Fields of Blood (75 page)

It is simply not true that “religion” is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE,
Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, “
nonviolence.” The medieval
Peace and Truce of God forced
knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that
Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been
rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. The Buddhist
sangha had no political power, but it became a vibrant presence in ancient India and even influenced emperors.
Ashoka published the ideals of ahimsa, tolerance, kindness, and respect in the extraordinary inscriptions he published throughout the empire. Confucians kept the ideal of humanity (
ren
) alive in the government of imperial
China until the revolution. For centuries, the egalitarian code of the
Shariah was a countercultural challenge to the
Abbasid
aristocracy; the caliphs acknowledged that it was God’s law, even though they could not rule by it.

Other sages and mystics developed spiritual practices to help people control their aggression and develop a reverence for all human beings. In India,
renouncers practiced the disciplines of yoga and ahimsa to eradicate egotistic machismo. Others cultivated the ideals of anatta (“no self”) and kenosis (“self-emptying”) to control the “me first” impulses that so often lead to violence; they sought an “equanimity” that would make it impossible for one to see oneself as superior to anybody else, taught that every single person has sacred potential, and asserted that people should even love their enemies. Prophets and psalmists insisted that a city could not be “holy” if the ruling class did not care for the poor and dispossessed. Priests urged their compatriots to draw on the memory of their own past suffering to assuage the pain of others, instead of using it to justify harassment and persecution. They all insisted in one way or another that if people did not treat all others as they would wish to be treated themselves and develop a “concern for everybody,” society was doomed. If the colonial powers had observed the
Golden Rule in their colonies, we would not be having so many political problems today.

One of the most ubiquitous religious practices was the cult of community. In the premodern world, religion was a communal rather than a private pursuit. People achieved enlightenment and salvation by learning to live harmoniously together. Instead of distancing themselves from their fellow humans as the warriors did, sages, prophets, and mystics helped people cultivate a relationship with and responsibility for those they would not ordinarily find congenial. They devised meditations that deliberately extended their benevolence to the ends of the earth; wished all beings happiness; taught their compatriots to revere the holiness of every single person; and resolved to find practical ways of assuaging the
world’s suffering. Neuroscientists have discovered that Buddhist monks who have practiced this compassionate meditation assiduously have physically enhanced those centers of the brain that spark our
empathy.
Jains cultivated an outstanding vision of the community of all creatures. Muslims achieved the surrender of
islam
by taking responsibility for one another and sharing what they had with those in need. In Paul’s churches, rich and poor were instructed to sit at the same table and eat the same food. Cluniac monks made lay Christians live together like monks during a pilgrimage, rich and poor sharing the same hardships. The
Eucharist was not a solitary communion with Christ but a rite that bonded the political community.

From a very early date, prophets and poets helped people to contemplate the tragedy of life and face up to the damage they did to others. In ancient
Sumeria the
Atrahasis
could not find a solution to the social injustice on which their civilization depended, but this popular tale made people aware of it.
Gilgamesh had to come face-to-face with the horror of death, which drained warfare of spurious glamour and nobility. The Prophets of
Israel compelled rulers to take responsibility for the suffering they inflicted on the poor and lambasted them for their war crimes. The Priestly authors of the
Hebrew Bible lived in a violent society and could not abjure warfare but believed that warriors were contaminated by their violence, even if the campaign had been endorsed by God. That was why David was not allowed to build
Yahweh’s temple. The
Aryans loved warfare and revered their warriors; fighting and raiding were essential to the
pastoral economy; but the warrior always carried a taint. Chinese strategists admitted that the military way of life was a “way of deception” and must be segregated from civilian life. They drew attention to the uncomfortable fact that even an idealistic state nurtured at its heart an institution dedicated to killing, lying, and treachery.

In the West
secularism is now a part of our identity. It has been beneficial—not least because an intimate association with government can badly compromise a faith tradition. But it has had its own violence. Revolutionary France was secularized by coercion, extortion, and bloodshed; for the first time it mobilized the whole of society for war; and its secularism seemed propelled by an aggression toward religion that is still shared by many Europeans today. The
United States did not stigmatize faith in the same way, and religion has flourished there. There was an aggression in early modern thought, which failed to apply the concept
of human rights to the indigenous peoples of the Americas or to
African slaves. In the developing world secularization has been experienced as lethal, hostile, and invasive. There have been massacres in sacred shrines; clerics have been tortured, imprisoned, and assassinated; madrassa students shot down and humiliated; and the clerical establishment systematically deprived of resources, dignity, and status.

Hence secularization has sometimes damaged religion. Even in the relatively benign atmosphere of the
United States, Protestant
fundamentalists became
xenophobic and fearful of
modernity. The horrors of Nasser’s prison polarized the vision of
Sayyid Qutb; his former liberalism was transformed into a paranoid vision that saw enemies everywhere.
Khomeini too frequently spoke of conspiracies of
Jews, Christians, and imperialists. The
Deobandis, bruised by the British abolition of the
Moghul Empire, created a rigid, rule-bound form of Islam and gave us the
Taliban travesty, a noxious combination of Deobandi rigidity, tribal chauvinism, and the aggression of the traumatized war orphan. In the
Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, the alien ideology of
nationalism transformed
traditional religious symbols and myths and gave them a violent dimension. But the relationship between modernity and religion has not been wholly antagonistic. Some movements, such as the two
Great Awakenings and the
Muslim Brotherhood, have actually helped people to embrace modern ideals and institutions in a more familiar idiom.

