Civil war or Holy war?

As religious fanatics continue to riot in the name of God, their brutal tactics are really just defiling his very greatness.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This article appeared originally in the Boston Globe.

“Fanaticism,” William James wrote, ”is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme.” Religious fanaticism was James’s subject, and his reflection, published in ”The Varieties of Religious Experience” more than a hundred years ago, seems especially resonant now.

What James called ”jealousy for the deity’s honor” defines the apparent mode of feeling among those who take to the streets to protest the blasphemies that come like battle cries once war is deemed holy. When the virtue of loyalty is experienced as loyalty to a heavenly lord, restraints on behavior can seem like proof of insufficient devotion. The publishers of the Danish cartoons may not have been able to anticipate the responses that still roil the Islamic world, but those who attacked the Askariya shrine in Samarra last week surely knew what the reaction among Shi’ite Muslims would be — nothing less than an unbridled urge to defend the Holy One against such sacrilege. The civil war in Iraq aches to be a holy war.

An army that understands itself as defending God inevitably provokes reactions that are experienced as attacks, not on the army but on the Godhead itself. This in turn generates ever more ferocious escalations because more than the tribe is at stake, or the nation, or even the family. This is why, in history’s supreme irony, holy war is the most savage war of all.

The now familiar scenes of enraged protesters waving fists at cameras, en route to acts of sacred vengeance, cannot be understood apart from the theology that undergirds such passion. ”God is great!” the Koran says, and Muslims in the streets seem to take that to mean that the deity is a being of such infinite supremacy that any offense against it must itself be experienced as infinite, requiring an infinite rage in God’s behalf.

God, it seems, is understood to be a feudal potentate whose honor, once slighted by nefarious human actions, can only be restored by counterbalancing nefarious reactions. This theology, not particular to Islam, is rooted in the various mythologies of monotheism, some of which tend to portray the deity itself as jealous of its glory, ready to take offense.

Thus, as James puts it, ”crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other reason than to remove a fanciful slight upon the God.” Such theology has ”conspired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intolerance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind.”

But what if ”God is great!” does not mean God is a transcendent king, alert to trespass by lesser beings? The Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr suggests that the common phrase is mistranslated, and that what it actually means is ”that God is greater than anything we can conceive of Him as.”

In this radical otherness, kingship is as irrelevant an image as serfhood, and the idea of offending such a deity does not apply. Greatness is not the point. Nor is defending it. ”As soon as God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory,” James concludes, religious fanaticism ”ceases to be a danger.”

In Islam, as much as Judaism and Christianity, as this Christian understands it, the core theological tradition so affirms such otherness of the deity that no merely familial, tribal, or national claims can be made upon it. Indeed, that the Holy One is wholly other is the first principle of human toleration, since no single person or group has an exclusive claim on the divine. The second principle of toleration is that God, as its author, belongs to the entire cosmos, not to any mere part of it.

God is other, yet, as each tradition affirms, God is also the creator, fully invested in creation. ”I was a hidden treasure,” as the Koran reports God telling the Prophet. ”I loved to be known. Therefore I created the creation so that I would be known.” God creates, that is, to be known by all that God creates. God’s family, tribe, and nation — are everyone and everything.

Obviously, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have all had trouble keeping these principles of toleration straight, with each of the monotheisms having regularly reduced God to a tribal deity, and loyalty to God to a cause of war. We see just such a thing unfolding in the streets of Muslim cities today, as self-appointed defenders of the greatness of God are the ones, in fact, defiling it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate