The Religion of Love vs the Religion of Peace
Monday February 13 2006 11:23 IST
S Gurumurthy
"Massacre those who insult Islam." "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 will come." These slogans were raised not in Damascus or Teheran. Not in Riyadh or Karachi. In London! The occasion: Protest outside the Danish Embassy there. The violent slogans shook the British Government. Tony Blair said that such intolerance and incitement were unacceptable. The police said arrests would be made. London is just an illustration.
The provocation for the protest was some dozen objectionable cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper on the sacred icons of Islam, the Prophet and Allah. The cartoons were offensive to Muslims. One need not have to be a fanatic Muslim or Jihadi to feel offended at the high points of their faith being subjected to fun. The Islamic protests are normally considered as unjustified overreactions. But the protest against the Danish cartoons seems clearly justified. The West must understand, when Islamists protest, it will be Islamic, not Gandhian. The Islamic world already prone to violence is on the boil. In the Syrian capital Damascus, the Danish Embassy has been burnt. Iran has cut off diplomatic links with Denmark.
A few cartoons, in a language most cannot understand, have set the world on fire. Thinkers in the West must know that the God of aggressive faiths is not humour-friendly. In contrast, the Hindus, for instance, have religious literature that subjects their Gods to humour, to fun. But single God religions cannot tolerate their Gods being treated to fun. For them God is a serious business. The Hindus may not understand this rigidity, but Christians whose God is equally unfriendly to fun and the Christian West must.
But, the West with freedom of expression on the one hand and freedom of faith on the other would not disapprove of the cartoons. That will destroy the very pillars of the West, liberty and freedom. And they cannot support the cartoons. That would mean denying freedom of faith, particularly to the minorities. Also, it may trigger popular support for Islamic terror against the West. Yet, the West is converting the cartoon issue into a debate on freedom versus Islam. Questions like ‘‘Are Muslim sensitivity and Western liberty doomed to clash?’’ are raised in the debate.
Now a quick recall is relevant. More than a decade before the Danish cartoons appeared, Samuel Huntington prophesied the rise of civilisational clashes between the West and the Rest, and particularly between the modern West and Orthodox Islam. The very intelligentsia of the West, who today sees clash between Islam and liberty, had trivialised him then. Their response to Huntington’s hard analysis was that a universal global culture symbolised by Colas, McDonalds and Discotheques – yes Colas and their cousins – would sweep aside all dissent to modernisation and globalisation! But the past decade has dwarfed Huntington’s dissenters into just urchins.
So freedom versus Islam debate is just a veneer. Deep inside it lies a deeper, historic malaise, the centuries-old fraternal hate between two faiths, Christianity and Islam.
As the ‘Time’ has rightly put it, the Danish cartoonists have contributed a wave of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Muslim bashing’ throughout Europe. A closer look will show that geo-political Christianity operates more through West-centric modernity than through the Churches. In geo-political terms Christianity today is more a geo-political civilisation powered by the Western societies, and less a faith marketed by the churches, even though both coalesce and complement each other. The West has no utility for the churches or religion.
Half the churches had remained closed in the West on the Christmas Day 2005, as the statistical Christians and their ‘secular’ cousins were on bay watch and holidays. Christian faith and churches in the West are now meant for export, not for domestic consumption.
That is why the previous Pope spoke of planting the cross on Asia in the new millennium.
Yet the Christian social thinkers always keep asserting that market capitalism and its latest edition, globalisation, are products of Protestant Christianity. Secularism in the West first privatised the Christian faith into mere personal concern of the faithfuls.
It robbed the church of its power over the faithfuls. But gradually individuals of faith in the West turned into faithless individuals. Agnostics, even atheists, yet, in civilisational terms, they remained Christians as the ancestral civilisations had been reduced to artefacts! Thus Christianity in the secularised West has transformed into a common geo-Christian civilisation with liberty replacing old faith as the new faith.
It is of course true that many in US particularly are anxious to reinvent Christianity post 9/11, to recall the Christian roots of modern western civilisation to counter the rise of militant Islam. But that is more out of dislike for Islam, than for love of Christ.
QED: The hidden drive behind the labels of liberty and freedom is geo-political Christianity. The clashes, symbolised by 9/11 or the Danish cartoons, are not between freedom and Islam as the West is at pains to explain. It is between geo-political Christian civilisation and Islam. In substance it is a clash between the modern version of the Religion of Love and the rigidity of the Religion of Peace.
