A rchive Date
[ 15-10-2001 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/woodcock.html
This war's about religious freedom
Fundamentalism battling faiths of all kinds
By CONNIE WOODCOCK - Toronto Sun
October 15, 2001
The devil has been making a big comeback lately. You know who I mean - Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, or as my confirmation instructor put it: "That guy in the red suit carrying a pitchfork."
Mainstream Christianity, considering itself far too sophisticated for such simplistic nonsense, dumped the devil a long time ago. In the Anglican Church, godparents don't even have to "renounce the devil and all his works," on behalf of the newly baptized any more.
The devil was as dead as last year's Christmas tree, until Sept. 11, but he's back now and, boy, is he popular. Newspaper and magazine cartoonists have been particularly fond of him. My favourite is a cartoon that appeared in The Sunday Sun recently skewering an Islamic terrorist's belief his actions will guarantee him immediate entry into heaven. In the cartoon, he tumbles instead into hell where he is skewered on a pitchfork by a large, grinning devil saying, "Welcome to paradise!"
Another shows three Taliban members dressed as the three monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Behind them looms the dark shadow of Satan with the word "Terrorism" where his grinning mouth ought to be.
Along with the recurring requests for God to bless America, it's another indication that in this war, the R-word is playing a major role. No matter how hard we try to ignore it or pretend it isn't there, religion keeps right on rearing its head.
Almost no one has dealt with it, except for a piece that appeared in the Oct. 7 edition of the New York Times Magazine which bluntly summed it up: "This is a religious war" was its title.
In fact, wrote the Times' Andrew Sullivan, "The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning."
According to Sullivan, most of us are in denial when we try to ignore this conflict's religious roots, even though almost everything Osama bin Laden says is soaked in theology. But it's not a war between Islam and Christianity and Judaism. It's "a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity," Sullivan says.
In fact, bin Laden's intolerance has more in common with Jerry Falwell, of the Christian right, than you might think. It was Falwell, after all, who said after Sept. 11, "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Intolerance and repression - two traits of fundamentalists of both stripes.
Last spring, my husband and I toured the Alhambra, the series of Moorish palaces that rise above the ancient Spanish city of Granada. It is an awesome place - gracious halls, cooling pools and fountains, luxuriant gardens and everywhere the intricate mosaic work that we have come to know as the hallmark of Islamic culture at the time.
But it was also its last gasp. The Alhambra, beautiful as it is, is the high water mark of Islam's power in Europe and, as Sullivan explains, it was all downhill from there. Muslim rule of Spain ended in 1492, and no matter how hard it has tried since, it has never been able to return to those heights. "From the collapse of the Ottoman empire onward, it has been on the losing side of history."
It is not easy being on the losing side all the time, as Sullivan points out, and it's no wonder that people like bin Laden have emerged from it nor that he wants not just to win, but to crush unbelievers.
Religious war continued in Europe for several more centuries and even Nazism and Stalinism, although secular, are part of the continuum. It was Christian fundamentalists who conducted the Spanish Inquisition and as Sullivan explains, many of those who burned people at the stake really believed they were helping to save their immortal souls.
Christian fundamentalism has had its scary side in the modern world too - anti-abortionists attacking or killing doctors, for instance. Sullivan believes Christian fundamentalists are on the losing side in America too and are therefore defensive. Fundamentalists of whatever stripe are naturally insecure when they're on the losing side and are therefore extremely repressive when they do get power.
"From everywhere we see the lessons Europe learned in its bloody history have yet to be absorbed within the Muslim world," Sullivan writes. "There, as in 16th-century Europe, the promise of purity and salvation seems far more enticing than the mundane allure of mere peace.
"That means that we are not at the end of this conflict, but in its very early stages."
And what we are fighting for is not our countries but for the freedom of religion that Western society has come to take for granted.
Expect to hear much, much more about the devil, hell and eternal damnation from now on.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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