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The Footprints of the ’s Major

by

W B (Ben) Vosloo January 2016

The Footprints of the World’s Major Religions

CONTENTS Page The World’s Religious Make-up 1 The Roles of Religions 1 Religiosity and Cultural 2 as Source of Cleavage 3 Religiosity and Modernisation 4

Judaism and Jewry 5 The Core of 6 The Birth of Judaism 6 Doctrinal Foundations 7 The and the Growth of Anti-Semitism 15 Judaism and the Today 26 International Jewry and Modern Capitalism 31 Judaism in Retrospect 33 Bibliography 34

The Rise and Decline of 35 Christianity and the Bible 35 The Apostolic Preaching 36 The Canon of Scripture and the Christian Creed 36 Christianity and Western Civilisation 37 The Birth of Christianity 37 The Spread of Christianity Across the Roman Empire 40 Christianity in the 42 The (13th and 14th Centuries) 43 The and the Rise of Religious Cleavages 46 The Spread of Christianity in the New World 49 Religious Refugees, and Doubters 51 Impact of the French and the Industrial Revolutions 53 Church/State Separation and in the West 54 The Spread of Christianity (1780-1914) 56 Anti Christian Ideologies 56 Christianity and Science 58 ’s Wrath and Blessings 59 Christian Ethics and Political/Economic Life 59 The Emergence of European Social-Democratic Economies 60 Doctrinal Foundations of Socialist Welfarism 60 Mixed Economies 61 Comprehensive Social Security Schemes 62 Taxation Rather Than Nationalisation 63 Industrial Democracy 63 Ageing Populations 64 The Decline of Religiosity 64 and Freud 65 The Decline of Christianity’s Role 66 Bibliography 68

CONTENTS (continued) Page The Ascendancy of 69 Pillars of Islam 69 The Birth and Ascent of Islam 70 Trends in Islamic Doctrine 72 Members of the Islamic Arab World 76 Non-Arab Muslim States 77 Characteristics of Islamic Statehood 77 Profile of Islamic States in the Arab World 82 Profile of Non-Arab Muslim States 86 Urgent Need for Reform in Islamic States 88 Stirrings of Social Change 90 The Muslim Diaspora and its Consequences 91 Islamification of Europe 94 Jihadist Infiltration 96 The Ideological Struggle 97 Bibliography 102

Hinduism’s Renunciation of Worldly Things 103 Essence of 103 Indigenous Character 103 Hindu Scriptures 104 The Multiple of Hinduism 104 The Process of Renunciation 105 Foreign Invaders 105 The Legacy of British India 105 Independence and Partitioning 106 India’s Cultural Diversity 107 Indian Politics 109 India’s Economy 111 The Infrastructure Handicap 114 Policy Paralysis 115 Intergroup Conflict and Violence 116 India’s Potential 118 India’s Challenges 119 Bibliography 119

Confucianism Combined with and as Modernising Forces in East Asia 120 Buddhism 120 The Teachings of Buddha 120 Branches of Buddhism 122 Buddhism in 123 Buddhism in Japan 124 Taoism 125 127 The Core of Confucianism 128

CONTENTS (continued) Page Confucianism Combined with Buddhism and Taoism as Modernising Forces in East Asia (contd) Western Work in East Asia 133 Japan’s Reconstruction 134 The Thrust of Soviet Communism into Korea 134 The Impetus of the Korean Wars to Japan’s Economic Growth 135 South Korea’s Emancipation 135 Taiwan’s Confucian Capitalism 136 Singapore and the Impetus of Overseas Chinese 137 Mainland China’s Oppressive Communist Regime 138 The Revival of Confucian Capitalism 138 Bibliography 140

Concluding Remarks 141 The 141 Doctrinal Divergence Between Islam and ‘the ’ 143 India’s Emergence 144 East Asian Modernisation 145 The Correlation Between Religion-based Ethical Values 145

Foreword

Writing about religion is always fraught with pitfalls, because religion does not lend itself to casual rational analysis or discourse. It is based on what people believe about matters on which they hold strong convictions. History has only a few examples of people sacrificing their lives for the sake of a rational conclusion, but millions and millions of people have offered their lives on the altar of the beliefs they have held.

The text of this manuscript has been written with careful consideration for the sensibilities and beliefs of the concerned without sacrificing honest and realistic analysis. Despite the caution taken, it is possible that specific depictions are influenced by the Christian cultural background and agnostic convictions of the author. As such it may not always accord with the understanding of each and every reader. No offence is intended.

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The Footprints of the World’s Major Religions by W B Vosloo* - Wollongong, January 2016

By “religion” is meant any system based on the idea that there is an omniscient, supreme or intelligence or force equipped with the capability to act as the designer, creator and mover of the entire universe, including everything in it – all natural and moral phenomena. Most religions are characterised by both dogmatic and ritualistic aspects. The dogmatic refers to perceptions of divine revelations and the ritualistic to the rites or ceremonies embedded in historical tradition but symbolically related to the beliefs held. The dogmatic and the ritualistic elements of religion normally find expression in organisational structures such as churches, shrines and priesthoods.

The World’s Religious Make-up

The predominant religions in today’s world are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Confucianism is often classified as a moral code rather than a religion. These belief systems have crossed national boundaries and their followers add up to millions of people and, in the case of Islam and Christianity, more than a billion each. Other religions, such as , Shintoism, Taoism and , are largely local and are inseparably related to small- scale traditional societies.

Although hard numbers in questions of are scarce, the Pew Research Centre, a “fact tank” in Washington D.C., issued a report in 2010 on the state of religious belief around the world. It estimates that around 5.9 billion adults and children – approximately 84 percent of the world population in 2010 – have some kind of religious affiliation. Even of the over 1 billion persons who are unaffiliated, many profess some belief in a higher power. Asia has by far the largest number of people who claim to have no religion, most of whom are Chinese – living in an officially atheist country. But 44 percent of Chinese respondents in the Pew survey claimed that they have worshipped at a gravesite or tomb in the past year. China also has the world’s seventh-largest Christian population, estimated at 68 million persons.

The report of the Pew Research Centre states that in 2010 of the 5.9 billion religious believers the distribution of religious affiliation was as follows: Christian 31.5 percent, Muslim 23.2 percent, Hindu 15 percent, Buddhist 7.1 percent, Folk/Traditional 5.9 percent, Jewish 0.2 percent. Other (including Sikh, Shintoist, Taoist, Janoist) 0.8 percent. The median age of religious groups was highest (between 30-40 years of age) for Jews, Buddhist, Folk/Traditional and “other” categories. For the median age was 30 years of age, for Hindu around 25 and for around 22 years of age. Around one quarter of the world’s believers live as religious minorities. (See The Economist, December 22nd, 2012, to January 4th, 2013, p.96)

The Roles of Religions

The most important of these roles include the following: - offering an account of the origins and nature of reality and humanity’s relationship with it; - offering a basis for communal identity, social affiliation, cultural cohesion and territorial attachments; - offering a foundation for moral values such as thinking and feeling about what is right, just, fair and preferable, true and universally compelling; 2

- offering a sense of sacred mission exerting a profound hold upon people’s emotions and imagination while providing a fertile source of social and political cleavage driven by assumptions of a divine or imperative.

The human-based origins of religiosity are a matter of dispute. However, it is clear that since ancient times human beings have tended to speculate about things unknown to them. Systematic methods of inquiry and a body of accumulated knowledge only advanced slowly and often ambiguously. Before the scientific method of inquiry emerged in the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era, people had to rely on other sources of knowledge: their imaginations or illusions, their observations or experiences and often on the utterances or teachings of persuasive individuals among them.

The common element in all the historical examples of perceptions of “” or “spirits” is that they purport to explain the otherwise mysterious workings of nature and human experience. These dynamics are explained in supernatural terms – at least in terms that today’s scientific world would consider as “super-natural”.

Religiosity and Cultural Diversity

Since the times of Plato and Aristotle students of human affairs have noticed that mankind does not live in isolation: humans only become human in association with others. However, every individual person has a multiplicity of potential attractions to other human beings – each source of attraction forming a potential focus of social solidarity. These sources of solidarity can be depicted as a series of concentric circles: family, community, , culture, race, religion, nationality, etc. The range and structure of each person’s circles of solidarity usually determines the social walls separating “us” from “them”. Each society tends to develop its own pattern of social solidarity depending on its geographical determinants and its history of self-awareness.

In modern times the process of nation-building involved the integration of sub-national pockets of cultural identity into some form of common nationhood. It involves the gradual absorption of diverse forms of self-enclosed, sub-national loyalties (sometimes called ) into inclusive national identification patterns. All modern nations display some persistent form of cleavage between groups of people – each influenced by the predominant solidarity patterns. These may be based on race, ethnicity, language, region, class/ or combination of them. Each peculiar combination tends to serve as a badge of sub-national cultural identity. Historical experience has shown that race, language and especially religion (as badges of cultural identity) are capable of generating an intensity of identification and conflict which eclipse all other issues – or absorb other conflicts and translate them into fierce communal hostility.

A team of specialists in the comparative analysis of societies around the world had this to say: “Racial consciousness, facilitated by its extreme visibility, creates its own of cultural differentiation. Language, as the medium of social communication, simultaneously creates networks of intensive social communication but also discontinuities where the linguistic frontiers are contained within a given territory. Religion, by positing a divine or supernatural imperative for communal identity, removes differentiation from the plane of human rationality or debate. Conflict can become invested with a mandate from heaven and be pursued as a holy duty.” (See C.W. Anderson, Fred R. von der Mehden and Crawford Young – Issues of Political Development, Prentice-Hall, Inc., , 1967, p.26)

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The team of researchers goes on to state that the dimensions of the cultural pluralism problem are further expanded by the tendency of the sources of differentiation to intertwine. They also state that a common characteristic of cultural clusters within states is the high visibility of differentiation. Both in- group solidarity and the sense of differentness from other groups feed upon instantaneous recognition. Racial features are the most conspicuous differentiating factor, but language is almost as effective. Individuals are almost instantaneously enveloped in a whole “syndrome of stereotypes”, which may include characteristic costumes or headgear. Obviously, religion is only a basis of differentiation in society politics where more than one religion is present or where salient cleavages within the dominant religion exist.

Coexisting with intense cultural diversity constitutes a major challenge. To cope with multiple loyalties, societies have attempted several formulas such as federalism, special representation, cultural neutralism, integrative ideology, assimilation, encapsulation and expatriation (territorial partitioning). There are no simplistic, universally applicable recipes to “solve” the problems of cultural diversity. There is no “science of development” that can pretend to take proper account of all the peculiarities of culture as building blocks for a progressive form of social, political and economic life that can stand the tests of time and circumstance. History has bequeathed us with several artificially demarcated state boundaries that include population groups characterised by irreconcilable cleavages.

Religion as Source of Cleavage

Since ancient times religion has served as a binding force within communities – binding together people with the same values and aversions. Simultaneously religion served throughout history as a mark of distinction, giving rise to tensions and hostilities. The profound hold which religion is capable of exerting upon people’s emotions and imagination render these cleavages especially intractable. A common religion can produce both a militant cultural identity and a sense of sacred mission. Where religion regards sacred and secular issues as inseparable, co-existence of different religious communities within the same area or state becomes peculiarly difficult.

Often certain aspects of religious membership are of high visibility to the community at large. The in India are identifiable by their uncut hair, bound up in a . This distinctiveness assures a consistent reinforcement of both a sense of identity with their group and its uniqueness with regard to other groups. The same applies to the head scarves, burkas, or other veils used by Islamic women. They act as conspicuous differentiating factors which also could act as annoyance to other groups. Religious taboos, especially dietary, may also provide a mark of differentiation in slaughtering practices. Throughout history, the most violent religious conflicts were those between Christian factions such as the Catholic-Protestant cleavage, the Muslim-Christian cleavage such as during the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the cleavage between Shiite and Sunni Muslims and the Muslim versus non-Muslim conflicts in the Sudan and Indonesia.

There are many examples around the world where cleavages within the population (religious or other) threaten the breakdown of the state as an integrated political system. The breakdown of the political system could occur through the withdrawal of a segment of it, either to become independent or to join another territory – such as the break-up of India to create East and West Pakistan and, subsequently, Pakistan and . In most instances, such breakdowns occurred as part of post- colonial separatist drives or secession movements. In a few instances, irredentism, served as a drive to combine or unite areas to create a “homeland” for a religious or cultural community. The Malaysian Federation was split up to accommodate the separatist sentiments of Malay Muslims and Singapore 4

Chinese. The Armenian cultural group pressed for the creation of an Armenian state to combine the Armenians living in Turkey, Iran and the USSR. The Kurds are still pressing for the establishment of a Kurdistan to combine Kurds scattered in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. In each of these instances, religious affiliation plays an important part.

The Middle East inherited the demarcation of several artificial or arbitrary political units which underlies endemic political rivalry and conflict. In Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the most salient identity has been supra-national rather than sub-national. The result is that cleavages cannot be easily solved by sub-national partitioning. In Lebanon, one of the world’s most culturally (and religiously) divided states, the cleavages are not geographical and therefore cannot be resolved by the simple expedient of fragmenting the state. The cleavages between Sunnite, Shiite, Muslims, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Armenian Orthodox Christians are not geographical. Re-creating an Arab Palestine distinct from Israel is an equally complex challenge with part of former Palestine precariously glued to Jordan and another part, the Gaza-strip, attached to Egypt on the opposite side of the artificially created state of Israel.

Although Buddhism is also divided into major rites such as the Hinayana (Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Burma) and the (Ceylon, Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, Japan), these divisions did not occur within territorial boundaries and do not lead to domestic conflict. However, where sects existed within Buddhism inside countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Ceylon, it became the source of violent social cleavage.

Religiosity and Modernisation

Since the of the in the 18th century, the and the developing world influenced by it, has been fundamentally changed by the forces of modernisation. Modernity – a complex of economic, cultural and political innovations – reshaped the Western world. The rational, secular and individualistic values of modernity, fundamentally corroded aspects of traditional societies – especially hierarchies based on gender, age and inherited status. Modernity breaks with religious , it empowers individualism, it creates civil states under civil laws and supports the expansion of human freedom, creativity and innovation. Modernity relies on the human power of reason and conscience.

The process of modernisation has been closely associated with the introduction of technology and scientific patterns of thought in society. It also involved the acceptance of modern forms of social and political organisation. In the Western World the modernisation process was given strong impetus by three ground-breaking trends in the opening of the European mind: the Reformation (16th century), the Scientific Revolution (17th century) and the Enlightenment (18th century). Much of the classical learning was rediscovered in the Renaissance, but the Reformation was accompanied by the revolutionary role of the printing press which enabled writing in the vernacular rather than Latin. Religious leaders such as Luther and Calvin encouraged believers to read the scriptures for themselves. The pioneering work of Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle and Newton in the field of “natural philosophy” (as science was then known) spilled over into the fields of social science and metaphysics under the influence of many outstanding scholars such as Kant, Schiller, Hume, Locke, Smith, Montesquieu, and many others. It involved the acceptance of a wide range of humanitarian and universalistic ideals associated with the Enlightenment. Gradually the unlimited sovereignty of religion was replaced by the rational interpretation of the world of experience.

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Modernisation does not necessarily mean a unilinear pattern of change according to a “Western” development model. But it does mean a transformation to improved living conditions, less disease and ignorance and the engagement of the individual members of society in an inclusive process of problem-solving. The most generally accepted perception of the process of development is an economic one, i.e. finding and following a process where a growing proportion of society can share in opportunities to achieve a higher standard of living. In such societies economic growth is supported by modernising sociological and psychological changes involving the transformation from “traditional” to “modern” ways of doing things.

Modernisation involves a set of important changes in the organisation of society and the role played by the individual members. There is a movement away from strict identification with primary groups; from social norms assigning status on the basis of inherited characteristics to achievement-based norms recognising how well a person performs important functions in society. It requires a political order able to cope with the diverse demands and to set the appropriate standards in terms of which the reasonable demands and interests of the component groups can be reconciled and the quality of their lives be improved.

At the present time, there is no empirical research data available to analyse the role of religion on societies on a comparative and longitudinal basis. The only information 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: and Islam. 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. Christianity shares with Judaism its monotheistic roots in the Old Testament but it has extended its universalistic message to the teachings of Christ as set out in the New Testament of the Bible. 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 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 God”, 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”.

In Judaism, God is called Yah-weh, but also other names, Jehovah, Adonai, El or Elohim. The fact of being without beginning or end, God is the Creator of everything from nothing, but also the Saviour at the end of time, and the omnipresent actor in history. Despite the omnipotence and omniscience of God, people are responsible for their actions. They have the responsibility and capacity to make choices. They also have the power of reason, the ability to understand the ethical order of the world and to direct their actions in accordance with its laws. Since all people are made in the image of God and are God’s creatures, the rights of the individual are limited by the rights of others. Mankind’s task is to actively shape the world according to God’s laws. Sin is rebellion against God’s law and the Divine order. Suffering, however, is a mystery in Jewish faith. It can be experienced in three ways: as punishment, as a test of faith or as the atonement suffering of the righteous. 6

The Core of Judaism

Judaism is characterised by its monotheism, its belief in a special covenant with God making Jews his “”, giving them an ethnic and territorial identity with the “promised land”, buffeted by a series of specific laws and practices and the coming of a Messianic Age when the Jews will be gathered back to the by the “anointed one” and usher in an era of peace.

The origin of Judaism dates from ’s covenant with God which was affirmed by the revelation of the Laws to on Mount Sinai and subsequently set out in the Pentateuch (the Greek name of the first five books of the Old Testament). Political Judaism is more closely associated with King David who set up his capital in Judah and the temple built by his son, Solomon, in .

Mosaic Law () was fixed by the 5th century BC and subsequently interpreted by the and the . The Talmud sets out the religious and civil laws and gives explanations of them. The Midrash provides and exegetical explanation of the scriptures and covers a period up to the 12th century AD. It consists of the Halakah (a collection of traditional laws) and the Haggadah (a free interpretation of scripture consisting of parable stories and other non-prescriptive material).

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

The Birth of Judaism

The early written records of religion in Mesopotamia are fragmentary in the form of clay tablets. Similarly, the records of ancient China are also sketchy, engraved on cattle bones and turtle shells. During the third and second millennia before the Christian era, very few people were literate and script was little more than hordes of complex symbols that stood for whole words or concepts. Early Mesopotamia was a collection of city states interacting through some combination of trade and war. These people were polytheists often inclined to contest each other on religious grounds. Hence war was a big part of life in the ancient world. Sargon became Mesopotamia’s first great conqueror around 2350BC. He spoke a Semitic tongue from which both Arabic and Hebrew languages evolved.

Hammurabi entered the Mesopotamian scene in the early second millennium BC, centuries after Sargon’s empire had passed. Hammurabi was famous for producing one of the first legal codes of the ancient world. It drew strength from the gods in the sense that Hammurabi claimed to have been divinely authorised to make laws by Marduk, the god of the city of Babylon.

The trend towards monotheism was enhanced by developments in Egypt in the 14th century BC under Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. He acquired his position of power under the auspices of the single god Amun, but he later replaced Amun with Aten as the “king of gods” – foreshadowing the Hebrew god, Yahweh. Aten was believed to have created all human beings and to take care of all of them – with their peculiar tongues and distinct skins. Sigmund Freud, in his book Moses and Monotheism, suggested that Moses 7 was in Egypt during Aten’s reign and then carried this idea of monotheism towards Canaan, where it would launch the Judaic religion.

However, since the time of Sigmund Freud, archaeological and biblical scholarship has uncovered several alternative historical strands in the emergence of the Israelitic monotheism. Some historians claim that the bulk of Israelite tribes never migrated to Egypt and even express doubts that Moses ever existed. Biblical accounts of Moses were written down centuries after the events they describe and were edited later still. It is claimed that most early Israelites descended from a long line of Canaanites who never left the area. However, this claim does not exclude the possibility of a tribe of exiles returning from Egypt having been absorbed.

What other forces pushed Israelites toward monotheism? Modern biblical scholars and historians claim that the Israelites throughout their early history tended to several other deities (like Baal). According to the Bible they were constantly punished by Yahweh for their idolatry. In around 580 BC several tribes of Israel were taken into exile to Babylonia, signifying Yahweh’s humiliation by the Babylonian god Marduk. They spent about half a century in exile before the Persians, having conquered the Babylonians, allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem where many Israelites had remained all along. The magnitude of the catastrophe that had befallen the Israelites resulted in soul searching and psychological trauma which nourished their monotheistic sentiments. Monotheism was further pushed along by the influence of Zoroastrianism, the monotheistic Persian religion. The combination of these influences enabled the Israelites to strengthen their own concept of monotheism. (See Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Little Brown, London, 2009, pp.90-187)

Doctrinal Foundations

The doctrinal foundations of Judaism as the religion of the Jews crystallised over a period of more than two millennia. It started during the Old Testament Biblical period, was then consolidated by Rabbinic councils and enshrined in the Talmud, was subjected to several destructive forces in the Middle Ages, returned to Orthodoxy in the late 18th century and then faced several reformist trends in the Modern Era. The part of the Scripture that is commonly known as the Old Testament of the is the cornerstone of Judaism. Particularly the Five Books of Moses (the Torah or Pentateuch) which form the first part of the Bible, are considered by the Jews to be a direct and most fundamental divine revelation as delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. Every letter of the contents of the Pentateuch is hallowed by traditional Judaism. This tradition of Jewish orthodoxy makes it difficult for its devotees to come to terms with modern critical Biblical scholarship. In today’s world it is necessary to provide answers to questions relating to the authenticity of historical claims. What is fact and what is fiction? Who wrote the Bible? When was it written? Of the several historical accounts that are available, which are accurate?

According to Paul Johnson, the Old Testament Bible itself, as a written record of the of the Israelites, began to emerge as canon after the first five books, the Mosaic texts reached written form. Johnson claims that the form in which it is available today, is a compilation of five and possibly more “sources” and “codes”. This compilation took place after the return from exile in Babylon and was done by “families of scribes” who transcribed the ancient texts “with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy”. Their most honourable duty was to preserve the canon in all its holy integrity. They began with the Mosaic texts which were transcribed onto five separate scrolls (hence the Greek name Pentateuch, as are the individual names of the books). To these were 8 added the second division of the Bible: “Prophets”. These, in turn, consist of “Former Prophets” and “Later Prophets”. The former consist of the mainly narrative and historical works, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The latter consist of the writings of the prophetic orators Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micab, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi. Then there are the works of the third division, the “writings” or “Hagiographa”, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and the two books of Chronicles.

The Hebrew Bible took shape slowly over several centuries, and the order in which it was written is not the order in which it now appears. Archaeology has supplemented the research by biblical scholars and created a more comprehensive picture of the Abrahamic god. Paul Johnson states that the Pentateuch (Torah) could have been canonised as early as 600BC. The other books were added gradually, the process being complete by around 300BC. We do not know the criteria by which the canon was completed, but popular taste, as well as priestly and scholarly judgment, appears to have played a part. Inclusion in the canon was the only certain way of ensuring that a work of literature survived, for in antiquity, unless a manuscript was constantly recopied, it tended to vanish without trace within a generation or so. The families of the scribes ensured the survival of the Bible texts. Scribal scholars, who specialised in the writing, spelling and accenting of Bible texts, ultimately produced the official Jewish canonical version known as the Masoretic text which took shape in the . There is however, more than one canon and therefore more than one ancient text: the Samaritan version (Septuagint), the Greek version and the Dead Sea Scrolls copied by the Qumian .

Today, the Bible serves as a key document to reconstruct most of the Israelite religious history. But it is a religious interpretation of their historical experience. Hence it cannot qualify as a reliable record of actual history. It tells us about the religious interpretation of the Israelites’ experience and their perceptions of their interaction with their God. Judaism has remained an , related to the Jewish people in a more exclusive and intimate way than did the Christian religion to the Italians or English peoples, or to Western civilisation as a whole. Christianity became a missionary religion, whereas Judaism remained ethnically exclusive. It made no distinction between the spiritual and secular spheres and remained integrated in and intertwined with the concrete history of the historic Jewish people.

