Fundamentalism, a global menace?

THE BATTLE FOR GOD: Karen Armstrong; Ballantine Books, New York. Received from East West Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd., 62-A, Ormes Road, Kilpauk, Chennai-600010. $10.

EVEN IF God really does not exist, he has to be invented to save the world from the chaos it would sink into, would seem to be the plea of the believers. Such a belief is attributable to what they believe as an inescapable need for a supreme being who has to be there to redeem the world from the sense of nothingness which could fill a God-less world. Such a craving for a supreme presence felt by the entire humanity has come for a penetrating analysis by Ms. Karen Armstrong in this very well-researched book which calls for a determined effort for a grasp of its contents.

Ms. Armstrong gives a very close look at the existing vast gulf between a simple belief in God and an emotionally surcharged faith in Him . While the first as a rational approach regards God as an immanent, benevolent presence, the second driven by a fervour could have led the world's religions to the fierce, snarling divisiveness.

A major part of her book is a dissection of ``fundamentalism'' which, instead of receding with the advance of science and technology is becoming more and more pronounced around the world.

The semantics of fundamentalism is that it is a return to the basics of religion from the distance which is separating it because of the advance of knowledge and the dominance of mind by reason. The response to reason from the medieaval Church was to fight back with a ferocity the challenge thrown to it and cling to ``eschatology'' (which is the doctrine of the last or final things, the state after death). ``Fundamentalism'' fought back with an intolerance because of the religions claiming the prerogative to deliver the Gospel.

The earlier perception of fundamentalism in the first few centuries after the crucifixion of Christ, the author has pointed out, was that it was aimed at the restoration of the authentic Christian faith ``which had been buried under a mound of lifeless medieaval theology. By stripping away these latter accretions and going back to the sources - the Bible and the Fathers of the Church - Christians would recover the living kernel of the Gospels and experience new birth''.

The author's approach to her subject starts with the distinction between logos and mythos or reason and mythology influencing the evolution of religions and the doctrines they were propounding. It was inevitable that the people gripped by a sense of insecurity and fear came under the spell of the religions right from the dawn of history as it held out hopes of happiness and salvation.

She does not comment on the belief still prevailing among many about the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot having led to the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jews large numbers of whom had converted to Christianity out of a sense of security.

Despair with the state of the world which could hold out no hopes led to the visions of Messiah arriving sooner or later among the Jews. Zionism, the movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine was the response to what was felt as an unending persecution of their religion and way of life.

The Christians and Muslims also came under the spell of myths to fortify themselves with a faith in the eternal happiness waiting for them. She points out that while the modern mind could easily distinguish between blind faith and reason, such a distinction did not emerge so readily - except to those with a rare clarity - in the medieaval period until the Renaissance since whatever the clergy and the ulemas were saying had sounded so very self- evident that it did not provoke any questioning.

At a time when there is a very widespread awareness of secularism for freeing minds from religious dogmas, the author writes about the ``secularisation'' of time itself presumably to drive home the point that even time had to wait for the invention of mechanical clocks and other scientific appliances to be freed from a mystical projection of it. ``All this was potentially subversive to the conservative ethos''. The emergence of reason could not free medieaval Europe from the hold of the Witch Craze, ``a collective fantasy'', of the 16th and the 17th centuries.

The longing for the Second Coming of Christ persisted right up to the 18th century (as it perhaps does even now) to ``blend'' Christian and secular belief. The onslaught of science and rationalism could not, however, put the ``mainline clergy'' on the run. Instead they were highly successful in strengthening their sects and fomenting grass root rebellion against the rational establishment.

A long chapter on the Jews begins by recalling the revolt against the ``rabbinic establishment'' - or the Jewish church. However, the revolt led only to another creed of the Hasidics and the conjuring up of a vision of the angels. There could be no finding of God with rational powers since ``rational thinking was not the sole mode of perception''.

While Napoleon Bonaparte initially promised the liberation of Jews in France, he later offered them a ``Faustian bargain'' of their having to sell their Jewish souls ``in exchange for emancipation. Jews as Jews had to vanish.''

After his invasion of Egypt, Napoleon held out hopes of religious tolerance for the Muslims but the Ulemas remained suspicious. After the British took over in Egypt and the emergence of the Muslim ruler, Muhammad Ali bent upon modernising his country, there was a massacre of the Mamluks as a step towards such modernisation.

Despair resulting from a sense of helplessness at the heady advance of science and technology and the rebellious questioning it had provoked against the medieaval church and clergy led to the throwing up of visions of a future war.

The Great War of 1914-18 was in fact believed to be the war between God and Satan. The decay of faith in God and religion threw up visions of ``Antichrists'' like Charles Darwin because of his temerity in questioning the Biblical version of creation with his Origin of Species which was branded as ``bad science''.

Disillusionment with the ways of life dictated by medieaval religions led to almost frenzied westernisation spearheaded by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. The questioning of what had been expounded in the Bible was influenced by rationalism was prompted by what Ms. Armstrong calls ``Higher Criticism''.

She writes about the alarm caused by the rapidly spreading rationalism and the desperate clinging to faith which led to the Pentecostal movement characterised by a frenzied belief in the descent of the Holy Spirit.

The heavy price which the Shah of Iran had to pay for his forced march to modernisation which led to the widespread alienation of his country from its culture was the hurling back of his country to the fundamentalism of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Enraged by the Shah's westernisation of Iran and with his efforts to separate religion from politics, the Ayatollah saw Islam itself living among the people as a stranger. Equally bitter were the recalcitrant Jews who felt that the State of Israel was a truncated version of their Holy Land.

The author writes a great deal about how the U.S., far from being the God's Own Country as it had seen itself has its own fundamentalists who would not agree that religion should be legitimately cordoned off from politics. They were appalled by the materialist ways of life of the Americans and their ``falling under the influence of Satan''. They were in an ``electronic dark age in which the pagan hordes are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilised humanity''. Fundamentalism, she points out, is anything but a spent force everywhere around the world.

Her study, detailed as it is, would have been far more comprehensive had she not confined itself wholly to the Western world of Europe and the U.S. with India and the other Asian countries meriting not more than a few lines.

CVG

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