by Mark Tully
CAMBRIDGE: LESSONS IN HUMILITY
CAMBRIDGE IS A beautiful city at any time but, with my tendency to nostalgia, I like it best in the autumn. My old college, Trinity Hall, is one of those on the banks of the River Cam, overlooking the famous meadows known as ‘the Backs’. Autumn is a season of change. The trees are bare and the Backs are carpeted with golden leaves. It was in autumn that I started my first term at Trinity Hall, a time of great change in my life. At last, after all those years in boarding school and then the army, I felt free.
I went back to Cambridge in the autumn of 2006, exactly fifty years after the beginning of my first year there. I had returned to take part in a special weekend of events organised by the University for its alumni. The amazing variety of activities included the opportunity to sing in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, which was to be conducted by one of Britain’s best known modern composers, John Rutter. Not trusting my musical ear sufficiently, it was an opportunity that I didn’t intend to take up.
However, another of the activities was to be a discussion on religion and secularism, which I was to lead and in which some of the University’s outstanding scholars were to take part. The publicity for Alumni Day stated that we would be talking about ‘the growing tension between religious belief and the outside world, and trying to address the very topical question: which came first – aggressive secularism or religious fanaticism?’
The panel was chaired by the Regius Professor of Theology, David Ford, and one of the other participants was the atheist Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Not surprisingly, wide differences emerged among the panel, but these were discussed calmly and rationally. Inevitably, I was nervous that I would be intellectually mauled by scholars who had studied this subject much more deeply than I had, but I need not have worried. We all treated each other’s views with respect.
In my introduction to the discussion, I suggested that the Indian tradition of accepting that there can be many different ways to God, and thereby respecting the followers of all religions, as well as those who didn’t believe in any religion, could prevent conflict arising between the opposing factions of aggressive secularism and religious fundamentalism. I described a day when I had woken up in Delhi and switched on the BBC World Service broadcast as usual only to hear a debate about Christmas cards. It was suggested that the cards were no longer appropriate because they were not ‘secular’ – that much abused word again – and might offend believers of other religions. The cards, it was proposed, should simply say ‘Happy holiday’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. Yet that same morning over breakfast, when I picked up my copy of the Hindu, an Indian daily, I found that the picture on the front page showed the Governor of West Bengal, a Hindu, throwing a Christmas party for children, the vast majority of whom were not Christians.
After the discussion was over, a member of the audience who came from Bradford (a city in the north of England with a large Muslim population) approached me and said she thought cutting Christmas out of the December holiday would be justified in order to avoid offending Muslims. So I told her about the way that religious holidays are celebrated in India. There, we have public holidays to mark the births of the Prophet Muhammad, the Hindu god Rama, the Sikh Guru Nanak, the Buddha and Mahavira (the patriarch of the Jains), as well as the birth and the death of Jesus Christ.
At Eid, men and boys dressed in sparkling white new clothes, with prayer caps on their heads, hurry to mosques scattered all over Delhi to pray. Little girls, decked out in bright new shalwar suits and looking like tiny dolls, hold tightly to their fathers’ and brothers’ hands. The congregation at one of Asia’s largest mosques, Delhi’s Jama Masjid, overflows into the surrounding streets. The rows of the faithful bow almost as one man in the ordered worship presided over by the Shahi, or Royal Imam. Every Eid that we are in Delhi, Gilly and I are invited by Muslim friends living near the Jama Masjid to their family feast of home-made shami kebab, korma and biryani.
On other occasions, I have stood alongside Hindus and Muslims in the small north Indian town of Mustafabad to watch young Shia men walking bare-foot over smouldering coals and then see them process through the streets, pounding their chests and lashing their backs with knives attached to chains. They identify with the agony of Imam Husain, the Prophet’s grandson, whose martyrdom in a conflict over the leadership of the Muslim community in the early years is remembered on the tenth day of the Muslim month of Muharram.
Crowds of all faiths watch Sikh warriors ride their prancing horses (which are clearly overfed with oats) and joust with eight-foot long spears to celebrate the martial tradition of their religion during the spring festival of Hola Mahalla. As for Christmas – then every bazaar is as brightly illuminated as London’s Regent Street and no one would dream of questioning the theme of the decorations, which is, of course, ‘Happy Christmas’.
All these and many other religious festivals are observed in India without any questioning. Yet India describes itself in its constitution as a ‘sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic’.
There is, however, a form of secularism that I sense is hostile. While I certainly don’t wish to suggest that I am opposed to secularism in as far as it implies the separation of state and Church, I am uneasy about a form of secularism which goes beyond that. This form of secularism argues that religion should be entirely confined to private life, and doesn’t accept the right of public figures to express their religious convictions. It is an extreme, unbalanced, but nevertheless highly influential secularism that tends to regard religion with scorn and often portrays it as disreputable. This secularism claims to advocate freedom as its highest value, but doesn’t always seem to accept that people should be free to practise their own religion. The ban in France on Muslim school children wearing headscarves is an obvious example of a legal constraint on freedom of religion. Britons interpreting secularism as meaning that there should be no public celebration of Christmas, provide an example of a social pressure that impinges on religious freedom. Perhaps because believers in this type of secularism have no time for religion themselves, they see no need to provide a place in society for those who do.
