Role of ‘Religion’ in violence

Role of ‘Religion’ in violence
A Historic review of its Genesis

Organized religion is like organized crime, it preys on people’s weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators and is almost impossible to eradicate-Mike Hermann

One does not have to agree with the above to see that religion is used more frequently to cause mayhem, than any other attribute of human kind.
Examples of violence by the strong on the weak are many and come from the very earliest times of known history. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian empires come easily to mind. World wars were fought for the resources of colonies. Post WWII, with weakening of the Colonial powers, the USA took up the role and intervened directly by naked aggression and through surrogates.
In Western countries, violence is attributed variously to fanaticism, clash of cultures, poverty, lack of education etc. Muslim residents of Western countries, by and large, condemn acts of violence against innocent people, but would want the people in the West to understand the reasons why a person would deliberately sacrifice his life.
Jews were persecuted by followers of practically all religions. Romans persecuted Christians, and Muslims, after their fall from power, were subjugated by all comers including people of their own faith. But violence in the name of religion was first definitively documented in the late fifteenth century Papal Bull which authorized the king of Portugal “to attack, conquer and subdue Saracens, pagans and other non-believers who were inimical to Christ; to capture their goods and territories; to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to transfer their lands and properties to the king of Portugal and his successors”.
The common thread that runs through all aggression is greed or fear that the new creed would supplant the old one and control the means of production. When resources were no longer at stake, diverse beliefs were tolerated as during the period of Muslim rule in India. The British did send preachers to “spread the word of God” and when natives killed an odd missionary, gunboats followed.
Resistance to aggression against heavy odds is equally common.
All animals practice aggression against their own kind, and against other kinds, to a greater or lesser degree. The complexity of the practice appears to be directly related to intelligence. Lower orders generally kill members of other species for food. Others may injure/wound rivals for the affections of a female or to control several comely ones, but generally do not kill them.
Violence for greed is the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens.
All religions reacted to the prevailing milieu, and confronted the established order. They appealed mainly to the disempowered, the destitute and the poor. The rich, the powerful, and the learned had all the privileges already. They initially ignored the emergent creed, did not see any good reason for change, which would, in any case, affect their interests adversely. When the belief system gathered enough strength to challenge the established order, they tried to suppress the new forces with naked force, bribes and temptation, whatever would work. The prophet of Islam was offered riches, women, and positions of authority, if he would only give up his “pointless” preaching. They failed in every instance with all the prophets.
Religions initially attempted to eradicate social evils, and economic inequities. The ruling classes took measures to preserve their authority. They controlled the “ administration, the legislature, and the judiciary” . They treated the poor abominably. The ruled had no recourse. All the levers of power were in the hands of the ruling class. If they ran away and were caught, the punishment would be worse than death. If not caught, starvation would be the fate of most.
It must be clearly understood that religion did not hit at the root of privilege. It only aimed at amelioration of the living conditions of the powerless. Private property remained sacrosanct. Slavery was not abolished; the owners were exhorted to treat them humanely. Women remained the underclass, though they were lulled with meaningless honors like the paradise is at the feet of mothers or that their word was law as in ancient India .
Having overcome the establishment, all religions organized their own hegemony. The adherents then proceeded to use the faith to advance their own cause. Hegemony inevitably develops a class structure. Jewish priests objected vehemently and violently to Jesus Christ bucking the trend; challenging their right to privileges and a life of luxury. Voodoo practitioners keep their hold on popular mind by subjecting the deviants to exorcism. Christian priests accumulated great wealth, land, and authority rivaling that of Kings, the Popes actually had their own country; vestiges can be seen even now in the Papal state in Rome. The clergy firmly aligned themselves with the landed gentry, supported the established order, exhorting the poor to obey the ruler, suffer deprivation cheerfully, palming them off with the lure that the Kingdom of heaven will be theirs, as long as they do as they are told in this life. It was symbiotic existence; feudal class supported the clergy and was legitimized by the latter.
Islam ordains that one should obey the ruler, as long the ruler does not interfere with the private practice of the faith.
Among the divinely inspired religions, only Islam founded a political state in its early infancy. The late advent of a political control though did not prevent the followers of other belief systems from going forth, marauding and plundering in the name of the faith. Conspicuous in this behavior were the Christians. But first in the field of colonization in the name of their faith were the Muslims. Jihad, and proselytisation were among the core articles of the faith.
Energized by the conviction that everlasting salvation lay in the true path, they managed to conquer most of the known world in a matter of a few decades. They did not object if in the process riches, land, and women fell into their lap.
