Foundation for Pluralism | Preface by Mike Ghouse
Link: http://foundationforpluralism.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-myth-of-religious-violence-by-karen.html
My comments, and abstracts from the article are followed by Armstrong's article below.
The plight of minorities - be it racial, religious, sub-religious, secular, ethnic, linguistic or liberal is fairly similar throughout the history of the mankind. The following article is 4600 words long, but worth the read, it helps us understand the society and factors that shape the majority-minority relationships.
Religious masters have worked very hard to infuse humility into humanity as a bridge to building cohesive societies, most people got that right, and some did not. The struggle is between the majority and minority, it is not all of the majority, but the hard core tiny group of people within a given majority that drives the society, and ironically they tend to be insecure and frightened beings. They are afraid, that these ...... 'bunch of other people' will change their life styles, and their in-built animalistic defense mechanism kicks in and starts preempting attacks on them, to show them their place, and deny them their rights, i.e., be obedient to them.
The hardcore individuals within the Tea party, ISIS, Talibans, RSS, Islamists, Zionists, Hindutva and others behave the same when it comes to 'bunch of others'. They resort to imagining and annihilating the other to "feel" secure. The world is not big enough for them, they want to have it all, and don't want the "inferior" other to have their own space, food and the loved ones. I called it animalistic behavior because God has endowed animals with paws, fangs, horns and power to fight and resolve their conflicts, where as humans are suppose to resolve their issues through dialogue. As a society, we have to collectively bring every one to talk and assure security to the insecure, so we all can live without the fear of the other.
If you are a student of building cohesive societies, where we can live without the fear of the other, no matter who we are, then this is worth reading, it provides a deeper understanding of how society functions, how the majority-minority problems have evolved. Karen Armstrong is my favorite writer, and we have many things in common with Pope Francis, President Obama, President Carter, Aga Khan and I. We respect the otherness of others with all humility, because we are all created by God and we are all one family.
EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE
John Locke, "endorsed a master’s “Absolute, arbitrary, despotical
power” over a slave, which included “the power to kill him at any time”.
"Ironically, no sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion, than they invented another. Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they worshipped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis David."
"... allowed states to intrude into the lives of their citizens more than had ever been possible. Even if they spoke a different language from their rulers, subjects now belonged to the “nation,” whether they liked it or not. John Stuart Mill regarded this forcible integration as progress; .."
" ... Yet this toleration was only skin-deep, and as Lord Acton had predicted, an intolerance of ethnic and cultural minorities would become the achilles heel of the nation-state. Indeed, the ethnic minority would replace the heretic (who had usually been protesting against the social order) as the object of resentment in the new nation-state. "
"Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading proponents of the Enlightenment in the United States, instructed his secretary of war in 1807 that Native Americans were “backward peoples” who must either be “exterminated” or driven “beyond our reach” to the other side of the Mississippi “with the beasts of the forest”.
"Napoleon issued the “infamous decrees”, ordering the Jews of France to take French names, privatise their faith, and ensure that at least one in three marriages per family was with a gentile."
"....centuries of Christian prejudice, but gave it a scientific rationale, claiming that Jews did not fit the biological and genetic profile of the Volk, and should be eliminated from the body politic as modern medicine cut out a cancer."
"All too often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent riposte. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the liberal or secular establishment is determined to destroy their way of life. This has been tragically apparent in the Middle East."
"Mehmet Resid, known as the “execution governor”, regarded the Armenians as “dangerous microbes” in “the bosom of the Fatherland”. Ataturk completed this racial purge."
I am holding off expletives, the SOB Shah of Iran was kicked out because of what he did to his people, "
In Iran in 1928, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the laws of uniformity of dress: his soldiers tore off women’s veils with bayonets and ripped them to pieces in the street. In 1935, the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in one of the holiest shrines of Iran, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians. Policies like this made veiling, which has no Qur’anic endorsement, an emblem of Islamic authenticity in many parts of the Muslim world."
