Paper from Working Group 4 - 56th Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs,11-15 November 2006

Abstract

This paper looks at the sacred realm –as distinct from both the public and the private realm- as a contested space, full of old and new threats and challenges. As to conventional inter-religious violence the challenge today is to preserve both a culture of tolerance and the rule of law as basic guarantees against political manipulation of religious sentiments. A new challenge lies in constructive responses to the current ideological ‘wars of words and discourses’ in a climate of rapidly growing sensitivity. In response to this clash between ‘Anti-Western Occidentalism’ and ‘Anti-Islamic Secularism’ it is suggested to approach the sacred realm not from the outside but rather from within. A major challenge is to remove ‘holy texts’ of an aggressive nature from the realm of practical politics. As the real ‘war’ is between moderate Islam and radical political Islam, it is not particularly wise to treat Islam as if it were just one monolithic threat. By providing a space for creative hermeneutics a more positive contribution might be made. Finally, violence may also be perceived in connection with a sense of powerlessness in attempts to address major injustices in our world today.

Bas de Gaay Fortman

Professor of Political Economy of Human Rights at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Former Dutch MP and Senator (1971-1991). Chair of the Working Programme on States, Societies and Conflict of the Netherlands Research School for Development Studies (CERES). Member of the Committee for Development Co-operation of the Netherlands Advisory Council for International Affairs. Among his more recent publications are Globalization and Its New Divides: Malcontents, Recipes, and Reform, Amsterdam: Dutch University Press & West Lafayette (Ind.): Purdue University Press, 2003 (co-editor with Paul van Seters and Arie de Ruijter and author of two chapters), and From Warfare to Welfare. Human Security in a Southern African Context, Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004 (co-editor with Marie Muller and author of a chapter), and ‘Violence among peoples in the light of human frustration and aggression’, in European Journal of Pharmacology (international journal published by Elsevier), 526 (2005), pp. 2-8.

THE SACRED REALM: DOMAIN OF NEW THREATS AND CHALLENGES
Bas de Gaay Fortman

Introduction: An Open Nerve

In many villages in the Netherlands, but rarely in the cities, people refrain from noisy operations on Sundays, such as cutting their grass or blowing away autumnal leaves. At stake is “Sunday serenity”, to be respected by everyone, through the ages. The noise of church bells is accepted, however, practically during the whole day, as distinct churches have different times at which they call believers to their services. What we touch upon here are peaceful practices relating to the sacred realm, a space only partly subject to public law and order. The term is used by, among others, city architects: aside from the private realm of houses and offices and the public realm of roads, parks and squares, there is also a sacred realm of mosques, churches, temples, monuments and graveyards. In the setting of the present study on new challenges to human security the term will be used particularly in a figurative sense, as a field of orientation and focus, an area of beliefs, feelings, and emotions but also of rituals, symbols and words.

Already half a century ago there was a feeling that the sacred realm would disappear before long. As Wright Mills put it rather bluntly:

“Once the world was filled with the sacred – in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernisation swept across the globe and secularisation, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm” (Wright Mills 1959: 32-34, as quoted in Norris and Inglehart 2004: 3).

While the trend towards secularisation continues in the West, this does not apply to the world as a whole. In their study Sacred and Secular Norris and Inglehart conclude:

”1. The publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past fifty years. Nevertheless,

2. The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before –and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population” (2004: 5).

