SUNDAY POST JAN 18-24
Cover Story
Religious history is replete with genocides and crimes like Hebdo and Peshawar. It is instructive to appreciate the historical conflict between the faithful and the ‘faithfool’, writes Sourav Banerjee.
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it. – Charles Caleb Cotton
On December 16, 2014 a Talibani group, perhaps the one whom Allah has entrusted with the task of building an Islam-only world, attacked a school in Peshawar and shot over 130 schoolchildren, the dead ranging from eight to 18 years of age including a dozen teachers and staff of the school. Before executing the helpless kids they made to watch them their teachers being burnt alive. It was devil on the prowl, but according to their brand of ‘Islam’ the act was saintly, as they “do not kill little children. The children of the enemy aged less than 12 are not allowed to be killed,” and abiding by that most of the victims shot at the head by the ‘faithfools’ were above 12 years of age!
Every sane person was aghast to see the theatre of cruelty that has crossed all limits of human reason, and ethics of violence, while there emerges common anger and frustration: “What has become of humanity?” Evidently, the idea was to kill as many lives as possible and instil fear. Such was the trauma on children that a son aged 14 asked his mum what he should do in case they invaded his school, “line up or run”. The mother kept mum, as either way you cannot escape; perhaps God wants you to die.
In the melee of confusion and despair we try to moralise the technology, the AK 47s, missiles, drones and the nukes in vain, and forget what German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht warned
General
Your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
The man behind the technology, the object of scrutiny becomes invisible while the act crawls into prominence. Frenzied, in the age of modernity, we forget again
General
Man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
Culture of violence
However, the Peshawar incident is not the first of its kind. Religious history is replete with genocides and crimes like Hebdo and Peshawar. Veda admits of burning some thousands of Indian villages to ashes by the Aryans in order to establish their exclusive land and religious dominance. The history of Christianity is marked by violent acts, which otherwise epitomises love and peace, while Jesus’ teaching: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mark 12:31) painfully fails.
Surprisingly, there is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which implies genocide. It is called ‘herem’, i.e. total annihilation. The history of Christianity is strewn with herem. During the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the Catholic popes declared the Muslims ‘Amalekites’ (cruelty personified) and subjected them to torture and death. The Crusades saw European armies saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs – “Kill them all, God will know his own.” In the great religious wars of the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries, Protestants and Catholics both believed the other side were the Amalekites and thus deserved annihilation. Millions were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies. Two thirds of the Christian population of Europe was slaughtered by Christians themselves during Europe’s Reformation and Counter Reformation.
And now, the Taliban gunmen who slaughtered 148 innocent lives, just hours before the massacre posed with a white banner of the Pakistani Taliban, on which was scripted ‘there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger.’ Just
the perpetrators and venues are different while the act remains the same. Gods are a failure, as they couldn’t bless human beings, and all the violence Gods collectively own up since their inception stands testimony to the claim. Urdu poet Iqbal almost summarises the situation:
Kise khabar thi ke lekar charagh-e Mustafwi
Jahan me aag lagati phiregi Bu – Lahabi
(Who could have thought that the followers of Bu-Lahab [Bu-Lahab or Abu Lahab symbolises the enemy of Islam who refuses to accept the truth of Islam and the oneness of God] would hold aloft the Prophet’s torch, setting the world afire?)
The Cult
Atharva Veda (12:5:67-71) reads, “Strike off the shoulders and the heads (of the non-believers). Snatch thou the hair from off his head, and from his body strip the skin. Tear out his sinews; cause his flesh to fall in pieces from his frame. Crush thou his bones together, strike and beat the marrow out of him. Dislocate all his limbs and joints.” Rig Veda (1:CLXXVI:4) too says, “Slay everyone who pours no gift, who, hard to reach, delights thee not. Bestow on us what wealth he hath: this even the worshipper awaits.” Then, we all know how Krishna persuaded Arjuna to fight his loved ones to death and the legend of Kurukshetra was born. We all know how Krishna justified Arjuna’s participation in the battle by saying it is Arjuna’s duty (dharma) to fight as a member of the warrior caste (Kshatriya), and his duty to his caste and the divine structure of society is more important than his personal feelings. We know how he further assured violence only affects the body and cannot harm the soul, so killing is not a fault and there is no reason for Arjuna not to kill people, nor should he be sorry for those he has killed. One thing that no one can contradict is that the battle of Kurukshetra was indeed brutal and violent.
Quran (2:191-193) reads, “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah (disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah) is worse than killing. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah and worship is for Allah alone.” “Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah Heareth and knoweth all things. Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them,” Allah instructs Prophet Muhammad. He continues: “Prophet! Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites!… Hell shall be their home, an evil fate.” (Quran, 2:244/9:5)
If this is not enough, much to our surprise, Professor Jenkins of Penn State University and author of two books Jesus Wars and Dark Passages says, “The Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.” Consider the Book of 1 Samuel, when God instructs King Saul to attack the Amalekites (the enemy of Jews and Israel): “And utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” When Saul failed to do that, God took away his kingdom. “In other words,” Jenkins says, “Saul has committed a dreadful sin by failing to complete genocide. And that passage echoes through Christian history. It is often used, for example, in American stories of confrontation with Indians — not just is it legitimate to kill Indians, but you are violating God’s law if you do not.”
