The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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for jurists. Any Shiis who refused to accept the Usuli position were outlawed as infidels, and opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. There was fighting in Kerbala and Najaf, and some Akhbaris died in the struggle. The mystical philosophy of Isfahan was also banned, and Sufism was suppressed so savagely that Bihbehani’s son, Ali, was known as the Sufi-slayer. But, as we have seen, coercion in religious matters is usually counterproductive; mysticism went underground and would continue to shape the ideas of dissidents and intellectuals who fought the status quo. Bihbehani’s victory was a political victory for the Iranian ulema. The Usuli position was popular with the people during the turbulent years of the interregnum, since it provided them with a source of charismatic authority that brought some measure of order. The mujtahids were able to step into the political vacuum and would never lose their power with the people. But Bihbehani’s victory, achieved by tyrannical means, was a religious defeat of sorts, since it was far removed from the behavior and ideals of the Imams.56
By the end of the eighteenth century, both the Ottoman and Iranian empires were in disarray. They had succumbed to the inevitable fate of an agrarian civilization that had outrun its resources. Ever since the Axial Age, the conservative spirit had helped men and women to accept the limitations of such a society at a profound level. This did not mean that conservative societies were static and fatalistic. This spirituality had inspired great cultural and political achievements in the Islamic world. Until the seventeenth century, Islamdom was the greatest world power. But this political, intellectual, and artistic endeavor had been conducted within a mythological context which would be alien to the values of the new Western culture that had been developing in Europe. Many of the ideals of modern Europe would be congenial to Muslims. We have seen that their faith had encouraged them to form attitudes that would be similar to those promoted by the modern West: social justice, egalitarianism, the freedom of the individual, a humanly based spirituality, a secular polity, a privatized faith, and the cultivation of rational thought. But other aspects of the new Europe would be difficult for people shaped by the conservative ethos to accept. By the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims had fallen behind the West intellectually, and, because the Islamic empires were also politically weak at this date, they would be vulnerable to the European states which were about to make their bid for world hegemony. The British had already established themselves in India, and France was determined to create its own empire. On May 19, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for the Middle East from Toulon with 38,000 men and 400 ships to challenge British power in the Orient. The French fleet crossed the Mediterranean and on July 1 Napoleon landed 4300 troops on the beach at Alexandria and took the city shortly after dawn the following day.57 He thus achieved a base in Egypt. Napoleon had brought with him a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a scientific laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The new scientific, secularist culture of the West had invaded the Muslim world, and it would never be the same again.
3. Christians: Brave New World
AT THE SAME TIME as Jews were struggling with the traumatic consequences of their expulsion from Spain and Muslims were establishing their three great empires, the Christians in the West were embarking on a course that would take them far from the certainties and sanctities of the old world. This was an exciting period, but it was also disturbing. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death had killed one-third of the population of Christendom, and countries of Europe had been ravaged by such interminable strife as the Hundred Years War between England and France and the internecine Italian wars. Europeans had endured the shock of the Ottoman conquest of Christian Byzantium in 1453, and the papal scandals of the Avignon Captivity and the Great Schism—when as many as three pontiffs had claimed to be the successor of St. Peter at the same time—had caused many to lose faith in the institutional church. People felt obscurely afraid, and found that they could not be religious in the old way. Yet it was also a time of liberation and empowerment. The Iberian explorers had discovered a new world; the astronomers were opening up the heavens, and a new technical efficiency was giving Europeans greater control over their environment than anybody had achieved before. Where the conservative spirit had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, the new culture of Western Christendom showed that it was possible to venture beyond the confines of the known world and not only to survive but to prosper. This would ultimately make the old mythological religion impossible, and it would seem that Western modernity was inherently hostile to faith.
Yet during the early stages of this transformation of Western society this was not the case. Many of the explorers, scientists, and thinkers at the cutting edge of change believed that they were finding new ways of being religious rather than abolishing religion altogether. We shall examine some of their solutions in this chapter and consider their deeper implications. But it is important to be clear that the men who became the spokesmen of the modern spirit did not themselves create it. By the sixteenth century, a complex process was at work in Europe and, later, in its American colonies which was transforming the way that people thought and experienced the world. Change would occur gradually and often unobtrusively. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed particularly decisive at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be conclusive. All these discoveries were characterized by a pragmatic, scientific spirit that slowly undermined the old conservative, mythical ethos and made an increasing number of people receptive to new ideas about God, religion, the state, the individual, and society. Europe and the American colonies would need to accommodate these changes in different political arrangements. Like any other period of far-reaching social change, this was a violent era. There were destructive wars and revolutions, violent uprooting, the despoliation of the countryside, and hideous religious strife. In the course of three hundred years, Europeans and Americans had to employ ruthless methods to modernize their society. There was bloodshed, persecution, inquisition, massacre, exploitation, enslavement, and cruelty. We are witnessing the same bloody upheavals in countries in the developing world which are going through the painful modernizing process today.
The rationalization of agriculture was just one small part of the process, but the increased productivity and healthier livestock affected everybody’s life. There were other, more specialized improvements. People started to make precise instruments: the compass, the telescope, the magnifying lens all revealed new worlds and made for better maps, charts, and navigational techniques. The seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek for the first time observed bacteria, spermatozoa, and other microorganisms, and his observations would one day cast new light on the processes of generation and corruption. This would not only have the pragmatic effect of eliminating disease; it would also divest these basic areas of life and death of much of their mythical content. Medicine began to improve; even though therapy remained a hit-and-miss affair until well into the nineteenth century, there was, during the seventeenth century, a growing concern for sanitation, and some diseases were identified properly for the first time. The earth sciences began to develop, and discussion of such phenomena as earthquakes and volcanoes would push mythological considerations of such events into the background. Mechanical devices improved. Clocks and watches became more reliable and this development would lead to the secularization of time. The application of mathematical and statistical techniques gave people an entirely new sense of the future: in the 1650s and 1660s, the word “probable” began to change its meaning. It would no longer mean that something was “supported by the authorities,” as in the conservative period, but “likely in view of all the evidence.” This independent attitude and confidence in the future would lead to a new drive for scientific proof and bureaucratic rationalization. The British statisticians William Perry and John Graunt were especially interested in life expectancy, and by the early eighteenth century, people in Europe had begun to insure their lives.1 All this was potentially subversive to the conservative ethos.
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