THE HARDLY, BARELY PRAYABLE

Reading Thomas Friedman’s excellent New York Times columns from Dubai recently, I was struck by his point that for the first time, the countries of the Middle East can no longer simply blame the problems on “the West” but are, or will be, forced to recognise that ISIS, or Daech, is a homegrown monster that calls into question everyone’s understanding of what and who they are and intend to be. And seeing the degeneration of Sunni-Shia relations in the area, I’m reminded of, say, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 and the fact that, 400 years after that, my mother still refused to buy meat from our town’s Catholic butcher. We Christians have been there, done that. Yes, torn the other guys limb from limb, cut their throats, decapitated them, drowned them in barrels, the lot. It makes one think about how we got out of that. I suspect it involved three or four successive and in part cumulative factors.

First, strong monarchies and symbolic power. When I first visited Versailles, I found it excessive and vulgar. Only later did I realise the gigantic and brilliant public-relations exercise it had been. Louis XIV accomplished, with Versailles, the astonishing feat of convincing provincial seigneurs, who had real power in the form of private armies, that the number of feet they were allowed to stand from the King’s bed at his morning levée – in other words, symbolic power – was more important to their well-being than being lords of Lorraine.  That began the drain away from murderous mobs run by ambitious warlords.

Second, the Enlightenment. That curious and formless movement toward knowledge in harness with civilised behaviour, that second Renaissance that briefly celebrated balance and harmony and went on to apply thought to emotion, modified faith by making it unreasonable to maim and kill for its sake. In the time, and the world, of Diderot and Voltaire, faith was increasingly what one lived in one’s private relation to God; the Church was where those of faith came together, but society as a whole was supposed to be directed by reasonable and civilised behaviour. This, of course, had a few serious birth-pains involving guillotines and terror, but in the end it proved irresistible because, like democracy, it was the worst conceivable system except for all the alternatives.

Third, the Industrial Revolution. This almost-unimaginable J-curve of social and material change, which is still going on, although for many it intensified their faith (think of the Oxford Movement), made the habits of the Enlightenment – faith as something you might propagate but you did not maim or kill for – not only attractive but essential. It also continued another aspect of the Enlightenment: atheism, the failure of faith when touched by reason, grew apace and from then on faith could no longer ignore it.

So, now. What about now? In large swathes of the world, Christian faith is being threatened by real, physical enemies who still consider faith something worth maiming and killing for. How do we, and should we, react? On a worldly level, Friedman, I think, is right: containment to stop the horror spreading, and amplification to help good developments where they are starting to happen. But what do we do as Christians? Well, in many churches there is an admirable movement to help fellow-believers in that part of the world. But beyond that? Yesterday at a dinner party I heard some devout people’s reaction: No truck with Islam in any form, it’s an evil masquerading as a religion, maybe it was decent once but that was centuries ago, etcetera etcetera.

It made me reflect that in the various churches I have worshipped in since 2001, not once have I heard prayers for those we feel, and often know, to be our enemies. I have heard prayers for the Queen; I have heard prayers for various Presidents and their governments; I have heard many prayers for persecuted Christians everywhere; but I have not heard prayers for the members of ISIS; I have not heard prayers for Vladimir Putin; I have not heard prayers for Boko Haram. Let us ponder this very seriously. And reread Matthew 5:43-48, in the full knowledge that for those in the field that is almost impossibly difficult, but that for us, for us in safety and in prayer, it is probably crucial.

THE NEED TO SEE CLEARLY

In an interview with the French daily Le Figaro, the Tunisian philosopher Mezri Haddad corrected his French colleague Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had said that "Jihadism" was a new form of fascism. I found his correction both intriguing and moving, because we often think that not enough Muslims are speaking out against what we now call jihadism, and what Haddad urges us to rethink as something both broader and deeper, and even more dangerous. 

I decided to publish this here in part because Christianity has gone through the same traumatic development in past ages -- think French Wars of Religion, think Calvin's Geneva, think English Civil War -- and because Christianity is occasionally tempted, in the face of what seems like galloping indifference, to call into question its 200-300-year-old pact with the Enlightenment. 

