Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  Similarly the intellectual progenitors of religious extremism in Egypt, Hasan al-Banna and al-Sayyid Qutb, were not educated in traditional religious institutions. Both were graduates of the Dar al-Ulum, or House of Sciences, in Cairo, an institution that has been described as a "modernist teacher training institute." Al-Sayyid Qutb first made his name as a literary figure, a writer of fiction and critic who was actively involved in debates centered on questions of literary modernism in the Cairo of the 1930s and 1940s. Like the Anagarika Dharmapala in Sri Lanka before him, he began his career in the educational bureaucracy. His bosses in Egypt's Ministry of Public Instruction sent him to America in 1948, apparently in the hope that he would be won over by American ways. His discovery of his religious mission is said to have occurred as he stood on the deck of the liner that was carrying him to New York. I have cited figures from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam; many similar figures could be cited from the Jewish and Christian traditions.

  What do these moments of conversion signify? In trying to answer that question, we find ourselves reaching reflexively for the terms that float by on one or the other side of the modernist stream. On the one shore we find terms or phrases such as "atavism," "medievalism," "fear of uncertainty" coming all too readily to hand; on the other, our hands close upon "resistance," "alternative," "search for community," "thirst for meaning."

  To a greater or lesser degree, moments of conversion such as those I have referred to are all of these things, but they are also something else: they mark a crossing from one current of modernism to another. It is too easy to forget that these reinvented forms of religion are not a repudiation of but a means of laying claim to the modern world. That is why the advance guards of these ideologies are never traditional religious specialists but rather young college graduates or engineering students—products, in other words, of secularly oriented, modernist institutions. It is for this reason that we find the same things valued on both shores but in diametrically opposed ways. Literature and art, for example, being regarded as the ultimate repository of value on one side, come to be excoriated on the other, in exact and equal measure, so that their destruction becomes a prime article of faith.

  Where else are we to look for the sources of this antagonism except within the whirlpools that mark the meeting of these two currents? Certainly the conflict cannot be ascribed to religion in the broadest sense. For most of human history, religion and literature have been virtually inseparable, everywhere. I can think of nonreligious ideologies that have thought of literature as an enemy; I know of no religion that has historically held that position. That is why we must be rigorous and unrelenting in our rejection of the claims of those religious extremists who try to invoke historical and religious precedents for their attacks on writers. These claims are offered in bad faith. In fact, the roots of this hostility lie in the eminently modern pedigree of their own moments of conversion. The religions they invoke do not begin with a positive content of faith; they have their beginnings in acts of negation.

  I have been using the phrase "religious extremism" with what may appear to be a reckless disregard for differences among the world's major religions. I do not do so unadvisedly. I do believe that the content of these ideologies is startlingly similar, across continents and cultures.

  Consider, for example, that the rhetoric of religious extremism is everywhere centered on issues that would have been regarded as profane, or worldly, or largely secular, a few generations ago: issues of state power, control of the bureaucracy, school curricula, the army, the law courts, banks, and other such institutions. Consider also that religious extremists are everywhere hostile to mainstream traditions of dissent within whatever religion they claim to be speaking for. Muslim extremists in the Middle East are contemptuous of the traditional Sufi tariqas ("ways" of schools) that have so long been a mainstay within popular Islam; the political leadership of the Hindu extremist movement treats traditional mendicants and ascetics as a source of embarrassment. In both instances, this hostility has its roots in peculiarly bourgeois anxieties about respectability and rationality.

  There is also much evidence to show that as the concerns of the major religions have grown more and more sociological, their doctrines and institutions have also increasingly converged. Yet while we speak of doctrine, we are still within a domain that is recognizably religious. But the truth is that in those areas of the world that are currently beset by religious turmoil, we very rarely hear anyone speak of doctrine or faith. In many of these areas, by a curious inversion, the language of religious hatred is not a religious language at all. The voices that spew hate invariably draw on more incendiary sources. One of these is the language of quantity, of number—statistics, in other words, that famous syntax of falsehood. Such and such a group is growing too fast, they declare, its birthrate is so and so; it will soon become a majority, overtake another group that has nowhere else to go; that group will then be swamped, washed into the sea by the rising tide of enemies within. Equally, these voices borrow the language of academic historiography. They produce archaeological data to prove that such and such a group has no right to be here, that they are invaders who arrived later than some other, more authentically located peoples, whose claim to the land is therefore greater.

  One of the more curious elements of these bizarre but all too real discourses is what might be called the logic of competitive vic-timhood. Group X, incontestably a majority in its own area, will declare itself to be the real minority because it is outnumbered if the surrounding regions are taken into account. Its ideologues will cite this as the reason that, to preserve itself, it must drive members of Group Y off its territory: Group Y, which appears to be a minority, is actually a majority; the members of Group X are the real victims. And so on.

