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The Footprints of Abrahamic by W B Vosloo – Wollongong, February 2013

At the present time, there is no empirical research data available to analyse the role of on societies on a comparative and longitudinal basis. The only available is based on case studies of the historical developments of particular religions in various parts of the world.

Judaism and Jewry

Judaism is the source of the two largest religions in the world: Christendom and . But where these religions are universalistic and missionary in orientation, i.e. focussed on extending its reach to all communities, Judaism is essentially particularistic and ethnically focussed exclusively on Jewish people. shares with Judaism its monotheistic roots in the Old Testament but it has extended its universalistic message to the teachings of Christ as out in the New Testament of the . Islam also shares with Judaism its and also its Abrahamic history and several precepts and practices but they direct their missionary focus to all communities who are prepared to accept the teachings of Muhammed about Allah as set out in their sacred text, which is the Koran.

The Old Testament’s book of Genesis begins with an account of the Jewish creation myth. It begins with a universalistic description of the beginnings of man and everything that is in Heaven and on Earth. But because man is created in the “image of ”, he also carries the divine spirit in him. This sets him apart, over and above the rest of creation. But the remainder of the Old Testament is mainly focussed on the history of the Israelites which it singles out as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”.

Judaism has a complex relationship with the Jewry. Judaism cannot survive without because only Jews or persons converted to Jewry can become Judaists. Judaism has for centuries been handed down by many generations of Rabbis. Throughout, the Rabbis have acted as the interpreters, articulators and guardians of the Judaic Torah. They decided who qualified to be a Jew and what the text of the Bible meant. This has given Judaism an exclusiveness which is inevitably frowned upon by other communities.

After the middle of the second century AD, the of the Jews took them to many countries. Everywhere they distinguished themselves as an isolated, closed community of assiduous traders with wide-spun family and religious networks. As traders they became stockpilers, hoarders or accumulators of money. They developed a reputation as money lenders which raised the question of usury. Although the practice of charging an interest on loans was common in parts of Mesopotamia and among Phoenicians and Egyptians, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to other Jews. Deuteronomy 23:24 clearly stated “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury”. By being permitted to charge interest to strangers but not to Jews, the charging of interest was made synonymous with something hostile. The charging of interest became calamitous for Jews in their relations with the rest of the world: they were disliked and mistrusted. As a result of their concentration on money lending to make a living, the Jews became an element in a vicious circle of money lending and being disliked.

The traditional involvement of Jews in a variety of money-lending practices, has given rise to giving Jewry a bad . “Being a Jew” in a proverbial sense has acquired the meaning of being a reclusive 2 exploiter of other people. Since the expulsion of Jews from Spain, many Jews took their ticket to emancipation or access to society through baptism as Christians. A famous example is the baptism into the Anglican Church of Benjamin Disraeli in 1817 as a result of a quarrel between his father and the local synagogue. Jews were not legally admitted to parliament until 1858, and without his baptism Disraeli could never have become Prime Minister. Karl Heinrich Marx was baptised as a 6-year old in Trier. His grandfather was a rabbi, but his father, Heinrich, was a child of the Enlightenment and a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. But he was also an ambitious lawyer and became a Christian, and in due course, rose to be dean of the Trier bar. His son, Karl, instead of going to the yeshiva attended Trier high . During much of the first half of the 19th century Jews could not own land or exercise a trade or profession throughout Prussia. It was only after the Prussian Reform Treaty of 1847 and 1848 that civil rights on a non-religious base were established in the German states.

Karl Marx himself, paradoxically, reflected the anti-Jewish sentiments of his time. Like the French utopian socialists Fourier and Proudhon who considered Jews as the “incarnation of commerce”, the “source of all evil”, an “unsociable race, obstinate, infernal ... the enemy of mankind”, “a network of commercial conspirators against humanity”, Marx described Jews in utterly pejorative terms. In two essays on “The Jewish Question” which he published in the Deutsch-Francöisische Jahrbucher in 1844, his terminology reflected typical anti-Semitic clichés: “the dirtiest of all races”, “leprous people”, “the Jewish money-men who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants”, the “disease of the Jews is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism”. Karl Marx expanded anti-Semitism from a conspiracy-theory based on a parasitical race into an anti- capitalist theory of class conflict.

Wherever Jews settled as communities, their money lending led to trouble with the locals. The very fact of their constant displacement and resettlement probably had an invigorating effect on their cultural way of doing things and probably sharpened their business skills. They generally added a dynamic input to the areas where they settled. They became “expert settlers” as a result of having been forced to move throughout their history. As strangers and sojourners from their earliest origins, they had, over many generations, and in a variety of circumstances, perfected the skills of concentrating their wealth so that it could be switched quickly from a point of danger to a safer destination. Their outsider status is well demonstrated in their attitude to dealing with money – a double standard for money dealings with Jews and . This prepared Jews to take advantage of economic opportunities wherever they settled. They kept on pushing the diaspora further in search of new business opportunities.

