Not in God's Name
Authors: Jonathan Sacks
ALSO BY JONATHAN SACKS
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Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Sacks
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2015.
Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
All Scripture references are taken from the author’s own translation, unless otherwise indicated. (Scripture references marked KJV are taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version.)
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, formerly International Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Written with a Pencil in a Sealed Wagon” by Dan Pagis, translated by Anthony Rudolf and Miriam Neiger-Fleishchmann. Copyright © Anthony Rudolf and Miriam Neiger-Fleishchmann. First published in
Silent Conversations: A Reader’s Life
by Anthony Rudolf, Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, in 2013.
“Faces of the Enemy” by Sam Keen, first published in
Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination
by Sam Keen, HarperSanFrancisco, in 1992. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sacks, Jonathan, [date]
Not in God’s name : confronting religious violence / Jonathan Sacks.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
978-0-8052-4334-5 (hard cover : alk. paper).
ISBN
978-0-8052-4335-2 (e-book).
1. Violence—Religious aspects. 2. Abrahamic religions. 3. Bible. Genesis—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BL
65.
V
55
S
24 2015 201′.76332—dc23 2015016809
eBook ISBN 9780805243352
Cover image: Total solar eclipse by Dan Suzio/Science Source/Getty Images
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.1
a
To my brother Eliot,
With love
I could not have completed this work without the help of some remarkable people who read the manuscript and made many insightful suggestions. My thanks go to Mark Berner, Dayan Ivan Binstock, Dr Megan Burridge, Revd. Canon Professor Richard Burridge, David Frei, Professor Robert P. George, Rabbi Alex Greenberg, Ed Husain, Justin Mclaren, Geoffrey Paul, Rabbi Yehudah Sarna, Professor Leslie Wagner and Professor N. T. Wright. Their comments saved me from many inaccuracies and infelicities. The errors that remain are my own. I also owe an enormous debt to Prince El Hassan bin Talal and Professor Akbar Ahmed, two figures who over the years have inspired me with their generous and deeply humane vision of Islam.
Special thanks to my office team of Joanna Benarroch, Dan Sacker and Val Sheridan for the kindness and efficiency they show daily; to my indefatigable and motivating literary agent Louise Greenberg; and to Altie Karper and her team at Schocken for their enthusiasm and professionalism. My greatest thanks as always go to my wife Elaine, my best reader and constant support.
Ultimately this book could not have been written without many encounters over the years with people of different faiths who have known, and had the courage to show, that our overarching humanity transcends our religious differences. They and what they stand for are our best hope for the future. Religious extremism flourishes when ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.’ That must no longer be the case. Religiously motivated violence must be fought religiously as well as militarily, and with passionate intensity, for this will be one of the defining battles of the twenty-first century.
Jonathan Sacks
March 2015 / Adar 5755
Bad Faith
Altruistic Evil
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.
So the book of Genesis tells us. Having made human beings in his image, God sees the first man and woman disobey the first command, and the first human child commit the first murder. Within a short space of time ‘the world was filled with violence’. God ‘saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth’. We then read one of the most searing sentences in religious literature. ‘God regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain’ (Gen. 6:6).
Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is:
Not in My Name
.
Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. Why was there hierarchy on earth? Because there was hierarchy in heaven. Just as the sun ruled the sky, so the pharaoh, king or emperor ruled the land. When some oppressed others, the few ruled the many, and whole populations were turned into slaves, this was – so it was said – to defend the sacred order written
into the fabric of reality itself. Without it, there would be chaos. Polytheism was the cosmological vindication of the hierarchical society. Its monumental buildings, the ziggurats of Babylon and pyramids of Egypt, broad at the base, narrow at the top, were hierarchy’s visible symbols. Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.
It was against this background that Abrahamic monotheism emerged as a sustained protest. Not all at once but ultimately it made extraordinary claims. It said that every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class or creed, was in the image and likeness of God. The supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. A society is judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. Life is sacred. Murder is both a crime and a sin. Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love. Though in its early books the Hebrew Bible commanded war, within centuries its prophets, Isaiah and Micah, became the first voices to speak of peace as an ideal. A day would come, they said, when the peoples of the earth would turn their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and wage war no more. According to the Hebrew Bible, Abrahamic monotheism entered the world as a rejection of imperialism and the use of force to make some men masters and others slaves.