Scholarly opinion is divided not only on the correct interpretation of Biblical texts, but also on questions relating to the origin and composition of the Biblical texts. It is not clear to what extent the Biblical text reflects actual events and developments such as the migrations of “Hebrew” tribes from Mesopotamia to Canaan and thence to Egypt – as well as the actual linkages between the promised land and the names of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and with those of Moses and Joshua, or how many Hebrew tribes migrated to Egypt and went back from there. The exodus from Egypt around the middle of the 13th century BC is considered a decisive and central event for the merging of tribes to become the nation of Israel. The figure of Abraham dominates the Biblical account of the beginnings of the Israelite religion. The figure of Moses predominates the traditions connected with the next major stage of . These traditions cover the basic notions of faith, the law (Torah) and the commandments that were subsequently to become the normative rules of Judaism. The Law of Moses and the Covenant he made between the people and God, became the cornerstone of Israel’s existence. (See R.J.Z. Werblowsky’s “Judaism, or the Religion of Israel” in R.C. Zaehner (ed.), Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, , 1988, p.6-8)

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The gist of the Judaist conception of Yahweh is that Yahweh, as creator of heaven and earth, transcendent and free in absolute sovereign mastery, took Israel unto himself as his chosen people. The covenant between the people and Yahweh did not mean more privileges for Israel, but more responsibilities and an existence that was constantly exposed to divine judgment. This led to a direct connection between sinfulness and disaster as punishment. But equally important is the promise of deliverance and redemption.

The Israelite monotheism, though universalist in its conception of God, was ethnocentric in its demand for His worship. Israel alone was required to serve this one God in absolute fidelity, whilst the gentiles were not held to be punishable for their idolatry. But the universalistic and ethnocentric aspects of the Bible remain intertwined throughout the Pentateuch. The book of Genesis provides an account of the beginnings of the human race as part of the whole creation, but it is essentially about the Jews. It is an ethno-centric description of the Israelites, set in a wider perspective.

The concept of Covenant is central to the Israelite understanding of both the world (nature) and man (history). They experienced the Divine as a very personal God who presided over the destinies of the group with an extraordinary intensity. His “Word” was his chief manifestation. Every practicing Jew is bound to repeat every morning and every evening the words of the central Judaic confession: “Hear O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One”.

The perennial struggle of the Israelites with their neighbouring Philistines is recorded in the Old Testament books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, as well as in the collections of prophetic speeches. Inordinate stress was laid by the writers of Kings and Chronicles on the centralisation of worship in Jerusalem as the hallmark of true religion. But the formal concepts like Covenant, Election and Law, and the existence of prophets, priests and a Temple are merely the skeleton of Judaism. Its flesh and blood consist of a host of ideas and concrete beliefs. It enjoins all the actions which it commands and prohibits. Some are symbolic acts like the institution of the Sabbath. Others are rites that regulate the relation of the group and its individual members to God, such as the annual ritual of Atonement. The people hold their land from their liege lord, which is God. Feasts and fasts revitalise the consciousness of historic solidarity with past and future, such as the annual Passover celebration of the Exodus. On Passover, the Jew relives the beginnings of his people as the revelation of the ultimate meaning of history as such.

Judaists believe that freedom is a gift of Yahweh and a calling by Yahweh. There is only one road from Egypt to the Promised Land: the road past Sinai. Commands and prohibitions are meant to prevent a lowering of the moral and spiritual level. The purpose of the many food laws is to submit the whole of life to the discipline of sanctification. Every part of the Jew’s life and body is under a divine charge. Other Biblical laws or commands are more directly concerned with other objectives of the Covenant such as social justice and the love of one’s fellow man.

Jerusalem city and the Temple of Solomon were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC. The Jewish people were taken into captivity to Babylon. Henceforth the Jewish people lived under alien rule and alien law in diaspora. Jewish life was that of a scattered minority enjoying greater or lesser autonomy. In practice Caesar’s will ruled the world and the traditional law of God could operate only as a private norm of a minority, which increasingly conceived of itself as a religious community.

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Rabbinic Judaism took its beginnings at the time of the Babylonian exile. It involved a doctrine of last things (an eschatology). Ideas and hopes were current about a national restoration under a victorious military leader or through a miraculous intervention from above. The ideal redeemer would be a Davidic king or a heavenly being referred to as “Son of Man”. Redemption could thus mean a better and more peaceful world - ushering in of a new era.

The spiritual leaders or theologians of Judaism, the Rabbis, are essentially lawyers. They were focussed on the formulation of norms and rules that enable the alignment of human action to the revealed will of the Creator. The old institution known as the was a legislative and judicial body halfway between a parliament and a supreme court. The main emphasis of Rabbinic Judaism was on “right action” rather than “right faith”: orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy. Talmud Torah (the study of the Law) became the ideal business of life and of supreme religious value in itself. Study of the Law tended to become a sacramental activity to the Jew who saw in the Torah the revealed word and logos of God. The negative side of this tendency was the enlargement of Rabbinic casuistry about legal and ritual minutiae which could border on the absurd. (See Werblowsky, op.cit. p.18)

The word in Hebrew means “good deed” or “religious act” – or literally “commandment”. The Rabbis counted 613 positive and negative commandments (not counting sub-divisions and casuistic ramifications) which they related to the 613 parts of the body which their anatomy recognised. Rabbis generated ordained blessings for a large variety of occasions: when eating, putting on new clothes, receiving sad news, etc. This huge expansion of Rabbinic law and its decisive role for the practice of Judaism was made possible by the respectful treatment of the Rabbinic profession by devotees of Judaism, their deep-rooted acceptance of the Biblical tradition and their unquestioning conviction that the divine word was an eternally valid guide to action. The Sadducees and represented sects who disagreed with mainstream Rabbinic interpretations. Rabbis tended to claim that their views were anchored in tradition going back to Moses on Sinai, the so-called Oral Law which was concurrent with and supplementary to scripture. Their rules of interpretation (hermeneutics) gave rise in Rabbinic Judaism to the theory of tradition as a second vehicle of revelation parallel to scripture.

The phase of expansive Rabbinic interpretation came to an end upon the destruction of the Temple and the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD70. Thereafter the analyses and detailed elaboration of Rabbinic interpretation were embodied in the Talmud. It was a compilation of Rabbinic lore made in the Academies of Palestine as well as Babylonia. The Talmud as “Oral Law” is only second to the Bible and is often used to interpret Bible texts.

An example of Rabbinic Talmud Law is the prohibition to eat anything “with blood”. Blood is considered as the seat of life, hence the taboo on consuming blood in any form. For this reason the Jewish method of slaughter is designed to drain the animal body as effectively as possible of blood. Connected with this prohibition is the law against eating certain parts of animals. Rabbis also established the duty of praying first thing every morning, before breakfast.

The Middle Ages During the Biblical and Rabbinic periods Judaism was given its shape and content while it was given its substantive meaning in the Middle Ages. A distinctive mark of medieval Judaism is its or . This philosophical effort was indebted to various influences. First of all was the rediscovery and development of Greek philosophy by the Arabs. As Muslim thinkers examined their 11 own faith in the light of the new philosophy, the Jewish theologians too began to discuss fundamental Jewish beliefs in the light of Aristotelian and Platonic thinking and with the rigorous discipline of philosophical logic. Devotees of each faith were stimulated to uphold their own faith against competing religions, such as Christianity, that claimed equally divine and authoritative revelations as their basis. The only common ground on which the discussion could move was the neutral sphere of rational thinking and rational proof.

Several questions posed by Aristotelian philosophy forced Jewish philosophers to find answers to issues not normally raised in their own circles. What is the nature of revelation, knowledge and faith and their relation to each other? What is the nature of the human personality and its relation to God? What are the rational proofs of the existence of God? What are the attributes of God, of eternity and providence? These issues had to be confronted with a profound seriousness as a religious duty. It was argued that reason was man’s noblest part and that through reason man could communicate with each other and with his “Creator”. The essentials of the Jewish faith had to be formulated with intellectual precision. These discussions went on between philosophers and not between official theologians authorised to proclaim the “truth” or to pronounce anathemas. Hence the formulations or interpretations expressed by the philosophers did not attain the Talmudic authority that would Rabbinic confirmation allow.

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) was the most influential of Jewish medieval philosophers. His magnum opus, The Guide to the Perplexed, explained the thirteen articles of faith which are usually held to comprise the essential dogmas of Jewish religion. Since they are articles of faith, they are not capable of logical demonstration. Examples of the articles of faith are the immutability of the Torah, the coming of Christ, reward and punishment according to one’s deeds, the resurrection of the dead, etc. These are matters to be “believed”, not “known”. It illustrates an almost unbridgeable gulf between the philosopher’s God and the God of the devout believer.

Yehudah Halevi (1080-1141) was more famous as a poet than as a philosopher-theologian. He expressed a mystic, intensely personal love of God in the form of a personal longing for divine communion: “Lord where shall I find Thee? Where shall I not find Thee?” He claimed that just as God has chosen one particular people as the focus of his purpose with mankind, so has he chosen one particular country, the Holy Land, to be the territory of his people’s religious fulfilment.

The Cabbalist movement represents a bizarrely exotic “theosophic” group that distinguished two aspects of the divine: the hidden and unknowable in contrast to the manifest, self revealing, accessible God of religious experience. The former was called by the Cabbalists En Sof (“Infinite”) which is totally hidden in mystery and not accessible in contemplation. The bible, God’s Word, is per definition nothing but the revelation or self manifestation of God. The is the most important Cabbalistic text. It explains the unification of the aspects of the divine – the unification of God. This union is symbolic of the union between male and female of which perfection was only possible in the married state. Cabbalism was the dominant form of Jewish piety since the 16th century, but in the 18th century a mystic movement called Hasidism emerged in Eastern Europe which introduced degenerate elements of ecstatic mystical communion. In modern rationalist Jewry, the Cabbalistic heritage is dismissed as medieval superstition.

The Return to Orthodoxy By the 18th century, Rabbinic Judaism once again returned its focus on the orthodox interpretation of the basic elements of their faith in response to the thirteen basic articles set out by Maimonides. 12

The first dealt with the existence of God and the faith in divine Providence and God’s sovereignty over his creation. Orthodoxy reasserted their acceptance of the traditional Jewish chronology with BC1971 (5731 according to the Jewish calendar) as the year of creation. The assumption of geological ages, evolution and other cosmological assumptions of modern science are still considered heretical by the orthodox. The modern theologists who accept the relevance of the natural sciences argue that dates are unimportant. Hence they simply cling to their faith in creation and the Creator.

The second article dealt with the unity of God. It rejects all types of polytheistic, dualistic and trinitarian beliefs. God’s unity is an absolutely unique unity which is defined to exclude all forms of mediation.

The third and fourth articles deal with the incorporeality and eternity of God. God has no form and is beyond time and space. God is “theomorphic” and can only be described in words by way of analogy.

The fifth article refers to the duty to worship God alone. It embodies the practical implication of monotheism. It excludes other divinities and forbids the appeal to other powers, forces and intermediaries. God is the only object of , irrespective of the nature, meaning, value or efficacy of prayer. Rabbinic tradition sees in prayer a divine mitzvah, a commandment. Jewish tradition also insists on the value of public worship with full liturgical proceedings.

The sixth article dealing with prophesy is based on the premise that God communicates with man. It does not raise the question by what criteria true prophesy can be distinguished from false.

The seventh article deals with the superiority of the prophesy of Moses. It flows from the centrality which the Pentateuch occupies in Judaism in relation to the other books of the Old Testament Bible. Whereas the prophetic books are “inspired”, the Pentateuch is God’s very Word, literally spoken or dictated to his servant, Moses. God spoke to Moses “mouth to mouth”, not in a vision of a dream.

The eighth article refers to the Torah as God’s revelation to Moses. Jewish orthodoxy has always upheld the theory of verbal inspiration in its extremist form. The whole fabric of traditional Judaism rests on the notion of the divine nature of Mosaic Law. Liberal and accepts the questioning of the sacred text of the Law and would substitute for it a purely ethical Judaism.

The ninth article holds that the Torah is immutable. It asserts the continued validity of Judaism in the face of other religions, Christianity in particular, which have brought final and fuller revelations to the fore as superseding or “fulfilling” the Jewish religion. The sees the Torah as the divine logos. As the expression of God’s eternal wisdom, the Torah shares the immutability of God. Its theology does not depend upon rational evaluation, it is a matter of belief.

The tenth article deals with God’s omniscience as part of His complex of powers such as omnipotence and omnipresence. These powers condition the belief in a Special Prudence and also in individual reward and punishment. Since God knows everything including all innermost thoughts, purity of heart and holiness of thoughts are as significant as physical acts. The love of God, fear of God and practice of the presence of God is based on personal relationships - not merely reactions to certain “attributes” of God.

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The eleventh article is based on the belief that individual reward and punishment is self explanatory. It refers to the soul as the immortal part of the individual and to its fate in the hereafter. It does not refer to material prosperity or misfortune in this life, or to a belief in a national or a collective justice. The traditional doctrine is that most souls are purged from their sins during one year of Purgatory. Thereafter they are removed to paradise.

The twelfth article deals with the meaning of Messianism – the coming of the Messiah. Redemption, whatever else it may have meant, has always meant the actual, physical liberation of Israel from and humiliation and its return to its ancient homeland, the restoration of the Davidic dynasty, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and the recognition by all nations of Israel’s election and calling.

The thirteenth article deals with the orthodox official doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Rabbinic orthodoxy insists on it as an essential dogma. has found this doctrine as one of the most unpalatable. The Reform Prayer book has deleted all references to the resurrection of the body and substituted the more “refined” expression “life eternal”.

These thirteen articles identified certain fundamental presuppositions of Judaism. But its essence must be found in the original sources and from the meaning that can be derived from its laws, ethics and . It requires close attention to the description and analysis of its “law” and practices. (See Werblowsky, op.cit. pp.31-36)

Reformist Trends in the Modern Period For centuries many Jews lived as social outcasts in ghettos and under special laws in many parts of the world – particularly in countries around the Mediterranean Ocean, Eastern Europe as well as Mid- and North-western Europe. They faced spasmodic persecution wherever they settled in diaspora. As a group they were held together by their religious tradition and by their faith in a common calling and destiny. Each local group was aware of its identity with similar groups scattered all over the four corners of the earth. This cohesion and isolation produced a community that was national and international at the same time. As described by Werblowsky: “Israel knew itself to be the chosen people, at home everywhere and nowhere, living in a world of nations and political states but not of them.” (See Werblowsky, op.cit., p.36)

The Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, with its secular human values, together with its emphasis on man as a “citizen”, created new opportunities for Jews living in the Western world. The price to be paid for the right to human dignity, equality and emancipation was to cease to be different and to share in the cultural and civic values of society. Western Jewry accepted and embraced this opportunity while Eastern Jewry, living under more despotic conditions, had to fight for it. Emancipation appeared to be a more attractive choice as its ideals of equality and social justice seemed to accord well with the ethical, universalistic parts of Biblical Judaism. But the progressive temper of the age rejected the ritual, irrational and particularistic parts of Biblical Judaism. The orthodox Rabbis opposed this kind of emancipation because they thought that the anti-Semitic and ghettos, horrible as they were, were merely the other side of “election”. But, according to Werblowsky, modern Jewry desired neither the one nor the other.

The Reform Judaism movement, rejecting orthodox ritualism and particularism, desired to formulate a Judaism that would be acceptable to the emancipated Jew trying to be the equal of his Gentile neighbour. They embraced the new critical methods of historical research as these could be used as 14 weapons against orthodoxy. They wanted to show that traditional religion, particularly the Talmud and Rabbinical Law was essentially a human creation. The new was modelled on the pattern of the German church service: organ, mixed choir and prayer in the vernacular. Ritual laws which hindered free social intercourse were declared to be no longer binding. Particularistic or nationalist elements such as the hope of a return to Zion were deleted from the prayer book and creed.

However, orthodoxy managed to reassert itself. While developing an understanding of the problems and challenges of the , orthodox Judaism defended the validity and unbroken authority of the traditional way of life. Whereas the champions of the extreme views are in the minority, the bulk of Judaism, particularly in America, take a large variety of intermediary positions. Reform Judaism shows signs of returning to a more positive appreciation of the halakhah and attempts to revive traditional symbols and rituals. At the same time, the orthodox wing also shows a growing awareness that neither all traditional ideas (eg. that the whole Pentateuch was verbally dictated to Moses), nor all the traditional rules (such as not riding in a car on the Sabbath) are essential for a virile and authentic Jewish faith.

Zionism The most decisive of all modern developments was as a secular movement inspired by 19th century nationalisms. Reformers as individuals entertained a desire for . Whereas the assimilationist believed that he was neither “chosen” nor different from other citizens of his country, the Zionist affirmed that the Jewish people as a whole was a nation like all others. The Zionists stressed nationhood and eagerly responded to the nationalist spirit and interpreted it as a Messianic chance by which Providence challenged Israelites to live as a chosen people, no longer in exile and dispersion, but as a body politic in the “promised land”.

Paradoxically, present-day Israel also has a group of orthodox extremists who ignore the “ungodly” of Israel and refuse their loyalty to it. To them the arrogation of the name “Israel” by a secular state is sheer blasphemy. But the secularist and nationalist majority hold a sentimental and social attachment to the “national” religion. Secular Zionism has its roots in sentiments that are unconsciously religious, near religious, pseudo-religious or even expedient or based on rational grounds. Hence this kind of Zionism exhibits characteristics that are found in other “secular religions”. It refuses to relate its basic Messianic drive to the total pattern of Jewish theology.

When he wrote his observations on the religious life of mid-20th century Jewry, Werblowsky identified two major historical events as crucial determinants. One was the greatest “” in history – Hitler’s systematic and cold-blooded extermination of around six million Jews “under the eyes of a passive Christian civilisation”. The other was the emergence of the state of Israel amid toil, sweat and blood and in a confused tangle of justice, injustice and heroism. In the words of Werblowsky the dangers were obvious: “Suffering may lead to self-righteousness and to injustice, faith in providence to arrogance, and Messianism to Chauvinism. Even is tempted to mistake for fulfilment what is really a trial and for accomplishment what is essentially another stage on the long road of Israel’s Messianic destiny.” (See Werblowsky, op.cit. p.38)

Werblowsky maintained that Jewry was polarised in two centres, Israel and America. The two centres represent the two classical forms of Jewish life – the Judaism of the Diaspora and the Judaism of the nation in its homeland. These two forces exist side by side in “dialectical tension”. Today Israel is the name of a state and of a . It is both in the world and of it, both national and international. The paradox of Judaism is its and particularism. There is a 15 which is obliged to include Muslims, Christians and others as “Israeli” citizens. There is also a minority religion of Israelites which consists of citizens of France, Great Britain, the and other Anglophone countries where the Bible is read by a majority of citizens under the umbrella of a variety of Christian religions.

The Jewish Diaspora and the Growth of Anti-Semitism

From ancient times Judaism was regarded by many observers as strange, narrow, exclusive and anti- social. As early as the 4th century BC, Moses was accused by Egyptian historians of secluding his people from other men and encouraging . Anti-Judaistic sentiments were enhanced during the process of bifurcation of Christianity and Judaism as a result of the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law. Judaic rigorism led to a head-on collision with the Greco-Roman world after 66-70AD when the Christian branch of Judaism finally severed from its Jewish trunk. The tendency among Jews to regard other religions with disrespect made them unpopular. Not only did circumcision set them apart, but the practice was regarded as barbarous and distasteful by the Greco-Roman world. They came in conflict with Greek ideas about the unity of humanity so that the Jewish tendency to keep themselves apart was resented as anti-humanitarian and “misanthropic”.

Israel was ruined by the 65-72AD war against Rome and destroyed as a Jewish state in 135AD. During the 4th to 5th centuries, Jews living in Christian societies had most of their communal rights and privileges withdrawn. Intermarriage with Christians was prohibited. Only St. Augustine, most influential among the Latin theologians, supported of Jews, since they were part of God’s design. As a result of his influence small Jewish communities were tolerated in the Roman world.

The Greek Church, however, continued to uphold an emotional hostility against the Jews. Influential Greek theologians, led anti-Jewish campaigns, presenting the Jews as murderers of Christ, putting Jewish communities in Greek cities at risk. Jerusalem and other cities in Palestine were increasingly Christianised. But the Christian control of Palestine ended when the Byzantines were defeated by Mohammed’s forces in 636AD and the Muslims occupied all of Palestine and most of Syria.

Towards the end of the first millennium, Catholic Christian theologians en force started to spread the idea that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They were constantly concealing the truth and suppressing the evidence. They served the devil and communed with him at their secret ceremonies. They were treacherous auxiliaries to the ill-treatment of Christians in the Holy Land. After the Crusades started in 1095, Jews became the victims of persecution and in France and in Rhineland cities. Some of these attacks were fuelled by anti-Semitic ideology and folklore. Often it was directed at the money-lending activities of the Jews and this hostility also spread to England where the Jewish population stood at 5,000 in the 12th century. Many Jews converted to Christianity to avoid persecution. Various pogroms were carried out in English towns and cities during the 12th century. Wealthy Jewish families and communities were particularly vulnerable.

During the 12th century the Papacy looked with suspicion on any non-orthodox form of religious activity, including Judaism. The Dominican and Franciscan orders were specifically charged with consolidating orthodox Christian faith in the cities.

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Crimes of Money-Lending After the middle of the second century AD, the diaspora 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 name. “Being a Jew” in a proverbial sense has acquired the meaning of being a reclusive 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 . 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 , 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 school. 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 Gentiles. This prepared Jews to take advantage of economic 17 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 Brazil 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.

Since the 13th century Jewish money-lending became a serious stimulant for anti-Jewish sentiments. It affected a very wide social spectrum. Accusations were rife about exorbitant interest rates charged, leading to accusations of usury and robbery. In England there was a special exchequer for Jews, which was run by two Jews and two Christians, who kept records of all debt-bonds. At headquarters there were Jewish and Christian judges, and a rabbi to advise. When Aaron of Lincoln, the most successful Jewish financier in Medieval England died in 1186, a special exchequer was set up to deal with his estate. In the 1190s there were several major anti-Semitic outbreaks which destroyed the Jewish communities in York and several other places. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, one of the architects of the Magna Carta, which itself had an anti-Jewish clause, took the initiative to organise an anti-Jewish boycott. The scope for Jewish lenders was reduced by the rise of the Knights Templar of Jerusalem and their European Commanderies, the first Christian bankers. In 1275 usury was made illegal in England. Three years later 300 Jews were hanged in the Tower of London for blasphemy, then a further dozen for coin-clipping. Christian governments all over Europe started to expel Jews for usury: from France, from the Rhineland, from Bavaria and from England. Governments were under constant pressure to take anti-Jewish measures. The people believed free Christians had become Jewish slaves and banned Jews from universities.

In 1236 Pope Gregory IX was persuaded to condemn the Talmud, reversing the Augustinian tolerance of the . When the Black Death plague spread across Europe, killing one-third of the population, stories were spread that it was a pestis manufacta (human malice) caused by the Jews spreading poison. Some Jews were forced to confess under and in 1348 thousands were killed in over 300 communities in Germany, Austria, France and Spain.

Expulsions and the Spanish Up to the early 14th century Spain was relatively safe for Jews. During the 1400s the pressure on Jewish communities increased as they were now seen as a racial danger. Large numbers of Jews became converts (conversos), but the local populace called them marranos (swine) and considered them interlopers in trade and craft. The concealed or “secret Jews” were seen as even more dangerous. It was decided to introduce a new solution: isolation and segregation. That meant imposing physical barriers between them and the true Christian population. Segregation was decreed by the Cortes at Toledo in 1480. At the same time a special was being created. Run from Seville, the first inquisition for Andalusia started operating in 1481 and in the next 8 years burned over 700 at the stake there. were also set up in other areas and placed under central control during the 18 reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1479. By 1500 a total of around 341,000 had been prosecuted. Of these 32,000 were killed by burning, 17,659 burned in effigy and 291,000 given lesser punishments. If a converso was rich, his punishment could be commuted into a large fine, but he had to wear a sackcloth garment with two yellow crosses for at least one year.