"Had the democratic process been thwarted in such an unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been worldwide outrage. But because an Islamic government had been blocked by the coup, there was jubilation in some quarters of the western press – as if this undemocratic action had instead made Algeria safe for democracy. In rather the same way, there was an almost audible sigh of relief in the west when the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power in Egypt last year. But there has been less attention to the violence of the secular military dictatorship that has replaced it, which has exceeded the abuses of the Mubarak regime."
The United States has committed many blunders - one of them was rejecting Hamas, democratically elected by the people of Gaza. What options did we give them? All of them were wrong.
"...any secular thinkers now regard “religion” as inherently belligerent and intolerant, and an irrational, backward and violent “other” to the peaceable and humane liberal state – an attitude with an unfortunate echo of the colonialist view of indigenous peoples as hopelessly “primitive”, mired in their benighted religious beliefs."
And the last one, "When secularisation has been applied by force, it has provoked a fundamentalist reaction – and history shows that fundamentalist movements which come under attack invariably grow even more extreme. "
Please read my solution at the very end.
..........................................................................
Myths of religious violence by Karen Armstrong
Courtesy of the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/-sp-karen-armstrong-religious-violence-myth-secular
The popular belief that religion is the cause of the world’s bloodiest
conflicts is central to our modern conviction that faith and politics
should never mix. But the messy history of their separation suggests it
was never so simple
As we watch the fighters of the
Islamic State (Isis) rampaging through the Middle East, tearing apart the
modern nation-states of Syria and Iraq created by departing European
colonialists, it may be difficult to believe we are living in the 21st century.
The sight of throngs of terrified refugees and the savage and
indiscriminate violence is all too reminiscent of barbarian tribes sweeping
away the Roman empire, or the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan cutting a swath
through China, Anatolia, Russia and eastern Europe, devastating entire cities
and massacring their inhabitants. Only the wearily familiar pictures of bombs falling yet again on Middle Eastern cities
and towns – this time dropped by the United States and a few Arab allies – and
the gloomy predictions that this may become another Vietnam, remind us that
this is indeed a very modern war.
The ferocious cruelty of these
jihadist fighters, quoting the Qur’an as they behead their hapless victims, raises another
distinctly modern concern: the connection between religion and violence. The
atrocities of Isis would seem to prove that Sam Harris, one of the loudest
voices of the “New Atheism”, was right to claim that “most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith”,
and to conclude that “religion itself produces a perverse solidarity that we
must find some way to undercut”. Many will agree with Richard Dawkins, who
wrote in The God Delusion that “only religious faith is a strong enough force
to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people”. Even those
who find these statements too extreme may still believe, instinctively, that
there is a violent essence inherent in religion, which inevitably radicalises
any conflict – because once combatants are convinced that God is on their side,
compromise becomes impossible and cruelty knows no bounds.
Despite the valiant attempts by
Barack Obama and David Cameron to insist that the lawless violence of Isis has
nothing to do with Islam, many will disagree. They may also feel exasperated.
In the west, we learned from bitter experience that the fanatical bigotry which
religion seems always to unleash can only be contained by the creation of a
liberal state that separates politics and religion. Never again, we believed,
would these intolerant passions be allowed to intrude on political life. But
why, oh why, have Muslims found it impossible to arrive at this logical solution to their current problems? Why do they
cling with perverse obstinacy to the obviously bad idea of theocracy? Why, in
short, have they been unable to enter the modern world? The answer must surely
lie in their primitive and atavistic religion.
A Ukrainian soldier near the eastern
Ukrainian town of Pervomaysk. Photograph: Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
But perhaps we should ask, instead,
how it came about that we in the west developed our view of religion as a
purely private pursuit, essentially separate from all other human activities,
and especially distinct from politics. After all, warfare and violence have
always been a feature of political life, and yet we alone drew the conclusion that
separating the church from the state was a prerequisite for peace. Secularism
has become so natural to us that we assume it emerged organically, as a
necessary condition of any society’s progress into modernity. Yet it was in
fact a distinct creation, which arose as a result of a peculiar concatenation
of historical circumstances; we may be mistaken to assume that it would evolve
in the same fashion in every culture in every part of the world.
