by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“Have you learned nothing from history?”

Freud (The Future of an Illusion)

In the US, Donald Trump, the orange-haired billionaire whose claim to fame includes a string of spectacular business failures, is about to become the official nominee of the Republican Party. In the UK, Sadiq Khan, the son of immigrant parents from Pakistan, defeated an insidious campaign of religious fear-mongering to become the mayor of London. Mr. Trump, whose anti-immigrant plans include building a wall along the border with Mexico and an outright ban on Muslims entering the US, announced that he will most probably make an exception in the case of London’s new Lord Mayor. Mr. Khan politely turned down the concession, warning that Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric “…risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of the extremists.”i

Mr. Trump, in his obsessive desire to gain the presidency, has embraced Salvationist politics, portraying himself as the political saviour of white Christian Americans. In this advocacy of government of, by and for the ‘chosen people’, chosen on the basis of a primordial identity, Mr. Trump is no different from the Islamic State (IS) or fundamentalists of any other religion or race. From orient to occident, extremists of every race and fundamentalists of every creed have a similar aim – the purification of the land (reinen in the Nazi parlance) by evicting/suppressing the racial, religious or politico-cultural ‘Other’.

In Sri Lanka, before Black July and the long Eelam War, there was the myth of the encroaching Tamil who was taking over ‘our’ schools, ‘our’ universities and ‘our’ government jobs. Today there are similar whispers about the moneyed Muslim who predominates in ‘our’ shops and ‘our’ holiday resorts. In between there was – and will be – grousing about the insidious Christian who is converting ‘our’ people.

Prejudice and intolerance are not the preserve of one people, but the common bane of every race and religion. When the LTTE expelled Muslims en masse, very few Tamils protested. In some Muslim majority areas in the East, adherents of more extremist variants of Islam (especially Wahabism) attack and victimise fellow Muslims they consider to be improper Muslims or non-Muslims. Such facts are both undeniable and immaterial. The rights of minorities (or any discriminated community) should be protected and fought for not because they are good people but because they are people, fellow human beings like us. It is precisely this common humanity that extremists of every race, fundamentalists of every creed object to and deny.

Different Faultlines

Samuel Huntingdon saw global history as a clash of rival and incompatible civilisations. But historical evidence and current events point to a far more nuanced faultline which runs not between civilisations or religions, but through each civilisation and each religion, dividing moderation from extremism.

During the middle ages, Europe was a wasteland of religious intolerance and bigotry while the Islamic world, by contrast, was far more open and tolerant. An illuminating example is the case of Muhammad al-Razi, thinker, polymath and physician, who lived between 824 CE and 925 CE. Al-Razi is believed to have authored two ‘heretical’ books, ‘On Prophesies’ and ‘The Prophet’s Fraudulent Tricks’. The following excerpt said to be from the second book is probably indicative of the whole: “If the people of this religion are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.”

Al-Razi was not beheaded or even incarcerated for writing such words. Instead he was highly respected for his learning. The orthodox philosopher Amiri’s complaint about the honourable position occupied by al-Razi is an unintended compliment to the tolerance of Islamic middle ages: “The extraordinary thing about the people of our own time is that, when they see that a man has read Euclid’s book and mastered the principles of logic, they describe him as a sage…even if he completely lacks (knowledge of) the divine sciences. Thus they ascribe wisdom to Muhammad b.Zakariya al-Razi because his proficiency in medicine – this in spite of his various ravings.”ii

The Islamic fundamentalists of today are throwbacks not to the relatively more tolerant Islamic middle ages but the absolutely intolerant Christian middle ages.

When Philip Pullman’s book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, came out, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams responded to the provocative title and the content. The prelate did not scream ‘heresy’, nor accuse Mr. Pullman of denigrating Christianity nor demand the immediate banning of the book. Instead he penned a critique of the book, conceding a point here, disputing another there, and concluded by maintaining the superiority and relevance of the New Testament.

That is how religious controversies should be conducted in civilised societies.

If a book supportive of the Buddha but critical of Buddhism as a religion, even sans such a provocative title as Mr. Pullman’s, is published in Sri Lanka, instead of reasoned debate, there will be invective, screechy and fuming; and violence.

A few centuries ago, Mr. Pullman, and innumerable other authors who debate, deny or ridicule Christ and Christianity in the West, would have met a different fate. Heresy was a crime in Christian Rome and became a crime in Christian Europe, often punishable by death.