Origin of violence as advocated by the custodians of faith dates back to the time when transformation of religion to an organisation of labour from a spiritual pursuit of faith or belief began. Since then it has gradually crept deep into the social as well as individual life up to an extent of a philosophy or guiding force that tells you either to resign or rule. In the course it could only establish nothing more than a social code of conduct, more often used as an instrument to claim authority. Those who submit to it are spared, while those who challenge or reject it are ‘Kafirs’ or ‘Pagans’ or ‘Heretics’ or non-believers. And all the religions have a set of punishments no less violent for the one who refuses to subscribe. These terror cults, with a monotheistic, violent and exclusive interpretation of religion, labels ‘the other’ as an enemy and thus makes him a legitimate target for death, the reward for which is sainthood and heaven.
Noted scholar Regina Schwartz in her book The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, argues that, “Whether as singleness (this God against the others) or totality (this is all the God there is), monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass.” Given that the belief in one God “forges identity antithetically,” it issues in a mistaken notion of identity (“we are ‘us’ because we are not ‘them’”) and contributes to violent practice (“we can remain ‘us’ only if we obliterate ‘them’).”
Every religion is destined to walk the trajectory of right wing religious extremism and fanaticism before ending up in fascism and imperialism. Ranging from early Judaism to Christianity, Hinduism or Islam, they all saw the same fate sometime or the other in history. Whether they can evolve out of it is, however, another thing altogether.
Religious Politics
Organised mass killings in the name of religion are always politics driven. During the French Revolution, which led to the emergence of the first secular state in Europe, the Jacobins publicly beheaded about 17,000 men, women and children. Clearly here in India, rabid Hindutva forces pose equal threat to India’s democracy and secularism. Back home thousands belonging to minority communities (Muslims, Christians, Dalits, tribal) are violated and killed by Hindu resurrectionist forces (VHP, RSS and ‘Sangh Parivaar’) everyday in order to establish India as a Hindu state. From the days of partition to the present day Godhra or Babri Masjid, thousands were killed in pursuit of the Hindu Rashtra dream. During the course of the last three and a half decades, the extreme religious right wing forces of Anglo-Zionist imperialism as well as the cult of religio-sectarian terror organisations have grown menacingly. Similarly, IS uses violence through a religious movement to establish an Islamic world and to help Allah achieve the supremacy over other Gods. In spite of all the best intentions, religion demands such slaughter to fulfil its dream and it is a tragic expression of the dark side of modernity.
On these cults of terror, there grows deadly parasites – the international drugs and weapon smuggling cartels as well as a band of disillusioned and marginalised youths easily bought, thanks to abject poverty and illiteracy, and are trained to be dedicated in reddening the battlefields of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Ukraine, Chechenya, Afghanistan and Pakistan to name a few. All of these non-state terror organisations are backed by the deep military and intelligence apparatus and have now grown beyond the control of their very masters and creators. They range from the Al Qaeda, Haqqani Network (CIA linked to both), Lashkar-e-Taiba, Boko Haram and myriad others. In the case of the new global threat ISIS, it’s very creation and survival is specifically linked to the American CIA, Saudi and Qatari Intel, the Turkish MIT, Israeli Mossad, British MI5-MI6, German BND and the French DGSE Intelligence agencies.
Dead End or Enlightenment?
In his book Culture and the Death of God, literary critique Terry Eagleton says, “God have been through a very rough patch over the last 500 years. Once the Creator and Ruler of the universe, He fell into a long and precipitous decline with the advent of modernity. Dethroned as Ruler by religious tolerance and democracy, the Almighty watched helplessly as science refuted His claim to be the Creator. Historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars broke the spell of His holy books, impugning their inerrancy and exposing them as driven by myths, errors, and contradictions. God’s hold on the moral and metaphysical imagination grew ever more attenuated.” Diderot mused that God had become “one of the most sublime and useless truths.” For Voltaire if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Perhaps, it is because, religious faith is the effect of larger oppression and human suffering.
Man invented Him because Martin Luther had to urge his followers to set fire to synagogues “and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them… to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom…” Man invented him because business worth trillions had to be made by selling arms to aid and sex to sweets in every corner of this planet in His name. He was made so that ‘a few’ could rule while the ‘many’ would resign comfortably numb with religion served as opiate. If there is God, there will be Pagans and Kafirs and God’s punishment. As long as there will be tyranny and oppression, there will be religion; because “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering; it is as a scholar friend Jeet Bhattacharya explains, “Monday yes, Tuesday yes, Wednesday yes, Thursday No. It is rebel.”
As protest, it is to set ourselves free from the religion, overwhelmed by a cult of hate, violence, fear, division, murder, genocide, and suicide terror attacks. It will pave the further course of the human civilisation. Shaken by the Reformation, the culture of Catholic authority and hegemony was finally destroyed by the Enlightenment. In its tender age Enlightenment had promised to abolish all kinds of mental slavery and set him free from the immature state of ignorance; it promised “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”, tutelage being “Man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” However, it ultimately failed to keep its promise and grew up to be a much more reformist than radical affair, seeking to base religion on reason. But that was in the 18th century. This century needs something more than that. A big leap forward. So…
I carry a torch in one hand
And a bucket of water in the other:
With these things I am going to set fire to Heaven
And put out the flames of Hell
So that voyagers to God can rip the veils
And see the real goal…
Rabia Basri (Rabi’a Al-‘Adawiyya), Iraqi Sufi poet.