How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religion by Reza Aslan

In February we took a trip to the neighboring city of Ajmer, less than two hours by car from Jaipur. We went there to see the tomb (shrine) of Moinuddin Chishtī, the medieval Sufi saint.

We entered Ajmer, and it didn't look much different than any of the other cities and towns in Rajasthan. We pulled into a parking lot and called our contact, who was to guide us the site. In about ten minutes a man dressed in white with a white cap appeared. He bid us to follow him and we did. After walking about a block, cars were barred and even the ubiquitous motorcycles thinned. The street narrowed and become busy, almost crowded, and marked by men in white with caps, like our guide. I had not encountered such a concentration of Muslims since coming to India (although I had visited C's madrasa teacher training program in Delhi). Walking the narrow street crowded with Muslims, young and old, I felt as if I was in a movie, Bourne movie or Syriana. Not that I felt threatened (I didn't), but it reminded me of the significance of the Muslim presence in India and the world, a very considerable presence.  

As we approached the gates, our guide verred right, and we headed up a narrower lane, entering into a labyrinth of by-ways. We reached a small storefront where we left our shoes and cameras (with not small ttrepidation). We entered into the enclosure of the tomb area following our guide and eventually we came into the room of the tomb. Strewn with flowers and crowded with supplicants, our guide held a cloth over us and offered a blessing. We emerged and then we were shown the great pots where feasts were prepared for the needy. 

After leaving the shrine and the hospitality of our guide, who became our host by inviting us to his home and sharing tea and fried chicken with us, we went on a Pushkar and its Hindu temples (a story for another time). 

We in the U.S. know of religion, but we rarely see it displayed and practiced in the manner that one sees it in India. In India, Moslems are a minority, but a very large minority, and one that, at least within the country,  remains relatively peaceful. But then, that's true of Muslims everywhere. And Christians and Jews. Almost all are peaceful, but a few, a frightening few, become caught up on what Reza Aslan calls a "cosmic war". 

I read Aslan's book How to Win a Cosmic War: Confronting Radical Religion (2009, 176p.) as a follow-up to Atran's book that I reviewed in my previous post. If you were to read them both yourself, I would recommend reversing the order. Aslan's book--as one would expect from a veteran of the Iowa Writer's Workshop--reads easily and gives a quicker, more succinct overview of what has been happening in the current Muslim world, and well as in the world of the Old Testament and Bush's America. Aslan details a fact of life that we can too easily ignore: some people are drawn to cosmic wars, battles of good versus evil, us versus them. The early Jewish scriptures display a wrathful warrior God. Christians of a fundementalist persuasion, ignoring great themes of the New Testament, take up these ancient cries of righteouness and blood lust to make contemporary appeals to vanquish the heathens. Contemporary Judaism, especially within Israel and the West Bank, contains some of the same types of holy warriors. In all, these small but incredibly vocal band of holy warriors in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam make a scary lot. Only a few, of course, opt for terrorism as a means of realizing their holy orders, but even without such overt acts, they create a climate where tolerance and alternative faiths find it hard to get a footing. Alsan points, however, that out that many of the Muslim groups that we hear about, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others, have very limited, particular concerns (like the rights of Palestinians), and we Americans lump them all together at our peril.Not all are cosmic warriors.

One can't help leaving a book such as Aslan's without some sense of fear and despair, but we know that these are a minority of a minority who threaten violence. Most of us are more humble about divine intentions through either reasoned caution or courtesy of the demands of daily life. In any event, writers like Aslan help us to understand this wider world, and we should thank him for it. 

N.B. Besides his Iowa City/UI connection and his notoriety as a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Aslan was a speaker at JLF, and I thought one of the pithier commentators on American politics. I hope that he keeps writing, as his voice adds a great deal to our understanding and the conversation that we must have.   

 

Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human by Scott Atran

If I were to start college now with the knowledge that I've gained over these nearly six decades, for a major, I think that I might now choose anthropology, and more specifically, the anthropology of religion. This is not a statement of regret. Obtaining majors in history and political science were very worthwhile, and I'm inclined to think that history might be the master of all learning, since all thinking immediately recedes to the past (see John Lukacs on this topic). Political science and economics study distinct forms of life and thinking, but each has a limited scope. Anthropology, how we humans have lived from before history (as a written record of the past) through the present, can perhaps make the best imperial claim among the human sciences. It can poach grand theories as needed (rational choice, game theory, etc.), but perhaps best of all, anthropologists spend time with people, learning the languages, customs, and religions. 

And religions, modern predictions notwithstanding, have withstood the challenges of modernity. How we define and relate the the sacred, however we may define it, how we navigate meaning in the  world, and how we relate such meaning to our daily actions, raises fascinating questions. India, of course, provides a wholely different world of religious practice than anything than I'd ever experienced before. Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism (nearer its original form), even Christianity, are all practiced here. How these beliefs and practices affect (or don't affect) its adherents deeply affects how individuals and groups relate to their neighbors and even cultures on the far side of the globe. From the earliest indications of human kind through the present, religion has shaped human behavior in deep and persistent ways. 

I share all of the above as a prelimnary to a review of Atran's book because his work addresses these issues. Indeed, Atran has written several books in one. The most interesting aspect of the book comes from his conversations with those in the Muslim world who are "terrorists" or the family and friends of terrorists. Obviously putting himself at great risk on more than one occasion, he speaks to those who guide or have participated in acts of terrorist violence. We learn from Atran that persons who undertake such activities, including suicide bombers, do so because of a variety of factors. Some of the factors have to do with religious beliefs, but even more important are issues of respect, despair, and friendship. Atran makes human what we often try to dismiss as inhuman, but these behaviors, no matter how we may revile them, are human, all to human. 