Religion, wrote Karl Marx famously, is the opium of the people. Marx was writing about 19th Century Christianity, after it was done with its holy wars, its inquisitions and its burnings, long after Emperor Justinian’s fight against heresy destroyed the intellectual achievements of the Greco-Roman world and condemned Europe to centuries of backwardness, long after the Crusades rained devastation, long after denominational wars laid waste to parts of Europe.

“If Richard Cœur – de – Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced Free Trade instead of getting mixed up in the Crusades we would have been spared 500 years of misery and stupidity,”iii Engels pointed out. Today Islam is repeating that history. By the time the multiple religious wars in the Middle East are over, the region is likely to have become a real life dystopia, politically, economically, culturally and environmentally.

Islam is not the only religion retreating into the black-hole of all-consuming ignorance and lethal intolerance Christianity escaped from. Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism too are headed in the same direction, albeit at a much, much slower pace. Of the major world religions, perhaps the only one which has escaped the virus of violence from its inception until now is Jainism. The reasons for this exception need to be investigated. One explanation may be that Jainism is not and has never been a state or a racial/national religion – and therefore never had its own version of politics of salvation as all other religions did.

Europe (and America) escaped the scourge of religious extremism and politics of salvation by putting Christianity in its allotted (politically marginal) place. That transformation came from within the religious community. It was led by Christians, often at great risk. Books not guns were their weapons of choice. Eventually laws could be changed because minds had changed.

Avijit Roy was a Bangladeshi atheist and blogger who was hacked to death by a fundamentalist mob, in broad daylight during a book fair in Dhaka. When Roy’s widow, Bonya Ahmed (who was severely injured in the attack which killed Roy), was chosen to give the 2015 Voltaire Lecture, she gave her talk an interesting title, Fighting Machetes with Pensiv. Beating the scourge of fundamentalism will require a long war in the terrain of ideas, even though one side will not hesitate wield machetes and every other weapon, ancient and new.

As Martha Nussbaum points out, “…the real clash is not a civilizational one between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations – between people who are prepared to live with others who are different on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.” v That struggle for a world in which a human being will not be punished for his/her ideas is an integral and essential component of the larger struggle for basic freedoms and rights.

The Dangerous Saviours

American columnist Adam Gopnik in a recent piece itemised common characteristics of politics of salvation. “…an incoherent programme of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing government….is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism…; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimisation;…failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original programme of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe.”vi

And always the need for the enemy within and without, some enemy, the enemy who necessitates the existence of a saviour.

Historically politics of salvation have achieved success almost always in times of economic discontent. When economic growth or recovery happens at the cost of the poor and the middle classes, when relative poverty increases deepening the gulf between the haves and have-nots, when solemn promises about economic relief are broken by politicians, alienation results. And alienation makes a segment of the populace vulnerable to appeals of extremism and to the inevitable searches for ‘scapegoats’. In multi-ethnic and multi-religious countries such as ours the extremisms are usually based on ethno-religious identities while the ‘scapegoats’ are naturally the ethnic/religious ‘other’. From that to instability and upheaval, violence and bloodshed is only a short step.

Dysfunctional economics is a threat to political stability and democracy. The unwillingness of major Western powers and international financial institutions to abandon their insistence on economics of austerity and to do for the Middle East what was done for the war-devastated Western Europe through the Marshall Plan played a significant role in the undermining of the Arab Spring and its replacement by a brutal winter of extremism.

A somewhat similar drama might be in the making in Sri Lanka. The government’s new economic regimen threatens to undermine its credibility and legitimacy, and enable the pro-Rajapaksa opposition to find its way out of the rubbish heap of history.

According to media reports, a UPFA parliamentarian who is a member of the pro-Rajapaksa Joint Opposition became the first to cash in on the vehicle bonanza – he imported a vehicle worth Rs.40 million and paid the princely sum of Rs. 1,750 as import taxesvii. The rest of the parliamentarians are likely to follow suit, ere long. When it comes to venality and cupidity, Lankan lawmakers are distressingly similar. But such outrages will hurt the government far more than the pro-Rajapaksa opposition. The electorate does not expect honesty or probity from the Rajapaksa clique. The government won by advocating a higher standard, and will be judged in accordance, come election time.

As economic austerity begins to bite, the Sinhala-Buddhist majority’s receptivity to the violently intolerant political creed of the Rajapaksa clique will increase. The Rajapaksas, like Donald Trump, will portray themselves, again, as the saviours of victimised Sinhala-Buddhists, betrayed by an ‘anti-national’ government which is on the side of the minorities, India and the West. That Rajapaksa gamble may or may not work, electorally. Either way, it will undermine the post-January 8th gains and turn Sri Lanka into a more divided, more intolerant and more violent land.

Courtesy:Sunday Island