Writer’s e-mail: gurumurthy@epmltd.com
S Gurumurthy
"Massacre those who insult Islam." "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 will come." These slogans were raised not in Damascus or Teheran. Not in Riyadh or Karachi. In London! The occasion: Protest outside the Danish Embassy there. The violent slogans shook the British Government. Tony Blair said that such intolerance and incitement were unacceptable. The police said arrests would be made. London is just an illustration.
The provocation for the protest was some dozen objectionable cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper on the sacred icons of Islam, the Prophet and Allah. The cartoons were offensive to Muslims. One need not have to be a fanatic Muslim or Jihadi to feel offended at the high points of their faith being subjected to fun. The Islamic protests are normally considered as unjustified overreactions. But the protest against the Danish cartoons seems clearly justified. The West must understand, when Islamists protest, it will be Islamic, not Gandhian. The Islamic world already prone to violence is on the boil. In the Syrian capital Damascus, the Danish Embassy has been burnt. Iran has cut off diplomatic links with Denmark.
A few cartoons, in a language most cannot understand, have set the world on fire. Thinkers in the West must know that the God of aggressive faiths is not humour-friendly. In contrast, the Hindus, for instance, have religious literature that subjects their Gods to humour, to fun. But single God religions cannot tolerate their Gods being treated to fun. For them God is a serious business. The Hindus may not understand this rigidity, but Christians whose God is equally unfriendly to fun and the Christian West must.
But, the West with freedom of expression on the one hand and freedom of faith on the other would not disapprove of the cartoons. That will destroy the very pillars of the West, liberty and freedom. And they cannot support the cartoons. That would mean denying freedom of faith, particularly to the minorities. Also, it may trigger popular support for Islamic terror against the West. Yet, the West is converting the cartoon issue into a debate on freedom versus Islam. Questions like ‘‘Are Muslim sensitivity and Western liberty doomed to clash?’’ are raised in the debate.
Now a quick recall is relevant. More than a decade before the Danish cartoons appeared, Samuel Huntington prophesied the rise of civilisational clashes between the West and the Rest, and particularly between the modern West and Orthodox Islam. The very intelligentsia of the West, who today sees clash between Islam and liberty, had trivialised him then. Their response to Huntington’s hard analysis was that a universal global culture symbolised by Colas, McDonalds and Discotheques – yes Colas and their cousins – would sweep aside all dissent to modernisation and globalisation! But the past decade has dwarfed Huntington’s dissenters into just urchins.
So freedom versus Islam debate is just a veneer. Deep inside it lies a deeper, historic malaise, the centuries-old fraternal hate between two faiths, Christianity and Islam.
As the ‘Time’ has rightly put it, the Danish cartoonists have contributed a wave of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Muslim bashing’ throughout Europe. A closer look will show that geo-political Christianity operates more through West-centric modernity than through the Churches. In geo-political terms Christianity today is more a geo-political civilisation powered by the Western societies, and less a faith marketed by the churches, even though both coalesce and complement each other. The West has no utility for the churches or religion.
Half the churches had remained closed in the West on the Christmas Day 2005, as the statistical Christians and their ‘secular’ cousins were on bay watch and holidays. Christian faith and churches in the West are now meant for export, not for domestic consumption.
That is why the previous Pope spoke of planting the cross on Asia in the new millennium.
Yet the Christian social thinkers always keep asserting that market capitalism and its latest edition, globalisation, are products of Protestant Christianity. Secularism in the West first privatised the Christian faith into mere personal concern of the faithfuls.
It robbed the church of its power over the faithfuls. But gradually individuals of faith in the West turned into faithless individuals. Agnostics, even atheists, yet, in civilisational terms, they remained Christians as the ancestral civilisations had been reduced to artefacts! Thus Christianity in the secularised West has transformed into a common geo-Christian civilisation with liberty replacing old faith as the new faith.
It is of course true that many in US particularly are anxious to reinvent Christianity post 9/11, to recall the Christian roots of modern western civilisation to counter the rise of militant Islam. But that is more out of dislike for Islam, than for love of Christ.
QED: The hidden drive behind the labels of liberty and freedom is geo-political Christianity. The clashes, symbolised by 9/11 or the Danish cartoons, are not between freedom and Islam as the West is at pains to explain. It is between geo-political Christian civilisation and Islam. In substance it is a clash between the modern version of the Religion of Love and the rigidity of the Religion of Peace.
Writer’s e-mail: gurumurthy@epmltd.com
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