The Church’s Latin liturgy and humanist devotion to classical antiquity hardened this self-portrait, leaving little room for Islamic or Jewish voices. By aligning itself with antiquity rather than the multilingual, multifaith worlds of al-Andalus and the Levant, Europe chose a story of continuity over complexity.

Yet this narrative concealed a deep contradiction — how could a civilization claim universality while denying the traditions that sustained it? This tension, between selective inheritance and suppressed hybridity, set the stage for German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical critique of what he called life-denying civilization.

Christianity’s famine of life

For Nietzsche, the moral revolution of Christianity marked the moment when Europe began to starve its instincts. In (1888), he accused the Church of destroying “the whole harvest of ancient civilization.” What began as a transformation of Jewish ethics into Roman law soon became, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a moral economy built on guilt and repression. Power became sin; pleasure became shame; suffering became virtue.��

In his , Nietzsche diagnosed this as the psychology of ressentiment — a world where the weak define “good” by condemning the strong. “Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all,” he wrote, describing how the will to life was replaced by a will to denial. Ascetic ideals turned vitality inward, away from creation and toward salvation.��

While Moorish Spain celebrated philosophy, architecture and sensual beauty, Christian Europe retreated into metaphysics. Nietzsche’s critique, though aimed at his own century, looked backward in search of worlds that had once embraced existence. This hunger for vitality, this famine of the spirit, would drive him southward, to the civilization he saw as the embodiment of life-affirmation.

Moorish Spain and the lost East

To show what Europe lost, Nietzsche invoked the memory of Moorish Spain, calling it “a wonderful culture … nearer to us and appealing more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece.” For him, al-Andalus was the model of a life-affirming civilization — one that “said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life.” 

Its achievements were not metaphors but monuments. By the 10th century, Córdoba housed over 400,000 manuscripts, far surpassing any European city. Scholars like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) preserved and expanded Aristotle, pioneering rationalism centuries before René Descartes. 

As historian notes, translators in Toledo transmitted Arabic philosophy, optics and medicine into Latin, laying the intellectual foundations of the European university. This pluralism extended beyond knowledge. The architecture of the Alhambra, by María Rosa Menocal, fused geometry, calligraphy and poetry into a sensual celebration of beauty.��

To Nietzsche, such refinement born of strength exemplified what he called “noble and manly instincts” — not patriarchal domination but the courage to live without guilt, to turn instinct into art. In contrasting this Moorish feast with Europe’s Christian famine, Nietzsche was not idealizing Islam; he was diagnosing Europe’s amnesia. Al-Andalus, he believed, was a mirror of what Europe could have been: confident, worldly and joyous in its creation.

Orientalism and Nietzsche’s mirror

Nietzsche’s admiration, however, came filtered through Orientalist romanticism. Scholar Ian Almond it as “rhetorical Islamophilia” — a fascination less with Islam itself than with what it symbolized: vitality, sensuality and affirmation. Nietzsche’s Islam was drawn not from theology or travel but from the same 19th-century sources that nourished German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West–Eastern Divan and French philosopher Ernest Renan’s racialized Orientalism.

Like many Romantics, Nietzsche saw “the East” as everything Europe was not: instinctive where Europe was cerebral, passionate where it was ascetic. The difference was that Nietzsche inverted moral polarity. For him, the “sensuous East” was not decadent but noble — the antithesis of Christian weakness. In that inversion, he both challenged and reproduced Orientalism: the East remained Europe’s reflection, not its equal.

Yet this mirror cracked the old binary. When Nietzsche could say the Moorish world was “nearer to us,” he implicitly questioned the idea of a pure, bounded Europe. His rhetoric of life-affirmation became, unintentionally, a bridge toward what post-colonial thinkers would later call entanglement. Nietzsche’s mirror may have been distorted, but it reflected a Europe uneasy with its own reflection — a civilization that could admire the vitality of the Other only after destroying it.

The irony Nietzsche intuited has since unfolded with eerie precision. The very civilization he saw as “life-affirming” came to be branded as “fanatical”, while the Europe he described as spiritually impoverished reinvented itself as the bastion of liberal reason. 

In the 19th century, Romantic writers such as and turned the Muslim world from a landscape of sensual freedom into one of moral excess and irrationality. After the colonial encounters of the 20th century and the geopolitics of the 21st, this image hardened into the stereotype of “Islamic fanaticism.”��

Meanwhile, Europe’s Christian famine — its moral rigidity and guilt — was secularized into a liberal order that prized tolerance yet struggled to embrace the vitality it once condemned. AsTalal Asad argues in , secularism did not erase the Christian inheritance; it refined its moral discipline under new banners. The result is an inversion Nietzsche would have recognized: the “lively, free” Muslim world recast as repressed, and a “life-denying” Christendom reborn as the world’s moral guide.

From inheritance to entanglement

Post-Orientalist scholars have since redrawn the map Nietzsche glimpsed only dimly. Said showed that “the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” Historians like and philosophers such as trace how Nietzsche’s writings later circulated through Arab intellectual networks, influencing debates about modernity and secularism.

These exchanges reveal that knowledge never moved in one direction; it was reciprocal, sustained by translation and critique. The city of Toledo — where Muslims, Jews and Christians once translated each other’s books — embodies this truth. 

Civilization advanced not through isolation but through contact zones: Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma, Sicily under Frederick II and Córdoba’s academies. Each was a site where languages met, and worldviews merged. The myth of a self-contained Europe collapses when viewed from these crossroads. Nietzsche’s “life-affirming” Moorish Spain thus prefigures the post-Orientalist insight that vitality arises from mixture. His “life-denying” Europe warns what happens when cultures mistake purity for power. 

Today, as Europe grapples with pluralism, migration and memory, the philosopher’s metaphor acquires new urgency: civilizations survive only by affirming the fullness of their entanglements. When they forget, the feast turns once again to famine.

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Although Sharia law, an Islamic that outlines divinely ordained ethics for practicing Muslims, advocates for circumstantial Christian rights, some extremist groups understand it as justifying . Therefore, while the SAF’s present conflict with Commander Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan and his Rapid Support Forces (RSF) cannot be entirely blamed for the evident abuses of religious minorities, Al-Burham’s ignorance around why over have been attacked following the start of Sudan’s third civil war in April 2023 does warrant skepticism. Considering their nation has a population of around people, of which identify as Christian, implies this violent pattern may be more than coincidental.

Escalating violence and the erosion of religious freedom

The July 8 attack on the in Khartoum’s El-Haj Yousif district illustrated how vulnerable Christians have become. Witnesses vehicles belonging to SAF and police were present, allowing extremists to act with impunity. Since 2023, churches have been bombed in and , airstrikes have killed worshippers in Wad Madani and mobs have harassed communities in Shamaliya. Clerics warn that Christians are increasingly forced into secret gatherings, as the collapse of constitutional protections has in religious freedom achieved after Bashir’s removal.

The deterioration of religious rights is inseparable from the strengthening of Islamist militias allied with the SAF. such as the Al-Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade and the Sudan Shield Forces (SSF) openly reject peace efforts and embrace jihadist rhetoric. The Al-Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade, now estimated at 20,000 fighters, has integrated itself within SAF ranks while carrying out attacks on civilians, churches and even an International Committee of the Red Cross () convoy.��

Its leaders — many tied to the dissolved National Congress Party and Muslim Brotherhood networks — embody the return of Bashir-era Islamists under Burhan’s watch. Across contested areas like the Nuba Mountains, describe girls being raped, boys abducted to be trained as fighters and villages terrorized for their Christian identity.

International organizations have warned that these attacks not only threaten Sudanese minorities but also obstruct peace negotiations. Both ACT Alliance and Caritas Internationalis that global aid cuts and unchecked impunity are pushing Sudan further from reconciliation. The bishops of Sudan and South Sudan have likewise called for the primacy of human life, restraint and dialogue, though their pleas remain unanswered.

In fact, the Al-Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade, known for similar since the third Sudanese civil war began, is rumored to contain from now-dissolved al-Bashir loyalist organizations like the Popular Defence Forces and National Congress Party, respectively. Should these articulation politics go on appeased, so too will rage a slow battle for Sudan’s religious freedom. These issues have no simple solution; all we can do is pray for peace to find all parties as soon as possible. Hopefully, someone will hear our cry.

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Trump and Vance are plutocrats, representatives of an authoritarian movement that is on the rise in the US. The billionaires who support plutocratic politicians focus on increasing their power and wealth rather than addressing the social responsibilities that come with governance. Over time, this small group accumulates power and wealth while undermining the individual rights of all citizens. This corrupts the moral fiber of society. A simple word describes the value that motivates plutocrats — “more.”

The history of plutocracy��

Plutocracy in the US has a long and infamous history. Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland this well in her 2012 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Plutocracy was most prominent in the 1920s, when economic and social guardrails to uncontained capitalism were minimal. It declined somewhat with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, reforms which created a social safety net and gave the lower classes some degree of economic autonomy. Today, a new plutocratic movement seeks to undo this work.

The current plutocratic movement stems from the theoretical tenets of neoliberalism. Economist Friedrich Hayek first introduced this ideology, which rejects most forms of government intervention or regulation. Later, economists like Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan popularized neoliberalism, making it the orthodoxy among right-wing politicians by the 1980s. Political leaders such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher embraced neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism emphasizes individualism over social cohesion, prioritizes the private sector over government intervention, favors deregulation over social responsibility and advocates for unfettered access to capital markets instead of disciplined spending and tax policies. These principles have laid the foundation for the rise of “populism” within today’s Republican Party. In other words, the MAGA movement promotes a clearly plutocratic, neoliberal agenda under the guise of conservative, Christian populism.

This agenda is evident in , a policy wish-list put together by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and written by a number of current and former Trump acolytes. Agenda 47, the platform on Trump’s campaign website, reveals much of the same. Upon close examination, both exhibit three prominent, interdependent themes: (1) reversing cultural norms to those of the 1940s, (2) increasing corporate influence by centralizing power in the executive branch of government and (3) growing the wealth and power of the financial elite. Their interdependence evidences the devious bargain plutocrats made with evangelical leaders.

Evangelicals led astray��

While billionaires’ wealth gives them a great deal of influence, by themselves, of course, they cannot swing elections. So, in order for a plutocratic platform to succeed in a democracy, it needs to make an unnatural alliance with some base of popular support. The MAGA movement has settled on white Evangelical Christians.

Given that of the US population is evangelical, it is no wonder that politicians would aim to appeal to them. The exit polls for the 2016 US presidential elections that 81% of white Evangelical Christians voted for Trump.

Evangelicals are the heirs of the Great Awakenings, religious revivals that shaped the early US. Revivalist preachers toured the country, spreading a fiery message of conversion. They denounced vices like sexual immorality, alcoholism and, in some cases, slavery. These religious radicals formed the core of the abolitionist and Prohibition movements; their modern heirs, however, seem to be less concerned with social justice, although Evangelicals retain the populist, moralistic fervor. Today, they rail against gay marriage, abortion and the teaching of evolution in schools.

However, many leaders of the evangelicals within the Trump orbit are simply opportunists. Amplifying Trump’s vehemence against cultural change allows them to grow the size of their congregations and gain prominence in the secular world of politics — at the price of sacrificing their values. As journalist Tim Alberta in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, many evangelical leaders took a political worldview and simply baptized it as Christian.

Republicans have parlayed the panic of evangelicals over secularization, along with the fears of working-class groups over job losses, housing and crime — all of which they blame on immigration — into political support. This has enabled the plutocrats and other ultra-conservative allies to surreptitiously establish policy and administrative agendas that will forestall any economic progress for lower- and middle-income Americans. Rather, over time the wealth accumulated by the 1% of wealthiest Americans will continue to grow, further enhancing their power within the governance system and eventually leading to the deterioration of democratic governance. The alignment of plutocrats’ avarice with evangelicals’ newfound political activism gave a popularity boost to “” theology, which makes materialism a Christian virtue.

If Trump has his way…

Project 2025 and Agenda 47 advocate for the privatization of government services and an oligarchical structure to the US economy. This would clearly result in greater accumulation of wealth to the billionaire class, achieving the long-held goals of the champions of neoliberalism.

According to these plans, policymakers will remove regulations that safeguard the environment, women’s reproductive rights and public health. “Drill, baby, drill” would be the ethos of our environmental policy. Foreign policy would focus on expanding use of fossil fuels in developing countries. Agencies responsible for ensuring our safety or well-being, like the EPA and the National Weather Service, would face severe limitations or privatization. Public funds would support private schools allowing them to teach their own version of science and history. Private insurance companies would gain greater control over healthcare decisions. Corporate taxes would decrease even further. These are but a few examples of the policies designed to shift money upward in the class hierarchy.

Policies designed to increase the wealth of the upper tiers of society are endless. None of these would be acceptable to most Americans, but the narratives of cultural wars and populism cloak their true meaning. This ensures that working class and middle-income Americans will vote against their long-term interests, if not their very survival. Look carefully, remove the populist clothing and recognize that MAGA is really about enriching the rich and realigning our government to ensure that the economic elites will continue to pull the levers of power.

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Then, Atul asked me another question. “I never understood why there needed to be so much suffering,” he said. “Why did God want Jesus undergo all that torture?”

I was dumbstruck. All of a sudden, I had nothing to say. It was not because I had never thought of the question before; indeed, I have been pondering the meaning of Jesus’s death all of my life. But how does one even begin to express the answer to that question in a sentence or two, without it falling flat like some stolid answer from a theology textbook?

It’s a little bit like when a woman asks a man why he loves her. The obvious answers just don’t seem to do the question justice.

Yet Atul’s is a question that deserves to be answered. Is the central drama of the world’s most widespread religion simply absurd? How can the religion that preaches a message of love really teach that God demanded his own son to suffer and die on a cross to satisfy the demands of his justice?

God is not a sadist

When I finally did manage to stammer out an answer, it was something along the lines of, “Well, that would be what the Calvinists would say.” An unsatisfying answer, sure, but one that was true enough. The Calvinist tradition has proposed a theory of the Crucifixion which, I think, is the cause of a lot of the concern that underlay Atul’s question. In many ways, it is the concept that the rest of the world has perhaps now come to see as the Christian idea of redemption. The name of this theory would be .

According to the theory of penal substitution, what Jesus did on the Cross was take all of the punishment that was really ours, the wrath of God that we had merited by our sins. God imputes the sins of humanity to Christ, and he punishes him with all of the fury that his divine holiness has for the wickedness that we commit. In a paradoxical way, God treats his own son like a sinner and unleashes his wrath on him.

There is something about this picture that does not sit right with our ideas of what Christianity should be. God is so angry that he needs to take it out on somebody, and that somebody turns out to be Jesus? Is God really pleased by the suffering of an innocent man? Sure, you can say the innocent man voluntarily accepts his suffering. But one still finds it hard to accept. In this picture, God seems to be acting more out of wrath than out of love, or even justice.

That is not the God of scripture, the God who “.” The Old Testament book of Wisdom us that “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” And God loves none of the living, human beings or , as much as he loves his own Son. Jesus is the offspring of the very bosom of Father’s divinity, the son whom he loves more than the entire created universe. No, God is not pleased by the torturing of his son.

This theory is a distortion of the biblical truth: Jesus did the will of his Father by bravely accepting death in an act of pure love, obedience and self-sacrifice that is worth more to the Father than the sins of the whole world. Jesus paid the debt for evil men, not by taking the punishment they deserved — which would be Hell — but by showing the Father a love that was greater than all of the worship that sinners had denied him throughout the ages. This is why Jesus is our and our justification and our savior — not our whipping-boy.

A sacrifice of love

It is love that God desires, than anything; Jesus earned our salvation by his love, because love deserves a , and love a multitude of sins. But then, one might justifiably ask: Why did Jesus have to die? Was not his love enough?

