Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  But as we have seen, the same texts and spiritual practices can lead to entirely different courses of actions. Others opposed this interpretation of the Gita. The Hindu scholar Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) argued that Krishna’s validation of violence in the Gita was simply an acknowledgment of life’s grim reality. Yes, it would be nice to remain peacefully above the fray, but until Gandhi’s “soul force” actually became an effective reality in the world, the natural aggression inherent in both men and nations “tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes as we see it doing today.” Gandhi might discover that he had caused as much destruction of life by abjuring violence as those who had resorted to fighting.8 Aurobindo was voicing the view of Gandhi’s critics, who thought that he closed his eyes to the fact that the British response to his nonviolent campaigns actually resulted in hideous bloodshed. But Aurobindo was also articulating the eternal dilemma of Ashoka: Is nonviolence feasible in the inescapably violent world of politics?

  Nevertheless, Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military ruthlessness of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it:

  Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.9

  Without reverence for the sanctity of every single human being and the “equanimity” long seen in India as the pinnacle of the spiritual quest, “politics bereft of religion,” Gandhi believed, were a “death-trap because they kill the soul.”10 Secular nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”11 Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to Pakistan.

  As they forged their national identities in the peculiarly tense conditions of India, Muslims and Hindus would both fall prey to the besetting sin of secular nationalism: its inability to tolerate minorities. And because their outlook was still permeated by spirituality, this nationalist bias distorted their traditional religious vision. As violence between Muslims and Hindus escalated during the 1920s, the Arya Samaj became more militant.12 At a conference in 1927, it formed a military cadre, the Arya Vir Dal (“Troop of Aryan Horses”). It declared that the new Aryan hero must develop the virtues of the Kshatriya—courage, physical strength, and, especially, proficiency in the use of weapons. His principal duty was to defend the rights of the Aryan nation against the Muslims and the British.13 The Arya was anxious not to be outdone by the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (“National Volunteer Association”), usually referred to as RSS, founded in central India three years earlier by Keshav B. Hedgewar. Where the Arya had adapted the British idea of “religion” to “Hinduism,” RSS had fused traditional religious ideals with Western nationalism. It was primarily a character-building organization designed to develop an ethos of service, based on loyalty, discipline, and a respect for the Hindu heritage, and it appealed particularly to the urban middle classes. Its hero was the seventeenth-century warrior Shivaji who, empowered by his fidelity to traditional Hindu ritual as well as his organizational skills, had led a successful revolt against the Moghuls. He had managed to weld recruits from disparate peasant castes into a unified army, and RSS vowed to do the same in British India.14

  Thus a new religiosity was coming to birth in India, one that cultivated Hindu strength not by evoking ahimsa but by developing the traditional warrior ethos. Yet this combination of the Kshatriya ideal with secular nationalism was dangerous. For RSS, Mother India was not simply a territorial entity but a living goddess. She had always been revered as a holy land, and her seas, rivers, and mountains were sacred, but for centuries she had been desecrated by foreigners and would shortly be raped by partition. Traditionally, the Mother Goddess had embraced everyone, but with its new nationalist intolerance of minorities, RSS insisted that she could no longer admit Muslims or East Asian Buddhists.

  Hedgewar was an activist rather than an intellectual, his thinking deeply influenced by V. D. Savarkar, a brilliant radical imprisoned by the British whose classic Hindutva (“Hinduness”) had been smuggled out of prison and published in 1923. It defined the Hindu as a person who acknowledged the integrity of Greater India (which stretched from the Himalayas to Iran and Singapore) and revered her not only as Motherland, as other nationalists did, but also as Holy Land.15 This fusion of religion and secular nationalism was potentially toxic. In Savarkar’s books, the emerging Hindu national identity depended upon the exclusion of Islam: the whole complex history of India was presented as a struggle to the death with Muslim imperialism. Even though Hindus had always been the majority population, they had been conditioned by centuries of imperial domination to see themselves as an embattled, endangered minority.16 Like so many subject peoples, they had developed a history of injury and humiliation, which can corrode a religious tradition and incline it toward violence. Some experienced their long oppression as a national disgrace. During the 1930s M. S. Golwalkar, the second leader of the RSS, felt an affinity with the ideals of National Socialism, in part the product of Germany’s humiliation by the Allies after the First World War. Foreigners in India had only two options, Golwalkar argued: “The foreign races must lose their separate existence … or [they] may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.” Golwalkar praised the Germans for “purging the country of the Semitic Races”; India, he believed, had much to learn from this Aryan “Race pride.”17

  The horror of partition could only inflame the history of grievance that was so dangerously poisoning relations between Muslims and Hindus. As the psychologist Sudhir Kakar has explained, for decades hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Muslim children have listened to tales of the violence of that time, which “dwell on the fierceness of the implacable enemy. This is a primary channel through which historical enmity is transmitted from one generation or the next.” It also created a rift between secularist and religious Hindus.18 Secularists convinced themselves that this violence could never happen again. Many blamed the British for the tragedy; others regarded it merely as a terrifying aberration. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, believed that the industrialization of the country and the spread of scientific rationalism and democracy would counter these communal passions.

