No More Learning

A Politico- Psychological Essay] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
See Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft [The Religion of Society], ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 152f.
15
16
17 18 19
20 21
22 23
Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin. One must also insist that the doctrine of the ‘lamb of God’ was derived not from the near- sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but from the monstrous reinterpretation of the slaughter ritual at Passover.
The most assured representation of Catholic Romanism is to be found in Hans Küng's magnum opus Das Christentum [Christianity] (Munich, 1994), in the third section of the historical part, which, under the title ‘The Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages’, shows in particular – like a book within a book – the process of ‘Romanization at the expense of Catholic identity’ with reference to centralization, juridicization, politicization, militarization and clericalization.
David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005).
Especially in the extensive request for forgiveness on 12 March 2000.
Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Rapport sur les idées religieuses et morales’ (7 May 1794) in Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ed. Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez and Pierre- Célestin Roux-Lavergne (Paris: Paulin, 1834–8), vol XXXII, pp. 353ff.
Louis Scutenaire, Mes inscriptions 1943–1944 (Paris: Allia, 1982).
See, for example, I. S. Hussain, The Qur'an and Modernism. Beyond Science and Philosophy (Lahore, 2000), pp. 1f. : ‘The Qur'an: An Immaculate Conception’.
Mühlmann, Jesus überlistet Darwin.
According to the narrative scheme ecclesia oppressa, ecclesia militans, ecclesia triumphans – from the church under pressure to the fighting church, then from the fighting to the triumphant church – used in church history to summarize the political fate of Christianity between the death of Christ and the Constantinian shift.
3
The battle fronts
Having presented the main candidates on the field of monotheistic faith and zeal (a fourth, the Communism expanding in the nineteenth century, does not require consideration at this point), it is not very difficult to subject the potential and actual confrontations between the monotheisms to systematic examination. Gaining the freest view of the field requires not a historical report, but rather a combinatorial scheme detailing all the formal possibilities of confrontation between the protagonists. In the following structural exercise – which, I hope, will not shock readers with its methodical callousness – I shall present twelve, or perhaps eighteen, basic possibilities of inter-monotheistic and intra-monotheistic formation of fronts, pointing here and there to the historical or diachronic contents of the synchronously schematized constellations. Their order is arbitrary and does not convey anything about the historical or moral weight of the individual figures in the conflicts. As I shall begin with the Christian positions, it is fitting that the oldest and most harmful manifestation of inter-monotheistic polemic should be mentioned first.
The first figure of confrontation on the inter-monotheistic field is Christian anti-Judaism (1), whose founding document, the proto- apostle's letter to the Romans, has already been mentioned above. One of its oldest sources is also the Gospel of John, which already displays the most vehement anti-Jewish sentiment – here the Jews are openly condemned as the ‘children of Satan’ and viewed as part of a counter-world that has been rejected. Needless to say, such statements are more than simply the darkest blot on the history of the world's favourite religion; beyond that, they also make it clear what price was paid for this new idea of the Messiah. From an evolution-dynamic perspective, religious anti-Judaism constitutes a special case within a more general law, namely that the inception of an innovative ‘spiritual movement’ will inevitably leave behind slower groups, whose delayed or reluctant manner is taken as a ruinous sign by those already ahead. As the conservatives of the old
covenant, the Jews were to embody this law and suffer under it, just as they looked back upon the Egyptians and the idolaters of Canaan as allegedly spiritually backward. As the history of the Christian hostility towards Jews fills entire libraries, archives of villainy that taught generations of academics to doubt Christianity, if not humanity at large, there is no further need to speak about it in the context of a formal enumeration – except for the conceptual criticism that one often describes these phenomena completely mechanically with the word ‘anti-Semitism’, which still gives the absurd fabrications of the political racism of the nineteenth century too much credence.
The next figure is that of Christian anti-Islamism (2), whose beginnings can be traced back to the Byzantine reactions to the Arab- Islamic attacks of the seventh and eighth centuries. The Byzantine Empire had already lost two-thirds of its territories and half of its population to the Islamic conquerors by this point. In the High Middle Ages, the denigration of Islam was commonplace in Europe. When Dante wrote the twenty-eighth Canto of Inferno, which depicts the prophet Mohammed, together with the sowers of scandal and schism, being hacked to pieces by a sword-wielding devil for all eternity, he was most likely able to draw on the Islamophobic clichés of his time without having to rely on any inspiration himself – if one leaves aside the commedia's typical schema of analogy between the manner of blasphemy and the mode of infernal punishment. A further document of Christian Islamophobia from the early fifteenth century was made famous by the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI in Regensburg in September 2006, in which he quoted the statement – or rather the sigh – of the unhappy emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos (whose daughter had once sat in the harem of the enemy as they besieged Byzantium), that the prophet Mohammed had added nothing but evil and inhumanity to Christian revelation.
Next we should mention Christian anti-Paganism (3), a prototype for all monotheistic religious polemic. The Christian opposition to the pagani, i. e. the followers of the ‘backward’ religion of the villages and fields in the Roman Empire (like the opposition to the gentiles, the yet unconverted foreign peoples), was determined by two factors: firstly, it stemmed in a more indirect manner from the traditional Jewish rejection of the idolatrous and cultic religions that had
previously dominated. Secondly, it developed from the urbane design of the ‘God's people’ project as conceived by Paul, with a clear imperial instinct in analogy to the Roman–Hellenistic ecumenical model. In this project the new figure of God, designed for the maximum mediality and transportability, inevitably came into great conflict with anything that recalled the magical circles of the older rural relics and local cults. The entire history of Christianity is thus characterized by a polemical tension between itself and all forms of folk religion with its magical-polytheistic dispositions, extending to the atrocities of the inquisition trials and extermination of witches – a tension that also permitted compromises, such as the cult of saints and relics and other manifestations of the semi-heathen, reterritorialized, folkloric and national-Catholic religion of the people.
In the next round we encounter Islamic anti-Christianism (4) and Islamic anti-Judaism (5). As much as Islam was aware of its later historical position in relation to the two other exclusively monotheistic movements, and consequently saw fit to cultivate the knowledge of those connections, it nonetheless insisted on displaying its specific differences from the earlier religions of the book. I am not sure whether Christian Delacampagne is right to speak of a ‘radically
anti-Jewish logic’1 informing Muslim culture from its beginnings to the present day. One can, however, diagnose a far-reaching ambivalence towards the Jewish legacy, for which the history of both ideas and actions in the corresponding field of conflict provides ample evidence. In fact, an emphatic distancing from Judaism can be traced back to Mohammed's Medina period. Not only was Jerusalem replaced by Mecca as the direction of prayer; there were also ‘cleansings and massacres’ of Jewish citizens – I have taken these two qualifications from Hans Küng's very empathetic and well-
2
disposed monograph on the third of the Abrahamic religions. Whether one considers it constitutive or conjunctural, anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam has been reinforced by the texts of such writers as the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who held the view that the West was waging a war of conquest against the Islamic world, and that this war was controlled primarily by Jewish interests. Such agitated interpretations of the time have recently been augmented by the loud, apocalyptic Muslim sects that are
omnipresent in Arab pop culture and burn with anticipation for the extermination of Judaism as if it were a salvation-historical event.
