Divine music

Recently I have been going to Sunday services with the local congregation of the Anglican Church of Canada. This may surprise some of my readers; let me add that the motive force behind this is my wife, who wanted to add one more singer to the ranks of the congregation. So my connection with the Anglican church is primarily through hymns and the liturgy of the Eucharist.

Since I am a historian whose teaching career has involved A LOT of ecclesiastical history, it's very interesting to return to this material (see? I told you I was a historian). Thanks to my training and my own scholarship I can't help but look at the liturgy and the readings as a collection of voices originating in far-flung times and places, and try to understand both the individual texts and their connections to each other. For example, the letters of Paul and... just about anything else in the Bible.

Throw in the hymns (the Anglicans have a huge collection) and it becomes quite a challenge to visualize for instance Regency-era country gentlemen retreating to their studies, having just returned from some gambling hell, and trying to turn King David or Wesley or both into a coherent representation of what is essential in Christianity.

About a month ago there was a hymn that depicted the universal chorus of God's creatures and how even pathetic human beings could add their little bit. That struck me as an entirely mistaken understanding of the divine, of music, and of humanity. You can say a lot of bad but true things about humanity, but our ability to turn any collection of noises produced by sticks and stones or our own voices into astonishing structures of sound is truly amazing. Faithful readers know how much I have been impressed by the innovative rock music of the 1960s and 70s (Jefferson Airplane, Yes). But pick your own faves. How about the Irish traditional band The Bothy Band?

Well over a decade ago I was driving to work listening to the Bothy Band and I was suddenly struck by the divine nature of their enterprise. I had a flash of anger against such divinities, that they could not spare some of their evident power to deal with the many problems afflicting humanity. But quickly I realized my mistake. Practical problems are for humans, as humans, to deal with. The divine nature of music is the proper concern of those seemingly human, but actually divine musicians. And that's my theology.

If you find this lacking in sophistication or rigor, I suggest you look into the "procession of the Holy Spirit," which has divided Christian churches for a thousand years, and then explain to me why this schism makes sense.

Great Events in Religion, edited by Florin Curta and Andrew Holt

A while back I was recruited by Andrew Holt to write some articles for an encyclopedia of the history of religion.  I took him up on it, even though he was asking for articles not particularly close to my current research interests.  It was an interesting challenge.

Just a couple of hours ago my contributor's copy came to my door.  I hadn't thought about the encyclopedia for quite a while, even though Andrew and I correspond fairly frequently, and as a result it was a bit of a shock to see the finished work.


Part of the surprise was the sheer size of the thing, which is a three-volume work.  I shouldn't be surprised, of course, because it is after all aiming at describing a whole important aspect of human existence.  There are, however, plenty of things calling themselves encyclopedias that have huge holes in their coverage.  Now I'm not sure yet that Great Events covers everything that I might think it should cover -- remember I've had it for two hours or so -- but it does have an awful lot of stuff.

Likewise I did know, somewhere in my fallible memory, that it was going to be "an Encyclopedia of Pivotal Events in Religious History," but perhaps I hadn't really thought about what that might mean. What it does mean is that all religious history is treated in chronological order, which gives the whole thing a comparative history emphasis.  For me, that's a big plus. I am tempted to just sit down and read it through and see what I learn.  (I am unlikely to be able to do that.)

I have to admit that I have always been skeptical of the usefulness of  encyclopedias -- something I share with many historians -- but there is a chance that this one might be useful. The rare reader who has the time and access to the whole thing may get a much fuller view of world history than I did l when I  read Arnold Toynbee's A Study in History in my high school library.

I am genuinely pleased to see this.  As to how well it succeeds, I will get back to you.

Contest:   I am not sure this will have a prize, and it has as much intellectual content as clickbait promising to show you how the stars of some shows in the 70s look today.  In other words, you will be guessing.  Guess what three pivotal events I wrote up for Great Events.  To narrow the field a tiny bit, I wrote nothing on chivalry or the crusades.  Do it for laughs.

Biblical marriage

Quite possibly if you are interested in this issue, you've seen something like this. But Juan Cole's summary of what the Bible says about marriage is to the point:

But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally get how you could, like, actually read the Bible and come to that conclusion (see below). Even if you wanted to argue that the New Testament abrogates all the laws in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t anything in the NT that clearly forbids polygamy, either, and it was sometimes practiced in the early church, including by priests. Josephus makes it clear that polygamy was still practiced among the Jews of Jesus’ time. Any attempt to shoe-horn stray statements in the New Testament about a man and a woman being married into a commandment of monogamy is anachronistic. Likely it was the Roman Empire that established Christian monogamy as a norm over the centuries. The Church was not even allowed to marry people until well after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was an imperial prerogative.

Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism. Since this is the case, fundamentalists are always highly selective, trying to impose parts of the scripture on us but conveniently ignoring the parts even they can’t stomach as modern persons.

1. In Exodus 21:10 it is clearly written of the husband: “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.” This is the same rule as the Qur’an in Islam, that another wife can only be taken if the two are treated equally.