In a way, this is true. One single act of Jesus’s perfect love is worth more to God than the sins of the whole world. He could have merited our salvation with a single prayer, a single day of fasting or a single act of mercy for the poor. And indeed, Jesus spent his entire life sanctifying the world with acts of unspeakable love. Yet God desired our salvation to be accomplished by the greatest act of love — and there is than this, which is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

We will never fully unpack the mystery of the supreme act of saving love that Jesus poured out on the Cross. Perhaps God desired to show his infinite love for us by saving us in a gratuitous way, something more than was strictly necessary. Perhaps God wanted to show us how Jesus was betrayed by Christians, accused by Jews and tortured by Gentiles, to teach us that we all have a part in rejecting God’s goodness. Perhaps it was fitting that God had turned death itself, which had been the weapon the Devil used to oppress humankind, into his own instrument for frustrating the evil one’s plans. Thomas Aquinas five reasons. He could have listed five hundred more.

I will try, in my own little way, to offer three reasons that I hope will answer Atul’s question.

Why did Jesus have to die for the salvation of mankind? Because doing so was the greatest act of sacrifice, of sincerity and of solidarity.

Sacrifice is an ancient concept. Nearly all human cultures have had sacrifice as a way of displaying devotion to the gods. Today, with the spread of Christianity and Islam worldwide, animal sacrifice has become much rarer than it was in ages past. Yet the basic idea is universal: Human beings, who owe everything to the divine, must out of gratitude give back in some way. We do this by sacrificing, because, as an ancient Sumerian expressed, “What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away.”

The Jewish religion was full of animal sacrifices, especially bloody sacrifices of cattle, sheep and goats. The essential act was not merely the killing of the animal, which could be done by laymen, but the offering of its blood upon the altar by an ordained priest. In this way, the animal was dedicated to God. Christians believe that Jesus is our priest, and that, while he was slain by the hands of other men, it was by his own blood on the altar of the Cross that he gave God an act of pure, saving worship.

What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away. Jesus gave up everything to God on the cross, accepting the abandonment of his friends, the stripping of his possessions, the defamation of his good name and the loss of his very life. In doing so, he showed us that he held nothing back in order to save us. At the same time, he taught us to hold nothing back from God, but to offer ourselves wholly. And, in time, God was to restore to Jesus everything that he had offered a hundredfold, precisely because he had given it up so freely.

Why do I bring up sacrifice? It seems an archaic concept, and perhaps an excessively technical one. But it’s important to remember because sacrifice is the biblical concept that was distorted and made unrecognizable by the theory of penal substitution. Jesus is not so much the scapegoat of Yom Kippur as he is the lamb of Passover. And that is why this day, Easter, is called the Pasch — pascha, פֶּסַח, the Passover, when the blood of the Lamb rescued God’s people from destruction.

An act of honesty

Even beyond this perhaps esoteric conception of sacrifice, I believe that something far simpler is too at the heart of the Crucifixion. That is the plain fact that to die is hard.

This world is full of false prophets, would-be messiahs and cult leaders. It is easy and profitable to make yourself look holy and sound profound. With it come fame, wealth and even, a lot of the time, sex. (One sure way to tell that you have a cult leader is to see that he has a lot of girlfriends.)

We are much more willing when we believe preachers who are capable of denying themselves. The Buddha and St. Francis made themselves credible by casting away their wealth, not by amassing it like televangelists do. Yet perhaps even for selfish reasons one might cast away one’s wealth. After all, a good reputation is worth more than gold. Someone might prefer to be revered rather than be rich. What someone will not do, unless they are insane, even for the sake of fame is die.

Jesus is a preacher who tells me that he from heaven, that he comes bearing for human beings, that I must call upon him to be saved, love him more than my own kin and deny myself and be willing to for him. This is not just a purveyor of good advice, to whom I might listen and gather some pearls of wisdom and go on my merry way, even if the rest of his sayings are not trustworthy. I can glean pearls of wisdom from a Christian televangelist or a Hindu self-named guru. But I cannot trust them. With the demands that Jesus makes of me, unless I can trust that this man means what he is saying, I cannot listen to him.

I daresay that if Jesus had not died on the Cross, he would not have had many followers. But this is a man who is willing to go the whole nine yards. This is someone who is willing to give it all up — everything — suffer the betrayal of his followers, the condemnation of his own people and the most humiliating and cruel form of torture-execution designed by the Romans, who were masters of cruelty. And he tells me that he is doing it all for .

Because Jesus died on the Cross, because he withstood horrible tortures and refused to recant or make excuses, I know that he meant everything that he said. His suffering proves his sincerity. And his wisdom proves his sanity. This was no lunatic with a death wish, but a wise, compassionate, strong and capable man who gave it all up for the truth.

Only such a man will I trust with my immortal soul.

A savior who was not ashamed to be like me

The sacrifice of the crucifixion tells us something about God. The sincerity of it tells us something about Jesus. But what does it tell us about ourselves, and about our own suffering?

On the Cross, God the Son embraced suffering. He took it into himself. He bore what all human beings bear — pain, humiliation, death. Jesus did not consider these things to be beneath himself.

Jesus lived an entire human life, complete with all of the things that a human life includes, except for sin. We can miss the profoundness of this truth for how obvious it is: Everyone suffers.

God created this entire world, with suffering in it. He did not create evil, but he did not disdain from making even those creatures which he knew would experience evil. He creates human lives, fully knowing all of their joys and their sorrows, their successes, failures, deprivations, long lonely nights, heartbreaks. God looks at the entirety of a human life and, in his all-knowing decree, he says yes.

Jesus did not select some parts of our humanity, the pretty ones and the pleasant ones, to take to himself. He did not disdain any part of it, consider it unworthy of his dignity. He took it all. Thus, he testifies to the truth that human life is worth living, human life is fundamentally good, despite and even within suffering.

Even more: Jesus chose suffering. Even suffering itself then is not without value, without meaning. When I suffer, I am not experiencing the absurd uncaringness of a cold universe. Nor am I experiencing simply something unfortunate, a mere flaw in the universe that God simply did not feel like fixing, something not meant to be.

No, even suffering has meaning, because Jesus embraced suffering. So I will embrace suffering, too. I will take on all that my human life has to offer me, not shrink from pain out of fear, not fly from humiliation because I have an inflated sense of how dignified I should be. I want to live it all. I want the world that God created. Wrinkles and all.

And Jesus shows me that suffering is part of the story, but not the end. He gave everything to God in an act of utter self-emptying. And yet God gave still more back to him, because of his love. God raised Jesus, today, not reversing his sacrifice but completing it: A man, fully alive, fully devoted, full of truth and of love, having given up his life for others, now becomes the fountain of life for all of them.

Evil does not have the last word. Suffering is more than evil: It is what the soul does when it confronts evil, wrestles with it in order to defeat it. And in the end, life wins. After all the suffering of Good Friday, the morning of Easter comes.

Why did Jesus need to undergo so much suffering? Because he is the way of self-sacrificing love. He is the truth of honest teaching. And he is the life that embraces suffering, and even overcomes it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In history, man has realized that there must be a God that transcended everything, although he cannot perceive this deity with his usual senses. As time passed, the spontaneous realization of God gradually evolved into institutions that we now refer to as religion. People sought religion to address their concerns about natural phenomena and the powers that control them. Therefore, it is not surprising that the essence of all major world religions remains the unity of mankind. It is founded on the belief in the one and only God, which is worshiped through the multitude of idols in Hinduism, the Trinity in Christianity and the oneness in Islam.

When these three major religions are cleared of all man-made innovations, they boil down to many of the same virtues. They promote honesty, trust, compassion, love, peace, cooperation and brotherhood. They prohibit dishonesty, betrayal, theft, rape and murder. They inspire us to help the poor and disadvantaged. The following is a brief discussion of God as he is presented in these religions.

God in Hinduism

Among the world’s major religions, Hinduism is believed to be the oldest, between . It is rooted in monotheism, the belief in a single omnipotent God. In about 2,000 BC, an early Vedic hymn titled, Origin of All Things, set the foundation for by referring to God as the source of life:

There was neither aught nor naught, nor air, nor sky beyond.

What covered all? Where rested all? In watery gulf profound?

Nor death was then, nor deathlessness, nor change of night and day.

The One breathed calmly, self-sustained; nought else beyond it lay.

As time passed, the deity was called the Brahman — “supreme, lord, eternal, unborn, imperishable.” He put in motion “creation, preservation, and destruction.”

Over time, Hindu writers went overboard in creating deities to illustrate the Brahman. He is now represented by over gods, vying for superiority. This is head-scratching for many. However, the hymn leads wise believers to one conclusion: “God alone knew how the world came into being.”

Hinduism’s core values are based on the purpose of life and ethical virtues. It teaches that given how our universe is created, it is in our best interest to work together for the well-being of mankind and other species. The primary belief of Hinduism is of a universal God. It perceives a pure, wakeful, omnipresent intelligence that created and maintains the universe. It professes the mindset that a clever person should have: He knows that God is beyond the grasp of knowledge, he sees God in every being and he does not get fixated on his choices in achieving eternal life.

Hinduism has influenced and been influenced by other religions. In particular, the faith has influenced Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism. It shares numerous concepts with the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — including the soul (atman) and personal, loving devotion to a deity (bhakti).

The peaceful spirit of Hinduism must not be confused with the bigoted zeal of its followers in attacking minorities in India, especially and . The country is considered extremely for women. The (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has disgraced the faith by the minority Muslims and polarizing Hindus against them. In the 2002 Gujarat massacres, Modi allegedly other officials not to intervene as Hindu mobs killed Muslims. As punishment for failing to stop the massacres, the United States banned Modi from entering the country for years.

God in Christianity

Around 2,000 years ago in the early 1st century AD, Jesus Christ was miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of his virgin mother, Mary. He was one of Abraham’s descendants. He rose among the Israelites and performed countless miracles.

According to biblical scholars, Jesus’s ministry began with his baptism by . He that besides worshiping the one God, people should treat others the way they want to be treated. His kind demeanor and peaceful approach provided a positive passivity permeated with intense love and charity toward others.

In his lifetime, Jesus attracted a few dedicated followers. But his message of compassion resonated in the hearts of millions long after him. His teachings became the doctrine of a new religion, dubbed Christianity.

Jesus called the to return to God and observe the commandments laid out in the , the Jewish holy law. In Jesus’s spoken language of Aramaic, God is called . This is cognate to the Arabic word ilah, the root of Allah (al-ilah, “the God”), the name Arabs and Muslims would go on to use when referring to God.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus , “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.” He , “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” Even as the Romans crucified him, he , “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The were written years after Jesus. So, some contradictions and inaccuracies are not surprising. However, one thing is clear in all four gospels: Jesus preached the worship of only one God. On occasion, the scribe’s imagination scandalously stretched, Jesus or the Holy Spirit with God.

His message clearly shows that Jesus worshiped the single God, Alaha. This defies the Trinity, an innovation that emerged years after he was gone. The idea of the , rooted in “threefold”, was first used by (d. 200) in his small circle.��

In the 4th century, the (325), discussed Christ’s relationship with the Father and formalized the doctrine of the Trinity, declaring Jesus to be “of the same substance” as God. Yet the word “trinity” does not appear anywhere in the four Gospels. Matthew does appear to refer to it with the formula, “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” However, that statement does not imply that the three are equal or the same.��

As for the , Jesus’s teachings hang on two : First, you must love God with all your heart, soul and mind. Second, you must love other people as you love yourself.

Jesus’s early followers considered themselves Jews by birth or conversion. They believed in the Jewish God and Jesus as the Savior, considering him the prophesized Jewish mashiach, or messiah. They insisted on following Jewish laws and rituals. They believed God would destroy their enemies and set the stage for the coming . He would gather all Jews and bring justice and peace, specifically to Egypt.

Jesus’s disciples lived alongside other Jewish sects, such as Essenes, Sadducees and Pharisees. Some of them were referred to as and . Jesus’s early followers closely obeyed his teachings. These peaceful people lived by loving their neighbors, adversaries and persecutors. In the Bible, they never referred to themselves as , although that name was given to them in the pagan city of Antioch. Jesus never gave a name to the faith or followers. However, they considered themselves those Jews who worshiped the one God and exercised for one another.

Christ preached for people to love one another unconditionally. The aggressively vicious behaviors of Christendom must not be bemused with his teachings. In his , The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote: “Jesus did not bring peace on the earth, but a sword; his patient and humble virtues should not be confounded with the intolerant zeal of princes and bishops, who have disgraced the name of his disciples.”

God in Islam

In 610 AD, in a forgotten land that interested neither Romans nor Persians, a middle-aged man undertook a task no man had ever achieved: to unite mankind. His only weapon was his passionate conviction in the oneness of God, and thus the oneness of humanity. Like Noah, he was patient, persistent and faithful to God. Like Abraham, he reasoned to explain his ideas in a simple language that his people could easily comprehend. Like Moses, he spoke only a few words, filled with wisdom and meaning. Like Jesus, he was humble, compassionate, forgiving and looked after the sick and orphaned. His eloquence pierced the hearts of his listeners.

In his early years of preaching, no one beyond his close family joined him for fear of retribution from the tribal chiefs. After preaching for 13 years in his hometown of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, few people followed him. That only made him more determined. His perseverance finally paid off when he left his home; his teachings changed the desolate Arabian peninsula and the world. This brilliant man was , the Prophet of Islam.

Muhammad preached , an Arabic word meaning, “submission to the will of God.” This was the continuation of God’s message to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. He spoke of the one God, , Who him:

Say: He, God is one.

God is He on whom all depend.

He begets not, nor is He begotten.

And none is like Him.

As for the oneness of God:

If there were, in the universe, other gods besides God, there would have been confusion!

1,400 years ago, Muhammad superstitions and the tradition of following the paths of ancestors. He called people to think, reason and reflect.

At a time when women had little value, Muhammad men and women equally. When men considered daughters shame and killed them, Muhammad preached rights and privileges for women and forbade the people from molesting and hurting them. When the economy ran on the toil of slaves, Muhammad encouraged people to set them for and . He championed opportunity and people to give to those less fortunate what they loved for themselves.

These days, we must all have a keen mind when absorbing information. The propaganda against Islam must not fool us that the US has disseminated across the globe. It is perpetuated to distract from domestic issues, cover for atrocities and justify interventions in Muslim countries. The Western support of the Israeli against Palestinians clearly demonstrates that the West has long abandoned its Christian values.

To retake a page from , we can say: “[Islam] is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God. The prophet of Mecca [Muhammad] rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish.”

[ edited this piece.]

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Nagorno-Karabakh is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but its 120,000 inhabitants are predominantly ethnic Armenians. They broke away from Baku in the early 1990s and Yerevan supported their fellow Armenians. This led to a war in which Armenia emerged on top. By 1993, Armenia not only gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh but also of Azerbaijan.

In 2020, war broke out again. Thanks to Turkish drones and large-scale military operations, Azerbaijan regained much of the territory it lost in the early 1990s. Now, its blockade of the Lachin Corridor is inflaming passions yet again.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken got Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev to meet in Munich. The post-Davos Munich Security Conference was a convenient excuse for the leaders to get together. Both sides claimed that they had made progress towards a peace deal. Yet a war of words broke out. Aliyev “accused Armenia of occupying Azerbaijan’s lands for almost 30 years.” Pashinyan claimed that “Azerbaijan has adopted a revenge policy” and was using the meeting for “enflaming intolerance, hate, aggressive rhetoric.”