Abraham himself, the man revered by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews, ruled no empire, commanded no army, conquered no territory, performed no miracles and delivered no prophecies. Though he lived differently from his neighbours, he fought for them and prayed for them in some of the most audacious language ever uttered by a human to God – ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ (Gen. 18:25) He sought to be true to his faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith.
That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not
our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry. It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words ‘God is dead’, whose ethic was the will to power.
To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.
Since the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, religiously motivated violence has not diminished. After wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions in Libya and Syria, regime changes in many Middle Eastern countries and the rise of ISIS (commonly known as Islamic State), after more than a decade in which to think the problem through, the West has grown weaker while radical political Islam has grown stronger.
Al-Qaeda and the Islamist ideology from which it derived have generated dozens, perhaps hundreds, of associated or imitative groups throughout the world and neither they nor their acts of terror show any signs of diminution. In November 2014, for example, there were 664 jihadist attacks in 14 countries, killing a total of 5,042 people. A December 2014 report by the BBC World Service and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London concluded that Islamist extremism is ‘stronger than ever’ despite al-Qaeda’s declining role.
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We have grown used to seeing sights on television and the social media that we thought had been consigned to the Middle Ages. Hostages beheaded. Soldiers hacked to death with axes. A Jordanian pilot burned alive. Innocent populations butchered. Schoolchildren murdered in cold blood. Young girls sexually
assaulted and sold as slaves. Ten-year-olds turned into suicide bombers. A February 2015 report by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child spoke of mass executions of boys by ISIS, and of children being beheaded or buried alive.
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Churches, synagogues and mosques have been destroyed, holy sites desecrated, people at prayer assassinated, and Christians abducted and crucified. Ancient communities have been driven from their homes.
Christians are being systematically persecuted in many parts of the world. Throughout the Middle East they are facing threat, imprisonment and death. In Afghanistan Christianity has almost been extinguished. In 2010 the last remaining church was burned to the ground. People converting to Christianity face the death sentence. In Syria, an estimated 450,000 Christians have fled. Members of other religions, among them Mandeans, Yazidis, Baha’i and people from Muslim minority faiths, have also suffered persecution and death.
In Egypt, 5 million Copts live in fear. In 2013, in the largest single attack on Christians since the fourteenth century, more than fifty churches were bombed or burned in an attack that has been called Egypt’s Kristallnacht.
3
Young Coptic girls are abducted, converted to Islam against their will and forcibly married to Muslim men. If they attempt to return to their Christian faith, they face imprisonment and death.
4
In 2001 there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq: today barely 400,000. In 2014 ISIS began a programme of beheading and butchering Christians, announcing that anyone refusing to convert to Islam will be ‘killed, crucified or have their hands and feet cut off’. Christians have been expelled from Iraq’s second city, Mosul, where they had been a presence for more than sixteen centuries.
In Sudan, an estimated 1.5 million Christians have been killed by the Arab Muslim militia Janjaweed since 1984. In Pakistan, they live in a state of fear. In November 2010, a Christian woman from Punjab Province, Asia Noreen Bibi, was sentenced to death by hanging for violating Pakistan’s blasphemy law. The accusation arose from an incident in which she had drunk water
together with Muslim farm workers. They had protested that as a Christian she was unfit to touch the drinking bowl. An argument ensued. The workers accused her of blasphemy. As I write, she is still being held in solitary confinement pending an appeal for her life.
A century ago Christians made up 20 per cent of the population of the Middle East. Today the figure is 4 per cent. What is happening is the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing. It is one of the crimes against humanity of our time.
Muslims too face persecution in Myanmar, South Thailand, Sri Lanka, China and Uzbekistan. Eight thousand were murdered in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, and many others raped, tortured or deported. In Cambodia in the 1970s as many as half a million were killed by the Khmer Rouge, and 132 mosques were destroyed. In Hebron in 1994 a religious Jew, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born physician, opened fire on Muslim Palestinians at prayer in Abraham’s Tomb, killing 29 and injuring a further 125. On 2 July 2014 a seventeen-year-old Palestinian, Mohamed Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped and gruesomely murdered in a revenge attack after the killing of three Israeli teenagers. On 10 February 2015, three Muslims were killed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, allegedly by a militant atheist.