  Most of these ideologies share similar discourses on women: what women should wear, how they should comport themselves, when and if they should reproduce. And all this, we are told, because scripture or custom has ordained it so. I remember very well an incident that dates back some fourteen years, to a time when I was living in a village in Egypt. One day a schoolboy of fifteen—one of the brightest and most likable in the village—said to me, "Do you know what I did today? I gave my mother and the womenfolk in the house a stern talking-to. I told them that they could not go to the burial ground anymore to pray at our family's tombs."

  I was taken aback by this. So far as I knew, the custom of visiting tombs was a very old one, and it served the additional function of providing women with a place to meet their kinfolk and friends. "Why?" I asked the boy. "What made you do this?"

  "Because it is against our religion, of course," he said. "Visiting a grave is nothing but irrational superstition."

  It turned out, I later learned, that a schoolteacher with fundamentalist leanings had preached a fiery sermon in the mosque, urging the men of the village to put an end to this custom.

  The image of that adolescent schoolboy lecturing his mother on what she could and could not do stayed with me for a long time. Where did he find that authority at the age of fifteen? Why did she allow him to speak to her like that? But wasn't he also right to do what he did? After all, is it not perhaps irrational to visit graves? But still, did she resent having to renounce her trips to the graveyard? I don't know. The outcome in any case was that she stayed at home. That is how religious extremism seems to work.

  The issues around which these fundamentalist discourses are configured are not, of course, exclusively the concern of religious extremists. On the contrary, the concerns are precisely the same as those that animate certain kinds of conflict that have no religious referents at all: language conflicts, for example, or ethnic and tribal conflicts. In a sense, this is the most revealing aspect of these movements: that they all have recourse to the same language of difference—a language that is entirely profane, entirely devoid of faith or belief.

  This was brought home to me very forcefully a couple of years ago when I was traveling in Cambodia. It so
happened that the United Nations was then conducting a large-scale peacekeeping operation, and some 20,000 peacekeeping personnel from all over the globe had been deployed throughout the country. The principal obstacle to the peace was the Khmer Rouge, whose ideology had by that time been reduced to a nationalistic form of racism, directed at the Vietnamese and particularly the Vietnamese-speaking minority in Cambodia. A defector who had surrendered to UN officials a few months before the elections described his political training with the Khmer Rouge:

  As far as the Vietnamese are concerned, whenever we meet them we must kill them, whether they are militaries or civilians, because they are not ordinary civilians but soldiers disguised as civilians. We must kill them, whether they are men, women, or children, there is no distinction, they are enemies. Children are not militaries, but if they are born or grow up in Cambodia, when they will be adult, they will consider Cambodian land as theirs. So we make no distinction. As to women, they give birth to Vietnamese children.

  The Khmer Rouge carried out several massacres of civilians during the peacekeeping process, most of them directed against small Vietnamese fishing communities.

  I arrived in Cambodia in January 1993, just six or seven weeks after my own country, India, had faced what was perhaps its most serious political crisis since it gained independence in 1947. The crisis was precipitated by the demolition of a mosque in the city of Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. The demolition of the mosque was followed by a wave of murderous attacks upon Muslim-minority communities in India. In a series of pogroms in various Indian cities, thousands of Muslims were systematically murdered, raped, and brutalized by Hindu extremists. In many respects, the language of the Hindu extremists, with the appropriate substitutions, was identical to that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

  It was against the background of these tragic events that I found myself one day in Siem Reap, in northwestern Cambodia. In this town, famous for its proximity to the glorious temple complexes of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thorn, I came upon a group of Indian doctors who were running a small field hospital for the UN. By virtue of the camaraderie that links compatriots in a faraway place, I was invited to join them for a meal at their hospital. The doctors received me with the greatest cordiality in their prefabricated dining room. But no sooner had I sat down than they turned to me, smiling cordially across the rice and dal, and one of them said, "Mr. Ghosh, can you think of a good reason why we Hindus should not demolish every mosque in India? After all, we are the majority. Why should we allow minorities to dictate what is right for us?" I had not noticed until then that my hosts were all Hindus, from various parts of India.

  Their line of reasoning was, of course, far from unfamiliar to me: it was the standard majoritarian argument trotted out by Hindu extremists in India. But here, in this context, with the gunshots of the Khmer Rouge occasionally audible in the distance, it provoked an extra dimension of outrage. In the first place, these doctors were not extremists, in any ordinary meaning of the term. On the contrary, they were the personification of middle-class normality. Second, they were probably not religious in any but the most private sense. For them, most likely, religion was no more than a mark of distinction, defining the borders of what they believed to be a majority. In the course of the furious argument that followed, I was amazed to discover—though perhaps I should not have been—that these doctors actually harbored a lurking admiration for the Khmer Rouge, an admiration that was in no way diminished by the fact that we were then under Khmer Rouge fire.