2. Let’s take Solomon, who maintained 300 concubines or sex slaves. 1 Kings 11:3: “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.” Led him astray! That’s all the Bible minded about this situation? Abducting 300 people and keeping them immured for sex? And the objection is only that they had a lot of diverse religions and interested Solomon in them? (By the way, this is proof that he wasn’t Jewish but just a legendary Canaanite polytheist). I think a settled gay marriage is rather healthier than imprisoning 300 people in your house to have sex with at your whim.

3. Not only does the Bible authorize slavery and human trafficking, but it urges slaves to “submit themselves” to their masters. It should be remembered that masters had sexual rights over their property assuming the slave-woman was not betrothed to another, and so this advice is intended for concubines as well as other slaves. And, the Bible even suggests that slaves quietly accept sadism and cruelty from their masters: 1 Peter 2:18:

And there is more...

Image: Abraham's family. Don't get me started.

What would Thomas Jefferson have said?

Today I took the time to watch Pres. Obama's eulogy all the way through. It certainly will go down as one of the great American speeches.

On the other hand, it felt odd to have the Emperor lecturing us on theology of Grace. If he had been talking about the evils of icons, just at the time when a caliphate is being established, we might have to wonder if we were on our way back to the 7th century.

Image: Paine, not Jefferson -- Mr. Age of Reason

Yes, the ancient Egyptians were odd

From Discovery News:

Animals Mummified by the Millions in Ancient Egypt

About a third of the X-rayed and CT scanned artifacts do in fact contain complete and remarkably well preserved animals. Another third contain partial remains. The rest is simply empty.

Highlighted in a BBC documentary, the “mummy scandal” was exposed as scan of beautifully crafted animal mummies showed linens padded out with various items.

“Basically, organic material such as mud, sticks and reeds, that would have been lying around the embalmers workshops, and also things like eggshells and feathers, which were associated with the animals, but aren’t the animals themselves,” Lidija McKnight, an Egyptologist from the University of Manchester, told the BBC.

Experts believe as many as 70 million animals were‭ ‬ritually slaughtered by the Egyptians to foster a huge mummification industry that even drove some species extinct.‭ ‬

How Different Cultures Made Their Mummies

There were four kinds of animal mummies: pets that died of natural causes before their mummification and were buried with their owners; sacred beasts, worshiped and pampered in life, and buried in elaborate tombs at their death; animals serving as food for their owners in the afterlife; and religious offerings, which were the majority.

Having miserable, short lives, these poor animals were simply bred to become votive mummies — offered to the gods in a gesture similar to the way people light candles in churches today.

The practice began as early as‭ ‬3,000 B.C. and reached its zenith from about‭ ‬650‭ ‬B.C. to‭ ‬200‭ ‬A.D., when millions of animals like dogs and cats were raised by temple priests and mummified.‭

According to the researchers, there was an element of demand outstripping supply which may have accounted for some mummies not containing a complete animal.

Ancient Dogs Found Buried in Pots in Egypt

“There simply wouldn’t have been enough to go round,” McKnight told Discovery News.

“More importantly, the ancient Egyptians believed that a small fragment of bone or material associated with the animals or a sacred space contained sufficient importance to be offered as a gift to the gods,” she added.

McKnight believes the procedure shouldn’t be seen as a forgery or scam as the pilgrims likely knew they were not burying a fully mummified animal.

“It simply wouldn’t have mattered what they contained as long as they were a suitable offering to the gods. Often the most beautifully wrapped mummies don’t contain the animal remains themselves,” she said.

Juan Cole on religious divisions in the Middle East: Sunni vs. Shiite?

From Informed Comment

JUAN COLE: I agree that from 30,000 feet, it looks as though Iran has put together a bloc of countries with significant Shiite populations and is using the Shiite form of Islam as a kind of soft-power wedge to establish a kind of bloc. But if you go down on the ground, then that way of looking at it becomes difficult to maintain. Syria, for example, where Iran is supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, is a Baathist state, which is irreligious. They actually persecuted religion. It is true that the upper echelons of the Baath Party in Syria are staffed by members of the Alawite minority, who are technically—at least scholars would consider them a form of Shiite Islam. But Alawite Islam is barely Islam. They don’t have mosques. They don’t pray five times a day. They have Neoplatonic and Gnostic philosophies coming from the pre-Islamic Greek world. There is a kind of mythology there that is very important in their thinking.

I went to Antakya one time, which is an Alawite city, and I asked someone—I was eager to meet an Alawite—I asked someone local, “Are you an Alawite?” He said, “No. Praise be to God, I’m a Muslim.”

The idea that Iran is supporting Syria because orthodox Twelver Shiite Islam feels any kind of kinship with the Alawites is crazy. The ayatollahs would issue fatwas of excommunication and heresy and so forth against Alawites.

Then the Alawites are only one part of a coalition of Syrians that involves Christians, Druze, and very substantial numbers of Sunnis. The regime still has about two-thirds of the country, which it cannot have unless a large number of Sunnis in Damascus continue to support it, because the business class has benefited from that regime and so forth.

So, yes, Iran is supporting the Alawites of Syria, but you have to have an extremely narrow lens to make this look as though it’s about Shias.

