I am reminded of a key phrase describing the Iranian revolution. It was coined by one of the revolution’s main ideologues, Ali Shariati. He described what was happening as a ‘revolt against history’. What a phrase! In these three unforgettable words, history is characterized as a colossal error, and the revolution sets out quite literally to turn back the clock. Time must be reversed. Can it be that Shariati wished to restore, in place of calendar-time, the old ‘Messianic’ time-sense of the imagined community of faith? I think not. Rhetoric, even when memorable, remains rhetoric. And in spite of all the pedantry, all the restoration of ancient laws, time in Iran has persisted in running forward. To believe otherwise would be to succumb to obscurantist illusions.
Tom Nairn has suggested that nationalism progresses in a two-faced, a Janus-headed manner; that, in plain terms, it always moves forward while claiming to look back, in a kind of progress-by-regression. This, or something like this, is to my mind a description of what is taking place in Iran. And there is one resonance of this Janus theory that I want to explore, because it is heard at the very beginning of Islam.
Arabia in the seventh century after Christ was undergoing a period of transition from the old nomadic culture to a new, urbanized, mercantile culture. What Maxime Rodinson calls the ‘old tribal humanism’ of the Bedouins was decaying under the pressure of the new, business-based ethics of a city like Mecca. Muhammad, an orphan himself at an early age, was in an excellent position to appreciate the way in which Meccan culture failed to care for the weak as dutifully as the nomads would have. And the ethic of the revelation he received when, at the age of forty, having married a wealthy older woman and made his fortune, he climbed Mount Hira and found there the Archangel Gabriel or Gibril ordering him to recite (the word Al-Qur’an means the recitation), has often been seen, at least in part, as a plea for a return to the code of the nomadic Bedouin. So we may say that the ideas of the Qur’an are in this sense backward-looking, nostalgic, against the current. But the people on whom Muhammad’s words made the strongest initial impression were the poor, the people of the bazaar, the lower classes of Meccan society—precisely those people who knew that they would have been better off under the old nomadic system. Thus early Islam instantly acquired the character of a subversive, radical movement. When Khomeini speaks of a revolt against history, we can argue that he echoes, in his fashion, the Prophet himself; for Muhammad’s revelation, too, was a revolt against his time. Yet, plainly, history did move forward; nomadism did not once again become the Arab norm, nor, obviously was that truly Muhammad’s aim. The birth of Islam was presided over by two gods: Allah, and also Janus.
Turning now to recent events in the Indian sub-continent, we find, once again, nationalistic and religious ideas inextricably intertwined. In independent India, the idea of secular nationalism has a particular importance. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the survival of the State may depend upon it. ‘We have to build the noble mansion of free India,’ Pandit Nehru said in his famous independence night speech, ‘where all her children may dwell.’ After the terrible communal killings of the Partition riots, it was plainer than ever that if India’s remaining Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Jews and Harijans (untouchables), as well as the Hindu majority, were to be able to live together in peace, the idea of a godless State must be elevated above all of the 330 million deities. The very idea that a Hindu imperium might ever take the place of the British Raj would—it was feared—provoke civil unrest on a scale that would dwarf the Partition troubles. It was, therefore, of great value and importance that the Congress Party under Nehru based its electoral appeal firmly on safeguarding the rights of minorities. It forged a unique electoral coalition between India’s Muslims, Harijans and Brahmin Hindus—the only large, nationwide groupings—and for a long time seemed invincible as a result.
Now it can be argued forcefully that the idea of secularism in India has never been much more than a slogan; that the very fact of religious block voting proves this to be so; that the divisions between the communities have by no means been subsumed in a common ‘Indian’ or national identity; and that it is strange to speak of nationalism when the main impetus in present-day India comes from regionalist, even separatist political groups. And there is much truth in these criticisms. Still the union’s survival is an answer of a sort, a rough and imperfect answer, but at least an indication that for many Indians the idea of the gigantic nation-state has taken root.