  I was amazed because I could not immediately understand why extremist Hindu beliefs should translate so fluently into sympathy for a group that had no religious affiliations at all, a group whose ideological genealogy ought to have inspired revulsion in these middle-class professional men. It only became obvious to me later, reading reports from Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, and other strife-torn lands, that for this species of thinking, religion, race, ethnicity, and language have no real content at all. Their only significance lies in the lines of distinction they provide. The actual content of the ideology, whether it manifests itself in its religious avatar or its linguistic or ethnic one, is actually the same in every case, although articulated through different symbols. In several instances—Sri Lanka, for example—extremist movements have seamlessly shifted their focus from language to religion.

  What, then, is this ideology that can travel so indifferently among such disparate political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century, an ideology that, for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must also be regarded as a variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The nonsectarian, anti-imperialist nationalism of a Gandhi or a Saad Zaghloul was founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.

  To return to where I began: it is my belief that extremist religious movements, whether in India or Israel or Egypt or the United States, are often supremacist movements, whatever their rhetoric. The movements that fit the pattern least perhaps are radical Muslim movements. Of all the world's religions, Islam remains today the least territorial, the least, as it were, nationalized. Yet it cannot be a coincidence that despite the critique of nationalism that is inherent in some branches of radical Islam, these movements have everywhere lapsed into patterns that are contained within the current framework of nation-states. Nor can it be a coincidence that in the Islamic world, as elsewhere, religious movements are at their most extreme in countries with large minority populations—Sudan and Egypt, for example. Indeed, such is the peculiar power of supremacist movements that they have actually conjured minorities into being where none actively existed before. Thus, in Algeria, Muslim extremists must now contend with an increasingly assertive minority Berber population.

  In principle, it is not unreasonable that a population should have the right to live under religious law, with the proper democratic safeguards. But in practice, in contemporary societies, when such laws are instituted, they almost invariably become instruments of majoritarian domination. Consider, for example, the blasphemy laws enacted in Pakistan in the 1980s. A recently published Amnesty International report tells us that "at present several dozen people are charged with blasphemy, in Pakistan." The majority of these belong to the minority Ahmadiyya community. This sect, which considers itself Muslim, was declared heretical by the country's legislature, and its members were forbidden to profess, practice, or propagate their faith. According to Pakistani human rights activists, in a period of five years 108 Ahmadis were charged with blasphemy for practicing their faith. Over the past three years, according to the report, members of the Christian minority in Pakistan have also increasingly been charged with blasphemy. But here again, the meaning of blasphemy itself has changed. When a law such as this is available, it is unrealistic to expect that people will not use it in ways other than was intended. I quote from the report:

  In a number of cases, personal grudges against Christian neighbours seem to have led people to settle their disputes by bringing blasphemy charges. Anwar Masih, a Christian in Sammundri in Faisalabad district, had a quarrel with the local Muslim shopkeeper over a small debt and was subsequently charged with blasphemy ... A 13-year-old Christian boy in Punjab was reported to have said that he had had a fight with the eight-year-old son of a Muslim neighbour. "It all started with some pigeons. The boys caught my pigeons and they didn't want to give them back to me ... The little boy with whom I had a fight said he saw me write [blasphemous words] on the mosque..." [The boy], who has never learned to read or write, and two adult Christians were charged with blasphemy, in May 199
3.

  How far we are here from a reverence for the spirit of scripture!

  I would like to turn now to a novel which, more than anything I have read recently, has forced me to confront the questions that contemporary religious extremism raises for writers. This is the Bengali novel Lojja (Shame), by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin. I believe that this book, deeply flawed in many respects, is nonetheless a very important novel and a work of considerable insight. It is also a work that is literally much misunderstood, because at the moment it is available to most of the world in an English translation that can only be described as appalling. As a result the book has received many slighting and dismissive notices in America and Europe, probably because reviewers have assumed uncritically that the translation provides an accurate indication of the book's quality. It happens that although I write in English, my native language is Bengali, and having read the book in the original, I know this assumption to be untrue. It seems more and more unlikely now that the book will ever get a fair reading, partly because it has become a pawn within the religious conflicts of the Indian subcontinent, and partly because Taslima Nasrin is herself now a global "cause" for reasons that have little to do with her writing.

  Lojja was apparently written at great speed, being completed in a couple of months. The book was later revised, but even in its revised version it remains a short novel—the new Bengali edition numbers 150 pages. The narrative is simple: through its protagonist, Suranjan Datta, it follows the fortunes of a Hindu family that finds itself engulfed in a wave of violence directed against the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh. The events it describes occur in the aftermath of the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. The narrative is punctuated throughout with paraphrased news reports, items from the files of human rights organizations, and other accounts detailing actual instances of violence. In particular it is a severe, because factual, indictment of certain groups of religious extremists in Bangladesh.