the soul of Palestine against the nationalists: the cultural identity of the Palestinian people, he believed, should be Muslim rather than secular. The popularity of Mujamah showed that many Palestinians agreed. They were proud of Arafat, but his secularist ethos only made perfect sense to an elite who had the benefit of a modern Western education.100

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He saw “Orientals” themselves as inherently, genetically flawed. Cromer’s achievements in Egypt were considerable. He stabilized the economy, improved irrigation in the country, and increased the market production of cotton. He abolished the corvée , the old system of forced labor, and established a competent judicial system. But this progress came at a price. Although the khedive was nominally in charge of his government, each ministry had an English “adviser” whose views invariably carried the day. Cromer believed this to be necessary. He assumed that Europeans had always been rational, efficient, and modern, while the Orientals were naturally illogical, unreliable, and corrupt. 67 Similarly, Islam “as a social system was a complete failure,” and incapable of reform or development. It was not possible to resuscitate “a body which is not, indeed, dead, and which may yet linger on for centuries, but which is nevertheless politically and socially moribund, and whose gradual decay cannot be arrested by any modern palliatives.” 68 He made it clear that this chronically retarded country would need direct British supervision for some time. The British occupation created new rifts within Egyptian society. The ulema were displaced as the educators and chief guardians of knowledge by those who had received a Western education. The Shariah courts were replaced by the European civil courts established by Lord Cromer. Artisans and small merchants were also adversely affected. A new class of Westernized civil servants and intellectuals formed a new elite, estranged from the vast majority of the people. But most damaging of all, perhaps, was the tendency of Egyptians themselves to internalize the colonialists’ negative views of the Egyptian people. Thus, Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), a disciple of Afghani, was devastated by the British occupation. He described the modern period as a “torrent of science” drowning the traditional men of religion : It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions … and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects. 69 This corrosive sense of inferiority crept into the religious life of the colonized people, compelling a reformer such as Abdu to answer the charges of the colonialists and to prove that Islam could be just as rational and modern as any Western system. 70 For the first time, Muslims were forced to allow their conquerors to set their intellectual agenda. Abdu had been involved in the Urubi revolt and was exiled after the British victory. He joined Afghani in Paris. The two men had much in common.