While Jews and Christians, as ‘people of the book’, were treated with greater tolerance, even a certain respect in classical Islam (especially when they lived as dhimmi, wards who were protected under Islamic law and paid the poll tax), the monotheistic polemic against all that was alien or archaic showed itself all the more virulently in Islamic anti-Paganism (6). Unlike its Christian counterpart, this was not directed at the country-dwellers with polytheistic origins, whom believers in the city and the rest of the empire viewed as a thorn in their side. This time its impulses came from the religiously inflamed nomadic cultures of the desert, aimed at the confusion of the cities with all their cultic polyvalence, wealth of images and architectural excesses. There was an attempt, not entirely without substance, to attribute the attacks of 11 September 2001 to the imaginary idea of the original Islam (although contemporary Islamic extremism seems most prevalent in cities and among students). It is no secret that certain passages in the Qur'an openly urge believers not only to kill polytheists (Sura 2:191, Sura 9:5, etc. ), but also to destroy their cities and towers if they refuse to accept the holy word (Sura 17:58: ‘And there is no city that we would not ravage before the day of resurrection’). One of the sources of religiously coded anti-urbanism in Islam was pointed out by Régis Debray in his uncovering of the close connection between original monotheism and the experience of living in the desert: ‘God is a nomad who has been extended to the
heavens, remembering his dunes. ’3
The next item on the list of inter-monotheistic conflict areas is Jewish anti-Christianism (7) – a position presumably connected to a wide range of historical realities that were not, to the best of our knowledge, explicitly documented. There is at least evidence, however, that the reactionary rabbinical factions in Judaism prayed in their synagogues for the destruction of the ‘Nazarenes’ from the second century AD onwards: ‘May their names be struck from the
Book of Life. ’4 Such polemics are undoubtedly more than simply the inversions of Christian anti-Judaism. If, on the one hand, Christianity inevitably saw the mere existence of Judaism as a provocation, as the Jews' continued adherence to their traditional doctrine could only mean a harsh rejection of the Christian message,
then conversely, on the other hand, the new faith of Christians in Jesus as the envoy of God was destined to be met with more or less open disapproval among the Jews. In more recent times, Jewish authors writing from a religion-psychological perspective have occasionally proposed that Christianity is fundamentally regressive in comparison to Judaism, as it exchanged the more mature belief in a life under the law for an illusory bond with a messiah who had ‘come’. One can see just how far such anti-Christian polemic in Jewish sources can extend in a book by the psychoanalysts Béla Grunberger and Pierre Dessuant entitled Narzissmus, Christentum,
Antisemitismus,5 in which the authors suggest that there is a continuum of malign Christian narcissism leading straight from Jesus to Hitler. Although the authors stepped onto the field of universal polemic with this claim, there was no scandal; those under attack simply shook their heads. Here one could observe with bafflement how psychoanalysis was being appropriated by a zealous Judaism without boundaries.
As far as Jewish anti-Islamism (8) is concerned, its historical manifestations have remained faint and presumably little-examined. Whatever their nature may have been, they would have been balanced out by occasional Jewish–Islamic alliances, which can be traced back to the time of the crusades. At any rate, the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attacks of the New York ‘hate preacher’ Meir Kahan (1932–90) only expressed a marginal position within Judaism. The ideal and real manifestations of Jewish anti-Paganism (9), on the other hand, are far clearer: they lead us to the exophobic origins of any exclusive monotheism. One can justify it by pointing to its defensive character. If Judaism had not withdrawn behind the ‘fence of the law’, it would hardly have survived the countless trials of history. On the other hand, the antithetical relationship between the Jewish faith and the conventions of those with other beliefs in the Middle East would never have grown into the vicious conflict that has meanwhile become familiar without this. One could say that the division of mankind into Jews and gentiles (goyim) still common today (a distinction that seems to pass the lips of German Sunday speakers especially easily) highlights aspects of a very old attitude, both fearful and contemptuous, towards the followers of other gods and depraved cults.
Finally one must take into account the possibility and reality of
internal schisms, which extended the polemical range with three
further positions: Christian anti-Christianism (10), Islamic anti-
Islamism (11) and Jewish anti-Judaism (12). As far as the first of
these is concerned, we primarily recall the deep gulf between the
Christian confessions from the century of the Reformation onwards
(prefigured by numerous dogmatically and politically motivated
schisms in early church history). Nonetheless, this is only one of
many manifestations of the potential for intra-Christian conflict.
Like all monotheisms, the Christian variety is no stranger to the
tension between the rigorist and laxist interpretations of the
scriptures on the one hand, and the chronic friction between
orthodox and heretical tendencies on the other. In the case of Islam,
one naturally thinks of the breaking away of the Shia, which,
according to the contemporary Sunni leader Abu Mus'ab al Zarkawi,
has as little to do with Islam as Judaism with Christianity, ‘which are
6
This overview outlines the twelve main battle fronts that could transpire from an identitary, collective-forming and polemogenic use of the three monotheistic syntheses. If one considers possible two- against-one coalitions, a further three figures can be added to the list: Christians and Muslims against Jews (13), Jews and Muslims against Christians (14), and Jews and Christians against Muslims (15). I shall refrain from supplying historical indications of such alliances.
With reference to real and virtual religious history, one should also note the development of three atheisms corresponding to the three monotheisms, a process that took place with evolutionary necessity. In order to understand this, one must acknowledge the fact that atheism does not usually stem from a context-free logical examination of the existence or non-existence of God. It practically always comes from idiosyncratic negations of particular theistic tenets and their organized cultic contexts. In this sense, atheism
likewise based on the same scripture’.
well as the Cabbalistic and mystical deviations from orthodoxy, the most obvious choice would be the opposition between the legalistic and messianic schools of thought. The schism between the conservative and the liberal synagogue is also not without certain polemogenic effects.
