Nonviolence as a Paradigm for Dialogue Among Religions

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Mary McCarthy once said: “religion is only good for good people”. Historically, religious ideas have been used to justify both war and peace, both violence and reconciliation. What remains open to question is whether religion makes anybody good or nonviolent who would otherwise be malicious and violent. Human spirit can be at its highest level of tolerance and generosity but sometimes also at the lowest level of the low and reduced to the highest level of cruelty when it finds itself cloaked in religion. The relationship of religious belief to social and political action is profoundly obscure; it cannot be predicted with certainty which religious belief will lead to violence and which to mercy in any particular mind. What we may need to understand is how to accept belief as belief and not as directive: how to consider it with a critical judgment and not an idolater's compliance. It is the question of having the power to distinguish in one’s religious psychology between the belief that is pluralistic and integrates diversity and the belief that destroys others through violent acts. A belief is a way of life, not an excuse to force that way of life on anyone else. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that any religion, if followed by the letter, can be interpreted in a way that is incompatible with a pluralistic way of life. Religious violence is a slippery topic and it tends to be even more problematic than religion itself. Religion is a mixed blessing. It could promote a sense of community and provide valued service to its members, but one should not also be blind to its divisive and harmful effects. Religious intolerance and  persecution have been common throughout history, and most faiths have been subject to it at one time or another. Let's be honest, it's not just the Muslims but Christians, Jews and Hindus too have had leaders who have been extreme in their preaching. When we look back at history we see that a wide variety of religious and social minorities within predominantly Christian and Muslim countries were raped, tortured, imprisoned and executed only because of their differences. Many today have a tendency to forget all the violence that was practiced for centuries around the world in the name of religion, since today history is repeating itself. The history of mankind is spattered with blood and religious wars have been among the bloodiest. Those who wish to find support for their cruel acts in Islam can find a great deal of it in its history. That history, for example, tells the story of the massacre of the entire male population of Banu Quraiza believed to number between 600 and 700 AD, soon after the Battle of the Trench in the year 627 AD/ 5 AH. Christian history is also of no exception. The wars among Catholics and Protestants in Europe and the Inquisition also stand out in the history of Christendom. How many Christians do know that a witch-hunter’s handbook, The Malleus Maleficarum,  was published in Christian Europe in 1487 and  had a profound impact on witch trials in Europe for about 200 years? The Malleus Maleficarumwas one of the earliest books to receive mass distribution. Six editions were published before 1550, at least thirteen more by 1620, and another sixteen by 1669. It was translated into German, French, Italian, and English,  The Malleus Maleficarum was compiled by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, who claimed in the book that they had been empowered by Pope Innocent VIII to prosecute witches. The religious intolerance of the book is completed by a sexist attitude through which the authors get to the conclusion that women are inferior, weak, and easily corruptible creatures. Horrifyingly enough, The Malleus Maleficarum is still in print, and not simply as a curiosity or a research tool. In his introduction to The Malleus Maleficarum,1948 edition, priest Montague Summers writes: "Certain it is that the Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest: From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme…”

As we can see, many around the world have not risen above the madness driven by superstition and religious fanaticism. Recent years have seen an alarming global increase in religiously motivated violence. In January 2003, in Kashmir, three Muslim women were slaughtered for showing their face in public. Also in January 2003 three Christian missionaries were gunned down in Yemen. In November 2002 Nigerian Muslims took to the street and at least two hundred people lay dead and hundreds wounded. In October 2002, in Bali, Indonesia, a bomb claimed nearly two hundred lives. In September 2002, in Karachi, seven Pakistani Christians were gunned down, execution style, at a charity organization. In March 2002 five people were killed in an attack on a church in Islamabad, Pakistan. In October 2001, in the Punjab, Pakistan, sixteen worshippers were killed in an attack on a church. I am not trying to make a catalogue of religious violence around the world in recent years. Such a catalogue would be much longer than the above account and would, for example, include not only the tragic event of September 11, 2001, but also the Gujarat riots of 2003 that claimed a thousand lives on the Muslim side. Going only a few more years in the past, it would also include the massacre of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the West Bank of Palestine by a Jewish fanatic. What this long list of atrocities suggests is not that nobody worries about the increasing incidence of violence. On the contrary, what these killings suggest to a decent and sane mind is that we are living in a world that has lost not only its sense of proportion but also its ability to distinguish between what is violent and what is not violent. The truth is that barbaric attacks happen weekly in the name of different religions against innocent souls, no matter how much and how often men and women of wisdom talk in favor of peace and nonviolence. The fact is that the sense of worry is strangely muted and, more importantly, couched in distinctly defensive terms. The dominant reaction to acts of violence by many Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Christians has been to point out that their religions do not approve of them. Violence is a fault from which no major religion has historically been free. St Patrick’s conversion of Ireland is sometimes given as a unique example of the conversion of a nation without the loss of a single life. But so many persecutions have taken place in the name of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. Yet nowadays not all believers in different religions do believe in terrorism and martyrdom as a serious doctrinal issue. Of course, some like the members of the Al Qaeda believe that suicide bombing is a way of carrying out a religious duty. In the opinion of many believers around the world, “extremists” who “distort” true religious beliefs cause religious violence. According to them, it is a small minority who is prepared to kill and get killed for such religious beliefs. In other words, religious texts are open to multiple levels of reading. But each reading is inevitably openness to the best and the worst, because concepts and images are unstable signifiers and belief is a social attitude that can spin out of control. 