We now take the secular state so
much for granted that it is hard for us to appreciate its novelty, since before
the modern period, there were no “secular” institutions and no “secular” states
in our sense of the word. Their creation required the development of an
entirely different understanding of religion, one that was unique to the modern
west. No other culture has had anything remotely like it, and before the 18th
century, it would have been incomprehensible even to European Catholics. The
words in other languages that we translate as “religion” invariably refer to
something vaguer, larger and more inclusive. The Arabic word din
signifies an entire way of life, and the Sanskrit dharma covers law,
politics, and social institutions as well as piety. The Hebrew Bible has no
abstract concept of “religion”; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it
impossible to define faith in a single word or formula, because the Talmud was
expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the
sacred. The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek
or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious’.” In fact, the
only tradition that satisfies the modern western criterion of religion as a
purely private pursuit is Protestant Christianity, which, like our western view
of “religion”, was also a creation of the early modern period.
Traditional spirituality did not
urge people to retreat from political activity. The prophets of Israel had
harsh words for those who assiduously observed the temple rituals but neglected
the plight of the poor and oppressed. Jesus’s famous maxim to “Render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” was not a plea for the separation of
religion and politics. Nearly all the uprisings against Rome in first-century
Palestine were inspired by the conviction that the Land of Israel and its
produce belonged to God, so that there was, therefore, precious little to “give
back” to Caesar. When Jesus overturned the money-changers’ tables in the
temple, he was not demanding a more spiritualised religion. For 500 years, the
temple had been an instrument of imperial control and the tribute for Rome was
stored there. Hence for Jesus it was a “den of thieves”. The bedrock message of
the Qur’an is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your
wealth in order to create a just, egalitarian and decent society. Gandhi would
have agreed that these were matters of sacred import: “Those who say that
religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”
The
myth of religious violence
Before the modern period, religion
was not a separate activity, hermetically sealed off from all others; rather,
it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building,
politics and warfare. Before 1700, it would have been impossible for people to
say where, for example, “politics” ended and “religion” began. The Crusades
were certainly inspired by religious passion but they were also deeply
political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim
world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy
that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was a deeply
flawed attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil
war, at a time when the nation feared an imminent attack by the Ottoman empire.
Similarly, the European wars of religion and the thirty years war were
certainly exacerbated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics,
but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.
 |
| A US army soldier shoots at Taliban fighters on the
outskirts of Jellawar in the Arghandab Valley, Afghanistan. Photograph: Patrick
Baz/AFP/Getty Images |
Before the modern period, religion
was not a separate activity, it permeated all human undertakings
It was these European wars, in the
16th and 17th centuries, that helped create what has been called “the myth of
religious violence”. It was said that Protestants and Catholics were so
inflamed by the theological passions of the Reformation that they butchered one
another in senseless battles that killed 35% of the population of central
Europe. Yet while there is no doubt that the participants certainly experienced
these wars as a life-and-death religious struggle, this was also a conflict
between two sets of state-builders: the princes of Germany and the other kings
of Europe were battling against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his
ambition to establish a trans-European hegemony modelled after the Ottoman
empire.
If the wars of religion had been
solely motivated by sectarian bigotry, we should not expect to have found
Protestants and Catholics fighting on the same side, yet in fact they often did
so. Thus Catholic France repeatedly fought the Catholic Habsburgs, who were
regularly supported by some of the Protestant princes. In the French wars of
religion (1562–98) and the thirty years war, combatants crossed confessional
lines so often that it was impossible to talk about solidly “Catholic” or
“Protestant” populations. These wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all
about politics”. Nor was it a question of the state simply “using” religion for
political ends. There was as yet no coherent way to divide religious causes
from social causes. People were fighting for different visions of society, but
they would not, and could not, have distinguished between religious and
temporal factors in these conflicts. Until the 18th century, dissociating the two
would have been like trying to take the gin out of a cocktail.
