The popular belief that religion is a divisive force results from a tendency to simplify both religion and socio-political phenomena.
If I got a penny for every time I was told that religion is the cause of all trouble, I'd be a rich woman by now. If only we had John Lennon's religionless world, there would be no war, or conflict and everyone would love their neighbour. If only the theologians, clergymen, mullahs and priests could get on, the world's problems would be resolved at a stroke.
I was, therefore, not surprised to read that the majority of respondents to the recent Guardian ICM poll say that religion is a divisive force. The result was the predictable outcome of a predominant tendency to simplify both religion and socio-political phenomena. No doubt, religion does play a part in many of the crises and conflicts raging around us. But more often than not, these problems take on a religious name and speak through the medium of religion, while having their roots in socio-political factors.
Examples are found in the Northern Ireland dispute as in the Middle East conflict. Though those at loggerheads happen to belong to divergent confessional communities, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims/Christians, they did not come to blows because of their religious affiliations. Their grievances are fundamentally political, even if they hide themselves in the guise of religion and communicate in its language. Religion is often the mirror that reflects worldly tensions. To say that religion is divisive is to attempt no analysis of the problems at hand. It is to stop at the surface making no effort to dig deeper for the underlying problems seething underneath.
Take the orgy of sectarian bloodshed currently raging in Iraq, for instance. Sunnis and Shia are killing each other by the tens on a daily basis. Do not venture into a Sunni dominated area if your name happens to be Hassan, and you have more chance of ending up with a slit throat on some street corner if you suddenly lost your way and found yourself in Sadr city and you were called Omar.
But let us not stop there, let us ask the difficult questions others would rather we left undisturbed. Why do Iraq's Sunni and Shia kill each other today when they didn't a few years back? Why were they able to coexist before, but find that impossible to do today? Every Iraqi tribe and family numbers both Sunni and Shia. They intermingled, intermarried, lived not only side by side but under the same roof, often sharing the same bed. This was the case even under Saddam's despotic rule. Then and before, for centuries Iraq was one of the world's most diverse places, a veritable mosaic of religions, ethnicities, sects and denominations, Muslims, Christians, Sabians, Yazdis, Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turkmen all peacefully shared the same space.
This was Iraq before. It isn't Iraq today, after the American/British invasion and Bremer's transitional authority, which destroyed Iraq's political order, substituting it for one grounded in sectarianism and ethnic factionalism. National identity was broken asunder, the common torn apart, only narrow group affiliations remained. In the chaos that followed, every splinter group wanted to seize all, leaving the rest with nothing. Forming the security and police forces in the new Iraq along sectarian lines poured oil over fire, equipping one faction with the tools it would later use in its quest to exterminate its rivals.
That the Americans handed Saddam over to their thuggish Shia sectarian clients to execute him on the eve of Islam's holiest festival was no coincidence. It was just another sinister move carefully designed to fan the flames of sectarian strife, and turn all against all in a rapidly disintegrating Iraq.
Shiism and Sunnism are not to blame. Bush, Blair and Bremer are.
Neither are Judaism, Christianity, or Islam responsible for the Middle East conflict. Palestinians and Israelis invoke religious symbols and references in their rationalisation of the dispute, in a space laden with sacred meanings for both sides. But the truth is that this is not a conflict over a mosque, church, or temple, though it has come to be symbolised by such monuments. Primarily, and above all, it is over land, dispossession, settlement, occupation and will to liberation. The relationship is more between occupier and occupied than between Jew and Muslim/Christian. More than the Quran or the Old Testament, it is the Balfour Declaration and the great powers' strategies in the region that have spawned and dictated the course of this long and painful drama.
Many more examples could be cited for the superficiality of explanations of socio-political movements and phenomena in exclusively religious terms, from the Reformation in 16th century Europe, to Islamic radicalism in the 20th. Religion is neither the root of all virtue, nor the cause of all evil. Good conditions spawn good religion, bad conditions bad religion. The evils of reality have a habit of metamorphosing into evil religion.
Humans and societies are not blank pages, but the carriers of a profound cultural, symbolic, and historic heritage, through which they communicate and make sense of reality. This imbedded repository of values, images and references, is inevitably invoked in peace as in war, and more so in war and times of turmoil. Amidst tension, cultural, religious, and national identities are awakened, activated, and intensified. This is not to say, as Marx had done, that religion is a superfluous illusion. It is an integral part of the collective memory and consciousness of groups and individuals. Through it they ascribe meaning to their experiences and justification to their actions. It functions silently unnoticed amidst stability and calm and becomes more vocal, more visible and sometimes more explosive through crisis and turbulence. There is no inherently peaceful religion, and no inherently aggressive religion. Take Christianity, for instance, it inspired asceticism and otherworldliness, just as it ignited the flames of conflict and schism, in the 16th century, wars of religion as in the Crusades. There is no religion per se.