DAVID SPEEDIE: The other, perhaps even more contemporary context in which this being played out in the minds of some Western commentators, of course, is in Yemen, which is a very, very perilous situation, it seems to many of us. Obviously, al-Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility for many terror attacks, including Charlie Hebdo at one point. It is regarded as one of the most virulent and violent of the extremist movements. They, of course, are extremist Sunni. Then this dichotomy, Shia-Sunni, comes into play with, “Oh, Iran is supporting”—now, I read somewhere that they should not technically to be called Houthi, but Ansarullah, the Shia insurgent forces in Yemen.

What’s going on there? What should our response be, for example, to the Saudi-led military action? Is this offering comfort and succor to the extremist elements in Yemen? Or is that again too simplistic? JUAN COLE: In my own view, Yemen is, of course, a complete mess. It is an ecological mess above all. It is running out of water. The capital may go dry within five years. We can expect vast displacement of people just on, surely, ecological grounds. For it to be bombed is the last thing that it needed. This is a humanitarian catastrophe.

The United States has joined in this effort and is giving logistical support, it says, to the Saudis and others who are engaged in this bombing campaign. The bombing campaign is being conducted against a grassroots tribal movement and seems very unsuited to produce a military victory of any sort. I think it can succeed in knocking out electricity and making it difficult to distribute petroleum and, again, making people’s lives miserable. I’m not sure it can succeed in changing the politics simply by bombing from a distance.

I really think the United States is poorly advised to get involved in this thing. I don’t think that the lines are at all clear. The Houthi movement is named for the family that led it. Of course, it is not what it calls itself. (The Quakers don’t call themselves that either. It’s the Society of Friends. People don’t get to choose.) But they have become known as the Houthis. They are a movement of the Zaidi Shiite community in Northern Yemen. The Zaidis are known as a form of Shi’ism, again, very unlike what is in Iran and Iraq what is in Iran and Iraq, what Americans are more used to, as being quite close to the Sunnis. They don’t, for instance, curse the Sunni caliphs. They don’t have that kind of animosity towards Sunnism. And they don’t have ayatollahs. They shade over at some level into Sunnism. They are not that different. People in Yemen, anyway, make alliances by clan and tribe, and not so much by which sect the clan or tribe belongs to. There are substantial Sunni tribes that are allied with the Houthis. Seeing this as Shiite or Iran—maybe it looks like that from a very great distance, but down on the ground, it is a real exaggeration. DAVID SPEEDIE: Again, it is superficial to see this as strictly a religious divide. Many of the tribal entities are probably not that religious at all. JUAN COLE: Many of the tribal entities are not religious at all, and then the ones that are can be united. For instance, most Sunnis in Yemen, in North Yemen at least, are Shafi’i Sunnis, who differ dramatically with the Sunni Wahabi branch of Islam and might well make common cause with Zaidis against the Wahabis.

Fighting the Islamic State

From Foreign Policy:

The war against the Islamic State, and the brand of extremist violence it exemplifies, won’t be won or lost on the battlefield. Defeating the group, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said Thursday, will instead first require debunking the ideological propaganda the group spews to justify its killing.
Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hussein lamented the brutal murder of his Jordanian countryman, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive by the Islamic State in a video made public earlier this week. “Just bombing them or choking off their finances has clearly not worked, for these groups have only proliferated and grown in strength,” he said. That meant the fight against the group required “the addition of a different sort of battle-line one waged principally by Muslim leaders and Muslim countries and based on ideas — on a reassertion of traditional Islam in the everyday narrative of Muslims.”
That won’t be easy. Even though the pilot’s burning sparked revulsion and fury across the world, the group still has its defenders. The radical British cleric Anjem Choudary defended the Islamic State’s method of killing the pilot in an interview on NewsmaxTV, claiming it was justified because of the women and children killed by bombing campaigns. “In defensive jihad,” he said, “whatever the Muslims can do within the realms of the acceptable behavior, they are doing. And part of that is terrorizing the enemy.” And an Islamic State admirer on Twitter reportedly wrote, “To any pilot participating in the crusader coalition against the holy warriors — know that your plane might fall in the next mission. Sleep well!”
Hussein, who became the first Arab and Muslim to lead the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights when he assumed the role in September, has long been critical of the military-first approach that the United States and governments and international bodies have favored in combatting the Islamic States.
Instead, he’s been pushing for a war of ideas against the group, something that he believes has already started. Last September, in a letter translated into 10 languages, more than 120 Muslim scholars “discredited the cruel, harsh, ideology promoted by the leader of the Takfiris [Muslims who accuse other Muslims of apostasy] in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This is a hopeful beginning and deserves support,” he said during his address Thursday at the Holocaust museum, a powerful setting for a speech by a Muslim condemning atrocities ostensibly carried out in the name of his own religion.
It’s not a new argument for Hussein, but in the wake of this week’s gruesome killing he’s been gaining an array of new allies who have lashed out at the Islamic State’s claim that burning the Jordanian pilot was within the bounds of sharia law.
“Burning is an abominable crime rejected by Islamic law regardless of its causes,” tweeted Saudi cleric Salman al-Odah, according to euters. “It is rejected whether it falls on an individual or a group or a people. Only God tortures by fire.” Sheikh Hussein bin Shu’ayb, head of the religious affairs department in southern Yemen, told the news service, “The Prophet, peace be upon him, advised against burning people with fire.” The Grand Sheikh of Egypt’s Al-Azhar university, Ahmed al-Tayeb, expressed disgust with the act and said its perpetrators deserved to be “killed, crucified or to have their limbs amputated.” Hussein is a realist who knows that the fight against the Islamic state — and whatever will come along to replace it — is going to be longer than any bombing campaign.
“Years of tyranny, inequalities, fear, and bad governance are what contribute to the expansion of extremist ideas and violence,” he said in his speech on Thursday. “Few of these crises have erupted without warning.” And quashing extremism before it grows into the next terrorist threat means discrediting the ideas that are used to justify violence before they can take hold.