Clearly, all those believers do not accept a confinement of words and practices based on their religious views purely to the private realm. Far from vanished, the sacred realm now dominates the international news, almost from day to day. Gravely, it has become an area full of sparks that tend to set fire throughout the world’s tinder. Yet, for ‘secularists’ the view that the sacred realm were just to evaporate into the private realm has assumed normative proportions: as something that just ought to happen. The cartoon drawings of the Prophet Mohamed that set off mass demonstrations all over the world in the first months of 2006 are a case in point. Notably, these did not emerge from autonomous artistic desires to express contemporary views on the founder of Islam but instead they constituted responses to a Danish newspaper editor’s explicit invitation to draw such cartoons. Once published in Denmark a full process of ‘mediatization’ followed, with an awkward aftermath. In a first stage it was just Danish Muslims who consulted their teachers in Arab countries of origin. Next, it became a full media-hype in which the cartoons were brought to public attention in all sorts of places where people might be easily incited. We live, indeed, in a ‘symbolic society’ in which spreading information through newspapers, (summarised) reports and oral accounts has been largely replaced by electronic dissemination through symbols, images and words transmitted on the internet by websites with instant video- and audiotapes (Elchardus 2002). Although as a result of processes of individualisation in principle more autonomous than ever before, the individual has actually become an easy prey to media manipulation. Public anxiety, culminating in mass demonstrations, can be quite easily mobilised today, and this certainly applies to ‘religious’ violence. Illustrative of the irrationality at the roots of such violence are some totally unreasonable expressions of protest against the cartoons. In Pakistan, for example, Christian schools and hospitals were attacked, whereas both global and local Christian leaders had fully condemned the cartoons. On average ninety percent of students and patients in the molested institutions were Muslim.

Instances of folly abound. In the Netherlands a cabinet minister pointed to the consequences of democracy as an arithmetic method of political decision-making, implying that with an Islamist majority of two thirds the constitution could be changed in order to introduce Shar’ia law. Subsequently parliament devoted a full afternoon to a discussion of ways and means to block Shar’ia in the lowlands. (Notably, of the seven percent current Muslim MPs none advocates such a move.) Pope Benedict quoted a 14^th century Byzantine emperor’s derogatory remark on Prophet Mohamed’s assumed legacy in respect of hostility and violence and already before giving him an opportunity to clarify and express his regret, mass demonstrations against him were held all over the world, not habitually very peaceful, while in Mogadishu a catholic nun was assassinated. Is it, indeed, an almost complete silliness that is getting our world in its grip? What we are witnessing today may at least be called an open nerve. The sacred realm has become an extremely shaky space.

As an organisation tuned to peace, Pugwash cannot ignore the new threat to global security embodied in the sacred realm as a heavily contested space. But scholars relate a great deal more easily to processes of modernisation and secularisation than to senseless violence in response to what people perceive as attacks that hit them inside their sacred realm. Yet, at this juncture we are confronted with such a serious challenge that attempts to gain insight into causes and possible policy responses may well be seen as urgent. This chapter attempts to stimulate such a venture.

Conventional Inter-religious Violence

“Good people will do good things …”, the physicist and Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg once said in a dialogue with other scientists on religion, “… and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion” (Dyson 2006: 6). Although the historical background to this statement is clear enough –just think of the religious wars in Europe to which the Peace of Westphalia (1648) constituted a positive response- it needs at least an amendment: for good people to do bad things –that takes unholy alliances between religion and politics. One might see the still unpacified civil war between Tamils and Singhalese in Sri Lanka as an example here. Institutionalised Buddhism –the Sangha- has been heavily involved in the provocation of collective intra-state violence. Yet, that religion to which by far the majority of the population adheres, is not only known for its peaceful character, it even embraces tolerance and non-violence as primary religious principles (Pereira 2000). How then to explain the involvement of Buddhist activism in that collective violence?

In response to this query one should first take note of the many ages of peaceful coexistence between Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamils. Hence, those who describe the war as religious or ethnic or a combination of these, are faced with a major interpretative problem: how to explain all those centuries of inter-religious and interethnic peace? Apparently, all that time religion functioned if not as a peace-promoting force than at least as a non-instigator of sectarian violence. Secondly, the question is how in the 1980s religion got involved. Undeniably, the spark off point was when young Buddhist monks got mixed up in extremist nationalist politics. Accordingly, it was not religion as such but its link with politics that drove people to do bad things.