In short, we would do well to avoid peering at reality through the prism of ideas and doctrines. Humans, you see, walk on their feet, not their heads.
Some Comments
Quote by Mark Twain: "Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven."
Irrational beliefs are the root of all human evil!
"Shiism and Sunnism are not to blame. Bush, Blair and Bremer are."
I've never thought we should be in Iraq but this is a load of old hokum. It's all a little bit "white man's burden" if you ask me, in which Iraqis are bit-players, subject to the whim of the West - after all, we can't expect the natives to behave well can we?
Rarely is a bad situation not made worse by religion.
"Why do Iraq's Sunni and Shia kill each other today when they didn't a few years back"
Because Saddam was brutal enough to suppress them and impose a secular authority. Perhaps the 'Allies' should follow his example.
The majority of atheists are secularists; we don't aspire to a religionless world per se, but one in which religion is relieved of its special status that trumps other considerations. I see no reason why religious ideas should be protected when political or scientific ideas are not. Indeed, it is the lifeblood of rational debate (and hence free democratic society) that ideas are challengeable, as a means of sanity-checking.
Secularists will uphold your right to believe whatever crazy stuff you want, as well as your right to use the democratic process to change things as you see fit. But these changes should be based on merit, and not any special status, regardless of how passionately you may indulge your irrational beliefs.
Ms Ghannoushi:
You shoe a remarkable ignorance of the recent history of Iraq.
Granted the invasion by US/Britain has made the sectarian situation worse as we all predicted it would.
But I seem to remember that Saddam and his Sunni Ba'athist party have been slaughtering Shia muslims for decades. And what about the 5,000 Kurds he massacred in 1988.
There may have been some political as well as religious reasons for these killings, but the underlying divisions in Iraqi society (as in may places) ARE religious and pre-date Blair and Bush by many centuries.
"But more often than not, these problems take on a religious name and speak through the medium of religion, while having their roots in socio-political factors."
Religion isn't *alternative* to socio-political factors. Religions are themselves "socio-political" phenomena. They are human constructs, just like all other ideologies and value systems, and some religions have proved extremely effective as means of creating and policing group identities entirely predicated upon notions of difference to and superiority over other groups. Hence the proselytising, missionary imperatives inherent to the two big desert god monotheisms - Christianity and Islam - and the doctrinal and historical viciousness both display towards dissent (be it in the forms of blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, or simply non-belief).
One fundamental difference between believers and atheists is that believers imagine that their religion comes from god and is subsequently distorted by human beings, while atheists grasp that religions are invented by human beings and therefore contain all the flaws and failings, as well as perhaps some of the better qualities, of humanity itself.
To claim that religion is the route of all evil is undeniably false, and why Dawkins was ever stupid enough to ever agree to call his program "The route of all evil" I'll never know.
But while people will kill over land, power, wealth, race etc, religion is also a huge factor to deny this would be to completely ignore history. I'm from Northern Ireland and while the arguement was primarily about power and land, the dehumanising element was down to religion. The same with Iraq. While they are fighting for power they have dehumanised the enemy by faith.
My experience religion is devisive in that religious people generally socialise within their own groups and the stronger your faith the more segregated the social group.
Rather than attacking the war in Iraq can you give examples of how religion encourages integration?
From my experience it promotes people to marry within their faith, vote according to their faith, school within their faith, socialise within there faith, etc
These are all incrediably devisive. A few joint prayer meetings or joint school trips hardly cancel these policies.
It's very naive to think religions are to blame for any conflict. Religions are a tool in some people's hands.
The human race fights about land, resources, sex, money, food, survival, but beliefs??? Never!
OK, so religion is not the the only divisive force - there are nationalistic and ethnic loyalties and prejudices, socio-political and economic factors and so on.
But it is *a* divisive force, and a bloody big one at that. And it is noteworthy how often religious conflicts flare up when nations and empires are under stress - the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to add to others mentioned above.
A single religion can be a divisive force within its own domain too, as with the Hindu caste system or the Baptist churches of southern U.S. slave society. Here in Australia a little sect called the Exclusive Brethren has been getting some press for being a divisive force within families - and of course they can cite scripture to support their behaviour.
Frankly, if 82% of Brits have worked out that "religion is a divisive force" there may be hope for the old country yet...
What is atheistic survivalism when it's at home? It sounds like something of a straw man to me.
I've never actually met a 'religious thinker'.
I've met religious people who could mimic the act of thinking but not to the extent that they would pass the Turing test.
I could cobble together a fairly convincing simulation of a religious person in about 3 minutes.
I'd simply programme it to regurgitate the same old crap about how intollerant atheists are.
Funny how few atheists there were preaching hatred of homosexuals outside the House of Lords yesterday.
Comment No. 372629
January 10 9:31
GBR