Public pagan worship to return to Iceland

According to the Globe and Mail, they are building a temple:

“I don’t believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet,” said Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, high priest of Asatruarfelagid, an association that promotes faith in the Norse gods. “We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology.” Membership in Asatruarfelagid has tripled in Iceland in the last decade to 2,400 members last year, out of a total population of 330,000, data from Statistics Iceland showed. The temple will be circular and will be dug four metres down into a hill overlooking the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, with a dome on top to let in the sunlight. “The sun changes with the seasons so we are in a way having the sun paint the space for us,” Hilmarsson said.

Atheism in Egypt

Did anyone expect this?

  Juan Cole reports:  

 Egyptian journalist Hilmy al-Namnam said last fall that some researchers had concluded that there were 2 million Egyptian atheists. He blamed the rapid increase in unbelief among young people on the period of Muslim Brotherhood rule and the hypocrisy of television preachers. Educated young women are especially dismayed at the discourse on women apparent in clerical sermons. [Quoting Hilmy al-Namnam:]

Apparently it was the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood [June 2012-July 2013] that caused these groups of young people to pop up and which increased their numbers. It was suggested that I meet with a number of them last April, and I heard then from a young woman who says that she forsook religion, and when I discussed with them I did not find exactly what you could call a atheism, but a great deal of anger and protest at prevailing actions and behavior, and even many believers will share their anger and protest at the glaring contradiction between words and deeds of some of the preachers on television.”

In Georgia in the Caucasus, a modern stylite monk revives living on a stone pillar

Here's the story (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty):

In an isolated part of the Caucasus, a monk is spending his days in prayer and silence atop a 40-meter pillar of limestone in western Georgia (near the town of Chiatura). The Katskhi Pillar was used by stylites -- Christian ascetics who lived atop pillars and eschewed worldly temptations -- until the 15th century when the practice was stopped following the Ottoman Empire's invasion of Georgia. For centuries the pillar was abandoned and locals could only look up at the mysterious ruins on its summit. Finally, in 1944, a mountain climber ascended the pillar, discovering the skeleton of a stylite and the remains of a chapel. Shortly after the collapse of communism and the resurgence of religion in Georgia, former "bad boy" Maxime Qavtaradze (now 59) decided to live atop the pillar in the way of the old stylites. “When I was young I drank, sold drugs, everything. When I ended up in prison.... It was time for a change. I used to drink with friends in the hills around here and look up at this place, where land met sky. We knew the monks had lived up there before and I felt great respect for them." In 1993 Maxime took monastic vows and climbed the pillar to begin his new life. "For the first two years there was nothing up here so I slept in an old refrigerator to protect me from the weather." Since then Maxime and the nearby Christian community have constructed a ladder to the top, rebuilt the chapel, and built a cottage where Maxime spends his days praying, reading, and "preparing to meet God." As a result of the interest in the site there is now a religious community at the base of the pillar. Men with troubled lives come to stay and ask for guidance from Maxime and the young priests who live at the site. The men are fed and housed on the condition they join the priests in praying for around seven hours per day (including from 2 a.m. until sunrise) and help with chores. (19 PHOTOS) Photos by Amos Chapple.

Mahdis! Mahdis! Mahdis!

Brian Ulrich forwards this from the Economist:

Earlier this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil on earth. A website based in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and “petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March. Many of the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000 fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the Mahdi,” she says. 

I've heard that Jerusalem has a similar problem with its Messiahs.

Image: The Mahdi hangout in Jamkaran.

Somewhere there's a village/where things turned out OK

Think of all the exotic religious beliefs you have read about.  Is it fair to say that most of them are held by people who live in exotic climes, have exotic names, speak exotic languages, perhaps even wear exotic clothes? 

But one day you have your nose rubbed in the fact  that your ordinary neighbors might be as exotic as anybody else.  Or maybe you yourself!

Above, exhibit A for a Canadian example.

I am one of those Canadians -- and there are plenty -- who is not particularly attached to hockey.  But I know enough to realize how much seriousness there is behind the humorous facade.

Provocative films, angry riots: the downside of new media

Doug Saunders at the Globe and Mail has been writing some really good stuff on the Middle East for a while now.  See this for clear-eyed clear thinking, clearly expressed  (my emphases):

After this week’s violence in the Middle East, two things are apparent. First, a lot of Arabs in the region believe that “the United States” created a video mocking the Prophet Mohammed. And second, a lot of people in North America believe that “Egypt” and “Libya” attacked U.S. diplomatic outposts and killed an American ambassador.