There are, moreover, a number of other factors that have to be considered in order to understand the context in which collective intra-state violence erupted in Sri Lanka. Decidedly significant among these are, for example, the economic factor, expressed in lack of job opportunities for educated youth, among both the Tamil and the Singhalese population, and the political-juridical factor, related to processes through which the Tamil population lost all confidence in the state as protector of people’s personal security.

In other instances of religious division linked to collective violence such as the civil war between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, the story is not essentially different. Although religion does play its part in terms of a potential to mobilize resources on the basis of collective identity, such wars cannot be satisfactorily explained as just ‘religious conflicts’. Undeniably, religious identity figures as an increasingly significant part of modern identity politics and ways in which contending identities generate markers and signposts to distinguish them from other identities. Generally, identity politics is informed by collective memories of injustice or shared experiences of prosecution or fear of those groups that they perceive as a challenge to a way of life, heritage and set of values and beliefs unique to them. Religious identity is also boosted by similar fears, although originally it draws its edifice from the practiced and non-practiced values of a community of believers. Similarly, religious identities may be intensified by feelings of oppression and stigmatization. In the latter case, religious identity may manifest itself in different forms of extremism as an instrument of counter-oppression (Salih and Fortman, 2007, forthcoming).

Given the often dangerous consequences of a mixture of religion with politics one might think that protection were to be found in a constitutionally enshrined separation of religious institutions and the state. Yet, secularity per se does not seem to guarantee the necessary combination of tolerance with the rule of law, implying that power is limited by law and the individual is recognised as a person with rights. Iran may serve as an example here: just like the Shah’s secular state the current Islamic republic, too, appears to see respect for the rule of law and tolerance as vices rather than virtues. Notably, Abdulkarim Soroush argues in his exquisite Treatise on Tolerance that like love, tolerance “is an extra-religious (and certainly not an anti-religious) virtue” (2004: 21). It is to be seen as an extra-secular virtue too, as current attacks in the West against the Islam as a whole demonstrate. Furthermore, the rule of law seems to have lost its global secular sanctity as new anti-terrorist legislation in the United States based on principal deviations from well established international legal standards, indicates. What is new then is the way in which growing intolerance in both East and West mutually reinforces enemy images. Doubtless, the climate this creates constitutes a threat to international security.

Clash Between Occidentalism and Anti-Islamic Secularism

Intolerance and ‘us-them’ divides are usually built upon contorted pictures of the other. What we are witnessing today is a new threat in this respect, not so much Huntington’s clash of civilisations (1996) but rather a collision between an ideologically coloured rejection of ‘the West’ and an ideologically coloured rejection of Islam as a monolithic despicable religion. In both cases the threat to human security lies in ideological manipulation of religion–or of its opposite, anti-religion- as a means of constructing opposing cultural identities in regard to which both sides claim irreconcilable incompatibility.

Buruma and Margalit have coined Anti-Westernism as espoused by radical Islamists religious ‘Occidentalism’ (2004). Occidentalism despises ‘the West’ as a materialist capitalist society worshipping false gods based on a public-political order that allows a false dichotomy between the public and the private realm. (Incidentally, the ideological manner in which the Danish prime minister distanced not only the state but also his government and his person from the cartoons issue – ‘those offended can file their applications with the judiciary’ - did much to confirm that image.)

Strikingly, we find the term ‘Occidentals’ already in the last lines of Edward Said’s famous Orientalism (1978), albeit in a different connotation (Westerners as they see themselves, viz. as superiors). Said’s scholarly work shows how time and again studies originating outside the East have constructed ‘the Orient’ as distinct, culminating in all sorts of divides between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Orientalism is a way of dealing with ‘the Orient’ that confirms a relationship between Occident and Orient of power, domination and hegemony. Said’s focus is, primarily, on academic studies. Today, however, orientalism manifests itself as a secularist political ideology. Its object is not so much the East as such but Islam as a religion fundamentally incompatible with such crucial values and institutions as freedom, democracy, gender equality and the rule of law. When criticised from within the West itself it is usually called ‘secularism’ or even ‘secular fundamentalism’ (Ekins 2002), even though the term ‘fundamentalism’ is misleading in this respect, as will be argued below.Although, indeed, political in nature, it seeks connections with liberal political theory arguing that without fully confining religion to the private realm, democracy were impossible. Notably, in The Netherlands we see a growing number of liberal theorists entering the political arena today, presenting their ideological secularist view in newspaper columns, radio and television interviews, and presentations at political party gatherings. Whereas this observation finds its basis particularly in that country, it would, however, be no surprise if it were confirmed elsewhere.