A Tortured Past: Christianity, Islam and Communism

Both Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia tell us that Armenia became the first country to establish Christianity as its state religion. Apparently, in 300 CE as per the former and 301 AD as per the latter, Saint Gregory the Illuminator convinced King Tiridates III to convert to Christianity. The Armenian Apostolic Church is an independent Oriental Orthodox Christian church and has many similarities to the Russian Orthodox Church.

If Armenia is Christian, Azerbaijan is Muslim. In the early 16th century, Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid Dynasty conquered Azerbaijan. Ismail I proclaimed the Twelver denomination of Shia Islam as the official religion of the Persian Empire. While Iran is almost entirely Shia and Sunnis are , Azerbaijan follows a more syncretic version of Islam. The US State Department’s 2021 on International Religious Freedom tells us that Azerbaijan’s “constitution stipulates the separation of religion and state and the equality of all religions before the law.” It also tells us that of the 96% Muslim population, 65% are Shia and 35% Sunni. There is little internecine Muslim conflict, though non-Muslims still have a hard time in the country.

In the 19th century, Russia started gobbling up Azerbaijan as the Persian Empire weakened under the Qajar dynasty. Sunnis fled from Russian-controlled territory to Azerbaijan. As Russia took over, a modern Azeri nationalism arose. It emphasized a common Turkic heritage. Ties with Ottoman Turkey deepened while those with Qajar Persia weakened. To this day, Azerbaijan remains closer to Turkey than to Iran.

Azerbaijan also retains close ties with Moscow. It has spent much of the last two centuries under Moscow’s thumb. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Azerbaijan declared independence in 1918. This did not last long. Under Moscow’s rather heavy hand, the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was formed.

Armenia too is closely intertwined with Moscow. Until World War I, Armenia was part of the Ottoman Empire. Yet war inflamed suspicions about the loyalty of Amenians to Istanbul. Some Armenian volunteers were serving in the Imperial Russian Army. The  infamous 1915 Tehcir Law ordered the of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population to the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Iraq. Death marches into the desert and massacres led to the deaths of 800,000 to 1.5 million people. Forced Islamization of women and children sought to erase Armenian cultural identity and make them loyal subjects of the Ottoman sultan who was then the caliph of the entire Islamic world. This mass murder and cultural destruction has come to be known as the Armenian genocide.

World War I went badly for both Ottoman Turkey and Tsarist Russia. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres “provided for an independent Armenia, for an autonomous Kurdistan, and for a Greek presence in eastern Thrace and on the Anatolian west coast, as well as Greek control over the Aegean islands commanding the Dardanelles.” The Turks rejected this unfair treaty and fought back. Peace only came with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that established the boundaries of modern Turkey. A year earlier, the Soviet Red Army had annexed Armenia along with Azerbaijan and Georgia. Universalist communism snuffed out nationalism in this part of the world.

Communism Collapses, Nationalism Rises

In 1923, the Soviet Union established the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast within Azerbaijan. About 95% of its population was Armenian. For the next 60 years, the region was peaceful thanks to the heavy-handed Soviet rule. During the disastrous 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghanistan War, Moscow’s authority weakened significantly. In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional legislature passed a resolution to join Armenia. Tensions rose, but the Soviets kept things under control.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, all hell broke loose. Armenia and Azerbaijan achieved independent statehood, and went to war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians in this region declared a breakaway state of Artsakh. This was unacceptable to Azerbaijan. Like the collapse of Yugoslavia, the results were tragic. The war caused over 30,000 casualties and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. As stated earlier, Armenia held the upper hand. 

By 1993, Armenia had gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied 20% of Azerbaijan’s geographic area. Peace only came in 1994 when Russia brokered a ceasefire that has come to be known as the . This left Nagorno-Karabakh with de facto independence with a self-proclaimed government in Stepanakert. However, this enclave was still heavily reliant on close economic, political and military ties with Armenia.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan were economic backwaters under Soviet rule. In 2011, Azerbaijan struck gold in the form of gas. Baku launched what has come to be known as the Southern Gas Corridor. Azerbaijan wrangled a deal with the European Commission to supply gas as far away as Italy. The country used gas proceeds to buy arms from both Turkey and Russia as well as modernize its military.

In early 2016, a broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh. Most analysts say that Azerbaijan triggered this conflict with the tacit, if not overt, acquiescence of Moscow. For many years, Baku had “been promising to liberate the territories occupied by the Armenians.” Neither were the Azerbaijani troops able to break through Armenian defenses in Nagorno-Karabakh, nor were the Armenians able to launch a counteroffensive. The truce reestablished the status quo.

In 2018, #MerzhirSerzhin—anti-government protests that have come to be known as the Velvet Revolution—broke out in Armenia and swept the old elites out of power. Serzh Sargsyan reluctantly stepped down as prime minister and Pashinyan took over. The new government to loosen ties with Russia without antagonizing Moscow, strengthen relations with Europe, and improve relations with neighboring countries, including Iran and Georgia.

Democracy in Armenia did not lead to peace in the region. As stated earlier, conflict broke out again in 2020. Azerbaijani forces crossed not only into the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh of Nagorno-Karabakh, but also into Armenia. Azerbaijani artillery strikes hit cities and villages deep within Armenian territory. More than 7,000 people died and hundreds, if not thousands, were wounded. Azerbaijan recaptured most of the territory it had lost in the 1990s. Three ceasefires brokered by Russia, France and the US failed. 

Eventually, Russia pushed through a ceasefire and sent 2,000 of its troops as peacekeepers. Armenia had to guarantee “the security of transport links” between the western regions of Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhichevan that lies within Armenia.

A Strange String Quartet: Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Azerbaijan

Since 1991, Russia had been Armenia’s main security and energy provider. The shared Orthodox Christian tradition has long made Yerevan Moscow’s most reliable in the region. Armenia is “the sole Russian ally in the region, the only host of a Russian military base, and “the only South Caucasus country to belong to the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation.”

Yet it seems that street protests for democracy sent alarm bells ringing in the Kremlin. Russian giant Gazprom hiked gas prices in 2019, forcing Armenia to make overtures to its southern neighbor Iran. Worse, Russia turned into a primary weapons supplier to Azerbaijan. This led to “a rather surprising crisis in Armenian-Russian relations.” Intelligence sources speak about a deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to back Azerbaijan because the former wanted to teach Armenia a lesson. Putin did not want Armenia to follow the Ukraine example and form the so-called wave of democracy that would sweep him out of office.

Turkey the 2020 ceasefire deal to be a “sacred success” for its ally Azerbaijan. In his characteristically colorful language, Erdoğan described Ankara’s support for Azerbaijan as part of Turkey’s quest for its “deserved place in the world order.” In a nutshell, Armenia-Azerbaijan has become a theater where big powers are yet again playing another version of the great game. Once, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire and the Russian Empire met here in the Caucasus, and jostled for dominance. Another jostling has now begun with Turkey, Iran and Russia—successors to the three empires—playing key roles.

Others have got involved. Unsurprisingly, one of them is the US. On September 11, 2022, Mikael Zolyan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explained how the West had Russia in mediating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In reality, the EU is playing a distant second fiddle. As the post-Davos Blinken-led negotiations in Munich have just demonstrated, the US is calling the shots, at least as of now. Naturally, Russia is not too pleased.

Other actors are involved too. Azerbaijan is allowing Ukraine’s military to fuel from its gas stations at no cost. Furthermore, Ukraine has always supported “the integrity of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict” despite having the fifth largest Armenian in the world. Georgia is in Ukraine’s camp and is pursuing both EU and NATO membership. Armenia is home to a major Russian that has ground forces, tanks, air defense, missiles, helicopters and Mig-29 multi-role fighters. These are Armenia’s insurance against total Turkish-Azerbaijani domination. Despite heartburn over Russia’s betrayal in 2020, Armenian public opinion still favors Russia over Ukraine in the current ongoing conflict. The waters in the Caucasus are becoming very muddy.

A Truly International Fight Club

Involvement of distant powers is muddying the waters further. Over the last few years, Pakistan has been self-consciously looking up to Turkey to craft its Islamic identity. The northern part of the Indian subcontinent was conquered by mamluk (i.e. manumitted slave) Turks in 1192. In recent years, Pakistan has been turning to these distant Turkish roots and Erdoğan is even more than the Turkish soap operas that are enthralling Pakistan. The Turkish leader is seen as a true representative of the Muslim world just as historical television drama is viewed as glorifying “the Muslim value system and the Ottoman Empire.” 

It is important to remember that Muslims in British India, modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, launched the 1919 Khilafat movement to restore the caliph to his throne in Turkey. They considered the Ottoman sultan to be their spiritual leader. Erdoğan has emerged as a new caliph for Pakistanis, many of whom are willing to fight and die for him.

The 51�Թ� Intelligence (FOI) Threat Monitor concluded that Turkey and Pakistan were institutionalizing strategic relations and developing the characteristics of a military alliance. With the continuing deterioration of Pakistan’s economic and political situation, the supply and willingness of young men to volunteer for jihadi causes is increasing too.

Sadly for Armenia, Pakistan has the capability to support Turkey and Azerbaijan with large numbers of well-trained regular or irregular troops in any future conflict. Pakistani regular military personnel already supplement local forces in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. The Pakistani state has rich experience of training jihadi volunteers in unconventional warfare and then sending them to fight in support of Islamic causes around the world. These irregular forces have appeared in Afghanistan, India, and Yemen, sometimes working with Pakistani special forces. With appropriate incentives, these fighters could be deployed against Armenia to support Azerbaijani and Turkish objectives, possibly in combination with elements of the Pakistani Army.

Luckily for Armenia, India has decided to support this beleaguered Christian nation. In September 2022, the two countries a $245 million worth of Indian artillery systems, anti-tank rockets and ammunition to the Armenian military. Two months later, Armenia a $155 million order for 155-millimeter artillery gun systems. Aliyev, who succeeded his father to become the strongman president of Azerbaijan in 2003, declared India’s supply of weapons to Armenia as an “unfriendly move.” India made this move only after years of provocation by Erdoğan who has sided with Pakistan on Kashmir. According to Glenn Carle, FOI senior partner and retired CIA officer, India’s sale to Armenia makes strategic sense and is a play for great power status.

In a nutshell, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has ramifications far beyond the region. The US wants Armenia to emulate Georgia and Ukraine, and join the ranks of free democracies. The EU wants peace in the Caucasus and cheap Azerbaijani gas to replace disrupted Russian supplies. Russia wants the Pashinyan government, which is increasingly unpopular after defeat in 2020, to fall. Yet it cannot and will not allow Armenia, an Orthodox Christian nation, to be completely subjugated by its Muslim neighbors.

Thanks to religion and ethnicity, Turkey and Azerbaijan see Armenia as a historic enemy. Both want to teach Yerevan a lesson. So does Ukraine and perhaps even Georgia. Curiously, mullah-run Iran wants to counter the growing influence of fellow Muslims—largely Sunni Turkey and majority Shia Azerbaijan—in the region. It fears that a powerful Azerbaijan could strive for the integration of Nakhchivan, the Azeri enclave in Armenia, and Azeri-majority areas in Iran. Therefore, Tehran is selling gas to energy-hungry Armenia. Thanks to Pavlovian cultural deference to Turkey, Pakistan sees the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as jihad and its madrassa-trained young men might provide cannon fodder for this conflict. Meanwhile, India is responding to the pan-Islamism threat of Turkey and Pakistan by supporting a potentially valuable ally. 

The die is cast for a riveting saga, which promises to have more twists and turns than Dirilis Ertugrul.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Westernizers called for Russia to modernize its economy and political institutions to become part of the advanced European intellectual space. In contrast, the did not see the autocratic and religious political culture as backward but rather as an expression of the uniqueness of Russian identity that ought to be preserved.

US, NATO and the Question of Russia

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Throughout the Soviet experience, Europe and the West have retained this position of alterity and, at times, enmity, especially due to the USSR’s long-lasting confrontation with the US and NATO that characterized the Cold War years. Nowadays, Russian identity vis-à-vis Europe is again a topic of heated debate.

Indeed, relations between Moscow and its Western neighbors have become increasingly , especially since the events in Ukraine that led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. In particular, a renewed oppositional stance toward the EU and NATO has allowed some interesting reworking of ideas around the relationship between Moscow and the West.  

Conservative Thought

The turbulent events of 2013 and 2014 marked a crucial point, when political instability in Ukraine — a country Moscow considers a historic and strategic ally — and the ousting of the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, created the conditions for the annexation of Crimea, provoking a Western response in the form of sanctions.

An unsurprising consequence of these developments was Russia’s to the old Slavophile civilizational discourse to distance itself from Europe. But together with a new Russian imperial narrative to justify its hegemonic tendencies toward other post-Soviet countries, another, more ambiguous discourse has been disseminated by the Kremlin and Russian conservatives.

First of all, it is essential to emphasize that the Russian conservative milieu is varied and comprises people who are at least partially critical of President Vladimir Putin, but whose ideas are still to the Kremlin not to be considered opposition figures. These include the controversial neo-Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin, the outspoken imperialist leader of the Liberal Democratic Party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the hard-line nationalist Alexander Prokhanov. The intellectual debate taking place within this circle is contributing to the of the Russian government. 

Particularly because of the renewed tensions, it is not surprising that the Kremlin is disseminating anti-Western discourses, both domestically and abroad. Mainly thanks to a well-developed web of alternative media, such as RT and Sputnik, directed at Western audiences, Russia is attempting to market itself as a civilizational alternative centered on “traditional values,” especially among those in the West who are with current politics.

An interesting way of both marketing Russia as an anti-Western civilization but still maintaining that active thread to Europe is by designating Russia as the “Third Rome.”

This idea is both simple and enticing. It entails a reinterpretation of the Third Rome prophecy formulated in the 16^th century, according to which Moscow is the third and last Christian kingdom after the fall of Rome and Constantinople. Consistent with the characterizing Christian philosophy, Moscow is as destined to represent Christianity in its last and decisive struggle against the forces of the Antichrist: “Two Romes have fallen, the Third stands and a fourth shall never be.”

The first is of course Ancient Rome, which adopted Christianity as its state religion in the 4^th century under Emperor Constantine but fell to the a century later, and the second is Byzantium, which succumbed to the in 1453. Reinterpreted in modern terms, according to the anti-liberal and anti-Western worldview that has become part of the official discourse in Russia, the country is resignified as the political heir of the Christian and as the last standing of Christian moral values amidst a world corrupted by cultural decadence and moral relativism.

This trope has the effect of distancing Russia from the West while at the same time reclaiming Russian conservative values as quintessentially European. Indeed, the central claim is that Russia is now the last country that completely abides by the Christian values Europe once supposedly stood for, as seen in the Kremlin support for family values, characterized by traditional gender roles, opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and the rejection of multiculturalism.

The West is seen as , as a sort of parasitic entity that has swallowed its true soul, and it is Russia that is to save Europe from decline.

Transnational Implications

Disseminated by pro-Russian media and other sympathetic outlets, such ideas have found the approval of far-right activists in Europe and beyond. At the International Conservative Forum in Saint Petersburg organized in 2015 by the Russian ultra-nationalist party Rodina (Motherland), Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party, and Roberto Fiore, leader of Italy’s neo-fascist party Forza Nuova (New Force), underlined how Russia is the only country today that could save the West from the encroachment of the global elites and Islamization.

Griffin and Fiore both commented on how Russia represents the and also the hope for a multipolar future against the “New World Order,” with not-so-subtle conspiratorial undertones.

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Even if these ideas deal with the perception of Europe, they may also be easily reframed into a broader civilizational nuance. Matthew Heimbach, an American white supremacist and the founder of the Traditional Workers Movement, does not hide his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a 2016 tweet, he emphasized how his government has itself “as the defender of Christendom and the Third Rome, and has demonstrated a rediscovered purpose of supporting Tradition, Christianity, and identity.” 