Muslims form the majority of victims of Islamist violence. A report from the University of Maryland’s Global Terror Database estimated that between 2004 and 2013, about half of terrorist attacks and 60 per cent of fatalities occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of which have a mostly Muslim population.
5
One of the most tragic incidents occurred in Peshawar, Pakistan, where on 15 December 2014 Taliban gunmen stormed a military-run school and massacred 141 people, 132 of them children. Many Muslims feel deeply threatened by what they see as Western hostility, whether in the form of civilian casualties of the war in Iraq, drone strikes in Pakistan, or Israeli retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks, or as generalised antagonism in countries where they are a minority.
Meanwhile antisemitism has returned to the world in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. In Stockholm, on 27 January 2000, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, leaders of every nation in Europe committed themselves to a continuing programme of anti-racist and Holocaust education. Since then antisemitism has risen in every European country. Jews are leaving France, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Hungary in fear. A survey by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, published in November 2013, showed that a third of Europe’s Jews were contemplating leaving.
In Copenhagen on 14 February 2015, a Jewish security volunteer was killed outside a synagogue. In Paris on 9 January 2015, four Jews were shot in a kosher supermarket. In May 2014, three people were killed by a gunman in the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In Toulouse in 2012, a Jewish teacher and three schoolchildren were murdered. In these last three cases the killers were all French-born Muslims. In the summer of 2014, a synagogue near the Bastille in central Paris was surrounded by a large and angry mob chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.
That the cry of ‘Jews to the gas’ should be heard again on the streets of Germany, and that several European countries should now be considered by Jews as unsafe places in which to live, is extraordinary, given decades of anti-racist legislation, interfaith dialogue and Holocaust education. Jews fear that ‘Never again’ may become ‘Ever again’.
It is not only members of the Abrahamic monotheisms who are under threat. So too are Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and Baha’is. In Northern Iraq, the ancient sect of the Yazidis only narrowly escaped genocide at the hands of ISIS. As well as being victims, several of the non-Abrahamic faiths, especially nationalist Buddhists and Hindus, have been among the perpetrators. Religious freedom, a right enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is under threat today in more than a quarter of the world’s nations. A report entitled
Religious Freedom in the World,
6
covering the years 2012–14,
notes that there has been a marked deterioration in 55 of the world’s 196 countries, due either to authoritarian regimes or to Islamist groups. These are deeply troubled times.
Hannah Arendt, writing about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, famously used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that many of those who implemented the Final Solution, the planned extermination of Europe’s Jews, were faceless bureaucrats implementing government orders, more out of obedience than hate. There is nothing banal about the evil currently consuming large parts of the world.
Many of the perpetrators, including suicide bombers and jihadists, come from European homes, have had a university education, and until their radicalisation were regarded by friends and neighbours as friendly, likeable people. Unlike the Nazis, who took fastidious care to hide their crimes from the world, today’s terrorists take equal care to advertise them to the world using professionally produced videos and the latest social media technology. Their lack of conscience in committing what leading Islamic jurists and theologians have deemed forbidden, sinful and contrary to the Qur’an is breathtaking. In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. ‘They told us they were doing God’s work even though all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.’
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We need a term to describe this deadly phenomenon that can turn ordinary non-psychopathic people into cold-blooded murderers of schoolchildren, aid workers, journalists and people at prayer. It is, to give it a name,
altruistic evil
: evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.
By this I do not mean the kind of behaviour that people argue over: abortion, for instance, or assisted suicide. Nor do I mean
issues like the highly complex question of civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare. I mean evil of the kind that we all recognise as such. Killing the weak, the innocent, the very young and old is evil. Indiscriminate murder by terrorist attack or suicide bombing is evil. Murdering people because of their religion or race or nationality is evil. It was for this reason that, during the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, the concept of a crime against humanity was born, to give global force to the principle that there are some acts so heinous that they cannot be defended on the grounds that ‘I was only obeying orders’. There are acts so alien to our concept of humanity that they cannot be justified on the grounds that they were the means to a great, noble or holy end.