It is, particularly, the confrontation between contemporary Occidentalism and Anti-Islamic Secularism that has created a climate of intense sensitivity towards anything that might be seen as confirmation of ideological positions already taken. This applies, for instance, to both the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohamed in a ‘Western’ medium and the violent demonstrations following that ‘simple manifestation of freedom of expression’. It is quite possible that without such incidents - they happen with increasingly shorter intervals - the conflict between Israel and the Arab Middle East would not have assumed the dimension of the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. Notably, in the social sciences it is impossible to get such assumptions confirmed as in the natural sciences. Hence, such careful observations remain a matter of argued plausibility.

It is the constant ‘mediatization’ of touchy events, opinions and discourses that makes the new sensitivity so hazardous. There is an urgent need, therefore, to recognise this global ideological confrontation as a new threat in the first place, and to accept the new challenge to surmount it.

In order to overcome the new battle of discourses a first prerequisite is to understand how it came into being. Towards the end of their mirror study Occidentalism, Buruma and Margalit acknowledge the way in which Islamism has been influenced precisely by Western secularism:

“The Islamist revolutionary movement that currently stalks the world, from Kabul to Java, would not have existed without the harsh secularism of Reza Shah Pahlavi or the failed experiments in state socialism in Egypt, Syria and Algeria. This is why it was such a misfortune, in many ways, for the Middle East to have encountered the modern West for the first time through echoes of the French revolution” (2004: 143).

This historical interpretation is confirmed by Sadik Al-Azm in his perceptive essay on Islam, Terrorism and the West Today:

“In fact, the modern European violent intrusion into Islamdom and Arabdom [starting with Bonaparte in 1798] created, in my view, a final, decisive and definitive rupture with the past that I can only compare with the no less final and definitive rupture effected by the violent Arab-Muslim intervention into the history of Sassanid Persia. And just as the history of post-conquest Persia stopped making sense without Arabs, Islam and their eruption on the local Farsi scene, similarly, the post-Bonaparte history of Arabdom stopped making sense without Europe, modernity and their eruption on the local Arab scene as well” (2004: 27).

No Occidentalism without its prior counterpart, in other words. Consequently, from a Western perspective a first challenge lies in a critical analysis of what can be done to overcome Orientalism in its modern Anti-Islamic secularist guise. The importance of that ‘liberating’ mission was implicitly noted by Said, when towards the end of his study he concluded: “Without ‘the Orient’ there would be scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise of promoting human community” (1978: 328).

Building Peace From Within the Sacred Realm

At the roots of perceptions and discourses about ‘the other’ lie interpretations of holy texts, too. Remarkable in this connection is the popular secularist assumption that Islam will always remain bound to a literal grammatical interpretation of ‘violent’ texts in the Qur’an. This hermeneutical premise stands at the roots of modern Anti-Islamism. Notably, however, the Bible, too, is full of texts that tend to be classified as brutal, some 1400 or so, more at any rate than in the Qur’an. Some of these classifications rest on obvious misinterpretations such as Jesus’ words “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to bring peace, but a sword” (St Matthew 10:34). Rather than advocating violence Jesus told his disciples that they would encounter animosity. Yet, with regard to Exodus 32: 27-28 where Moses orders the people of Israel in the name of God that every man put “his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour”, an order followed to such an extent that “there fell of the people that day about three thousand men”, all I found in a modern commentary is a direction to the next verse which states that by executing that divine judgment the Levites are consecrated to the Lord (Fensham 1977: 221). Not surprisingly, in mainstream contemporary Christian theology and practice such texts are totally disregarded. No text without a context, at any rate.

