When he went to Cairo to train as a teacher, he was disgusted by his fellow students, whom he described as ‘nihilists and libertarians’. He was horrified too by the debauchery of the Europeans, their addiction to liquor and frivolous entertainments, their talk about the liberation of women, casting doubts on tradition, and treating everything Western, American or British as sacred. The theatres, concerts and cinemas of the city did not interest him, nor learning foreign languages. He abhorred the ‘conflicting debates’ within Islam, ‘the tangles of terminology and scholastic labyrinths’ of its theologians and their ‘petty squabbles’, and so started preaching to the public in coffee houses. He proved to be extremely persuasive, charismatic and a brilliant organiser. A group formed around him swearing to follow him, ‘to live and die for Islam’. He wanted them to ‘hold identical views with me’ and to be people who ‘love the upholders of such views’, rejecting ‘the hotch-potch of confused . . . non-Islamic ideas’.
Then he added nationalism to his creed. As a primary school teacher in Ismailia, Britain’s principal military base in Egypt, a sense of ‘humiliation and captivity’ in the face of foreign occupation inflamed his fervent patriotism. ‘I wish to train the nation for an honourable and dignified place in the world . . . It is incumbent on every Muslim that he must become the leader of the world’, excelling in every field, while avoiding materialism or self-promotion. Soon he was attracting huge crowds in mosques and establishing branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all over Egypt. His followers gave the Brotherhood as much as half their earnings; they established businesses to support its work, and a welfare organisation that provided friendly help for the needy, the sick, the unemployed and the very young – cheap medicine, vocational training, financial assistance. He himself lived in a rented room very modestly, constantly affable, saluting everyone, enquiring about their children by name, the progress of their education and even the welfare of their animals; his memory was prodigious.
These two versions of the Muslim ideal were diametrically opposed. They expressed a clash of imaginations. Indonesia contains 17,508 islands, 300 different ethnicities, and speaks 742 languages and dialects, and it has had to adapt its original animist religion successively to Muslim conversion, Hindu rulers, Dutch colonisation, Japanese occupation, the world’s third largest communist party, nationalism and capitalism. Variations of each of these ideologies survived in different places in different degrees. Change was often resisted, to the extent of some communities maintaining their refusal to pay tribute for two centuries, but innumerable Indonesians learned to live with others of seemingly opposed philosophies, ignoring each other’s beliefs, valuing not theoretical adherence to a dogma but practical good sense and experience. They treasured their village feasts which brought them together, including every nuance of opinion. Children moved between different households, choosing a favourite aunt or uncle from outside the family, so that families unconnected by blood were common, for it was considered improper to refuse if another family asked to foster or ‘borrow’ your child. ‘For weddings and funerals, people needed Islam, for earthly blessings, they appealed to ancestors, and for magical protection they contacted the village guardian spirit.’ The caretaker of the mosque who led prayers at weddings and funerals did not always bother to fast during Ramadan or pray five times a day; one of them said that those who did were ‘just showing off’, and the only hell he personally feared was the police station. A village headman summed up this doctrine of live-and-let-live thus: ‘Islam means welfare and prosperity, which all people seek, so everyone is Muslim.’ A pious puritan condemned three-quarters of the inhabitants as being Muslims only in name, seldom praying or performing their religious duties. For a long time those who ignored religion were, on the whole, not harassed.
But at the end of the twentieth century that suddenly changed. What the locals called ‘Arab Islam’ arrived, different from the Indian version that had converted Indonesia many centuries before and had been more individualist, internalised, tolerant, shaped by a kind of Sufism that placed less emphasis on public worship. The new preachers became more threatening: ‘People are ignorant and it is our duty to teach them; a Muslim must behave like one; ignorant people cannot decide these things for themselves, they need to be told; and if they do not comply, they must be punished.’ Schoolchildren were taught to memorise the Quran in Arabic; though they did not speak the language; as one of them said, ‘God never said anything I could understand.’ Women began wearing head-scarves. Arab Islam became the new face of modernity, replacing both nationalism and communism as a response to humiliation, poverty or disappointment. A born-again Muslim said: ‘For the first time in my life I feel awake . . . I feel my faith getting stronger by the day, almost like a force . . . Did you notice how full the mosque was on Friday? After five hundred years, Islam is finally making progress.’ Of course there were many who resented being told what to believe and what to do. But others said, ‘Nowadays, people have too many wishes and a thousand ways of satisfying them; they are ruled by their passions. Islam saves you from yourself.’