I am not trying to brush the criticisms aside. There is a crisis of nationalism in India. In the Punjab, in Bombay, in Assam, in Kashmir, communal violence has been breaking out once more; many Indian observers feel that this heightening of violence may not be a passing phenomenon. The point I want to make is that much of the present religious sectarianism, many of the centrifugal stresses in Indian society, can be traced to political, not religious, origins. And we will have to begin with the Emergency, and with Sanjay Gandhi. Because it was in the time of Sanjay that the Congress, and the government of Mrs Gandhi, abandoned its policy of representing the coalition of minorities, and began to transform itself into an overtly Hindu party. Not only Hindu, but Hindi: attempts to impose this language on the whole of India created much resentment, particularly in the South. Such actions invariably bring forth reactions; and the growth of communalist politics in India stemmed from this shift by the ruling party. From Hindu nationalism sprang separatism of all sorts; if Hindustan was really to be turned into the home of the Hindus, no wonder some Sikhs began to talk of a homeland. But nobody paid them much attention until, in the 1980s, Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay had actually helped to finance a firebrand Sikh politico-religious figure called Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale; they were quite prepared, in the interest of a strong Central government, to foster communalism, and use Bhindranwale to split the vote of the regionalist Akali Dal Party. So, as we now know, Mrs Gandhi’s murder was a part of a chain of events which she helped to forge. It is a tragic irony. But it cannot be understood in purely religious terms; more important, perhaps, is the struggle for power between the Centre and the States. And most tragic—with more profound implications even than the assassination—is the progressive alienation of minority groups which, like the Sikhs, have been in the main extremely loyal to the nation-state. In the aftermath of the revenge-killings of Sikhs that followed Mrs Gandhi’s death, the idea of Khalistan, the separate Sikh State, ceased to seem like the pipe-dream of a few, and a little more like a safe haven to some of the many traumatized members of the Sikh community who had wanted nothing to do with Bhindranwale, who abhorred the assassination, but who had been held responsible for it by the Congress-led mobs.
Across the frontier in Pakistan, we find a very clear demonstration of the impracticability of trying to place religious beliefs at the centre of contemporary politics. Here, after all, is a State that was based on a faith; and the problems that have beset it ever since its birth are those of having been—as I’ve said elsewhere—insufficiently imagined. In other words, what Pakistan has been discovering, very painfully, is that no religion is any longer a sufficient basis for a society. The world has changed too much for that. As a result, pieces of the State have begun to break off; and the Zia dictatorship has done its best to break up what’s left. We can perhaps best understand the tensions of modern Pakistan as the result of the resurgence of the old, suppressed nationalisms—Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch—and the new, and inadequate, ideological unity. The Benazir Bhutto government has inherited a derelict State—a militarized, gangster-infested theocracy. Ms Bhutto must construct, at high speed and in unfavourable circumstances, nothing less than the institutions and processes of a modern nation-state. That is, history must be excavated from beneath the rubble of dogmatism and tyranny. Her best hope for success may lie in the realization of all Pakistan’s citizens, Sindhis as well as Pathans, Punjabis as well as Balochis, that nothing is to be gained from Balkanization. The real possibility of such an outcome may be, strangely, what prevent
s it from happening. And if enlightened self-interest does guide Pakistanis to back away from that precipice, then the first constructive step will have been taken towards the making of a State with a real reason for being—let us say, a post-Islamic Pakistan.
From the powerful, wealthy, confident certainties of the nineteenth century, the West has arrived at a moment beyond consensus, a fractured time, in which doubt, anxiety, and a kind of rudderlessness dominate life. This loss of certainty has been in many ways—for example, in the arts—of great value. Just as an atom, when split, releases colossal energy, so the old, rigid orthodoxies of colonial Europe produced, by being broken, the unparalleled outburst of newness and excitement that the modernist movement has been. But such an event is, of course, ambiguous.
In the same period, the language of politics has become more materialistic. Both on the right and the left, politicians have learned to speak in the newspeak of economics. If an airport is to be built in the midst of sleepy villages, the distress of the locals is calculated, astoundingly, in cash terms, and then balanced against other figures. The increasing mechanization of society has created a mechanical politics; one which no longer asks ‘why’ or ‘whither’ questions, but only ‘how’. As a result, the world of politics no longer encompasses much of what real human beings actually care about. It does not ask what kind of world we wish to live in; it does not analyse the consequences of the choices that are made for us; nor, but perhaps it never did, does it address itself to the grievances and achings of the soul—of that other event that we are, the one that perceives existence not as one-thing-after-another, but as everything-at-once. Politics has come to narrow the world down to things, and the idea, the only idea, which is offered to make us accept this awful limitation, is called progress. Progress: the dream of heaven on earth.
But Western political systems, both of the liberal capitalist and communist variety, have simply failed to deliver progress. We now know the ever-expanding cake to be a myth; the citizens of the West face futures of narrowing horizons, diminishing prospects. One could say that the West has lost the future; and without the future, the one validating concept of its political systems is removed.
Poland’s religious fervour, for example, seems deeply nationalistic; those who mourn the death of a fallen priest mourn his falling, in a political struggle. We have a Pope who is more politically involved than most—although when his priests join forces with radical politics in South America, he brings intense pressure on them to back off. And in the burning arenas of Northern Ireland and the Middle East, religious fervour cloaks equally fierce nationalist aspirations. We are near a millennium; once again, we have the idea of standing near the end of time. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many of us, awaking from the dream of politics, choose to fall into the dream of God. But that dream, today, is not a means of cancelling politics; it does not and cannot turn back the clock. The religious revivals of the world are continuations of the political process by other means.