Few protesters in Cairo or Benghazi believed that the video Innocence of Muslims could have been created by a largely unknown group of anti-Muslim activists in California, a group so obscure that it took U.S. reporters more than a day to identify them – or that this network of bigots could be allowed to exist simply because American laws protect freedom of speech. This could only be a direct product of Washington.
After all, this was, until recently, how things worked in their own countries. If something was allowed to exist in Egypt or Libya, the authoritarian government must have encouraged it to exist. Ergo, this wasn’t some fringe oddball in California offending them; it could only have been the United States assaulting them.

Likewise, many Americans, including prominent ones, simply could not believe that a consulate or embassy could be stormed by anti-American protesters without the active consent, and likely direct involvement, of the country’s government. These attacks prove that America has “lost Egypt” or “been betrayed by Libya,” commentators wrote, likening this week’s relatively small-scope protests to Iran’s 1979 revolution

We need to take three lessons from this week’s events.

The first is that both Arab and Western citizens – and sometimes politicians – are failing to appreciate the polyphonic nature of democratic nations. This has always been a problem for the U.S. and its neighbours: One-note nations such as Russia and Iran have never really believed that every political statement, protest march and YouTube video emerging from a diverse Western country isn’t orchestrated by the national government.
But now it’s also a problem for the new Arab democracies. Suddenly, they are large, and contain multitudes. They have become polyphonic. We should not mistake the signal from the noise, even when things become very noisy, indeed.

The second is to realize that the new freedoms – both political and electronic – allow the most obscure and marginal figures to dominate the agenda. ...

The third is to realize that, as a result of this, these fringe movements are increasingly threatening, far out of proportion of their actual numbers, not just within their small sphere of action but on a larger stage. The past decade has seen a largely unnoticed ascent of the circle of xenophobic activists behind the short film that triggered this violence, their rise into mainstream politics, and the failure of mainstream conservatives to confront and denounce them...

This is a new, wide-open world – one whose freedoms, if we aren’t careful, can easily be seized and abused.

The taking of Jerusalem, 1099

People often wonder how medieval Christians could have taken part in holy war, given Jesus's well-known pacifistic pronouncements.  Here are excerpts from a lecture I gave yesterday on the taking of Jerusalem, which ended in a massacre, which touches on the issue:

Here’s what Tyerman (page 31) says about a famous Christian account of the massacre: 

Raymond of Aguilers… who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, described the ensuing massacre on the Temple Mount: "it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode  in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses."  What ever the atrocities performed that day, Raymond was quoting Revelations 14:20 "and the winepress was trodden without the city and the blood came out of the winepress even to the horse bridles."

Comments? [No comments from students.]

Here are my comments.   Massacres of garrisons and the civil  population of fortifications and cities that had resisted for a long time were pretty common in medieval times.   According to the laws of war (or the customs of war) those who resisted, even if they were not armed and had no authority or say in the waging of war, brought the consequences of such resistance upon themselves.  It was kind of a no-win situation because people who surrendered too quickly to a threat of siege might invite the revenge of their rulers if the rulers won the war eventually.   But to focus on the other situation: we've already seen in this course that a siege was a hard task and a dangerous one even for the people outside.  I sometimes joke that it is no real joke that sieges came down to who caught dysentery first, the people outside in their squalid camps, or the people inside crowded together in bad conditions.   Besiegers died in significant numbers in a hard siege, and the numbers went up significantly if there were a number of unsuccessful assaults.  Besiegers became targets for missiles thrown at them from above, and insults meant to break the morale and boost morale on the other side.  When besiegers swarmed into a city through a gap in the walls or by the treachery of the tower commander, that they were not in a good mood all.  All the anger fear and hardship came together in a murderous rage and perhaps a sudden feeling of invulnerability.   Like hunters, they fell upon their prey, animate and inanimate.

Further remark is necessary in the case of Jerusalem, however.   Modern observers from the historically Christian environment often expressed wonder that the religion of peace and my kingdom is not of this world could have inspired warfare.   Forgetting entirely about Muslim and Jewish accounts of the slaughter of Jerusalem, we can see just from Christian accounts that not only did nominal Christians take part in mass murder like anyone else, they felt more justified in doing so in this case because they had scriptural authority behind them.  Those who took part and had read their Bible knew that this was God's will.

Two further points:

1. Any important and popular religion contains a multitude of contradictory elements that can be used to justify all sorts of actions.
2. People who study religion or are particularly pious or are opposed to some specific religion often act like a person or group can be completely characterized as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Shiite" or whatever.  Not so.  Those Crusaders at Jerusalem liked to think of themselves as Christians, bound by the law of God, but also as warriors, subject to the customs of war. This should be obvious, but the way people talk, it clearly isn't.

  Image:  A medieval illustration combines the taking of Jerusalem with the Crucifixion.

The Arab Spring and sectarian violence

There has been a lot of talk from Syria about how the loosening of the dictatorship's effective power would lead to the kind of religious-inspired civil war that took place in Iraq after the American invasion, or the somewhat different civil war that took place in Lebanon after 1976.  The Arab Middle East, which looks so Arab from a distance, on closer inspection reveals itself to be divided between Shia and Sunni Muslims, various kinds of Christians, and non-standard Muslim groups like the Alawis (Syria) and the Druze (Lebanon).  Some of these people see violence as the short root to dominance in their region, or their only hope of self-defense.