In more recent times, observers have the proliferation of Byzantine themes in QAnon circles and among similar conspiracy groups, remarking the continuity between this bizarre phenomenon and the official statements of the Russian government defining itself as the rightful heir of Byzantium. In a period marked by increasing tensions between Russia and the West, it is of paramount importance to continue monitoring the evolution of such ideas and their potential impact both in Russia and beyond.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

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Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press begins her on the encyclical with this summary: “Pope Francis says the coronavirus pandemic has proven that the ‘magic theories’ of market capitalism have failed and that the world needs a new type of politics that promotes dialogue and solidarity and rejects war at all costs.”

Mitch McConnell and the Newspeak of Democracy

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Like Winfield, NPR’s correspondent Sylvia Poggioli what she sees as the two most salient issues Francis has addressed: a neoliberal economy that is out of control and the dominant role of war in contemporary political culture. Poggioli summarizes the pope’s take on the economy: “Francis says the marketplace cannot resolve every problem, and he denounces what he describes as ‘this dogma of neoliberal faith’ that ‘resort[s] to the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle.’”

On the issue of war, Poggioli reports a truly historical scoop: “Francis turns to the Catholic Church‘s own doctrine on war, rejecting it as a means of legitimate defense.” She quotes the encyclical: “It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war‘. Never again war!”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Just war:

An oxymoron that, despite its paradoxical nature, may have made sense at a time of history when the idea of defense was really about defense rather than serving as a euphemism for conquest and consolidation of power by imperial-minded nation-states.

Contextual Note

In Pope Francis’ mind, military might and acts of war are connected to an economy that relies on neoliberal theories he qualifies as “magic.” These theories, such as trickle-down economics, foster growing inequality. He sees them as the source of ever-increasing injustice. 

Francis is certainly not the first commentator to highlight the cancerous relationship between the economy and the belief in justified war. In January 1961, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower — a former general — famously put the subject on the map by giving the system a name: the military-industrial complex. The fact that no US president since Eisenhower has dared even to evoke the idea in public, let alone critique it the way Ike did in his famous farewell speech, tells us a lot about the scale of the problem today. It has only grown monstrously more bloated over the years. And more invisible to the media.

In the six decades since Eisenhower’s speech, The New York Times has notoriously spent a fair amount of time celebrating the prowess of the military-industrial machine, which has assumed the role of locomotive of the modern technological economy. It should surprise no one that Times journalist Jason Horowitz, on Francis’ encyclical, noticed neither the pope’s condemnation of the “dogmas” of the economy or his radical and emphatic position on the idea of a just war. Instead, Horowitz offers this overview of the content: “Pope Francis criticized the failures of global cooperation in response to the coronavirus pandemic in a document released on Sunday that underscores the priorities of his pontificate.”

On the question of a just war, which the Times prefers to ignore, three distinct positions have now emerged. The first is the Augustinian notion that in rare circumstances war can be justified. The second is Francis’ position that, given the destructive force of war in our time, no war can be just. The third version of a “just war” is the New York Times’ position, evidenced in its reporting and editorializing in recent decades with regard to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Venezuela. It could be paraphrased as: All we want in our foreign policy is war, just war and little else.

The Times appears embarrassed by the themes that stood out for journalists such as Winfield and Poggioli. Later in his article, Horowitz summarizes the themes he deems prominent and  dismissively writes: “The document calls for closeness to the marginalized, support for migrants, resistance of nationalist and tribal populism, and the abolition of the death penalty, but in those respects it broke little new ground.” Horowitz selected the themes the Times is authorized to talk about.

In its article on “Fratelli Tutti,” The Washington Post loses no time using Francis’ words and thoughts to cast on US President Donald Trump: “For Americans, certain passages will likely read as a warning against Trump-style politics.” Not once does it mention Francis’ critique of the neoliberal economy or his condemnation of war. Instead, it compares the pope’s elucubrations on the world today with those of an opinionated journalist working at The Post and trying to promote a book for extra cash. “Here Francis is like an op-ed writer who, after seven years of writing, has decided to repackage his work and present his thought in a comprehensive and systematic way,” The Post quotes Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest.

These two examples confirm that the beacons of US liberalism, both considered “newspapers of reference,” simply refuse to hear from those intellectuals — including a pope — who needlessly pass their time critiquing the logic of an economic system that has clearly failed and a global military order that has spread untold misery across entire regions of the world.

Historical Note

Pope Francis’ ideas about just wars mark a true historical turning point, as Sylvia Poggioli insists. It has never been easy for a religion whose founder insisted on turning the other cheek to justify war. In the early centuries, Christians celebrated the martyrdom that often resulted precisely from turning the other cheek. 

When Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire after Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 CE, the question of the legitimizing war came to the fore as a moral problem. Writing nearly a century after Constantine’s rule, St. Augustine his just war theory, which founded the traditional doctrine of the Church.  

Rather than contradicting the just war theory initiated by Augustine and refined in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, Francis appeals to Augustinian reasoning and the idea of to propose a novel interpretation of the theory. He maintains that a rational justification of war conducted with modern means has become quite simply unthinkable. The massive destructive power of modern weapons has put humanity beyond the threshold of justifying war by a nation-state.

Francis may have noticed the bitter irony when, in 2003, US President George W. Bush used the pretext of seizing weapons of mass destruction (that didn’t exist) to inflict massive and ongoing destruction in Iraq and the entire region. What absurd action could better illustrate Augustine’s principle of proportionality?

Here is how Francis frames it: “We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’�ĝ

In other words, Francis has consciously overturned centuries of traditional political reasoning shared by nations in the Christian West and the Catholic Church. It often boiled down to the simplistic idea that because we are Christian, what we do is just. The rather subtle moral idea of a just war as formulated by Augustine and Aquinas was routinely used to paper over the most excessive forms of military aggression conducted by Christian nations, later followed — if not aggravated — by the secular versions of most of those same nations.

That is the pope’s message. The message that The New York Times and The Washington Post are delivering goes in a different direction. Here is what they have to say to the great Catholic theologians of the past: Thanks in advance for the justification you provided. We still need it because the power structure we serve happens to be addicted to war and to nothing else… just war.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Interfaith dialogue is a necessity in our age. In a world suffering from armed conflicts, diplomatic standoffs and trade wars, cooperative and constructive interaction between people of different religious traditions is fundamental to solidifying peace and stability, and stemming racism, xenophobia, radicalization, violent extremism and terrorism.

Interreligious dialogue is about encounters — it drives respect, mutual understanding and appreciation for common values. Interfaith dialogue helps debunk the myths and eradicate the stereotypes about religion that politicians abuse to further their (often populist) agendas.

The 1893 Parliament of World Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, is often to as the birth of the modern interfaith movement, even though interfaith dialogue has ancient roots. There have been notable examples of collaboration between the devotees of different religions in the far past. In the 16^th century, the emperor Akbar the Great encouraged tolerance in Mughal India where people of various faith backgrounds, including Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity, lived.

It’s also in the Bible that Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and ordered a temple to be built in Jerusalem upon a decree from God in the first year of his reign. It is for this reason that Cyrus is talked of favorably in the Bible and loved by the Jews.

While such plagues as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism continue to spread intolerance and mar relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians, faith leaders have a crucial responsibility to preach engagement, interaction and peaceful dialogue among their followers to prevent these social gaps from widening further.

Leonard Swidler is professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue at Temple University, Philadelphia. He is the co-founder and director of Global Dialogue Institute and is a major figure in the scholarly study of interfaith dialogue. In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Swidler about interreligious dialogue and the major obstacles blocking successful cooperation between the leaders and adherents of the world’s many faiths.

The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kourosh Ziabari: What are the prerequisites of successful interfaith dialogue? What should be done before religious leaders sit together to discuss their differences and shared values?

Leonard Swidler: The essence of interreligious dialogue is to learn from the dialogue partner so we can grow — and a growth of knowledge, no matter how slight, is a growth in me, and hence a change in me. My dialogue partner is not me, and so necessarily sees reality from his or her family, gender, wealth and religious perspective, which will be the same or similar to mine, and necessarily different from mine. That combination of the livening person is what I want to learn about in dialogue so I can live more fully on the basis of the always expanding, deepening understanding of reality. In brief, as in a mantra I composed, “Nobody knows everything about anything — therefore, dialogue!”

Ziabari: Deadlock in interfaith dialogue emerges when there’s a feeling that religions reject pluralism and only approve of their own teachings and principles. Do Islam, Christianity and Judaism clash because they are not ready and willing to listen to each other?

Swidler: In fact, all three of the monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — affirm the possibility of living a good, “salutary” life outside their own tradition. The Jewish tradition, at least from the Middle Ages, has maintained that gentiles — that is,��non-Jews — could live a righteous life simply by living according to the seven : not to worship idols; not to curse God; to establish courts of justice; not to commit murder; not to commit adultery or sexual immorality; not to steal; not to eat flesh torn from a living animal.

Although the phrase “Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus” — outside the church there is no salvation — was first formulated by St. Cyprian in the 3rd century and repeated several times throughout the Middle Ages, particularly at the 1420 Ecumenical Council of Florence, at the [1962-65] the Catholic Church declared that every person must be free to choose and follow her or his religion, or none at all, and that the state should protect this right.

In Islam, from the beginning — that is, in the Quran — it states that “there shall be no compulsion in religion.” As my friend and colleague Professor Khalid Duran noted in his section of the The Power of Dialogue: Jewish – Christian – Muslim Agreement and Collaboration, in the Meccan revelations, the principles announced tended to be general, and hence often meant to be a follower of islam. The lower case “i” means to be “devoted” to God and follow the fundamental moral principles, as distinct from upper case “I” Islam, which indicates being a member of the “institution” — the umma, which means a worldwide Muslim community, rather like what “church” means in Christianity.

The mass media need to do everything they can to promote two absolutely essential practices in this new era of globalization on all levels: deep dialogue and critical thinking. They must promote not the superficial exchange of superficial information, but self-transformative deep dialogue and critical thinking.

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Ziabari: Do you think that religious extremists who push to take the full credit as the representatives of divine faiths are able to block a meaningful and profound dialogue between religions and stifle interreligious understanding?

Swidler: No, the extremists will not stop serious dialogue. Rather, they in the end drive the good-willed majority of persons to rouse from their sleep and actively seek out their “other” neighbors around the world.

Ziabari: How do you think the 9/11 attacks undermined the efforts made by academics and religious leaders to bring Muslims, Christians, Jews and followers of other faiths closer to each other? Is it possible to undo the detrimental impacts of that tragedy on interreligious dialogue?

Swidler: Actually, 9/11 has launched a worldwide entrance of multiple forces of Islam into the dialogue. Back in 1978, my friend Eugene Fisher and I were asked by Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of President John Kennedy and the founder of the Peace Corps, to bring together 10 each Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars from around the world to enter into serious dialogue.

This was a serious breakthrough. We met first every half a year, and then annually, with work in between, until 2008 — a full 30 years. Around the third year, the 10 Muslims said to themselves that they should look for fellow Muslims who had an openness to dialogue: They looked, and looked, and looked, but could find none. Then, about three years after September 11, some 130-plus Muslim scholars from around the world wrote a , “A Common Word Between Us and You,” calling for dialogue. Since then an avalanche of Muslims at all levels around the world have joined the dialogue with increasing energy.

Ziabari: You are a professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue. What does Catholicism say about dialogue with other religions and faiths?

Swidler: The official Catholic position on interreligious is expressed in several Vatican II documents committing not only the clergy but “all the faithful” to engage in dialogue with other Christians, other religions, even non-believers, and the “modern world.” This was a total reversal of the previous almost two millennia of “We’re right, and you’re wrong” — a 180˚ turn. That can be seen not only in Rome and the Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, but all across the Catholic massive educational and health systems, and all Catholic systems and laity.

Ziabari: How does the mass media contribute to the facilitation or obstruction of interfaith dialogue? How are they performing today?

Swidler: The mass media need to do everything they can to promote two absolutely essential practices in this new era of globalization on all levels: deep dialogue and critical thinking. They must promote not the superficial exchange of superficial information, but self-transformative deep dialogue and critical thinking, which can be summarized in two words: ask questions!

Expanded slightly into the three Ws: What precisely are you talking about? (This is most of all not followed, and leads to intellectual, and worse, disaster.) Whence the information? (First-hand? Biased source?). Whither does the claim lead? If when the claim is traced further down the line leads to disaster, to a reduction ad absurdum, then one must trace it back, even to the point of origin if need be, to where the blunder occurred, and correct it.

Ziabari: Muslims and Christians together make up about half of the world’s population. What makes understanding and dialogue between them so complicated and difficult? Why can’t their leaders reach a comprehensive and viable agreement on how to solve their differences?

Swidler: Actually, in very many ways, dialogue is not difficult. However, our histories of interaction, and the relatively separate histories of Western civilization and Islamic civilization since the Enlightenment, have caused a huge gap, which needs to be bridged, for we all now live in a global world.

The beginning started very badly. Very shortly after the death of [Prophet] Muhammad in 634, Arab-Muslim armies broke out of Arabia and in a few decades conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain, all the way to northern France, until they were forced back into Spain by Charlemagne. From that bloody beginning there ensued a constant battering by Muslim armies against Christian kingdoms, until Constantinople fell in 1452, and in the middle of the 17^th century Muslim armies were for the second time battering on the walls of Vienna.

However, at the same time, within the Islamic empire from Spain to the Philippines, an incredibly rich civilization reigned and flourished for 1,000 years.

However, in the 12^th century Christendom started to revive from the invasions of the scourge of barbaric Germanic and other tribes. It did so partly by learning from the Muslim civilization in Spain and the Mediterranean, which was interrupted by the violent, but in the end unsuccessful, Crusades of the 11^th-13^th centuries. Christendom then caught up to Islam in its own 14^th-16^th Renaissance, the 16^th-17^th century Scientific Revolution, and roared past it in the 18^th-century Enlightenment, after which it gradually morphed into Western civilization, and thence now to global civilization. For the most part Islam, despite its 1,000-year glorious civilization, did not participate in the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent modern world. This caused and causes deep-seated discontent and only slightly veiled jealousy, having been so great and triumphant for 1,000 years.

The Islamic world must reach out to the West, and not just on the scientific surface, but to its deep intellectual center, to be sure, with the help of the West, with its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage, which must reach out to the Islamic world in an outstretched hand manner, which is fundamentally Christian. And at the center of Christianity there is that Jew: Rabbi Yeshua ha Notzri — Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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To those who celebrate it, Christmas is as important as the history of Christianity itself. The religious and cultural celebration connects millions of people throughout the world who speak a variety of languages and come from different backgrounds but share the same religion and calendar. Christmas, however, has evolved throughout the years to become a worldwide fiesta that is both religious and secular, integrating a range of pre-Christian and pagan traditions into the festivities.

As the annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, Christmas is observed by most on December 25. It has become so popular that many non-Christians around the world mark it by exchanging gifts, putting up decorations and “inviting” Santa Claus to their parties.

There are few celebrations like Christmas in which gift-giving, enforcing familial bonds, generosity, charitable giving and social communion are encouraged. Many Christmas-related rituals in different countries have been inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. One example is the men’s group , shared by the Republic of Moldova and Romania. Each year and prior to the advent of Christmas, groups of young men gather in villages across both countries, go from house to house, perform festive songs, and receive gifts and money from the hosts. The rite of , which belongs to Belarus, is also an example.

Christmas has a strong presence in Western popular culture and literature. Such notable books as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot, A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling are either entirely about Christmas or have stories happening in a festive setting.

In this edition of , 51�Թ� talks to Professor Carole Cusack, an Australian historian of religion, about Christmas, its roots and traditions.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Kourosh Ziabari: Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ Christ, celebrated by millions of people across the world. Where did Christmas originate from? Is there any indication as to the date of the first Christmas celebration and its form and shape?