The vanquished did not surrender with out a fight. Resistance was in fact fierce. There is credible evidence that after the main battles, people fought on in guerrilla fashion . History is being repeated in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries. Not able to confront the aggressor directly they have developed a culture of suicide bombing and other such similar measures.
With decline of Muslim power, Christian cast their covetous eyes on the riches of the East. Advent of the Industrial revolution in the same time frame made them invincibly potent. They went forth as traders for spices and paid in gold, as India did not need any handicraft they could produce.
Europeans swooped down on the East, as well the Americas and found rich pickings everywhere. The idea of spreading Christianity was the inevitable excuse, but that did not keep them from using all kinds of measures and subterfuges, immoral in their own books, to subjugate the natives. The English and other immigrants- economic, religious, and political refugees, escaping starvation, discrimination and destitution in their home countries, were welcomed by the American natives, given shelter and food, and paid the debt back by gifting small pox infested blankets to their hosts . Power and dominance lend legitimacy. No one talks about the genocide perpetrated by the English. It barely merits a footnote in history.
Europeans captured vast colonies and exploited the resources for their own ruling class. Remember, even at the height of their power, the ordinary British citizen often went with out a job, food shelter or protection under the law. Debtor’s jails were bursting at the seams. Mal nutrition was common and child labor universal. Twelve-hour days, six and a half days a week, was the norm. Bonded labor and serfdom were accepted facts of life; the lord of the manor owned the peasants body and soul, often taking his pleasure in female (and male) bodies. Prostitution was rife; physical punishment, beatings were permissible .
The British were, and are, past masters at the art of divide and rule. They had honed their skill during European wars, and patronized Hindus and Muslims in turn. After the crusades, in which the British had played a leading role too, it was they who used the religious divide as an instrument of policy. They also promoted Shia-Sunni conflict .
They had left festering wounds behind. Chronic infections metamorphose into cancer. Kashmir and Arab-Israeli conflicts no longer need promotion and have spawned generations of “terrorists” .
Post WWII, with the Empire gone they passed on the “torch” to the USA.
Advent of oil and the consequent dependence of Capitalist economy on it, catapulted Middle Eastern countries into a position of consequence. These countries happened to be Muslim. The rulers, creations of colonists one and all, were all too amenable to foreign control.
But winds of nationalism were blowing across the globe. Among the Muslims, Arab satraps were all too ready to fund extremist elements to undermine the movements, with Pakistan’s Jamaat e Islami, among the chief recipients.
They had aided and abetted the creation of Israel, the chief patron none other King Abdullah of Jordan, the current Abdullah’s great grandfather. They used the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine Nasser.
The mullahs of the other sects, Ayatollahs of Iran conspired with the CIA and MI5, and the Iranian establishment to overthrow the nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadheg, whose main ‘crime’ was nationalization of oil companies.
A few adventurers in critical positions of authority in Afghanistan, with an organized political cadre backing them, though lacking popular support, yet decided to take over the Government.
They could not stand on their own. The USSR had to step in to prop them up. The USA saw it correctly as a chance to avenge their humiliation in Vietnam.
In any event, Pakistan as conduit of military, financial and intelligence aid, got its cut, came out of economic depression and worked hand in hand with its patron in supplying the resistance fighters with materiel and training.
Their patrons, in their glee at Soviet discomfiture, and with exhaustion of their old foe fervently anticipated, glossed over the fact that they were nurturing a serpent in their sleeves. They were in cahoots with Taliban , the most virulent variety of fanatics.
Ben Laden’s Al-Qaida emerged as an international movement. Starting with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center its operatives started attacking western interests.
In due course Taliban made short work of all the other groups. They were especially brutal in suppressing Shias. In the town called Mazar Sharif they killed thousands of unarmed men women and children after tempting them to surrender with an offer of amnesty sworn on the holy book. They went on to unleash an unprecedented reign of terror and misogyny. Western powers only made pious noises as a matter of form.
Come 9/11, Bush, without any clue to the genesis of the outrage, had to declare an all out war on ‘terror’.
All it achieved was enhancement of recruits to fanatic groups and wanton destruction of Iraq.