The intensive ferocious persecution lasted around twelve years and spread to every corner of Spain. It coincided with the final phase of the conquest of the old Moorish kingdom of Granada. This conquest added additional numbers of Jewish communities to deal with. All the gaols were full and tens of thousands were under house arrest. The reyos catholicos, despairing of ending the problem of the Jews with conventional inquisitorial investigation, decided on a gigantic act of will to produce a “final solution”. On 31 March 1492 the “Edict of Expulsion” was signed. It mandated physically driving from Spain any Jew who would not accept immediate conversion.

At the time there were still around 200,000 Jews in Spain. Many thousands chose conversion, but about 100,000 trudged across to Portugal from where they were pushed across the straits into North Africa or by ship to Turkey, North-West Europe and the Americas. At the time, the persecution of Spanish Jewry was the most momentous event in Jewish history since the fall of Jerusalem in the mid- second century AD.

From the 14th century it became general practice to distinguish between (Spanish) and (German). The Sephardi created their own language, called Ladino or Judezmo as opposed to the originally Ashkenazi .

The Spanish expulsions were preceded by many others. Jews were expelled from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 and in 1450, from the cities of Moravia in 1454, Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma 1488, Milan and Lucca in 1489, and from Florence and all of Tuscany in 1494.

One expulsion provoked another, as refugees streamed into cities that housed already more Jews than their rulers were prepared to tolerate. In Italy, their main activity at the end of the 15th century was pawn broking and making small loans to the poor. Christian bankers and craftsmen got the Jews banned as soon as their guilds were powerful enough. In Italy, Provence and in Germany, the Jews had been virtually marginalised by the year 1500. Hence they moved into less developed territories further east: Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Poland (Warsaw and Cracow), Brest-Litovsk and to Lithuania. But Poland was regarded as the safest country in Europe for Jews and it soon became known as Ashkenazi heartland.

Hatred of Jews in Germany and Italy In many parts of Europe Jews became the butt of popular iconography. In Germany it was called Juden sau, depicting Jews in association with pig sows. The impact of the demeaning iconography pictures and sculptures was to depict Jews as usurers and diabolic creatures who poisoned wells and murdered Christian youth. Jews came to symbolise all unclean persons, sinners and heretics. In the words of Paul Johnson: “It assumed an infinite variety of repellent forms. Jews were portrayed venerating the sow, sucking its teats, embracing its hindquarters, devouring its excrement. It offered rich opportunities to the coarser type of popular artist, presented with a target where none of the rules of taste and decorum applied and where the crudest obscenity was not merely acceptable but positively meritorious.” (See Paul Johnson, op.cit. p.232). In Germany these images became so ubiquitous that its 19 endless repetition helped on a process which became the dehumanisation of Jews. Once the Jews were stereotyped as working with the forces of darkness, it was easier to herd them into ghettos.

In 1543 Luther published the first major anti-Semitic pamphlet called Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and their Lies) which Paul Johnson describes as “... a giant step forward on the road to .” He said their should be set on fire, prayer books should be destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, banned from the roads and markets, homes destroyed, property seized and then these poisonous worms should be drafted into forced labour and made to earn their bread or kicked out for all time. He concentrated on their role as moneylenders and said their wealth had been extorted usuriously. About all usurers Luther said: “There is on earth no greater enemy of man, after the Devil, than a gripe-money and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men ...” (See Paul Johnson, op.cit. p.242)

The Counter-Reformation, when it came in the 16th century, dealt harshly with Protestants as well as Jews. In most parts of Italy a total of 50,000 Jews were tolerated – many refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. When Cardinal Caraffa, the Grand Inquisitor, became Pope as Paul IV, he took the view that Judaism was a mortal threat to the Christian faith. With the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum he drove Rome’s Jews into a walled ghetto and started to refugee Spanish marranos. From 1562 the ghetto policy was extended to all papal cities. His successor, Pius V (1566-72) was even fiercer in expelling Jewish communities. The Jews, especially marannos were seen as a disturbing element to be persecuted.

Penetration into Central and Eastern Europe The Jews have been active in the Russian border territories, especially the shores of the Black Sea, since Hellenistic times. Legends connect the arrival of Jews in Armenia and Georgia with the of Israel. From medieval times, Jews had been active as traders over vast areas in southern Euro-Asia. In the 1470s they were active as a semi-secret sect in the Moscow area. Tsar “Ivan the Terrible” (1530-84) ordered Jews who refused to embrace Christianity to be drowned. Jews were officially excluded from Russian territory until the late 18th century.

The Russian barrier to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine. In about 1500 there were only 20,000 to 30,000 Jews living in Poland out of a population of about 5 million. By 1575 the Jewish population had risen to 150,000. The Polish monarchy, in 1503, allowed the Jews to practice a form of limited self-government. The rabbinate had wide powers over law and finances and appointing judges and other officials. This led to hostility towards the Jews on the part of the Polish people. The crown gave protection to the Jews in exchange for money.

The Jewish communities themselves developed elaborate inter-Jewish credit instruments linking them with Jewish family firms in the Netherlands and Germany. With access to easy credit, Jewish pioneers played a leading role in developing eastern Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine. The Jews acting as middlemen ran the tolls, the mills, distilleries, shops, taverns and established townships (shtetls) where they lived in the centre. Every Polish magnate had his own “Joseph” keeping the books, running the administration.

By the late 16th century, Jews were again allowed in German-speaking towns and principalities and the Habsburg Emperor Maximillian II allowed their return into Bohemia. His son Rudolph II allowed Jews to return to Prague and to Vienna. They soon took advantage of the new opportunities as 20 financiers and as jewel smiths. Rudolph brought a Jew called Meisel into his court as financial advisor and thus created the position of Judenfürst (princely court Jew) which became a sought after connection. Meisel supplied Rudolph with objets d’art but his main function was to help raising finance for the war against Turkey. Loan money was raised by Meisel against promissory notes, land, tax immunity and other privileges or charters. The relationship was probably exploitative on both sides, according to Paul Johnson’s research. (Op.cit. p.253). When Meisel died, the state seized his estate on the grounds that his transactions were illegal, but by then most of Meisel’s funds were squirreled away in other hiding places.

When the Thirty Years War between the Protestants and the Catholics broke out in 1618, the Jews were not directly involved, but they were tightly entangled in the network of relationships between the various princes, principalities and military leaders. This terrible conflict wiped out almost one- third of the German population and left devastating ruin in its wake. But it elevated the Jews into the centre of the European economy. Huge armies had to be kept in the field, supplied with food, munitions, horses and fodder. Jewish distribution networks provided the funding and the logistical support, making themselves indispensable to all sides. They were paid in credit, protection and privileges. As more European powers intervened in the struggle, the Jews of the Rhineland, Alsace, Bohemia and Vienna supplied them all. In the words of Paul Johnson, “... while Germany underwent the worst harrowing in its history, the Jews survived and even prospered.” In the closing stages of the war, court Jews were acting as provision-contractors for entire armies. They became a permanent part of the absolutist princely state, raising the money for the gigantic baroque palaces and launching the mercantilist policies that kept it afloat. These included the Karlskirche and Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna as well as the monuments left by the principalities of Hanover, Munster, Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony and Mecklenburg. Jews were also active in the Scandinavian courts of the Danes and the Swedes, the Kings of Poland, Portugal and Spain.

Jewish financial skills also played a key role in the great military confrontations of the second half of the 17th century: the Habsburgs; successful resistance to the advance of the Ottoman Turks into Europe and the great coalition which halted Louis XIV’s attempt to dominate the Continent. Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703) played a key role in both as Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrian monarchy in their struggle against France (1673-79) and struggle against France (1673-79) and in Austria’s struggle against Turkey (1682). He produced uniforms, rations, wages, fodder, rafts to transport logistic supplies and soldiers down the river systems – even hospital care for the wounded. He was running the finances of a two-front war, marshalling the resources of a vast network of Jewish financial families, throughout Germany and the Netherlands.

The Polish and Ukraine peasants carried much of the workload and pressure of the food-exporting businesses ran by the Jewish suppliers to the armies during the thirty Years War. The Ukrainian peasants rose in arms in 1648. They were assisted by Dneipert Cossacks and Tartars from the Crimea. The principle animus was directed against Jews. Thousands of Jews fled from their villages to the safety of big fortified towns. The Polish troops were unable or unwilling to protect them. Thousands of Jews were killed and saw their synagogues burned down. As many as 100,000 Jews were killed and 300 communities destroyed.

Ill-treatment of Jews in Tsarist Russia The Tsarist regime in Russia epitomised the systematic ill-treatment of Jews. Whereas other autocracies in Austria and Russia, even in Rome, preserved an ambivalent attitude – protecting and exploiting the Hews as well as persecuting them from time to time – the Russians always treated Jews 21 as unacceptable aliens. Until the partition of Poland, 1772-95, they had more or less succeeded in keeping Jews out of their territories. However, their greed for Polish territory brought them a large Jewish population. They sought to solve “the Jewish problem” either by assimilation or expulsion.

The Russians engaged in the first modern exercise in social engineering by moving Jews around. First, they confined Jews to the “Pale of Settlement” in 1812, which consisted of twenty-five western provinces stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jews could not travel, let alone live, outside the “Pale” except with special legal authority. Next, a series of statutes, beginning in 1804, determined where Jews could live inside the Pale and what they were allowed to do there. They were not allowed to live or work in certain villages or sell alcohol to peasants. This destroyed the livelihood of many Jews. In theory the object was to push Jews to “productive labour” on the land. The real objective was to drive Jews into accepting baptism, or getting out altogether.

The next turn of the screw came in 1827 when Nicholas I, issued the “Cantonist Decree” which conscripted all male Jews from 12 to 25 years of age, placing the boys in schools at military depots and forcing them into baptism. Anxious to destroy Jewish schools, the authorities tried to force Jewish children into state schools where the languages of instruction were Russian, Polish and German only. A special committee was established in 1840 to promote the “moral education” of the undesirable, semi- criminal Jewish community. Jews were forbidden to wear traditional garments such as the skullcap and the kapota. It divided them into “useful” and “useless” Jews, subjecting the latter to triple conscription quotas.

Legislation discriminating against Jews and regulating their activities gradually accumulated. Much of it was frustrated by bribery within the corrupt Tsarist bureaucracy. Government policy oscillated between liberalism and repression. In 1856, Alexander II introduced a liberal phase, granting privileged rights to “useful” Jews. There was another in the 1870s which ended when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Thereafter the position of Jews deteriorated sharply.

During the last half-century of imperial Russia, the regulation of Jewish life was pushed to extreme levels. The Jews formed around 4 percent of the population, trapped in the Pale towns and shtetis (“group areas”), limited to certain occupations (“job reservation”), Jews wishing to use the Caucasian mineral springs had to pass an examination conducted by an army officer (“separate amenities”). Some resorts were entirely banned to Jews. There were anti- restrictions at Russian universities. Night raids were made by police to track residents without “Law of Settlement” documentation. Occasionally police organised massive “Jew Hunts”. Jewish communities had to provide “fixed quotas” of conscripts, but were banned from strategic divisions such as guards, the navy, quarantine services, the gendarmeries, military bands, the commissariat and from becoming officers. All Jews were banned from any kind of state service in St. Petersburg or Moscow. There were no Jewish teachers in the state schools, nor any Jewish university professors. They were not allowed to vote in municipal elections, excluded from juries, or to practice as notaries. They were not allowed to practice as barristers and solicitors without special permission. Jews were excluded from top training institutions and their attendance at high schools was limited by quotas.

These measures radicalised the Jewish population, but more Jews prospered by getting themselves baptised. Anton Rubinstein and his brother Nikolay ran the St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatories and even non-Christian Jews flourished in industries such as brewing, tobacco, textiles, grain shipping, railways, oil mining and, of course, banking.

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Anti-Semitism had been the official policy of the government for many decades. It took many forms, from tolerating pogroms to publishing the Protocols of Zion. Pogrom is a Russian word for “round up” or “”. After 1881 it gained the special meaning of assaults on Jews. The first pogrom came in 1871 in Odessa, instigated by Greek merchants. Then in 1881 it spread over one hundred centres and involved huge mobs, ethnic groups and police plundering and killing Jewish communities. These events were cited as illustration of the extent of popular indignation against this anti-social minority. The Jews claimed that the government inspired and permitted the mob action in the first place. Jews were robbed and killed on a large scale.

The pogroms led to a panic flight of Jews from Russia to the West. The year 1881 was the most important in Jewish history since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. After the first rush, the Jews left at a rate of 50,000 to 60,000 a year. In 1891 a total of 110,000 Russian Jews had emigrated and 137,000 a year later. In the pogrom year 1905-06, over 200,000 left. The exodus also involved neighbouring countries. Between 1881 and 1914 more than 350,000 Jews left Austrian Galicia. Many thousands also left Rumania. At the end of 1914 there were still five-and-a-half million Jews in Russia and two-and-a-half million in the Austrian Empire. Of these emigrants more than two million went to the United States where it created a mass of American urban Jewry. In time it changed the whole balance of Jewish power and influence in the USA and elsewhere. Many Jews settled in New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Louisville, New Orleans, Philadelphia and California. In the USA they acquired a disproportionate amount of financial and political power compared to other ethnic communities.

Anti-Semitism under Communism Jewish socialists like Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg (both with privileged backgrounds) thought of Judaism as nothing but the “spirit of hucksterism and swindle” which appears in every society where exploitation reigns. Thus Marx removed the Jewish question from the racial and religious sphere and gave it a social foundation. Marx accepted the Lepsius historian’s narrative that Moses was a renegade Egyptian priest, leading a revolt of outcasts including lepers and negroes who derived his ideas from the monotheistic sun-cult of Akhenatan mixed up with pseudo-factual nonsense of his own. He maintained that the profane base of Judaism was self interest, its cult was hucksterism and his worldly god was money. For the Jewish slaves of Mammon, the world is a stock exchange. But the Jews are only the symptoms of a disease. This disease is the religion of money and its modern form is capitalism. The conspiracy of Judaism is but an element of the entire bourgeois capitalist class. The making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical and anti-social activity. Thus Marx superimposed his concept of class on top of race and religion. It expands the scope and multiplies the number of those to be treated as conspirators (capitalists) and as victims (proletariat).

Marx’s paradoxical combination of Jewishness with anti-Semitism appealed to a growing coterie of Jewish intelligentsia. According to Paul Johnson (op.cit. pp.353-355), Das Kapital became a new kind of Torah for the radical left Jewish intelligentsia. They turned against the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism. They hated their own Jewishness and to fight for the “revolutionary struggle”, was a morally acceptable means to escape from it: a personal escape from their Jewish burden. Such non-Jewish Jews were prominent in every revolutionary party in every European country, just before and after the First . They took a leading role in insurrections which followed the defeat of Germany.

In Russia Jews were most prominently associated with revolutionary violence. The architect of the putch which placed the Bolshevik government in dictatorial power in October 1917 was a non-Jew, 23

Lenin. But the executive agent was Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein and a product of Odessa. Trotsky led the armed uprising which overthrew the provisional government and commanded the Communist forces during the Civil War that followed. The consequences for the Jews were appalling. The White Russian armies, seeking to destroy the Soviet regime, treated all Jews as enemies. In Ukraine, the Civil War developed into the most extensive pogrom in Jewish history. There were more than 1000 separate incidents involving the killing of Jews. Between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews were murdered. In other parts of eastern Europe, a similar identification of Jews with Bolshevism led directly to murderous attacks on Jewish communities – particularly in Poland, Hungary and Rumania, where the Communist Parties were run by non-Jewish Jews. The traditional observant Jews of the ghettos paid the penalty.

Since Marxism itself was rooted in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Soviet regime set about its business by identifying whole categories of people as “class enemies” and then persecuting them. Jews were branded as “exploiters and profiteers” or “bagmen” which were to be eliminated as anti-social” groups. Thousands were liquidated, others, perhaps 300,000 slipped across the borders into Poland, the Baltic States, Turkey and the Balkans.

But Jews were also prominent in the Bolshevik Party, in the top echelons as well as among the rank and file. Around 20 percent of delegates at party congresses were Jewish, particularly non-Jewish Jews. They were also active in the Cheka (secret police) as commissars, tax inspectors and bureaucrats. So Jews were “bagmen” as well as “Bolsheviki”.

In August 1919 all Jewish religious communities were dissolved, their property confiscated and the majority of synagogues were closed. The study of Hebrew and the publication of secular works in Hebrew were banned. Non-Jewish Jews, in charge of Yevsektsiya, set up within the Communist Party, were tasked to eradicate “Jewish cultural particularism”. They set about destroying Russian Zionism with its 300,000 members and 1,200 branches. Cheka units were used to round up Jews to be sent to camps from which they never returned.

Once Stalin took power, the pressure on Jews increased in intensity. He persecuted not only Jews but also the Non-Jewish Jews. He strove to eliminate them from all senior posts in the regime. The destruction of Jewish institutions increased as did the physical threat to Jews and Non-Jewish Jews. The distinction between the two categories was seen as a mere camouflage for an underlying identity of aim. It was believed that they worked together behind the scenes.

Stalin made non-Jewish Jews the agents of his anti-Semitism. For tactical reasons, he supported the creation of the state of Israel, thinking it would be a socialist state. But his anti-Semitism endured – despite the fact that his daughter, Svetlana, was married to a Jew. Under Stalin, thousands of Jewish intellectuals and writers were executed by his secret police. This campaign was extended to other East-Bloc countries. In 1953, nine medical doctors, six of them Jews, were accused of seeking to poison Stalin in conjunction with US, British and Zionist agents. A show-trial was organised as prelude to the mass deportation of Jews to Siberia. Stalin died before the doctors came to trial and proceedings were quashed by his successors.

For several decades since Stalin the Soviet campaign against the Jews was conducted under the code name of anti-Zionism. Zionism, of which the state of Israel is but an outpost, is seen as a form of Jewish Imperialism. Judaism and Zionism are seen as inseparably linked, both rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people. Zionists and Judaist leaders are engaged in a world-wide 24 conspiracy along the lines of the old Protocols of Zion. It is like an “international Cosa Nostra” with “... a common centre, a common programme and common funds”. (See Johnson, op.cit. p.575)

Behind Zionism, it is believed, lies the idea of the “God-chosen” status of the Jewish people, the of messianism and the idea of ruling over the people of the world. Today, anti-Zionist material continues to flow from the Russian Federation and the Arab World.

The Holocaust The assault of the Nazis on the Jews from 1933 to 1945, the central event of modern Jewish history, is known as the “Holocaust” (in Hebrew, the Shoah). It involved first the in all walks of life and then what was labelled “the Final solution to the Jewish Question”. This involved the use of industrial technology in an effort to kill every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe, simply for being Jewish.

As a writer of interpretative history, Paul Johnson made a major effort to find answers to the question why this highly civilised nation, the world’s best educated, found it necessary or possible to turn with such colossal, organised brutality on the Jews? Attempts to find answers have filled whole libraries, but many questions remain.

The chief components of an explanation could be found in the following: - the impact of the First World War and the conditions imposed on Germany by Allied Powers in the Treaty of Versailles; - the impact of the post-war economic conditions, the hyper-inflation and the Great Depression; - the impact of conventional elements of anti-Semitism in Germany ranging from Christian Judensan to pseudo-scientific race theories of the herrenvolk; - the impact of German perceptions of the corrupting influences of Jewish promiscuity and moral degradation (based on Freudian-Jewish psychiatry) on German culture – particularly around decadent Berlin; - the impact of the growing fear of “Jewish-Bolshevik Russia” and the proliferating mythology of the Protocols of Zion stressing the Jewish-Bolshevist connection and the dangers of infiltration of Germany by Ostjuden, a dark and inferior race corrupting German culture and blood; - the impact of the emergence of the totalitarian political party structure which Hitler was able to bring to life with his exceptional organisational skills and demagogic oratory combining a socialist group, the German Workers Party with strong-arm ex-servicemen.

In time, Hitler’s small band of supporters in the Nazi Party morphed into the National Socialist (NSDAP) Democratic Labour Party which built its support on the basis of the German’s need for a scapegoat – something to blame for the hard times suffering of the Germans. Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, described his own experience as a German soldier fighting in the World War I trenches and his own discovery of his German soul. Hitler was an Austrian by birth – albeit of uncertain heritage – but a Pan- German by conviction. He wrote in Mein Kampf that “... if at the beginning of the war, and during the war, 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew defilers had been put under poison gas as hundreds of thousands of our best workers from all walks of life had to endure at the front, then the of millions would not have been in vain”. (Quoted by Paul Johnson, op.cit. p.472)

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German politics were especially vulnerable to the effects of the depression. German leaders were mercilessly squeezed by both Allied Powers and by voters’ concerns. The German economy had been tortured for a decade, first by reparation payments and then by hyperinflation. By the end of the 1920s, it was exceptionally dependent on Wall Street loans. The infant Weimar Republic was extremely fragile. Parts of Germany were excluded from the Reich. On the Ostfront, Soviet Russia was flexing its muscles. The violent hostility of the German left and the German right stalked the land. Radical nationalists fed on the humiliation of the war guilt clauses, on resistance to reparations and on the ongoing Allied occupation of the Rhineland. Radical socialists fed on mass unemployment and the dire effects of hyperinflation. Hitler’s NSDAP fed on fusing the grievances of both Left and Right.

Confusion reigned in the field of international finance. The Allied Powers sought to make Germany pay for the entire costs of the war so that the Allied Powers could then pay off their own war debts. The Soviet Regime refused to recognise the debts of the Tsar. Germany refused full payment. The plan proved to be unworkable. It was clear that the recovery of Germany was essential for the recovery of Europe as a whole.

The total German reparation debts amounted to 269 million German Goldmarks payable over 42 years. When the German marks were heavily reduced in value by hyperinflation, the French occupied the Rhineland area in 1923. Various plans were subsequently designed (the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan, et.al.) to adjust the German repayment schedule, stretching up to 1988, on a mortgage secured against the German state railways. By 24 October, 1929, the day of the Great Crash on the New York Exchange, the world economy was moving into depression and the question of German war reparations became irrelevant. Dictatorships or authoritarian governments were in ascendance in various shapes and sizes. (See Norman Davies, Europe – A History, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp.934-1088)

In the early 1930s the Nazi Party established themselves as the largest single party in the Reichstag. After endless Cabinet crises Hitler became Chancellor in December 1932 under President Hindenburg, hoping by this action to stem the rising influence of the Communist Party. A month later a mysterious fire destroyed the Reichstag building. The Nazis blamed the Communists and won 44 percent of the popular vote at the next election. They passed an Enabling Act granting the Chancellor dictatorial powers for four years. He organised a plebiscite to approve Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, receiving 96 percent support. In August 1934, following Hindenburg’s death, he called another plebiscite to approve his own elevation to the new party-state position of “Führer and Reich Chancellor” with full emergency powers. This time he received 90 percent support. Hitler was now in control. The democratic process now produced a dictator who used his party’s elite guard, the SS (Black shirts) to wipe out the Party’s older formation of storm troopers, the SA (Brown shirts). He banned the Communist Party and then dissolved all the other parties.

His economic policy was based on a combination of Keynesian financial management with complete state direction of industry and agriculture. The trade unions were replaced by a Nazi labour front and strikes were outlawed. A state-funded work creation programme ensured full employment: building the autobahns, the launching of Volkswagen and, above all, rearmament. In 1936 he introduced a Four- Year-Plan including a state-owned steel corporation. In 1935 Hitler reintroduced conscription.