By the end of the thirty years war,
Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. Henceforth Europe would
be divided into smaller states, each claiming sovereign power in its own territory,
each supported by a professional army and governed by a prince who aspired to
absolute rule – a recipe, perhaps, for chronic interstate warfare. New
configurations of political power were beginning to force the church into a
subordinate role, a process that involved a fundamental reallocation of
authority and resources from the ecclesiastical establishment to the monarch.
When the new word “secularisation” was coined in the late 16th century, it
originally referred to “the transfer of goods from the possession of the church
into that of the world”. This was a wholly new experiment. It was not a
question of the west discovering a natural law; rather, secularisation was a
contingent development. It took root in Europe in large part because it
mirrored the new structures of power that were pushing the churches out of
government.
These developments required a new
understanding of religion. It was provided by Martin Luther, who was the first
European to propose the separation of church and state. Medieval Catholicism
had been an essentially communal faith; most people experienced the sacred by
living in community. But for Luther, the Christian stood alone before his God,
relying only upon his Bible. Luther’s acute sense of human sinfulness led him,
in the early 16th century, to advocate the absolute states that would not
become a political reality for another hundred years. For Luther, the state’s prime
duty was to restrain its wicked subjects by force, “in the same way as a savage
wild beast is bound with chains and ropes”. The sovereign, independent state
reflected this vision of the independent and sovereign individual. Luther’s
view of religion, as an essentially subjective and private quest over which the
state had no jurisdiction, would be the foundation of the modern secular ideal.
But Luther’s response to the
peasants’ war in Germany in 1525, during the early stages of the wars of
religion, suggested that a secularised political theory would not necessarily
be a force for peace or democracy. The peasants, who were resisting the
centralising policies of the German princes – which deprived them of their
traditional rights – were mercilessly slaughtered by the state. Luther believed
that they had committed the cardinal sin of mixing religion and politics:
suffering was their lot, and they should have turned the other cheek, and
accepted the loss of their lives and property. “A worldly kingdom,” he
insisted, “cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some
imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.” So, Luther commanded the princes, “Let
everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that
nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.”
Dawn
of the liberal state
By the late 17th century,
philosophers had devised a more urbane version of the secular ideal. For John
Locke it had become self-evident that “the church itself is a thing absolutely
separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are
fixed and immovable.” The separation of religion and politics – “perfectly and
infinitely different from each other” – was, for Locke, written into the very
nature of things. But the liberal state was a radical innovation, just as
revolutionary as the market economy that was developing in the west and would
shortly transform the world. Because of the violent passions it aroused, Locke
insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all
things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society.
Hence Locke was adamant that the
liberal state could tolerate neither Catholics nor Muslims, condemning their
confusion of politics and religion as dangerously perverse. Locke was a major
advocate of the theory of natural human rights, originally pioneered by the
Renaissance humanists and given definition in the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence as life, liberty and
property. But secularisation emerged at a time when Europe was beginning to
colonise the New World, and it would come to exert considerable influence on
the way the west viewed those it had colonised – much as in our own time, the
prevailing secular ideology perceives Muslim societies that seem incapable of
separating faith from politics to be irredeemably flawed.
The reign of terror plunged France
into an irrational bloodbath, in which 17,000 men, women and children were
executed
This introduced an inconsistency,
since for the Renaissance humanists there could be no question of extending
these natural rights to the indigenous inhabitants of the New World. Indeed,
these peoples could justly be penalised for failing to conform to European
norms. In the 16th century, Alberico Gentili, a professor of civil law at
Oxford, argued that land that had not been exploited agriculturally, as it was
in Europe, was “empty” and that “the seizure of [such] vacant places” should be
“regarded as law of nature”. Locke agreed that the native peoples had no right
to life, liberty or property. The “kings” of America, he decreed, had no legal
right of ownership to their territory. He also endorsed a master’s “Absolute,
arbitrary, despotical power” over a slave, which included “the power to kill
him at any time”.