The pundits of all hues, leanings, and national origin are busy explaining the genesis of terrorism. The Muslim baiting cadre attributes it to their different values, hatred of Judeo-Christian ethos, lure of paradise with nubile and willing virgins, and all kinds of thinly disguised racist attitudes. Others dwell on desperation, reaction to historic injustices, after effects of colonialism, legacy of the Soviet Union, poverty, lack of education, indoctrination, reaction to Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is an element of truth in all the proffered reasons. Not all suicide bombers are illiterate. Many come from affluent households. The TV pictures of Madrassahs (seminaries) with children reciting the Quran, which they obviously do not understand, would not appeal to an educated person. The recent London subway suicide bombers were born and brought up in Britain. That country offers free Health service, nearly free college education (completely free in Scotland), and a decent welfare system. One of the bombers was teacher of children with learning difficulties. He was well respected and had to be a sensitive and considerate person to be able to cope with his job. It is argued that but for religious indoctrination, they would not have suicide bombed London tubes and bus system. All 9/11 highjackers were well educated and lived a fairly affluent life. But they conveniently forget that George Washington and his fellow leaders of the American war of independence were wealthy landowners.
Apologists lament that Islam does not sanction mindless killing, that suicide is a sin in Islam etc. But the promoters of the acts of terror appear to have equally valid authority to back up their claim that suicide bombers are fighting injustice and killing for a good cause.
I have dwelt at some length on a historic review of violence and the thread of religion running through it. Secular fundamentalists attribute it entirely to exclusivity of faith. It is true that all religions teach that followers of the particular creed are on the right path; only they enjoy divine favor and all that goes with it. Non-believers will never be forgiven and burn in hell forever. Except for Hindus and Jews they lay great store by proselytization, though this abstinence has not kept the two peoples from may hem and murder.
Atheists compare religion to a poison. They say that if you leave cyanide around children would eat it. It is not just that the attitude is crudely elitist, but also it is impractical. You cannot hide all the poison in the world. Some poisons do have medicinal value and are used in industry.
The alienation of well-placed and prosperous Muslim expatriates deserves a careful study and analysis.
The solution is not to destroy all venom, but to spread the knowledge of its lethal qualities and above all to work towards and found an equitable and egalitarian society.
One has to consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (MGA) of Qadian, now in the India Punjab, in the context of the prevailing conditions in India in mid and late 18th CE. Islam was under siege by Christian missionaries and Hindu revivalists. Punjab, which had been designated a battlefield by all comers and their Indian foes, had adopted a homogenous culture, in which mysticism and Sufism played a great part. In the census of 1881, men of religion had to run a vigorous campaign to persuade people to register as Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Moulvis, naturally, had to work the hardest, as Muslims had not recovered from the depredations visited on their faith and places of worship by Ranjit Singh-he had converted the Shahi mosque in Lahore into Royal stables.
MGA was a learned man, and developed a thesis in defense of his religion. He developed a big following.
He would not have merited even a footnote in history, if he had not had a ‘revelation’ that Jesus had not died on the cross, had in fact been rescued, helped to escape from Palestine and eventually arrived in Kashmir, and lived happily for a long time. It implied that he would appear again on earth. That was MGA himself, a Nabi, but not a Rasool- the former term denotes the status of one sent by god for guidance, renaissance as it were, the latter term the status of a messenger, with a new message. .
The ‘revelation’ denied the mainstream Islamic belief that Jesus had been lifted off the cross and replaced by a look alike. It also belied the Christian belief that he had die, and rose from the grave three days later.
One rather remarkable tenet of the creed is armed Jihaad is not permitted, which suited the British just fine.
He was greeted with a lot of ‘fatwas’, but continued to gain strength.
MGA died in 1908, and was succeeded by a caliph, on whose death, MGA’s son Mirza Bashiruddin took over. This led to a split. One group accepted his teachings, but rejected the claim of “ Naboat”. They are called Lahori group. Both are called Ahmadis, after his last name.
Like all small groups, they looked after each other, with missionary zeal.
Jinnah nominated a member of the creed, Chaudhury Zafarullah Khan, s high court judge, to the Partition Council, and after independence, appointed him as Pakistan’s first foreign minister. Nobel Laureate Professor Abdus Salam had converted to the faith in his early life.
The faith was, more or less, confined to the Punjab. I had not heard of it in post partition India, and was only vaguely made aware of them on arrival in Quetta. I was actually warned to brush off their advances, as they tried to entice students from the poorer sections of the population.
Looking for a populist cause, and to gain a measure of legitimacy they had lost by opposing the creation of Pakistan, Islamists led by Maulana Maududi, started a violent campaign against them. The Punjab chief minister, Mian Mumtaz Daulatana, was in cahoots with governor General Ghulam Muhammad, against PM Khwaja Nazimuddin, and saw in the disturbance an opportunity to destabilize the government. He kept the police from intervening. Riots exploded. Ghulam Muhammad declared martial law in Lahore, with Major General Azam Khan as ML administrator. Azam got the situation under control in twenty four hours.