In Mein Kampf Hitler set out his ideas about the German herrenvolk (master race) and Germany’s right to seek Lebensraum in the East. He divided mankind into a hierarchy of races: culture founders, culture bearers and culture destroyers. All great cultures from the past perished from blood-poisoning. Each 26 healthy nation needs its own soil. He also believed in the “iron logic” of “racial purity”. Jews ought to be excluded from German citizenship and from state employment. Jewish traders should be boycotted and marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews forbidden. These measures were clearly defined in the Nurnberg Laws of 1935. The Nazis approved euthanasia for mentally and genetically handicapped. Nazi propaganda peddled strange notions about Teutonic Knights and created a Hitler personality cult of all that is wise and good. The Party Guard, the Schutzstaffeln and the Gestapo (Secret State Police) were used to supplement existing military and police forces. Nazi-run People’s Courts and People’s Judges increasingly absorbed the work of the traditional judiciary.

Starting in 1936 some 500,000 German Jews were persecuted and expelled. Apprehension really mounted after the Kristallnacht of 1938 when Jewish synagogues and shops were damaged or smashed.

In 1938 Hitler started to reach across the German borders when he engineered the Anschluss or merger with Austria. In 1939 he reclaimed Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and then Danzig from the Poles after organising a rapprochement with Stalin. On September 1st, 1939, Hitler’s army invaded Poland and started the Second World War, facing a rather impotent array of Western Powers wracked by the fallout of the Depression years.

After the fall of Poland, 13 European countries were due to be overrun: 8 by Hitler and 5 by Stalin. In the summer of 1940, first the Low Countries and then France fell in a matter of weeks under the onslaught of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. The British Expeditionary Force was soon beaten on the dunes of Dunkirk. Then followed a costly failure when the Nazi air offensive against Britain failed. Hitler then switched to this fatal Russian offensive.

The wholesale onslaught on the Jews in Germany and in the occupied territories in the form of the “Final solution” was started under the signature of Göring on 31 July, 1941. The policy was annihilation under the official euphemism of “resettlement”. As the German armies advanced into the heart of the former Tsarist “Pale” territories, the notorious Einsatzgruppen rounded up Jews by the thousands, driving them to pits and gulleys to be shot en masse. At one such action near Kiev around 70,000 Jews were killed.

Adolf Eichmann was head of the section tasked with the Jewish action. Decisions were taken to proceed with experiments to use Zyklon-B gas to create a number of dedicated death camps at Chelmno, Belzec and Treblinka, to expand Nazi concentration camps in Poland, notably Auschwitz and Birkenau, to consult the best German firms regarding crematorium design, to draw up timetables and rolling-stock arrangements for international railway transports and to recruit auxiliary formations.

The ultimate death-toll will never be known, but at the Nurnberg Trials after the war, an estimate was made of 5.85 million. But although no accurate figures could be obtained, no responsible estimates have brought the figure down below 5 million. (See Norman Davies, op.cit. p.1023)

Judaism and the Jews Today

In its issue of July 28th, 2012, The Economist, a financial newspaper owned by Jewish interests, published a Special Report entitled Judaism and the Jews. Its subtitle read “Alive and Well”. It says that Judaism is flourishing, both in Israel where 43 percent of the world’s Jews now live, and throughout the Jewish diaspora. In the diaspora, Jewish life has never been so free, so prosperous, so 27 unthreatened. Jewish is cool in America. Barmitzva (the coming-of-age ceremony) has become stylish too. Also in smaller diaspora countries such as France, the , Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and South Africa. Jews are prospering too. Even in Russia and Ukraine, where Judaism and Zionism were repressed in communist times, Jews are prominent in business. The Economist did not provide comparative figures of Jewish per capita income levels, but in practice it is likely to be higher than any other ethnic group, anywhere in the world.

Although Hitler had wiped out close to one-third of Jewish people in central and eastern Europe, the “final solution” of the Nazis had been preceded by a flurry of pogroms across the then tsarist empire that started 60 years earlier, sending waves of mass Jewish emigration westward. By the time Hitler struck, some 6 million Jews were safe in North and South America and in Britain, with 3 million more living in the . The Sephardic communities of north Africa and the Levant, long a minority within Jewry, together with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe who were not welcomed elsewhere, became the core population of the new state of Israel.

The Economist’s Special Report supplied the distribution of the world’s total Jewish population of 13,580,000 by country for 2010:

Israel 5,703,700 United States 5,275,000 France 483,500 Canada 375,000 Britain 292,000 Russia 205,000 Argentina 182,300 Germany 119,000 Australia 107,500 Brazil 95,600 Ukraine 71,500 South Africa 70,800 Hungary 48,600 Mexico 39,400 Belgium 30,300 Netherlands 30,000 Italy 28,400 Chile 20,500

According to Paul Johnson’s research in the period 1800-80 the Sephardic percentage of Jewry fell from 20 to 10 percent, most of whom were concentrated in the Afro-Asian Mediterranean area. In Africa and Asia as a whole, the number of Jews in this area did rise from 500,000 to 750,000. In Europe, during the same period, the total leapt from two million to seven million. Jews married younger and lived longer than their compatriots. The Ashkenazi Jews were concentrated in big cities like Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Odessa, Berlin, Paris and New York. But by 1914, there were around eight million Jews in the two great empires of east-central Europe, Russia and Austria, nearly all of them in towns and cities. In modern times, Jews flourished in Anglophone countries where they enjoyed constitutionally protected civil rights and flexible economic opportunities.

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Orthodox vs Non-Orthodox David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was a socialist-Zionist who believed that the 2000 years of diasporic Judaism was a deviation from the true Jewish ethos. He thought the Talmud as Judaism’s body of law and lore was too casuistic. He thought the new state ought to return to pure Biblical guidelines.

The new state of Israel also had to mobilise support amongst the millions of standoffish assimilationist Jews, especially those who found refuge in America. But after the Six-Day War against the Arabs in 1967, support for Israel increased. Fundraising and lobbying on behalf of Israel became American Jewry’s “secular religion”. A grassroots campaign was also launched among younger Jews to support campaigns to promote emigration to Israel from all quarters, particularly for Soviet Jewry.

The Main Jewish Denominations

Modern Ultra-Orthodox Conservative Reform Orthodox Inspired by Source of Dictated by Moses do. God/Interpreted do. the Torah by humans Authority of Only ethical God inspired, do., but more Binding but Religious aspects are immutable flexible changed by Rabbis Law binding Do. but pushing Minutely regulated Modernised for Restoration of Ritual and for change by halacha and women and gay some rituals and Practice regarding unchanging Rabbis practices women Divine Support Zionism Support Zionism Zionism and Accept Israel and manifestation but not much but not much Israel immigration to Israel and support immigration immigration immigration - Jewish mother - Jewish mother - converted by ritual or father do. but mitzvot Definition of conversion, - Converts by interpreted do. Jewishness circumcision immersion and more flexibly - accepting mitzvot circumcision (religious precepts) but not mitzvot

Source: The Economist Special Report

By the turn of the the question of what defines Jewishness became a matter of strong debate. Many diaspora Jews continued to drift out of Judaism or even out of Jewishness and chose assimilation. But many consciously decided to remain Jewish, choosing one of several ways to express their commitment. Jewish Orthodoxy has come surging back, even producing a demographic explosion among the ultra-Orthodox, the haredim (God-fearers), compensating for the outflow from active Judaism caused by assimilation. The overall total of Jews world-wide is now somewhat higher than it was 40 years ago. According to David Landau (The Economist, op.cit.) one in ten Jews is now haredi and the modern-Orthodox account for another 10 percent.

Many Israelis like to think of themselves as “traditional”, but even the avowedly secular live Jewish lives – including religious lives. Israel increasingly radiates its national, cultural and religious 29

Jewishness into diaspora communities. Landau states that although Israel’s mainstream parties are committed to a “two-state solution”, in practice, the growing modern-Orthodox settler movement in the West Bank spearheads a government policy of “occupation without end”. To sustain and justify that policy, a stridently nationalistic Zeitgeist is evolving and it is winning the soul of the diaspora Jewry. (See Landau’s Special Report, op.cit. p.4)

The prevailing political sentiment is described by Landau as “aggressive defensiveness”, a curious amalgam of victimhood and intolerance. Dissent about Israel is discouraged. In America discussion about Israel is largely shut down, a disinclination to argue about Israel. But Jews find themselves out of step with most world opinion about Israel. Diaspora Jewish leaders insist that Israel is misunderstood. They attribute criticism to anti-Semitism. Israeli hawkishness vis-a-vis Iran and militant Palestinians turn young diaspora Jews away from Judaism. As their attachment to Judaism weakens, so does their commitment to Israel.

Conservatists vs Reformists in America The Conservative and Reform Judaist camps are the two largest Judaist denominations in the USA. The Conservatists accounted for more than half of all synagogue-affiliated Jews only a few decades ago. Now their numbers are on the decline. The Reform camp with some 1.1 million fee-paying members and another million-odd who identify themselves as such deny that they are losing ground. They have changed their rules by accepting those born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother as full-fledged Jews and welcome Jewish-Gentile couples into their congregations.

Both movements had their roots in 19th century Germany. The Conservative movement became the bridge for millions of immigrants who moved from traditional orthodoxy in eastern Europe to the USA. Men and women prayed together and liturgy was revised. They could drive to synagogue on the Sabbath. They still insist that their Conservatism is based on halakah, the system of Jewish law based on the Talmud.

The Reform camp was in favour of ditching halakah and even moved their Sabbath to Sunday to fit in with the Christian world around them. Yet Reform has gone a long way back on itself. It embraced Zionism but introduced modern practices into its synagogue services. Both branches of Judaism are facing a slide away from religion. The largest denomination among American Jews is “none”, and getting larger. The same is true among Christians. The “unchurched” are growing as the mood is changing towards , especially in the Blue (Democratic) states where most of the Jews live.

Sociologists have recorded a steep increase in Jewish-Gentile intermarriage in recent decades. Intermarried couples are less likely to bring up their children as Jews. Their commitment to the synagogue is more tenuous and most of them are less actively Jewish. They reflect the age of “pick- and-choose”. The Orthodox say Judaism is not a buffet. programmes are now on offer at almost every university in the USA. Of some 350,000 Jewish students on American campuses about 25 percent take Jewish studies courses. American Jews appear to be largely ignorant of Judaism. For the majority, is confined to a few hours a week and ends at the age of 13, after bar- (or bat- for girls) mitzvah. Orthodox children almost all attend Jewish day schools, at least at the elementary level. Many liberal Jews still see sectarian day schools as somehow un-American. The majority of those who intermarry are persons who did not attend Jewish day schools. In Australia and South Africa where day schools are the norm in Jewish communities, intermarriage rates are significantly lower than in America. 30

Judaism in Israel In a survey of religious beliefs and practices among Jewish Israelis conducted in 2009, 46 percent defined themselves as secular, but only 16 percent said they did not observe tradition at all. Only 6 percent said that circumcision is not important to them and only 10 percent had no time for the Passover Seder. Around 70 percent of respondents said they only eat kosher food. Most observe the Sabbath, but only a third of the total “meticulously”, and most do not favour imposing those restrictions on others. No less than 20 percent said they attended all-night study sessions on Shavuot.

Most of the Russian-Israeli community, now more than 1 million strong, arrived in the , after the collapse of communism. The Russian immigrants are purposefully assimilating into Israeli society and tradition-based behaviour is part of that assimilation. That also applies to some 300,000 who are not recognised as Jewish under Israeli law. The law is based on the orthodox definition of a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother, or converted to Judaism. Some of the younger ones go through conversion during their army service. They are prevented from marrying full-fledged Jews in Israel, because the Rabbinate has a monopoly over marriages. In response they hop over to Cyprus for a civil marriage, which is legally acceptable. But hating rabbis is an integral part of Israeli .

The biggest reason for hating rabbis is the draft. The 400 Talmud students whom Ben-Gurion exempted from army service have grown to 110,000 able-bodied haredi men who have served neither in the regular army nor in the reserves. Each year another 6000 haredi yeshiva (Talmudic seminary) students reach the age of 18 and join the ranks of the draft dodgers. That figure already represents 13 percent of the Jewish male age group (Arab-Israelis are also exempt from the draft) and is set to grow fast. Among Jewish schoolchildren, 26 percent of first-graders are haredi. Their schools focus on religious learning as basic subjects such as maths and English get short shrift.

Under the present law draft-dodging becomes a way of life because the dodger must remain full-time in his Yeshiva. Unemployment among haredi men exceeds 60 percent. The rest of the population shoulders the tax burden of supporting the increasingly impoverished haredi community. But the High Court of Justice has ruled that the draft is unconstitutional. Netanyahu has a long association with the haredi establishment and is not keen to alienate this support group. But a community of around 900,000 cannot expect to continue not pulling its weight.

Israeli Politics The Revisionist-Zionist Party, the Russian Immigrant Party and the Orthodox Zionist Party have given Binyamin Netanyahu the power to govern Israel for several years. Netanyahu calls his tripartite alliance the “national camp” and the opposition the “peace camp”. His allies have developed a messianic theology based on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible which sets the conquest and settlement of the land above all else. These teachings have penetrated and influenced much broader swathes of Israel’s politics and culture.

The conflation of hawkishness and Jewishness is also in evidence in the diaspora where it blurs criticism of Israel’s occupation policy with anti-Semitism. If “anti-Israel” equals anti-Semitic (i.e. anti- Jewish), then Israel, and especially the occupation policy being criticised, equals Jewish. A consequence of this trend is the possibility of the rise of anti-Semitism. In the Muslim world anti-Semitism and anti- Israelism coincides.

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Iran’s former President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. His government worked hard to obtain the means to implement his threats to annihilate the Jewish state. Netanyahu brands this as a campaign for the “deligitimisation” of Israel. This implies that any critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is branded as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But how can building settlements on Palestinian land be acceptable simply by claiming a mitzvah (a Judaist religious precept) to occupy the land? The creation of Israel should rather be seen as an opportunity to create a viable and sustainable Jewish society that is not based on pushing Palestinians from their place of birth and where they have been living for many generations. The Israelis cannot escape sharing the land with the Palestinians – either as one state or a negotiated two or more.

Ideological Divisions Judaic Reform movements outside Israel have long fought against Orthodoxy’s monopoly on Judaism in Israel. Non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are not allowed to conduct marriages and conversions. Many Israelis are uncomfortable with the notion of a in Israel; they insist the state’s religion should at least be Judaism and not Orthodox Judaism. Many American Jews are opposed to Netanyahu’s pandering to the Orthodox factions in Israel.

The big divide between the Conservative and the Reform movements involves, primarily, the question of “who is a Jew?” and “who decides?”. Reform Judaism recognises patrilineal Jews (Jewish father, Gentile mother) as full Jews, provided they choose to live Jewish lives. has stuck with the traditional matrilineal criterion. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who are accepted as Jews by Reform synagogues are not considered Jewish by Conservative rabbis.

A further problem is the turf war that is waged by the two non-Orthodox movements against Israeli Orthodoxy. The solution to the problem seems to be the realisation that Judaism is on the path of change and adjustment between traditional religiosity and secularism. Apathy, alienation and assimilation inevitably weaken Jewish solidarity in the diaspora.

International Jewry and Modern Capitalism

In New York and elsewhere in America, the Jews soon moved to control the centre of the 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 India 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 South Africa. 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 32 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.

The Global Financial Crisis 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 bulkanised 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.

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 assessment: “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 33 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 was controlled by Jews.

The Disproportionate Concentration of Power and Influence 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”.

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 “Bible Belt” campaigners, the insurgent Islamic jihadists and the efforts of these groups to win over the support of the emerging Latino contingency.

Judaism in Retrospect

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?

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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 (believed?) 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)

Bibliography

Davies, N. (1996) Europe – A History, Oxford University Press, Oxford Ferguson, N. (2008) The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World, Allen Lane, London Hattstein, M. (2006) World Religions, Krönemann, Cologne Johnson, P. (1987) A History of the Jews, Phoenix Press, London Landau, D. (2012) “Judaism and the Jews” in The Economist, Special Report, July 28th, 2012, pp.1-12 Werblowsky, R.J.Z. (1997) “Judaism, the Religion of Israel” in Zaehner (ed) Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, New York

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The Rise and Decline of Christianity

Christianity, today, is still said to be the largest religion in the world, but it is essentially associated with Western civilisation. Together, the Greek philosophy of rationalism, the Roman doctrine of the supremacy of law and Christian ethics, form the three pillars of Western civilisation. Christian ethics, by assigning a central role to the sovereign and inviolable individual conscience, provided the foundation of the Western concept of what is right and desirable as distinct from what is not.

Christianity and the Bible

The basic theme of the Old Testament is that of God’s dealings with Israel from the time when the twelve tribes were united under Moses to form a nation. This story is set within a universal context by the opening chapter of Genesis which recounts God’s creation of heaven and earth and of man “in his own image”. Abraham’s descendants, out of the fallen mass of mankind, were chosen to form the nucleus of faithful people and to be both the recipients of the divine blessing and the source of its mediation to all men. These descendants, who were delivered by God from bondage in Egypt, were united to him in a Covenant and led into the promised land and provided with a King which was at the same time the Messiah (the Lord’s Anointed). Israelites did not persevere on the way of righteousness, so they were brought to the suffering of exile in Babylonia. After their return from Babylon a succession of foreign powers held them in submission: first the Persians, then the Romans in the latter half of the 1st century BC.

For Christians, God is conceived as a trinity: God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit – all aspects of the divine. God the Father is seen, similar to Judaism, as the creator of all things and is the Lord of history and of judgment. God the Son (Jesus Christ) is the centre of Christianity and is connected with the salvation of creation and the redemption of humankind. The Holy Spirit, the most difficult to comprehend, can be recognised through its actions and it is the source of the power of the church and its sacraments. The paradox of theology is how and to what extent a good and just and omnipotent God is responsible for evil in the world. Evil personified, is depicted as having been created by God in the form of the fallen angel Lucifer, who fell from grace as a result of arrogance. Lucifer, or Satan, is God’s opponent or rival in designing the order of salvation. Satan takes advantage of human freedom, tempting an individual to turn away from God and to do evil.

The expectation that the promised Messiah and a New Covenant would be fulfilled through the mission of a preacher called Jesus of Nazareth, gave rise to the birth of Christianity. Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God and saying that the time was fulfilled and the kingdom of God was at hand.

There is no recorded instance in the first three Gospels of Jesus making an explicit affirmation of Messiahship. It appears that Jesus considered himself Messias Designatus (Messiah designate). Only when he had accomplished his mission was he to be enthroned as Messiah. In the preachings of Jesus he indicated that he thought of men being in bondage to evil and of his own death as the means of securing their release. He did not publicly indulge in theological reflection with regard to his own person, but he did believe himself to stand in a unique relationship to God – as indeed the “Son of God” who, as “divine agent”, was to become through death, the glorified “Son of Man”. His own death he interpreted as a means by which the barrier of sin between God and man would be removed – a victorious struggle over the powers of evil. Thus would be established the moral conditions in which the Rule of God could be perfected.

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The Apostolic Preaching

The preachings of the apostles of Jesus of Nazareth consist mainly of the proclamation of the events surrounding his death and “resurrection” in an eschatological setting. It was affirmed that the age of the fulfilment of the Old Testament had dawned and that this had taken place through the ministry of Jesus, whose death was according to the determinate council and foreknowledge of God. But death could not hold him and God had both raised him and exalted him, thereby making him both “Christ and Lord” – that is, the promised Messiah. The sign of his present power and glory is the Holy Spirit, now dwelling in the Christian community. He himself, in due course, would return for the final act of consummation.

As the first disciples of Jesus were Jews, potential Gentile converts faced uncertainty about the significance of the Old Testament, and the relation of Israel to the Christian community. The role of Paul of Tarsus (the later St. Paul), converted from being a persecutor of Christians to a believer, was to find acceptable answers to these questions. Paul of Tarsus answered the first question by saying that the Old Testament was a preparatory discipline to tutor people on the path to Christ. Having served its purpose, it was no longer authoritative. To the second question Paul of Tarsus answered that the Christian community had now taken the role of the true Israel and that the Jews, who had failed to understand their role of preparing the way, had been replaced by the “righteous remnant”, the New Israel, which is the Christian Church. So the Christian community, composed of Jew and Gentile alike, may appropriate the Jewish hope. It is to the Church that the Jewish scriptures belong by right, since its members are Abraham’s heirs. So the divine purpose, which ran through all the , had entered upon the final stages of its fulfilment. This, according to St. Paul, was the outcome of the mission of Jesus Christ, whose Gospel he had been commissioned to preach.

The Canon of Scripture and the Christian Creed

The Bible of the early church was the Old Testament in its Greek form, which consisted of what is now the Protestant Old Testament. This, it was believed, was “God’s Book”, the record of his ordering of history. To the body of Jewish scriptures was added Christian writings – including the Epistles of St. Paul and the four Gospels. Lists of “canons” were drawn up and by the 4th century, New Testament writings were divided into three classes: acknowledged books, disputed writings and the spurious. The combination of the first two produced the 27 books of today’s New Testament as endorsed by several scholars and synods.

From the earliest times of the Christian Church, efforts were made to identify the fundamentals of the Christian belief – essential to all who profess themselves Christian – distinct from speculative items concerning which difference of opinion was not only legitimate, but to be expected. These formulae came to be expressed in succinctly formulated Creeds.

In essence, a Christian Creed involves the following components: - a belief in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; - a belief in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who came down from heaven, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day and ascended to heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come again with glory to judge living and dead, of whose kingdom there will be no end; 37

- a belief in the Holy Spirit, the life-giver, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and co- glorified, who spoke through the prophets; and in one holy all-embracing Christian Church; - confession in one Baptism for the remission of sins, looking forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Christianity and Western Civilisation

Christianity is historically the single most important ethical impulse of Western civilisation. During the most of its first millennium, Western civilisation was known as Western Christendom. There existed among Western Christian peoples a sense of community that they were distinct from Turks, Moors, Byzantines and others. These feelings provided a fertile seedbed for the Crusade campaigns against Islam in the Middle Ages. Similarly the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and the division of Western Christendom into a Protestant north and a Catholic south are also distinctive features of Western history.

Viewed in historical perspective, Christianity has given the Western world much of its character and coherence, permeating human behaviour in various ways, either directly or, through codes of morals and through customs shaped under religious influences, indirectly. Despite the great secularising process that took place during the last four centuries, belief in God has continued to play a predominant role in Western political ideas, motivations and institutions. Historically speaking, the rise of modern democracy was strongly influenced by the interaction of Greek rationalism, Roman Law and Judaic-Christian ethics. Even Karl Marx, no friend of religious dogma and inclined to trace historical events to economic rather than religious concepts, acknowledged that democracy is based on the principle of the sovereign worth of the individual, which, in turn, is based on the belief of Christianity that man has an immortal soul. This interpretation is in line with the general findings of many historians on the role actually played by Christianity in the genesis of democracy.

It is indeed an open question whether modern democracy with its emphasis on the dignity of the individual person could ever have arisen without religious impulses. It is also a legitimate question to ask whether, even today, the formal devices of democratic government alone could hold society together without the cement of a common religious belief. (See Arnold Brecht, Political Theory – the Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Princeton University Press, 1959, pp.456-457)

The Birth of Christianity

In 63BC, Palestine was invaded by the Romans. Near the end of the reign of King Herod, the Roman appointed ruler, Jesus was born, possibly in 6BC. He grew up in the town of Nazareth in Galilee and worked as a carpenter. At the local synagogue and in Jerusalem he immersed himself in and, in time, became an itinerant preacher. He soon picked up a following of local disciples and delivered a famous sermon called the “Sermon on the Mount” as well as the “Lord’s Prayer”. He repeatedly preached a message of love of others and resentment of the mean-spirited; he saw personal wealth as a burden and a peril, respected humility and hated pride. He especially despised hypocrisy and his overwhelming message was of God’s love and . He soon attracted thousands of sympathisers and followers and urged his disciples to spread the Christian message of love and repentance to all nations.

