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Religion, Violence, and
the Modern World
By Sheikh Hamza Yusuf
Toward the latter days of indiscriminate violence, be like the
first and better of the two sons of Adam who said, "If you raise
your hand to kill me, I will not raise mine to kill you; surely I
fear God, the Lord of the worlds."
Many of us, in the hustle and bustle of modern life, have little
time for reflection; yet as these days are marred by violence of the
worst kind, reflection â€" on the part of those who regard
themselves 'religious' as well those who consider
themselves 'secularists' â€" is more needed than ever. With
continual terror in Iraq and Palestine, and now, most recently, with
the bombings in Turkey, Muslims are confronted with the increasingly
tragic reality of religious violence and the subsequent retaliations
of secular violence.
A strange dual consciousness pervades the Muslim when it comes to
modern violence. When Khalil Sarakiti, the Palestinian intellectual
of the 40's and 50's reminded the Palestinian leadership of the
importance of adherence to the highest principles of engagement in
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he remarked in his journal that
they viewed it as romantic chivalry, incompatible with the realities
of modern warfare. And sadly, this is the reality of modern man:
expediency has won out over principle.
The modern Muslim has learned well the lessons of his secular
counterpart. American military action rarely distinguishes between
combatants and civilians. The Pentagon callously refers to them
as 'secondary effects' or 'collateral damage.' When some Muslims use
tactics of indiscriminate violence toward objects of hate, too often
other Muslims are quick to point out that, 'They kill our innocents
and expect us to sit by and watch.' Defenders of American foreign
policy parry with, 'Collateral damage can never be equated with
terrorism because we don't specifically target civilians and in fact
attempt to avoid civilian casualties.' Apologetics for wanton
killing of women and children on both sides nauseates anyone who
considers the very real impact of innocent blood spilt so
injudiciously.
Like all things in which humans engage, religion has many
paradoxical aspects. On the one hand, it elevates our ideals and
aspirations to the heavens themselves giving us such priceless
principles as, "The entire Torah can be summed up in two statements:
love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself;
everything else is commentary"; "Do unto others as you would have
others do unto you"; and "Taking one life unjustly is as if you have
killed all of humanity." These are taken from the Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim faiths, respectively. Meanwhile, some adherents to each
faith justify with their teachings the most heinous depredations
against their fellow men. Jonathan Swift remarked, "We have just
enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one
another." Perhaps that is true; for many people, religion is no
longer a solution to anything but very much part of the problem.
The great tragedy of modern religion is that it is now seen as a
toxin polluting the waters of possibility. We who claim faith and
commitment have too often made our faiths the objects of hatred.
With our zealousness, we have driven away countless people who see
the worst aspects of humanity embodied in religious peoples. For
some of us, it is easy to write them off as skeptics, mockers, or
secularists who just hate religion, but the truth is that most of
them are not so. They are simply people who know intuitively that
the behavior of those claiming to be religious is both inhumane and
irreligious, and they seek other philosophies to guide them. They
look to Epictetus or the Tao Te Ching or even Deepak Chopra, or they
give up the search for meaning altogether, contenting themselves
with film and music as fulfilling past-times. Organized religion,
with its self-righteous pugnaciousness and its officious meddling in
the affairs of others, has driven many moderns to relegate
it to the dustbin of discarded ideas. The irony, of course, is
that the religious people feel the secularists are the pugnacious
ones forcing secularity down their throats, ignoring their most
sacred beliefs or relegating them to a few minutes on shows such as
Thought for the Day.
The more religion is marginalized, the angrier religious people
get; the angrier they get, the more others want to marginalize
religion, ad nauseam. We have found ourselves in a vicious cyclical
clash between secularists, who, in many ways, abandoned the
Englightenment project of a more humane world long ago, and
religious utopians battling for a piece of turf in the modern world
â€" both sides bitter, both sides with minorities that use
indiscriminate violence to lesser and greater effectiveness, both
sides becoming increasingly intolerant. Tragically, the very reason
so many Europeans felt disillusioned with Christianity was the
centuries of intolerance and pointless religious violence. The
Muslims, on the other hand, were far less prone to internal
religious violence, and the level of tolerance toward other faiths
was unparalleled in the premodern world. Unfortunately, explosions
in Riyadh, Karachi, Turkey, and countless other places show that
violence and intolerance have become the paths of pursuit among religious thrill-seekers
in much of the Muslim world. The unexpected side-effect is that it
is not just non-Muslims that find Islam odious, but many modern
Muslims are increasingly becoming disillusioned with Islam, blaming
the behavior of the practitioners on the religion, seeking
alternatives in other faiths or philosophies. I believe many Muslims
are in deep denial about this, refusing to even consider it, but I
am seeing its signs everywhere, and it troubles me deeply. Those of
us who are committed to Islam should seriously ask ourselves if we
are indeed representatives of the Religion of ar-Rahman, the
Merciful: "The servants of the Merciful are those who tread lightly
on the earth, and when ignorant people deride them, they
reply 'peace'" â€" are we as the Qur'an so wonderfully describes the
true servants of God?
Muslims are commanded to avoid backbiting, slander, lying,
cheating, treachery, pride, anger, sloth, greed, and all of the
other tragic qualities of beastly humanity. We must remember that
much of the worst crimes we see in the world are simply our own sins
magnified on a grander, more grotesque scale. The vice of setting
aside our principles in small matters that apparently harm no one
leads to the heinous enormities of our time as the vice continues
while the scale increases. Religious people who set aside every true
and universal religious principle in the name of religion are worse
than any secular beast doing the same in the name of 'might makes
right.'
The reason is obvious: one acts in the name of religion and causes
others to hate religion; the other acts in the name of power and
causes others to rightly hate the worst qualities of man. It has
been said that a religious fanatic is someone who redoubles his
efforts after forgetting his cause. I think a sounder definition is
someone who cannot risk considering that his life's work has been
meaningless; that his efforts have been in vain; that his victories
are, in truth, defeats; and that his successes are utter and bitter
failures. Violence is not a religious truth â€" it never has been,
and it never will be. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
said, "Never desire to meet anyone in battle, but if ever forced to
do so, be virtuous." He also said, "Kindness is never present in an
act except that it embellishes it and is never removed from any act
except that it defiles it." In addition, he said, "God gives with
gentleness what He will never give with harshness."
The Qur'an speaks to the Prophet (peace be upon him), reminding
us about his noble character: "It is a mercy from God that you were
made gentle in nature, and had you been harsh and hardhearted,
people would have fled from your presence." In a sound tradition
narrated by Imam Tirmidhi, the Prophet oe is reported to have said,
Toward the latter days of indiscriminate violence, be like the first
and better of the two sons of Adam who said, "If you raise your hand
to kill me, I will not raise mine to kill you; surely I fear God,
the Lord of the worlds." In an increasingly violent world in which
the individual can now inflict harm that armies of the past were
incapable of, religious people in particular must categorically
reject and condemn any vigilante retaliations for injustices and
question deeply the compatibility of modern warfare with religiously
sanctioned military action that emanates from pre-modern just-war
principles in the Abrahamic faiths.
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