In Islam, however, the fundamentalist movement is notably stronger than it is in contemporary Christendom. In this respect two observations seem relevant. Firstly, it is a serious error to confuse fundamentalist interpretation of holy texts and the desire to lead a puritan life with political Islamism. “The political Islamists”, Buruma and Margalit observe, “are interested in power and want to establish an Islamic state. … The puritans, who wish only to enforce collective morality, are fundamentalists”(2004: 129). Notably, it is quite possible to be fundamentalist as well as tolerant, simply because the orthodox faithful too, may realise that one has to acquiesce to the impossibility of convincing others that one’s own truth, considered as being absolute, must be accepted as exclusive.

Secondly, as already noted, it is precisely those who reject and attack Islam per se who underline its complete rigidity, while connecting orthodoxy with political Jihadism. By denying all Muslims their sacred realm, orthodox believers are thrown on one heap with political terrorists. In this way the real clash of civilizations, the struggle between moderate Islam and radical militant Islam, is being denied and neglected. A more constructive attitude, in contrast, starts with the recognition of Islam as a legitimate faith as well as a genuine way of life. It is just by dissociating ourselves from any tendency to approach different religions and worldviews in categories of moral-political superiority and inferiority that dialogue becomes possible. Only through dialogue and reunion, based on recognition of the other’s precious sacred realm, the new ideological threats to global security can be effectively addressed.

Freeman Dyson wrote his review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon under the title ‘Religion from the Outside’. Dennett’s study is indeed an attempt to study religion as a sociologically observable set of facts. In contrast, Dyson’s point is that it will never be possible to understand religion purely from the perspective of an outsider. In response to Weinberg’s famous words that were quoted above, he states: “And for bad people to do good things - that takes religion” (2006: 6). This at least has always been the purpose of religion: to convert sinners in a way that affects human behavior, too. In order to understand that function of religion it will be necessary to explore it from the inside: “The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations” (id. : 8).

Islam of course is far from monolithic (Ferguson 2006: 639), as the real conflict, I repeat, is between moderate Islam and radical Islam. Crucial for an Islamic reform from within, is a rereading of texts in general and critical texts in particular. At a conference on ‘Hermeneutics, Scriptural Politics and Human Rights’, organized at Utrecht University to bring theologians and jurists from different religious backgrounds together, two Shiite scholars of Mofid University in Qom (an institution established particularly for higher education of Mullahs) addressed sensitive issues that always arise when it comes to the ‘violent and uncompromising’ character of Islam. In a scholarly paper Sadegh Haghighat (2007, forthcoming) argues convincingly that the militant interpretation of the Qur’anic notion of Jihad is false, and he concludes:

“No text can be interpreted without its specific context. Jihad, in all kinds, must be read in the context of tribe-state conditions. The offensive kind of jihad – which is allowed just in the time of the holy Prophet and his successors (according to the majority of Shiite jurisprudences) – is tuned to anti-Muslim countries, not to secular ones. International conventions confine trans-national responsibilities of Islamic states (11)”.

Ali Mirmoosavi presented a paper on the highly intricate theme of ‘The Qur’an and Religious Freedom: The Issue of Apostasy’. After carefully analysing the relevant texts he arrives at the following conclusions:

“The Qur’anic scriptures establish a general principle that can be described as the Qur’anic principle of religious freedom. The main rule is that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’, which rejects any pressure on belief. Yet, in connection with other verses that put some limitation on belief, this principle cannot justify religious freedom in its broad dimensions. … [Yet], according to the Qur’an apostasy does not mean just simple changing of religion or disbelief. It implies to change religion after confidently believing and because of an unjustified motivation, usually concerning treason. However, the Qur’an does not directly impose any worldly punishment for apostasy. This deduction discloses a possibility for reconciliation between the Qur’an and religious freedom.