Here, Haddad addresses Lévy:

No, Sir, it is Islamism itself that is by definition, by its nature, by axiology and by etiology a neo-fascist ideology. It is the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928) that is the mother-cell of jihadism, Khomeinism, Talibanism, Al-Qaida, Hamas, Boko Haram, Ansar-al-Sharia, the AKP, Ennahda, ISF . . . If those terminological metastases, those excrescences and ramifications becloud analysis and trouble Western rationality, they do not prevent the Muslim philosopher from seeing what unites them all and which constitutes their common foundation, i.e. the indissociability of the temporal and the spiritual, of the sacred and the profane, of the religious and the political. The difference between an Erdogan or a Ghannouchi on the one hand and a Ben Laden or Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, on the other, therefore, is not a difference of nature but of strategy or more precisely of tactics. In this respect, the Machiavellian difference based on the readjustment of means relative to ends should enlighten us more: in Islamist doctrine, Islam is a religious means in the service of a political goal: power, total power, nothing but power. 

A necrosis of Islamic civilisation, an alteration of the Muslim religion, Islamism is a neo-fascist, theocratic and totalitarian ideology.  It is not the incarnation of Islam but its incarceration. It is a “secular religion”, as Raymond Aron termed Nazism and Communism. And there [Levy] is perfectly correct when he says that “Fascislamism” is the final form of modern totalitarianism to be fought, because it constitutes a danger not only for the Muslim world but also for the Western world. In a recent address to the diplomatic corps in Saudi Arabia, King Abdallah – who knows whereof he speaks! – declared, “If they do not react, Europe and the USA will have jihadists in their own countries within a month”!

And this combat is one of philosophy against sophism, of autonomy against heteronomy, of alterity against identity, of knowledge against ignorance, of hermeneutics against exegetic fundamentalism, of truth against lies, of reason against passion, of pedagogy against demagogy, of the Enlightenment against obscurantism, of secularisation against clericalism, of liberty against totalitarianism.

IMAGINE

If parson lost his senses,

And people came to theirs . . .

Thus began, in the early 20^th century, a moving poem by Ralph Hodgson in defence of mistreated animals. The opening played through my head in reading the news about the Middle East and new anti-terrorist defences. ‘If leaders lost their senses, And people came to theirs . . .’ I thought, what might happen? What might we construct? And in a John Lennon mood, I began to Imagine.

Imagine three great monotheist religions, living in mutual respect and affection. Imagine Muslims and Christians according Judaism the respect due to the Eldest Brother, the one who was first chosen by God, the one who received the Law, the one who, with the self-confidence of his seniority, is still the only one who dares argue with God. Imagine Jews and Muslims according to Christianity the affection due to the Second Brother, the one who dared go further than the Nation and the Law, to extend God’s love to all humanity and summarize the Law as absolute Love. Imagine Jews and Christians according to Islam the respect and affection due to the Youngest Brother, the one who lives a faith summed up in Obedience, who keeps his Ramadan and, with the fire of youth, dares to believe in unadulterated values.

Imagine the nations of a vast region on the planet, recognizing that they all contain these three faiths and their respective grandeurs, and that nevertheless they all have to live in a modern world where many could not care less about religion. The vast reserve of faith they contain acts as a leaven, of respect and affection toward neighbours, and of a consciousness that there is a vertical dimension to life as well as a horizontal one. The respect and affection will furnish one of their peoples’ permanent needs, security. Meanwhile, the vast reserve of ingenuity and honesty released by this peaceful coexistence turns bomb-inventors’ talent to creating clever irrigation schemes to make the desert flower, and sees small-scale financing help the poor into trades both decent and profitable. The peoples’ other great need, modest prosperity, becomes attainable also. The three religions’ values, which tie in quite well with the secular ones of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, are now, combined, so powerful that beyond the borders of the Middle East they restrain the inordinate greed of stock trading and the corrosive political hatred that paralyzes polarized democracies. Bills for the common good get passed, elections take on the cheerful variety of football championships, prayer is no longer seen as a divisive group label but as an act of primary value, all faiths can wear their distinctive attributes openly and be respected for them, and boarding an aeroplane becomes as simple and agreeable as it was sixty years ago.

Imagine – since Christianity is the faith this blog is most concerned with – a Church that is one house with many mansions, that has healed its great schisms, between East and West, between Catholic and Protestant, and that attracts the intelligent young to serve in it. It would have many churches, and many different forms of worship to suit the various temperaments of the faithful. There would be cheerful family churches with guitars, and tall, still churches of awe and Latin beauty; churches that know the Bible by heart and churches that distil the finest points of liturgical symbolism; churches that live in permanent prayer and churches that help and defend the disadvantaged in their daily lives; churches that study the history of the faith and churches that find joy in daily conversation with synagogues and mosques, comparing ways of loving God.

None of this, says the Father we all worship, is impossible.

The image above is take from an article on the House of One, a joint place of worship for the three faiths being built in Berlin.