Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (138 page)

What the world witnessed, during the late 1970s, throughout the
1980s and into the 1990s, was a widespread retreat from the churches and established religious bodies which had sought to rationalize their beliefs and come to terms with societies which in general were non-religious; and simultaneously, the growth of fundamentalism, which bypassed rationalism, stressed the overwhelming importance of faith and miraculous revelation and rejected the idea of compromise with institutions based on non-belief. The outstanding symbol of ‘rationalizing’ religion was the World Council of Churches, which throughout the 1980s had stressed ecumenicalism, minimalist beliefs and the need to reach agreement with Marxism and other anti-religious creeds. It lost support throughout the decade, and came close to discrediting itself finally in February 1991 during its meeting in Canberra. Some delegates were shocked to find in the foyer a stall advocating more women clergy, which ‘displayed pornographic cartoons including a couple performing an unnatural act’; one well-known religious leader attending the meeting ‘asked a female delegate to perform a sexual act on him’ and then ‘beat her over the head until she surrendered to his demand’.
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Another form of rationalizing Christianity was the so-called ‘liberation theology’, ultimately derived from Germany, which sought to transform Catholic activism into a radical political force, operating from ‘basic communities’ organized on the Communist cell principle, and even advocating violence for the overthrow of oppressive governments of the Right. During the 1970s and 1980s it attracted much attention in the media and was said to be flourishing in Brazil and Central America. In Castro’s Communist satellite, Nicaragua, four Catholic priests professing this radicalized form of Christianity held ministerial office in 1979, and two years later refused to obey orders from their bishops to return to their pastoral duties. A section of the Latin American clergy, which hitherto had usually underwritten established authority, had become strongly antinomian during the years 1965–80.
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Yet this politicization of Catholicism, though a source of fascination to the media, was confined to a small portion of the élites. Most priests and bishops remained strongly traditionalist; the laity still more so. When liberation theology was put to any kind of popular test, it failed to make much impact. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, led by the Marxist Daniel Ortega and including the supporters of liberation theology who backed and worked with him, was decisively defeated the first time it was subjected to free elections in 1990.

Indeed, the two outstanding religious phenomena in Latin America during the 1970s, and still more in the 1980s, both attracting wide popular support almost everywhere, were fundamentalist. The first was evangelical Protestantism, hitherto banned from
proselytizing in Latin America as a result of concordats between states and the Catholic Church, or laws granting Catholicism privileged status. The lifting of these prohibitions led to a large-scale missionary effort by Protestant groups, mainly directed and financed from the United States, where evangelicalism, making full use of television, radio and cable, made huge advances in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, constituting what was popularly known as ‘the Moral Majority’. Its efforts in Latin America, especially in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela, met with remarkable success, and by the late 1980s a new generation of trained Latin American evangelists were at work. The Catholic response was the growth, which seems to have been quite spontaneous in origin, of a form of religious observance not essentially different from Protestant evangelicalism, and known as
religiosidad popular
, anti-political, anti-intellectual, spontaneous, devotional, fervent and with a strong mass appeal among the poor. But whereas Protestant fundamentalism stressed the Bible, Catholic fundamentalism was characterized by the cult of saints (often unofficial local ones), relics and shrines.

John Paul II gave the movement the stamp of his approval in January 1979, when he insisted on visiting the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe and placed the people of Mexico under the protection of that Indian-style Madonna. But of course these popular cults were often heterodox, mixtures of paganism and Christianity, nurtured in villages and then brought by migrating peasants into the sprawling cities to protect themselves from urban alienation. These syncretistic forms of Christianity have always tended to appear in periods of rapid population growth, racial and cultural mingling, movement and change. They were particularly marked in Brazil, where the large black population whose forebears had been slaves retained modes of belief and worship ultimately drawn from Africa.
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They were a still more important feature in Africa itself, a boiling maelstrom of expansion, revivalism, strange sects, gnosticism, evangelism, Christian Zionism, fervent orthodoxy and fanatic zeal, rather as primitive Christianity had been in Asia Minor and the Balkans in the third century AD.
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While theologians at the Universities of Tübingen and Utrecht were diminishing the total of Christian belief, strange charismatics in the slums of Mexico City and São Paulo, of Recife and Rio, of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi, were adding to it. The first group spoke for thousands; the second for scores of millions.