The pioneers of secularism seemed to be falling into the same
old habits as their religious predecessors. Secularism was designed to create a
peaceful world order, but the church was so intricately involved in the
economic, political and cultural structures of society that the secular order
could only be established with a measure of violence. In North America, where
there was no entrenched aristocratic government, the disestablishment of the
various churches could be accomplished with relative ease. But in France, the
church could be dismantled only by an outright assault; far from being
experienced as a natural and essentially normative arrangement, the separation
of religion and politics could be experienced as traumatic and terrifying.
During the French revolution, one of
the first acts of the new national assembly on November 2, 1789, was to
confiscate all church property to pay off the national debt: secularisation
involved dispossession, humiliation and marginalisation. This segued into
outright violence during the September massacres of 1792, when the mob fell
upon the jails of Paris and slaughtered between two and three thousand
prisoners, many of them priests. Early in 1794, four revolutionary armies were
dispatched from Paris to quell an uprising in the Vendée against the
anti-Catholic policies of the regime. Their instructions were to spare no one.
At the end of the campaign, General François-Joseph Westermann reportedly wrote
to his superiors: “The Vendée no longer exists. I have crushed children beneath
the hooves of our horses, and massacred the women … The roads are littered with
corpses.”
Ironically, no sooner had the
revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion, than they invented another.
Their new gods were liberty, nature and the French nation, which they
worshipped in elaborate festivals choreographed by the artist Jacques Louis
David. The same year that the goddess of reason was enthroned on the high altar
of Notre Dame cathedral, the reign of terror plunged the new nation into an irrational
bloodbath, in which some 17,000 men, women and children were executed by the
state.
To
die for one’s country
When Napoleon’s armies invaded
Prussia in 1807, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte similarly urged his
countrymen to lay down their lives for the Fatherland – a manifestation of the
divine and the repository of the spiritual essence of the Volk. If we
define the sacred as that for which we are prepared to die, what Benedict
Anderson called the “imagined community” of the nation had come to replace God.
It is now considered admirable to die for your country, but not for your
religion.
As the nation-state came into its
own in the 19th century along with the industrial revolution, its citizens had
to be bound tightly together and mobilised for industry. Modern communications
enabled governments to create and propagate a national ethos, and allowed
states to intrude into the lives of their citizens more than had ever been
possible. Even if they spoke a different language from their rulers, subjects
now belonged to the “nation,” whether they liked it or not. John Stuart Mill
regarded this forcible integration as progress; it was surely better for a
Breton, “the half-savage remnant of past times”, to become a French citizen
than “sulk on his own rocks”. But in the late 19th century, the British
historian Lord Acton feared that the adulation of the national spirit that laid
such emphasis on ethnicity, culture and language, would penalise those who did
not fit the national norm: “According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and
civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the
community, the inferior races are exterminated or reduced to servitude, or put
in a condition of dependence.”
The Enlightenment philosophers had
tried to counter the intolerance and bigotry that they associated with
“religion” by promoting the equality of all human beings, together with
democracy, human rights, and intellectual and political liberty, modern secular
versions of ideals which had been promoted in a religious idiom in the past.
The structural injustice of the agrarian state, however, had made it impossible
to implement these ideals fully. The nation-state made these noble aspirations
practical necessities. More and more people had to be drawn into the productive
process and needed at least a modicum of education. Eventually they would
demand the right to participate in the decisions of government. It was found by
trial and error that those nations that democratised forged ahead economically,
while those that confined the benefits of modernity to an elite fell behind.
Innovation was essential to progress, so people had to be allowed to think
freely, unconstrained by the constraints of their class, guild or church.