In the case of Judaism, as
constitutes a regional phenomenon. We must therefore take into account a Christian atheism and its damnation by orthodox Christians (16), then Islamic atheism and its damnation by Islamic zealots (17) and Jewish atheism with its damnation by pious Jews (18). The term ‘damnation’ here encompasses the darkest of meanings: for Thomas Aquinas, falling away from the Christian faith was a crime that deserved to be punished with death; even at the end of the seventeenth century, the constitution of the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts stated that the crime of atheism called for the death penalty; in the Islamic republic of Pakistan, non-believers and followers of other faiths can still be sentenced to death on charges of apostasy and blasphemy. Admittedly Rousseau, the totalitarian prophet of the Enlightenment, also proposed the death penalty for those who broke away from the ‘civil religion’ – and even in the enlightened Western ‘societies’ of today, there is no shortage of examples showing how readily the civil-religiously committed centrists begin a witch hunt whenever individuals blaspheme against the liberal consensus: a witch hunt whose practitioners happily take into account the social death of their victim. It is much rarer to encounter an abstract atheism free of any presuppositions, one that adopts a stance against the historical theisms as a whole – for example in the Treatise on the Three Impostors (these being Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) from the eighteenth century, whose anonymous author, inspired by Spinoza, takes the common Enlightenment doctrine of clerical fraud to the point of prophet fraud, even fraud by the religious founders – and actually implies that these founding fathers were not only deceivers, but also the first to be deceived. The recent case of the biologist Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion (2006) is a monument to the eternal shallowness of Anglican atheism, shows how avowed deniers of God can in turn be duped by their own zeal.
If, having completed our brief rundown, we cast a glance at the conflict area as a whole, two concluding observations seem inescapable: firstly, one can see that the classical monotheisms clearly did not make the most of their polemogenic potential. Even if one believes that the inter- and intra-monotheistic struggles cost too many lives anyway, studying the formally prefigured likelihood of different enmities between these religions in a structural overview
reveals just how far the historical reality fell short of the script's possibilities. It should be clear why this insufficiency was beneficial to mankind, which would otherwise have fought many more battles.
Secondly, we should not neglect to mention the non-combatant observers on the edges of the tripolemic field, who have always cast astonished and disapproving glances at the warlike formations of the participants. In their own way, these also belong to the scene of the battling monotheisms. For them, admittedly, the state of consciousness among the ‘common people’ is decisive, as the masses' blissful lack of opinion (as God is too enormous a subject) or principles (as fundamental issues always lead to overexertion) makes them keep their distance from the tiring theatre of hyper-motivation among the faithful and the chosen.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5 6
Christian Delacampagne, Islam et Occident. Les raisons d'un confl it (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), p. 27.
Hans Küng, Der Islam. Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft [Islam: Past, Present and Future] (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 2006), p. 152.
Régis Debray, Einführung in die Mediologie [Introduction to Mediology] (Bern Stuttgart and Vienna: Hauph Verlag, 2003), p. 98.
F. E. Peters, The Monotheists. Jews, Christians and Muslims in Confl ict and Competition, vol. I: The Peoples of God (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 161.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000.
Excerpts from the ‘Letter to Bin Laden and al Zawahiri’ in Al Quaida. Texte des Terrors, edited with a commentary by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli (Munich, 2006), p. 459. English edition: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press, 2008).
4
The campaigns
If it is accurate to characterize the classical monotheisms as vehicles of zealous universalism, this inevitably raises the question of their world strategies. Naturally, each of these religions has a well- developed reality of life or, as Ivan Illich puts it, a vernacular side in which the charm of non-zealous, everyday religious life enforced by cult and tradition can take effect. As is well known, Chateaubriand
celebrated the ‘beauties of the Christian religion’,1 and Jewish and Islamic apologists could equally have dealt with the attractions of their religions. As well as the aesthetic merits, such defences would have emphasized above all the moral or social achievements that unfolded within the local communes in more or less impressive ways. As open as we may be to the charms of the monotheistic forms of life in the ‘rear line’, however (without overlooking its compulsive aspects, for example the Islamic custom of circumcision among young girls, ultimately motivated simply by a rule-obsessed attachment to a malign tradition, coupled with the need to pass on one's own lack of freedom), all three must primarily be defined as front-line religions owing to their polemical beginnings. The fact that their offensive potential sometimes lay dormant for centuries under certain historical conditions does not change the expansive orientation of the programmes. Each of the monotheisms has its own specific quality of ‘world-taking’, to use a term coined by Carl Schmitt in a different context. The truth is that the One and Only, though first discovered in the regional cult, inevitably ends up being promoted as a god with imposing worldly representation and increasing claims to sovereignty. Because of its predication on a concept of God that emphasizes the uniqueness and omnipotence of the Highest, religious universalism produces surpluses of meaning that erupt in encroachments of monotheistic communes on their political and cultic environments.
In the following, I shall distinguish between three main forms of expansion that are evident in the historical development of
monotheistic campaigns. The first, that of theocratic sovereignism, which came to exert a defining influence on Judaism throughout its many times and spaces, has predominantly defensive and separatist characteristics, while the second and third forms, namely expansion through missionary activity and through the Holy War, show a clearly offensive approach, one that also encompassed such means as persuasion, coercion and subjugation, even open blackmail (‘Baptism or death! ’, ‘Qur'an or death! ’). I do not think any formal proof is required that the latter two forms are not atypical of the two more extroverted monotheisms.
One can only speak of a Jewish campaign in the limited, even
paradoxical, sense that the surpluses of meaning found in post-exile
monotheism show a clear anti-Babylonian, and later also anti-
Hellenic, anti-Roman and generally anti-imperial, thrust. One
cannot, on the other hand, speak of any missionary expansion or
proselytistic dynamic in Judaism as a whole. The post-Babylonian
theology of Judaism is sovereignist in so far as it claims a supreme
position for the god of the enslaved people – a provocation that
became unforgettable especially through the book of Genesis, whose
final version was produced in the post-exile era. The basic position of
Judaism in relation to the rest of the world, however, remained a
separatist one in so far as it refused any form of cultic communality
with the other religious peoples and evaded any ecumenical mixture
or levelling out – an approach that, especially in the families of the
Jewish priests, the kohanim, maintained a high degree of biological
2
stability over millennia.
It proves the effectiveness of a closed
3
religious community as a ‘selective genetic force’.
an outward missionary shift was only conceded for relatively short periods – it is perhaps no coincidence that the only proselytistic episode in the history of Judaism was in the time directly before the messianic sect of Jesuans broke away from the main movement (from c. 150 BC to AD 50). For the majority of its historical existence, however, Judaism occupied a position that can best be described as defensive universalism. With this self-enclosed stance, the people of Israel produced – initially on the basis of tribal and small-state forms of life, later (after what Harold Bloom terms the ‘Roman holocaust’) under the conditions of exile and dispersion – a massive theological surplus that would have been sufficient for a large empire, even
The necessity of
though the originators of these teachings could not even rely on their subsistence as a people on their own territory for many centuries. By following the notion of living under the eyes of a watchful god, the Jewish people developed a sensorium for the counter-observation of this god, through which a theologically tinged, eccentric positionality (concentrated in the idea of the covenant) became second nature.