They have been active over large parts of Asia from early medieval times trading in silks and spices they bought from the East and slaves they brought from the West. They served as bankers in Muslim courts, taking deposits from Jewish traders, while on-lending it to the Muslim caliphs. They thrived in Baghdad, Tunisia and Spain. Expelled Jews went to the Americas where they set up factories and became plantation owners. They were particularly active in where they controlled the trade in precious and semi-precious stones.

The Jews have always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But since they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate assets. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted the sole economic activity in which Jews could engage safely. In New York and elsewhere in America, the Jews soon moved to control the centre of the 3 financial stage. In England the Jews became the founding element in the financial market of the City of London.

As argued by Paul Johnson, the Jews made a contribution to the development of modern capitalism quite disproportionate to their numbers. They invented several financial instruments: bearer-bonds, bills of exchange, banknotes and a variety of financial securities. They dominated the Amsterdam stock exchange, held large portfolios in the Dutch VOC and both the British West and East Companies. They were the first professional stock jobbers and brokers in England. In 1792 they took the lead in creating the New York Stock Exchange. As a people without a country, the world was their home: the further the market stretched, the greater were the opportunities. Jews built the first textile mills in India and acquired control of the first diamond and gold mines in . The Jewish Randlords in conjunction with Cecil John Rhodes and Lord Milner succeeded in pushing the British Colonial Office into war with the two Boer Republics. Afterwards the trading of gold and diamonds became the mainstay of the City of London trading accounts in the first decades of the 20th century.

In modern times the centre of the world’s financial markets shifted to the Jewish bankers in Wall Street, New York. Then in 2008 these bankers and brokers dumped their toxic financial instruments (all kinds of derivatives) onto other financial markets and so precipitated the World Financial Crisis when it brought the fragile European economies into turmoil. These economies, in turn, have been brought to the fringe of insolvency by their practice of chronic deficit spending financed by the unfathomable bond market – also a creature of Jewish financial acumen.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Washington demanded no scalps from Wall Street. No directors were brought to book. When the US Congress introduced what actually became the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, the financial interests of Wall Street evidently resolved that reforming Wall Street was too delicate a task to be left to Capitol Hill. The Obama Administration left it to the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner (a former New York Federal Reserve President and Wall Street confidante) to design a mild overhaul of Wall Street regulation. After numerous consultations with interested parties such as Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, the voluminous Dodd-Frank Act was chaperoned through Congress by Wall Street lobbyists (the largest contributors to the President’s campaign fund). The new system enshrined the “too big to fail” principle without effectively creating a straight-jacket for the banks. It created a mechanism for seizing and winding down big failing firms and reinforces capital and liquidity buffers throughout the financial system, hoping thereby to reduce the danger of contagion caused by failing institutions. The changes effectively reshuffled the status quo and added additional regulatory bureaus to Washington’s already “balkanised” regulatory arrangement which ensured that the regulated would continue to have opportunities to play off one regulator against the other. The “moral hazard” problem remains as large as ever.

During the bill-writing process, interested parties such as Blankfein appeared before Congressional Committees. The Sunday Times of November 8th, 2009, reported Blankfein saying in an interview with John Arlidge, that Wall Street was doing “God’s Work”. No one was reported to be commenting on God’s need to employ a good auditor to look into Wall Street’s shenanigans and possibly also a good prosecutor to seek out the culprits – the scapegoat Bernie Madoff aside. Subsequently, in 2012 it was reported in The Economist that the board of Goldman Sachs had awarded Blankfein the largest remuneration package ever received by a bank chief executive. God evidently rewards his “workers” very generously. 4

The finance and banking cronies of Wall Street and the City of London are today sitting at the cross roads of the world’s financial networks, making a living out of speculative investments in a range of highly complex national and international financial instruments. These financiers operate on a global scale while the regulatory instruments, which the Jews also tend to dominate, only have a national footprint. They cannot function as an effective monitor of the world’s shadow finance and banking system driven by secretive hedge funds and investment trusts based in tax havens and obscure financial centres.

Economic historian Niall Ferguson’s remarkable study, The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World, Allen Lane, New York, 2008, p.2, makes the following statement: “Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that those who make a living from lending money are somehow parasitical on the ‘real’ economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing. This hostility has three causes. It is partly because debtors have tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial crises and scandals occur frequently enough to make finance appear to be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by members of ethnic minorities, who had been excluded from land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and rent.”

Addressing the summit of the Islamic Conference on October 16th, 2003, Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, ’s Prime Minister for 22 years, stated: “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them”. When his remarks drew outrage from Jewish groups around the world and from Western governments, Dr. Mahathir responded by saying the reaction to his comments proved his point, for it showed the Western media was controlled by Jews.