  But there was a disturbing portent of future trouble. In 1949 an image of Ram, incarnation of Vishnu and chief exemplar of Hindu virtue, was discovered in a building at the site of his mythological birthplace in Ayodhya on the eastern Gangetic plain. This was also the site of a mosque said to have been established by Babur, the first Moghul emperor, in 1528.19 Devout Hindus claimed that Ram’s image had been placed there by God; Muslims, naturally, denied this. There were violent clashes, and the district magistrate, a member of RSS, refused to remove the image. Because their images require regular worship, Hindus were henceforth permitted to enter the building for devotional chanting on the anniversary of the miraculous arrival of Ram’s statue. Forty years later this sacred geography would trump the s
cientific rationalism so confidently predicted by the secularists.

  The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), was an unabashed secularist who simply wanted to create a state in which Muslims would not be defined or limited by their religious affiliation. In fact, the nation was defined by Islam before it had even begun. This inevitably raised certain expectations, and from the beginning, while the government was still resolutely secularist, there was pressure to resacralize political life. The Deobandis became particularly powerful in Pakistan. They endorsed the modern system of territorial nationalism and secular democracy and offered free education to the poor in their madrassas at a time when the state school system was collapsing due to lack of funding. Their students would be isolated from mainstream secular life and schooled in the Deobandis’ peculiarly rigid and intolerant form of Islam. To protect their Islamic lifestyle, the Deobandis also founded a political party, the JUI (Association of Ulema of Islam). By the late 1960s, having accumulated tens of thousands of students and alumni, they were in an excellent position to pressure the government to Islamize civil law and the banking system, thereby creating jobs for their ultrareligious graduates.

  Quite different was the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had been founded in India in 1941 to oppose the creation of a separate secular state. Jamaat had no madrassa base and did not cling to the past, as the Deobandis did, but developed an Islamic ideology influenced by the modern ideals of liberty and independence. Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), its founder, argued that because God alone ruled human affairs, nothing else—“be it a human being, a family, a class, or a group of people, or even the human race as a whole”—could claim sovereignty.20 Therefore nobody was obliged to obey any mortal authority. Each generation had to fight the jahiliyyah of its day, as the Prophet had done, since jahili violence, greed, and Godlessness were an ever-present danger. Western secularism epitomized the modern jahiliyyah because it amounted to a rebellion against God’s rule.21 Islam, Maududi insisted, was not a Western-style “religion,” separate from politics; here he was in full agreement with Gandhi. Rather, Islam was a din, a whole way of life that had to include economic, social, and political as well as ritualized activities:22

  The use of the word [din] categorically refutes the views of those who believe a prophet’s message is principally aimed at ensuring worship of the one God, adherence to a set of beliefs, and observance of a few rituals. This also refutes the views of those who think that din has nothing to do with cultural, political, economic, legal, judicial, and other matters pertaining to this world.23

  Muslims had been charged to reject the structural violence of the jahili state and to implement economic justice, social harmony, and political equality in public as well as private life, all based on a profound awareness of God (taqwah).

  Before partition, Jamaat had concentrated on training its members to reform their own lives in the Greater Jihad; only by living an authentically Quranic life could they hope to inspire the people with a longing for Islamic government. But after partition, the movement split. Of its 625 members, 240 remained in India. Since only 11 percent of the population of India was Muslim, Indian Jamaat could not hope to create an Islamic state; instead, its members acquired a qualified appreciation of the moderate (as opposed to atheistic) secularism of the new state of India that forbade discrimination on the basis of religious belief. This, they declared, was a “blessing” and a “guarantee for a safe future for Islam in India.”24 But in Pakistan, where there was a possibility of an Islamic state, Maududi and his 385 Jamaat disciples felt no such constraints. They became the most organized Pakistani political party, gained the support of the educated urban classes, and campaigned vigorously against the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (r. 1958–69), who confiscated all clerical property, and the socialist regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (r. 1970–77), who used Islamic symbols and slogans to win popular support but in reality had nothing but contempt for religion.

  Maududi, therefore, was still committed to the struggle (jihad) against jahili secularism, but he always interpreted jihad broadly in the traditional manner so that it did not simply mean “holy war”; one could “strive” to achieve God’s sovereignty by peaceful political activities, such as writing books or working in education.25 It is a mistake, therefore, to brand Pakistani Jamaat as fanatically intent on violence; the fact that the party went in two such different directions after partition shows that it had the flexibility to adapt to circumstances. Maududi would have nothing to do with revolutionary coups, assassinations, or policies that stirred up hatred and conflict, insisting that an Islamic state could put down firm roots only if ends and means were “clean and commendable.”26 The transition from a secular nation-state to a truly Islamic society must, he would always maintain, be “natural, evolutionary and peaceful.”27

