God of Love?

It was almost certainly a deliberate and very telling editorial decision, but one page of the print Guardian should have caught the attention of any reader today.

Emblazoned across the top of the page was the headline:

Pakistani girl accused of Qur'an burning could face death penalty

In an outskirt of Islamabad, an eleven year old Christian girl has been accused of blasphemy, a capital crime in Pakistan, for allegedly burning some pages of the Qu'ran - her family dispute this, claiming she was tricked by a Muslim neighbour into throwing ash into a pot with pages from the Muslim holy book already in it. Whatever happened, this child has now been arrested and nine hundred Christians expelled from the area.

Although he is a priest for a faith whose founder called on its followers to extend special protections to Christians and Jews as "Peoples of the Book", the local mullah is quoted as approving of the expulsions, not only because of the alleged book burning, but because of the infernal singing of hymns in the local churches (now closed).

"They have done this to provoke the Muslims, like they have with their noisy banging and singing from their churches," said a local mullah, who would not give his name. "We are not upset the Christians have left and we will be pleased if they don't come back."

On the same page, the next article similarly told the tragic tale of religious intolerance and the hypocritical taking of lives in the name of faiths that all outlaw killing.

Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians listed as 'terrorist incidents' by US

The US Government has finally declared as terroristic a longstanding pattern of hate crimes by Jewish settlers in Palestinian lands against Arabs - and even the Israeli Government has condemned in similar terms a series of attacks by settlers over the last few weeks which have included the random beating of a young Arab by a mob and the firebombing of a taxi carrying Arab children. The "Hilltop Youth", a group of Zionist extremists, has been linked to attacks that have killed three Palestinians and injured 183 over recent months. 10,000 olive trees, vital for Arab farmers' livelihoods, have been destroyed and in 90% of cases, the Israeli police have closed the case without charge.

During the same time, Palestinians have murdered a Jewish settler family in their home and bombed a bus terminal in Jerusalem, killing one and injuring fifty. Some may argue that the continuing and desperate siege of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands live in ghetto conditions surrounded by the Israeli army, somehow justifies such assaults, yet how can it? Such attacks are not war, but simple murders with civilians as their targets - as such, they detract from the real injustices and murder committed against Gazans by the Israeli state and invite the enemies of Palestine to create some moral equivalence between oppressor and oppressed.

And the three faiths involved - the Judaism of Israel and the Islam and minority Christianity of the Palestinians all talk of the sanctity of life. Yet here we see blood shed in the name of these same faiths.

The final article is less directly focussed on interfaith disputes, but shows how bigotry, in this case Christian-led against Muslims, can lead to laws with supposedly unintended consequences for all.

Pussy Riot protesters arrested in Marseille

Arrested because...?

Because in a fit of Islamophobia, France has banned the niqab, the face covering worn by some Muslim women as a mark of their faith. It is a policy advocated by many rightwingers in Europe - curiously adopting the same policy adopted by President Assad in Syria, who enacted a similar ban on such garments in universities, while until recently Turkey imposed a similar ban on Islamic dress in public buildings. Why so many are so obsessed with what others wear has always been a puzzle to me - it also ignores the possibility that, while some people may ban face-coverings now, this is setting a precedent for other people to ban other forms of dress they don't like. For example, what if the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths club together to ban women wearing trousers? Or to insist that men must stop shaving (a sinful activity in all three faiths writings)?

In France, the law has been used to arrest people who wore balaclavas over their faces to show solidarity with the similarly-clad Russian punks, Pussy Riot, three of whom were jailed for two years at the weekend. Supposedly, the French arrests prove that the niqab law is not about niqabs at all - but about face coverings and so not aimed in particular at Muslims. It seems an ingenuous argument and a patent lie - the law was inspired and argued for by pro-Christian rightists supposedly to defend alleged and undefined "French republican values". The last time I looked, the values of the Republic included liberte; but in modern France, it seems noticeable by its absence, especially for liberal protesters and for Muslim women of a certain outlook.

And the point behind all these sad stories of intolerance, violence and bigotry?

JUDAISM: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"      (Leviticus 19:18)

CHRISTIANITY: "Love your neighbor as yourself.'           (Matthew 22:36-40, NIV)

ISLAM: "Do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, the poor, the neighbour who is near of kin, the neighbour who is a stranger..."                                             (Qu'ran Ch4, v 36)

"We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ishmai'l, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets form their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we submit to God."  Qur'an (2:136)

Each faith stems from the same beginnings, shares a number of Prophets and holds, on paper at least, the many of the same or similar teachings, mostly based on respect and love. Yet, as we know, so often the reality is warped beyond recognition by the fundamentalists and bigots of each. It may be a trait within monotheism - if there is One God with One Way which has to be revealed to His followers, then the corollary is that those who don't agree with you must not only be wrong, but sinfully against God too. And so what is the duty of a believer? The majority of each faith see it as little more than proselytising, if even that - for the truth is that most people of faith live in at least passive tolerance of each other the overwhelming majority of the time; many learn to respect and share each other. 

But where belief morphs into blind faith with its attendant dogmatic superiority and is manipulated by those with a political agenda to boot - racial supremacy, land grabs or simply scapegoating for some sort of gain, then we see the headlines of today. A sad, bad and foreboding taste of how the 21st Century presents itself as far from the enlightened "modern" society it would like to think it is; but rather, the echoes of the Dark Ages and the dark hearts of the zealots of monotheism grow louder and louder with every day. It is a harbinger of a dystopian future of neo-Inquisitorial theocracy. Torquemada would approve.

We let the headlines pass at our own risk.

Jews, Christians and Muslims - one God, three faiths.

"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1