That gave the army the first taste of control over the civilians, from which the country has not recovered yet.
The demand to declare Ahmadis ‘kafir’ faded, till in 1976, Zulfiqar Bhutto, in order to steal the thunder of the combined opposition of which Islamists were an important component, and who had derided him for drinking and womanizing, declared them non-Muslims, in addition to the ban on alcohol and change weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday.
A lengthy enquiry, presided by CJ Munir and Justice Kayani followed. During the enquiry, Ulema of different sects could not agree on a definition of a Muslim.
Islamist extremist bigots resurrect these anti-Ahmadiya and ant- Shia and anti-everything except anti-Wahhabi outrages, whenever they feel they need to revive their fortunes and revitalize their cadres.

These offices did not exist in their current form, but members of the ruling class did administer, make rules and sit on judgment.
An ancient Indian lore has it that four brothers went hunting and found a stray but comely girl. They brought her back to serve their mother and told her that they had a gift for her. The mother said that she was too old for gifts and they were to share it among themselves. Gods blessed the polyandrous alliance with a unique concession. She would regain virginity after each cohabitation. Firaq Gorakhpuri’s rather irreverent verse;

“Hazar bar zamana edher say guzra hai
Nai nai si hai teri rah guzar phir bhi”
Nasim Hijazi was a prolific novelist of Urdu. He wrote numerous nostalgic tomes in which nubile girls in Spain invariably fell in love with Muslim warriors, converted to Islam and lived happily ever afterwards in which heroines chaffed at being forced to accept Islam and were forever on the look out to reconvert to the true faith. I have come across Christian equivalents of Nasim Hejazi novels.
Their fixation with spices can be easily understood. It was critical. Their own land was cold, relatively infertile and productive only during short summer months; they had to keep food for long periods of time. There was no refrigeration, natural ice and snow not being consistently reliable, food, especially fish, often went bad. Its odor had to be suppressed, hence the value of pungent spices.
This was the first recorded use of Biological warfare, and that too on non-belligerents. The natives not having been exposed to the virus before, had no immunity and died in their hundreds of thousands.
Please read Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham, especially the latter fro a description of the pathetic state of the working class in early twentieth century England. If the ruling class treated their own kind this way, you do not have to stretch your imagination too far to make an educated guess of the treatment meted out to the “natives”.
In the nineteen forties one of their paid agents, a Maulana Abdul Shakoor of the Frangi Mahal-a renowned house of Muslim Scholars of Lucknow-wrote a pamphlet in that it was the Shias who had martyred Imam Husain!! He insisted on taking out a Madhe Sahaba (adulation of the first four caliphs of the Prophet of Islam procession through Shia localities. He rode in a palanquin A Maulana from Lahore Ataullah Shah Bukhari followed him on an elephant. The British gave permission for the procession to parade through the route. Quite a few Shia-Sunni riots ensued. Insiders let the cat out of the bag. The Frangi Mahli Maulana had been gifted a printing press by the British administration and was on a regular, and generous stipend.
Terrorist label, like most other labels invented by humans, has an unpredictable shelf life. Only the other day, a true blue American observer pointed out that fathers of this nation were dubbed terrorist by the British. In more recent memory, Menachim Begin, one time PM of Israel had a price on his head, after he had blown up King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and sent a number of Britishers to an unscheduled meeting with their Maker. He shared a Nobel peace prize with Saadat of Egypt. Yasser Arafat after heading the list of “terrorists” for a considerable time was feted at the White House. He also won the Nobel peace award. US officials are trying to open lines of communications with the insurgents in Iraq.
Before WWI the British and the French had suborned Arabs to rebel against the Turks. After the Turks lost the region they divided it into respective zones of influence. Satraps were imposed on countries created by artificial lines. Kuwait had been part of Iraq and Syria and Lebanon were one country.
Literally seekers, in common usage, of Education, they were indoctrinated in religious seminaries in Pakistan. To add to the missionary zeal and to give it an International color* (remember all Muslims, in theory, belong to one Ummah -Brotherhood, comrades in arms, it is difficult to translate) were the cohorts of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida.
The policy was akin to lighting slow fuses to widespread ammunition dumps.
Al-Qaida developed in the fashion of hydra heads. It is no use cutting one, another, nay be many, will grow to replace it. It was only a question of time, before it would garner adequate resources, technology and men to hit at the vitals of the “infidel


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