The fundamentalist spirit of Islam, gathering force in the third quarter of the twentieth century, became a powerful, popular and, to many, frightening phenomenon in the 1980s. It affected all the
great religions, often in response to fundamentalist outbreaks in their traditional rivals. Thus the revival of Islamic extremism, which began in the 1950s and by the early 1990s had spread to most of the Muslim world, provoked violent reactions. In India, for instance, the Hindu-based Janata Dal Party had, by the end of the 1980s, been goaded into forms of religious extremism by Islamic pressure, and early in 1991 there was widespread violence in northern India as Hindus fought to reclaim the shrines of their gods where mosques had been built. Islamic fundamentalism also helped along the revival of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, started in New York under the Rabbi Meir Kahane, then transferring itself to Israel to promote both the expanding ‘historical’ frontiers of the Kingdom of David, and the transformation of Israel into a Jewish theocracy. This led to running legal battles and street fights with the Israeli authorities, and more serious violence between fundamentalist Jewish settlers and Arabs in the West Bank.
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Islamic militancy was the most important of the new fundamentalist forces because of the vast numbers involved and the huge geographical spread, curving in a long crescent from West Africa, through the southern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Middle East, across the interior of Southwest Asia, the Indian subcontinent and down into Malaysia and the Philippines. Its political, military and indeed cultural impact was felt over three continents. It was advancing in black Africa, often with the aid of Arab money, arms and indeed force. In the 1960s the ruling northern élite in the Sudan sought to impose Islam on the Christian south. In the 1970s and 1980s Gadafy tried to convert all of Chad by fire and sword, or rather by napalm and helicopter, just as Amin tried to Islamize Uganda by mass-murder. But Islam enjoyed natural growth as well and a new dynamism fuelled by its own internal revival. One reason for this was the increase of Muslim self-confidence, indeed stridency, as a result of the new wealth from oil. By filtering down to the masses it also made possible an unprecedented expansion in the number of Mecca pilgrims, flown by chartered jet to kiss the
Kaaba
and returning full of zeal for Islam, which is a far more political and this-worldly faith than Christianity. The prime beneficiaries of the new Islamic zealotry were not the orthodox Sunni Muslims, who constituted the majority, especially among Arabs, and represented the right-thinking, conservative, static establishment of Islam, including the two chief ruling families, the Hashemites and the Saudis. The effect of the revival was to reanimate the dramatic bifurcation of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, when Islamic nonconformity, in the shape of the Shi’ites and the many heterodox sects they spawned, such as the Druzes, the
Ismailis and the Alawites, made their appearance. Shi’ia Islam, with its messianic belief in the ‘hidden Imam’ and its consequent millennarianism, its cult of martyrs and suffering, its puritanism and not least its addiction to violence (the Assassins were Shi’ia Ismailis), has always been a source of disorder in the Muslim world, especially in Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq, where they are numerous, and Iran, where they form the majority. They claimed that the Sunnis always, when possible, treated them like second-class citizens. The Islamic revival led them to demand a new deal for themselves as well as producing a new assertiveness by Islam towards the infidel world. They created a belt of crisis which cut across the familiar Cold War patterns.