Carole Cusack: December 25 is the date on which the world celebrates Christmas, the festival in honor of the birth of Jesus Christ, the savior of the Christian faith. Yet it is well-known that Jesus was not born on December 25, and that date, deep midwinter in the Northern Hemisphere, was a time of magic and celebration since at least the Neolithic era. This was because the Winter Solstice, usually falling between December 20 and 24, marked the shortest day of the year, and monuments like Newgrange in Ireland and Maes Howe in the Orkneys demonstrate that people watched carefully for the date, as after it passed the powers of darkness, chill and death were retreating and the power of sun, warmth and life gained momentum.

The tradition of celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25 started in the fourth century. The celebration of the birthday of Mithras, the sun god of the Persians whose mystery religion was popular among soldiers in the Roman army, was also celebrated on December 25. Mithras was often perceived as a rival to Jesus Christ, and Christians took advantage of the popularity of the 25th December date to celebrate the birth of their own influential religious figure on the same day.

Ziabari: Christmas was historically associated with revelry and drunkenness and it’s reported that Puritans banned it in the 17th century until being restored as a legal holiday in 1660. Are these accounts, attributing misbehavior and irresponsible drinking to Christmas, true?

Cusack: The northern European midwinter festivals included Yule, which celebrated the rebirth of the year as the sun returns after the solstice. The evergreen conifers that are still used as Christmas trees were green and palpable signs of life amidst the winter snows. The tradition of the Yule log, which burned on the night of the festival and smoldered for days afterwards, perhaps relates to the tree that upholds the world in Germanic and Scandinavian mythology, Yggdrasil, which is an ash tree. Feasting and drinking raised people’s spirits and assisted them to make it through the remaining two months of winter and look forward to spring.

In the Middle Ages Christians celebrated with special food and drink. The Puritans were against drinking, dancing, sport, theatrical productions, and most forms of human entertainment and enjoyment. They have inheritors today; the Presbyterians of the Scottish island of Lewis do not sing hymns or do anything on the Sabbath. It’s difficult if you are a visitor on the island even to find something to eat on Sunday. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas, either.

Ziabari: There are many non-Christians who cherish Christmas today as well as millions of Christians who celebrate the festival. Does this mean that Christmas is not merely a religious occasion and has crossed the boundaries of ideology and faith?

Cusack: Christmas has become a cultural event, associated with the giving of gifts and lavish meals with friends and family. Many religions have festivals around that time. Chanukah, which means dedication in Hebrew, is an eight-day long “festival of lights,” in which each day is marked by the lighting of a candle in the menorah — multi-branched candlestick. The festival commemorates the victory of Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers over the Seleucids, and the reclamation of the Temple in Jerusalem for the worship of Yahweh. The Jewish calendar date at which it begins is the eve of Kislev 25, which generally falls in December. Special prayers and blessings are recited each day.

Buddhist communities around the world hold Bodhi Day gatherings on December 8. This commemorates the enlightenment of the Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama. Vesak is the festival that celebrates his birth. Buddhists put fairy lights on Bodhi trees or ficus religiosa, and hang ornaments representing the Three Jewels of Buddhism — the Buddha, the Dharma or law, and the Sangha or monastic community. Rice and milk are eaten to recall the meal the Buddha ate after he abandoned strict asceticism.

Ziabari: What are some of the most notable Christmas traditions that continue to be observed today? Why are they important?

Cusack: The popularity of decorating a pine tree as part of Christmas also has its origins in non-Christian traditions from the northern parts of Europe where Yule was celebrated at the mid-winter solstice. The traditional Christmas tree is an evergreen, whose green branches defy the chill winter and point to the ultimate victory of the sun.

The idea of giving gifts may be traced to the Bible, in which the infant Jesus was presented with gold, frankincense and myrrh by the Three Wise Men, named in apocryphal texts as Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior. This received a boost in the Middle Ages, when Boxing Day, December 26, became a holiday when masters gave their apprentices and other employees “boxes,” that is, gifts.

Ziabari: What do you think is the most important message that the celebration of Christmas sends?

Cusack: The message of Christmas now is largely about gathering with friends and family. The consumerist aspects are deeply integrated into the Western celebration, though Asian countries are generally less materialistic.

In South Korea, Christmas is a public holiday even though around 70% of the population is not Christian. There are many Christmas trees with twinkling lights, often with a red cross on the top, and lavish Christmas displays in shop windows are common. For many non-Christians, it is fashionable to attend a Christmas church service, and groups of people walk through neighborhoods singing Christmas carols. Christmas cake, though not European-style fruit cake but either sponge cake with cream or an ice-cream cake, is a popular seasonal indulgence. But Christmas present-buying and giving to everyone at the office or at school is not part of the Korean Christmas.

Ziabari: As you noted, family gatherings are pivotal to Christmas. How do you think Christmas bridges the gaps between the family members and goes to heal family wounds at a time that families have become vulnerable to conflict and tensions of the digital, industrial age?

Cusack: The television comedy series Seinfeld introduced the world to the tradition of Festivus in Season 9, which aired in December 1997. It is traditionally held on December 23 and has the slogan “A Festivus for the rest of us!” Based on the Seinfeld episode, the celebration has an aluminum pole which is undecorated, contrasting with the traditional Christmas tree, and at the dinner there is an “airing of grievances,” in which everyone complains, and also the “feats of strength,” in which the host must be pinned. Festivus has more loosely been adopted by those who are not religious as a festival for anyone who just likes getting together with friends or family at a ritual occasion.

Ziabari: Does the legacy of Christmas as a cultural celebration that connects many people with different backgrounds and belongings need protection? Is Christmas susceptible to oblivion?

Cusack: The only people who advance this type of argument are generally Christians who feel threatened by multi-culturalism. For those who believe multi-ethnic, multi-faith communities are more interesting and more open-minded, these sorts of ideas are not important. Christmas is a celebration in a civic sense as well as a religious sense, and in that civic space a large number of different communities can participate.

Ziabari: What do you think about the reflection of Christmas and customs associated with it in English literature? Why is Christmas so prominent and omnipresent in the work of writers such as Charles Dickens?

Cusack: Prior to the 20th century, the majority of Western people lived in poverty and the sadness of their exclusion from society created great and moving literature. Think of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson, a heartrending tale of a pious, orphaned child who dies in the snow on New Year’s Eve. She has visions of a Christmas tree and feast before a shooting star heralds her death and her grandmother comes to take her to heaven. In the 21st century, there is still terrible poverty, and Christmas represents a time when generous acts are possible as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the four March girls, who are not well off, all their Christmas treats to a poverty-stricken family.

Ziabari: To the people of countries in which Christmas is not celebrated, Santa Claus and Christmas trees are the most significant representations of the festival. Where did they come from?

Cusack: The figure of Santa Claus, the jolly bringer of presents to good children, is derived from St. Nicholas, a fourth-century Christian bishop in the Greek city of Myra, now in modern Turkey. Two famous stories are told of him that associate him with gifts and children. First, he rescued three girls from a life of prostitution by giving their father three bags of gold for their dowries. Second, he brought back to life three young boys who had been murdered and pickled by an evil inn-keeper.

Santa Claus has associations with the North Pole and elves and reindeer are his companions in general Western folklore. In the Netherlands, St. Nicholas, or Sinterklaas, brings children presents on December 5, the day before the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6.

Ziabari: And any final thoughts?

Cusack: Here are a few other celebrations that happen at the same time as Christmas; one ancient, two modern.

Saturnalia was the Roman winter solstice festival, which was characterized by giving gifts, charity to the poor, the decoration of trees and special family dinners. The state canceled executions, war was never declared at this time, and the rich were expected to pay several months’ rent for the poor or perform other acts of generosity. It started outs as a festival in honor of Saturn to celebrate the planting of autumn and winter crops, and in the first century AD the date was fixed at December 25.

Two final modern December holidays are given in conclusion. The first is Zamenhof Day, a festival in honor of Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of the “universal language” Esperanto, celebrated on December 15, Zamenhof’s actual birthday. The second is Kwanzaa, an African-American festival established in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga. It is celebrated from December 26 to January 1, mostly in America, though it has spread to Canada.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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After two decades of consistently rising fortunes, Elon Musk’s star — situated well beyond the planet Mars he currently wants to colonize — appears to be waning.��Reporting on this downturn, The Guardian of Musk’s glory days: “Breaking into a market of gasoline-focused giants to make stylish, emissions-free cars adored by customers was a remarkable feat. Few others had dared, let alone succeeded. Musk’s public presentations inspired an evangelical vibe among cheering audiences.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Evangelical (in US English):

1) (Religious): committed to the principle of never doubting the literal truth of the Christian Bible and the immediate and automatic application of beliefs derived therefrom (real or imaginary) to all current moral and political questions

2) (US media culture): describes the emotions Americans feel and display in the contemplation of power, celebrity and wealth (evangelical fervor, evangelical vibe)

Contextual note

Originally, the adjective “evangelical” referred to the teaching of the Christian gospel by early Christians. It comes from the Ancient Greek (��ܲ��Բ�é�����Dz�, “good news”). The word gospel itself derives from Old English, ��ō�������, which also literally means “good news.”

The word evangelical has appeared recently in the news mainly as a synonym for the Christian right as a segment of the vote — a segment that paradoxically supported Sinner-in-Chief Donald Trump. But The Guardian article uses it in relation to business, not religion. Yet the meaning derives from the highly emotional style of celebration in the American evangelical religious tradition. In contrast with other Christian practices, evangelical preachers — and especially the televangelists and pastors of megachurches — deploy their highly charged, sometimes hypnotic rhetoric to provoke collective emotion in the public, a technique that allows them to succeed in their principal mission, extracting money from the faithful.

Historical note

The Christian evangelical movement in the US traces its origins back to at least the 18th century and the . This marked an important change from the religious culture of the closely knitted local communities built around a single Protestant denomination typical of 17th-century settlements. It was a movement that reflected the mobility of a population spreading across an ever widening land mass, as Christian Europeans pushed against the native populations to occupy the land and consolidate the colonies that would later become states. Itinerant preachers spread their various brands of inspirational religious messages that no longer focused on specific communities, but appealed to the notion of personal salvation. In other words, a religious marketing concept was born and took root across the swaths of land controlled by the European immigrants.

The example of the British preacher George Whitefield illustrates the : “Whitefield toured the colonies up and down the Atlantic coast, preaching his message. In one year, Whitefield covered 5,000 miles in America and preached more than 350 times … His style was charismatic, theatrical and expressive. Whitefield would often shout the word of God and tremble during his sermons.”

He more or less defined the role for future evangelists, though he failed to discover the key marketing principle that 19th and 20th-entury preachers learned to apply and which has been taken further by televangelists and megachurch preachers. In his preaching, Whitefield encouraged people to go back to their community churches. Modern Evangelism seeks to replace local churches and has thus proved to be a rich source of income for charismatic preachers. Rather than sending the faithful back to their churches, they create their own church that the faithful are called upon to finance. None other than the founder of Scientology, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, succinctly the principle: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”

The latest avatar is the prosperity theology. Just last week, prosperity evangelist to his world that God had ordered him to buy a new Falcon 7X private jet to accomplish his mission. This appears to be part of a trend.

But American evangelism isn’t confined to religion. , “The title of ‘Chief Evangelist’ has been around for a few years now in Silicon Valley.” Decades ago, Silicon Valley learned to apply the the wisdom of L. Ron Hubbard to its marketing. Don’t sell hardware. Get people to think of your company as a church that provides a solution to personal salvation. No company has achieved this as successfully as Apple, whose loyal public is inclined to view its products as sacraments.

Elon Musk has followed the game plan to the point of parody, turning baseball caps and flamethrowers into monetizable sacraments, while watching people queue up for communion (at $500 a shot for the flamethrowers).

Is the party over for Musk or Tesla? Perhaps instead of vituperating the media, Brother Elon should simply kneel down and pray.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Today’s 3D Definition: Faith

The Washington Post offers this on a California congressman: “This lawmaker isn’t sure that God exists. Now, he’s finally decided to tell people.”

In the same article we learn that “the number of members who decline to offer a description of their faith identity has bounced between five and 10 since the 1960s, according to .” Apart from the fact that the author of the article doesn’t know whether she has faith in numbers (“five”) or digits (“10”), the meaning of the notion of faith — as it is used here — highlights a serious problem with the definition of that word in US political culture.

Here is its 3D definition:

Faith:

For most of humanity, an intellectual and emotional identification with a particular tradition that refers to or invokes supernatural or mystical forces. In the US, the public act of avowing that one is absolutely and incontrovertibly sure of something that is, by definition, uncertain and unprovable, a requirement that such a person is competent to serve in government.

Contextual note

As a news story, we suppose that if one congressman “isn’t sure that God exists,” we are expected to presume that all or most of the others are “sure.” The Pew Research Center mentions “faith identity,” signifying the traditions that particular office holders follow. But the notion of faith in the Christian tradition was first defined by St Paul in the Christian Bible (): “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

In other words, in the that same Christian tradition — which tends to be the reference in the officially non-denominational government of Washington as defined in the Constitution — faith is a choice that individuals make to “hope” for what they cannot be sure of. Not being sure would thus be the foundation of faith, in the process Søren Kierkegaard described as the “leap of faith.”

In a very literal sense, if one was “sure” of one’s religious convictions, it would no longer be faith. But The Washington Post assumes that a congressman who is not “sure” is an exception. Can it be that Jared Huffman is the only congressman with faith in the traditional Christian sense? But more significantly, can American voters really have confidence in legislators who are sure of everything they believe?

Historical note

The Constitution mentions religion only once, in , Section 3, where it states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” As with many phenomena in the United States, the government may be prevented from doing what citizens decide to do despite the constitutional restriction. Voters tend to test candidates on the basis of their religion, in particular requiring some proof of commitment to a “faith,” if only to be able to conclude their public speeches with, “God bless America.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: /

The post The Daily Devil’s Dictionary: Defining “Faith” in America appeared first on 51�Թ�.

According to a widely disseminated 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, the . Taking the cue, Daniel Dennett, one of the four horsemen of��,��wrote��that for centuries, and if the trend continues, religion will disappear—at least in the West.

Dennett joins many thinkers such as Voltaire, Auguste Comte and Max Weber, who have over the course of centuries enthusiastically sounded the death knell for religion in various ways.��Modernization theory��and its corollary secularization thesis did much to bolster and almost cement the idea that religion and modernity are engaged in a zero sum game. For many observers and analysts, a smoking gun in the case for secularization and the death of religion is the�� and the rise of “nones”��in the West. This incontrovertible piece of evidence, however, does not show that religion is on the wane, but that it is changing forms.

Far from kicking the bucket, religion has been thriving, changing and gaining in influence in various hues of everyday lives across the world. Religion, in other words, is here to stay. This phenomenon is discernible by looking at three interrelated aspects of how religion and religiosity are increasing, adapting and finally impacting societies across the world in a post-secular age. These facets of religion are punctuated by contradictions, upheavals and innovation that��are central to understanding its transformation across the world.

Believing Without Belonging

The perils of identifying religion with a tangible structure are many. Changes in religiosity due to the impact of globalization do not lend themselves hostage to��. Most surveys about religion go by narrow definitions and ask if respondents have been to a place of worship in the last seven days. They do not take into account the factor of “believing without belonging” (the category of “unaffiliated” is usually��). People no longer want to be dictated the terms to their spiritual success. There is seemingly an aversion to organizing lives around central and impenetrable institutions. This aspect of religion where faith exists independent of structures and institutions led the sociologist Grace Davie to write of them as “.”