Governments needed to exploit all their human resources, so outsiders, such as
Jews in Europe and Catholics in England and America, were brought into the
mainstream.
A candlelight vigil in 2007 at the
Arlington West Memorial in Santa Barbara, California, to honour American
soldiers killed in the Iraq war. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX
Yet this toleration was only
skin-deep, and as Lord Acton had predicted, an intolerance of ethnic and
cultural minorities would become the achilles heel of the nation-state. Indeed,
the ethnic minority would replace the heretic (who had usually been protesting
against the social order) as the object of resentment in the new nation-state.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading proponents of the Enlightenment in the
United States, instructed his secretary of war in 1807 that Native Americans
were “backward peoples” who must either be “exterminated” or driven “beyond our
reach” to the other side of the Mississippi “with the beasts of the forest”.
The following year, Napoleon issued the “infamous decrees”, ordering the Jews
of France to take French names, privatise their faith, and ensure that at least
one in three marriages per family was with a gentile. Increasingly, as national
feeling became a supreme value, Jews would come to be seen as rootless and
cosmopolitan. In the late 19th century, there was an explosion of antisemitism
in Europe, which undoubtedly drew upon centuries of Christian prejudice, but
gave it a scientific rationale, claiming that Jews did not fit the biological
and genetic profile of the Volk, and should be eliminated from the body politic
as modern medicine cut out a cancer.
When secularisation was implemented
in the developing world, it was experienced as a profound disruption – just as
it had originally been in Europe. Because it usually came with colonial rule,
it was seen as a foreign import and rejected as profoundly unnatural. In almost
every region of the world where secular governments have been established with
a goal of separating religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement has
developed in response, determined to bring religion back into public life. What
we call “fundamentalism” has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with a
secularisation that is experienced as cruel, violent and invasive. All too
often an aggressive secularism has pushed religion into a violent riposte.
Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and
Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the liberal
or secular establishment is determined to destroy their way of life. This has
been tragically apparent in the Middle East.
Very often modernising rulers have
embodied secularism at its very worst and have made it unpalatable to their
subjects. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the secular republic of Turkey in
1918, is often admired in the west as an enlightened Muslim leader, but for
many in the Middle East he epitomised the cruelty of secular nationalism. He
hated Islam, describing it as a “putrefied corpse”, and suppressed it in Turkey
by outlawing the Sufi orders and seizing their properties, closing down the madrasas
and appropriating their income. He also abolished the beloved institution of
the caliphate, which had long been a dead-letter politically but which
symbolised a link with the Prophet. For groups such as al-Qaida and Isis,
reversing this decision has become a paramount goal.
Ataturk also continued the policy of
ethnic cleansing that had been initiated by the last Ottoman sultans; in an
attempt to control the rising commercial classes, they systematically deported
the Armenian and Greek-speaking Christians, who comprised 90% of the
bourgeoisie. The Young Turks, who seized power in 1909, espoused the
antireligious positivism associated with August Comte and were also determined
to create a purely Turkic state. During the first world war, approximately one
million Armenians were slaughtered in the first genocide of the 20th century:
men and youths were killed where they stood, while women, children and the
elderly were driven into the desert where they were raped, shot, starved,
poisoned, suffocated or burned to death. Clearly inspired by the new scientific
racism, Mehmet Resid, known as the “execution governor”, regarded the Armenians
as “dangerous microbes” in “the bosom of the Fatherland”. Ataturk completed
this racial purge. For centuries Muslims and Christians had lived together on
both sides of the Aegean; Ataturk partitioned the region, deporting Greek
Christians living in what is now Turkey to Greece, while Turkish-speaking
Muslims in Greece were sent the other way.
The
fundamentalist reaction
Secularising rulers such as Ataturk
often wanted their countries to look modern, that is, European. In Iran
in 1928, Reza Shah Pahlavi issued the laws of uniformity of dress: his soldiers
tore off women’s veils with bayonets and ripped them to pieces in the street.