There is not a clash of civilisations between Christianity and Islam, but a clash of imaginations within each of them. Both have endlessly clashed inside their own ranks about how to interpret their ideals, because they harbour such a huge variety of temperaments. Most civilisations and most religions have clashed internally between two visions, between on the one hand civilisation as a city-fortress, surrounded by walls, protecting itself against barbarians and rejecting the vices of the external world, and on the other hand the city–port, always hungry for what it does not possess, searching for a better life by trading with strangers and importing novelties without too many worries about where they might lead. It is a division between those who want life simplified and those who accept that it is a muddle of contradictions and complexities, between those who like to know what is expected of them and those who prefer to invent their own solutions, between those who value having basic laws and texts that need to be obeyed and those who question, argue and resist. However, because individuals have inconsistent attitudes in different situations and few have been either puritan or worldly in everything they do and say and think, the clashes between them are not collisions but more like bells rung together out of sequence.
Al-Banna was part of a long tradition found intermittently in most religions, protesting against greed and lechery, demanding stricter morality and a renunciation of frivolous pleasures, aiming for ecstatic experiences of the divine through abstinence or asceticism or even martyrdom. Puritanism has alternated between trying to impose its ideas on everyone else so as to eliminate sin from the world, and withdrawing from its wickedness to pursue a self-contained existence isolated from pernicious influences. The founders of America’s Southern Baptists rejected modern morality in much the same way as al-Banna.
Wahid’s universalism, by contrast, represented an equally widespread tradition, which flourished with exceptional brilliance during Islam’s golden age, as well as in periods of renaissance in other regions. After conquering large portions of the earth, Muslims had the confidence to be curious about all previous wisdoms, to absorb them, to synthesise them, to advance beyond them, innovating not only in many branches of knowledge, but also in the arts, with a vast multiplication of heterodox ideas and a free flowering of passionate love poetry unrestrained by convention. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, is in this tradition, and calls himself a Universalist Unitarian, a member of a religion which has no fixed creed, giving each member freedom to search for truth and to incorporate elements of other faiths. He draws a parallel between this religion and the internet, which facilitates interest in all cultures. Though Unitarians began as a Christian nonconformist minority, they are almost as open to other faiths as Eastern religions which reject the idea that to follow one religion must necessarily be to exclude all others. An extraordinary number of pioneers have links with the Unitarians: Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer of f
eminism, John Locke, the pioneer of toleration, Florence Nightingale, the nursing pioneer, Albert Schweitzer, possibly the first Médecin sans frontières, Josiah Wedgwood, who not only industrialised pottery making but may have also been the inventor of modern marketing (using direct mail, money-back guarantees, and buy one and get one free); Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, four other U.S. presidents and a whole variety of adventurous minds.
Does this mean that puritans of different religions can appreciate each other and realise what they have in common? No, religions which make proselytising an important part of their creed are rivals in the race to capture hearts and minds. Though interfaith dialogue is increasingly fashionable, competition between religions is in many places intense. Nobody knows how many converts each religion makes each day, or the exact effect that has, but the passion for proselytisation across national boundaries has never been so widespread. The Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, for example, established in a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro in 1977, has over a thousand churches in eighty countries, with an international organisation that ‘would be the envy of many a CEO’; able for example to convert a Pakistani in Russia who then starts a Brazilian church in his home country. The international arm of Japan’s Nicheren Buddhists, the Soka Gakkai, claims twelve million followers in eighty-two countries. Turks are opening Muslim schools in the southern parts of the old Soviet empire, training the new elites, while Koreans are advancing into its Asian domains, as well as Africa. Formerly colonised countries are now sending missionaries to convert their colonisers. There are perhaps half a million professional missionaries travelling the world, and innumerable amateurs who go abroad for short periods of proselytising, in addition to the constant duty to convert compatriots. This is the spiritual counterpart to globalisation. Pentecostalism has in less than half a century made about 500 million converts, but there is an enormous variety of options to choose from. The use of every kind of media and every kind of marketing method is making competition between religions almost as vigorous as between business brands.
However, humanity’s inability to agree on what it wants to believe does not inevitably condemn it to permanent conflict or mistrust. Past experience suggests that when people feel appreciated rather than threatened, they can become more curious about the world outside their own. One of the greatest compliments one can pay another is to show interest in them. One of the best ways of enriching oneself is to learn what others think. Humans do not always have to imitate the snail which retreats into its shell at the slightest sign of danger.
I once had a meeting with an eminent Iranian ayatollah. He fulminated angrily for an hour against the misdeeds of the West. When he had finished, his anger vanished, he smiled, he put his arm round me and said, ‘I should like to come again.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you listened to me.’
That gesture, that one remark, opened up a human side that usually remains hidden in the confrontations of doctrine. It immediately turned disagreement into curiosity. But I know that curiosity by itself is only a beginning, an opening of a door, which leads nowhere unless it is accompanied by knowledge. To listen is not enough, to understand requires a preparation with information, reading and enquiry so that one is not just an uncomprehending stranger. To be understood involves being able to offer ideas that illuminate the concerns and resonate with the thoughts of those whose stance one does not share. Understanding does not eliminate disagreement, but it transforms disagreement into an enriching experience, a feeling that one is being allowed to enter into the mysteries of human variability and to escape from being only partly alive. Despite all the bitter quarrels between and within religions, I value the memory of this ayatollah insisting that one essential feature of the Shi’a tradition is that it respects individual judgement. Ideals seldom become reality, but this is a clue not to be missed.