The important point is not merely the immensity of wealth (and power) accumulation, but the obscure and disproportionate concentration of power and influence in a few hands. It is not clear at what stage the concentration of power becomes manipulative and excessive. Lord Acton said “all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Certainly the Jewish people do not wield absolute power in today’s world but they do have a lot of influence and soft power: money buys results. Some people may even wield enough manipulative influence and power to make self- fulfilling predictions – especially if they believe that they are “God’s chosen people”.

In 2012 Edward Luce, an Oxford trained British journalist and Financial Times correspondent, published an interesting book entitled Time To Start Thinking – America and the Spectre of Decline, Little Brown, London, in which he paints a disturbing picture of the state of American society. According to Luce the American elites fail to come to grips with the real problems facing the country. He points his fingers in accusation at the Republican Party and “Tea Party” leaders of the conservative right rather than to the socialist-liberal left “... because there is no such thing as a liberal ‘movement’; angry liberals are not as unified as angry conservatives ... and they are not nearly as numerous”. (Luce, op.cit. p.268)

Luce misses the point. Most of his contacts and sources of information and opinions are Jewish American: Wall Street financiers, Washington lobbyists, leftist academics or lawyers, teachers or 5 journalists. Luce is not a reliable guide into the intricate policy-making structures of the American society. To understand the functioning of the complex American political-economic society, proper regard must be had to the demographic determinants of party and voter allegiances and particularly to the predominant role of the well-financed lobbyists on all levels of government where money buys results. There can be no doubt in whose hands the power strings of money are held. In years to come the American political scene is likely to be dominated by the contest between the political fronts of the major religious camps: the Jewish network, the “” campaigners, the insurgent Islamic jihadists and the efforts of these groups to win over the support of the emerging Latino contingency.

The person who was asked to write the chapter on Judaism in the Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, concluded his survey with the following words: “Perhaps we do not go far wrong in suggesting that Judaism and Israel can at least be partly understood as a continuing historical process which is the result of and the response to God’s charge to his servant Moses: ‘... for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel’. To which the Rabbis added the laconic comment: These are the words – no more and no less.” (See Werblowsky, op.cit. p.39)

The Jewish creation myth and Judaism’s particularistic and exclusively ethnic focus on Jews and their total reliance on the text of the Old Testament, have given rise to many questions. Has God chosen the Jews as the focus of his purpose with mankind? How certain is that claim? Since the Jews wrote the Bible, how can we find independent confirmation of the validity of that claim? What part of the Bible, the Talmud and Rabbinical Law is essentially a human creation? Was the Pentateuch verbally dictated to Moses? Is each and every individual Jew “chosen” and different from other citizens of the countries where he or she lives?

Paul Johnson ends his remarkable History of the Jews with the following words: “Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events. They are too easily found, for we are credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme. Yet excessive scepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity. The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical. If the early Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it. They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race. That Jewish dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life, would only seem natural to them. That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected. Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed. The historian may say: there is no such thing as providence. Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them. The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so a long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story.” (Paul Johnson, op.cit. pp.586-587)

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Christianity and the Rise and Decline of Religiosity

Historian Geoffrey Blainey states that few invasions of ideas have matched the global during the period 1780 to 1914. During this period it became the largest religion in the world. Catholics were initially more successful than Protestants but the latter gradually gained ground. Two Catholic countries, Spain and Portugal, initially took the lead but Britain, Germany and the , later joined by the , assisted the Protestants to catch up. Ever since the time of Emperor Constantine, political support was vital for Christianity’s expansion into new territories. Several dozen different churches, and religious orders joined in the quest to convert Africans and Asians. All the missionaries confronted the problem that they were often seen as accomplices of the ruling European powers. Christians who were willing to adapt to the new lands and peoples were more likely to succeed.

By 1900 Christian missionaries had reached almost every part of the inhabited world except remote parts of Africa and New Guinea. But they seldom succeeded in converting more than 5 percent of the local populations. The Philippines remained the most Christianised country in – a tribute to Spanish priests and and of earlier centuries. Doctors, nurses, linguists and teachers came with the missionaries and sometimes a printing press to issue the newly translated New Testament in the local language. These efforts were financed largely by small coin contributions by European and American citizens.

In the industrial age new professions were open to the ambitious. More and more women were knocking at the door of church preaching as a career. But the doors remained closed until well into the 20th century. The first pioneer women preachers in the 19th century had to preach in the open air, because most church buildings were not open to them.

The crusade against in the USA was initially a white male crusade, but gradually women also took leading roles in the American Anti-slavery Society. The abolition of slavery in the USA in 1865 owed much to the American Civil War and to the campaign led by Christian men and women. The rising campaign to reduce the consumption of alcohol relied heavily on female orators, writers and petitioners who came mainly from Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Disciples of Christ, Salvation Army and other denominations. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was a major forerunner of modern political feminism because it demanded the right to vote. The women proved powerful campaigners.