If, in spite of all our reservations, it were permissible to speak of a Jewish campaign, this expression could only refer to what Leo Baeck termed, in Das Wesen des Judentums [The Nature of Judaism] (1905), the ‘struggle for self-preservation’. Certainly, according to Baeck, it is impossible to conceive of Judaism as a whole without the ‘force of instruction and conversion’, but this potential was only able to take effect in an introverted and defensive direction during almost 2,000 years of diaspora. ‘People understood that mere existence can already be a declaration, a sermon to the world . . . The mere fact that one existed posited some meaning . . . Self-preservation was
experienced as preservation through God. ’4 One Christian author exaggerated these statements to the most obvious extent by declaring that, for him, the continued existence of Judaism in the world of today constitutes no less than a historical proof of God's existence. Advocates of evolutionist neuro-rhetoric would say that the longevity of Judaism proves the precise vertical duplicability of the memoactive rituals practised among this people. As Judaism invested its religious surpluses of meaning in its self-preservation as a people and a ritual community, its physical existence became charged with metaphysical ideas that amounted to the fulfilment of a mission – one more reason why the physical attack on Judaism can go hand in hand with the desire for its spiritual and moral eradication.
Formally speaking, the relationship between Judaism and the two religions that followed it could be viewed as a spiritual prefiguration of the asymmetrical war. Henry Kissinger supplied the latter's strategic formula in 1969 with the observation that the guerrillas win if they do not lose, whereas the regular troops lose if they do not win. The Jewish position corresponds to that of a guerrilla movement that takes the non-defeat it constantly achieves as a necessary, albeit inadequate, condition for its victory. By securing its survival, it creates the preconditions for its provisional – and who knows,
perhaps one day even its ultimate – success. The ‘preservation of Judaism’ takes place, as Leo Baeck notes with prophetic pathos, according to the ‘strict laws of life’ in a historical selection process. ‘History chooses, for it demands a decision; it becomes the grand selection among humans. ’ ‘When the gravity of circumstances calls upon humanity, it is often only the few who are left . . . The remainder
is the justification for history. ’5 Hence the real Jewish campaign resembles a swift gallop through many times and realms with heavy losses. This anabasis of the just has the form of a test undergone by each new generation. Here, a minority is filtered out from within a minority in order to continue the monotheistic adventure in its original form, life under the law and behind the ‘fence around the
doctrine’6 as unadulteratedly as possible. Here, the fundamental paradox of this religious structure, the fixation of the universal god on a single people, is prevented, with all its practitioners' power, from unfolding.
The state of Israel proclaimed in 1948 secularized the motif of tested survival. It presents itself as the political form of a ‘society’ of immigrants that claims (after the people's ‘return’ to the region of its former historical existence) an additional, discreetly transcendental significance for its physical existence. To many Jews, founding a state of their own seemed the only possible way of securing their future survival after the Shoa. As one of the conflict parties in the permanent crisis in the Middle East, Israel is paying a high price for this. In this role, it is inevitably losing a large part of the moral advantages it could still claim as long as it perceived itself as a dispersed, suffering community. The number of those still willing to accompany Israel through the complications of its new position is not especially great. In this position, it suffers from the compulsion to show strength just as it formerly suffered from its ability to survive mistreatment. Here too, there is no doubt as to the primacy of the defensive. Let us bear in mind that this hypothesis concerns Israel's reason of state, not the obstructed universalism of Jewish religiosity.
One can speak far more directly of a Christian campaign, as its appearance was accompanied by a shift towards offensive universalism. Within it, one finds the paradoxes of monotheistic system formation still suppressed in Judaism being developed bit by bit. Its appearance on the stage of earth-shattering forces teaches us
that ideas of this level embody themselves in autopoietic processes that, on the basis of their results, one reads as success stories. The administrators of the imperium Romanum realized early on how dangerous the Christian provocation was when they suppressed the new religion and its missionary efforts in several waves of persecution, while generally leaving the non-missionary Jews in peace. During the period of repression, the Christians remained true to their non-violent, ecstatically passive stance. They only formed alliances that resorted to violence once their faith had become the state religion. One can certainly understand what historians critical of the church mean when they date Christianity's own Fall to the moment when it began to cohabit with worldly power.
The essence of Christianity's historical successes can be expressed in a trivial observation: the majority of people today use the Christian calendar, or refer to it as an external guideline in so far as they follow other counting systems that define our current year as 2007 post Christum natum – which corresponds roughly to the Jewish year 5767 or the Islamic year 1428. Only few contemporaries realize that, in doing so, they are acting in relation to an event that marks a caesura in the ‘history of truth’. In this counting system, the year AD 0 reminds us of the moment at which the ‘world’ became the broadcasting area for a radically inclusive message. This message was that all people, in accordance with their common nature as creatures, should view themselves as members of a single commune created by God, destroyed by human sin and restored by the Son of God. If understood, this news should result in the dissolution of the enmities that arise among individuals and groups; it would also annul the hermetic self-enclosure of the different cultures and make all collectives follow a shared ideal of sublime justice.
Morally speaking, this was one of the best things humanity had ever heard – which did not, admittedly, prevent a number of the worst conflicts from growing out of the rivalries between those groups who sought to secure the privilege of bringing the good news to the non- believers. In noting that ‘the world changed into a site of cockfights
for apostles’,7 the subtle reactionary Dávila recognized one of the primary aspects of monotheistic conflicts. He underestimated the potency of such ‘cockfights’ for making history, however. In fact, this ‘history’ results from the project of the monotheistic will to total
communication. From an internal point of view, it means the process of opening all peoples up to the news of the One God, whose portrait is differentiated into a trinity. All that has gone before now sinks down into aeons past, and only retains validity in so far as it can be interpreted as a preparation for the gospel. Whereas human life until then had hardly consisted of anything except obedience to the cycles of nature and the rise and fall of empires, it would now be integrated into a purposeful process. The world is set in historical motion, in the stricter sense of the word, from the moment in which everything that happens is supposed to be governed by a single principle.
What we call history is the campaign of the human race to achieve consenting unity under a god common to all. In this sense, Leo Baeck was right
8
that there is ‘no monotheism without world history’.
history presupposes that Christianity is the executive organ of messianic work. In fact, the significance of the messianic only becomes genuinely clear once it is fulfilled through the evangelical. Messianism post Christum natum testifies not only to the Jewish non-observance of the Christian caesura, it also shows that, despite the arrival of the good news, there is still enough room for the expectation of new good, even among Christians. Whether there can and should be a collection of the good news of new good in a Newer Testament remains to be seen.
The special role of Paul in overturning the Jewish privilege of sole access to the One and Highest has already been mentioned in the section on the battle formations. Characteristically, there has been no lack of exegetes among the Jewish theologians of recent times who no longer see Paul as a mere traitor, the role he has always embodied for the majority of Jewish commentators. He is increasingly being acknowledged as the zealot who, in bringing the universalist potential of the post-Babylonian Jewish doctrine of God into the world through an ingenious popularization, actually showed that he took the fundamental clerical vocation of the Jewish people seriously. An author such as Ben-Chorin states that even Jews should ultimately applaud the fact that Israel's monotheistic zeal proved infectious for other peoples of the world – albeit at the price that the Christians were lamentably deluded in their play with the messianic
9
The shift to the global scale remained irrevocably tied to the
fire.