[9]
How can a religion change?
THE MORE EDUCATED PEOPLE ARE, the more doubts they have. By the twentieth century, a Catholic monk, having studied at Cambridge and Columbia universities, was praying in these words:
‘My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Thomas Merton (1915–1968), who wrote this now much repeated prayer, spent many years trying to discover what he should do with his life. Opening the Bible at random in search of guidance he put his finger on the phrase ‘Thou shalt be silent’, so he withdrew from the world and became a Trappist monk. Nonetheless, neither his faith nor his activism for peace and social justice could wholly satisfy him and he devoted much energy to conversations with leaders of Eastern religions. His autobiography was a bestseller because he openly expressed widely shared doubts, and these show no signs of disappearing. The more religions, ideologies and distractions there are to choose from, the fewer the escape routes out of doubt.
‘We all worship the same God.’ Is that true? And what about those who say they have no god? Is a single religion that would please and unite everybody a possible goal? At the age of twenty-four, a handsome and charismatic native of Babylon called Mani (A.D. 213–276) decided it was.
He invented what for over three centuries was one of the most widespread religions on earth. It expanded rapidly, from France and Spain and North Africa (where St Augustine was a follower for nine years before becoming a Christian) as far as India and China. The Uighur empire, which once extended over large parts of Central Asia and was remarkable for its passion for theological debate, adopted it as its state religion. It flourished, with ups and downs, for nearly a thousand years in China, where Mani came to be regarded as a reincarnation of Lao-tzu and his religion virtually amalgamated with Taoism. In one wave of persecution, 4,600 of its monasteries and 40,000 temples and shrines were said to have been destroyed, but it recovered and revived, and metamorphosed into a Chinese secret society.
Other religions, said Mani, were linked with one country, and presented in one language; but he was offering a faith that would combine all faiths, for every country in every language, adapted to local traditions and even local beliefs, however discordant. He wove Christian, Buddhist, Gnostic and Zoroastrian thoughts into a dramatic mythology about how the world came to be in the mess it was. In the Middle East, he presented himself as an apostle of Christ.
After visiting India, he adopted the doctrine of transmigration of souls. In Iran, he incorporated Iranian divinities. He travelled everywhere for many years, personally enrolling kings and communities of all kinds to his cause. No religion has ever been so flexible. It was as though the executives of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which today claims to be at once global and local, were to change their clothing as they fly around the world, exchanging their pin-striped business suits for the flowing robes of the bazaar or kimonos or saris.
Mani knew how to appeal to both pessimism and optimism. God, he said, was not omnipotent, he could not solve the conflict between good and evil, though his angels might try to contain it. Evil came from Greed. It was no use fighting it. He prophesied that there would be war, strife and poverty till the end of time. But he offered a refuge: the creation of beauty, gentleness, non-violence, vegetarianism, and simple living. His religion grew rich as
it expanded, despite its belief in simplicity.
The way Mani won adherents reveals that his converts were not necessarily won over just by his teachings, let alone by such rituals as a whole month of fasting each year. He was an aesthete. He devoted himself not only to proclaiming his gospel, but to literature and the fine arts. The trouble with previous religious reformers, he said, was that they only talked, but never wrote books. So he wrote seven. He illustrated them himself, and indeed his seventh volume was composed entirely of pictures. He also wrote an autobiography, devised a splendid calligraphy, and made his books into complete works of art with amazing bindings covered in gold leaf – and this passion for beauty became a tradition in all the subsequent literature of his religion. He is remembered as a great artist in his native country today, overshadowing his ancient reputation as a heretic. He was also a devoted musician and pictures have been found showing a full orchestra accompanying his religious services.
He was more interested in bringing light into the world than in battling with dark devils. The methods of his disciples are revealed in a manuscript about one of them, Julia of Antioch, who migrated around A.D. 400 to Gaza in Palestine, accompanied by two younger women and two young men, described as particularly beautiful, of humble disposition and gentle character. She went door to door, visiting people in their homes and inviting them to hers, making converts by offering social services to the poor. That only annoyed rival churches, who accused her of holding orgies at which lavish meals were served.
A world religion is a challenge to all existing religions. Mani’s readiness to form loose alliances with almost any faith aroused the hostility of all those for whom religion was a community with finite boundaries and a vision of the truth that outsiders could not fully appreciate. His enemies had him arrested and he died in prison, flayed alive according to one legend. For centuries after his death, Manicheanism continued to be regarded as a serious rival by the leaders of all the established religions – Zoroastrian, Muslim, Christian and Confucian – who gradually succeeded in wiping virtually all trace of it from the face of the earth, with unusual thoroughness. Only very recently have astonishing archeological finds in Egypt and Turkestan, exhuming its vanished monuments and scriptures, begun to reveal what the insults of his detractors had concealed.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 10