by Susan Jacoby
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Anyone who thinks that forced conversion is irrelevant to the aims of Islamic terrorists today would do well to read medieval accounts of the First Crusade, which began in 1096, after Pope Urban II issued a call for Christian knights to liberate the “Holy Land” from Muslim control. The parallels between the religiously driven behavior of today’s jihadists and that of the good eleventh-century Christian soldiers—as described by both Hebrew and Christian chroniclers—are startling. When Pope Urban issued his call for the First Crusade, he did not suggest that the crusaders massacre Jews during the long trek to Jerusalem. But that is what happened, and one might well wonder exactly what the pope thought thousands of young men, unmoored from their homes and charged with a religious mission to capture and murder “infidels” in a faraway land, were going to do on the long journey from Northern Europe to Jerusalem. Why not practice on that other, older group of infidels—the Jews? Ironically, the crusaders en route to Jerusalem through Europe offered Jews the same choice—convert, leave, or die—offered by ISIS to Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.
Accounts by medieval chroniclers of the destruction of Jewish communities on the crusaders’ route south resemble newspaper accounts in 2014 of the ISIS occupation of cities in Iraq and Syria. The town of Trier, on the Moselle River, was an early stop for the crusaders. A Hebrew chronicler reported that, after the Jewish community had made an unsuccessful attempt, by paying off a bishop, to persuade the crusaders to bypass their community, the trapped Jews sought refuge in the bishop’s palace. Fearful that he, too, would be murdered by the crusaders, the bishop told the Jews, “The emperor himself could not save you….Be converted or accept upon yourselves the judgment of heaven.” The chronicler describes the bishop’s final abandonment of the Jews. “In the gateway there was a door like the grate of a furnace. The enemy stood around the palace by the hundreds and thousands, grasping sharp swords. They stood ready to swallow them alive, body and flesh. Then the bishop’s military officer and ministers entered the palace and said to them: ‘Thus said our lord the bishop: Convert or leave his place. I do not wish to preserve you any longer,…You cannot be saved—your God does not wish to save you as in earlier days.’ ”7 Albert of Aix, a Christian, described a similar slaughter in Mainz at the hands of a band of crusaders headed by one Count Emico. Again, there is a bishop who promises the Jews protection for money but is unable to deliver. “Then the excellent Bishop of the city cautiously set aside the incredible amount of money received from them [the Jews]. He placed the Jews in the very spacious hall of his own house, away from the sight of Emico and his followers, that they might remain safe and sound in a very secure and strong place.” The Jews were anything but safe, as Albert goes on to explain:
But Emico and the rest of his band held a council and, after sunrise, attacked the Jews in the hall with arrows and lances. Breaking the bolts and doors, they killed the Jews, about seven hundred in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and sex….Horrible to say, mothers cut the throats of nursing children with knives and stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus by their own hand rather than to be killed by the weapons of the uncircumcised.
From this cruel slaughter of the Jews a few escaped; and a few because of fear, rather than because of love of the Christian faith, were baptized. With very great spoils taken from this people, Count Emico, Clarebol, Thomas, and all that intolerable company of men and women then continued on their way to Jerusalem….8
There are so many common elements in the behavior of the crusaders en route to recapture Christian shrines from Muslims and the terror inflicted by groups like ISIS that, were it not for photographs of weapons that did not exist in the eleventh century, a Martian might assume that these were contemporaneous events. They include the choice between conversion and exile or death; the murders of women and children as well as of men who take up arms against the marauders; the destruction of cultural artifacts that offend the beliefs of the terrorists; and the imposition of financial penalties for anyone—“convert” or not—who tries to stay.
In June 2014, ISIS occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, where Christians had coexisted for more than a millennium with Muslims. The city was also home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious sect whose theology includes elements of Zoroastrianism as well as Islam and Christianity, and the Mandeans, an ancient non-Christian Gnostic faith whose prophet is not Jesus but John the Baptist. And there were at least two sects of Shiite Muslims, whose interpretation of Islam ran counter to whatever medieval concepts ISIS professes to represent. After blowing up a thirteenth-century Muslim shrine that had survived the Mongol invasion and possessed a fabled vaulted honeycomb ceiling—the terrorists have made a concerted effort to destroy any Muslim, Christian, or ancient pagan art objects they consider idolatrous—ISIS fighters then turned to the people of Mosul. According to CNN, whose team of reporters included many Arabic-speakers, ISIS ordered the Christians trapped in Mosul to convert to Islam, pay extra taxes to Islamic Shariah courts, or face “death by the sword.” Christians who did not agree to convert and pay extra taxes were given a deadline to leave the city before they would be put to death.9 Sound familiar?
Another terrible similarity between the plight of the Rhineland’s Jews during the First Crusade and the situation of all religious groups targeted by terrorists in the Middle East is the uncertainty about whether even an agreement to convert would help a person avoid execution—at least long enough to flee. Forced converts in the Middle East today (including Western hostages), like Conversos and Moriscos in Spain during the Inquisition, can never really win. Who would not suspect a Christian (or Muslim) in territory controlled by ISIS of concealing his true beliefs in order to save his life by embracing the terrorists’ brand of Islam?