Since the start of the 20th century, Christianity was seriously challenged by two powerful : communism and nationalism. Communism was an offshoot of socialism which, in turn, was originally derived from Christian principles, particularly assisting the less privileged or disadvantaged members of society through charitable action. Socialists elevated charitable action to action through the instruments of the state. The communists added to the collective action of the state the mechanism of the totalitarian party dictatorship. Nationalism is derived from extremist patriotic sentiments. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany elevated patriotic sentiments into a powerful nationalistic where the alleged interests of the nation override all other considerations.

Following the theories of Karl Marx, communism insisted that religion was the “ of the masses”. It made people feel content, materially, with what they had. Christianity fixed their hopes 7 on an afterlife, whereas communism would create a paradise on earth in which poverty was unknown. Communism became a luring millions of people away from Christianity. They set up their own version of the Inquisition with extinction chambers and prison camps in Siberia. The was suppressed first by Lenin and later by Stalin. In 1918 all theological seminaries were shut and afterwards all churches were closed or used as storehouses. A wave of Soviet propaganda denounced Christianity. During the Second World War, Stalin gave the Church a brief reprieve. After the war, the Soviet vendetta against Christianity was resumed and relayed to the newly occupied countries of Eastern Europe. In the whole history of Christianity few setbacks were as serious as the decline of the Orthodox Church in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. The Orthodox Church was the heir of the longest strand in Christian history: the eastern Orthodox brand of Christianity was the custodian of the birthplaces of Christianity. Its sacred language – classical Greek – was the language of the authors of the New Testament. The influence of Rome came into effect centuries later during the time of Constantine. After 1918, the Russian Church, the strongest of the Orthodox Churches, was suppressed by Russia’s atheists.

Many German Christians were alarmed by the spread of and the suppression of . So when Hitler’s National Socialist Party came into power in 1932, many Christians saw in Hitler a bulwark against the communist threat. But Hitler saw Christianity only as a temporary ally. In his opinion one is either a Christian or a German. He elevated his brand of nationalism – Nazism – into a religion. He ceased to open the parliament after it was, fortuitously for him, burnt down in 1934. He broke his pact with the and divided the Lutherans by setting up his own brand of “German Christians”. A host of Lutheran pastors rebelled against Hitler and hundreds went to prison from where they never returned. A notable Lutheran opponent was Reverend Martin Niemöller, who spent seven years in Dachau.

In a mere five years Nazism replaced Christianity as the dominant creed. The cry “Heil Hitler” was the rallying call. The churches were allowed to continue in a subdued role. In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and after a brief Blitzkrieg soon subdued all the West-European countries, including . Only the stubborn air defences of Britain and Churchill’s inspiring leadership saved the UK from invasion. In June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and like Napoleon’s 1812 campaign, was defeated by the long distances and cold winters of the Russian steppe.

During World War II the Nazis perpetrated the most ghastly genocide of Jews and Gypsies imaginable by killing people on an industrial scale. It embraced all Jews, old and young for the crime of being Jews. Hitler massacred not only Jews from Germany but also from Poland, Austria, France, the Netherlands and other East European countries. The massacre of around 6 million Jews seriously reduced the talent pool of the in music, art, literature, science, physics, law and finance. Some people tend to point accusing fingers at Christians for not doing more to stop Hitler. But that was easier said than done. Millions of Christians from Western countries fought and perished in the War to defeat Nazi Germany and its ally, .

The Second World War stands out as a decade of unprecedented destruction. Human lives were destroyed at a rate of tens of millions to a total of around 50 million. Most of this destruction was facilitated by modern science in the hands of atheists. Both World Wars of the 20th century were devastating in the extreme because science and technology had been enlisted to support war efforts as never before. Two anti-Christian ideologies – Communism and Nazism – both placing a low premium on human lives, were in command of the destructive use of science and technology. 8

Ironically, the deadliest part of World War II was when the two secular creeds confronted one another.

Since the Age of Enlightenment all religions were seriously challenged by the advancement of science as a method of inquiry. Scientists rely on empirical evidence and factual knowledge that can be transferred intersubjectively to determine its objective validity. Beliefs and related to supra-natural forces were viewed as mere superstitions. Although these doubts were applicable to all religions, the debate between scientists and believers mainly took place in the Western world. The parts of the world where freedom of speech, conscience and assembly were constitutionally guaranteed were much more amenable to debates about religion. In the Muslim world atheism is not tolerated and treated as a punishable crime. Even deviant religious beliefs are not tolerated. The Western world with its high level of religious in modern times was also the main arena of scientific .

In the Western world it is widely assumed that many scientists nurse secret religious doubts, despite the fact that as many probably believe in God. Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel both probed the tantalising question of the origins and evolution of species – old and new. Most atheists and agnostics are less vocal than Dawkins about their religious beliefs.