After Jesus knocked over the tables of money-changers and traders inside the temple, local authorities concluded that Jesus was a troublemaker and his activities were reported to the high priest, who 38 decided to take action. He feared Jesus had become too popular and was too widely perceived as exercising supernatural powers. Expecting to be arrested, Jesus called together his disciples for a final meal. Soon afterwards he was arrested by the Jewish local authorities. When asked by the Chief Priest, he confirmed that he was “Christ” – a name that signified the anointed person, the Messiah who would transform Israel. The Chief Priest thereupon accused Jesus of blasphemy. Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who condemned him to death by crucifixion. Jesus seemed to believe that he was ordained to die, that his birth and death were part of a divine plan, that his disciples would spread his creed and that he would take his place with God himself. After his death at the cross, the body of Jesus was placed in a cave-like tomb with a heavy stone to block the entrance. It was reported that after two days the blocking stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty.

According to the accounts of some of the apostles, Jesus made miraculous appearances to them during the next few days and informed them that they were now the leaders of the movement “... to make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. I am with you always, to the close of the age”. To his followers, Jesus was now seen as the long-awaited Messiah.

(See Geoffrey Blainey – A Short History of Christianity, Penguin Group, Victoria, 2011, pp.4-35)

Early Christianity was characterised by three main beliefs: first, that God had sent his son, Jesus Christ, into the world to save all those who merited or attracted his mercy; second, that Jesus Christ, after death, was resurrected, ascended to heaven, where he reigns alongside God; and third, that God and Jesus together, in the form of the Holy Spirit, can inhabit the hearts and minds of Christians.

From the start, Christianity was faced with scepticism about the resurrection and ascent to heaven of Jesus, the Nazarene. However, the Jewish people, dispersed across the Roman Empire, provided the first network through which Christianity spread. Jews were influential already in the towns and cities of coastal North Africa, Arabia, Persia, Syria, other parts of Asia minor, Spain, Italy, Sicily, the Greek mainland and islands. After their failed rebellion against the Romans in the years 65 to 70, thousands of Jews were compelled to move elsewhere. Wherever the Jews settled, they founded synagogues as houses of worship, as places for meetings and social gatherings, as schools for children and as a “courthouse” to settle questions of legal dispute.

The first Jewish Christians used the synagogues to spread their religious precepts as “God-fearers” and were more welcoming to newcomers than the more restricted Judaistic congregations. Brief manuscripts came into circulation, recording some of the sayings and doings of Christ. Occasionally Christian congregations broke away from existing synagogues and attracted growing numbers of Gentiles and other pagans. As Christians and Jews gradually moved apart, Christian congregations became familiar with the contents of the Old Testament (mainly Greek versions).

Although most of Christ’s disciples let him down during his lifetime, all but one returned to the faith. But the most important recruit to the faith was Paul of Tarsus. The town of Tarsus was situated in southern Turkey and held a flourishing Jewish quarter. Paul, formerly known as Saul, was both a Jew and a Roman citizen. After being tutored by Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem, Saul became a persecutor of Christians who offended against Jewish law – including urging on the stoning of offenders. Travelling to Damascus he had an overwhelming experience which converted him to become a fervent follower of Christ’s disciples in Jerusalem. He became convinced that Christianity should not remain a branch of Judaism but become a religion for all people, Gentiles as well as Jews. It was under Paul’s influence that 39 the term “Christian” was first used. It was in Antioch that Paul’s congregation agreed that Gentiles and Jews should each be free to follow their own rules on diet, circumcision and marriage. Paul set out a credo for the infant church: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.

Paul was a talented organiser, theologian and preacher. His letters, or epistles, are the earliest surviving documents written by a Christian. He emphasised in his teachings the idea of original, or inherited sin as part of human nature that had originated with Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. Those who were saved by Christ and by their faith in him would be rewarded with a place in heaven and a victory over death. For Paul charity was a way of thinking and feeling, and much more than good deeds. He made several long missionary journeys in Asia Minor and the lands around the Aegean Sea. He was arrested in Rome in about 60AD, sentenced to death and executed during emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians. (See Blainey, op.cit. pp.36-44)

Most of the earliest Christian Churches preached, sang and prayed in Hebrew, since Jews were the main members. But those who met far from Palestine worshipped in Greek, the main language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Most of Jesus’ parables and sayings were translated from Aramaic into Greek. The four gospels that formed the core of the New Testament, and the letters of Paul, were written in Greek. The words “Christ”, “Bible” and “Eucharist” are Greek words. (See Blainey, op.cit. pp.44-46)

Of the four major works, the Gospels According to Mark and Matthew were read aloud in churches more than any other. The third gospel, Luke, was written by a friend of Paul and the fourth, written by John, was claimed to be written in Aramaic, not in Greek as were the other three. In 160AD a Syrian named Tatian reduced the four gospels into one called the “Diatessaron”. It was written in Greek and translated into Arabic, Latin, Armenian and several other languages.

The books of the Old and New Testaments were translated into Latin in about 400AD by St. Jerome. The version in Latin known as the “Vulgate” appeared in the sixth century. According to historian Geoffrey Blainey, three centuries after the death of Jesus the Nazarene, there was still no agreement on which of the scores of gospels, memoirs, epistles and histories should be chosen as the truest. Amidst all their disagreements, most Christians did agree that a man called Jesus lived and died and that his life and spirit transmitted a magnetic message. However, over many centuries, scholars of history in the words of Blainey “... did not debate whether or not he lived, but whether in origin he was human or divine or both”. (See Blainey, op.cit. p.52)

The concept of a powerful and disembodied spirit also found its place as part of the Christian doctrinal foundations. Although the concept of the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost does appear in the Old Testament as an inspiration to prophets, giving them wisdom and understanding, it reappeared in the New Testament in more dramatic forms. The Holy Spirit appeared before the apostles who had assembled in Jerusalem after the death of Christ at the Jewish feats of Pentecost. Reportedly they spoke in different languages. In time the Christian leaders began to visualise God as a Trinity consisting of Father, Son and Holy Spirit: one God consisting of three parts.

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The Spread of Christianity Across the Roman Empire

Under emperor Nero, the Roman government conducted cruel campaigns of persecution against Christians since 64AD. Most campaigns were led by provincial governors and large numbers were imprisoned, tortured and executed in the space of 300 years.

Many factors contributed to the rapid spread of the Christian religion. Historian Blainey lists such factors as the benefits of its Jewish connection with its network of synagogues spread over a vast area. He also mentions the down-to-earth way in which Christianity helped the poor and the hungry, the ill and the orphaned; its belief in an afterlife and the hope of heaven; its fascination with numbers such as the Seven Gifts, the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins; the help Christians provided during the spread of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles; its respect for women and a helping hand for slaves.

In 312AD, Constantine became the emperor of the western half of the Roman Empire. His mother was a Christian and he himself was said to have been a Christian worshipper. One after coming to power, Constantine met Licinius, the emperor of the eastern half of the Empire to devise a policy on religions. They jointly issued the Edict of Milan which gave of Christians and all other believers. By 321AD, Christianity had become the mainstream and preferred religion of the Roman Empire.

By 324AD Constantine became the sole emperor governing all the Roman colonies from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, and from the Nile to the upper Rhine. He continued to support his own religion and banished death by crucifixion. Christian schools were opened and Christian manuscripts were collected and copied. Constantine also made gifts of property and land to the Catholic church and allowed the building of the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul just outside Rome.

Constantine did not like the city of Rome and decided that Byzantium, a city founded by Greek colonists on the very border of Europe and Asia, should be the capital of the Roman Empire. Its name was changed to Constantinople (today Istanbul). Constantine died in 337AD.

During and after the fourth century several disputes emerged about the details of the Christian doctrine: particularly the nature of the Trinity and the relationship between God, Son and Holy Spirit. Emperor Constantine summoned a council of the whole church to meet in Nicaea (Izmike), close to Constantinople. With the support of Constantine it was decided that Christ was of one substance with God. However, this matter remained a bone of contention among Christian theologians. The dispute was particularly driven by Arius, a fourth-century Egyptian city-preacher, who found strong support among the Goths and Vandals, originally Scandinavian residents, who resettled in a region west of Constantinople. They believed God, in his majesty and perfection, was a step higher up on the divine ladder.

A major intellectual force during and after the fourth century was the work of Augustine, born in 453AD in Algeria. His ancestry was Berber and he had a pagan father and a Christian mother. He studied philosophy in Carthage which was then one of the largest cities of the western world. He sailed across the Mediterranean to Rome where he became a teacher. He later returned to Africa and became the bishop of Hippo. His writings became the most influential of his age. He accepted the creation myth of the Book of Genesis, the doctrine of the original sin and the role of Christ as saviour of those who earnestly sought and deserved relief.

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During the last thirty years of his life, Augustine saw the unravelling of the Roman Empire. It was collapsing from within, it had extended too far, could not police its long borders and was eventually swamped by the “barbarians”: the Vandals, Huns, Goths and others. In the year 429AD, the Vandals invaded North Africa and marooned the city of Hippo.

In Europe the period 400-600AD is marked by barbarian invasions. The invaders of the Roman Empire – the Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Vandals – eventually made their version of Christianity the dominant one in the western half of Europe.

Throughout the Roman Empire, Christian believers flocked around churches and monasteries. Convents and cloisters were built for self-protection and social security. For many these institutions became retreats from the outside world – each with its own ideas how a monastic life should be lived. In time layers of rules were added by and church leaders. Some monasteries started producing their own food, clothes and leather and wrote out copies of sacred manuscripts. They set up hospitals and infirmaries, produced food and established schools. Clusters of monasteries were organised into formal associations such as the Benedictines which became powerful in France, Germany, Holland and England. Westminster Abbey was also Benedictine. Ireland had its own active monasteries at Bangor, close to the present Belfast, from where its monks founded new monasteries in Scotland, France, Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

In some parts of the Christian world some of the Christian virtues such as humility, hope, faith and charity were believed to be more fully exemplified in the lives of women than of men. By the fifth century the veneration of Mary as the Mother of God became widespread. By the twelfth century the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary reached new heights and the prayer ”Ave Maria” became popular. As time went on the Ave Maria was recited several times per day and led to the use of the rosary, a string of beads or semi-previous stones or even jewels that guided the memory of those reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria or the Gloria. Many artists painted Mary as she cradled Baby Jesus in her arms. Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, the “Pieta” conveyed her grief nursing her son’s body as it was released from the cross. In , Mary was considered a favoured intermediary to reach the ear of God.

Mary Magdalene also rose as a female from the sixth century. She was associated with several encounters with Jesus Christ including being present at the crucifixion and being the first to speak to the risen Christ.

In the Christian east, the controversy about the relative status of God and Christ remained a bone of contention. The debate involved many theologians. The ideas of Arius continued to reappear in the cities of Alexandria and Constantinople. A council was summoned to Ephesus in Asia Minor in 431 AD by bishop Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, who believed that Christ was not the equal of God. After grave discussions the patriarch Nestorius was condemned and banished from Constantinople by the emperor. First exiled at Petra in Arabia he was later sent to Greater Oasis in Southern Egypt. Another council of the church met at Chalcedon in 451AD where more than 500 bishops were present. It reached a compromise that Christ had two natures, united indivisibly in one person. This doctrine became officially accepted by both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Nestorius and his followers formed a separate sect which found a home in Baghdad where they attracted Persian theologians, philosophers and physicians. It spread to Arabia where one of its 42 monks, Sergius, is said to have taught Muhammad. Some of Nestorius’s followers took to the silk road and eventually settled in Xian, Western China.

Christianity in the Middle Ages

The “Middle Ages” or “Medieval Period” is generally considered to be the period between the ancient era and the beginning of modern times. There are no clear lines which mark the end of the ancient world or the beginning of modern times. Some historians fix the start of the medieval period from the conversion of Constantine onwards and its end has been variously fixed at the fall of Constantinople in 1453 or the onset of the Renaissance and from the middle of the 15th century. The 15th century is generally taken as the century of transition between the medieval and the modern periods. (See Norman Davies, Europe – A History, op.cit. 0.444)

The central theme of the Middle Ages appears to be the reorganisation of Christendom into two new imperial systems: the Western (Latin) branch and the Eastern (Greek) branch. Although the Latin and the Greek branches of Christendom shared all of their basic beliefs, they often existed in alien camps after the of 1054.

The northern coasts were ravaged by the Vikings or Norsemen for centuries. They raided the British Isles and set up camps to loot communities in France, Portugal, Provence, Tuscany and throughout the Baltic. On the eastern edges the Roman Empire was infiltrated by the Mongols or “Tartars” and their nomadic descendants. They mastered an area more to the south where they pushed the Turks towards the west. The Magyars moved in from the north-east and determined the future profile of Central Europe in the formation of Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Austria and the German Empire. They drove the local princes to unite and provoked the rise of several durable fixtures on the map of Europe.

Charlemagne (768-814) was the great-grandson of Charles Martel who defeated the Muslim onslaught on France and reigned over a vast territory from the Atlantic to the Danube, from the Netherlands to Provence, including Lombardy, Saxony, Bavaria, Carinthia, Brittany and Spain. The Carolingians revived the term “Europe” to describe the section of the world in which they dominated. Charlemagne was not only an energetic builder of palaces and canals but a promoter of scholarship and education. His empire was divided between his grandsons and ultimately ransacked by the Vikings.

Feudal society consisted of a dense network of hierarchical contractual relationships which linked the highest to the lowest levels of the realm. It involved contracts between sovereigns, barons, tenants and so on, down the line to the lowest vassals. Castle-building began in the 9th and 10th centuries, providing a fortress to the inhabitants of a . Knighthood was based on a “code of honour” encompassing moral values such as honesty, loyalty, modesty, gallantry, fortitude to protect the Church, to support the weak, to respect women, to fight the infidel and to uphold truth and justice. In its widest sense it refers to the ethos of feudal society as a whole. Feudalism greatly weakened central ecclesiastical authority and gave power and influence to local potentates, putting the at their mercy. Popes became the puppets of noblemen and princes. The profound legacy of feudalism in is to be found in the way it moulded speech and manners, conditioned attitudes to property, to the rule of law and the relations between governing authority and the individual. In the words of historian Norman Davies “By its emphasis on contract, and on the valance between rights and obligations, it generated a lasting concern for mutual trust and for keeping one’s word. These attitudes held implications far beyond the narrow spheres of military service and land-holding”. (See Norman Davies, Europe – A History, op.cit. pp.315-316) 43

In the three centuries after Charlemagne, the frontiers of Christendom were greatly extended. By the 11th century advances had been made into Scandinavia and several Slav lands towards Central Europe were converted: Moravia, Bulgaria, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and the area around Kiev. The Russian Orthodox Church only came onto the scene centuries later.

By the mid-eleventh century, in 1054, a point of departure was reached between the Latin and Greek Churches. It was Christendom’s major scandal and has never been repaired. It is known as the “schism” between the Catholic lands of the West and the Orthodox lands of the East. During the next two centuries the West and Centre of Europe bore the brunt of the turmoil in the form of Viking and Magyar infiltration. The East sustained the havoc of the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols.

In March 1075, a new Pope, Gregory VII, published the 27 propositions of his Dictatus Papae claiming legislative and judicial power within Christendom, together with the right to depose all princes, both temporal and spiritual. A major conflict between Papacy and Empire ensued known as the Investiture Contest. It was a straightforward struggle for power between the two pillars of authority: the temporal, headed by the Emperor and the Spiritual headed by the Pope. In the long run the contest ended in compromise, but the Emperor suffered comprehensive humiliation.

The 11th century saw the emergence of several “city-states” as the leading cities established their own communal independence. Examples were Pisa, Venice, Genoa, Florence, La Mans, St. Quentin, Bruges, Ghent, Lübeck, Cologne, Nuremberg and Hamburg. Within their communes merchant associations and craft guilds began to form.

The Crusades, which lasted almost two centuries, was initiated by Pope Urbanus II on 27 November 1095 at the synod of Clermont in Auvergne. He addressed a throng of bishops, knights and common people and appealed to all Christians to fight for the delivery of Jerusalem. The Pope’s proposal for a Crusade, a “War of the Cross”, was taken up throughout the . For the next six or seven generations, counts, kings and commoners flocked to “take the Cross” and to fight the infidel in the Holy Land.

The obsession to recover the Holy Land lasted for 200 years and ended in failure after seven crusades. Thousands were killed as they marched and sailed towards Jerusalem. It involved kings, barons and knights of England, France and Germany. Murder and in the service of the Gospel were commonplace. Jerusalem was the visionary city of Revelation.

The impact of the Crusades was profound. The eastern Mediterranean was reopened to trade and travel. Venice and Genoa flourished. But they reinforced the barriers between Christianity and Islam. In the words of historian Norman Davies “... the Crusaders brought Christianity into disrepute”.

By the beginning of the 13th century, Eastern Europe was invaded by the ruthless Mongols of Genghis Kahn sweeping out of the Asian steppes like a whirlwind. They conquered southern Siberia, Kiev, Moscow, Galicia, Cracow. As proof of their victory, the Mongols were said to have collected sackfuls of the right ears from the bodies of the slain.

By the 13th century the emergence of national identities was gradually taking shape across Europe. People started to look at themselves in terms of their national identity. But the period 1250-1493 is often described as the age of “Christendom in Crisis”. The Black Death of 1347-50 was a pandemic 44 plague carried by fleas hosted by rats. Medieval medicine did not understand the mechanisms of the plague’s transmission. Crowded tenements and poor sanitation provided a fertile seedbed. The result was mass mortality. It started in Central Asia, spread with lightening speed. It engulfed China and India, then spread to the Crimea by the Tartars, then reached Sicily, Genoa, Marseilles, Valencia, Adriatic cities, Paris, crossed the English Channel to the British Isles, marched northwards and eastwards across Germany, south-eastwards into the Balkans. The conviction reigned that God was punishing mankind for its sins. Calculations based on fragmentary records suggest over-all losses of one-third. This works out to around 30 million for Europe as a whole. The psychological trauma ran deep, the feudal system collapsed, popular religiosity increased, charity foundations proliferated, scapegoats (such as Jews) were sought, mobs rebelled against overlords, cities were taken over by riotous elements.

A sensational development of the era was the appearance of a new Turkish warrior tribe that was destined to supplant the Byzantines in Constantinople. The Ottomans (Osmantis Turks) moved into the void left by the Mongols’ defeat of the Seljuks. They established an outpost in the Anatolian interior from where they raided far and wide, launching fleets of pirates and crossing over into the Balkans. They took Ephesus, Bursa, Nicaea and conquered Asia Minor overwhelming the Christian Greek settlements with Muslim Turkish colonists. By 1402 Constantinople was surrounded after the Ottoman Turks subjugated most of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia.

In the 14th century, the Iberian peninsula was controlled by several kingdoms practising three main religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism – and speaking six main languages. The Christians dominated the central Plateau, the Moors the fertile south, while the Spanish Jews, spread throughout the Peninsula, figured in many roles – administration, medicine, learning, trade and finance. Disputations between the religions were popular and after the 1350s various pogroms started to occur. A growing caste of conversos (New Christians) appeared as Jews converted to Christianity in order to escape prosecution.

The Christian Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims took several centuries and progressed by way of a series of battles around major cities such as Toledo, Seville, Valencia and Cordova. By 1266 most of the Iberian peninsula (except the emirate of Granada) was in Christian hands.

The “Hundred Years War” between France and England which ran from 1337 to 1453, was not a formal or continuous war. It was a long period of raids, jaunts and military expeditions. France was always the stronger contestant but English dominance at sea kept its island safe from French occupation. Most of the fighting took place on French soil where the English held large swathes of land in Burgundy for generations. In the end, England was shorn of its Continental possessions, secure in its separateness as an island kingdom and confident in its Englishness.

The 15th century is generally taken as the century of transition between the medieval and the modern periods. The old order held sway in many ways, but it was challenged in the fields of learning and arts. Huge variations persisted and a gulf opened between Latin Christendom in the West and Orthodox Christendom in the East.

The 15th century also saw a momentous shift in the confrontation between Christendom and Islam by way of two landmark events. In 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Roman Empire ceased to exist. But in 1492, the last stronghold of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, Granada, fell 45 to the Spaniards. As the Ottoman Turks triumphed, the Islamic Moors finally faltered. Christians of the Latin West could rejoice while Christians of the Orthodox East could not. Eastern Europe was confronted with the Muslim challenge in intensified form. St. Sophia was turned into a mosque. The Ottoman Turks now controlled the trade routes which linked Europe with the Levant and India. But the West, led by Spanish and Portuguese explorers, commenced their conquest of new across the oceans. (See Norman Davies, op.cit. pp.444-450)

The Renaissance (13th and 14th Centuries)

Medieval civilisation was pervasively influenced by the concept of an all-omnipotent God. The service of God was seen as the sole legitimate purpose of all human enterprise. God’s will was sufficient to explain all phenomena and the contemplation of God was considered the highest form of intellectual or creative endeavour.

Since large sections of the population were illiterate, not all people shared the “high culture” of the educated elite made up of clerics and clerics’ pupils. Most people relied on their own observations and experience – including their own superstitions, misconceptions and fallacies. Awareness of time and space was often uninformed as were their understandings of what is natural or supernatural and what is fact or fiction, real or imaginary. Most people believed the earth to be a flat surface with countries arranged around Jerusalem. Understanding the functioning of the human body was limited. Disease control was elementary and often misguided. Most people lived in an environment of fear and insecurity, exposure to warfare and banditry and to uncertainty what the next day might bring.

Medieval philosophy was largely a branch of theology. Reason had to be reconciled with faith. Few scholars had the courage to question existing religious dogma or conventional patterns of thought. All knowledge was inextricably bound up with faith: no separation of physical and spiritual phenomena. Exploring the secrets of nature could easily be depicted as immodest prying into the sacred forces of life.

For many generations the precedence of religious intention over rational conclusions was deeply rooted in the general population. Christian thrived when people misunderstood the frontiers between fact and delusion – between charlatanry and hallucination. Astrology, divination, miracles, witchcraft, ghosts, omens and fairies always competed with rational explanations and interpretations of day-to-day events. It was in this climate of opinion that the spirit of Renaissance arrived on the intellectual horizons of the European world as it moved out of the grips of the “Dark” Ages. But this transformation was a subtle and gradual process. It did not involve a total departure from medieval values or a sudden return to the Greco-Roman world-view of Classical times. It did not involve an abandonment of Christian belief. But a rediscovery of the rationalist thought of Plato and Aristotle brought to the Middle Ages the insight that reason is the key that must unlock the door to knowledge of the natural world.

The Renaissance was not confined to Italy. Its intellectual ferment was steadily spread throughout Latin Christendom and gave the Latin West a new lease on life. The causes and effects of the Renaissance were broad and deep. They were related to the growth of cities and trade patterns, to technical progress and its effects not only on economic and artistic life, but particularly in the realm of ideas – intellectual life. As described by Norman Davies, the “new learning” possessed three novel features: firstly, the rediscovery of long-neglected classical authors; secondly, the cultivation of ancient 46

Greek as an essential partner to Latin in classical studies; and, thirdly, the rise of biblical scholarship based on the critical study of original classical texts. (See Norman Davies, op.cit. p.473)

Circles of “humanist” scholars sprang up at different points from Oxford to Salamanca and Cracow. A key role was played by Gerhard Gerhards (1466-1536), a Dutchman from Rotterdam, who was better known by his pen-names “Desiderius” and “Erasmus”. He was a frequent visitor to London, Cambridge and Basle and at Utrecht established a centre for the scientific study of Divinity. He became the author of several widely read books such as Moriae Encomium (1511), Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1516) and the New Testament (1516) in Greek. His books were freely printed in England, Switzerland and the Netherlands. His collection of annotated Adagia (1508) was the world’s first bestseller, bringing over 3,000 classical proverbs into popular circulation.

Humanism is a label given to the wider movement of which the “New Learning” of the Renaissance was both precursor and catalyst. This transformation is well described by Norman Davies (op.cit. p.479): “It was marked by a fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middle Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been written by Pico’s treatise On the Dignity of Man; and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the concept of human personality, created by the new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, hence the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science – that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art it was accompanied by renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation- state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person.”