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The horrors now being perpetrated in the name of a particular form of Islam provide yet another demonstration of what most religions, unmediated and unchecked by secular law, have been capable of doing throughout history. It took European Christendom more than six centuries to move from the mind-set that produced the Crusades to the beginnings of the concept of freedom of religion as a human right. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this book, and are political as well as religious, only a small proportion of the world’s largest Muslim communities have extensive experience with the long battle for freedom of conscience that is one of the greatest achievements of secular democracy. A widely publicized Pew poll of Muslims in Southern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia shows a close correlation between the absence of experience under secular government and support for strict Shariah penalties. Only 15 percent of Muslims in Bosnia, for example, and only 20 percent in Kosovo, support making Shariah the law of their lands. (Before the massacres of Muslims by Serbian Christians in the 1990s, Bosnia—especially in cities like Sarajevo—was a cosmopolitan society in which religious intermarriage was common.) In Turkey, where traditional Shariah courts were eliminated in the 1920s, only 12 percent of Muslims support government by Islamic law. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 99 percent and 84 percent, respectively, want rule by Shariah. In Egypt, where there has always been a huge gap between a secularized, educated elite and the poor—under British colonial rule, as well as since independence in 1953—74 percent of Muslims favor religious justice over secular courts and laws.10
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The relationship between shaky (or nonexistent) secular governing traditions and repression of overall religious freedom is also evident in the persecution of atheists and others who question theocratic practices in the Muslim world. In 2013, a Shariah court in Saudi Arabia—where no religion but Islam is permitted—sentenced the human rights activist Raif Badawi to the ancient penalty of a thousand lashes for “insulting Islam” by establishing a Web site to promote respect for freedom of religion, free speech, and women’s rights. The first flogging, w
hich specified lashes to be administered fifty at a time on successive Fridays (the Muslim Sabbath)—took place, in all its medieval glory, in January 2015. By then, the court had actually increased the defendant’s original sentence. Saudi officials kindly postponed the second lashing after doctors examined Badawi and found that his wounds had not healed sufficiently for him to be flogged again without dying. The practice of letting torture victims heal just enough so that they can live to be tortured another time is also an ancient one.
Indonesia, by contrast, has a “religious freedom” law that does guarantee freedom—but only for believers in Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Approximately 88 percent of Indonesians are Muslim. Any Indonesian citizen who criticizes any of these faiths can be sentenced to up to five years in prison for “insulting a major religion.” (Presumably, it is all right to insult the “minor religions” not specified in the law.) If the Internet is used as a forum for negative comments about religion, an additional six-year sentence may be imposed for blasphemy. Indonesia’s constitution, based on a political philosophy called Pancasila, criminalizes blasphemy at the same time that it “guarantees” freedom of religion and speech. Alexander Aan, a government data analyst and an atheist raised in a traditionalist Muslim family, was convicted in 2012 of “inciting religious hatred” for posting commentaries explaining his nonbelief in the existence of God on an atheist Facebook site established by Indonesians living in the Netherlands. When Aan’s Facebook postings became public knowledge in January 2012 (none of the articles about his case explained exactly how that happened), a mob showed up at his government office. “They wanted me to stop saying there is no God,” he explained. “I told them it was my right to express my beliefs.”11 Police officers stepped in, supposedly to prevent violence, and Aan was taken to the local police station and charged with inciting religious hatred. Having been sentenced to two and a half years in prison in June 2012, he was paroled after nineteen months. Before his trial, police had to transfer Aan from his local prison in West Sumatra’s capital, Padang, because he was badly beaten by a group of inmates who knew that he was an atheist. There were also public calls for his beheading.
While he was awaiting his sentence in 2012, Aan told a correspondent for The Guardian that he considered himself an atheist from an early age but hid his beliefs from his family and participated in all Muslim rituals. “From 11, I thought, ‘if God exists, why is there suffering? Why is there war, poverty, hell. My family would ask me my thoughts but I knew my answers would cause problems, so I kept quiet.” When he was twenty-six, in 2008, he finally told his family that he was an atheist, and his parents and siblings responded with disappointment and pleas for him to return to Islam.12
According to international human rights organizations, persecution of all religious minorities—including those protected by Indonesia’s constitution—has increased in Indonesia during the past ten years. Although both Catholicism and Protestantism are supposedly protected religions, the Indonesian Communion of Churches has reported that at least eighty churches have been closed each year since 2004. Other unprotected groups, such as the Baha’i and Shia and Ahmadiyah Muslims—just as in the Middle East—have faced mob violence, sometimes leading to death, from terrorists. But atheists occupy a special place in the psyches of those who want to see Indonesia turn in a more radical and theocratic Islamist direction. “If you are not a religious person, you might be dangerous to others, behaving without control and doing anything you like,” said the Muslim Padang clan chief, Zainuddin Datuk Rajo Lenggang. “Religion brings order. You cannot be an individualist.”13
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What Indonesia demonstrates, above all, is the impossibility of true freedom of conscience under any legal system based on favoritism for particular religions or for religion in general. Many Americans, including supposedly sophisticated members of the national media, just don’t get it. In The Wall Street Journal, Benedict Rogers reports:
According to the guiding political philosophy, Pancasila, Indonesia is a land of religious tolerance. The country’s six recognized religions…supposedly enjoy equal protection under the law in the Muslim-majority nation. Pancasila is Indonesia’s official ideology. Children nationwide have been taught to believe it since the country’s independence in 1945. Pancasila is also a myth.14
Of course Pancasila is a myth. And even if it were everything it claimed to be, religious “tolerance” cannot exist under a government that officially favors six hundred religions, six religions, or one religion. Unless people are free to convert to any religion or to reject religious belief altogether, there is no such thing as true liberty of conscience.