As I understand it, there are four main causes for the rise of the sort of illiberal secularism that sets up a shouting match with religion. Those reasons are fear of religion, hostility to religion, a misunderstanding of science and indifference to the issues central to religion.
It is easy to understand the fear generated by Islamic terrorism, by the Christian terrorism that used to plague Northern Ireland, or by the Sikh terrorism in India during the eighties. But time and again I am told that religion is evil because it causes terrorism – as though it were the only cause. There are many other causes of terrorism in the world. For example, disputes between different ethnic groups can cause terrorism, such as the campaign of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. There are also instances of linguistic and regional terrorism, but do we say that we should all speak one language because differences of tongue provoke terrorism, or that taking pride in our ethnicity, our place of birth or culture is wrong because this too can provoke terrorism?
And what about state terrorism? The two most appalling perpetrators of state terrorism in the twentieth century were Hitler and Stalin. Hitler massacred Jews in the name of racial, not religious, purity. And Stalin was enforcing an atheistic creed. While the Spanish Civil War has gone down in history as a righteous war against Fascism – and I would agree that Fascism should have been challenged, and that in this instance the Church was on the wrong side – the republicans turned the civil war into a battle between atheism and Catholicism, a war in which they burnt churches, and killed bishops, priests and monks. Even nuns were not spared. The writer Hugh Thomas describes horrific incidents in which priests’ ears were cut off, rosary beads were shoved into monks’ ears to perforate their eardrums, the mother of two Jesuit priests had a rosary forced down her throat, and 800 people were thrown down a mine-shaft. There were certai
nly atrocities on the other side as well, but – as Hitler, Stalin and the Spanish republicans show – religion does not have a monopoly on terrorism.
Whenever there is violence in the name of religion it is important to set this violence in a broader context, to look for the political and economic issues that may well be involved, and to discover whether the violence is spontaneous or engineered. Since the sixties, Ahmedabad, the main city of the western state of Gujarat and the city in which Mahatma Gandhi established his first Indian ashram, has earned for itself an unenviable reputation for what is called in India ‘communal violence’. This term almost always refers to violence between Hindus and Muslims.
The worst outbreak of communal violence during my first spell in India occurred in Ahmedabad in 1969. The official figure for people killed in six violent days when people were hacked to death, speared and burnt alive, was 1,200. This is bad enough, but some say the figure should be 2,500. When it was all over, sober political analysts reckoned that the riots had been caused by the widening rift between the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and her rival within the Congress, the veteran Gujarati politician Morarji Desai. There was indeed evidence to suggest that the riots had been engineered by members of the Indira Gandhi faction in order to discredit the Chief Minister of Gujarat, who was a supporter of Morarji.
After the riots in Ahmedabad in 1990, which broke out in the middle of Ramazan, the Muslim month of fasting, I interviewed a group of Muslim women who earned a living by hand-printing cloth. Muslims had, as is more often than not the case, come off worst in the riots. But the consensus among these women was summed up by Hasina, the most vocal member of the group, who said, ‘These riots are nothing to do with Hindus or Muslims. It’s all about politicians. When the Congress comes to power the BJP does it, and when the BJP comes to power the Congress does it. It’s just to give the new government a bad name!’
Raoof Valiullah, a Muslim Congress member of the Upper House of Parliament whose ancestral home was in the heart of the old city, said to me, ‘Communal strife arises because a communal riot is the only thing which can bring down a government.’ Ela Bhatt founded in Ahmedabad one of the most admired Indian NGOs, the Self Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA. When I asked her about Valiullah’s view, she said, ‘I agree with those who say that riots are used to change the politics of the state.’
The opposite was true of the outbreak of communal violence in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat in 2002. In that instance, the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, a hawkish member of the BJP, clearly thought that riots would strengthen his own position. It was reported that Muslims had attacked a train just outside a station in north Gujarat. Many of the passengers on the train were members of Hindu organisations who were returning from a rally in Ayodhya, where they had been to protest against the failure to build the controversial temple I mentioned in Chapter 4. A fire broke out in which many of the passengers died. Although it’s still not clear exactly what happened on that train, it’s all too clear what happened afterwards: three days of rioting followed, in which the police totally failed in their duty to maintain law and order, allowing Hindu mobs to roam freely around Ahmedabad and other towns in Gujarat attacking Muslims and their property. Then, instead of apologising for the riots, Narendra Modi went on to mount a distinctly communal campaign to fight the next election to the state assembly.
I find that those who suggest we should try to understand why some young men were so hostile to America that they were prepared to kill themselves on 9/11, are all too often dismissed as being soft on terrorism. However, President Bush’s call for a ‘war on terrorism’ is subconsciously, and often consciously, interpreted by Muslims as American imperialism’s call for a war on Islam. If Muslims are to be convinced that this is not the case, then the United States and other Western countries have to open a dialogue with Islam. This will involve challenging the West’s certainties and discovering what it is that Muslims find disturbing about Western culture.
