by Wole Soyinka
We have to speak to religion! True, the issue is fanaticism, but this does not exonerate the mother—secular ideology or religious indoctrination—from the lapses of the child. We are obliged to recognize, indeed, to emphasize, the place of injustice, localized or global, as ready manure for the deadly shoots of fanaticism. However, the engines of global violence today are oiled from the deep wells of fanaticism, even though they may be cranked by the calculating hands of politicians or the power-hungry. These sometimes end up being run over by the juggernaut they have set in motion, but the lesson appears to be constantly lost on the next contenders for political domination. They believe that they have uncovered a secret that the erstwhile contender for power failed to grasp, and proceed to unleash a monster on an unprepared polity. It is time for all to recognize that there is no regulating mechanism for the fanatic mind. The sooner this is accepted, the earlier we can move to addressing the phenomenon of fanaticism in its own right. Not for nothing do the Yoruba warn that Sooner than have a monster child meet a shameful death in the marketplace, it is best that the mother strangle it in the secret recesses of the home. What this means, quite simply, is that the primary burden of exorcising the demon that escaped from the womb rests on the same womb that gave it life. Today, there is urgent need for Mother Religion, of whatever inclination, to come to the rescue of humanity with the benevolent act of infanticide.
It was not theocratic dictatorship but repressions of a secular order that evoked my sense of unease when, a full generation ago, I delivered a lecture entitled “Climates of Art,” to which I made reference at the beginning of this series. There is however a link, unsought, a sense of brutal continuity. That link is the attempted murder of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner, by the way, but what matters to us is that he was—and still is—a writer of his time and, most relevantly, place. Unlike a number of other creative minds trapped within the killing domains of the terminal censors, Mahfouz did survive. So, however, most lamentably, has the poised blade of fanaticism that has become even more proficient and inventive over its agency of execution: the time bomb, the suicide bomb, the sarin sachet, and even, possibly, that ominous pod, miniaturized, one that, almost on its own, bore full responsibility for the climate of fear of fifty years before—the atom bomb. Let Mahfouz serve us as a living symbol of that space of creative martyrdom that stretches from antiquity till now, from the communist world of the Soviet Union to Afghanistan of the Taliban through Iran, Ireland, and Yugoslavia to North Africa—Algeria most excruciatingly. The space of fanaticism aggressively expands into other nations of traditional tolerance and balance, including my own, Nigeria.
Once, the terminal censor flourished in the arena of ideological insecurity and/or the will to total mind domination, where the so-called crime of deviationism—that is, diversion from the strict party line—led, quite simply, to a Siberian wilderness or, straightforwardly, to death. Who can forget the notorious purges and show trials of the Stalinist era! Secular zealotry and intolerance appear to have lost steam since then, although we must be careful not to sing their demise too early. Still, it is largely the religious breed that remains to plague the world, a stubborn strain nestled in the vital organs of humanity from the earliest social orders—as the fate of Socrates eternally reminds us. Now that was one obsessed lover of dialogue, who reminds us that it is from the “dialectics of the mind” that truth is elicited and tested far more durably than from the monologue. The monologue, alas, continues to dominate the murderous swath blazed by succeeding religions—Christianity and Islam most notoriously. Deviationism—or heresy—is one shortcut to death.
My poem “Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known” was a tribute to Naguib Mahfouz, who was fated to expand into the religious those apprehensions of the secular to which I had given voice in “Climates of Art,” delivered some twenty-five years ago:
. . . the ink of Kandahar
Has turned to blood. The heir of ancient dynasties
Of letters—Khuorassan, Alexandria, Timbuktoo lies
sprawled
In the dirt and dust of a passageway.
He is no alien. No roots than his grow deeper
In that marketplace, no eye roved closer home.
He is that fixture in the marketplace café
Sipping sweetened cups of mint, oblivious of
The bitter one that would be served
By the shadowy one, the waiter-stalker, a youth
Fed on dreams of sarabands of houris
Doe-eyed virgins, wine and sweetmeats in the afterlife
But to his paradise, a key—the plunging knife.
The nineteenth-century black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once declared that the issue of the twentieth century would be that of race. It is becoming clear that while that century, the last, did indeed inherit—and still remains plagued almost continuously by—that social issue, race was replaced toward the end by religion, and it is something that has yet to be addressed with the same global concern as race once was. The issue of the twenty-first century is clearly that of religion, whose cynical manipulations contribute in no small measure to our current climate of fear. Perhaps the Khatami-UNESCO initiative to which I referred in an earlier lecture, a series of contacts titled Dialogue of Civilizations, will succeed in bringing the world to confront this lethal successor to the secular monologue whose fanatic fringe has been lately deprived of oxygen, and much of its breeding ground. In the wilds of Thailand or Cambodia, in a few isolated spots in South America, the mind of the fanatic secularist still operates, locked in a vision of Utopia that demands a disposable approach to “unenlightened” humanity. Pol Pot, however, is dead, gone the way of those other architects of the necropolis, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and mixed company of both left and right. Today, the main source of the fanatic mind is religion, and its temper—one that, ironically, is grounded in the doctrine of submission—has grown increasingly contemptuous of humanity, being characterized by arrogance, intolerance, and violence, almost as an unconscious vengeful recompense for its apprenticeship within the spiritual principle of submission.