Christian caesura. In his Letter to the Magnesians (10:3–4), Ignatius
This concept of
of Antioch, an author of the early second century, stated in no uncertain terms that Judaism leads to Christianity, not vice versa. In this thesis one hears the voice of the resolute cleric who, beyond the martyrdom he aspired to for his own person, demanded and
10
Under the magnifying glass of success, the dark sides of zealous monotheism also develop into world powers. The zealotic militancy of the early Christians soon came into severe conflict with the circumstance that these devout few were inevitably faced with a vast majority of people to whom the faith of this new sect meant nothing. The zealots took revenge by branding those who did not share their faith ‘infidels’. The latter's unperturbed insistence on their previous ideas was thus declared a spiritual crime with grave metaphysical consequences – especially when they chose to decline Christianity's offer after extensive reflection. This is why, from its earliest days, the message of salvation has been accompanied by an escort of threats predicting the worst for unbelievers. Certainly the gospel speaks of wanting to bring blessings to all sides; but Christian militantism has wished the curse of heaven upon the unconverted from its inception. On the one hand, Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal’ (1 Corinthians 13:1). On the other hand, in the second epistle to the Thessalonians (1:8–9) – whose authenticity is not uncontested – one can already observe the apocalyptic shadow that grows with the spreading of the message: when the Lord is revealed from heaven in blazing fire, ‘He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord. ’ So the writings of the people's apostle already promote a love that, if not requited, turns into scorn and lust for extermination. The physiognomy of the offensive universalist monotheisms is characterized by the determination of the preachers to make themselves fearsome in the name of the Lord. Possibly this corresponds to a rule of universalist religious communication, namely that every gospel must inevitably cast a dysangelic shadow in the course of its proclamation. Thus the non-acceptance of its truths in fact becomes a dangerous indicator of imminent disaster. The message divides the world as a whole into the
predicted the triumph of the Christian cause on a grand scale.
unequal halves of church and world. The Christian offensive's ambition to define that whole cannot be fulfilled without excluding ‘this world’ from the holy community. What constitutes a paradox in logical terms, however, amounts to horror in moral terms.
One can therefore agree – not without a grain of salt – with Alfred N. Whitehead when he reaches the following conclusion in his lectures on the philosophy of religion (Boston, 1926): ‘On the whole, the Gospel of love was turned into a Gospel of fear. The Christian world
was composed of terrified populations. ’11 One should append the question as to whether it was really a matter of turning a fundamentally good thing into its opposite, or rather an ambivalence that was present from the start. In this case, the motives of Christian missionary successes should be interpreted more critically than is generally the case in official church histories. They should no longer be attributed exclusively to the infectious effects of evangelical proclamations, which undeniably had an innate tendency towards improving the world's moral climate at first. They would then be attributable equally to the threats used to enslave intimately those who received them. That would make the mission more than simply the externalization required in order to spread the message of salvation; it would then also be the form in which the church, opposed to the ‘world’, worked through its irresolvable conflict with that ‘world’. The corresponding formula should be: going on the offensive by fleeing from the world – or, to put it more mildly: serving the world from a position of scepticism towards the world.
One can assess how far these somewhat uneasy suppositions are justified with reference to the effects of the church teacher Aurelius Augustinus. He can claim the privilege of having contributed more than any other individual believer – except Paul – to the confusion, and in fact the neuroticization, of a civilization. This diagnosis by no means refers only to the sexual-pathological distortions that were forced on Christian forms of life for one and a half centuries. The metaphysics of predestination taught by Augustine was even more harmful: upon closer inspection, it reveals itself as the most
12
unfathomable system of terror in the history of religion.
doctrine of the eternal predestination of Adam's children was based on an axiom stating that only very few would undeservedly be saved, while the majority would deservedly be cast into the flames, weighed
As the
down by the ‘burden of damnation’, the edifice of Christian faith after Augustine could only be erected over the tormenting uncertainty of one's own predetermined salvation. The only vague indication for individuals of possibly being chosen came from the fact that, with God's help, they could progress from fearful trembling to zealotry. It is no coincidence, then, that with Augustine – following preludes in the deserts of the Near East – the flight of believers to the monastic orders in late antiquity also began in the Western sphere; these orders offered a liveable form for the total absorption of being through the religious imperative. Yet even if Augustinism declared complete subservience to the gospel as the precondition for salvation – a compacted anticipation of Islam – neither resolute zealotry nor strict self-renunciation could guarantee the salvation of the individual. Conversely, the slightest trace of indifference to the good news could be read as an almost certain indication of predestination to damnation.
Whoever desires to trace the underlying modus operandi of Augustinian Christianity with analytical clarity will find it, brilliantly disguised by the winning discourse of God's all-encompassing love, in the devious and systematic combination of a rational universalism of damnation and an unfathomable elitism of salvation. In order to do the theologian's doctrine greater justice, it may be useful to realize the ways in which all great religions have a part in a general economy of cruelty. Its application lies in ostensibly lowering the general level of cruelty by inducing believers to take a certain amount of suffering upon themselves voluntarily in order to avoid or hold back greater unwanted terrors. This forms the basis for the transformative effects of spiritual asceticisms. One of the most attractive aspects of early Christianity was its dissolution of the standards of the Roman culture of cruelty – especially through its resistance to the brutalizing gladiatorial games, which had developed into a ubiquitous form of decadent mass culture in the Roman Empire (comparable only to the perversions of top-level sports in the second half of the twentieth century). Augustine intensified this resistance by striving for a moderation of human behaviour through the threat of maximum cruelty in the life beyond. With this approach, however, he fell prey to the danger of overshooting the mark: with his unflinching theological absolutism, this most influential of all the church fathers
inflated the diabolical aspect of God to the point of sacred terrorism. It can therefore be said that Augustinian Christianity proved a victim of fatal losses: because metaphysical terror inevitably translates into psychological, and ultimately also physical, terror, Augustine's ungracious doctrine of grace contributed to raising the level of cruelty in the Christianized world through the gospel, rather than lowering it. In this sense, Christianity's critics touch on a raw nerve when they argue that Christianity often furthered the evil from which it subsequently offered deliverance.