As the sociologist Nancy Ammerman writes, people are����and do find religion in everyday lives, but move away from the institutions of the church. Thus, many Christians retain their Christian affiliation, but not with other Christians as part of a large and global institution. The “nones” as a group connote that religious activity, especially in America, will increasingly take place outside the ambit of the institutional church and, therefore, the question is about its form rather than survival. Thus, the����are Christians without Christian affiliation. Most of them today are not against religion per se but institutions.

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In Canada, as well,����and belief in angels at��. In the United States, belief in angels is also staggeringly��. In Latin America, popular religion is also making major strides against institutional religion. Its reasons for the decline may be evident in its��of the past, especially in Argentina.

China and Russia

With the advent of the post-Cold War era, countries that sponsored atheism have come to realize that religion still packs a punch. In China and Russia, the uses of religion are not lost upon its political dispensations. Russia has increasingly drawn its support in favor of the Russian Orthodox Church, and China has gradually toned down its anti-religious stance where the fastest growing religion is��. It realizes that religion may provide resources for stemming social unrest and protecting the��.

In Russia,����identified themselves as Orthodox Christians in 2008. In spite of the state-sponsored militant atheism for decades, religion refused to die and, today, in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church continues to exert an��. Article 36 of China’s constitution recognizes five official religions—Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism—but they are regulated and closely monitored. Many still fear the Chinese state apparatus of being seen as overtly religious or having a religious membership, since movements with large following or popularity such as Falun Gong are��.

One among the many lives of religion is its contradictory nature wherein it could be marshaled for ideological reasons as well as recruited as a conduit to the wider world. For both the Russian and Chinese governments, religion offers a toolkit for building a new society or coming to terms with the changes that ripple across the world through globalization.

Africa, meanwhile, is a����as it is expected to be the locus of religious growth and boom over the next few decades for Islam and Christianity. On the other hand, while not growing as fast as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism enjoy commitments higher than in any previous centuries. In fact, out of all the world religions,��.

How Religion Adapts

One obvious reason as to why religion survives is that it is adept at adaptation and is always tweaked for the local environment. It is important to note that religion is a chameleon of sorts with its dynamics, and not an immutable structure that is etched in stone forever.

According to a widely disseminated 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, the US is drifting away from religion.

However, contrary to this, world religions seek to see/depict themselves as homogeneous entities that embrace��. But this aspect of world religions has more to do with how they wish to see themselves. Their legitimacy is premised upon permanence and past prestige. Even if these religions lay claim to being universal and espouse orthodoxy as well as orthopraxy, they are locally rooted and indulge in��. Additionally, they continually interact with other religious communities (sects, denominations and religions) influencing as well as being��influenced,��. Thus, the local lives of the world religions matter as much as the global.

New religious movements, too, do not seek a modern birth or depict themselves as products or globalization, but see themselves as��heirs or successors from bygone eras.

Any world religion, for that matter, is not monolithic, but a tissue of representations that results in confrontations and contestations across the world with other faiths as well as within itself. The result is an unending contestation in making and unmaking of practices and identities. As a consequence, world religions of today��may vanish—as have—centuries from now, and relatively insignificant and unimportant movements of today can gather steam and acquire world religiosity in the future.

With the onset of global forces and communication technologies alongside population mobility, boundaries are increasingly traversed, bringing in a diverse range of perspectives leading to a stressful situation for older religious institutions. In such a scenario, some may adapt and others may render themselves maladaptive.

Loss of Trust

A discernible macro trend across the world is the loss of trust in religious institutions and leaders. They are increasingly seen as irrelevant to the personal lives by many. A����in the US on the honesty and ethics of clergy profession had dropped to 47%, falling below 50% for the first time since 1977 when the question was first posed.

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Religious actors have also been under stress. But they too have adapted. No longer do religious and spiritual teachers indulge in the pulpit preaching from red brick buildings. Instead, they take to satellite TV and the Internet. Every morning, hundreds of television channels across India beam����to predict the day for its followers. In the Middle East, the televangelist��, preaching tolerance and interfaith understanding, bypasses traditional religious leaders and political structures, reaching and influencing millions through new mediums of connectivity. These mediums also provide a voice to Muslim conservatives such as Zakir Naik, who through his����reaches a mammoth 200 million viewers across South Asia and the Middle East.

Thus, the Facebook era provides a platform for liberal as well as conservative voices leaving any unadjusted religious establishment out in the cold.

Religion as an Anchor

With the loss of faith in secular nationalism and a flurry of forces brought in by globalization, traditional structures and institutions across societies are inverted leaving many individuals rudderless in a sea of confusion and disorientation. In this vortex of forces, individuals and communities are continually assailed by myriad perspectives sowing confusion and angst. The sheer multiplicity of choices and options invoke new anxieties. In such a scenario, religion can market itself as a viable option providing a sense of certainty and stability.

In this hodgepodge of scenarios, religious anchoring in social lives can go either way. It can become a����that seek to rail against the malaise of modernity, Westernization and multicultural tendencies of the contemporary world or can����well with a cosmopolitan ethos.

Many immigrants in foreign societies also use religion not to reject the norms of the host societies, but to����and find a footing. Religion can also provide resources for spiritual values by marketing a common denominator across faiths—a spiritual depth that every religion has. This is evident in the way many people across religions consider themselves as��. With instantaneous communication and connectivity, many have come to realize that there is no one way of being Muslim or Christian. They can espouse identities that need not be along either/or paradigm but can coexist simultaneously.

Religious leadership also can sow ambivalence and easily marshal religion for����as evident in Saudi Arabia. But more importantly, for many, religion and its moral authority can provide resources and act as a vector of change against anti-authoritarianism as seen in. Its presence is discernible in the current global surge against anti-authoritarianism too.

The Post-Secular Age

Europe’s experience with religion has been far different from that of other regions. The church got implicated in its support for authoritarian governments as well as for ratcheting up a conflict that led to the privatization of religion and an elimination of its claims in the arena of politics. But a closer look shows that this alleged demarcation between religion and politics is not rigid even in the West. It is porous and fluid. Politics in America, as well as France, show that religious discourse married to a����is not absent—as it is purported to be.

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In Muslim-majority countries, on the other hand, especially the Middle East, Islamist movements have been at the forefront in opposing authoritarian regimes by disseminating��. Thus, while the vehicle of opposition to authoritarianism in the West was channeled through a secular toolkit, one forged from religion helped mount a strong opposition to authoritarianism in Muslim-majority countries.

Triggered by a loss of faith in secular nationalism along with betrayed promises, colonialism and an association of “secularism” with��, many in the Arab world have turned to religion as a source of alternative locus of identity. Secularism in this sense is imbued with suspicion and looked at askance. Compounding this, the persistence of religiosity across societies has created issues for the states where a purported liberal political system nevertheless seeks to exclude religion from the political decision-making by dubbing it as����that needs archiving.

Sensing the increasing role religion has been playing in politics as well as the public sphere,����as a term has been suggested to diagnose such a situation. A post-secular society is marked by a recognition that religion has returned, or a realization that it never actually disappeared��but remained merely unnoticed. It recognizes the abiding role religion plays in society and gives credence to the idea that it is a repository of resources for community and ethical building.

More importantly, it seeks to overcome the antimony that is placed on the secular/religion. Religious and non-religious communities and individuals are thus equal in a post-secular society. The post-secular is also marked by a development where political demands are not restricted to the realms of the social and political arena, but increasingly involve cultural aspects as well.

But a rejection of secularism here is not tantamount to a rejection of democracy or religious pluralism or freedom for that matter.��—a hard-won bargain between Islamist and secular parties—is emblematic of post-secular developments where Islam is the state religion but derives its legitimacy from the people and bestows freedom of religion and rights on all without discrimination. The question that animates Muslim societies is not whether democracy is compatible with Islam. That has been answered emphatically and affirmatively. But��what form it would take is a crucial development to look forward to.

Moreover, differing versions of secularism attuned for the local environment can have distinct consequences for societies. In Turkey, with its proximity to the European Union, Western notions of secularism are imposed��.

India, meanwhile, has seen a��. Armed with a growing confidence, the new digital generation desires a bigger role for itself and thus by extension for India in the global arena. In such a scenario, its toolkit comprises entrepreneurship, business acumen and an unqualified embrace of��vikas��(development). Religious pluralism and a climate of coexistence are welcome but not essential and, in fact, non-essential if seen as encumbrances in this��.

The older and pre-enlightenment form of religiosity allowed for a lot of diversity in the Middle East and South Asia. But with the post-enlightenment, religion can easily be linked with nationalism and ethnicity sharpening the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Whether the post-secular moment results in a toxic mixture of religion and exclusionary politics or agreeable compromises with inclusive religiosity, religion will be the central actor.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In 1600, the Roman Church burnt Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance philosopher who proposed that stars were just distant suns and some of their planets could foster life as well. The Inquisitors declared that Bruno held opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and, therefore, deserved death. As late as 2000, Cardinal Angelo Soldano, the first person since 1828 to serve simultaneously as dean of the College of Cardinals and secretary of state, had the cheek to claim that Bruno’s inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”

In 2015, some crazed terrorists have avenged insults to by killing some of ’s finest cartoonists in . La grande nation has a long history of radical philosophy, anti-clericalism and biting satire. represented the best of the tradition and took pot shots at everyone. In 2012, it published a cartoon of Prophet Muhammad naked and crouching. The magazine’s office was firebombed the next day. Undaunted, Charlie Hebdo continued to mock Muhammad. In an interview with Le Monde, Managing Editor , or “Charb,” declared: “What I’m about to say is maybe a little pompous, but I’d rather die standing up than live on my knees.” Tragically, Charb got his wish.

Immediately after the Paris murders, my conversations turned explosive. Some claimed that was a of violence going back as far as Muhammad. An scholar pointed out that Islam destroyed native faiths and had to flee to for refuge when Islam came to his country. Indians referred to the destruction of ancient temples of north India. A historian nearly wept talking about the destruction of in 1198. Ikhtiyar ad-Din Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji, a general, sacked Nalanda, the great Indian university where students came to study from around the world. He slaughtered its scholars. The army used its manuscripts were used to light campfires for six months. Many see the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo as part of a longstanding tradition of violence and intolerance in Islam.

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Others jumped to draw the distinction between religion and fanaticism. They claimed that fanatics who followed , and killed more people than and . Human beings are programmed to kill. If it is not religion, then they will find some other ideology to fight for, die for and kill for. Most Muslims, like most , , or members of any other religion, want to live peacefully, provide for their children and cherish their culture. It is unemployment, alienation and poverty that create conditions for . The most fashionable comment in today’s liberal circles is that religion has nothing to do with violence.

Yet others declared that this was blowback for the sins of the West. If the is going to kill innocent women and children through drone strikes in places like , then Muslim fundamentalists are going to take revenge. For years, the US has backed where and amputations are conducted as “God’s will,” but Uncle Sam’s addiction makes it turn a blind eye to the extremism of its ally. Saudi money has funded madrasas (religious schools) all around the Muslim world. This export of puritanical Wahhabism is tearing apart local social fabrics with deep traditions of eclecticism. As per this line of thought, Islamist terrorists are merely Frankensteins created in capitals like , and Paris.

So, what is really going on? How do we make sense of it all?

Religion: A Big Problem

In my recent on Jesus, I mentioned that religion at its best provides a repository of tradition, a locus for community and a crucible for spirituality. At its worst, it is a map of the world that is outdated. Do I believe that Eve came out of Adam’s rib? Certainly not! For me this is a sexist creation tale that replaced the pagan idea of the mother goddess. Even the act of creation was now a male preserve. I agree with that the doctrine of original sin is obnoxious. The idea that God would punish humanity ruthlessly for Adam’s disobedience is authoritarian mumbo jumbo.

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Similarly, do I think Muhammad is a prophet? Hell no! He was a charismatic fellow who had some interesting things to say. He was able to create a moral, spiritual and political force that spread across much of the world. Conversion to Islam was achieved in no small measure due to the sword. The record of Islam in India is particularly brutal. The natives to the east of the Indus were termed Hindus and were seen as idol worshippers who didn’t believe in monotheism. They worshipped thousands of gods, including those with monkey and elephant heads, which was anathema to the early Muslim invaders. Temples were sacked, universities destroyed and those who didn’t convert to Islam had to pay , a per capita tax on non-Muslims from the 12^th century onward. Under certain rulers, evasion of jizya meant enslavement. The tax continued till the early 18^th century.

Moreover, do I think that came out of Brahma’s mouth? That is gobbledygook written up by Brahmin priests to perpetuate the hegemony of their caste. In India, the caste system was baked into religious doctrine. The Hindu notion of purity and impurity of birth is vile. It led to a perverse class system that denied opportunity to millions. The superstitions peddled by Brahmin priests held back inquiry, promoted conformity and enabled the colonization of a deeply divided society.

The problem with religion arises because people believe in the absolute truth of their views on little or no evidence. Argument is impossible because their beliefs come from God and are beyond reason. This makes them prey to superstition, fanaticism and worse.

But Men and Women Need God…

Atheists like and Dawkins believe that eventually religion will become redundant and fall to the march of reason. The reality is that new faiths such as and keep popping up. In India, holy men appear all the time and people continue to believe in them, even when they are found guilty of theft, rape, pedophilia, extortion and murder. Sadly, human beings are largely conformists. William Golding in Lord of the Flies paints a tale of how schoolboys moored on an island turn to violence and murder. Tribes throughout history have raided each other’s territories, plundered valuables and kidnapped women. Religion is a code of beliefs that appeals to a transcendent authority and makes conformity easier. It also allows human beings to justify their interests more easily. Crusades becomes noble, “Muscular Christianity” wonderful and conversions of savages the work of God.

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Men and women need God or Gods. Human beings are not entirely rational creatures. They turn to narratives, myths and symbols to create meaning in their lives. When I speak about Inquisition, Christians invariably point to Hitler as a secular leader who killed many more than the Catholic Church. My contention is that Hitler was trying to create his own religion that was based on race, but he failed because he was unable to temper his doctrinaire beliefs to account for a world that didn’t fit his crazy theory. People want to believe in God. They want to believe that some father figure is looking out for them. They want to believe that our transient lives have clear and defined meaning. They want to believe in something bigger than themselves. Che Guevara believed deeply in a cause and was willing to die for it. That is why he is a saint-like figure for many.

Successful religions are ones that have been able to mix coercion and cooption. They also meet human needs. Islam succeeded in spreading so rapidly perhaps because it was the Marxism of its time. It offered greater equality than existing religions and a supra-tribal identity, uniting warring tribes in . Of course, the early Muslim conquerors committed excesses, but they provided community and welfare as well. The mosque provided and continues to provide a place for reflection. Zakat is a redistributive tax on those with wealth. Islam succeeded because its early adherents were supremely motivated, skilled with the sword and able to account for fundamental human needs.

It can be argued that early Muslim conquerors were more humane than the Christian conquistadors of . Muslim regimes such as the and Caliphates proved to be more humane than Philip II’s Spain or Calvin’s Geneva. Akbar’s was certainly more tolerant than any contemporary European kingdom, including Elizabeth’s England. Yet God provided the glue for these regimes and even now is a large cloud in people’s lives, if not the entire firmament.

So, What to do With “Allahu Akbar”?

Most Muslims are not terrorists. Yet it is also true that most terrorists tend to be Muslim. A monotheistic faith that rests its authority on a revealed book in the Arabic language lends itself to fanaticism. Like Christianity, Islam has a history of violence. Currently, the Muslim world is seeing the equivalent of the across , and . The is quite literally putting the fear of God into the people of the as it rips apart the paradigm. The murderers in Paris shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) as they killed harmless cartoonists. There is a feeling of victimization in the Muslim world and violence is often the reaction. Instead, an intellectual and spiritual renaissance is the answer. There are no simple answers, but a culture of questioning will go a long way.

