Climate of Fear (11 page)

Thus, within a secular dispensation, even under the most rigid totalitarian order, its underpinning ideology— that is, the equivalent of theology—remains open to contestation. Open questioning may be suppressed, open debate may be restricted or prohibited by the state or the party of power, but the functioning of the mind, its capacity for critique—even self-criticism—never ceases. Self-criticism was of course an expression that was much abused under totalitarian orders—Stalinist Soviet Union, China during the Cultural Revolution, or Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Within those self-righteous regimes, self-criticism meant one thing and one thing only: recantation, and a routine incantation of loyal pledges—according to prescribed formulae—to the party line. Despite those perverted rituals, however, the mind remained a free agent within its own space, free to roam outside the confines of the totalitarian order, to seek, and often find, kindred spirits, and form a conspiracy of nonbelievers or, at least, skeptics. This factor leads sooner or later to an alternative view, and perhaps to piecemeal erosion of the hermetic system.

Under the theocratic sibling, however, one that derives its authority not from theories that are elicited from the material conditions of society but from the secret spaces of revelation, this disposition of the mind toward alternative concepts or variants is next to impossible. Curiosity succumbs to fear, often masquerading as pious submission. The theocratic order derives its mandate from the unknown. Only a chosen few are privileged to have penetrated the workings of the mind of the unknown, whose constitution—known as the Scriptures—they and they alone can interpret. The fanatic that is born of this dogmatic structure of the ineffable, religion, is the most dangerous being on earth.

Again, it must be conceded that there are, naturally, numerous variants of the fanatic spore—as well as enabling environments. While psychologists and social scientists theorize over cause and effect, the Community is confronted with an immediate choice: either to submit or to protect itself. Poverty is a powerful recruiting agent for the army of the soul, we know that; so is political injustice—but society fools itself if it imagines that these are the only parameters for anticipating, preventing, or responding to a development where the totality of society is indicted to the undiscriminating extent that all are pronounced guilty who do not share this mind-set of the fanatic, or who dare propose a different worldview from that which motivates it. The philosophy that sustained Nazism was not a philosophy for the amelioration of the condition of the poor; on the contrary, it was a philosophy of elitism, a philosophy of the Chosen versus the Rest. And what we must seek is the common denominator that unites the opposite extremes of beliefs and ideologies but also breeds and nurtures the fanatic, intolerant mind. While we are engaged on that quest, we, the Rest, in whatever aspect of belief we are thus defined, must either lay our necks tamely on this versatile execution block or imaginatively pursue remedial action. This involves, certainly, eradicating those conditions that serve as ready recruitment agencies—poverty, political injustice, and other forms of social alienation—but, even more crucially, demonstrating in an equally determined, structured way our right, indeed our duty, to implement strategies of self-protection, making it abundantly clear that the other doctrine of the Chosen is intolerable to humanity. To do otherwise is to condone the doctrine that moves so arrogantly from
I am right, you are wrong
to its fatal manifestation as
I am right; you are dead.

The world would of course be a simpler space to contend with if only religion kept within the domain of the spiritual. Historically, it never has. With the blindly submissive army of enforcers in its midst, ready to be unleashed on profane humanity, the religious is an order that remains incapable of remaining within a private zone that does not translate into
power
—as distinct from
guidance
—over others. There are a few exceptions to this in the world of religion, and we shall encounter one toward the end. The incursion of religion into the secular domain, appropriating the provinces of ethics, mores, and social conduct—and even the sciences—guarantees the clerical dominance of the total field of play. (
What, in
the name of all that is unholy, does a council of religious clerics
in northern Nigeria know of modern medicine that it commands
Muslims to resist inoculation against cerebrospinal meningitis—
a scourge in that part of the nation that leaves hundreds of
thousands of infants disabled for life—and claim its authority
from the Koran!
)

Submission, however, is the very foundation of faith. It is mostly within that theocratic order that we find those extreme offshoots that raise the stakes of those rhetorical devices, already touched upon, to the defining edge of existence. The provenance of faith is the soul and, by extension, the soul's material housing, the body itself. In one easy step, the materialist declaration of
All property
is theft
—a theme from one of our earlier lectures—is promoted to one of
All life is theft.
The secular ideologue might be largely content with brooking no dissent through the dictum
I am right, you are wrong,
but the ultimate ambition of the fanatic within the theocratic order is
I am right; you are dead.

Homicidal hubris is the ultimate hallmark of the fanatic. The ice pick in the neck of Leon Trotsky, ensconced in the deceptive safety of Mexico, was forged in the same furnace as the knife that sought the throat of Naguib Mahfouz.

It is fortunate that we are sometimes able—thanks to modern communication—to identify the intrusion of political opportunism into the workings of religious zealotry, a common enough marriage of convenience that gives birth to monstrosities. And technology—the camera—assists in the close psychological study of mob arousal for religious reasons, such as led to the outrage in India that ended with Hindus razing to the ground an ancient mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh because this centuries-old mosque had been built on the very spot where Rama, a Hindu deity, first made his appearance on earth. The reverberations of that act have continued to haunt the Indian nation till today, but the immediate repercussions were orgies of killings, including the ambush of railway trains and commuter buses, the virtual “religious cleansing” of rival, but especially Muslim, neighborhoods, creating ghost villages and derelict urban sectors.

And here, let us pause, and use this episode to anticipate and silence those who, whenever an outrage that is linked to one religion or another attracts amply deserved rebuke and condemnation, immediately raise alarms of prejudice, sectarian hatred, and world conspiracies, tacitly claiming for such structures of faith an immunity from commentary. The world, East and West, including its official organs UNO and UNESCO, was unambiguous in its condemnation of that crime, even as it would later unite in condemnation of the iconoclasm of the Taliban against the historic statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. That former rebuke did not lead to any claims by Hindus that the world nursed a primordial hatred against Hinduism or had entered into a conspiracy to eradicate that religion from the world. What was factually indisputable was more than sufficient: an outrage had been committed, and that outrage deserved to be addressed in its own right, albeit without totally ignoring its antecedents and context.