Modern religious violence is not an alien growth but is part of the modern scene. We have created an interconnected world. It is true that we are dangerously polarized, but we are also linked together more closely than ever before. When shares fall in one region, markets plummet all around the globe. What happens in
Palestine or
Iraq today can have repercussions tomorrow in
New York,
London, or
Madrid. We are connected electronically so that images of suffering and devastation in a remote
Syrian village or an Iraqi prison are instantly beamed around the world. We all face the possibility of environmental or nuclear catastrophe. But our perceptions have not caught up with the realities of our situation, so that in the First World we still tend to put ourselves in a special privileged category. Our policies have helped to create widespread rage and frustration, and in the West we bear some responsibility for the suffering in the Muslim world that
Bin Laden was able to exploit. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” The answer must surely be yes.

War, it has been said, is caused “by our inability to see relationships.
Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. Our relationship with our fellow-men. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
⁴
We need ideologies today, religious or secular, that help people to face up to the intractable dilemmas of our current “economic and historical situation” as the prophets did in the past. Even though we no longer have to contend with the oppressive injustice of the agrarian empire, there is still massive inequality and an unfair imbalance of power. But the dispossessed are no longer helpless peasants; they have found ways of fighting back. If we want a viable world, we have to take responsibility for the pain of others and learn to listen to narratives that challenge our sense of ourselves. All this requires the “surrender,” selflessness, and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades and
jihads.

We all wrestle—in secular or religious ways—with “nothingness,” the void at the heart of modern culture. Ever since
Zoroaster, religious movements that tried to address the violence of their time have absorbed some of its aggression. Protestant
fundamentalism came into being in the
United States when evangelical Christians pondered the unprecedented slaughter of the
First World War. Their apocalyptic vision was simply a religious version of the secular “future war” genre that had developed in Europe. Religious fundamentalists and extremists have used the language of faith to express fears that also afflict secularists. We have seen that some of the cruelest and most self-destructive of these movements have been in part a response to the
Holocaust or the nuclear threat. Groups such as
Shukri Mustafa’s
Society in Sadat’s
Egypt can hold up a distorted mirror image of the structural violence of contemporary culture. Secularists as well as religious people have resorted to the suicide attack, which in some ways reflects the death wish in modern culture. Religious and secularists have shared the same enthusiasms. Kookism was clearly a religious form of secular
nationalism and was able to work closely with the
Israeli secular right. The Muslims who flocked to join the jihad against the
Soviet Union were certainly reviving the classical Islamic practice of “volunteering,” but they also experienced the impulse that prompted hundreds of Europeans to leave the safety of home and fight in the
Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and
Jews to hasten from the diaspora to support Israel on the eve of the
Six-Day War.

When we confront the violence of our time, it is natural to harden our hearts to the global pain and deprivation that makes us feel uncomfortable,
depressed, and frustrated. Yet we must find ways of contemplating these distressing facts of modern life, or we will lose the best part of our humanity. Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and “equanimity” for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current predicament of the world. There is no state, however idealistic and however great its achievements, that has not incurred the taint of the warrior. It is a stain on the international community that
Mamana Bibi’s son can say: “Quite simply, nobody seems to care.” The scapegoat ritual was an attempt to sever the community’s relationship with its misdeeds; it cannot be a solution for us today.

This book is dedicated to Jane Garrett, my friend as well as my editor at Knopf for twenty years. From the very beginning, your encouragement and enthusiasm gave me the strength to persevere with the daily jihad of writing; it was a privilege and a joy to work with you.

I am also blessed with my editors George Andreou and Jorg Hensgen, whose stringent, meticulous work on the manuscript helped me to push the book into another dimension, for which I am sincerely grateful. My thanks also to all the people who have worked on the book with such skill and expertise—at The Bodley Head: Stuart Williams (editor), Beth Humphries (copy editor), Joe Pickering (publicist), James Jones (jacket designer), Mary Chamberlain (proofreader), and Katherine Ailes (assistant editor); at Knopf: Roméo Enriquez (production manager), Ellen Feldman (production editor), Kim Thornton (publicist), Oliver Munday (jacket designer), Cassandra Pappas (text designer), Janet Biehl (copy editor), and Terezia Cicelova (editorial assistant); and at Knopf Canada: Louise Dennys (editor) and Sheila Kaye (publicist). Many of you I have never met, but be assured I appreciate all you do for me.

As always, I must thank my agents Felicity Bryan, Peter Ginsberg, and Andrew Nurnberg for their tireless support, loyalty, and, above all, their continued faith in me; this time, I really could not have managed without you. Thanks too to Michele Topham, Jackie Head, and Carole Robinson in Felicity Bryan’s office for helping me so cheerfully through the day-to-day crises of a writer’s life, from bookkeeping to computer meltdowns. And my sincere gratitude to Nancy Roberts, my assistant, for dealing so patiently with my correspondence and for her adamantine firmness in ensuring that I have time and space to write.

A big thank-you to Sally Cockburn, whose paintings helped me to understand what my book was, in part, about. And, finally, thanks to Eve, Gary, Stacey, and Amy Mott, and Michelle Stevenson at My Ideal Dog, for looking after Poppy so devotedly during her last years and enabling me to do my work. This book is also in loving memory of Gary, who always saw to the heart of things and would, I think, have approved its contents.

1.
Leviticus 16:21–22. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical quotations—in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—are from
The Jerusalem Bible
(London, 1966).