Not in God's Name

Confronting Religious Violence

Jonathan Sacks

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473616523
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Despite predictions of continuing secularisation, the twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of religious extremism and violence in the name of God.In this powerful and timely book, Jonathan Sacks explores the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, focusing on the historic tensions between the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.Drawing on arguments from evolutionary psychology, game theory, history, philosophy, ethics and theology, Sacks shows how a tendency to violence can subvert even the most compassionate of religions. Through a close reading of key biblical texts at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths, Sacks then challenges those who claim that religion is intrinsically a cause of violence, and argues that theology must become part of the solution if it is not to remain at the heart of the problem.This book is a rebuke to all those who kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love, and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.For the sake of humanity and the free world, the time has come for people of all faiths and none to stand together and declare: Not In God's Name.

Part One

Bad Faith

Chapter 1

Altruistic Evil

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.

So the book of Genesis tells us. Having made human beings in his image, God sees the first man and woman disobey the first command, and the first human child commit the first murder. Within a short space of time ‘the world was filled with violence’. God ‘saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth’. We then read one of the most searing sentences in religious literature. ‘God regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain’ (Gen. 6:6).

Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.

Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. Why was there hierarchy on earth? Because there was hierarchy in heaven. Just as the sun ruled the sky, so the pharaoh, king or emperor ruled the land. When some oppressed others, the few ruled the many, and whole populations were turned into slaves, this was – so it was said – to defend the sacred order written into the fabric of reality itself. Without it, there would be chaos. Polytheism was the cosmological vindication of the hierarchical society. Its monumental buildings, the ziggurats of Babylon and pyramids of Egypt, broad at the base, narrow at the top, were hierarchy’s visible symbols. Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.

It was against this background that Abrahamic monotheism emerged as a sustained protest. Not all at once but ultimately it made extraordinary claims. It said that every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class or creed, was in the image and likeness of God. The supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. A society is judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. Life is sacred. Murder is both a crime and a sin. Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love. Though in its early books the Hebrew Bible commanded war, within centuries its prophets, Isaiah and Micah, became the first voices to speak of peace as an ideal. A day would come, they said, when the peoples of the earth would turn their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and wage war no more. According to the Hebrew Bible, Abrahamic monotheism entered the world as a rejection of imperialism and the use of force to make some men masters and others slaves.

Abraham himself, the man revered by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews, ruled no empire, commanded no army, conquered no territory, performed no miracles and delivered no prophecies. Though he lived differently from his neighbours, he fought for them and prayed for them in some of the most audacious language ever uttered by a human to God – ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ (Gen. 18:25) He sought to be true to his faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.

That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry. It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words ‘God is dead’, whose ethic was the will to power.

To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.

*

Since the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, religiously motivated violence has not diminished. After wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions in Libya and Syria, regime changes in many Middle Eastern countries and the rise of ISIS (commonly known as Islamic State), after more than a decade in which to think the problem through, the West has grown weaker while radical political Islam has grown stronger.

Al-Qaeda and the Islamist ideology from which it derived have generated dozens, perhaps hundreds, of associated or imitative groups throughout the world and neither they nor their acts of terror show any signs of diminution. In November 2014, for example, there were 664 jihadist attacks in 14 countries, killing a total of 5,042 people. A December 2014 report by the BBC World Service and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London concluded that Islamist extremism is ‘stronger than ever’ despite al-Qaeda’s declining role.1

We have grown used to seeing sights on television and the social media that we thought had been consigned to the Middle Ages. Hostages beheaded. Soldiers hacked to death with axes. A Jordanian pilot burned alive. Innocent populations butchered. Schoolchildren murdered in cold blood. Young girls sexually assaulted and sold as slaves. Ten-year-olds turned into suicide bombers. A February 2015 report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child spoke of mass executions of boys by ISIS, and of children being beheaded or buried alive.2 Churches, synagogues and mosques have been destroyed, holy sites desecrated, people at prayer assassinated, and Christians abducted and crucified. Ancient communities have been driven from their homes.

Christians are being systematically persecuted in many parts of the world. Throughout the Middle East they are facing threat, imprisonment and death. In Afghanistan Christianity has almost been extinguished. In 2010 the last remaining church was burned to the ground. People converting to Christianity face the death sentence. In Syria, an estimated 450,000 Christians have fled. Members of other religions, among them Mandeans, Yazidis, Baha’i and people from Muslim minority faiths, have also suffered persecution and death.