One of the most attractive features of the Egyptian revolution (not over yet, I bet) was the way ordinary Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians refused to allow themselves to be divided, and literally watched each other's backs in Tahrir Square.  Now the troublemakers are at it, as we see in a meaty article by Yasmine El Rashidi in the New York Review of Books:

Even more worrying, it seems increasingly clear that a variety of groups have been encouraging the violence, in part by rekindling sectarian tensions that had disappeared during the Tahrir Square uprising, when Muslim and Coptic protesters protected one another against Mubarak’s thugs. Since then, there have been a series of attacks on Copts, and the perpetrators seem to include hardline Islamists (often referred to as Salafis), remnants of the former regime, and even, indirectly, some elements of the military now in charge, who have allowed these attacks to play out—all groups that in some way have an interest in disrupting a smooth transition to a freely elected civil government and democratic state.

On the weekend of May 7 and 8, in the Cairo district of Imbaba—an impoverished working-class neighborhood that has been a stronghold of militant Islamists in the past—a group of Salafis tried to force their way into Saint Mina Church, a local Coptic house of worship. They were demanding the release of a woman, Abeer, an alleged convert to Islam whom they claimed—without evidence—the church was holding against her will. (Christians here have long alleged that Islamists kidnap their girls, rape them, and force them to convert to Islam. In recent weeks, those allegations have grown. Now, some Salafis have been making similar charges about Copts.).

The day before, via Twitter, they had called on Muslims to come to the church to “free a Muslim sister,” and on Saturday night, a handful of Salafis and some thugs gathered outside the church, waving sticks and swords, chanting Allahu Akbar (Allah is the Greatest), provoking onlookers. A Christian man pulled out a gun and fired at them from a café nearby, and Christian residents from neighboring buildings followed suit, shooting from balconies. Before long, a battle had begun. The Muslim men and a growing crowd of hooligans brought out Molotov cocktails, rifles, handguns, bludgeons and knives. Eventually, the church was set on fire.

It was several hours before the police, fire department, and army showed up, and even then, witnesses told me, “they just stood by watching.” By the time they began firing tear-gas and dispersing the crowds, the Islamists and their now-large entourage of young men (many of whom were later revealed to be thugs with criminal records) had decided to move on. “They announced they were heading to another church to destroy it,” one eyewitness, a lawyer (and Muslim), told me, “and off they went.” The army just watched them march off, weapons in hand.

Image:  a burned church in Imbaba, guarded after the fact by Egyptian soldiers.

Holy Ignorance

Keith Kahn-Harris at Times Higher Education summarizes the argument of Olivier Roy's new book:

Religion was supposed to fade away in a secularising, globalising modernity, and in the post-9/11 period, proponents of secularism are often angry and bewildered at the persistence of religion. For both militant Richard Dawkins-style atheists and the more cautious supporters of a strictly secular public sphere, responsibility for the failure to secularise is placed at the door of a sinister resurgent religious militancy and a failure of liberal nerve to resist this resurgence. Secularity itself is, it would seem, never the problem.
But as Olivier Roy argues in Holy Ignorance, religious fundamentalism and secularising modernity are much more closely linked than is often appreciated. In fact, it is not just that "secularization has not eradicated religion", he argues, but that secularisation has worked as "we are witnessing ... the militant reformulation of religion in a secularized space that has given religion its autonomy".
Roy's methodology relies on an investigation of the complex and changing relationship between culture and religion to produce a panoramic but subtle overview of the place of religion in a globalised world. His argument is that, whereas in the past there was a close, even symbiotic, connection between religion and culture, in modernity they become decoupled. This is not an inevitable and uniform process, and Roy draws on a vast number of examples and case studies that show how religion and culture interrelate. He is particularly interested in practices of conversion because as religions bring in new adherents they are forced to confront alien cultures...
Holy Ignorance does not rely on an essentialist view of particular religions, but on a wider argument about the place of religion in a secularising modernity. Secularisation denies and undermines religion's symbiotic connection to culture and in the process religions become "formatted" or standardised, so that they come to resemble each other. So, for example, the roles of Jewish rabbis, Catholic priests and Muslim imams become similar.
As religion breaks free from its local manifestations, it becomes more easily transplanted to other locations. Fundamentalist forms of religion do this most successfully. Unanchored in the constraints of tradition and local culture, fundamentalism recognises no limitation and hence comes to view everything outside itself as pagan and impure. This is the "holy ignorance" that Roy identifies and warns us of.
Holy Ignorance's modest length suggests that there is some over-simplification and Roy's thesis awaits and requires serious empirical examination. But, if nothing else, this extraordinary book's disturbing message - that secularism may be religious fundamentalism's best friend - is worth taking very seriously.

Do we still want to be fighting the Crusades?

Prominent American ex-Senator Rick Santorum made a speech recently in which he blamed "the American left" for its supposed hatred of "Christendom" (and "Western Civilization" which Santorum sees as the same thing.  He hung this argument on the fact that some (many?) people see the Crusades as "aggression on our part."