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At the same time, the US, and France have acted arrogantly and ruthlessly in the Muslim world. If the Americans had not conducted the 1953 coup in and destroyed the secular opposition to the Shah, there would have been no . The British policy of divide and rule in India led to the creation of . France’s record in is horrendous. In the 1980s, the US ganged up with the Saudis to back the , which later morphed into the and under the tutelage of Pakistan. The illegal and the drone strikes in Afghanistan create resentment. Disaffected minorities living in ghettos of European cities are going to terrorism schools in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They graduate with honors and return to wreak havoc at home. The dead murderers in Paris are a classic example.

Many years ago, I ran away from home. I went to Sarnath, where began his preaching, and then walked around much of India. I still vividly remember how most of the people who hosted and fed me were deeply pious. Some of my closest friends are deeply religious. Some consult horoscopes, others wear rings to control planets, still others offer salah (prayer) five times a day and some even believe that Mary was a virgin mother. Yet they are not people who would pick up the gun to kill those who do not share their beliefs. They have jobs and hope. They are incredibly warm people and care deeply for their children. They even care about friends like me who supposedly live in sin.

People take to a gun in the name of religion only when they are angry, desperate and indoctrinated. They could be young men from a minority as in the . They could be poor young men as in the school attack. They could be the suicide bombers that blew themselves up in .

In many parts of the Muslim world, there are few opportunities. is low, inflation often high and life in sordid urban environments is disorienting. often provide refuge, identity and purpose to listless young men chafing against autocratic regimes. In the words of a colleague, these disenfranchised young men are vulnerable to charismatic “clerics with a cause” who often push them down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.

The more people learn to question, to think and to live full lives with hope, the less dogmatic they are likely to be. They may continue to believe in some mumbo jumbo, but they will certainly not be killing for it. In the days when I was an officer, I once led my men on a dangerous mission. All of them were Christian, and they knelt down to pray before we crossed a river. They believed the cost of not praying was death. I walked on and waited for them on the other side. When I returned alive, I told them that their belief had just been proved wrong. Their riposte was immediate: “Sir, you are a good man. All of us prayed for you.” Yes, believers can pray for heathens and not just kill them.

A close friend of mine did his PhD under Isaiah Berlin and is Catholic. Some years ago, I asked him whether he believed in God, and he responded by saying that he didn’t have time for such nonsense. He is Catholic because of the music, the tradition, the architecture and the sense of service. According to him, God is a useful idea to create a moral and reflective society. If there was no God, society would be far too materialistic and lack basic human values. He pointed out that people tell their children stories whether they are from Aesop’s Fables or the Panchtantra. Religion is just morality tales for grown-ups. The ideas of loving your neighbor, being truthful, caring for the poor, forgiving foes and turning the other cheek are best transmitted through stories. The Bible in Germany — the land of witch burnings and the Thirty Years’ War — is now regarded more as metaphor, less as literal truth. That is the way forward.

*[Updated: November 23, 2021.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Last December, Ryan Crocker, the distinguished American diplomat with exceptional experience and expertise in the Middle East, issued an opinion in . Given what he characterized as the paramount threat that a growing al-Qaeda presence in Syria posed to US interests, Crocker argued that the time had come for Washington to consider a modus vivendi with Bashar al-Assad.

In the aftermath of his comment, several other voices in the  have been supportive of this view.

I disagree. In the first place, his opinion is uninformed by the great sociological changes in the Arab world which continue to reflect a permanent sociopolitical transformation. Over the long-term, this movement is fluid and inexorable.

It is defined by a popular urge toward modernism and by a growing insistence, despite temporary unfavorable reactions like in Egypt, toward a shift in power from the . 

Syria is within that trend toward modernism and certainly its citizens are unafraid to act. It is hard to imagine that they would trade the dead hand of Assad’s autocracy for the joyless vision of al-Qaeda, nor the foreigners on their land who promote it.

Second, there has been too much blood spilled; hundreds of thousands have been killed or wounded by Assad, with millions displaced. There will be no national forgiveness by the majority population for this massacre. 

Any alignment of the US with an extension of the Assad regime would only serve to fortify the ranks of Islamist extremists and their anti-American ambitions.

And finally, policymakers in Washington must understand that the US will not stanch terrorism the way it sought to contain communism, by often accepting the most repugnant company to checkmate Soviet aggrandizement.

Terror is eminently not a nation-sourced antagonism. Rather, it is a reaction to a Western and American narrative that too often over the last hundred years has left too little egress for an Arab narrative — save that of waging an asymmetrical battle against the principal foreign hegemon.

And relying, as it does, on a very restrictive and prescriptive definition of man’s relationship with the mysteries as its “battle cry.” A battle cry — as it came from the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — which defines joy or doubt as apostasies, harkening back to similar dark aberrations in Christianity, then and now.

Over time, that brand of zeal will never survive the current emergent sociologies of modernism and popular enfranchisement in the Arab world. It can, however, get a longer life by policymakers, who nowadays are far removed from the street, and by policies such as that advocated by Ambassador Crocker. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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“Does God exist?” is an age-old question to a very old human obsession over belief in one thing or another, usually a “higher power.” So much so, that words like religion, religiosity, spirituality, meaning-making, and faith are quite often blindly associated with and connected to some idea of God.

In fact, I would suggest that our God-obsessed American imagination has much difficulty in conceptually and analytically separating the words “belief” and “God”; as if God not existing renders the notion of belief bankrupt and analytically void, or as if God really existing means that the concept of belief is always associated with an idea of the divine.

The question of God should not necessitate a concern over belief, and the idea of belief does not mean that one believes God actually exists. As a scholar of religion(s) who uses social scientific theory to make sense of the things people call religion, the very question of “Does God exist?” does little to help us understand and uncover the socio-cultural uses and public utility that this idea of God continues to make possible in the world today. In other words, the fact that the word “God” carries weight in our linguistic lexicon is what seems to matter most. If such is the case, then questions about God’s existence are irrelevant to the power already invested in the word itself by society and history.

“I am a God”

For instance, consider the song “I am a God” from Kanye West’s new album, Yeezus. Already considered nearly blasphemous for naming his album after the figure of Jesus, West goes even further by claiming to be God himself: “I am a god, even though I’m a man of God. My whole life in the hands of God, so y’all better quit playing with God.”

Here, West capitalizes on the weight of God-language in order to situate himself as the Most High of the rap game, letting the listening public know that like God, he too sits on a throne and deserves similar respect.

While this song caused a flurry of outrage in some believers in God, others were interested in knowing what West really believes. He packages his stardom in a God-complex and quickly reminds his listeners that he is a man of God, drawing a metaphysical line in the sand between his material self and a higher power — meaning he falls below God in power and worth.

But for the rap game, West considers himself the Most High. He also raps that his whole life is in the hands of God, but quickly puts himself back on the throne as God when he says: “So ya’ll better quit playing with God” – a word of caution for those that have yet to give West his sociopolitical respect. One would assume that such a distinction signals something about his own religious belief in an actual God.

West's use of God is a lyrical interplay, where the concept of God is simply used as a stand-in for claims about the artist’s own hubris and power. West is not trying to state his belief in God. Rather, he knows that God is an idea that easily translates into something of power, authority, and omniscience. That is not to say that West doesn’t actually believe in God, but such claims to belief cannot be extracted based on his rhetorical use of God.

Thus, the question over God’s existence is a matter of little to no consequence in a song like, “I am a God.” Belief is not as important as what this idea of God can do for West. What matters most is that West is aware that this term carries a social and cultural weight, regardless of whether this “thing” is in fact, real or not. The significance of using God-language will have the intended effect whether God actually exists or not. With West, the question of “Does God exist?” gives way to the question: “What can this idea of God do for him?”

God is my Chauffer

While 2004’s “Jesus Walks” gave West a certain type of respect among left-leaning and progressive Christians — due to his lyrical liberation theology that depicted the figure of Jesus walking with the most oppressed of society — Jay Z, who has been known to refer to himself as Hova (after Jehovah), has long been charged with being not only blasphemous but also a part of the Illuminati: a secret organization thought by some to control world affairs. His new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, is helping to continue such speculation.

For example, some have recently suggested that Jay Z's song, “Heaven,” proves his membership in the secret society and aligns him with the highly controversial Five Percent Nation — an offshoot of the Nation of Islam started by Clarence 13X in Harlem in 1964, and famous for proffering the idea of the black man as God. Do these supposed connections matter, and can they tell us anything about God or belief?

In “Heaven,” Jay Z begins his lyrical dive into theology by making a move similar to West – claiming to be God in the flesh: “Arm, leg, leg, arm, head – This is God body.”

A clear reference to the Five Percent Nation, Jay Z sidesteps Christian notions of God for something a bit more polemical and obvious: that God is nothing more than flesh and bones. God is real. God is not real. Asking about belief or existence is beside the point. God is human. Human is God.

Taking on claims regarding his Illuminati connections, in “Heaven,” Jay Z also calls out his hecklers as nothing more than: “Conspiracy theorist[s] screaming Illuminati [who] can’t believe this much skill in the human body.”

For Hova, because his skills as a rapper and businessman exceed the expectations of most, charges of being a Satanist (à la Illuminati membership) simply suggest that people are jealous of his artistic and entrepreneurial abilities. That is to say, anyone conflating or confusing belief and God have trouble making sense of a human so capable and effective at their chosen endeavors.

Moving beyond his role as rapper, Jay Z waxes philosophical and reminds his listeners that religion is something that should always be questioned, not embraced: “Question religion, question it all. Question existence, until them questions are solved.”

These bars are followed by his REM-inspired proclamation that he is “losing [his] religion.” Jay Z then reminds the listener that “God is my chauffer,” but whether he is talking about another Five Percenter “god body” at the wheel, or a metaphysical reality, is unclear. The story does not end there for Hova – God might be driving him around in his Maybach, but he professes in the next line that he is “God in the flesh” for those that might have forgotten, and quickly follows with the statement that he is a “prophet.”

God, Race, and Culture

Here, the ideas of god, belief, and existence give way to a more ardently humanist stance where no longer is God a metaphor for hip hop prowess (as in West's example), but the idea of God is subsumed underneath a portrait of the human being as immensely capable. Social and personal interests are presented in a manner that renders God as an entity, a thing, an idea as disconnected altogether from religious belief itself. More plainly stated, the use of God here is solely a rhetorical strategy. The only belief present is one in the self.

The theological (in)coherence and dizziness concerning the use of God in popular culture — here, rap music in particular — is quite reflective of the ordinary ways in which most people make use of God-language. While debates regarding the existence of God continue to flourish, one has to wonder whether attention to such concerns are productive, or even matter, for solving real social problems like poverty, identity-based forms of oppression, or even simply human physical suffering.

The idea of God not existing does not strip away the immense amount of power and traction that the word and idea will continue to hold and harness for centuries to come. God really existing does not change the many ways in which the word “God” will be used to create a wide variety of effects for a host of social interests.

It is for this reason that I often chuckle when asked in interviews what rappers mean and believe when they use words like “God.” My answer that (a) “belief” is of no consequence in answering the question, and that (b) uses of such language say nothing about belief itself, usually draw unnerving silence.

Many “believers” grow uneasy at the idea that God might not exist. Many “nonbelievers” and “believers” alike further dislike the idea that although the question of God’s existence might matter to them on a personal level, such a “belief” has little bearing on what others believe or on the social circumstances “believers” or “nonbelievers” meet up against each day – even if some of the beliefs held might suggest otherwise.

Rather than focusing on what a group might believe based on what they say — which seems to be grounded in an erroneous perspective that we are always conscious of why we do what we do — perhaps an exploration of what uses of such language accomplish might serve our curiosities in more productive ways.

Asking if God exists is like asking if race exists. Whether you believe your race is real (to the extent that it matters) or not (just a socially constructed label) doesn't really matter, nor does it change the ways in which the idea of God is (and has been) used to accomplish a wide variety of social and cultural interests.

So, to ask if God exists in hip hop, is to ask if race exists in hip hop. God is to the world what race is to culture and society. The use of God in society, as can be seen here in the examples of Kanye West and Jay Z, say less about belief and more about what we can do with the weight and authority that certain words carry. For hip hop to be so grounded and centered on words, lyrics, and wordplay, then, the question of “Does God exist in hip hop?” answers itself.  

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My friend network wrote a comment about my last  on Egypt quoting de Tocqueville, stating that political Islam was incompatible with democracy. A more accurate description might be that fundamentalist religion of any type is antithetical to democracy.

This is because democracy does not really exist in a completely homogeneous population. That is, if everybody was exactly the same and acted in exactly the same manner, there would be no need for compromise and recognition of differences that is at the very foundation of democracy. The most severe of the fundamentalist religions seek to force all people to fit a very narrow mold – to make everybody the same. Thus, democracy is not part of their vision.

Islam is a big tent. There are segments of Islam that seek to force everybody into a particular narrow mold. But there are many segments of the religion that recognizes differences. This is not unique to Islam. Similar fundamentalist segments can be seen in many religions. Fundamentalist movements inside Hinduism in India and some Christian sects in the US are examples of this widespread phenomenon.

What makes the situation in Egypt (and some other Arab Spring countries) somewhat unique, is that the existing power structure – the Mubarak regime – was brought down by a somewhat leaderless process. The fact that it was “leaderless” was critical to its success. The previous power structures could control dissent that came from hierarchically structured groups by controlling (arresting, etc) the leaders. Internet enabled amorphous groups that were not susceptible to this kind of control.

Unfortunately, the success of this process created a power/organization vacuum that fundamentalist groups tried to take advantage of.

The fundamentalists are generally a minority within their religions. Because Islam is considered an anti-colonial faith, its fundamentalist segments have a little more power. This is true in general across the Middle East and North Africa, and especially relevant to the Muslim Brotherhood. But still, they are a minority. To achieve the level of control they desire, they need some extra leverage.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood could use its organizational advantage to capture the first elections after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. That worked for a little while, but only a little while. It allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to win the election, but because they tried to consolidate their power and lock out the other portions of Egyptian society that represent the true majority, the “amorphous groups” and the military took power and instituted a transitional government. The amorphous groups also learned from this experience and became slightly more organized (the Tamarrod movement and June 30 Front are examples of this), but the spokespeople for these movements continued to resist being called leaders and positioned their organizations as temporary.

To fight back, the fundamentalists had to gain support from the majority. Their strategy was to provoke the transitional government into what they could characterize as massacres. In effect, creating a way to sucker (as in trick) the transitional government into actions that would give them support of the majority they otherwise lacked.

Unfortunately, the transitional government fell for the trap twice, both involving trying to control/disband demonstrations and camps. It is easy to understand how military leaders could think: “We are going to have to use force to fight these people. Let’s just get it over with.”

In each of these cases, the transitional government has been militarily successful, but at what cost? The risk is that they win the battle but lose the war.

Although the transitional government has apparently suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood’s ability to field significant demonstrations, they have eroded support from outside of Egypt and key figures have resigned from the government. Some have suggested that, as a result of recent massacres, there is such bad blood that it will be impossible to bring some of the factions together. 

This is not true. The most intense fundamentalists will never compromise no matter what. The rest are jockeying for power. For example, the Salafist al-Nour Party has recently to join Egypt’s constitutional committee. As long as the transitional government can avoid getting suckered again, the fringe severe fundamentalists will be pushed aside. Then the situation will be ripe for a political synthesis — a path that honors traditional Islamic sensibilities, while allowing for the development of an economically vibrant and pluralist country.

The Way Forward

In the piece cited at the beginning of this article, similarities between the US revolution and Egypt were pointed out. In the US revolution, there were two groups – the monarchists and the new world order supporters — neither of whom were powerful enough by themselves.