Similarly, in my part of the world, Nigeria, time and time again, waves of fundamentalist violence have been unleashed on a prostrate populace, resulting in the deaths, often in the most gruesome manner, of hundreds of innocents—men, women, children, without discrimination. The majority of those who have commented— except of course the violators themselves—have been unambiguous in their condemnation of such barbarities committed in the name of religion. They have done so without damning the religion itself, or belittling its precepts. The world cannot, I am certain, have forgotten the massacre that resulted from the attempt to hold a beauty pageant in the capital city of Abuja. The culprits have always earned the names
fanatics, criminals, fundamentalists,
and
zealots.
I believe it should be possible to attribute the massacre of innocents anywhere in the world in the same way, thus placing the responsibility for a corrective response on the shoulders of believers and nonbelievers alike.

On a personal level, I found myself sufficiently exercised to note the Uttar Pradesh event in my poetic calendar of “Twelve Canticles for the Zealot,” published in
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known:

A god is nowhere born, yet everywhere
But Rama's sect rejects that fine distinction—
The designated spot is sanctified, not for piety but
For dissolution of yours from mine, politics of hate

And forced exchange—peace for a moment's rapture.
They turn a mosque to rubble, stone by stone,
Condemned usurper of Lord Rama's vanished spot
Of dreamt epiphany. Now a cairn of stones
Usurps a dream of peace—can they dream peace
In iconoclast Uttar Pradesh?

Few spots in the world today are exempt from the depredations of the fanatic. I believe it should be possible to view the bombing of innocents in the United States, Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, or anywhere else in the same way. It is untenable to claim that, because those mass killers themselves implicated, and persist in invoking, the banner of Islam, seeking legitimization and a killing rapture from that religion, Islam is therefore under indictment. Equally unacceptable is to claim that any condemnation of the act or pursuit of the criminals reveals a hatred of the religion. A world in which a powerful European—and mostly Christian—organization, NATO, goes to battle against the Christian Serbs on behalf of a battered Muslim population, and brings the head of their violators to justice before an international tribunal, is not a world that is prejudiced against either Islam or Christendom, and the propagators of such doctrines are being not merely disingenuous, but dangerous.

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic
is
one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies, and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime, and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination—the zone of unquestioning certitude—sped by a common impetus that licenses each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one who creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.

The stillborn dogmatism of
I am right, you are wrong
has circled back since the contest of ideologies and once again attained its apotheosis of
I am right; you are dead.
The monologue of unilateralism constantly aspires to the mantle of the Chosen and, of course, further dichotomizes the world, inviting us, on pain of consequences, to choose between “them” and “us.” We must, in other words, reject the conditions George Bush delivered so explicitly in that ultimatum
You are either with us
and against the terrorists, or you are on the side of the terrorists, and in
We do not require the world's approval since we are divinely guided,
just as strongly as we repudiate Osama bin Laden's
The world is now clearly divided into two—the world
of the followers of Islam against that of infidels and unbelievers.
What does this mean for those billions of the world who are determinedly unbelievers? What does it mean for the world of Hindus, Buddhists, the Zoroastrians, the followers of Orisa, and a hundred other faiths that are routinely marginalized in the division of the world between two blood-stained behemoths of faith—the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian?

We, on the African continent, whose people were decimated, in a time of our own troubled peace, in Kenya and Tanzania, our soil violated by one of the earliest acts of aerial sabotage that scattered human limbs over the earth of Niger, have a special stake in this. The black freedom fighters of southern Sudan, locked in a brutal war of over three decades against an Islamic regime—a genocidal war that has claimed at least a hundred thousand times more lives and overseen a thousand times greater destruction of a people, an environment, and a culture than the conflicts in the Middle East—have not resorted to accusing the Islamic or Arab world of a conspiracy against the black race. They are focused on their quest for liberation from a specified, localized, theocratic, and often racist order, against which they have raised charges of an ongoing “ethnic cleansing” that remains largely ignored by the Western world. It has only belatedly, in very recent times, been acknowledged by the United Nations, through a warning from its secretary-general, as yet another Rwanda scenario in the making. We do not hear from the leaders of that struggle any proposition of the division of the world into the African world against All Others. The combatants have not moved to set the bazaars and monuments of Medina on fire or burn Japanese infants in their cribs. Not even the historic—still ongoing in places—denigration of African religions and cultures, or indeed the memory of both European and Arab enslavement of the African peoples, has elicited this inflammatory agenda.

Have we any lessons to offer the world from that same continent of a history of near-universal disdain? I can think of one. I dispense it at every opportunity. African religions do not proselytize, but let me break with that tradition yet again in the worthy cause of a global quest for harmonized coexistence, and offer the world a lesson from African spirituality, taken specifically from the religion of the Orisa, the pantheon of faith of the Yoruba people. This religion, one that is still pursued in Brazil and other parts of South America and the Caribbean, has never engaged in any equivalent of the crusade or the jihad in its own cause. The words
infidel,
unbeliever, kafiri
are anathema to its scriptures; thus it does not recognize a spiritual division of the world. Despite its reticence, however, it has penetrated the globe and survived in the confident retention by the displaced and dispossessed slaves, its infectious hold extending even to their European violators. Its watchword is
tolerance,
a belief that there are many paths to truth and godhead, and that the world should not be set on fire to prove the supremacy of a belief or the righteousness of a cause.