The impact of the Renaissance is well described in the words of historian Norman Davies: “The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any sudden rediscovery of classical civilization but rather in the use which was made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depth of disrepute into which the medieval church, the previous fount of all authority, had fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement which resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of medieval civilization, setting in motion the long process of disintegration which gradually gave birth to ‘modern Europe’”. (Norman Davies, Europe – A History, op.cit. p.471)

The Reformation and the Rise of Religious Cleavages

The Reformation was a grassroots movement directed against fossilised clerical attitudes and practices. It rode on a wave of religious revival affecting both scholars and masses – largely driven by popular disgust at the decadence of the Roman Catholic Church. Europe was full of tales of nepotistic popes, promiscuous priests, idle monks and the sheer worldly wealth of the Church. Pope Julius II was known as the Pope who rebuilt St. Peter’s through the sale in Germany of “indulgences” – paper certificates guaranteeing relief from punishment in Purgatory. Martin Luther, a young Augustinian from Wittenberg in Saxony was shocked by what he saw in Rome. Within ten years Luther found himself at the head of the first “Protestant” revolt. He spread the doctrine of “justification by faith 47 alone”. Rome, to him, was the seat of sodomy. In 1517 he nailed his sheet of 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. From that famous act of defiance many consequences flowed: a series of public disputations, his formal excommunication, and religious protest turning into political upheaval. By 1530 the Catholic and Protestant camps were clearly defined.

The Lutheran protest movement was swelled by a series of parallel events which widened the nature of . Zwingli in Switzerland, Henry VIII in England, Jean Calvin in Geneva – all represented Reformist movements against the hegemony of the Catholic Church and led to the rise of and as theological foundations of Protestant Church movements. In 1529 King Henry VIII of England initiated the policy which was to separate the from Rome. Lutheranism spread to most northern principalities in Germany and subsequently also to Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Calvinism spread to the Netherlands, Scotland in the form of and to England where provided an umbrella for “Low Church” Calvinist evangelicals.

Geoffrey Blainey, in Christianity – A Short History, Penguin Books, 2011, writes that “The Reformation sowed some of the seeds of modern democracy ... Whereas the Catholic tradition was based on hierarchy – in the authority of the popes, cardinals and bishops – the Protestant emphasis was on reading the Bible and on the individual’s personal relationship with God ... they needed no middleman in the form of a priest of bishop in order to approach God.” (Op.cit. pp.335-336)

Luther called this the “priesthood of all believers” and this democratic spirit coloured most of the Protestant sects that came after him. Moreover, various Calvinist congregations – Baptist, Unitarian, Presbyterian and others – ran their own churches and selected their own clergymen. This form of organisation depended on small governing committees composed of leading members of the church and the clergyman himself. Protestantism, once the Bible was freely available in a homeland language, tended to foster the kind of debate and discussion which is the core of democracy. The Bible was after all a cluster of books open to many interpretations so that worshippers could debate theological questions privately among themselves. The Reformation discouraged Latin, the international language of the day, and fostered the national languages into which the Bible had been translated. Not only did the Protestant practices foster nationalism, but it also fostered education, because the one book they had to read was the Bible. The various church congregations tended to promote education vigorously and countries like Scotland, the Netherlands and Prussia attained levels of literacy that few other parts of the world could equal. The arrival of popular democracy in the second half of the 19th century depended heavily on the spread of literacy. In the 17th century, Melchior Inchofer, a Viennese Jesuit, claimed that Jesus must have spoken Latin, but he was later corrected by another biblical scholar saying that “... the Lord cannot have used any other language upon earth since this is the language of the in heaven”. (Blainey, op.cit. p.337)

To meet the Protestant challenge, the Roman Catholic Church mounted a Counter-Reformation movement which led to the Council of Trent which met in several sessions. It confirmed that the Church alone could interpret the scriptures but failed to give Catholics a moral code to match that of the Protestants. The Counter-Reformation managed to restore the power of the Church in Italy, Spain, France, Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) and Ireland. In Germany an uneasy modus vivendi between Catholics and Protestants had been reached in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg. Each principality could decide on its own official religion. Germany was turned into an uneasy religious patchwork.

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During the 16th and 17th centuries religious fervour led to various wars across Europe. Passions and hatreds previously reserved for the campaigns against Islam now fired the conflicts between Christians. Examples are the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany, 1531-48; the , 1562-98; the Swedish Civil War, 1592-1604; the Thirty Years War, 1618-48. inspired the psalm-singing troopers of Gustaphus Adolphus and of Cromwell. In France the Edict of Nantes in 1598 prescribed the scope of Huguenot religious practices. Huguenots were considered as religious heretics and severely persecuted after 1685.

The British Isles were the scene of violent conflicts throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. It involved the Irish Catholics, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Catholic “High Church” and Protestant “Low Church” divisions of the Church of England – all parties participating in a Civil War intent on persecuting their opponents in the hope of imposing a single religion. As described by Conrad Russell in his The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1990), “the war was not fought for religious liberty, but between rival groups of persecutors”. In the end, it was found that absolute uniformity could not be enforced – despite the use of horrific violence. Although persisted in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Poland-Lithuania, much of Europe was characterised by a “Protestant North” and a “Catholic South”. In Central Europe and in Germany in particular, the Protestant-Catholic divide predominated. Senseless bloodletting in the name of religion became the order of the day during the Wars of Religion.

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was an extension of the international wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant superimposed upon the age-old German conflict between Emperor and princes. Initially it involved Bohemian squabbles between Archduke Ferdinand and Protestant Czech nobles. It spread to Bavaria when Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria was confronted by Lutheran princes. The Bohemian rebels raided Vienna and when Ferdinand succeeded to the Empire, he was deposed as King of Bohemia and replaced with a Calvinist Elector Palatine. The Bohemian rebels were crushed by the imperialists in a terrible revenge action. Bohemia’s native nobility was crushed by execution and confiscation. The Calvinists were expelled. The imperial general, Count Tilly, victor of Prague, stormed Heidelberg (1622) and criss-crossed northern Germany in pursuit of Protestant forces led by Count von Mansfeld. The unprovisioned armies lived off the land like hordes of locusts.

A Danish phase (1625-29) followed when Christian IV of Denmark, Superior of the Imperial Circle of Lower Saxony, entered the fray in support of his Protestant confreres – assisted by English, French and Dutch subsidies. He faced the imperialist army raised by Catholic noblemen from Bohemia. Catholic forces under Tilly attacked the Netherlands with the help of the Spaniards. A Catholic nobleman from Bohemia, Albrecht von Waldstein (or Wallenstein) overran Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg, Schleswig, Holstein, Jutland and the Baltic Coast. The Swedish phase (1628-35) began when Gustavus Adolphus sent a contingent to hold Stralsund and proceeded to restore Protestant fortunes. He crushed Tilly’s forces and moved into Palatinate and Bavaria. When Gustavus fell in battle near Leipzig, the Protestant cause faltered. The French phase (1635-48) began when Richelieu declared war on Spain, took Swedes into his pay and invaded Alsace. In 1637 Emperor Ferdinand died and Richelieu’s fortunes started to grow. In 1643 the French forces under Prince de Conde defeated the Spanish at Rocroi in the Ardennes. The French then ravaged Bavaria.

The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) set the ground plan of the international order in central Europe for more than a century. It confirmed the ascendancy of France and the subordination of the Habsburgs to the German princes. It ended the religious strife in Germany by granting the same rights to the Calvinists as to Catholics and Lutherans. Switzerland and the United Provinces of the Netherlands both 49 received their independence. France received the lion’s share in the form of most of the Alsace territory.

In the wake of the Thirty Years War, Germany lay desolate. The population had fallen from 21 million to around 13 million. Between a third and a half of the population were dead. Whole cities, like Magdeburg, stood in ruins while districts lay stripped of their livestock. A whole generation of pillage, famine, disease and social disruption had wreaked havoc. The exploits of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish and French soldiers had changed the racial composition of the people. German culture was so traumatised that art and literature passed entirely under the spell of foreign fashions. Germany’s strategic position was weakened. The French controlled the middle Rhine and the mouths of Germany’s great rivers – the Rhine, Elbe and Oder – were respectively held by the Dutch, Danes and Swedes. Destitution was accompanied by humiliation. (See Norman Davies, op.cit. pp.563-568)

The Spread of Christianity to the New World

The 16th century was the era of the spread of Christianity to the “New World”. Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, hoping to discover a field for Christian as well as enormous wealth for Spain. He sailed in the name of the Holy Trinity and was accompanied by Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans hoping to discover the land from which the Magi had come with their gifts for the baby Jesus at Bethlehem. In 1513 the Spanish found Florida and in 1533, the Franciscans claimed to have won more than a million converts in Mexico. In the following 150 years the Spanish were to build 15,000 churches in the “Indies”. Spain also had success in the Far East when it annexed a cluster of 7000 islands and named it “Philippines” after King Philip of Spain.

In 1494 the newly discovered world was divided by the Treaty of Tordesilhas into two spheres of influence under Pope Alexander VI: in effect granting the Caribbean region to Spain, and Brazil, Africa and Asia to Portugal. The Portuguese explored the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa until Bartholomew Diaz sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1500 and opened the trading route between the Far East and Europe. The Portuguese trading network extended to Malaysia, Java, China and Japan. Jesuit missionaries followed the Portuguese traders. The Dutch followed the Portuguese, ended their monopoly in East India and established Indonesia. Portugal hung on to Brazil which became a spectacular growth point for the slave trade which, in turn, aroused the interest of British traders and pirates.

In the early 17th century, Protestants from north-western Europe and the British Isles started to colonise the Atlantic coast of North America. Shiploads of migrants, sometimes entire congregations complete with pastors, followed and set up their own towns and church-dominated government structures. They settled in areas known as New England, New Amsterdam and Virginia. The French Catholics settled in Louisiana and Quebec.

The trade relations between the European powers and the New World colonies brought the sensitive issue of into focus. The slave ships crossing the Atlantic from West Africa to the American coast were initially considered an essential prerequisite for the sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations in the New World. It is also fair to say that the early Christians accepted slavery as part of the human condition. The Roman Empire held millions of slaves. The Franciscans and Dominicans were the first to preach against the practice of slavery. Under their influence, Pope Paul III issued a bull in 1537, 50

Sublimus Deus, against the owning of slaves, but the slave trade continued unabated for several centuries.

Reference to slave catching activities in the mountains of the Central Sahara is found in the writings of Herodotus dating back to the mid-first millennium BC and it appears that slave trading was already in progress throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The slave trade was achieved by way of the dispersion of captives. It was given considerable impetus by the rise and spread of Islam which was, since the time of Mohammed, a slave owning, slave raiding and polygamous society. It was customary for the men of defeated groups to be put to the sword and for women and children to be taken as slaves by the Muslim victors.

Historian R. Oliver describes the slave trade as follows: “The oldest directions of the slave trade were those which crossed the Mediterranean, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea from classical times onwards. The Muslim era saw a great increase in the trade from north-east Africa into south-western Asia. In later medieval times the African entrepôts of this trade proliferated southwards down the Indian coast, while its points of delivery extended eastwards to western India, Bengal and South East Asia. But the most dramatic increase in the international trade came with the opening of the Atlantic coast of Africa by European seafarers in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Portuguese were the first to arrive, and they maintained a near monopoly for a century and a half before they were joined by the British and the French, the Dutch and the Danes.” (See R. Oliver, The African Experience – from Olduvai Gorge to the 21st Century, London. P.140)

By the end of the 17th century, stimulated by the plantation agriculture in Brazil and the West Indies, Atlantic shipments had increased to about 30,000 a year and by the end of the 18th century they reached nearly 80,000. An estimated total of around 12 million Africans were shipped to the New World. The Portuguese traders even brought Chinese prisoners to Portugal where they were sold as slaves.

New research has shown that at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, most slaves originated as war captives. The commercial infrastructure along the African west coast was provided by local chieftains, who in turn, were supplied with slaves by trading networks in the interior in exchange for European goods such as textiles, metals and hardware.

It is an irony of history that the same British navy that transported millions of slaves to the Americas was also deployed to abolish the slave trade. By 1700, the port of Liverpool was sending 33 shipments a year on the triangular trip from England to West Africa to the Caribbean to keep the plantations supplied with slave labour. Sugar and tobacco flowed back to Britain, with a substantial proportion for re-export to the Continent. The profits from these New World commodities oiled the wheels of the British Empire’s move to the Asian frontier.

Anti-slavery sentiments gained momentum in the USA amongst the in the 18th century and in 1780 slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania, an example followed by a number of other northern states. In Britain the slave trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery itself was made illegal throughout the British Empire in 1833. Slave owners of the Caribbean were compensated and a special campaign was launched to disrupt the continuing traffic of slaves to Latin America. A British West African Squadron of 30 ships was sent to patrol the African coast from Freetown with bounties offered to naval officers for every slave they intercepted and liberated. In 1840 the Royal Navy intercepted no fewer than 425 slave ships off the West African coast. 51

In retrospect, it must be said that the Christian world’s involvement with and toleration of slavery during the 17th and 18th centuries represent an extremely dishonourable chapter of its history. Inhuman treatment of others goes against the grain of Christian ethics which require that you treat others as you would have them treat you. It is indeed an open question whether modern democracy with its emphasis on the dignity of the individual person could ever have arisen without the humanitarian inspiration of Christianity. It is also a legitimate question to ask whether the formal devices of democratic government could hold society together anywhere without the cement of the common humanity that Christianity implies.

Despite the venerated position of the Virgin Mary in Christian theology, during the Reformation women were more likely to be denounced as witches than men. The accusations of witchcraft often arose from domestic quarrels and disputes but more often from religious conflict. Between 1580 and 1640, the search for witches became a frenzy. Witches were said to be influenced by Satan in his clever warfare against individual Christians. After trials in religious or secular courts, about 40,000 or 50,000 “witches” were executed. (See Blainey, op.cit. p.338)

Religious Refugees, Sects and Doubters

Since the 16th century, the Netherlands became a place of refuge for religious refugees. The Dutch prosperity attracted persecuted religious groups from many countries, particularly French Huguenots and Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Rotterdam and Amsterdam became the largest Jewish cities in Western Europe and synagogues flourished. Baruch Spinoza, who was a child of Marrano parents, believed that God did not interfere in running the world. Having studied physics and astronomy, he believed natural laws made the world go round. He was expelled by the rabbis on 27 July 1656. He was one of the first “virtuous unbelievers”. He lived a good life and made his living in a useful way in The Hague – grinding and polishing lenses. He wrote his rebellious Short Treatise on God but remained virtually unknown until Wilhelm Goethe, the German literary scholar, revived an interest in Spinoza almost a century later.

The Reformation produced powerful sects: some rose in a European city or province, some in the British Isles and some crossed the Atlantic to North America. The Anabaptists (literally rebaptised) appeared in Wittenberg, Moravia and Zurich. They believed that baptism was a central ceremony not to be wasted on infants because babies were incapable of understanding it. To be a real Christian one had to be “born again” and baptism was the ceremony confirming rebirth – a sacred pledge. However Luther, Zwingli and Calvin held to the orthodox ideas on baptism and Anabaptists were seen as a threat to the Reformation. Many of their leaders were persecuted, imprisoned, whipped or even executed. Many fled to safe towns like Augsburg, Strasbourg or Moravia. Some became under the leadership of Menno Simons and fled to the Netherlands from where they emigrated to North America and formed the exclusive sect. English Protestants came under the influence of the Mennonites and set up their first Baptist congregation in London in 1612. John Bunyan, a soldier on Cromwell’s side, became a persuasive Baptist preacher. When Charles II became king of England in 1660, the and other sects fell from favour and John Bunyan was imprisoned. In 1672 he was licensed to preach and set up his own church at Bedford. While in prison he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress which began with a dream of a man clothed with rags setting out into the world with the Bible. On the long pilgrim’s way he finally crossed a big river and all the trumpets sounded for him at the other side. John Bunyan’s book was translated into several languages and was given by many generations of parents to their children. 52

The Quakers were named after storm birds which flew over England making loud cries. Their founder, George Fox, was a shoemaker’s apprentice who began preaching outdoors attracting many converts. He gatecrashed into church sermons, interrupting and delivering his own preachings. As he gathered followers they called themselves the “Society of Friends” but to the public they were known as “Quakers”. George Fox proved to be an arresting preacher and he soon had followers in Oxford and Cambridge but his group was generally regarded as “despicable fanatics” – people turned on by their religion into a frenzy of enthusiasm. After 1660 the Quakers and other Puritans were severely persecuted. Thousands died in prison until the Toleration Act was passed in 1689. Many Quakers emigrated to America in the 1650s where they soon came into conflict with other Puritans. In 1667 the Quakers found a prize recruit, William Penn, owner of large estates. In 1681 he received from King Charles II the right to set up a colony in North America, south of New York harbour, called Pennsylvania with Philadelphia as its capital. Pennsylvania became a permanent home for Quakers and other persecuted sects. It promised to give every male citizen a share in the government and individuals could buy land entitlements. Many shiploads of colonists arrived, buying land and building towns. German and Swedish Lutherans also arrived and soon outnumbered the Quakers. The Quakers took the lead in the independence movement of the United States of America and also in the movement to free the slaves and to end slavery.

In England the Anglican Church presided over the religious life of the nation, holding all the important offices, dominating the nobility, the universities, the courts and the navy and the army. Except in Scotland, the Anglicans were the established church, their activities financed by the public purse and their clergy present in nearly every village in England and Wales and many in Ireland. During the 18th century the Anglican Church was given a boost by the introduction of singing and evangelical preaching by John Wesley. Son of a rural clergyman he studied at Oxford University and later became a fellow of Lincoln College teaching classical Greek. On Sundays he preached in village churches. After spending a few years in Georgia (USA) he spent some time with the in Germany. He decided to rejuvenate the Anglican Church with special Bible study sessions and by producing a hymn book to augment church ceremonies. He translated some hymns from Germany as vehicles for his theology. His brother Charles also became a prodigious hymn composer. John Wesley also introduced organ and violin music into church ceremonies. By 1800 pipe organs had become common in many churches. In time popular singing and off the cuff praying became the hallmark of Sunday services conducted by Wesley and other revivalists. Wesley’s creed and methods eventually led to a separate “sect” that became worldwide: the Methodist Church which became the second largest in England and Wales and the largest in the USA.

In France in the 1780s just before the start of the French Revolution, more Christians lived in the country than any other country – mostly Roman Catholics with 30,000 parish priests and 130 bishops. Each bishop was served by two valets, a surgeon, a private chaplain, a palace manager, a horse carer, a cellar master, table waiters, skilled cooks and a carpenter. Above the bishops there were 28 archbishops and a cardinal at the very top. Some cardinals acted as prime ministers, such as Cardinal Richelieu. The Catholic Church owned one-sixth of the land in France. Paris was the most glamorous city in the world. The laws kept the few Protestants who lived in the South in submission. They were not allowed to meet in public for religious purposes, could only marry in a Catholic Church. The position of the Church was strongly defended by the Jesuits, who provided the most learned debaters on religious topics. The Jesuits maintained 89 colleges in France, 133 in Italy and 105 in Spain where they taught the elite and the sons of the nobility and high officials.

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The Reformation paved the way for doubters, atheists and philosophers to enter into debate about the core principle of Christianity. , a doctrine formulated by doubters gained influence in France, Prussia and England. It held that God existed, but presided over the universe rather than interfered. They dispensed with a personal God. The discovery of important Natural laws by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Huygens helped to underwrite deism. These discoveries suggested that the natural world followed its own laws and rhythms and had no need for God’s intervention. Such concepts of deism shaped important parts of the intellectual world and also some political leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Even James Cook was said to be a deist. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, originally a Calvinist from Geneva, also questioned the idea of original sin. He thought mankind was originally good but had been corrupted by civilisation. “Man was born free” wrote Rousseau in 1762, “and everywhere he is in chains”. Voltaire also spread radical ideas but accepted the need for the fear of God in a disorderly world: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”.

In the second half of the 18th century a few talented authors in England also started to interpret history in new ways, stating that human, geographical and other factors were the main shapers of the past. In 1754 David Hume published the first of six volumes on the history of England. He implied that if God did exist, he was impotent in the face of the current upheavals in Europe. Hume also saw religious enthusiasm as a dangerous passion. He was particularly critical of people trusting in miracles. He was accused of deism, heresy, scepticism and . He gave Edinburgh a reputation as a haven for atheism.

Impact of the French and the Industrial Revolutions

The French Revolution began in 1789. New laws and edicts were made reshaping the Catholic Church affecting the King and the Pope. Bishops were to be elected but their status and income reduced – one for each civil department in France. The vast properties of the Catholic Church were confiscated. In 1792 three ships carrying 550 convicted priests were exiled to a desolate place on the African coast. The King tried to flee from France but was captured and beheaded in January 1793. The Pope blamed the rationalists and the Calvinistic men for the upheaval. Secular symbols now replaced the cross in revolutionary France of the 1790s. Marriage was no longer a religious event, Sunday was abolished, monasteries and convents were taken over. Where the Reformation virtually drowned the Pope elsewhere in Europe, the French Revolution disowned Christianity in Europe’s most powerful country. In 1801 Napoleon Bonaparte resolved to restore the Church, but the confiscated lands were not returned. After he signed a Concordat with Pope Pius VII, Napoleon, at the grand crowning ceremony, took the jewelled crown from the hands of the Pope and then crowned himself.

The 19th century saw major mental and material transformations in the Christian world in the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. A new mental climate based on materialist progress and new discoveries in the fields of science and technology heralded in a period of dynamic change. In Europe and America a plethora of new evangelical sects sprang up focusing on the “Lord’s Second Coming”: the Catholic Apostolic Church, the Free Church of Scotland, the Oxford Movement, the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons).

In the wake of the spread of Christian influence came two typical cultural practices, the celebration of Christmas and the observance of Sunday. The practice of decorating a pine tree, exchanging presents and performing sacred oratorios like Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio were originated by the German Lutherans. In time “Christ’s birthday” changed into a free-spending, semi-secular 54 celebration with Santa Claus, a jolly bearded man in a red tunic arriving secretly with a sleigh and a sack of toys. Christmas cards were a British invention. Sabbath observance started as a serious day of rest which involved church attendance and Sunday school for children. Business activities came to a standstill and in some cases people refrained from travelling. But Sabbatarianism’s respect for Sunday as a holy day gradually lost its grip. In the second half of the 20th century, Sunday was reshaped as a day of entertainment, sport and recreation.

Geoffrey Blainey eloquently describes the state of Christianity in the modern Western world under the heading “The Unseen Guest”: “The history of Christianity does not simply encompass the lives of those who became known for preaching new doctrines. It is primarily about the everyday life of the people who practiced – or neglected – their religion. Tens of millions found comfort, inspiration or rejuvenation in Christianity ... Hosts of others called themselves Christians and rarely visited a church, but from time to time their lives were uplifted or their fears calmed by Christian doctrine or snippets of it ... On the other hand, many millions living in Christian countries, whether in remote farmlands or smoky industrial towns, knew almost nothing about religion. In the early 1840s, in the new cities of northern England, a public investigation revealed the width of their ignorance. James Taylor, aged eleven, in reply to questioning, vowed that he had never heard the name of God, except when coalminers used it as a swear word. An eighteen-year-old woman said that she ‘never heard of Christ at all’. Children who had been instructed to say the Lord’s Prayer before they went to sleep were able to remember only the two words ‘Our Father’. Many children did not know that Christ was part of Christmas. It was widely believed in the 19th century that Christianity was still at the heart of civilisation. What was new was the growing idea that a specific brand of Christianity was no longer crucial.” (See Blainey, op.cit. pp.423-426)

Church/State Separation and Religious Tolerance in the West

Geoffrey Blainey states that: “A high level of religious toleration is almost a modern invention. A few centuries ago it was almost unthinkable. Then it was important to hold the correct religious views rather than hold the freedom to reject them. The right to disobey the government and the Church, the right to be free in matters of conscience, was a concept that slowly emerged after the acute tensions aroused by the reformation. Today the western trend is to devalue the merits of religion and to enthrone the virtues of toleration. In western civilisation we view religious deviance or heresy as a minor matter because religion is no longer seen as all-important.” (Geoffrey Blainey, Christianity – A Short History, op.cit. p.341)

The first declaration of religious tolerance in the Western World was the Edict of Milan, AD313, when Constantine took the initiative to grant liberty to Christians to practice their religion in the Roman Empire. Then in AD321, Christianity became the preferred religion when Constantine declared that Rome recognised Sunday as a special day of rest. By AD324, Constantine had promoted Christianity by approving a site for the building of the Basilica of St. Peter just outside Rome and giving one of his own palaces to the Church as a residence for the Pope. Constantine became its financial patron and protector. By AD330 he had transformed the old city of Byzantium to become Constantinople as the capital of the Roman Empire. With the invasion of Barbarians into the western half of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, the Roman Empire’s military power diminished. It continued precariously in the eastern half where the Emperors maintained control over an ever-diminishing area around Constantinople. It finally fell prey to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

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The Holy Roman Empire was founded by Charles the Great (Charlemagne) around AD800. It was based on the legal theory of the universality of Roman Laws, but it was an Empire modified territorially, racially, socially, politically and spiritually by the growing influx of Teutonic elements. Charles the Great’s Empire fell apart among his successors according to the Frankish laws of inheritance and then gradually disintegrated in the face of continuous Norse invasions. It came to be confined to parts of Germany and a loose hold on the sovereignty of Italy.