"Freedom of religion was not compatible with past Islamic society where citizenship was based on religious belief. …

"Modern Islamic societies experience a completely different life in the globalized world of political, economic and security interdependence. Freedom of religion in this world is not only the legitimate right based on several arguments, but also a necessary condition for peaceful and stable life."

Evidently, efforts such as those undertaken by Islamic scholars like Haghighat and Mirmoosavi, arguing on a common ground, and confronting religious rules and cultural practices incompatible with universal standards of human dignity from within, are of foremost importance.

Some Final Observations

Clearly, globalization has affected religious sensitivities, too, and as a result the sacred realm has become a rather shaky space. To take this up, Pugwash would do well to provide a space for those involved in religion and peace. Indeed, contemporary new threats do imply a challenge to involve theologians no less than natural scientists, as hermeneutics is subject to manipulation because it is well known that people act on interpretations of sacred texts. Where religion is used as an instrument of power and manipulation, it has been less respectful of sanctity and human well being and has become further removed from enhancing the common good. Yet, religious praxis or theory of practice cannot be removed nor made to appear distant from the realities people endure in the real world (Salih and Fortman 2007, forthcoming).

The new challenge lies not merely in a struggle against ideological manipulations; where religion has been used as an instrument for the good; it delivered unprecedented justice, liberty and freedom. In both religion and politics, identity could also develop into a function of positive self-esteem, cooperation, solidarity and compassion in a community of believers. It may also extend from religion to social welfare, empowerment and positive attitudes towards oneself and to those with whom the community of believers interacts in the course of living together.

In response to the new challenges posed by globalization of religious sensitivities governments are obviously limited, precisely because the sacred realm requires a certain degree of autonomy in the first place. Yet, there is one particular aspect of ‘religious violence’ that remains highly subject to public policies. Indeed, this new threat to international security cannot be understood aside from a world with incredibly rapidly rising inequalities, both in the economic realm and in the political domain. In Hannah Arendt’s view the opposite of violence is not non-violence but power: “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent (1993: 64 [1969])”.Violence often springs from rage, the mad fury as a collective instinct that Sartre used to refer to, and that long ago expressed itself in the slave revolts and the rebellions of the oppressed. Yet, Arendt comments,

“…rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to a disease beyond the powers of medicine or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions which seem to be unchangeable. Only when there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not, does rage arise. Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage. … The point is that under certain circumstances violence, which is to act without argument or speech and without reckoning with consequences, is the only possibility of setting the scales of justice right again. (Billy Budd striking dead the man who bore false witness against him is the classic example.) In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes, not always, goes with it belong to the ‘natural’ emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate them (Arendt 1993: 65-66 [1969]).

This enlightening discourse brings us to a final focus: the scales of justice. Based on his practical experience in peace building, John Paul Lederach of the Conflict Transformation Program in the United States speaks of a justice gap (1999: 27ff.). This is the result of inadequate efforts to develop a peace-building framework that not only reduces direct violence but also produces social and economic justice. The point is that in all situations of violent conflict, there are original injustices that lie at the roots of it. The main reason why hostilities can be stopped in the end is that those involved realize that the violence of the war is even worse than the original injustices. But at the same time they will expect these original injustices to be dealt with after the cessation of hostilities. Expectations are raised that life will not continue as it used to be but that there will be an improvement, a public path towards justice. Notably, justice has very much to do with the outcome of the use of power, and hence with daily livelihoods, with people’s needs and the recognition of these. It is the root conflict, in Johan Galtung’s terminology (1998) that has to be addressed (Klein Goldewijk and Fortman 1999: 82). At a global level that root conflict lies in socio-economic and political inequalities. Challenges to human security in that sense, are not new. With a slight amendment to US president Bill Clinton’s famous exclamation: It is not merely the economy, stupid; it is justice!

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