At first glance the state of affairs in the United States of America does not seem to bear out the sort of ideas I’ve been propounding. In America, after all, the vision of the material, earthly paradise has not yet faded. The USA remains formidably wealthy and powerful, and it often appears that its political language still commands the belief of large numbers of its citizens. And yet, all over the land of the free, strange gods rule. Evangelists stalk the land and men and women walk forward for Christ. Such devout persons as John DeLorean are ‘born again’ into Christ. The followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh proliferate, and their livery, the colours of the sunset and the dawn, is everywhere to be seen. It is a time of Falwells and book-burnings. There was even a President who believed that the Apocalypse might very well come in his lifetime, and who had the button to prove it. In its way, the religious fundamentalism of the United States is as alarming as anything in the much feared world of Islam. How so? Where does it come from?
In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man’s (not so often a woman’s) ability and right to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and wit, which lies at the heart of that dream, has produced more Oswalds, more Sirhans, more Mansons and Jim Joneses, than Lincolns, of late. The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth. It is Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, or Charles Bronson in anything, or, in real life, the murderer Goetz who walked free after shooting down the man who asked him for a five-dollar bill on the subway. That is to say: the myth of the American hero has turned sour. The disorienting effects of such a transformation should not be underestimated.
In many other respects, too, it has been a bruising time to be an American. Fifteen years ago, Victor Charlie, the slope, the geek, inflicted on the US Army a humiliating defeat. Since then, America has lost further battles. Such loyal allies as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran have been overthrown. And let us not forget the taking of the hostages in Iran and the Lebanon.
The historian F. J. Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’—the idea that a country born with the urge to push a frontier westwards has needed, constantly, to find new frontiers, ever since it reached the Pacific—has long been a useful lens through which to view American history. The space race is only one subject which the thesis illuminates. In the last two decades many Americans have turned inwards in search of that new frontier. The enormous influences of psychiatry and psychotherapy can be adduced as evidence for this, as can the enormous body of literature about self-improvement.
When we examine the American self of this period, however, what do we find? We find that it has been the age of the great burn-out. Both radicals and conservatives—those who played with the drugs and great causes of the sixties and seventies on the one hand, and, say, the returning war veterans on the other—have entered a time of shock. It is interesting that so many writers in America today write very largely about this burn-out. Above all, in the spare, deliberately narrow-horizoned world of Raymond Carver, we sense a desire to turn away from the large canvas, from the great issues and events and the bold experiments that got America into such a mess, and to concentrate on minutiae, on the simplest things, on the first building blocks of life; to go back to basics, and try, by starting again, to salvage something: honesty, perhaps. Integrity. Truth.
I am arguing that in spite of America’s continued affluence, the idea of ‘progress’, which is very close to a nation’s sense of itself, has been badly damaged in America, too. And religion enters the story, once again, as a means of shoring up the crumbling patriotism of the American people—that is, as an aspect of the nationalist impulse, and not a replacement for it. Religion and patriotism have always gone hand in hand in a country in which schoolchildren are asked daily to perform an act of worship before the national flag. And in today’s America, there is a new patriotism whose links with the religious revival are explicit. God is America’s answer to its crisis of identity.
Myth, Roland Barthes tells us, is statistically on the right. If the left seeks always to de-mystify, then in a time when people need certainties, absolutes, it often fails to offer them what they ask for. The resulting crisis of liberalism is with us everywhere, and nowhere more than in the USA. History has done its best to shake America’s certainty that it was right. America reacts by burying its head in the lap of God.
John Schlesinger’s film The Falcon and the Snowman deals valuably with America’s chosen blindness. It is the story of two young Americans, one a drug dealer, the other an employee in a high-security installation, who team up to sell secrets to the Russians, becoming what are called ‘traitors’. The ‘Falcon’—the one of the pair who has the access to the secrets—has a rather different view of treason. He decides to become a spy when he learns about CIA activities a
gainst Allende’s Chilean government and the Whitlam government in Australia. To him, it is the CIA that is the traitor; it is the CIA which betrays the spirit of America. Memorably, he compares the activities of America as a superpower to those of predators (he owns a pet falcon, and knows a lot about the habits of such birds). If predators are not closely controlled, they swallow everything they can eat.
The ‘traitors’ also know that things have become so bad that not even a journalistic exposé can alter anything. Even when Americans know what their government is doing—even when they are told about Allende or Whitlam—they choose not to care. America has chosen to be a State in which, for example, it is possible for a President to denounce an elected government (in Nicaragua) as a tyranny, while it is conveniently forgotten that for the previous fifty years it was America who supported the real, full-blooded Somoza tyranny.
When the activities of a nation’s representatives begin to diverge so dramatically from its self-image as the guardian of freedom and decency, then the country has to find ways of turning away from the truth into cosy simplicities (God, patriotism), in order not to see itself too plainly; in order not to see that its picture of itself is in many ways a false one.
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