In 1935, the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a
peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in one of the holiest shrines of
Iran, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians. Policies like this made veiling,
which has no Qur’anic endorsement, an emblem of Islamic authenticity in many
parts of the Muslim world.
Following the example of the French,
Egyptian rulers secularised by disempowering and impoverishing the clergy.
Modernisation had begun in the Ottoman period under the governor Muhammad Ali,
who starved the Islamic clergy financially, taking away their tax-exempt
status, confiscating the religiously endowed properties that were their
principal source of income, and systematically robbing them of any shred of
power. When the reforming army officer Jamal Abdul Nasser came to power in
1952, he changed tack and turned the clergy into state officials. For
centuries, they had acted as a protective bulwark between the people and the
systemic violence of the state. Now Egyptians came to despise them as
government lackeys. This policy would ultimately backfire, because it deprived
the general population of learned guidance that was aware of the complexity of
the Islamic tradition. Self-appointed freelancers, whose knowledge of Islam was
limited, would step into the breach, often to disastrous effect.
Many regard the west’s devotion to
the separation of religion and politics as incompatible with democracy and
freedom
If some Muslims today fight shy of
secularism, it is not because they have been brainwashed by their faith but
because they have often experienced efforts at secularisation in a particularly
virulent form. Many regard the west’s devotion to the separation of religion
and politics as incompatible with admired western ideals such as democracy and
freedom. In 1992, a military coup in Algeria ousted a president who had
promised democratic reforms, and imprisoned the leaders of the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS), which seemed certain to gain a majority in the
forthcoming elections. Had the democratic process been thwarted in such an
unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been worldwide
outrage. But because an Islamic government had been blocked by the coup, there
was jubilation in some quarters of the western press – as if this undemocratic
action had instead made Algeria safe for democracy. In rather the same way,
there was an almost audible sigh of relief in the west when the Muslim
Brotherhood was ousted from power in Egypt last year. But there has been less
attention to the violence of the secular military dictatorship that has
replaced it, which has exceeded the abuses of the Mubarak regime.
After a bumpy beginning, secularism
has undoubtedly been valuable to the west, but we would be wrong to regard it
as a universal law. It emerged as a particular and unique feature of the
historical process in Europe; it was an evolutionary adaptation to a very
specific set of circumstances. In a different environment, modernity may well
take other forms. Many secular thinkers now regard “religion” as inherently
belligerent and intolerant, and an irrational, backward and violent “other” to
the peaceable and humane liberal state – an attitude with an unfortunate echo
of the colonialist view of indigenous peoples as hopelessly “primitive”, mired
in their benighted religious beliefs.
There are consequences to our failure to
understand that our secularism, and its understanding of the role of religion,
is exceptional. When secularisation has been applied by force, it has provoked a
fundamentalist reaction – and history shows that fundamentalist movements which
come under attack invariably grow even more extreme. The fruits of this error
are on display across the Middle East: when we look with horror upon the
travesty of Isis, we would be wise to acknowledge that its barbaric violence
may be, at least in part, the offspring of policies guided by our disdain.
• Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood:
Religion and the History of Violence is published today by Bodley Head.
My solution is pluralistic governance of course the requirement for that is every one feel secure about his belief and his way of life. I will present another paper on that, meanwhile, check this out. This is a warning to terrorist and education for those who bark blindly at religion.
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| CLICK ON THE RED POSTER TO VIEW IN FULL SIZE |
In a learning environment, good thoughts and concrete ideas
are developed with criticism and feedback; here is why this kind of response is
needed.
- Don't bark at the
religion for the acts of bad guys. Punishment is set for bad acts, to restore the trust in a given society. When a
Rapist is running around in a neighborhood, everyone is apprehensive, but when
the guy is caught and nailed, peace of mind is restored in the neighborhood. Instead
of catching the guy, if we blame his raising, his family, his religion, his
race or nation, and his imam, rabbi, pastor or pundit – we will not restore
peace. I intend to aggressively communicate this idea, the right idea, and
intend to speak at various law enforcement agencies as well as religious
institutions.