Wherever there is endemic confusion between religious and secular law, religious dissent and religious dissenters, of every ilk, are treated as the Other, the enemy. Vaguely expressed ideals of religious tolerance are no substitute for written guarantees. In Indonesia’s neighbor Malaysia, the government prohibits the use of the Malay word for God—which just happens to be “Allah”—by non-Muslims. (About 60 percent of Malaysians are Muslim, but the country has substantial Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu minorities.) The ruling is posted on the government’s “e-fatwa” Web site. Since 1981, the printing, publication, and possession of Malay-language Bibles has been against the law, on the grounds that vernacular Bibles could be used to proselytize Muslims (an illegal act in Malaysia) and seduce them into converting to another religion. The backstory to this Malaysian law’s concern about proselytizing is the seventeenth-century translation of the King James Bible into Malay, financed by Robert Boyle for the explicit purpose of promoting conversions to Christianity among indigenous peoples in an area where the English were establishing a naval and trading presence. In today’s Muslim-majority Malaysia, it is emphatically not illegal for Muslims to proselytize citizens of other religions. Again, fear and loathing of conversion to the “wrong” religion emerge as central concerns of theocracies—in this case, of a government that presents itself to the West as the very model of a modern, tolerant Muslim state where minorities may practice their religions (as long as they don’t flash vernacular Bibles around on the bus).
Limited religious toleration was a huge step forward in seventeenth-century Europe; in the twenty-first century, grudging toleration shows only that much of the world is far behind on the road illuminated by ideas of human rights that emerged from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century secular liberalism. Moreover, many people in many parts of the world do not want to go down that road at all.
Some years ago, in a review of my book Freethinkers, an American religious conservative criticized me for my positive view of the “so-called” Enlightenment. Since he was a Protestant, he presumably did not object to my unmodified use of the term “Reformation.” The Enlightenment bashers like to focus on the Jacobin terror in France and ignore the Scottish, British, and American Enlightenments—as well as the Enlightenment-steeped framers of the Constitution, who brought the United States into being without the internal revolutionary terror that occurred in countries, such as France, with a long history of a state-established church tied to the monarchy and aristocracy. Most “what if?” questions cannot be answered with any degree of certitude. We do know, however, what societies look like today if they have not gone through the tortuous, centuries-long journey from medieval theocracy through an Enlightenment that—however flawed and still a work in progress—recognizes the right of all human beings to believe exactly what they want, to change their religious beliefs as often as they want, or to believe in no religion at all. We can answer the question of what the Western world would have been like without the Enlightenment because we can see what other human beings are enduring now for holding the wrong beliefs in the wrong place at the wrong time, in societies where so-called secular law is subordinate to the laws and lawlessness of self-appointed spokesmen for God.
The great irony inherent in attempts to suppress both religious proselytizing and religi
ous conversion (unless the convert chooses the faith favored by a state or a would-be state run by terrorists) is that they ignore not only the villain of modern secularism but the older historical experience and beliefs that absolutists claim to revere.
The history of all religions suggests that the human desire to explore new forms of belief is unstoppable, and that coercion, for whatever length of time it may succeed, produces a false uniformity that collapses as swiftly or slowly as social conditions permit. In his Edinburgh lectures, William James argued that all religions develop as a solution to a profound uneasiness. He described the uneasiness, “reduced to its simplest terms,” as “a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand,” whereas the solution “is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.”15 That the “proper connection” can never be permanently imposed through exemplary beheadings or the banning of “sacred” texts in the vernacular is a lesson that has been administered repeatedly to various groups of coercive True Believers (including secularist totalitarians). James was talking about being saved from a sense of wrongness in a psychological and/or spiritual sense; this liberal thinker of the nineteenth century was, after all, a descendant of Calvinists. If the religious impulse is indeed rooted in a profound sense of unworthiness and the need for rescue from a fallen state, the inability of humans to agree on one “proper connection” to a greater power—regardless of external pressure—is the most persistent feature of religious history.