When I have asked Islamic clerics in India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh why Muslim fundamentalism is spreading, they have almost all replied, ‘Because Muslims are afraid of your culture, which they regard as godless and obscene.’
Fundamentalism feeds on fear. An Anglican Bishop in Ireland recently said to me, ‘When people are frightened, they rush to nanny and the security of the nursery – and fundamentalism is the nursery, where all your thinking is done for you.’ In The Battle for God, her study of how and why religious fundamentalist thinking arises, Karen Armstrong writes: ‘Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism and, under attack, increasingly becomes more bitter, extreme, and excessive.’ Shouldn’t the United States and Europe take the time to consider whether their culture might appear to be aggressive to Muslims, just as Islam appears to be aggressive to them?
I have been told so often by Islamic clerics that Western culture is obscene that when Kabul was captured from the Taliban I was struck by a thought that may appear strange to many. At the time, it was virtually impossible to open a newspaper or turn on a radio without hearing about Afghan women throwing off their burqas. But I wondered whether we shouldn’t also be taking this opportunity to discuss the possibility that our Western attitudes to nudity and our explicit sex scenes in films and books might unintentionally have strengthened the hands of those who forced their women to cover themselves from top to toe in the first place. Our attitudes may have given them the grounds upon which to insist that the burqa is essential to protect women from the culture propagated in the West.
Given recent demands to ban not only the burqa but also headscarves in some European countries, I can’t help feeling that the Indian Muslim writer M.J. Akbar is right to question which is the more civilised – the headscarf or the thong. If it is illiberal to attack near-nudity, why is it not illiberal to attack wearing certain clothes? The British playwright David Edgar ends an article called ‘We can’t just pick and choose what to tolerate’ with this statement:
Yes, the veil can be alienating to people trying to communicate with the person wearing it. But if we want to have a leg to stand on when we stand up for The Satanic Verses, or Behzti, or Jerry Springer, we must defend to the death the right to wear it.
In Western eyes the burqa has become a symbol of Islam as a repressive religion and, as such, it is impossible for many of us to conceive that there might be women who prefer to wear it. In 1993 I made a programme for BBC Radio 4 called Fundamentally Wrong, which argued that Islam took many different shapes in Pakistan and that by no means all Muslims supported fundamentalism. My partner Gilly, who was the programme researcher, spoke to women belonging to two different families in Lahore. She discovered that the women of one family liked wearing burqas whenever they went out because they felt safer in them, as they were protected from men staring at them and from the sexual harassment sometimes suffered by those women who didn’t wear burqas. In the other family, the women went even further. They said they were quite happy to be obliged to stay at home. One said, ‘Women basically are everything. Men are only good for working outside the home. But there is no home without us, no family, no society.’
In a village outside Lahore, we came across women who envied those living in purdah, the practice of shielding women from the eyes of male strangers, even in the home. One of the village women said, ‘Those who eat well can afford purdah. We who are poor, even by hard work we can’t get enough to eat, so we can’t afford purdah. But if we get a chance we’ll do it. Mind you,’ she added, ‘we are used to roaming around the place, so we might find it a little suffocating.’
Of course, we also found women who did not want to be in purdah, but even they resented what they saw as Western society telling them what to wear and how to live. A woman psychiatrist felt this resentment was inevitable as long as the West remained rich and so many Islamic countries poor. She told me, ‘As the gap between developed and under-developed countries increases,
the people who are poor are going to feel more and more threatened, and we are going to stick to our customs and our religions in order to have some security, some self-esteem.’
So if we in the West routinely criticise Muslim customs because they offend our concept of secularism, and thereby give the impression that we are hostile to Islam, we may well only be strengthening the fundamentalist form of the religion that we fear.
Hostility to religion, which I hold to be the second of the four contributing factors to illiberal secularism, is stirred up by secular fundamentalists who are often quite as aggressive as any religious fundamentalist. When we were talking about this at the Alumni Weekend discussion in Cambridge, Simon Blackburn, the Professor of Philosophy, argued that atheism couldn’t be aggressive or dominant by itself because you couldn’t be aggressive about something you didn’t believe in. ‘We just tiptoe past,’ he said. The Roman Catholic Eamon Duffy, one of Britain’s leading historians of the Church, disagreed, saying that he was a reader of the Independent, a British national newspaper, and was ‘more or less daily deeply offended by some of the journalism’. He quoted a recent article in which the journalist had said, ‘We should hate Pope Benedict’.
Polly Toynbee is one of the prominent secular fundamentalist journalists. Her attacks on Christianity include a virulent review of the film made in 2005 about the much loved Narnia stories by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. She warned non-believers watching it to ‘keep their sick-bags handy’. Her piece also described Aslan the Lion, who is clearly a representation of Christ, as ‘an emblem of everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth’. But surely humans have shown time and time again that they are not capable of taking responsibility for everything and that it’s precisely when they take upon themselves too much responsibility – when they play God – that they bring about disasters.