At stake is tolerance, and the place of dissent in social interaction. We would do well, however, to note—for practical ends—the differences between the workings of secular intolerance and those of the theocratic order. Such differences may assist us in assessing the very real threat to human freedom that the closed world of fanaticism poses to humanity. Secular ideology derives its theories from history and the material world. The mind has therefore learned to pause occasionally and reflect on the processes that link the material world to doctrines that derive from or govern it, to review changes in such a world, test theories against old and new realities—be they economic, cultural, industrial, or even environmental. The dynamic totality of the real world is given rational space. Even the craving after comprehensiveness and infallibility—as in the case of Marxism—may result in the exposure of fallacies and inconsistencies or, at the least, ambiguous zones within the theory.
Thus, within a secular dispensation, even under the most rigid totalitarian order, its underpinning ideology— that is, the equivalent of theology—remains open to contestation. Open questioning may be suppressed, open debate may be restricted or prohibited by the state or the party of power, but the functioning of the mind, its capacity for critique—even self-criticism—never ceases. Self-criticism was of course an expression that was much abused under totalitarian orders—Stalinist Soviet Union, China during the Cultural Revolution, or Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Within those self-righteous regimes, self-criticism meant one thing and one thing only: recantation, and a routine incantation of loyal pledges—according to prescribed formulae—to the party line. Despite those perverted rituals, however, the mind remained a free agent within its own space, free to roam outside the confines of the totalitarian order, to seek, and often find, kindred spirits, and form a conspiracy of nonbelievers or, at least, skeptics. This factor leads
sooner or later to an alternative view, and perhaps to piecemeal erosion of the hermetic system.
Under the theocratic sibling, however, one that derives its authority not from theories that are elicited from the material conditions of society but from the secret spaces of revelation, this disposition of the mind toward alternative concepts or variants is next to impossible. Curiosity succumbs to fear, often masquerading as pious submission. The theocratic order derives its mandate from the unknown. Only a chosen few are privileged to have penetrated the workings of the mind of the unknown, whose constitution—known as the Scriptures—they and they alone can interpret. The fanatic that is born of this dogmatic structure of the ineffable, religion, is the most dangerous being on earth.
Again, it must be conceded that there are, naturally, numerous variants of the fanatic spore—as well as enabling environments. While psychologists and social scientists theorize over cause and effect, the Community is confronted with an immediate choice: either to submit or to protect itself. Poverty is a powerful recruiting agent for the army of the soul, we know that; so is political injustice—but society fools itself if it imagines that these are the only parameters for anticipating, preventing, or responding to a development where the totality of society is indicted to the undiscriminating extent that all are pronounced guilty who do not share this mind-set of the fanatic, or who dare propose a different worldview from that which motivates it. The philosophy that sustained Nazism was not a philosophy for the amelioration of the condition of the poor; on the contrary, it was a philosophy of elitism, a philosophy of the Chosen versus the Rest. And what we must seek is the common denominator that unites the opposite extremes of beliefs and ideologies but also breeds and nurtures the fanatic, intolerant mind. While we are engaged on that quest, we, the Rest, in whatever aspect of belief we are thus defined, must either lay our necks tamely on this versatile execution block or imaginatively pursue remedial action. This involves, certainly, eradicating those conditions that serve as ready recruitment agencies—poverty, political injustice, and other forms of social alienation—but, even more crucially, demonstrating in an equally determined, structured way our right, indeed our duty, to implement strategies of self-protection, making it abundantly clear that the other doctrine of the Chosen is intolerable to humanity. To do otherwise is to condone the doctrine that moves so arrogantly from I am right, you are wrong to its fatal manifestation as I am right; you are dead.
The world would of course be a simpler space to contend with if only religion kept within the domain of the spiritual. Historically, it never has. With the blindly submissive army of enforcers in its midst, ready to be unleashed on profane humanity, the religious is an order that remains incapable of remaining within a private zone that does not translate into power—as distinct from guidance—over others. There are a few exceptions to this in the world of religion, and we shall encounter one toward the end. The incursion of religion into the secular domain, appropriating the provinces of ethics, mores, and social conduct—and even the sciences—guarantees the clerical dominance of the total field of play. (What, in the name of all that is unholy, does a council of religious clerics in northern Nigeria know of modern medicine that it commands Muslims to resist inoculation against cerebrospinal meningitis— a scourge in that part of the nation that leaves hundreds of thousands of infants disabled for life—and claim its authority from the Koran!)
Submission, however, is the very foundation of faith. It is mostly within that theocratic order that we find those extreme offshoots that raise the stakes of those rhetorical devices, already touched upon, to the defining edge of existence. The provenance of faith is the soul and, by extension, the soul’s material housing, the body itself. In one easy step, the materialist declaration of All property is theft—a theme from one of our earlier lectures—is promoted to one of All life is theft. The secular ideologue might be largely content with brooking no dissent through the dictum I am right, you are wrong, but the ultimate ambition of the fanatic within the theocratic order is I am right; you are dead.