As stated by Geoffrey Blainey, “Several learned observers concluded that midway between Christianity and atheism lay a wide strip of vacant ground. Neither side could capture it. Neither side could demolish its rival, intellectually. Christians, relying more on , intuition, imagination and a sense of wonder and mystery, could usually prevail in debates on their home ground – religion. Scientists, with their insistence on evidence and measurement, and their search for general theories and for certainties and predictability, usually prevailed on their home ground ... As for the deep question – is there a God? – Christian intellectuals could not prove the existence of God, and scientists could not disprove it.” (See Geoffrey Blainey – Christianity – A short History, op.cit. p.448)

What was often challenged on the side of the doubters, was the that was the Son of God, that he was conceived in the Virgin birth, that he had risen from the dead and that one day he would return to this earth to judge the living and the dead.

The permanent nature of this deadlock was succinctly expressed in 1959 by the French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin in his posthumous book The Phenomenon of Man. He said that science and religion are two sides of the same phenomenon, a quest for perfect knowledge, and that each side was vital. Yet each side often insisted that there was only one truth and that it could be seen perfectly clearly in the mirror that it had selected.

Scientists and believers often stand at two opposite ends of the spectrum of future expectations. Many scientists and secularists are optimists about human nature, about human progress and the material benefits applied science can bring. People like Stephen Hocking expect that in the fullness of time science will enable humans to fulfil its enormous potential – if only we succeed in adequately employing our reasoning powers. At the other end of the spectrum stand religious believers such as Christians who assume that evil, like goodness, is part of human nature,. Christians, in particular, combine pessimism and optimism in their belief system and consider it essential to introduce an element of humility in our expectations. The development of scientific rationality is not, per definition, a linear road to perfectibility. The ultimate truth cannot be established qua science alone. “Ought” questions can only be resolved in the realm of values. 9

In the Christian world, for close to 2000 years, people have believed that those who gravely and frequently offended the precepts of the Bible would, after death, suffer eternal torment in hell. This terrible fate was depicted in coloured glass in cathedrals and churches, in paintings, stone carvings, novels and poems. By 1900 millions of Protestants ceased to believe in perpetual punishment and in the existence of hell.

Heaven was not so easily discarded. It was a more consoling belief as a place where deceased loved ones would reunite. The persisting belief in heaven was further enhanced by the expectation that sins could be forgiven when genuinely repented. So sinners could also find a place in heaven. For Calvinists God’s judgement was supreme and should not be challenged.

For people of the Western world the 19th century was looking more promising” famine and disease were better controlled. Housing and hygiene improved and the standard of living was higher than ever before. People along both sides of the Atlantic were better educated, worked fewer hours, were healthier and more secure and better protected from foreign aggression. Fewer women died in childbirth, fewer children died in infancy and life expectancy increased. God’s wrath and blessings became more abstract and less visible.

The practice of church worshipping varied considerably in the West. Generally people of middling wealth were more likely than tradesmen or the poor to attend church and women more likely than men. The Irish and the Portuguese were more regular than the French or the English, the Poles more than the Swedes. Churchgoing was also less frequent in the city than the countryside, where it was also a social occasion. North America has always been a land of churchgoers. A good organist, a well- trained choir or good soloists, enhanced the standard of the music.

In the Western world, the 1960s started an era of rebellion against and rejection of traditions and taboos in religion, politics, sex, music, clothes and much else. Since the French Revolution, the Christian world has never seen such revolt against long-held precepts and values. The spirit of the time encouraged John Lennon of Beatles fame to declare “Christianity will go” and “It will vanish and shrink” and “We’re more popular than Jesus now”. But Lennon was partly correct in one respect: in the West, or Europe in particular, the Christian church was in decline. Christianity is still in decline in the most prosperous, most literate and most materialist nations. Is the decline in Europe, the traditional Christian heartland a portent of its long-term future?

Reliable survey data on religiosity – particularly in comparative and longitudinal perspective – is difficult to obtain. Recent statistics are summarised by Niall Ferguson in Civilization – The West and the Rest, pp.266-277, in the following terms: Europeans pray less and work less than Americans. According to the 2005-8 World Values Survey, 4 percent of Norwegians and Swedes and 8 percent of Germans and French attend church services at least once a week, compared with 36 percent of Americans, 44 percent of Indians, 48 percent of Brazilians and 78 percent of sub-Saharan Africans. The figures are significantly higher for a number of predominantly Catholic countries like Italy (32 percent) and Spain (16 percent). The only countries where religious observance is lower than in Protestant Europe are Russia and Japan. God is considered to be important in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and highest of all in Muslim countries of the Middle East. Only in is God important to fewer people (less than 5 percent) than in Europe.

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The case of Britain is especially interesting in view of the determination with which Britons sought to spread their own religious faith in the 19th century. Around 17 percent of Britons claim that they attend religious services at least once a week – higher than continental Europe, but less than half the American figure. Fewer than 25 percent of Britons say God is very important in their lives – less than half of the American figure. The surveys do not distinguish between religions, so that they almost certainly understate the decline of British Christianity. More Muslims attend a mosque than Anglicans go to church. The Evangelical and Pentecostal churches are better attended than the Anglican Church. Prior to 1960 most marriages in England and Wales were solemnised in a church. After that a downward slide began to around 40 percent in the late 1990s. The Church of Scotland shows a similar trend.