Notice that "our." As Brett Whalen, a historian at the University of North Carolina points out in the attached article, (hat-tip to Matt Gabriele) Santorum is basically saying that American politics, both domestic and international, should be an extension of the ecclesiastically shaped politics of the Middle Ages.  Note the sections I have bolded below:

BY BRETT WHALEN

CHAPEL HILL -- During a visit to the Oakbrook Preparatory School in South Carolina last month, Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and a 2012 Republican presidential hopeful, fired a salvo against "the American left," this time for its failure to understand the crusades and its hatred of Christendom.
"The idea that the crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical," Santorum is quoted as saying. "And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem."
The ridiculousness of playing the blame game for the crusades more than 1,000 years after the fact should speak for itself. Santorum, however, is not the first person to evoke medieval holy wars as part of a "Clash of Civilizations" between Islam and the West. Especially since 9/11, fear-mongers have darkly proclaimed that the crusades provide a history lesson about the age-old and inevitable struggle between Christians and Muslims.

Santorum's defense of the crusades echoes others who insist that Muslim aggression, including the seizure of Jerusalem in the seventh century, demanded an armed Christian response. By calling for the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II declared a Just War for the protection of Christians and the recovery of what rightfully belonged to them. (Never mind the fact that Muslims had ruled over the Holy Land for more than 400 years by that point, longer than the United States has been in existence.)
It is hardly "anti-historical" to see that both Christians and Muslims perpetrated horrible acts of violence in God's name during the era of the crusades. Ironically, Santorum himself sounds like medieval popes who described the world as one of "Christendom versus Islam" to rally their supporters.
In his sermon that launched the crusades, Urban roused listeners to action by describing alleged crimes against Christians by Muslims, including the slaughter of pilgrims, the rape of virgins, the defilement of churches and other unspeakable acts - many of which were exaggerated or fabricated. One can almost hear him saying "you're either for us or against us."
Yet other popes maintained diplomatic relations with Muslim rulers. European merchants traded with Muslims in luxury goods and even weapons. Christian clerics engaged in religious debates with their Muslims counterparts. Crusaders negotiated truces with the so-called infidels, forging alliances with certain Muslim kingdoms against other ones.
Upon closer inspection, the world of the crusades, much like our own, breaks down into a constellation of individual and collective actions, political decisions and moral choices - relating to how people define themselves through their religious faith, as well as how they treat others who believe differently from them.
By accusing the American left of hating Christendom, moreover, Santorum identifies his real enemy, a fifth column who despise Christianity and Western civilization so much that they will even stoop to blaming Christian aggression for the crusades. In the same address, he also declared that the separation of church and state in the United States has had "disastrous consequences" for our nation.
Apparently, "the left" needs to realize that they are not living in a modern civil democracy, but in Christendom, facing the same enemies as the crusaders!
Here, we might draw a history lesson from the crusades. Despite their reputation for fighting Muslims, crusaders also turned their swords against other Christians, whom they defined as heretics. Santorum echoes these sentiments with his comments about the American left being the problem.
As the crusades teach us, when religion infuses politics, defining "us" and "them," swords (or in this case dangerous words) are invariably turned inward toward the enemy within.
Not to mention, implicit in Santorum's defense of the Christendom and the crusades is the sense that the crusaders left unfinished business for America to complete, a disturbing proposition that recalls the polemical language of the past that less responsible Christians and Muslims labored to create. That, Mr. Santorum, is "the problem."

In the light of recent developments, Santorum's priorities are (once again, he's done this before) amazingly misdirected.  Misdirected?  Rather, on target for a medieval holy warrior.

Image:  Pope Innocent III, who declared crusades on everyone he could think of, including Markward of Anweiler, "another Saladin" and "an infidel worse than the infidels."

Religion and politics in the Middle East: the case of Egypt

It certainly is easy enough to believe that people in the Middle East, especially Muslims, are unusually religious, and that there political and social ideas are completely dominated by religious values. Up until January, the previous 30 years might seem to have taught that lesson. Well, now we have had another lesson. Religious organizations and religious values did not drive the Egyptian revolution (outcome still uncertain). Here is a good article from a source I have not used before, Religioscope, that discusses the complexities of the issue. In Egypt at least, the various prominent religious voices spoke out again and again against disorder and the protest movement. One result is that those religious leaders, Christian as well as Muslim, have lost a lot of standing in the eyes of the younger population of Egypt. We can also guess that the civic and nationalistic values proclaimed by the protesters have gained prestige, and not just in Egypt.

Here are some excerpts:

The Salafist movement condemned the protests; the Muslim Brothers first retreated, then got sucked in by the dynamism of the dispute, then tried to open up a negotiation process which the demonstrators, bolder in their demands, didn't want. Though that was not necessarily the position of all Egyptians, many of whom would have settled for a compromise, with Mubarak running the transition and the demand for democracy postponed until the next elections: the voice of the street isn't necessarily the will of the people. The Islamist groups were without doubt the most detached. Among these, various parts of the Salafist movement condemned the demonstrators very clearly from the time of the first appeals.