Considering all this, one can understand why countless Christians have only been able to adopt Augustine's doctrines by repressing their unpalatable aspects. The history of the Christian faith since the early Middle Ages is nothing but a series of attempts to mask the sinister dimensions of the Augustinian legacy through a more optimistic interpretation of the question of humanity's chances of salvation. Hardly any Christian ever had the necessary cold- bloodedness to realize why heaven had to remain almost empty – as far as human dwellers were concerned, at least – during the era dominated by Augustine's theology. It was only with the age of discoveries that believers were presented with the task of exploring the practically untouched continent of divine generosity. From that point on, the aim was to depict the realm of God beyond this world as a densely populated area – Dante would have been one of the first to encounter more than a ghost town on his journey to heaven. The current results of the search for a generous God were expressed in the Polish pope's well-known statement: speriamo che l'inferno sia vuoto – ‘let us hope that hell is empty’. The antithesis between Augustine and John Paul II encapsulates the whole drama of Christian theology: it shows the long way from the well-guarded terrorist secret of faith, in which God remained virtually alone in heaven, to the civil-religiously tinged hypothesis by which hell – in which one is still supposed to believe owing to the fact of our ‘distance from God’ – should remain empty in future.
The question of whether the full blame for the darkening influence of Augustinian doctrines on Christianity should be laid upon their originator will be left open here. In his way, he was the medium of a bad time that made superhuman demands on his brilliance; it is hardly surprising that this resulted in some inhumane solutions. It is
only regrettable that the fifth century did not produce any author with sufficient understanding to formulate the thesis: whoever did not live before Augustine knows nothing of life's sweetness. Douceur de vivre, however, is a concept that could only become meaningful again once one had reached the safe shore of post-Augustinian, in a way even post-Christian (in the sense of post-clericocratic), times. This marked the start of an age in which popes would feel obliged to point out that Christianity should not revolve primarily around compulsion and self-denial, but rather a positive way of life.
On the whole, Christianity's campaign to conquer the ‘globe’ owes its success to its episcopal guidance, which sought a balance between eschatological extremism and magical populism in the course of a learning process that continued for centuries. During its first expansion cycle, the secret of the Christian missions' success lay primarily in its alliances with political rulers and a specific strategy of converting nobles – the Constantinian shift provided the most brilliant and most questionable model for this. Whoever was interested in spreading Christianity in the age of monarchy had to follow the maxim that one can only win over the people if one has the local ruler on one's side.
As far as the infamous crusades or the Holy War are concerned, these are of secondary significance compared to the proselytistic or missionary mode of expansion – if, that is, one wishes to credit them with any genuine offensive significance at all. Certainly the crusade, as the prototype of a war inspired by Christianity, unleashed enormous resources and is often believed by internal and external critics alike to exemplify the religion's inherent aggression. A single glance at the historical connections, however, shows that the (conventionally counted) seven major ventures of this kind between 1096 and 1270 were, from the crusaders' point of view, primarily measures to contain the Islamic offensive – and their lack of success underlines the relative accuracy of this judgement. They were intended to take over what Christians viewed as the centre of the world – Jerusalem – or protect it from a supposedly inappropriate occupation, but not to open the entire world to Christianity by force. The claim one occasionally hears that the crusades to Jerusalem caused the deaths of more than 20 million people seems itself to be zealous in its exaggeration.
The most favourable account of the ‘armed pilgrimages’ to the Holy Land was probably penned by Hegel, who saw them as an indispensable experience for the curriculum of the spirit. In dialectics, experience is synonymous with productive disappointment, in so far as it reverses consciousness and enlightens it as to the falsity of its still badly abstract preconceptions. Hegel argues that, by seeking to force the holy and subtle by profane and crude means, the crusaders ‘combined opposing elements without any reconciliation’ in their battles; hence their failure was in the nature of the enterprise. The only lasting value lay in the realization of how misguided it is to seek the Highest in such an external form – here one can discern firstly the enlightened Protestant critique of the love of fetishes in Catholic populism, and secondly the speculative philosopher's declaration of war on the mechanics of ‘positive religion’. It is fitting, then, that the crusade as a behavioural pattern had a purely metaphorical meaning from the Modern Age onwards. General Eisenhower was able to publish his memoirs from the Second World War in 1948 under the – to Anglophone ears – entirely conventional title Crusade in Europe without anyone suspecting an underlying Christian agenda.
In previous centuries, on the other hand, there had been no lack of compulsive Christianizing enterprises that directly combined a war of aggression with mission, for example in Charlemagne's Saxon Wars or the conquest of Prussia and the Baltic by the Teutonic Knights. With Christanity acting as the imperial religion and state cult, the imposition of church uniforms was the order of the day. In addition, such factors as the maintenance of Latin as the church language, Thomism and canonical law played a part in enforcing Roman Catholic standards with sublimely compulsive homogeneity.
Christianity's most powerful expansionist campaigns took place during the post-medieval period. What we now call globalization, or
rather its terrestrial phase,13 is inseparable from the paradoxical path of Christianity into the openness of modernity. From the sixteenth century on, Rome launched a second apostolic wave with the founding of missionary orders, initiating the operative universalization of religion in the form of Christianity. In practice,
the world mission usually acted as a partner and parasite of
14
colonialism, and only rarely as its critic or opponent.
Ironically, the
Roman Catholic world missions, which were accompanied belatedly,
but successfully, by the Protestant enterprises, reached the zenith of
their effectiveness from the eighteenth century onwards, the century
that marked the start of Europe's dechristianization – or, to put it
more cautiously, the start of religion's differentiation into a
subsystem of its own. And, while the nineteenth century was
characterized in the Old World by anti-Christian offensives that
looked down on Christianity like a vanquished formation after their
rise to cultural hegemony, that same epoch must, in mission-
historical terms, be viewed as the golden age of external
Christianization. Only now did the spreading of Christian missions
across the entire globe and the founding of sustainable church
communities in the remotest corners of the world become a practical
15
The second irony of dechristianization is evident in the fact that the new major cultural force in Europe, the Enlightenment, amounted to a continuation of Christianity by rationalist and historico- philosophical means by virtue of its ideological or propagandistic design. It has been plausibly argued that the moral core of the Enlightenment, the doctrine of human rights, can only be explained as the secularized version of Christian anthropology. (I will speak further below about the formation of a fourth wave that flooded modern ‘society’ as a ‘human’ monotheism. ) It is no coincidence that the adherents of Protestantism and Catholicism are now quarrelling over the royalties for human rights. The continuities become most vivid if one considers the adoption of Christian monotheistic models by the zealots of secular modernity. This applies in particular to the human-churchly fanaticism of the Jacobins. But the militantism of Lenin's professional revolutionaries or even the fury of the Red Guards in Mao Zedong's China contain elements of a continuation of Christian universalism by un-Christian means. They can only be fully understood as feral imitations of the apostolic modus vivendi. As unbelievable as it may sound, even the Chinese students who humiliated, beat and murdered their professors during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 onwards believed they were ambassadors of a
reality.
in numerical terms, not least because of the incorporation of the populous continent of South America into the remotely controlled Roman Catholic empire.
Since then, Christianity has been the leading world religion
just cause and acting for the good of all. Had that not been the case,
it would not have been possible for parts of the Western European
intelligentsia to be affected by a collective Maoist psychosis during
the 1960s and 1970s – still one of the darkest chapters of recent
intellectual history. The members of these circles heard the signature
melody of unfettered egalitarianism in the Chinese excesses, a
melody that had first sounded in Europe during the Jacobin terror
and has since been used as a carrier for all manner of texts around
the world. In the light of these phenomena, it is not without a certain
anxiety that one recalls Leo Baeck's sublimely naïve thesis that the
future is essentially the future of good, a future to which all coming
16
Studying the frenzy in China – which consisted of rather more than a few regrettable incidents, as forgetful ex-Maoists in France and elsewhere like to suggest – can provide insight into the dangerous nature of universalist militants: for example, how quickly uncontrolled universalism can lead to a fascism of the good. It remains uncontrolled if it lacks a critical organ to restrain the zealots' urge to absolutize their goals. With this stance, the activist is neither willing nor able to attain the insight on which any enlightened political morality is based, namely that it is not the end that justifies the means, but rather the means that tell us the truth about the ends. As we know, the direst forms of terror are those motivated by the loftiest of intentions. More than a few of those possessed by the demon of goodness genuinely told themselves that crimes can be the highest form of divine service or fulfilment of the duty to humanity. The most effective objection to such enchantments comes from the spiritual core of the Christian religion: from the perspective of paying attention to the means, Jesus' theorem ‘you shall know them by their fruits’ (Matthew 7:16) and Marshall McLuhan's crypto-Christological maxim ‘the medium is the message’ mean the same thing.
From a synoptic point of view, one should note that Christianity's campaigns, especially after the severe setbacks encountered during the Age of Enlightenment, only seem capable of continuation in a somewhat more muted fashion. After its worldwide expansionist successes, which resulted in roughly one-third of the planet's population living under its influence, without all of these even being conscious or active Christians, one would hardly expect any further
days will lead.
spread – unless the intense dynamic of secular reform and its spiritual lacunae in East Asia, particularly China, result in the growth of a new religious market. Thus one can summarize the provisional endpoint of the Christian campaign with the observation that this religion today combines a relative maximum of dissemination with a relative minimum of intensity. Its condition proves that there can be not only imperial, but also simultaneous spiritual, ‘overstretching’.
With increasing success comes increasing entropy. Under its influence, the universalist potential of faith is confirmed and simultaneously pensioned off by the great church organizations. Entropic phenomena are also unmistakably responsible for the changing face of faith in the USA, where, as Harold Bloom incisively observed, the last fifty years have seen a reshaping of Protestant Christianity into a post-Christian ‘American religion’ with
17
pronounced gnostic, individualistic and Machiavellist aspects.
Here, the faith in the Father has almost entirely disappeared, while the narcissistic realm of the Son no longer tolerates resistance. If there were an American trinity it would consist of Jesus, Machiavelli and the spirit of money. The postmodern credo was formulated in exemplary fashion by the Afro-American actor Forest Whitaker when he gave his speech of thanks upon receiving the Oscar for the best leading role in 2007, closing with the words: ‘And I thank God for always believing in me. ’
The intentional universalism of Christianity, however, was inevitably foiled in the twentieth century by the pragmatic necessities arising from coexistence with other creeds – and the charitable weakening of the churches through the development of self-confidently secular forms of life. The Christian confessions attended the school of pluralism and became predictable factors in the world ecumenical movement. From this perspective, Christianity, at least with regard to its broad central field, has entered its ‘post-imperial’ period, and – as far as one can tell – irreversibly so. The radical sects are an excep- tion to this, especially at the evangelical end of the spectrum: they
18
‘use fundamentalism as a means of re-universalization’.
profit from them as unwitting enlighteners by listening to them as informants on the universalism of the lunatics. This is not, however, the place to discuss – let alone decide – whether one should take
One can
their example as representative of the hysterical nature of all militant universalism.
Finally, I would like to turn to the question of whether Islam too is committed to its own specific campaign. The obvious answer would seem to be in the affirmative, but any more precise elaboration comes up against various obstacles for fundamental and historical reasons. The historical complications result from the fact that, after an initial phase of rapid expansion and great imperial prosperity, the Islamic world, whose fate was initially identical to that of the Arab sphere as a whole, fell into a long period of stagnation and regression whose possible end only became foreseeable with the demographic explosiveness and fundamentalist reform dynamic of the twentieth century. As far as the difficulties of a fundamental nature are concerned, these are combined above all with the contentious interpretation of the term jihad, whose appropriation by radical Islamic terrorist sects in recent times continues to spawn polemics and counter-statements.
A first indication of the inherent offensive dynamic of Islamic preaching can be gained through the observation that the earliest suras, which followed the divine revelations of 610 and the years immediately after it (such as the famous Meccan sura 81 al-Takwirk, The Folding Up), predominantly follow the tunes of apocalyptic escalation, the final decision and the threat of the terrors of
19
Judgement Day.
unconditional separation from conventional religious practices in Mecca and elsewhere: ‘Say to them: you unbelievers! I do not honour what you honour, and you do not honour what I honour’ (Sura 109:1f. ). It is equally evident that the starting point of the Islamic commune as a small, sworn community did not constitute an ideal, but was intended to be overcome as quickly as possible. Furthermore, the first ummah of Medina that gathered around the prophet was anything but a contemplative idyll. Its chronicle tells of numerous martial confrontations, starting with the ominous skirmish at the waterhole of Badr. It deals with the prophet's controversial caravan raids, shifting strategic alliances, an attack on the palm grove of a rival party that was scandalous for Arabs, and the casual massacre of a Jewish minority. But whatever religious meanings might be read into these episodes, they already give clear
The tendency of the other early suras is one of an
indications of what was to follow. The imperative of growth was no less intrinsic to this religious foundation than it was to Paul's mission – with the difference that the political–military and religious dynamics here formed an inseparable a-priori unity. Mohammed followed on from the escalation of post-Babylonian Judaism, which lived on in the zealotic escalation of Paul, developing these elements further to form an integral militantism. He achieved this by making
– like an Arab Paul – the apostolic form of life, the self-consumption in the proclamation and the proclaimed, binding for all the members of his commune. In this way, the maximum religious existence, the complete devotion to God's instructions, was declared a standard expectation of all people – in fact, almost the bare minimum of service to the Almighty that humans should carry out. That is why the word islām, which literally means ‘submission’, also gave the religion its name.