These trends seem certain to continue. Practising Christians are ageing. According to a 2000 “ of Britain” survey, younger Britons are markedly less likely to believe in God or heaven. Less than 8 percent identified themselves as “atheists”; 12 percent indicated they did not know what to believe; 32 percent considered all religions as equally valid; more than 66 percent said they recognised no clearly defined moral guidelines; and, bizarrely, 45 percent of those surveyed said that the decline in religion had made the country a worse place. So much for opinion surveys!

Why have Westerners lost their Christian faith? Some seek the answer in the secular of the Sixties, the Beatles, the contraceptive pill, the mini-skirt, pop culture and the like. Many Europeans attribute the change to the realisation that religious faith is just an anachronism, a vestige of medieval superstition and roll their eyes at the religious zeal of the American Bible Belt. They do not consider their own lack of faith as an anomaly.

“So who killed Christianity in Europe?”, asks Niall Ferguson. Max Weber, the famous German social scientist, predicted that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy its Protestant ethic parent, as materialism corrupted the original asceticism of the godly. Leo Tolstoy also saw a fundamental contradiction between Christ’s teachings and those habitual conditions of life which we consider as civilisation, culture, art and science. If so, asks Ferguson, “what part of was specifically hostile to religious belief? Was it the changing role of women, the decline of the nuclear family, and the demographic decline of the West? Was it scientific knowledge which caused the ‘demystification of the world’? Was it Darwin’s theory of evolution which overthrew the biblical story of divine creation? Was it improving life expectancy which made the hereafter a much less alarmingly proximate destination? Was it the welfare state, a secular shepherd keeping watch over us from cradle to the grave? Or could it be that European Christianity was killed by the chronic self- obsession of modern culture? Was the murderer of Europe’s Protestant work ethic none other than Sigmund Freud?” (Ferguson, op.cit. p.270)

Freud, the Moravian born Jewish founding father of psychoanalysis, set out to refute Max Weber. For Freud religion could not be the driving force behind the achievements of Western civilisation because it was essentially an “illusion”, a “universal neurosis” devised to prevent people from giving way to their basic instincts – in particular, their sexual desires and violent, destructive impulses.

Freud’s theories about the death of did nothing to explain America’s continued Christian faith. Americans have become richer, their knowledge of science has increased. They have been more exposed to psychoanalysis and pornography than Europeans. Millions of worshippers flock to American churches every Sunday. The West has always maintained a strict separation between religion and state, allowing an open competition between multiple Protestant sects. The 11 competition between sects in a free religious market seems to encourage innovations to make the experience of and church membership more fulfilling. But are these American sects flourishing because they have developed a kind of consumer Christianity? It is easy to drive to and entertaining to watch. It makes few demands on believers. It is easy to switch from one church to the next.

Ferguson argues that the Americans, by turning religion into just another leisure pursuit, had drifted a long way from Max Weber’s version of the Protestant ethic, in which deferred gratification was the corollary of capital accumulation. They have created capitalism without saving. This decline of thrift turned out to be a recipe for a financial crisis – as has been experienced since 2008. People lived beyond their means and borrowed more than what they could realistically afford to repay.

This phenomenon was not uniquely American. Variations of the same theme were played out in other English-speaking countries and ultimately exported to Europe: “the fractal geometry of the age of leverage”. The irony is that as the debt burdens of Westerners increased, the savings of Easterners also steadily increased. Asians work many more hours than their Western counterparts and save more. The rise of the spirit of capitalism in China and elsewhere in South-East Asia has, chronically, gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the Protestant work ethic: working hard and saving more.

When G.K. Chesterton wrote his Short History of England in 1917, he said Christendom meant a specific culture or civilisation. When Christianity declined, “superstition would drown all your rationalism and scepticism”. Today, the West is indeed awash with post-modern , none of which according to Ferguson, “... offers anything remotely as economically invigorating or socially cohesive as the old Protestant ethic. Worse, this spiritual vacuum leaves West European societies vulnerable to the sinister ambitions of a minority of people who do have religious faith – as well as the political ambition to expand the power and influence of that faith in their adopted countries. That the struggle between radical Islam and Western civilizations can be caricatured as ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ speaks volumes. In , the core values of Western civilization are directly threatened by the brand of Islam espoused by terrorists, derived as it is from the teachings of nineteenth- century Wahhabist Jamal al-Din and the Muslim Brotherhood leaders al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The separation of church and state, the scientific method, the rule of law and the very idea of a free society – including relatively recent Western principles like the equality of the sexes and the legality of homosexual acts – all these things are openly repudiated by the Islamists.” (Ferguson, op.cit. pp.289-290)

What is striking about the modern reading of history, is the speed of the ’s collapse. Could our own version of Western civilisation collapse with equal suddenness? China and other big Asian countries are narrowing the economic gap between the “West and the Rest”. Some people throw in the spectre of a climate change disaster caused by man-made carbon emissions. It is difficult to weigh the evidence.

