The world would of course be a simpler space to contend with if only religion kept within the domain of the spiritual. Historically, it never has. With the blindly submissive army of enforcers in its midst, ready to be unleashed on profane humanity, the religious is an order that remains incapable of remaining within a private zone that does not translate into power—as distinct from guidance—over others. There are a few exceptions to this in the world of religion, and we shall encounter one toward the end. The incursion of religion into the secular domain, appropriating the provinces of ethics, mores, and social conduct — and even the sciences — guarantees the clerical dominance of the total field of play. (What, in the name of all that is unholy, does a council of religious clerics in northern Nigeria know of modern medicine that it commands Muslims to resist inoculation against cerebrospinal meningitis— a scourge in that part of the nation that leaves hundreds of thousands of infants disabled for life — and claim its authority from the Koran!)
Submission, however, is the very foundation of faith. It is mostly within that theocratic order that we find those extreme offshoots that raise the stakes of those rhetorical devices, already touched upon, to the defining edge of existence.The provenance of faith is the soul and, by extension, the soul’s material housing, the body itself. In one easy step, the materialist declaration of All property is theft—a theme from one of our earlier lectures — is promoted to one of All life is theft. The secular ideologue might be largely content with brooking no dissent through the dictum I am right, you are wrong, but the ultimate ambition of the fanatic within the theocratic order is I am right; you are dead.
Homicidal hubris is the ultimate hallmark of the fanatic. The ice pick in the neck of Leon Trotsky, ensconced in the deceptive safety of Mexico, was forged in the same furnace as the knife that sought the throat of Naguib Mahfouz.
It is fortunate that we are sometimes able — thanks to modern communication — to identify the intrusion of political opportunism into the workings of religious zealotry, a common enough marriage of convenience that gives birth to monstrosities. And technology — the camera — assists in the close psychological study of mob arousal for religious reasons, such as led to the outrage in India that ended with Hindus razing to the ground an ancient mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh because this centuries-old mosque had been built on the very spot where Rama, a Hindu deity, first made his appearance on earth. The reverberations of that act have continued to haunt the Indian nation till today, but the immediate repercussions were orgies of killings, including the ambush of railway trains and commuter buses, the virtual “religious cleansing” of rival, but especially Muslim, neighborhoods, creating ghost villages and derelict urban sectors.
And here, let us pause, and use this episode to anticipate and silence those who, whenever an outrage that is linked to one religion or another attracts amply deserved rebuke and condemnation, immediately raise alarms of prejudice, sectarian hatred, and world conspiracies, tacitly claiming for such structures of faith an immunity from commentary. The world, East and West, including its official organs UNO and UNESCO, was unambiguous in its condemnation of that crime, even as it would later unite in condemnation of the iconoclasm of the Taliban against the historic statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.That former rebuke did not lead to any claims by Hindus that the world nursed a primordial hatred against Hinduism or had entered into a conspiracy to eradicate that religion from the world. What was factually indisputable was more than sufficient: an outrage had been committed, and that outrage deserved to be addressed in its own right, albeit without totally ignoring its antecedents and context.
Similarly, in my part of the world, Nigeria, time and time again, waves of fundamentalist violence have been unleashed on a prostrate populace, resulting in the deaths, often in the most gruesome manner, of hundreds of innocents — men, women, children, without discrimination. The majority of those who have commented— except of course the violators themselves — have been unambiguous in their condemnation of such barbarities committed in the name of religion. They have done so without damning the religion itself, or belittling its precepts. The world cannot, I am certain, have forgotten the massacre that resulted from the attempt to hold a beauty pageant in the capital city of Abuja. The culprits have always earned the names fanatics, criminals, fundamentalists, and zealots. I believe it should be possible to attribute the massacre of innocents anywhere in the world in the same way, thus placing the responsibility for a corrective response on the shoulders of believers and nonbelievers alike.
On a personal level, I found myself sufficiently exercised to note the Uttar Pradesh event in my poetic calendar of “Twelve Canticles for the Zealot,” published in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known:
A god is nowhere born, yet everywhere But Rama’s sect rejects that fine distinction— The designated spot is sanctified, not for piety but For dissolution of yours from mine, politics of hate
And forced exchange — peace for a moment’s rapture. They turn a mosque to rubble, stone by stone, Condemned usurper of Lord Rama’s vanished spot Of dreamt epiphany. Now a cairn of stones Usurps a dream of peace — can they dream peace In iconoclast Uttar Pradesh?
Few spots in the world today are exempt from the depredations of the fanatic. I believe it should be possible to view the bombing of innocents in the United States, Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, or anywhere else in the same way. It is untenable to claim that, because those mass killers themselves implicated, and persist in invoking, the banner of Islam, seeking legitimization and a killing rapture from that religion, Islam is therefore under indictment. Equally unacceptable is to claim that any condemnation of the act or pursuit of the criminals reveals a hatred of the religion. A world in which a powerful European — and mostly Christian — organization, NATO, goes to battle against the Christian Serbs on behalf of a battered Muslim population, and brings the head of their violators to justice before an international tribunal, is not a world that is prejudiced against either Islam or Christendom, and the propagators of such doctrines are being not merely disingenuous, but dangerous.
In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic is one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies, and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime, and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination — the zone of unquestioning certitude — sped by a common impetus that licenses each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted.The zealot is one who creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community.