The reading of a religious text is never strictly speaking, a “reading”. It is a testimony about a new conception of truth. The sign of a new conception of truth is that it is beyond established interpretations that seem absolutely natural to us. Every “ reading” creates something universal which goes beyond evident universals. A  “ hard reading” of a religious text like the Koran or the Bible is a reading which always opposes an ambiguous “Other” to an unambiguous “religious collective identity”. This “religious collective identity” is most of the time translated into the idea of being a “chosen people”, which could instill in believers a high level of self-righteousness, which in turn may lead to concepts such as Holy War or Just War. This sense of union and unity (ligare) is organized around hatred, violence and war which easily sprout where love has died. Hard readings of religious texts end up with a hard doctrine of international politics. We can find in all religions a group of hardliners who believe that hard religion is the only possible view for the tough realities of our world. And then “hard universalism” shows its aggressive side as a “conquering missionarism” or a “House of Warfare” (dar al- harb). So, as we can see, there is a difference between a “hard reading” of a religious text and a “soft reading” of the same text. In other words, there is a difference between being a non-aggressive adherent of a faith like Christianity or Islam and living with a dogmatic vision of God which is backed up by a skilful use of the carrot and the stick. But in the long run, there cannot be any definitive sorting out of “good religions” from “bad religions”. Peace will come not when any one terrorist network has been neutralized but when a true and authentic dialogue of religions has emerged among the religious leaders that make the vision of “hard universalism” by violence irrelevant and unwelcome. It is essential that moderate religious leaders around the world stand up and be counted by condemning religious acts of violence unconditionally.  Only then can a meaningful dialogue take place. 

The major religious leaders who have addressed violence from religious perspectives, even while acknowledging the terrible ambiguity of religion in history, were all willing and able to use their religious traditions to ride against the waves of their societies. Those who used religion to take a firm stand and oppose certain attitudes and behaviors include Gandhi in South Africa and India, Martin Luther King Jr. in the U.S., Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Pope John Paul II in Poland. Gandhi's religion was a federation of different religious creeds. Communal violence pained Gandhi. All through his life Gandhi devoted much time and energy for the promotion of Hindu Muslim unity and also fasted for his cause on many occasions. Gandhi wanted communal harmony and peace not only between the Hindus and the Muslims but between all sections of the people who believe in God no matter to what faith they may belong.  Actually, Gandhi's concept of religion brought under its fold people belonging to different religions. Though deeply religious by nature, Gandhi did not believe in rituals, customs, traditions, dogmas and other formalities observed for the sake of religion. Like Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi's religion was not confined to Temples, Churches, books, rituals and other outer forms. Thus Gandhi's concept of religion was not bound by any dogmatic behaviors. Gandhi was convinced that a mere doctrinaire approach in the field of religion does not help to create inter religious fellowship. Dogmatic religions do not help to promote creative dialogue. The religions dogmas directly or indirectly breed an attitude of dislike towards other religions. Mahatma Gandhi's mission was to find a common ground based on nonviolence among religions. He wanted not only to humanize religion but also to moralize it. He would reject any religious doctrine, which was in conflict with morality. According to Gandhi religion and morality are inseparably bound up with each other, because there is no religion higher than truth. Today the world does not need a new religion. What it does need are the people who, discovering the eternal and universal truths in their own religion are courageous enough to live in accordance with morality. There can be no understanding of the religious “Other” as long as this “Other” is invoked as a hostile and dangerous element which needs to be ignored or destroyed. To conclude in the words of Swami Vivekananda, one of the greatest champions of interreligious dialogue, which Gandhi also supported : “If any one hopes that the unity [of religions] will come by the triumph of any one religion and the destruction of the others, to him I say, 'Brother, yours is an impossible hope.' Do I wish that a Christian would become a Hindu ? God forbid. Do I wish that a Hindu or Buddhist would become a Christian? God forbid ... The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth”. The future of interreligious dialogue is contingent upon its ability to find common ground with nonviolence in all world traditions. Such a proposal, of course, is bold. But if fundamentalism was the religious phenomenon of the 20th century, nonviolence could certainly be the religious phenomenon of this century.