- The criminal ought to know that he will be punished; we will not allow the poor
alibi of religion, not at all. The Law enforcement and the media people also
need to get this in their heads, the purpose of investigations and chasing the
bad guys is to restore trust and not to aggravate by barking at a non-entity
like Religion. The more you bark at criminal’s religion, race or ethnicity, the worse it gets.
You cannot shoot, kill, hang, beat or bury the religion, then why bark at it?
- 72 Virgins are
promised. Both the terrorists and the communicators of the problem (Media and
Politicians) to the world at large have gotten it wrong. The poor guy needs to
be outraged at the recruiters that he was duped, and there are no 72 virgins
waiting for him, instead the SOB will rot in Jail if we Americans get him, or
killed mercilessly if he is caught by the opposite party. No Geneva conventions
will be observed by either the terrorist or his chasers. The Media needs to stop the BS of propagating
the falsity with nothing to back up in the Qur'an.
- Both the criminal and
the law enforcement (coupled with the media and politicians) must be aware that
it is the Sin, and not the sinner we are after. The clarity should prevent us
from being unjust. We should not be
abusive in disciplining or punishing the wrong doer. As a civil society, we
cannot become the very evil we want to eradicate.
- We should seek the
criminal to lead us to the source of recruiting material and the recruiters by
mitigating his punishment.
- The Challenge to
“read the right translation/interpretation” of Qur'an applies to both the
criminal and the law enforcement. I am certain, the criminal will become a
genuine repenter, and the law enforcement will not buy or propagate the dished
out non-sense in the market or bark irrelevantly.
This is the right
time to forge peace to the society in general, and
American society in particular by boldly and loudly getting people to get
the message, and i.e.,
I am being assertive,
never has any Muslim or other communicated this so clearly and it is time we do
that, thank God for the opportunities he has blessed us with to find
solutions. If I don't, no one will
speak, and I sincerely hope many of us to speak up, do it on your own or join
me.
It is time we separate the evil from good.
Bottom line is to free Islam and Muslims from the stupid stereotyping, and focus
on punishing the bad guys and restoring trust in the society.
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You
SOB, you are the damned murderer, you messed up the peace, and your ass will nailed big time.
Don’t give me the BS about your job, childhood,
parents, kids, siblings, spouse, imam, rabbi, pastor or the pundit. You did it and you'll pay for it.
I
am not stupid to buy in your argument that your religion made you do
that, and then bark at the religion endlessly. AH, you are the bad guy
and you are going to pay for it. I am here to restore justice in the
society and not be detracted and scream at your religion like a stupid
ass. I can hang you, shoot you, bury
you and beat you up to restore justice and trust in the society, and that is my goal
Note:
Mr. Terrorist, I don't condemn you, it is your sin I condemn. If you
claim to be a Muslim, just remember, those guys who recruited you, and
cheated you with false promises of Hoories and virgins in paradise were
dead wrong. There is no such thing nor is it mentioned in Qur'an,
instead you will rot in jail for life. Would you turn in your recruiters
for cheating you? Would you read the correct translations of Qur'an, we
might minimize your sentence?
This should be the attitude of Law enforcement
Authorized by Mike Ghouse, World Muslim Congress.
Thank
you
Mike Ghouse
(214)
325-1916
text/talk
www.WorldMuslimCongress.com
...............................................................................................................................
Mike Ghouse is a public speaker, thinker, writer and a commentator on
Pluralism at work place, politics, religion, society, gender, race, culture,
ethnicity, food and foreign policy. He is commentator on Fox News and syndicated
Talk Radio shows and a writer at major news papers including Dallas Morning News
and Huffington Post. All about him is listed in several links at www.MikeGhouse.net and his writings are at
www.TheGhousediary.com and 10 other
blogs. He is committed to building cohesive societies and offers pluralistic
solutions on issues of the day.