England was never included within the limits of the Holy Roman Empire, nor was France after the break-up of Charlemagne’s dominions. Both countries developed an independence from the Papal authority, sufficiently vigorous to establish their own movements. In England the first Parliament appeared in 1265, which included Knights of the Shire and representatives of towns. In France the first such Assembly appeared in 1302 when the Pope tried to exempt the clergy from civil taxation.

In Germany and Italy where the conception of a Holy Roman Empire continued to be more generally accepted, the situation was complicated by perpetual conflicts between Imperial and Papal authorities, which grew in intensity from the middle of the 11th century. The Investiture Contest and caused by rival claims of succession to the throne of the Empire and to the office of the Papacy. These two great medieval institutions were so weakened by the end of the 13th century that they were never able to regain their former power.

The Great Schism (1378-1417) divided Western Europe into two religious allegiances under different Popes. Efforts were made to revive an earlier institution for the government of the Church, called the General Council, to which the Pope was to be forced to submit. The Council of Pisa (1409) was followed by the Council of Constance (1414-18) and then by the Council of Basil (1431-49). These Consiliums, attended by both clerical and lay representatives, laid down the principle of permanent Conciliar control of the Pope. But the Conciliar system failed and disappeared as a method of Catholic Church government. This failure paved the way to the Reformation.

It was only after the Reformation during the age of Enlightenment that the separation of church and state became a pre-condition for religious freedom. In representative democracies today, the separation of church and state has become the norm of religious freedom. in a democracy implies the absence of any governmental pressure to uphold any specific religious views – including any religious views at all.

In the UK the Queen (or King) is the formal head of the Church of England, but it should be realised that the Queen (or King) is only the ceremonial “Head of State”. The role of the “Crown” is symbolic and ceremonial. The executive power in the UK lies with the Cabinet. The monarch is constitutionally obliged to act through a Cabinet of Ministers responsible to Parliament. The same principle applies to the monarchies of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. (See C.F. Strong, Modern Political Constitutions, London, 1963, p.74)

The United States was the first modern democracy to protect the separation of church and state in its constitution. The American Bill of Rights begins with the celebrated First Amendment which guarantees against abridgement of religious freedom and of , press, or assembly; continues with specific guarantees against arbitrary governmental acts, particularly in respect to due process of law; and concludes by “reserving” to the states or the people all powers not constitutionally 56 granted to the federal government. Jefferson hailed the Bill of Rights as a safeguard “the people are entitled to against every government on earth”.

There is not a single Muslim country that qualifies as a democracy where basic are recognised. In Islam, God is Caesar and the Koran and the shari’a constitute basic law. Individualism is overruled by religious collectivism. Hence the area of choice available to the individual is not only subordinated to collective prerogatives, but prescribed by shari’a law. Islam and the way of life based on it leaves little scope for deviant religious convictions. The Muslim concept of Islam is that it is a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics. With a mindset based on religious exclusivity, there is no scope for religious toleration – let alone any form of atheism.

The Spread of Christianity (1780-1914)

Historian Geoffrey Blainey states that few invasions of ideas have matched the global spread of Christianity 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 Netherlands, later joined by the United States, 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, sects and religious orders joined in the quest to convert Africans and Asians. All 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 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 East Asia – a tribute to Spanish priests and monks 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.

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 Union was a major forerunner of modern political because it demanded the right to vote. The women proved powerful campaigners.

Anti-Christian Ideologies

Since the start of the 20th century, Christianity was seriously challenged by two powerful ideologies: 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 collective 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 elevated patriotic sentiments into a powerful nationalistic ideology where the alleged interests of the nation override all other considerations. 57

Following the theories of Karl Marx, communism insisted that religion was the “opium of the masses”. It made people feel content, materially, with what they had. Christianity fixed their hopes on an afterlife, whereas communism would create a paradise on earth in which poverty was unknown. Communism became a secular religion 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 Russian Orthodox Church 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 atheism and the suppression of Christianity in Russia. 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 Catholic Church 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 France. 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 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 Western world 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, Japan.

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

Christianity and Science

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 faiths 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 toleration in modern times was also the main arena of scientific progress.

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 faith, 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 belief that Jesus 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 59 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.

God’s Wrath and Blessings

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.

Christian Ethics and Political/Economic Life

The ideas, ideals and objectives that have come to orient the actions of Western nations are rooted in 25 centuries of Western history. They have been based on certain fundamental notions such as the originally Greco-Roman belief in the sovereignty of man’s rational intellect, but also on man’s spiritual relationship with a perceived omnipotent Providential Power that first arose amongst the ancient Hebrews and continued by the early Christians. The ancient pre-Christian world had at its heart the assumption of natural inequality. It is in Christianity that the individual moral agency and the inherent equality of all human beings has its roots. The teachings of Christianity from the earliest times proclaimed the supreme moral attribute of humans as beings created in the image of God. Thus Christianity invested all human beings with a God-given capacity for moral behaviour, individual liberty and an egalitarian basis for their human identity.

The dominant pre-occupation of Europeans in the era of the feudal system in medieval Europe was with man’s as inspired by the scriptures and administered by the Catholic Church. Though the Greco-Roman valuation of man’s rational intellect was not repudiated, it was assigned subordinate significance. As commanded by the pervasive Church, man was to seek his ultimate in 60 salvation in the world beyond and to exercise his rationality not for its own sake but as an instrument for the glorification of God. Since the end of the Middle Ages this earlier subordination of rationality to other-worldly spirituality has been progressively reversed. The view that man’s fulfilment should be “here and now” gradually gained ground. While it does not deny man’s spirituality, it sees it more as an ethical consciousness directing the use of his rationality in the service of his fellow man. The guiding inspiration of this modern Western world view is the ideal of maximised welfare here on earth. Its most insistent moral principle is the imperative that nature, human institutions, and even man himself be made to serve this ideal as efficiently and as fully as possible.

The Emergence of European Social-Democratic Economies

The period since 1950 can be described as the golden era of social-democracy in the Western World. Much of this progress took place under the auspices of the interventionist “welfare state” which entered the Western political arena during the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. It combined elements of “socialist” thought with the dynamic market forces of “capitalism”. It held that public influence on (and sometimes control of) key economic decisions was to the common good and necessary to maintain the basic socio-economic fabric of society to the extent that the market forces do not provide. It generally entailed a situation in which government provide all its citizens with certain guaranteed minimum services such as physical infrastructure, formal education, medical care, old age care, housing and protection against loss of employment. Governments, in response to public demand, have in the course of time steadily gained more and more control over the production, jobs and wealth of society. In many ways the enlarged state role was undertaken in an attempt to create a recession proof economy by such Keynesian style measures as temporary tax cuts and spending increases during downturns. In the decades following the Second World War, such measures achieved significant success in fostering economic growth and job creation.

Although advocates of the welfare state promoted the idea that every citizen ought to have the minimum conditions of the good life as a matter of right, they do not agree on the exact minima that ought to be guaranteed by collective provision or to what degree they ought to be guaranteed. They do agree, however, that it is the proper function of government to provide every citizen with some degree of formal education, medical care, social security and employment protection and that the rich be taxed to provide for the poor. In most Western nations the idea of “laissez faire” has lost most of its support, although many people still speak strongly in favour of “free enterprise” and against government “regimentation”. At the same time parties with “socialist” leanings have espoused programmes entailing public ownership and operation of railroads, electricity and gas services, postal services, telecommunications, airlines and coal mines without thereby advocating communist totalitarianism, the most repressive variant of socialism. Politically as well as economically both extremes have been shown to have grave imperfections. Most Western countries have become accustomed to the intervention of government in its ascribed role as the main gap-bridger, as a redistribution agency as well as a provider of public goods, collective goods and social insurance. This form of mixed economy is usually described as the “Social Democratic Market Model” or the “Social Market Model”.

Doctrinal Foundations of Socialist Welfarism

Socialist welfarism originated in an amalgam of the Christian ethics of caring for the poor and the deprived with the Socialist theory of collectivist provision. In the Western World it emerged in the wake of the gradual extension of universal political . 61

Social democracy is the most liberal form of socialism. Although there is no universal model of social democracy, it emphasizes egalitarianism rather than individual freedom, collective responsibility rather than free market liberalism, government intervention rather than market forces. However, one great objective of socialism, the welfare state – the collective responsibility of the community for a minimum standard of social and economic security for every person – is no longer a monopoly of socialist parties. All major parties in democratic nations accept the need for a certain minimum of welfare state services.

Social-democratic party leaders (alone or in coalitions) have been in power during much of the post World War II years in Western Europe: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. During this period the “welfare state” became the economic, social, cultural and organisational expression of the desire to promote equality. Some parties are stronger supporters of it than others, and some parties favour more benefits than others, but the principle that every citizen is entitled to a minimum standard of living is no longer a matter of partisan controversy.

Social democracy accepts a multi-party political system and in gradual, peaceful means of reaching its socialist goals. In practical terms this has meant that social democrats have concentrated more on alleviating what they regard as hardships created by capitalist economies (unemployment, salary and wage inequities) than on directly restructuring societies according to a collectivist blueprint.

Mixed Economies

States ruled by social democrats are generally mixed economies, combining elements of free enterprise competition with state ownership or direction of key industries. Germany is more free enterprise orientated than its Scandinavian neighbours or France. But in most social democracies, the nature of the mix of their economies, depends on the party in power.

Some parties, like the Gaullist Party in France and the Christian Democratic Party in Germany occupy a right-of-centre political posture advocating classically liberal ideas based on a free-market approach. Others, like the Socialist Party in France and the Social Democratic Parties in Germany and Sweden are left-of-centre parties in favour of government intervention to achieve socialist objectives.

In most Western countries, however, socialist regimes remained within the context of moderation. Only key industries or utilities were placed under direct government ownership and control, and the rest were left in private hands. Even in those nations which have had socialist regimes for generations (e.g. Scandinavia), a large sphere of production is left to free enterprise. Thus market forces can still prevail in a capitalist-socialist “mix” in countries such as Sweden and France. Some ventures – power generation, railroads, communications, certain “basic” industries like motor manufacturing, iron and steel – have undergone partial nationalisation, e.g. in France. But socialists had to moderate their demands on account of the failure of nationalised industries to perform according to expectations.

Social democratic planning never took the form of total, blueprinting, rigid dirigisme. Ostensibly it sought to have community interest replace “selfish” production decisions, to set an “ethical” rather than a monetary standard regarding production priorities. But these claims are more rhetorical than real. Democratic socialists by and large refrained from eliminating the market function. They tried to 62 impose a “standard of social value” on the market rather than to replace it. State plans are used as much to guide and supplement the private market as they are to lay out government goals. Representatives of labour and management as well as bureaucratic officials are consulted in the planning process.

Great pains are taken to avoid direct physical controls and to work with the more subtle techniques of monetary incentive, subsidies and penalties. Numerous techniques are applied to break up concentrations of economic power and to redistribute incomes. Business regulation, welfare programmes and taxation have been directed toward achieving these ends. Efforts have been made to equalize educational opportunities, to widen the chances for broadening the education of children coming from lower class families. Much attention has also been given to improve housing for the poor so that current disparities might not breed feelings of class conflict and hostility. Hence, the economies of social democracies are justifiably called “mixed”.

Comprehensive Social Security Schemes

The most distinctive achievement of social-democratic rule, is its provision of an extensive network of social services. These are provided through public sector delivery systems – either free of charge or at a modest cost. A variety of schemes are in place in the different countries to organise such functions as health care, old age care, assistance to the handicapped, child care, education, research, social work, family and individual counselling, etc. As various social security schemes spread across Europe over the years prior to 1940, three dominant systems emerged: the Bismarckian, the Beveridgean and the Scandinavian. Most countries adopted the principles of Bismarck’s “workmen’s insurance” as their basic model for benefits including sickness and unemployment allowances, pensions and public assistance as a subsidiary element. Thus the main instrument in the organisation of compensation for loss of income has been the system of “social insurance”, which is largely an imitation of private, voluntary insurance systems. There is a clear connection between contributions (by insured persons or employers) and eligibility for benefits. The Beveridge system is a modification of this scheme also using contributions by beneficiaries as a condition for eligibility of social benefits but involving the state in a tripartite arrangement. The Scandinavian scheme, however, is characterised by being run by public agencies, financed primarily through the revenue of general taxation and providing benefits conditioned on citizenship, not on previous occupation, income or contributions. It is often called “people’s insurance” in contrast to “workmen’s insurance”. Down the years these divergent schemes and approaches tended to converge although the main features of the various systems are clearly visible in social legislation in terms of the efforts made to maintain a balance between public and private responsibilities.

Scandinavians, in particular, strongly believe in the justice of equality and have introduced cradle-to- grave welfare services. Their public health systems provide free hospitalisation, surgery, medicine and dental care. The “people’s security” laws grant everyone , old age and unemployment benefits. Every worker is guaranteed at least four weeks paid vacation. They receive allowances for children, tuition-free education through university, sick pay, amounting to 90 percent of normal wages and a retirement pension equal to 60 percent of the average income of a worker’s fifteen highest paid years. Home-nurses and day centres for children are free. There is, generally, a relaxed attitude towards government and the public sector.

Socialism has always based its appeal on two main issues: social equality and the abolition of poverty. Most social-democracies in Western countries have gone a long way towards reaching these 63 objectives. The limits of the welfare state are only set by the ability of these countries to pay for their benefits rather than by differences of ideology amongst its major political parties. In most instances their inability to pay for the heavy load of government hand-outs has landed social democracies with mountains of public debt and stagnant economies.

Taxation Rather Than Nationalisation

Because social democrats have mostly come into power in industrially advanced and politically democratic nations, they have been cautious in their efforts to change existing systems. They have largely refrained from nationalising their industries.

During the early post-World War II days, the most comprehensive nationalisation strategy was followed by the British Labour Party which came to power in 1945. In its election campaign the Labour Party undertook to nationalise certain listed industries and services. In each case, it tried to explain why nationalisation was necessary. For gas and light, water, telephone and telegraph, and other utilities, the criterion of nationalisation was the existence of a natural monopoly. The coal, iron and steel industries were considered to be so sick and inefficient that they could not be put on their feet except through nationalisation. The nationalisation of all inland transport by rail, road and air was proposed on the ground that wasteful competition would best be avoided by a co-ordinated scheme owned and managed by public authorities. The Bank of England was also proposed for nationalisation on the ground that its purpose was so obviously public. After its electoral triumph in 1945 the Labour Party methodically carried out its programme.

The Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland) have had the most impressive record of social reforms, both in the inter-war years and after World War II. From the early 1930s onward, they have been governed by socialist governments based on parliamentary majorities. As a result communism has been kept down to minor proportions as political forces in these countries. The Scandinavian socialist movements have emphasized economic development and social security rather than nationalisation and their economic policies have been centred on monetary measures (such as low interest rates) and taxation rather than public ownership.

In all social-democracies taxation acted as the greatest leveller. As a result of high income and estate taxes there has been a significant shift in the distribution of wealth. While the share of high incomes in terms of the national income has declined, there has been a sharp increase of the middle-income groups, particularly skilled workers. The trend toward more social equality can also be seen in the fact that the proportion of the national income paid in wages and salaries increased significantly. These policies went a long way toward eliminating extremes of inequality.

Industrial Democracy

A basic belief among socialists of whatever stripe is that if the means of production remain under the complete control of private owners, the worker will be exploited. All socialists owe some debt to Karl Marx, who framed the classic socialist indictment of capitalism, accusing it of turning labour into a commodity and thus exploiting and dehumanising workers while it enriches bourgeois owners. Karl Marx claimed that he discovered certain “scientific” laws of history which hold that capitalism, by creating an increasingly numerous and impoverished working class, produces the forces that would eventually destroy it by way of a violent revolution. This prediction inspired many socialists for more than a century with the certainty of inevitable triumph. But rather than pushing workers deeper into 64 poverty, as Marx predicted, capitalism has lifted the vast majority of labourers in Western Europe into the middle class. Modern unions have given employees a counterforce to management’s power – and more often, more than a counterforce. An economic downturn now hits harder at corporate profits than at wages, which are usually fixed by contract or legislation. Today there is grave concern that trade unions have become too powerful and that the general public interest is not adequately protected against the abuse of trade union power – particularly by public sector unions.

Social-democratic governments all over Western Europe have given workers a major voice in management. Today employee representatives sit on boards of directors and management committees in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and other Western European States. In practice employees have a voice in setting wage levels, dividing profits, planning investments and firing executives.

Employment Participation

The West European social democracies have undergone some striking demographic changes in the post World War II period which are likely to have an important impact on future trends. The most striking changes are in the lives of women. At the beginning of the 1980s the proportion of women aged between 25 and 34 in the labour force was 42 percent in France and 49 percent in Germany. By 1988 these figures had risen, respectively to 67 percent, 75 percent and 87 percent. As the women went out to work, the fertility rate has fallen, which in turn, impacts on the age distribution of the population. By the end of the century, youngsters aged 14 or under made up a fifth of Europe’s population. In 1950 they accounted for a quarter. The first Europeans who started to have fewer babies were the rich Northerners – in Protestant Scandinavia, Germany and also Britain. Then followed France and then the Catholic Italians and Spaniards. Italian women now have the lowest fertility in Europe.

Ageing Populations

In Europe as a whole half of the citizens are older than 34. Within a generation, in most European countries a quarter of the population will be over 60. Across Europe, the rise in the ratio of pensioners to those of working age is striking. In 1950 this “dependency ratio” in European countries was commonly under 20 percent. By 2040, on present trends, this ratio is expected to rise to 30 percent. With a lower birth rate, lower immigration and an ageing population, Europe’s labour force will start to shrink as a share of the population. Without faster growth, Europe will be unable to afford its welfare system. The general growth in life expectancy will put more pressures on health and welfare services, state-run pension schemes as well as the pay-as-you-go retirement schemes. The latter pay pensions to retirees out of the contributions from current workers. As the proportion of old people rises across Europe, such schemes are running out of money. Recently the German government tackled its pensions problem by increasing workers’ contributions, raising the retirement age and reducing the value of pensions. Governments in most European countries are finding it difficult to push through such unpopular reforms.

The Decline of Religiosity

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 65 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 China is God important to fewer people (less than 5 percent) than in Europe.

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 “Soul 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 philosophies 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.

Max Weber and Freud

“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 economic development was 66 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 Protestantism 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 competition between sects in a free religious market seems to encourage innovations to make the experience of worship 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.

The Decline of Christianity’s Role

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 cults, 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 ‘ vs McWorld’ speaks volumes. In reality, 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 67

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)

In the November 14-15, 2015, edition of the Weekend Australian Magazine, Nikki Gemmell published an article entitled “Sex? Anything goes ...”. It describes “gender fluidity” as the new normal – something more interesting, more honest and a huge relief. The new buzzwords are “pansexual”, “asexual”, “hyposexual”, “semisexual” and “autosexual”. Adherence to traditional gender strictures is rejected as a “construct”, for the new generation “whatever goes”. Nikki Gemmell writes, “This new gender fluidity feels so empowered, honest and liberating especially for women. Its most famous exponents ... are bursting with energy and vividness. I’m a firm believer that you must look for the life and vitality in people, the beautiful spark, because you can always redirect vitality – yet you can’t give life to the lifeless..” Is this depiction of boundless hedonistic bliss perhaps the best antidote for the Jihadist’s promise of a martyr’s heaven?

What is striking about the modern reading of history, is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. Could our own version of Western civilisation collapse with equal suddenness? The economic gap between the “West and the Rest” is rapidly narrowed by China and other big Asian countries. Some people throw in the spectre of a climate change disaster caused by man-made carbon emissions. It is not easy 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.

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 British Empire 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 Russian Empire. 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- 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 Afghanistan confrontations, preceded by the 9/11 disaster, certainly fit Huntington’s model. The conflicts in the Sudan, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast 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 68 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.”

Bibliography

Blainey, G. (2011) Christianity – A Short History, Penguin Group, Victoria Brecht, A. (1959) Political theory – the Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Princeton University Press Davies, N. (1996) Europe – A History, Oxford University Press, Oxford Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, Transworld Publishers, London Ferguson, Niall (2011) Civilization – The West and the Rest, Allen Lane, London Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations – and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York Russell, C. (1990) The Causes of the English Civil War, London Shook, J.R. (2010) The God Debates, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester Strong, C.F. (1963) Modern Political Constitutions, Clowes & Sons, London Zaehner, R.C. (1997) Encyclopaedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, New York Tillich, P. (1951) Systematic Theology, Chicago

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The Ascendancy of Islam

Islam is the proper name of the religion traditionally called Mohammedanism in the West. It is based on revelations uttered by the prophet Muhammad (Mohammed) who lived in Arabia around AD570 to AD632. His revelations were collected after his death in the volume called the Koran (Qu’ran). From the Koran supplemented by statements and rulings traced back to Muhammad (the Hadith), a system of law and theology was derived in subsequent centuries. These, combined with precepts and elements of other religious sources, formed the religion of Islam which continued to grow into modern times with an estimated total number of adherents of around 1.4 billion persons, spread over more than 50 countries.

In Islam God is called Allah, but is shared with Judaism and Christianity. Islam believes in the original revelation and covenant between God and Adam to send prophets to all peoples. Mohammed was chosen as Allah’s messenger and the last link in a long line of prophets such as Ebrahim (Abraham), Mosu (Moses) and Issa (Jesus). God is one and has no “son”, but Jesus will come again as a perfected Muslim and rule as the righteous King over a unified world. Everything that happens to humans is predetermined by God. This predestination has made the problem of human free will a controversial issue in Islam. Why does God lead some persons to the correct faith and thus to salvation and lets others perish through their lack of faith? The Day of Judgment is a central element of Islam. Death is a separation of body and soul. Similar to the Apocalypse in Christianity, Allah’s severe judgment is a supreme disaster. Allah then separates the saved from the damned. Both the joys of Paradise and the of Hell are depicted in extreme and sensory terms in the Koran. It is not simply faith that counts, but the practical expression of that faith. There is a super abundance of food and the pleasures of the senses in Paradise.

After the death of Muhammad, the Community of Islam was involved in a civil war over succession. The majority faction, is called “Sunnis” or followers of the Sunna (Practice) of the Community at large. Opposed to them were two dissident groups: one which maintained the sole legitimacy in the headship of Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali (and his descendants), which were called the Shī‘at ‘Ali (partisans of Ali) or “Shī‘a”; the other, which rejected both Sunni and Shia positions and maintained the right of the Community not only to elect its own head, but to depose him if found guilty of sin (these were called ).