That revolution was successful because George Washington could gain the trust of both groups. He was able to do this because he was seen by the monarchists as one of them, while telling the new world order supporters that he understood their aspirations and would help them.

One path for Egypt is to find a similar leader. That is, one who is seen as a devout Muslim, while at the same time being able to understand the aspirations of Egyptian youth.

Because the youth that triggered the Arab Spring have this leaderless non-structure, there is no manifesto that explains their position. In fact, there may be no “position” as we have understood it in the past. There have been a range of differing expressed by some spokespeople of the “temporary” groups mentioned above.

Again, in seeking to understand the situation in Egypt, it may be helpful to reach back into US history. For the first time, in 1955, half the homes in America had television. Some posit that the vision of the world that TV made possible generated the cultural evolution in the US which brought the Civil Rights Movement, rock music, the end of the Vietnam War, and a transformation of government. This vision was embraced by a demographic bubble – the Baby Boom Generation – of young people who embraced the new technology and the world vision it brought.

Today, the advent of the Internet, combined with a demographic youth bubble in Arab countries, has created a similar situation. The last verse of a song written by a young American coming out of that US cultural evolution best evokes the feeling in the youth who triggered the Arab Spring:

Maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad

If my life didn’t look like just more of the same.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel so mad,

If I had a little say in my piece of the game.

That emotion is strong, enduring and, as Egypt struggles to find its own unique synthesis, will continue to play a key role.

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The logic is simple enough, right? In black, we have the Shi’a with the king being Iran. In the white, we have the Sunnis with the king being Saudi Arabia. The rest of the pieces on this Middle East chessboard include everyone else between the Euphrates and the Nile, fighting it out to keep their respective king alive. Not quite!

The Iranian Revolution in 1979, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, was a turning point in modern Sunni-Shi’a relations in the region. Many Sunni Muslims actually supported and came out on the streets in favor of what was taking place in Tehran at first, but over the years this has gradually turned into apathy and to its current state of resentment. Arab media led by the likes of Al Jazeera, rightly or wrongly, drilled it into the minds of the Arab masses that there was a "Shi’a" Safavid regime intent upon taking over the Arab lands. The only staunchly "Sunni" country opposed to Iran was Saudi Arabia, and thus, the two kings of the modern battle rose to their thrones.

The Origins of the Sunni-Shi’a Divide

For years, we have been fed the same narrative that at the heart of the battle for the Middle East are two warring camps, hell bent on winning this game of chess that began over 1,400 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula after the demise of Prophet Mohammed. Although this is not completely wrong, it is most certainly a simplified and extremely selective analysis of history.

The succession to Mohammed pitted the Shi’as on one side, who wanted his cousin and son in law, Ali bin Abi Talib, to take over against the Sunnis who, on the other side, wanted his companion, Abu Bakr, to rule.

Since its inception, this schism has without doubt had painful and fatal consequences, including the little known mass conversions of the once Fatimid-ruled Shi’a Egypt by the Sunni Ayubid dynasty led by Salah al-Din (Saladin), beginning around the year 1171, as well as the once Sunni Iran by the Safavid dynasty beginning around the year 1500.

This battle has transcended time and manifests itself today, most notably in the battles for Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. What do these Middle Eastern countries have in common?

A sizable, yet not overwhelming number of inhabitants hailing from both sides of the board. But is it really as simple as that, or are we being naive to think that simply having both Shi’a and Sunni in close proximity will inevitably result in a showdown?

For many years, the hostility between Shi’as and Sunnis has taken on an increasingly political core; although it inevitably gets cloaked in a guise of being about religious differences. This, of course, is advantageous to political elites on both sides, who would otherwise struggle to mobilize the masses had they tried to sell the battle based purely on the economic gain and longevity of the upper echelons of society.

Bahrain

This was very evident in the tiny gulf island of Bahrain, which saw mass protests flare up in 2011. The events there were an entirely peaceful wave of protests and civil disobedience against the Sunni monarchy of King Hamed Al-Khalifa. Protestors demanded equal representation, and human rights and political freedom for the country as a whole and, in particular, for the majority Shi’a population. It is imperative to note that while most protestors came from a largely Shi’a background, countless Sunnis who acknowledged the continuous tyranny bestowed upon their own country also came out in unison to call for an end to the suppression.

Over time, the Bahraini police force, largely made up of men imported from the Indian sub-continent, were summoned to brutally crack down on demonstrations that began to threaten the very survival of the monarchy. At one point, reported that more than 100,000 protestors had amassed around the Pearl Roundabout monument in Manama, calling for an end to the rule of the Al-Khalifa monarchy — in fact, by now they were calling for the king’s head.

It is at this point that the sectarian propaganda power play really came to the fore. Bahraini media began its blatant attempts to discredit the protestors as Iranian lackeys — a common pattern by Arab regimes since its inception by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq — and even began accusing Shi’a Muslim hospital staff of selectively treating the wounded based on sect. This has since been completely refuted by numerous sources, including Sunni Muslims at hospitals who worked tirelessly alongside their Sh’ia Muslim compatriots. Nevertheless, the Al-Khalifa regime had played their sectarian trump card, but with debatable success.

All this while the supposed bastions of democracy in the West were doing little, if anything at all, to champion the democratic goals and aspirations of the Bahraini people. One certainly has to consider the important trade and military ties, such as the stationing of the US Navy’s 5^th fleet on Bahrain's shores.

Syria

Syria is yet another case in point. The Syrian Army, whilst dominated by members of Bashar Al-Assad's Alawite sect in and amongst the top ranks, is actually compromised of a Sunni majority in the rank and file with estimates of around . Thus, in the Syrian armed conflict, we either have a people who do not actually realize that they are Sunni Muslim and going out to fight other Sunni Muslims, or this could be explained more reasonably as a political battle and, perhaps increasingly in Syria’s case, one between secular and religious fundamentalist ideologies.

If the sectarian narrative was correct, then half of the Syrian army would have at least defected by now and the regime would not last a week under such circumstances. This did not happen. Another factor with regards to the battle currently taking place in Syria is that the majority of the religiously driven rebels, such as many members of Jabhat Al-Nusra, are not actually Syrian. They originate from countries afar as Chechnya and Afghanistan and have come to Syria to fight what they see as the heretical Alawite regime. Thus, if we were to take the foreign imports out of the equation, including the Shi’a militias such as Hezbollah flooding into Syria from Iraq and Lebanon to support the secular Assad regime and protect the various religious Shi’a shrines, then the battle would take a far less sectarian appearance.

Iraq

One can use the modern Iraqi state as another example of why the Sunni vs Shi’a narrative does not necessarily hold true. Sunnis and Shi’as have historically — and even to this day, although to a lesser extent — lived side by side, intermarried, formed businesses together and generally led a unified existence. It was normal that Sunnis and Christians, for that matter, would partake in Shi’a Muslim rituals of mourning during the Islamic month of Muharram. In fact, if you were to ask many Baghdad residents of a bygone era, they would tell you that they honestly did not know what sect their immediate neighbors adhered to, and neither did they care for that matter. To this day, Iraqis consider inquiring or asking questions to this regard as aeib (rude). It simply did not matter, and why would it?

Tales of a time where you could enjoy the famed Iraqi Mazgoof style fish on the famous Abu Nuwas street with a Sunni, Shi’a or Christian friend and still be none the wiser, still evokes a sense of pride amongst Iraqis. There is a popular saying that Iraq has only seen two just rulers in its history: Imam Ali bin Abi Talib and Abd Al-Karim Qassim. The former was introduced above and the latter was a Sunni Muslim by definition, yet raised by a Shi’a Muslim mother from a Feyli Kurdish background. Both were widely seen to have worked solely for the people with little or no interest in any self-benefit.

Compare that to the Iraqis’ views of their government today: stories of immorality and corruption that would make even the devil wince and the dots begin to add up. Many Sunni Muslims accuse Iraq’s government of being a totally sectarian regime with only Shi’a interests at heart. Now, anyone with any idea of the make-up of the Iraqi government or political system would know this to be a half truth at best, for many positions are occupied by Sunni ministers.

This fact in connection with certain developments in the recent in the Sunni Anbar province against perceived persecution, shows another flaw in the simplistic Sunni vs Shi’a narration. For one, there were many Shi’a Muslim tribes showing solidarity. Although sections of the protestors did not greet them with a warm embrace, many did. Secondly, whilst there were documented cases of sectarian chanting and public speaking at the protests, as well as on some of the countless satellite channels now swamping Iraq, there was largely an attempt by the organizers to portray an inclusive heart at the core of the protests.

Finally, when Sunni Muslim government officials, such as Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, tried to attend and take part in the protests (ironically aimed at the very government he is part of), the protestors gave him the now legendary Iraqi shoe and slipper treatment and chased him out. The fact that in the middle of the now supposedly sectarianized Iraqi society we had Sunni protestors physically attacking a Sunni government official, once again shows the flaws of the accepted Sunni vs Shi’a narrative.

Many are quick to point out that during Saddam Hussein’s rule, there was seldom any intra-Islamic or religious friction in Iraq. In reality, this is just an illusion at best. While Saddam did clamp down on any fighting between the many religious sects and factions that make up Iraqi society, he engaged in it himself and only managed to keep a lid on the pressure cooker of tensions and animosity that he created — until it exploded and wreaked its havoc across Mesopotamia following the American-led invasion in 2003.

*[Note: Read the on September 6.]

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Syria has become a proxy war to shift the balance of power between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East. The struggle over the future of the country was not always a sectarian one; the revolution started as a united battle among the people against a dictatorial regime. In the beginning, Syrian rebels made immense gains and President Bashar al-Assad’s fall was “inevitable.” However, as the conflict became increasingly sectarian, progress deteriorated for the Syrian opposition. Some predict that Assad could at least hang onto power for another year.

For the Sunnis, who make up the majority of the Syrian population, the bloodshed ends with the demise of Assad. For Alawites, who follow an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, the fate of their community is intertwined with that of Assad’s. A post-Assad Syria could reflect grim consequences for the Alawites. Unless the Syrian opposition guarantees the protection of the Alawites in a post-Assad Syria, the Alawites see themselves as having no choice but to continue to fight for the Assad regime, and by extension their survival. 

The Bahrainization of Syria

One scenario that the Alawite community could see become a reality after the fall of the Assad regime is the Bahrainization of Syria, where the likely new Sunni-dominated government would try to marginalize the Alawites. A post-Assad Syria could resemble Bahrain, where the ruling Sunni al-Khalifa family actively seeks to weaken the influence and power of the Shi’ite-majority population through structural discrimination.

According to a new study by the , the Bahraini government suppresses its Shi’ite civilians at the public, economic, and political level. The likelihood of economic advancement and mobility is low for Shi’ites because of discrimination practiced by their predominantly Sunni employers. Shi’ites on average are lower-paid than their Sunni counterparts and tend to have less-skilled occupations. The government tends to exclude Shi’ites from prominent political posts, especially in the security sector. Additionally, the al-Khalifas manipulate the municipal and parliamentary elections in order to assure that Sunni Bahrainis remain in control of the political system. To further hinder Shi’ites from the political sphere, the government launched massive surveillance over Shi’ite communities to monitor underground political activity, persecuting anyone suspected of engaging in politics.

This is also, to some degree, how Syria appeared during the Assad family's rule. The Assad regime, although mostly Alawite, is not an Alawite regime and did not encompass the same sectarian fervor projected by the al-Khalifas. Instead, nepotism runs rampant in the House of Assad, as evident by the . The economic corruption and political suppression impacted Sunnis and Alawites alike. Before Syria became a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, Iran, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, many Alawites were actually a part of the rebellion against Assad. Now, the Alawite community is collectively targeted by the opposition — not for supporting Assad, but for simply being Shi’ites. One popular chant among the more religious and extreme rebels reflects this new sectarianism: “The Alawite to the coffin and the Christian to Beirut.” This sectarian divide is likely to continue after the fall of Assad, if a new Sunni-dominated transitional government potentially mirrors the al-Khalifa family’s marginalization of the Shi’ites.

Many Alawites are holding onto the Assad regime not because they support him, but because they are afraid of the alternative. A “Bahrainization” of Syria that transforms the Alawites into a second-class citizens living on Sunni territory is a frightening, but likely scenario. A post-Assad Syria could lead to severe collective persecution of the Alawite community and a mass exodus from the country.

Exodus of the Alawites

As a minority sect, there are only a few choices for where the Alawites could go. Iran, who has been helping arm Assad’s forces, would be the most welcoming to the Alawites. However, considering that Persians are not Arabs and Arabic is not spoken in Iran, it would be difficult for the Alawites to start a new life somewhere so foreign. Lebanon and Iraq, the only other Shi’ite strongholds, face immense sectarianism. Just as the emigration of Palestinians into Lebanon led to a devastating civil war, the acceptance of the Alawites — who are even more contested than the Palestinians — would only lead to more civil unrest. In Iraq, sectarian tensions are even more violent and regular.

The Alawites could become the new Kurds. Or, considering the strong role the Syrian Kurds play in securing the Assad regime, the Alawites may find a home in Kurdistan, the unofficially recognized Kurdish territory spanning form northern Iraq and Syria to western Iran and south-east Turkey. The Syrian Kurds are likely to retreat into the Kurdish region after the civil war, and it would not be farfetched to presume the Alawites may follow them. The Kurds, diverse in their religious beliefs from Christianity and Zoroastrianism to both Shi’ite and Sunni Islam, boast a strong ethnic pride. Although they may sympathize with the Alawites and grant them a safe haven, they would still remain isolated from Kurdish society.

There is one scenario where the Alawites could have semi-autonomy over their own land, for their own people. As Ghassan Dahhan argues on , the demise of Assad may lead to an Israel-Alawite alliance. The Golan Heights, before being captured by Israel in 1967, belonged to Syria. Today, the Golan Heights hold a large Syrian Druze population. Israeli Chief of Staff Benny Gantz has already suggested the Israel Defense Force is prepared to resettle thousands of Alawite refugees. The move threatens Assad, whose survival largely depends on fear mongering the Alawites into accepting the potential aftermath of regime change, in order to keep them fighting against the rebels. The Sunni Arab world, however, would use the new Alawite Golan Heights as a scapegoat for their hatred toward Israel and could be a new target for extremist Islamist groups. Additionally, the new Sunni government would probably try to recapture the territory, which would only invite new bloodshed between the Alawites and the Sunnis.

Ultimately, there are no good options for the Alawites if they choose to leave Syria after the fall of Assad. Unlike Sunni Syrians who found refuge in neighboring Arab states, the Alawites have little options to find refuge. Wherever they go, an exodus would only widen the Sunni-Shi’ite divide.

Guaranteeing Protection of the Alawites: Part of the Solution

Factoring protection of the Alawites into a political solution will not only ensure that the Alawites are not persecuted and expelled in a post-Assad Syria, but also expedite an end to the civil war. The Alawites have everything to lose with the fall of the House of Assad. Their survival depends on Assad. Many who now fight for Assad were once pro-revolutionaries before Islamic extremists joined the struggle against the regime and pitted Sunnis and Shi’ites against one another.

If the opposition supports a political solution that guarantees the protection of the Alawites and ensure moderates take the lead in a new transitional government, Assad’s support-base would be undoubtedly weakened. Even if he were to reject a political solution, the opposition with the backing of the Alawites could begin to sway the balance of power in Syria and force regime change. It will also appeal to Western states, who are wary that arming the rebels could exasperate the sectarian conflict.

National reconciliation, which the Syrian opposition has recently proposed in its , will help restore the revolution to a battle between a dictatorship and its people, Sunni and Alawite alike, fighting for a freer Syria. A democracy, which the opposition hopes to instill, is just as much about protecting the rights of the minority as it is about representing the majority, after all.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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