Many historians, philosophers and scientists have speculated about the rise and fall of civilisations in cyclical or gradualistic terms. Polybius, following Aristotle, wrote about the following cycle: monarchy – kingship – tyranny – aristocracy – oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy (mob rule). The American historian Carroll Quigley spoke of the cycle of civilisation as seven ages: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay, invasion.

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Ferguson argues that civilisations are highly complex systems made up of a large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organised. They operate between order and disorder, stable for sometime, in reality constantly adapting but a perturbation can set off a transition from equilibrium to crisis – and fall. The sun set on the with remarkable suddenness. The Soviet Union collapsed within a matter of months in 1989-1991. It fell off a cliff.

Samuel Huntington predicted that the twenty-first century would be marked by a “clash of civilizations” in which the West would be confronted by a “Sinic” East and a Muslim Greater Middle East and perhaps also the Orthodox civilisation of the former . The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future. Numerous objections were raised to this prediction which was made in 1996, but it nevertheless seems to be a better description of the post- Cold War than any competing theories.

It is argued that Huntington’s model failed as a prophesy. But much depends on the time-frame and the terminology used to describe the conflicts that occurred since 1996. The Iraq and confrontations, preceded by the 9/11 disaster, certainly fit Huntington’s model. The conflicts in the Sudan, Nigeria and the involved religious and ethnic confrontations, but ethnic conflicts usually also involve religious cleavages. The fact that local conflicts have not spilled over into a global collision of civilisations is merely a matter of time-bound perspective and terminology. The question is what lies at the root of these conflicts? At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st millennium the major flashpoints were Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Afghanistan – all of which involved intra-Muslim cleavages which were largely avoided by the Western powers. This aloofness was partly inspired by strategic caution and partly by the financial constraints on the part of the Western powers to get involved. Exceptions were the Iraq and the Afghan wars, when the West was provoked by jihad action and the domestic political pressure within the United States.

Ferguson provides an appropriate end to this analysis with his assessment of the recent historical challenges facing Western civilisation: “Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors ... by our own pusillanimity – and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

The Ascendancy of Islam

The historical record reveals that by the year 1000 Islam had become a prominent religion in large parts of the world. As the spearheads of Islam continued to probe in all directions, it soon reached the Strait of Gibraltar in the west. Far to the east it reached the mouth of the Indus on the Indian Ocean, the areas north of the Ganges as well as the banks of the Brahmaputra above the Bay of Bengal. After conquering the lands of the Persians they penetrated all the way to Samarkand and the areas west of the Chinese Walls. But the discovery of sea routes across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans by the Portuguese and Spanish navigators opened a new field for Christian missionaries. Western Europe also became dominant in science and technology which gave it increased vitality to capture most of the Muslim lands.

After the Second World War, Islam revived. The occupied Muslim lands became independent and Muslim regions benefited from the discovery of large oil deposits in their regions. Oil rich Muslim nations became financiers of the extension of Islamic influence. Millions of Muslims emigrated to Western lands where they flourished and were allowed to practice their religion. Islam maintained 13 an intensity of belief and a pace of growth not matched by its main rival in recent centuries. Although Christendom remained the religion of more than 30 percent of the world’s population, Islam was catching up. With around 12 percent in the year 2000, Christians are estimated to outnumber Muslims only by a ratio of five to four today.

Throughout modern history, religion has been a major foundation for identity and cohesion as a result of its profound hold upon people’s emotions and imaginations. Islam has provided the common bond for both a militant cultural identity and a sense of sacred for millions of people. In Islamic countries, religion has taken on an added importance because it regards the secular and the sacred realms as inseparable. Co-existence of different religions or secular communities within Islamic states is particularly difficult, if not impossible. Religious parties see it as their sacred duty to suppress and crush what they see as anti-religious, anti-Islamic movements.

All Islamic states are closed societies. With the exception of Dubai, they do not readily allow or attract immigrants, but they do generate millions of emigrants to Western countries. Only four Islamic countries have in recent years experimented with constitutional democracy: Turkey, , Lebanon and now also Egypt. In both Turkey and Indonesia the preservation of a fair degree of secular civil rights depends heavily on the intervention of the military.

A typical characteristic of the Arab world is the strong hold of plutocratic cliques at the heart of Islamic regimes coupled with the remarkable resilience of family dynasties such as in Saudi-Arabia, the Gulf States and Morocco. There have been positive stirrings of social change in the wake of the “Arab Spring” of 2011 and 2012. Positive breakthroughs have occurred in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. However, the democratisation process has moved slowly and ambiguously. Satellite television plays an important part to spread information about the world, but a democratic can only be built on a deep-rooted process of modernisation in , training, regulations and cultural habits. Muslim societies across the Arab world today enjoy unprecedented access to information and divergent opinions through al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. But much needs to be done to penetrate closed societies such as , Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia.