Homicidal hubris is the ultimate hallmark of the fanatic. The ice pick in the neck of Leon Trotsky, ensconced in the deceptive safety of Mexico, was forged in the same furnace as the knife that sought the throat of Naguib Mahfouz.
It is fortunate that we are sometimes able—thanks to modern communication—to identify the intrusion of political opportunism into the workings of religious zealotry, a common enough marriage of convenience that gives birth to monstrosities. And technology—the camera—assists in the close psychological study of mob arousal for religious reasons, such as led to the outrage in India that ended with Hindus razing to the ground an ancient mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh because this centuries-old mosque had been built on the very spot where Rama, a Hindu deity, first made his appearance on earth. The reverberations of that act have continued to haunt the Indian nation till today, but the immediate repercussions were orgies of killings, including the ambush of railway trains and commuter buses, the virtual “religious cleansing” of rival, but especially Muslim, neighborhoods, creating ghost villages and derelict urban sectors.
And here, let us pause, and use this episode to anticipate and silence those who, whenever an outrage that is linked to one religion or another attracts amply deserved rebuke and condemnation, immediately raise alarms of prejudice, sectarian hatred, and world conspiracies, tacitly claiming for such structures of faith an immunity from commentary. The world, East and West, including its official organs UNO and UNESCO, was unambiguous in its condemnation of that crime, even as it would later unite in condemnation of the iconoclasm of the Taliban against the historic statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. That former rebuke did not lead to any claims by Hindus that the world nursed a primordial hatred against Hinduism or had entered into a conspiracy to eradicate that religion from the world. What was factually indisputable was more than sufficient: an outrage had been committed, and that outrage deserved to be addressed in its own right, albeit without totally ignoring its antecedents and context.
Similarly, in my part of the world, Nigeria, time and time again, waves of fundamentalist violence have been unleashed on a prostrate populace, resulting in the deaths, often in the most gruesome manner, of hundreds of innocents—men, women, children, without discrimination. The majority of those who have commented— except of course the violators themselves—have been unambiguous in their condemnation of such barbarities committed in the name of religion. They have done so without damning the religion itself, or belittling its precepts. The world cannot, I am certain, have forgotten the massacre that resulted from the attempt to hold a beauty pageant in the capital city of Abuja. The culprits have always earned the names fanatics, criminals, fundamentalists, and zealots. I believe it should be possible to attribute the massacre of innocents anywhere in the world in the same way, thus placing the responsibility for a corrective response on the shoulders of believers and nonbelievers alike.
On a personal level, I found myself sufficiently exercised to note the Uttar Pradesh event in my poetic calendar of “Twelve Canticles for the Zealot,” published in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known:
A god is nowhere born, yet everywhere
But Rama’s sect rejects that fine distinction—
The designated spot is sanctified, not for piety but
For dissolution of yours from mine, politics of hate
And forced exchange—peace for a moment’s rapture.
They turn a mosque to rubble, stone by stone,
Condemned usurper of Lord Rama’s vanished spot
Of dreamt epiphany. Now a cairn of stones
Usurps a dream of peace—can they dream peace
In iconoclast Uttar Pradesh?
Few spots in the world today are exempt from the depredations of the fanatic. I believe it should be possible to view the bombing of innocents in the United States, Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, or anywhere else in the same way. It is untenable to claim that, because
those mass killers themselves implicated, and persist in invoking, the banner of Islam, seeking legitimization and a killing rapture from that religion, Islam is therefore under indictment. Equally unacceptable is to claim that any condemnation of the act or pursuit of the criminals reveals a hatred of the religion. A world in which a powerful European—and mostly Christian—organization, NATO, goes to battle against the Christian Serbs on behalf of a battered Muslim population, and brings the head of their violators to justice before an international tribunal, is not a world that is prejudiced against either Islam or Christendom, and the propagators of such doctrines are being not merely disingenuous, but dangerous.
In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic is one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies, and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime, and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination—the zone of unquestioning certitude—sped by a common impetus that licenses each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one who creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.
The stillborn dogmatism of I am right, you are wrong has circled back since the contest of ideologies and once again attained its apotheosis of I am right; you are dead. The monologue of unilateralism constantly aspires to the mantle of the Chosen and, of course, further dichotomizes the world, inviting us, on pain of consequences, to choose between “them” and “us.” We must, in other words, reject the conditions George Bush delivered so explicitly in that ultimatum You are either with us and against the terrorists, or you are on the side of the terrorists, and in We do not require the world’s approval since we are divinely guided, just as strongly as we repudiate Osama bin Laden’s The world is now clearly divided into two—the world of the followers of Islam against that of infidels and unbelievers. What does this mean for those billions of the world who are determinedly unbelievers? What does it mean for the world of Hindus, Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, the followers of Orisa, and a hundred other faiths that are routinely marginalized in the division of the world between two blood-stained behemoths of faith—the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian?