[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND RECOMMENDED: Civil war or holy war? - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Civil war or holy war?

By James Carroll  |  February 27, 2006  |  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.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/27/civil_war_or_holy_war/
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