The binding nature of this guiding concept for all Muslims has foreseeable consequences: it transfers the prophet's zealotry normatively to his followers' way of life – and inversely to the fates of the unbelievers. The constitutive role of the martial factor is reinforced by the fact that the canonic writings on the prophet include a subgroup, known as the maghazi literature, that deals exclusively with Mohammed's military campaigns; in them one finds a normative inflation of sacred militantism. This final escalation finds its most vivid expression in the compulsory prayer (salāt) to be carried out 5 times per day, each time with 17 bows and 2 prostrations. Thus every practising Muslim performs 85 bows to Allah and 10 prostrations daily, making 29,090 bows and 3,540 prostrations per lunar year, as well as the corresponding recitations. In Christianity, such intensive rehearsal is only demanded within monastic orders, with a daily quota of seven hours of prayer. Logically enough, the Arabic word for ‘mosque’, masjid, means ‘place of prostration’. One should not underestimate the formative effect of frequent ritual actions. The prophet says so himself: Ad-dînu mu'amala – ‘religion is behaviour’. This is why some Islamic scholars are right in going so far as to claim that ritual prayer is a
20
form of jihad.
psychosemantically evident reality. What goes on in Muslim houses of prayer thus serves not only the manifestation of faith. The
That may sound effusive, but it describes a
relationship with transcendence celebrated physically and psychologically on a daily basis becomes equally effective as a way of keeping in shape for projects of holy dispute. From an ethical and pragmatic perspective, Islam succeeded in absorbing zealotry completely into daily life through the universal duty of ritual prayer. The greatest of all duties is memoactive fitness: it equals the spirit of the law itself.
Given the familiarity of the subject, I will be permitted to refrain from recounting the astounding history of Islamic expansion leading to the foundation of the various caliphates under the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Ottomans, etc. The explosive spread of Islam in the one-and-a-half centuries following the prophet's death is undeniably one of the political-military wonders of the world, surpassed only by the extensively and intensively even more significant expansion of the British Empire between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It cannot be doubted for a moment that this rapid, albeit regionally limited, world conquest was based on the most authentic intentions of Islam and its holy scriptures. What
some have referred to as ‘the venture of Islam’21 was founded on a
vigorous ethic of expansion. Never was this more successful than in
the time of the early caliphs; all practical realizations of Islam-
22
specific dreams of a world empire originate from them.
The
frequently read claim that the Arab conquests were of a purely
political nature, that forced conversions of the conquered only took
place very rarely, and certainly not with people of the book – because
Islam rejects the use of force in religious matters – is a well-meaning
protective statement whose true core lies beneath a thick shell of
contradictory facts. Otherwise it would be inexplicable why,
following the Arabian peninsula, such countries as Syria, Palestine,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Spain, but also large parts
of Anatolia, Iran, the Caucasus and North India were taken up, with
lasting or at least long-term consequences, into the Islamic religious
space. Here one can apply Rousseau's theory that in earlier times,
‘since there was no means of converting people except by subduing
23
them, the only missionaries were conquerors’.
people would have embraced the Islamic faith because of their own inclination and conviction, but it can hardly be denied that, for most new believers, conversion began with an armed invitation to prayer.
Certainly some
Later generations found Islam as the ruling religion, experiencing it as a fact of culture that one acquires through the mild tyranny of education. What began with devout conventions came to fruition through the internalization of the memoactive stigma.
The history of the campaign of Islam can, despite regional setbacks and schisms verging on civil war, be related as a consistent success story until the fifteenth century AD (the ninth century by the Muslim calendar). Up to that point, the supremacy of Arab and Islamic civilization was incontestable in most areas, starting with their superior military power. In its golden age, Islam was also the most important economic force in the world, as can be seen from the intercontinental connections it cultivated. Its colourful bazaars were legendary, and the variety of the selection at its slave markets was unparalleled. Furthermore, Islamic scientists and artists embodied the highest level of achievement up to the turn of the thirteenth century. The assimilative power of Islamic culture for knowledge and skills from other parts of the world seemed to know no boundaries – until the bigoted reactionary movements in the thirteenth century (not forgetting the disastrous effects of the Mongol attack of 1258)
24
In their seemingly well-founded sense of superiority, most members of the Islamic cultural realm had missed the fact that they were in the process of being outdone by the ‘miserable infidels’ of the north-west – in the fields of theology, philosophy and worldly science from the thirteenth century on; in the visual arts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on; as well as economically from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on, which was due particularly to the superior European seafaring and the transition to modern property economy alias capitalism, with its dynamic of constant innovation. The achievements of the distant enemy could seemingly be ignored with impunity as long as people were living under the protection of timeless revelations and sublime governments. They were not able or willing to see that they had locked themselves in the prison of tradition. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the military supremacy
brought this high-cultural splendour to an end.
took centuries for the heirs of the Islamic heyday to notice the stagnation. When Constantinople was conquered by Ottoman troops in 1453, there was a general conviction that Christian Europe was now also ripe for conquest.
Nonetheless, it
of the Europeans was made shockingly clear – the trauma of Napoleon's Egyptian expedition in 1798 is still acute more than two centuries later. From the moment that Europe's ascent to global dominance could no longer be overlooked, the proud chronicle of Islam's campaigns turned into a never-ending history of insult. The disappointment of those left behind grew into bitterness from the eighteenth century on, and the noisy European expansionism of the nineteenth century was hardly likely to mitigate this sentiment. Since then, the extremely thymotic culture of the Islamic countries has been cloaked in a veil of anger woven from the conflicting sentiments of a longing for splendour and dominance on the one hand and a chronic feeling of resentment on the other. From that point on, pride in the past was always accompanied by a scarcely concealable shame at the current state of affairs.
Characteristically, the growth of a new zealotry in Islam can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when even the most introverted Muslims could no longer overlook the exhausted state of both their culture and their religion. Wahabbism, which sought redemption in a return to a literal interpretation of the Qur'an, was typical of the reactionary tendencies of the time, while in the nineteenth century the most characteristic movement was Salafism, which can best be understood as an ascetic romanticism and whose followers dreamed of the early ummah and the righteous predecessors (salaf as-salih) of Medina. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, then, a temptation had been in the air to alleviate the plight of Islam in the age of confrontation with the superior West through zealotic escalation and restorative collectives. By claiming more adamantly than ever to be under the just guidance of Allah, the new zealots resolutely chose not to learn from the enemy – and thus likewise to ignore the voices of the present. Perhaps they thought that bowing to God's authority entitled them to oppose the authority of the rest of the world. The Arabocentrism of these reactions was a further factor in weakening the Islamic world, as it encouraged the tendency to ignore the internal diversity of the Muslim universe, as exemplified by the spiritual and cultural treasures of the Persian- Shiite and Turkish-Ottoman epicentres. The consequences of this choice proved disastrous for the entire Islamic hemisphere, as they reinforced the tendency towards defiant intractability in the face of
the demands made by an age of new openings. Viewing oneself as a victim of foreign powers became a widespread approach, and when victims come together with other victims, it does not take long for culprits to be named. Bernard Lewis describes the harmful effects of these reactionary tendencies. It is only with great delay and in tentative forms that people in the Middle East are becoming willing to examine their own behaviour: ‘The question “Who did this to us? ” has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question – “What did we do wrong? ” – has led naturally to a second question: “How do we put it right? ” In that question, and in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the
future. ’25
The campaign-like qualities of the ‘venture of Islam’ can thus, as we have seen, be established historically with somewhat clear contours.