  But in Pakistan physical force had become one of the chief ways of doing politics.28 Leaders regularly came to power in military coups, and in their ruthless suppression of political opposition, neither Khan nor Bhutto could be seen as examples of benign, peaceable secularism. So prevalent was armed conflict in Pakistani society that a group that abjured it had little hope of success. In an effort to gain popular support for Jamaat, Maududi agreed to lead a campaign against the so-called heretical Ahmadi sect in 1953 and wrote an inflammatory pamphlet, which sparked riots and put him in prison.29 This, however, was an aberration. Maududi continued to denounce the violence of Pakistani politics and condemned the aggressive activities of Jamaat’s affiliate IJT (Islami Jamiat-i-Taliban), the Society of Islamic Students, which organized strikes and demonstrations against Bhutto, paralyzed the communication systems, disrupted urban commerce and educational establishments, and led militant confrontations with the police. While other members of Jamaat succumbed to Pakistan’s endemic violence, Maududi remained committed to achieving an Islamic state democratically. He repeatedly insisted that an Islamic state could not be a theocracy, because no group or individual had the right to rule in God’s name. An Islamic government must be elected by the people for a fixed term; there must be universal adult franchise, regular elections, a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, and guaranteed human rights and civil liberties—a system not very different from the parliamentary democracy of Westminster.30

  When Zia al-Haqq seized power in a coup in 1977, established a dictatorship, and announced that Pakistan would follow Shariah law, he drew heavily on Maududi’s writings in his speeches. He also brought several senior Jamaat officials into his cabinet and employed thousands of Jamaat activists in the civil service, education, and the army. Shariah courts were established, and traditional Islamic penalties for alcohol, theft, prostitution, and adultery were introduced. By this time, Maududi was in failing health, and the current Jamaat leaders supported Zia’s military regime, regarding it as a promising beginning. But Maududi had profound misgivings. How could a dictatorship, which usurped God’s sovereignty and ruled with martial and structural violence, be truly Islamic? Shortly before his death, he penned a brief note to this effect:

  The implementation of Islamic laws alone cannot yield the positive result Islam really aims at.… For, merely by dint of this announcement [of Islamic laws] you cannot kindle the hearts of the people with the light of faith, enlighten their minds with the teachings of Islam, and mold their habits and manners corresponding to the virtues of Islam.31

  Future generations of Muslim activists would have done well to heed this lesson.

  Western modernity had conferred two blessings in the places it was first conceived: political independence and technical innovation. But in the Middle East, modernity arrived as colonial subjugation, and there was little potential for innovation, with the West so far ahead that Muslims could only imitate.32 The unwelcome changes, imposed as foreign imports from without, were uncongenially abrupt. A process that had taken centuries in Europe had to be effected in a matter of decades, superficially and often violently. The almost insuperable problems faced by modernizers
had already become clear in the career of Muhammad Ali (1769–1849). He had become governor of Egypt after Napoleon’s invasion and managed the monumental feat of dragging this backward Ottoman province into the modern world within a mere forty years. Yet he could do so only by ruthless coercion. Twenty-three thousand peasants died in the forced labor bands that improved Egypt’s irrigation and communications. Thousands more were conscripted into the army; some cut off their fingers and even blinded themselves to avoid military service. There could never be technological self-sufficiency, because Muhammad Ali had to buy all his machinery, weapons, and manufactured goods from Europe.33 And there could be no independence: despite his achieving a degree of autonomy from the Ottomans, modernization eventually led to Egypt’s becoming a virtual British colony. Ismail Pasha (1830–95), Muhammad Ali’s grandson, made the country too desirable to the Europeans: he had commissioned French engineers to construct the Suez Canal, built nine hundred miles of railways, irrigated over a million acres of hitherto uncultivable land, set up modern schools for both boys and girls, and transformed Cairo into an elegant modern city. In the process, he bankrupted the country, ultimately giving the British the pretext they needed in 1882 to establish a military occupation to protect the interests of shareholders.

  Even when a degree of modernization was achieved, the European colonial powers managed to snuff it out. Perhaps Muhammad Ali’s greatest achievement had been the creation of the cotton industry, which promised to give Egypt a reliable economic base until Lord Cromer, the first consul-general of Egypt, put a brake on production, since Egyptian cotton damaged British interests. No friend to the emancipation of women—he was a founding member of the Anti-Women’s Suffrage League in London—Cromer also scaled back Ismail’s programs to educate women and blocked them from entering the professions. Every benefaction was less than it seemed. In 1922 the British allowed Egypt a modicum of independence, with a new king, a parliamentary body, and a liberal Western-style constitution, but they retained control of military and foreign policy. Between 1923 and 1930 there were three general elections, each won by the Wafd party, which campaigned for a reduced British presence in Egypt; but each time the British forced the elected government to resign.34 In the same way, Europeans obstructed the development of democracy in Iran, where modernizing clergy and intellectuals had led a successful revolution against the Qajar shah in 1906, demanding constitutional rule and representative government. But almost immediately the Russians helped the shah to close the new parliament (majlis), and during the 1920s, the British routinely rigged elections to prevent the majlis from nationalizing the Iranian oil that fueled their navy.35