In addition to his fascinating discussions with those professing violence in the Islamic world from North Africa to Indonesia, Atran spends a good deal of the book discussing the history and anthropology of religion. Atran writes not as a religious believer or practitioner (he apparently isn't either of these), but he writes as someone who knows from his vocation the role and importance of religion. Thus, his criticisms of the naive critiques of religion by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens hit the mark. (Atran gives Dennett, the fourth of the usual quartet, a partial pass because Dennett suports some serious interest in religion as a phenomenon. In this I think Atran is right.) War, killing, and religion (for good and ill) have been with us for the entire time of our species, and we'd better come to a better understanding of it if we want to protect ourselves from ourselves. 

Atran is the type of person that foreign policy decision makers should listen to. Instead, although he's spoken to national security types and Congress, one gets the sense that they don't want to listen. Bombs, and drones, the language of force as an abstraction, beguile them instead. Atran is far from naive, but he understands that concerns for dignity, respect, and revenge outweigh the economic rationality that too many foreign policy rationalists want to base their decisions upon. 

When you're done with this book you've learned an awfully lot, and you hope that someone who makes crucial decisions about life and death on behalf of the U.S. government has read it too. 

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham

James Burnham's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943, 305 p.) came into my possession in 2001 upon purchase from Great Expectations Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. It languished--or should I say waited for me--on my shelves until last summer, when it made the cut to India. It proved its merit, and I can only regret the wait. 

Burnham, better known for his The Managerial Revolution and then later as a writer at William F. Buckley's National Review, writes at a midway point in his odyssey from Trotskyite to Buckleyite. In this work, Burnham, starts by dismissing the claims of Dante's De Monarchia as anything other than at attempt to cover a naked political agenda. After dismissing Dante, he moves into a discussion of Dante’s fellow Florentine, political realist, Niccolo Machiavelli. Burnham argues that only by knowing politics as it's actually practiced, and not how we might wish it practiced, can we obtain and hold a measure of freedom. 

After discussing Machiavelli, Burnham moves forward a several centuries to discuss lesser known political thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, names familiar but not often read: Mosca (theory of the ruling class), Sorel (myth and violence), Michaels (iron law of oligarchy), and Pareto (famous for several things, but here about elites and beliefs). Each of these thinkers, early practitioners of political science as a discipline, looks at the stark realities of politics. For instance, the dominance of elites, the role of political parties (and elites within those parties), and beliefs based on something other than empirical science. In other words, how politics, even in nascent democracies, works. 

Burnham's argues that only by understanding how politics actually works can we preserve a measure of freedom, and his point convinces. Naive understandings of our political system only lead to frustration and failure. These individuals and their successors, the men and women who have studied politics since this was written (and even earlier, as Pareto is the most recent thinker considered) give us greater insight into our ways of practicing politics. Of course, ideas and even ideals are important, and perhaps Burnham undervalues these, but they do not overcome many hard realities. Machiavelli, ever the fascinating character, sets the tone not as a purveyor of evil, as the naive suppose him to be, but the consummate realist. Burnham and his thinkers add to this tradition, and by doing so can help us become wiser about the political world in which we live.  

 

 

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

In 1972 the naturalist writer and novelist Peter Matthiessen joined an expedition to go deep into the Nepalese Himalayas with biologist George Schaller to study the bharal, an ancestor of both sheep and goats, and to perhaps catch a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. Matthiessen’s book is in essence a diary of the arduous trek into the deep mountain wilderness beginning in late September and ending near the beginning of December. This is not an Into Thin Air account of a trek gone bad. Matthiessen and his group all survive, although conditions prove arduous, and the book contains no cliffhangers. Instead, it’s a description of the land, plants, animals, people, and culture of the region. If this was not enough—and it’s quite a lot—it’s also a reflection by Matthiessen on himself and his life. He undertakes this journey less than a year after the death of his wife from cancer, and he recounts their relationship in life and death. 

Matthiessen’s writing in The Snow Leopard (1978, 294 p.) is spare, concise, and yet detailed. Through the journey we learn a great deal about Matthiessen’s present and past. Matthiessen spares neither his environment nor himself as he reports about both about his surroundings and his own thoughts. Mathiessen is a student and practitioner of Zen Buddhism and his prose style reflects this clear, clean aesthetic. This serves him and his readers well because he’s also going deep into the culture of Tibetan Buddhism, a culture steeped in detailed mythology and symbolism that contrasts markedly with the sparse Zen aesthetic. Despite this contrast, Matthiessen’s sympathy for Tibetan Buddhism and the surrounding culture remains palpable. 

By the end of the journey and the book, the fact that Matthiessen observed only signs of the snow leopard’s presence and never any direct observation does not concern us (or him). We understand that this outcome is fitting. Matthiessen’s own journey and ours remain incomplete. We struggle with emotions, with failures, and with coming to grips with the now. We can think of Matthiessen’s book as a meditation: detailed, observant, honest—one that combines mindfulness and insight. Like the mountains that he describes, one leaves the book with a sense of awe at what Mathiessen has accomplished using only the humble tool of prose. Matthiessen won the National Book Award for Cotemporary Thought for this masterpiece in 1979 and for Nonfiction on 1980 with the publication of the paperback edition, and reading it now almost a quarter of a century later, it still merits it accolades. 

Cross-blogged in Steve's View from Abroad.