The official religious institutions, both Muslim (al-Azhar and Dar al-Fatwa) and Christian (the Coptic Church), had ties of allegiance to the regime, and were even further from grasping the new revolutionary spirit.

The grand sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, first supported the regime, then with some difficulty changed course, talking of the demands of the uprising in words that were less aligned to the regime, but extremely late. At the height of the dispute, in early February, the sheikh of al-Azhar called for calm and condemned the deaths of Egyptians – but without saying clearly that the deaths had been part of the confrontation between a regime which had resorted to violence through its usual outlets (the civilian police, the party-state) and young thugs from the poor parts of town. Pope Shenouda, for his part, called on the Christian population throughout the uprising not to join the protests.

The political dependence of the leadership of the clerical institutions – both Christian (the Coptic Church) and Muslim (al-Azhar) – was very badly received by the people, and risked jeopardising their relations with their bases over the long term. This was seen in the anger of young Copts in Tahrir Square at the position taken by Pope Shenouda; the resignation of al-Azhar's vice-spokesman, Mohamed Rifai al-Tahtawi (who then joined the demonstrators on the streets); and the number of al-Azhar preachers and imams who joined the protest movement, wearing their official clothes. The huge numbers who abandoned the official mosques on the Fridays to join the demonstrators showed the crisis of communication between religious establishment and people. Fatwas calling for calm went disregarded. On the Coptic side, many joined the protests, too. Their praying side by side with Muslims in the streets showed a double rejection: a rejection of the regime, but also of the Church's political support for a regime which many Copts feel has done nothing for them; they complain it has been responsible both for growing Islamisation and separation of identities along confessional lines....

The Salafist nebula of groups found itself deeply at odds with the dynamic of the street. From the start, and up to now, its position has been unequivocal: the protest movement must be boycotted because protest means chaos. Better to choose the iniquity of the regime than the void which opposing it might open up (the Salafists base themselves on a fatwa by the medieval Islamic thinker Ibn Taimiyya, affirming that 70 years of iniquitous rule are worth more that one day without rule).

The influential Salafist sheikhs in Egypt, especially those who have established strong positions of influence through the religious satellite television channels (al-Nas, al-Rahma etc), have, however, slightly scaled down their overall objection. As the movement grew, they stopped opposing it and tried to contain it, making do with reminders of the importance of protecting public goods and underlining the need to oppose thugs and gangs. ...

The Muslim Brothers' position evolved under pressure from the street (and not the reverse).

At the start, with the first demonstration on 25 January, the Brothers joined in but only in a symbolic way, sending some very restrained groups from their youth movement. Then, with the “Day of Rage” on 28 January, the Brothers concentrated their efforts on Cairo and mobilized about 100,000 people, according to one of their cadres.

As events unfolded (continued confrontation, massive repression, deaths, resignation of the police, the regime's strategy of chaos), positions radicalized. Mubarak blamed the Brothers for the disturbances. The Brothers in turn, through their supreme guide, Mohamed Badi'a, accused Mubarak of “state terrorism” (the Brothers, according to one of its officials, had suffered nearly 40 deaths). There was a feeling of no return among the Brothers, aware that they would be the main victims of the restoration of order if the protest movement did not succeed. “Our only card is the mobilization in Tahrir Square,” said a Brotherhood cadre who was present in the square. “It has become our life insurance against the swing of the pendulum which awaits us if the regime gets back on its feet.”

The Brothers in Tahrir Square, truly mobilized and strongly influenced by the other groups who started the protest movement, continued to call for Mubarak's departure ahead of any negotiation. But on 5 February, their leadership began talks with then vice president Omar Suleiman, former head of Egyptian intelligence. According to a close observer, the Brotherhood's leadership thought it could not pass up such a chance of winning some sort of recognition, even a legitimate presence. This exasperated the young Brothers out on the streets.

...

The Muslim Brothers did not lead the revolution; and they definitely do not appear as the guardians of its “spirit”. Though its concept may be floating, between Tunis and Cairo we are clearly seeing a revolutionary spirit take shape which could hardly be further from the political culture of the Brothers: it is not programmatic; it does not prefer one ideology over another but demands a transparent framework for political competition; it is anti-authoritarianism; it is democratic and not religious; it functions in a loose logic of networks, spirit of Facebook, transparency (the reverse of a pyramid structure, of secrecy and submission). It bypasses the existing political players in their entirety, including the Muslim Brothers, but recruits among the young of these parties and pushes them beyond their training (the Facebook experience has given birth to a movement, modest but real, of self-criticism and demobilisation of young people who have rejoined a network of existing mobilisations). Revealing, as so much else at Tahrir Square, was the enthusiasm of one young militant working for an Islamist site who rejoiced because the first demos had been led by secular Christians in disagreement with their own Church.

  ...

Through all this, the dynamic of opposition is showing the exhaustion of the authoritarian models of the regimes in place, but also the exhaustion of the traditional forms of opposition to them. What is happening in Egypt is not just the contesting of a regime, but the calling into question of a political culture.

Image:  Perhaps, "the old guys don't speak for us?"

 

Something worth celebrating

Thanks to xkcd.com.

My thought was ---

"How Carolingian!"

A giant Jesus in Poznan, Poland.  Thanks to MSNBC.com