In Egypt, 5 million Copts live in fear. In 2013, in the largest single attack on Christians since the fourteenth century, more than fifty churches were bombed or burned in an attack that has been called Egypt’s Kristallnacht.3 Young Coptic girls are abducted, converted to Islam against their will and forcibly married to Muslim men. If they attempt to return to their Christian faith, they face imprisonment and death.4

In 2001 there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq: today barely 400,000. In 2014 ISIS began a programme of beheading and butchering Christians, announcing that anyone refusing to convert to Islam will be ‘killed, crucified or have their hands and feet cut off’. Christians have been expelled from Iraq’s second city, Mosul, where they had been a presence for more than sixteen centuries.

In Sudan, an estimated 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the Arab Muslim militia Janjaweed since 1984. In Pakistan, they live in a state of fear. In November 2010, a Christian woman from Punjab Province, Asia Noreen Bibi, was sentenced to death by hanging for violating Pakistan’s blasphemy law. The accusation arose from an incident in which she had drunk water together with Muslim farm workers. They had protested that as a Christian she was unfit to touch the drinking bowl. An argument ensued. The workers accused her of blasphemy. As I write, she is still being held in solitary confinement pending an appeal for her life.

A century ago Christians made up 20 per cent of the population of the Middle East. Today the figure is 4 per cent. What is happening is the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing. It is one of the crimes against humanity of our time.

Muslims too face persecution in Myanmar, South Thailand, Sri Lanka, China and Uzbekistan. Eight thousand were murdered in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, and many others raped, tortured or deported. In Cambodia in the 1970s as many as half a million were killed by the Khmer Rouge, and 132 mosques were destroyed. In Hebron in 1994 a religious Jew, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born physician, opened fire on Muslim Palestinians at prayer in Abraham’s Tomb, killing 29 and injuring a further 125. On 2 July 2014 a seventeen-year-old Palestinian, Mohamed Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped and gruesomely murdered in a revenge attack after the killing of three Israeli teenagers. On 10 February 2015, three Muslims were killed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, allegedly by a militant atheist.

Muslims form the majority of victims of Islamist violence. A report from the University of Maryland’s Global Terror Database estimated that between 2004 and 2013, about half of terrorist attacks and 60 per cent of fatalities occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of which have a mostly Muslim population.5 One of the most tragic incidents occurred in Peshawar, Pakistan, where on 15 December 2014 Taliban gunmen stormed a military-run school and massacred 141 people, 132 of them children. Many Muslims feel deeply threatened by what they see as Western hostility, whether in the form of civilian casualties of the war in Iraq, drone strikes in Pakistan, or Israeli retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks, or as generalised antagonism in countries where they are a minority.

Meanwhile antisemitism has returned to the world in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. In Stockholm, on 27 January 2000, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, leaders of every nation in Europe committed themselves to a continuing programme of anti-racist and Holocaust education. Since then antisemitism has risen in every European country. Jews are leaving France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Hungary in fear. A survey by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published in November 2013, showed that a third of Europe’s Jews were contemplating leaving.

In Copenhagen on 14 February 2015, a Jewish security volunteer was killed outside a synagogue. In Paris on 9 January 2015, four Jews were shot in a kosher supermarket. In May 2014, three people were killed by a gunman in the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In Toulouse in 2012, a Jewish teacher and three schoolchildren were murdered. In these last three cases the killers were all French-born Muslims. In the summer of 2014, a synagogue near the Bastille in central Paris was surrounded by a large and angry mob chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.

That the cry of ‘Jews to the gas’ should be heard again on the streets of Germany, and that several European countries should now be considered by Jews as unsafe places in which to live, is extraordinary, given decades of anti-racist legislation, interfaith dialogue and Holocaust education. Jews fear that ‘Never again’ may become ‘Ever again’.

It is not only members of the Abrahamic monotheisms who are under threat. So too are Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and Bahais. In Northern Iraq, the ancient sect of the Yazidis only narrowly escaped genocide at the hands of ISIS. As well as being victims, several of the non-Abrahamic faiths, especially nationalist Buddhists and Hindus, have been among the perpetrators. Religious freedom, a right enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is under threat today in more than a quarter of the world’s nations. A report entitled Religious Freedom in the World,6 covering the years 2012–14, notes that there has been a marked deterioration in 55 of the world’s 196 countries, due either to authoritarian regimes or to Islamist groups. These are deeply troubled times.

*

Hannah Arendt, writing about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, famously used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that many of those who implemented the Final Solution, the planned extermination of Europe’s Jews, were faceless bureaucrats implementing government orders, more out of obedience than hate. There is nothing banal about the evil currently consuming large parts of the world.

Many of the perpetrators, including suicide bombers and jihadists, come from European homes, have had a university education, and until their radicalisation were regarded by ...