Compared to the West and the rapidly developing East, Muslim countries are generally under- developed. This state of affairs has much to do with the down-trodden status of women and the narrow focus of their education system. It is claimed that about 50 percent of Arab women cannot read or write. They suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements.

It seems that today, throughout the Islamic world, there are two opposite trends competing for ascendency: Islamic at one end of the spectrum and secular liberal democracy at the other end. The Islamic theocracy movement is currently the most prominent. The momentum of secular liberal democracy is sporadic and faces many obstacles. Islamic theocracy has several obvious advantages: their messages are cast in religious rather than secular political terms; both their critiques and aspirations are expressed in terms that are familiar and easily accepted on the street level; they have access in the mosques to a communications network that bears the authentic stamp of Islam; secular democrats are required by their own ideologies to tolerate the propaganda of their opponents, whereas the religious parties have no such obligation – and, in fact, go to great lengths to persecute secular or democratic views; Islamic theocrats diagnose the ills of the Islamic world as due to and their local imitators and declare it the sacred Islamic duty to crush the anti- religious, anti-Islamic secular movements.

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The bulk of the Islamic populations find themselves somewhere between the opposite positions on the political spectrum. Hence Islam’s main political arms differ greatly in both tactics and aims: from jihadist militancy against infidels to pragmatic co-existential participation in the political process as is currently happening in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

The political debate in the Arab world is overshadowed by the issue of Israel. It looms larger than anything else in Arab minds and distorts the internal Arab debate about politics and government. Iran has turned the Palestinian conflict with Israel into a tool against America’s Arab allies, arousing anti-American passions on Arab Street. Pro-American regimes lack democratic legitimacy and are presented as lackeys of a resented superpower. Many Arabs reject the idea of peaceful co-existence with Israel. This conflict tends to override internal quarrels between secular and religious Sunni and Shia, or left and right. Their hatred for Israel is an intoxicating way to ignore their own failings and to blame someone else. It enables the plutocratic regimes to maintain states of emergency at home and postpone reform. There will be no new dawn without solving the Palestinian problem.

Islam’s networks, like the Jewish network, are global in their reach. The most prominent are Salafism, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Their pan-Islamic movements arose in reaction to what was perceived as the threat of Western colonialism. All three movements focus on the common cultural, linguistic, historical and religious links between the Arab countries which are held up as the backbone of Islam. Pan-Arabism is seen as a prerequisite for Muslim unity. The Muslim Brotherhood appears to be the strongest in terms of numerical support and organisational coherence. It expects certain virtues of body, mind and behaviour to be upheld by members. It works through other movements and fronts or proxies. It takes advantage of any opportunities available. The control centre of the Brotherhood is in Egypt and much of their activities are financed out of Saudi Arabia. Its primary aim is to promote Islam and the introduction of Sharia law, which they believe will happen once people have freely convinced themselves of its virtues. Hamas is a prominent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Qaeda shares common ideological origins with the Muslim Brotherhood, but differs over politics and tactics.

In recent years a range of secret jihadist networks have appeared – all sailing under the flag of Islam. Many take advantage of the West’s civil rights guarantees of freedom of conscience, assembly and speech. In this way they are able to spread hate-filled messages and to create fifth column activists working to exploit and undermine the very systems under which they live in the West. Western governments and societies do not seem to understand the ideological threat posed by radical Islam. It is essential that they find ways to protect themselves not only from terrorism but also from the indirect incitement by militant organisations. Close to 20 million Muslims live in Western countries, which means the host countries will have to deal with a growing minority of disaffected Muslims. Theological struggles, like ideological contests, can last many generations.

Jihadist movements are constantly flaring up in many parts of the world: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, , the former Soviet Republics, Syria, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, the Gulf States and Africa, north of the equator over a vast terrain in and around the Sahara that stretches eastward across to the Horn of Africa. Al-Qaeda inspired militants are the driving force in many cases, taking advantage of the mismanagement of corrupt governments. These extremist Islamic groups recruit ill-educated, jobless and angry Muslim youngsters to wage a campaign of violence and murder. They are operating throughout the arc of instability stretching from Somalia in the east through Chad to Mali in the west. Extra money is collected from sponsors in Saudi Arabia and other sources in the oil-rich Gulf. 15

The global jihad movements capitalise on local grievances and ignorance. It radicalises jobless young Muslims, giving their discontent a dangerous edge which poorly trained and equipped local security services cannot contain. As in Kenya, Somalia and the Sudan, the tensions created by the jihadists easily spill over into tensions between Muslims and Christians. The conflict in one country spills over to its neighbours. Unless Muslims themselves turn hostile to jihad, outside intervention can do little more than douse isolated flare-ups of violence. Only when local communities become more prosperous, better educated and better governed will the jihadist menace be quelled.

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