The first consequence was the destruction of the Lebanon, a small but highly civilized country, the sole Arab democracy, whose survival was made possible only by a series of gentleman’s agreements among the élites of the main religious groups: Maronites (Eastern Christians in communion with Rome), Orthodox Christians, Sunni and Shi’ia Muslims and Druzes. Such agreements were made workable only by self-denying ordinances among all the religions and sects to forswear fanaticism. The Arab-Israeli dispute made such restraint increasingly difficult. In 1949 Lebanon had been obliged to accommodate 300,000 Palestine refugees, 100,000 of them in fifteen major camps, five of them ringing the capital, Beirut, and controlling all routes in and out of it. Each successive Arab-Israeli crisis dealt massive blows to Lebanon’s fragile unity. In 1958, following the Suez invasion, there was the first hint of civil war, which produced an American intervention at the request of the dominant Maronites. The 1967 war doubled the number of refugees in Jordan, and when King Hussein threw the militant Palestinians out of his kingdom by force in 1970–1, they moved into Lebanon, defying the legitimate authorities and forming militant enclaves ruled by the terrorists of the
PLO.
In 1975, following the Yom Kippur War, President Sadat of Egypt, with the encouragement of the United States, took the historic step of opening peace negotiations with Israel. The ‘Camp David process’, named after the presidential mountain retreat in Maryland where President Carter first brought Sadat and Prime Minister Begin of Israel together, ended in a peace treaty of immense benefit to both parties: the one potentially mortal threat to Israel was removed, and Egypt was released from the burden of a vendetta which had nothing to do with her and which was wrecking all her economic aspirations. The Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty was one of the few creative acts of a dismal decade, and made peace between Israel and all her neighbours not only possible but, in the long run, inevitable.

The word ‘inevitable’ is justified because whereas, up to the 1980s, Arab confidence in the eventual failure of Israel (indeed the extermination of Zionism, frequently stated as an object of Arab policy in Arabic broadcasts) had been buoyed up by demographic trends, both within Israel and the ‘occupied territories’, and in the Middle East as a whole, at the end of the 1980s the trend was reversed. On 3 January 1985 it was revealed that a secret airlift, operated with the consent of Sudan, had enabled 25,000 Falashas, black Jews of a tribe which for centuries had lived in Ethiopia, to be brought to Israel as settlers (a further 10,000 were flown to Israel in 1991). This was only a foretaste of a mass emigration by Russian Jews, allowed to leave the Soviet Union as a result of political changes there, which reached 100,000 in 1989, rose to over 200,000 in 1990, and continued to accelerate. Israeli authorities had always assumed that no more than 1.5 million Jews lived in Russia. By the end of 1990 it was clear that the total was very much larger, and might be as high as 4 million, almost all of whom wished to leave. By a decision of the Soviet government such emigrants were obliged to proceed straight to Israel. This mass immigration into Israel, actual and potential, had the effect of altering the demographic prospect completely, and strengthened the likelihood that other states, notably Syria, would eventually want to follow Egypt’s example and make peace.

But in the meantime the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, signed finally on 26 March 1979, led directly to Lebanese civil war, started by the
PLO
and broadened by the intervention of Syria, whose ruling Awali sect wished to capture from Egypt the leadership of the Arab world. The precarious balance of communal power in Lebanon was thus destroyed. It had been preserved hitherto by the conciliatory attitude of the local Higher Muslim Council, which spoke for all Muslim sects including the Druzes, and was dominated by an old-fashioned Sunni establishment. This was overthrown when the Shi’ites, led by a Persian fundamentalist of Lebanese origin called the Imam Moussa Sadr, called for a separate Shi’ia Muslim Higher Council. The Shi’ites formed a destructive alliance with the secular Left of the
PLO
. All the sects, Christian and Muslim, produced private armies. In the ensuing fighting, which raged fiercely in 1975–6, 1982, 1988–90 and sporadically in the intervals, Israel as well as Syria was forced to intervene, back-street gangsters flourished as respectable guerrilla and political leaders, 40,000 people were killed, Beirut was destroyed as a commercial centre, Lebanon ceased to exist as an independent country, the ancient Christian community lost its paramountcy, though it held on to its main settlement areas, and a light of reason in the Arab world was extinguished.
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In 1982 Israel felt obliged to conduct a full-scale invasion. This led to the expulsion and dispersal of the
PLO
, first to Tunisia, then also to Iraq. But Israel quickly found herself blamed for a massacre of Palestinian refugees, carried out by Christian militiamen at the Sabra and Chatila camps in West Beirut, and as early as spring 1983 she was beginning to withdraw her forces, keeping only a security zone in the south of the country. Gradually, Syrian forces filled the vacuum of power in Lebanon, though they found it no easier to establish a secure presence there than did the Israelis. By the early 1990s, Lebanon, once the richest and most civilized Arab state, found itself fragmented and almost destitute, with no focus of unity.