During subsequent centuries the Sunnis predominated, not only in the Arab world, but also amongst the numerically preponderant non-Arab converts. The Shia are largely limited to Iran. The Kharijites survive only in small enclaves in Oman, Zanzibar and Southern Algeria.

Pillars of Islam

Each individual Muslim believer is subject to certain duties called the “Pillars of the Faith” (Shahada): 1. Confession of Faith by repetition of the Word of Witness: There is no God but the one God, Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah. 2. Regular performance of the ritual of Prayer (salat) at the five appointed times and by performing certain prescribed ritual movements. 3. The giving of alms (Zakat), which is a certain percentage for the relief of the poor and needy. 4. Observance of the annual fast (Ramadan). 5. Once in a lifetime a Muslim should make a Pilgrimage to the Sacred Mosque at Mecca and participate in certain prescribed ceremonies. 70

In addition to these five duties, certain other obligations are laid on Muslims by the Koran: they are forbidden to drink wine, to eat swine’s flesh, to gamble, to practice usury and to refrain from unethical conduct such as perjury or slander. It is also obligatory to accept the Shari’a as both system of law and rule of life – setting out the ethical ideals. It is the Shari’a which confirms to each individual, as a Muslim citizen, those personal rights of liberty, prosperity and function awarded by God and which frees each person from capricious restrictions and classifications of a purely secular society.

The common interest of the Community of Muslims requires each believer to join with other members similarly aware of their responsibilities to “strive in God’s path” for its defence against external and internal enemies. This “Holy War” (jihād fi sabil Allāh) has taken different forms in different ages, but supplies Islam with a militant response to all confrontations with “infidels” who are not prepared to convert to Islam.

Holy War was waged vigorously against those who failed peacefully to submit to God’s will, though Jews and Christians were given special status as “protected peoples of the book” (), since their scripture was believed to be based on the “partial revelation” of lesser prophets. As dhimmis they could continue to follow their own faiths, provided they paid a special “head tax” (), about 6 percent of each individual’s total monetary worth, to their Muslim rulers. Pagans, however, were offered only the options of Islam or death. The last judgment day, when all dead would be raised to head Allah’s eternal decisions, was a concept vividly articulated by Muhammad. None were promised better prospects in Allah’s paradise than those valiant warriors who died in righteous battle. (See H.A.R. Gibb A (1977) “Islam” in Encyclopaedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, pp.166- 199 for a detailed analysis of Islamic theology and dogmatics)

The Birth and Ascent of Islam

Muhammad was born in Arabia in 570AD and as a young man travelled in camel caravans to distant markets. He was familiar with both Christians and Jews and absorbed many of their precepts and Biblical stories and gradually formed his own distinctive Islamic theology.

Muhammad combined intense religious views and ambitious military goals. He captured Mecca in 630AD and his followers extended his victories. Muhammad was succeeded by Omar who soon led his armed horsemen to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea where he captured Beirut and Damascus. He surrounded Jerusalem and after a one-year siege, captured the city in 638AD. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, said to be the burial place of Christ, was saved as a Christian shrine, but an Islamic mosque, the Dome of the Rock, was built on the vacant site of the great temple of the Jews. Jerusalem remained a Muslim possession for the following eleven centuries.

Within four years after capturing Jerusalem and the port of Basra, Egypt was captured by a Muslim army. Alexandria and most of the North African coast was conquered by 675AD. This coastal strip had been a vigorous Christian region for centuries. Byzantine shipyards at Alexandria were taken over and with more wooden ships the Muslims forces became strong on land and sea. By 674AD, Constantinople was conquered. Gibraltar, the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean, fell in 711AD and within ten years Muslim armies were in control of Spain and Portugal as the Emirate of Cordova. They crossed the Pyrenees into mainland Europe, but were turned back by Carles Martel and his Christian forces at the battle of Tours and Poitiers in 732AD. But much of this corner of Europe remained under Muslim control for another 700 years. 71

In the 9th century Muslim armies and navies captured Crete, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Minorca and Majorca along with the ports on the heel of Italy. In 846AD, a group of 500 Muslim horsemen landed at the mouth of the Tiber, went to Rome and pillaged the treasures at the sacred graves of St. Peter and St. Paul.

In Asia Minor, Arab armies won large swathes of land: Persia, Iraq, most of eastern Turkey and Armenia, most of present Pakistan, areas around 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. They penetrated Central Asia all the way to Samarkand and the areas west of the Chinese Walls. Martial fervour combined with the ethic of social unity made Muslim forces virtually invincible during the first centuries of their zealous expansion.

The first celebrated leader of the Osman Turks was born in 1258 in the Turkish town of Sogut. Osman assembled an army skilled in guerrilla tactics and occupied strategic places close to the Mediterranean and close to Constantinople, which was a major trading city in addition to being the capital of a vast Christian empire. Bypassing Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks advanced into Europe. By 1400 they held the present Bulgaria and long stretches of the Black Sea, advanced into Serbia and held much of the Adriatic coastline facing Italy. After a siege which lasted several months, Constantinople fell in 1453 to the all-conquering Ottoman Turks. Thousands were killed and scores of thousands fled the city. By now four vital eastern cities of the Christian world fell to the Muslim onslaught: Jerusalem, Alexandra, Antioch and Constantinople.

The Christian world now faced a crusade coming from Islam. In the following 40 years the Ottomans captured most of Albania, Bosnia and Serbia. They captured Athens, the rest of Greece and parts of the present Ukraine. They even captured the Italian port of Otranto, only a day’s horse-ride from Rome.

After 1454, the Ottoman rulers remade Constantinople into a Muslim city. The spectacular Christian Church of St. Sophia was turned into an Islamic temple with minarets at its corners. Christian boys were conscripted into the Muslim armies and all the land and property of Christian monasteries in the Ottoman Empire were confiscated by the Sultan. The Christian Orthodox Church moved its hub to Moscow.

Viewed in retrospect, during the period stretching from the seventh century to the fifteenth century, the forces of Islam had captured more than two-thirds of the Christian territories in Europe and Asia Minor. The crusades, poorly co-ordinated, recaptured only a faction of the land that had been lost.

Penetrating into Africa, Islam extended beyond the outer reaches of the Roman Empire. From the 8th century the first mosques appeared in the ports of East Africa. Islamic merchants visited the long stretch of dry territory, south of the Sahara, extending to the Atlantic coast in Mauritania. The Islamic religion gave meaning to the wandering nomads of the desert regions – requiring no priest and no church – not even for a burial. The language of the Koran was Arabic, but converts could learn passages by heart.

Islamic traders did business as far apart as Mombasa, Canton and Timbuktu. Although Islam proclaimed the kinship of all peoples, the idea did not extend to slaves. Over many centuries, Islamic merchants served as major slave traders from the upper reaches of the Niger River to Central Asia and Northern India. 72

By the end of the 15th century, the Christian forces completed the reconquest of Spain, ending the Islamic al-Andalus. The reconquest of the Mediterranean area was continued through Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. In time Western Europe not only discovered the sea routes across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but also became dominant in science and technology which gave it increased vitality to capture most of the Muslim lands in the 19th and 20th centuries.

After the Second World War, Islam revived. The occupied Muslim lands became independent and Muslim regions benefited hugely 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 an intensity of belief and a pace of growth not matched by Christianity.

With followers totalling close to one-and-a-half billion persons, Islam has provided the common bond for both a militant cultural identity and a sense of sacred mission 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 or anti-Islamic movements.

Trends in Islamic Doctrine

The elaboration of doctrine and scholastic theology was a relatively late development in Islam. The earlier generations were satisfied with simple unspeculative piety and fear of God (taqurā), together with the performance of the ritual obligations. Influential religious teachers generally disapproved of speculative scholastic theology. What is explicitly stated in the Koran was to be accepted without asking questions. The “madrasas” served as the main depositories of stereotypical orthodox scholasticism.

Sufism The first challenge to orthodoxy came in the 1100s with the spread of . For centuries the Sufis propagated a spiritual and mystical form of Islam. Sufism was influenced by the traditions of monastic asceticism and mysticism found in Buddhism, as well as in Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian religions. Richly endowed convents, madrasas or lodges were set up in various centres such as Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul and North India where the Sufis could engage in the pursuit of spiritual experience, the bodily discipline of celibacy and mystical intuition.

Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood The next phase saw a return to in the 1700s with the emergence of under the influence of an Arab sheikh named Muhammad ibu ’abd al-Wahhab. The Wahhabis called for a return to the doctrines and practices of early Islam. Their hostility towards Sufism led to a “purification of Islam” from Western influences. It also led to the development of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest in terms of numerical support and organisational coherence, grew from a grassroots organisation that interpreted Islam as a system of government, into a mass movement that provided key popular support for the 1952 Revolution of the Free Officers, a military coup led by Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser that ousted the Egyptian monarchy. Similar movements in 73

Palestine, Jordan and North Africa later emerged as significant actors in the political sphere. Many branches of the Brotherhood based on orthodox revivalism were directed towards missionary activities in Africa, India and Indonesia. The control centre of the Brotherhood is in Egypt and much of their activities are financed out of sources in the oil-rich Gulf States.

Wahhabism is now deeply entrenched in where they have a stranglehold on the Al Saud royal family. In a Special Report on Saudi Arabia, written by Max Rodenbeck for The Economist of January 7th 2006, it is reported that at a giant state-run press outside Medina, some 10 million beautifully printed Korans a year are produced in 40 languages and distributed free. These editions of the Koran are annotated by Wahhabist scholars, who pronounce, among other things, that jihad is one of the “pillars” of Islam in addition to the well-known five “pillars” - “Jihad is an obligatory duty”. Some estimates put the number of Saudi volunteers for jihadist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at around 30,000. Generous funding also flowed to jihadist causes, often without the knowledge of the Saudi donors. The Wahhabist establishment has been given control of the Saudi kingdom’s mosques and schools. Wahhabist schools and courts have supplanted older institutions across the kingdom. The powers of the mutawaa (religious police) have gradually been widened and rules on such things as female dress more rigidly enforced. Huge sums went to religious causes around the world, from the founding of Islamic universities to the building of mosques and pilgrimage assistance. Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, the founders of al-Qaeda, are both alumni of the Wahhabist school. The country’s main universities also remain steeped in Wahhabist thoughts.

Pan-Islamism The concept of Pan-Islam was first advocated by Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), a Persian Shi’ite, as a necessary response to what he perceived as the threat posed by the West to Islam. He also insisted that Islam should be rebuilt on its classical foundations. In the 20th century, the idea of Arab unity became prevalent. The common cultural, linguistic, historical and religious links between the Arab countries were emphasized and the Arabs held up as the backbone of Islam. Al Bazzaz maintained that there was no immediate possibility of unity of all Muslims for a variety of political and social reasons. Hence it was argued that Pan-Arabism was a necessary prerequisite of any future Muslim unity. These ideas were also supported by al-Husri (1880-1964) who believed that modern world conditions militated against Pan-Islamism, but that Arabic unity was a feasible goal for the foreseeable future.

In Egypt Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872-1963), the founder of the People’s Party, was a sceptic of Pan- Arabism and rather propagated sentiments of nationalism. The idea of Islamic nationalism featured prominently in the birth of Pakistan and its subsequent development. The main intellectual force behind the creation of Pakistan was the poet, mystic and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1875-1938) who perceived the creation of a separate Muslim state in India as a step towards the realisation of an ideal Islamic state and also as a means of freeing Islam from the influence of Arab imperialism.

The founding of Pakistan was originally opposed by Sayyid Abu I Ala Mandudi (1903-1979), founder of Jamaat-i-Islami, a militant movement whose purpose was to establish an Islamic world order. Mandudi argued that any form of nationalism was contrary to Islamic ideals. At a later stage he accepted the reality of Pakistan and spearheaded a movement to transform the country from a Muslim homeland to an Islamic state. This change of opinion highlights the inherent dichotomy in Muslim thought between the ideal of Islamic unity and the practical realities of loyalty to the individual state. The latter bears the danger of delegating the sovereignty which belongs to God, to a human ruler or to the people. 74

Islam and Socialism The relationship between Islam and conceptions of socialism and capitalism is complex. Capitalism has been associated with the corruption and decadence of the Western World and with Western Imperialism. It thus aroused strong feelings amongst Muslims of nationalism and a sense of religious morality. But socialism, which is also considered to be materialistic at its roots, was not readily accepted as an alternative. As a result, a division arose between Muslim countries committed to socialism and those which were not. There was also a broad spectrum of socialist stances amongst Muslims, ranging from Marxism to Islamic socialism. The Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, which came to power in Syria and Iraq in the latter half of the 20th century, combined the ideas of socialism with those of Pan-Arabism. The Algerian Popular Democratic Republic in its 1976 charter described social revolution as the only hope for a declining Muslim world.

Several Islamic intellectuals such as Mustafa Mahmud attempted to show that Islam can provide a system far superior to both Marxism and capitalism. By building on the principles of the Koran and the Sunna, the needs and desires of the individual and the group could be accommodated in balance. This view of Islam as the middle path between capitalism and socialism was also reflected in the ideas of Ayatollah Mahmud Taligani, a principal leader of the Iranian revolution. He argued that Islamic economics, based on the right of ownership by individuals of the fruits of their labour, were in fact the inevitable end of any economic system.

Islamising the State In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood began with their campaign in 1928 to create an Islamic state by direct action. They tried to work within the framework of the existing state. After initial successes which included the forced abdication of King Farouk in 1952, the Brotherhood formed an alliance with the then ruling Revolutionary Command Council. Disagreements between the two groups led to an assassination attempt on Nasser, leader of the Free Officers who put the Revolutionary Command Council in power, and the majority of the Brotherhood were imprisoned or executed. In the 1970s the Brotherhood were again active in opposition and continued their campaign to introduce more Shari’a law as a means towards Islamising the state.

In Iran the reformist policies of the Shah in the 1960s and early 1970s engendered widespread hostility. The Shah antagonised the mullahs by encroaching on the autonomy of the religious establishment. He also alienated conservative Muslims by banning the chador from universities and government offices. A broadly based movement backed the revolution and brought the exiled Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini into power to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

Reactionary Trends The role of women in modern Islam has also been affected by the reaction against Western culture in many Muslim countries. Increased freedom of activity for women and the abandonment of traditional dress have been seen by many as the result of corruption by Western decadence. The Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, has striven to encourage traditional Islamic values such as polygamy, which is seen as a protection from the evils of adultery and prostitution which are encouraged by enforced monogamy.

As a result of the fast changing world, many Muslim groups are placing a growing emphasis on a return to Islamic values. But the situations created by the increasingly complex world, confronts 75

Muslims with ever-changing challenges to interpret the ethical and social values of Islam in a meaningful way.

Fundamentalist Islamic Networks In recent years a new range of secret jihadist networks have appeared – all sailing under the flag of Islam. The most influential is Hisb ut-Tahrir (HT), the “Party of Liberation”. This particular network acts as ideological vanguard in many countries on behalf of Sunni Islamism. By combining Western sloganeering techniques with Wahhabi theology, this global network has become a potent challenger to the free world with its leitmotif of grievance against the West.

HT acts as a conveyor belt for terrorists. It indoctrinates individuals with radical ideology, priming them for recruitment by more extreme organisations where they can take part in actual operations. It combines fascist rhetoric and Western sloganeering with Wahhabi theology. It is composed of secretive cells with an estimated membership of thousands. It plays a major role in the radicalisation of disaffected Muslim youth. The bombers of the 7/7 attack in the UK were members of HT. Their websites offer easily accessible literature and news to Muslims living in Western countries. Taking advantage of the West’s freedoms of speech and assembly, HT spreads its hate-filled ideas creating a fifth column of activists to undermine the very systems under which they live. Many Westerners do not understand the ideological challenge posed by radical Islam and fail to take sensible precautions.

Extremist Islamic Jihadists The 1990s saw the formation of Al-Qaeda. It is composed of loosely affiliated terrorist cells and its activities have fuelled a resurgence in Islamic fundamentalism. Founded by Osama bin Laden, it operates in around 80 countries acting more or less like an “ideological franchise” coupled with a “terrorism central”. It supports jihadi groups who draw their strength from a common pool of self- righteous anger at what they see as the humiliation of Muslims at the hands of Western “infidels”. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with its support for Israel are interpreted as a war on Islam.

In addition, several extremist strains of Islamist Jihadism have emerged in different parts of the world. Among them are Jemaah Islamiah, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and Islamic State (IS or ISIL or ISIS). These militant splinter groups are off-shoots or fronts of the major global Islamic networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hisb ut-Tahrir. They take advantage of the mismanagement of corrupt governments, recruiting ill-educated, jobless and angry Muslim youngsters to wage a campaign of violence and murder. Extra money is collected from sponsors in Saudi Arabia and other sources in the oil-rich Gulf.

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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Members of the Islamic Arab World

Total Muslim Arab World Members Population Percentage

Algeria 34,178,188 99.0 Bahrain 727,785 82.0 Comoros 752,438 98.0 Djibouti 516,055 94.0 Egypt 83,082,869 90.0 Iraq 28,945,657 97.0 Jordan 6,342,948 95.0 Kuwait 2,691,158 85.0 Lebanon 4,017,095 60.0 Libya 6,310,434 100.0 Mauritania 3,129,486 100.0 Morocco 34,859,364 98.7 Oman 3,418,085 100.0 Palestinian Territories 4,000,000 100.0 Qatar 833,285 100.0 Saudi Arabia 28,686,633 100.0 Somalia 9,832,017 100.0 Sudan 41,087,825 70.0 Syria 20,178,485 74.0 Tunisia 10,486,339 98.0 United Arab Emirates 4,798,491 96.0 23,822,783 99.0

Source: Pop. Data – 2009 CIA World Fact Book

The 22 countries that belong to the Arab League are not as homogenous as is generally assumed. Apart from pockets of Kurds, Maronites, Copts, Berbers and Africans and apart from the fact that Arabic is widely spoken and understood, there are many Arab dialects that are not commonly understood. The Islamic religion provides some glue, but in a few cases is a divisive force. The only source of consensus is their mutual hatred for Israel.

Within the borders of some Arab countries a major problem has been the missing glue of nationhood. Iraq is saddled with the perennial sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia factions and the separatist striving of the Kurds. Lebanon is notoriously fragile as a result of its religious factions. Sudan has been plagued by civil wars between its Arab-dominated centre and the non-Arab minorities in its south and west.

The region’s population has doubled over the past 30 years to around 360 million. The majority of Arabs are under 25 years old. The rapid population growth has coincided with a massive influx into the cities. Cairo burgeoned from 9 million in 1976 to 18 million in 2006. Saudi Arabia’s capital, , 77 hardly a noteworthy town 50 years ago, is a city of 5 million people today. Around 90 percent of Lebanese and Jordanians live in cities.

The Arab population is expected to surge by 40 percent over the next two decades. That amounts to 150 million additional people – the equivalent of two Egypts. With low employment rates and particularly high youth unemployment (around one person in five are out of work), the Arab world faces looming problems. Particularly in the most populous states (Egypt, Algeria and Morocco), the prospects of creating enough job opportunities seem remote.

Non-Arab Muslim States

Along the borders of the Arab world and further away are a number of outlying states with predominantly Muslim populations. To the north of the Arab world lies Turkey (99.6 percent out of 76.8 million) and north-east lies Iran (99 percent out of 66.4 million). In South-Central Asia lie Afghanistan (99 percent out of 33.6 million), Pakistan (97 percent out of 154 million) and Bangladesh (83 percent out of 156 million). Further east lies the most populous Muslim state, Indonesia (86 percent out of 232 million) and Malaysia (52 percent out of 25.7 million). Towards Central Asia lie the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan (90 percent out of 53.6 million). In Africa these include Chad (54 percent out of 10.3 million), Mali (90 percent out of 12.6 million), Niger (80 percent out of 15.3 million), Nigeria (75 percent out of 149 million), Sierra Leone (60 percent out of 6.4 million), Tanzania (65 percent out of 41 million) and Western Sahara (100 percent out of 405,000). Together these countries have a combined population of around 1 billion people of which around 75 percent are Muslim.

Characteristics of Islamic Statehood

All the countries of the Islamic world mentioned in this survey are sovereign entities in which religion combined with other social characteristics such as race, language or culture are explicitly or implicitly recognised as the basis of the state. Those countries consistently display certain recurrent characteristics.

Creations of the Colonial Era In the case of Indonesia, the mere existence of the state as a political entity is a product of its colonial history: its pre-colonial political systems were much smaller in scale consisting of a number of traditional monarchies which were absorbed within the new political system. Some Islamic states are examples of traditional states which never fell under prolonged colonial occupation: Afghanistan, Iran and Yemen. In Iran there have been brief occupations and some border alteration but it did not involve the imposition of European colonial rule – which explains the delayed impact of social change upon customary institutions.

In some cases the Islamic states were created artificially following the break-up of colonial empires such as the Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq – both more or less fabricated to reward those who rendered wartime services to the British Empire. Similarly petty monarchs were awarded (or permitted to seize) territory ranging beyond the ambit of any justifiable claims (Saudis in Saudi Arabia and Senussi leaders in Libya). In the cases of Pakistan and Bangladesh, religion combined with ethnic factors has been the organising foundation of the emerging political entities.

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The colonial era left many Islamic states with territorial boundaries inchoately dissecting religious or ethnic communities. An obvious example of trans-territorial ethnicity is the case of the Kurds. They are situated as an ethnic-linguistic minority in each of four distinct states: Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. Their aspiration of an independent Kurdish Republic has brought them into conflict with ruling groups in all four sovereignties. Kurdish self-consciousness has been stimulated by the development of militant nationalism among dominant groups in the four states. Kurdish cultural pride is traced back 4200 years to the ancient Medes. The great majority of Kurds are Sunnite Muslims, particularly important for their members in Iran who confront a Shi’ite . Under Saddam Hussein the persecution of Kurds led to mass killings of many thousands. The Turkish army has often conducted raids into Kurd territory in Iraq. Thus religion, a shared sense of persecution and resentment at minority status, a sense of historic uniqueness and the impact of intensified nationalism in surrounding areas brought about the Kurdish dilemma.

The British colonial office must take responsibility for drawing many arbitrary lines during the colonial era. The arbitrary territorial demarcation of Iraq, with its eastern boundary dissecting the Shia community, created an Iraqi political entity with a virtually unmanageable conflict potential. A similar artificial situation exists in Sudan. The inhabitants of the western region of Darfur as well as the “blacker-skinned” Christian and animist tribes in the south have little in common with the Muslim Arabs in the north. Since the British left, millions of westerners and southerners have been killed. An estimated 9 million people depended on food handouts from abroad by 2010. Also on the western boundary of Pakistan, the colonial-drawn Durand Line bisects the Pashtun tribes. Afghanistan’s poverty is exacerbated by fundamentalism coupled with the fluidity of the Pashtun tribes fluctuating across the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Similarly the creation of the state of Israel with the support of the Western World (particularly the USA and the UK) led to the displacement of millions of Palestinians. The neglect of the legitimate territorial claims of the Palestinians has created one of the most volatile flashpoints in the modern world.

Sense of Sacred Mission Throughout modern history, religion has been a major foundation for identity and cohesion. The world’s great religions have all provided significant politically relevant affiliations: Christianity, Buddhism, . The profound hold which religion is capable of exerting upon man’s emotions and imagination render these cleavages peculiarly intractable. The common bond of religion can produce both militant cultural identity and a sense of sacred mission.

The role of religion takes on an added importance where religion regards the sacred and secular realms as inseparable – as is the case in Islamic countries. Coexistence of different religious 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.

Predominance of Islamic Finance The roots of Islamic finance stretch back 14 centuries. It rests on the application of Islamic law, or sharia, whose primary sources are the Koran and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Sharia emphasises justice and partnership. In the world of finance that translates into a ban on speculation (gharar) and on the charging of interest (riba).

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The idea of a lender levying a straight interest charge, regardless of how the underlying assets fare in an uncertain world, offends against these principles. Some Muslims dispute this, arguing that the literature of sharia covering business practices is small and that terms such as “usury” and “speculation” are open to interpretation.

Companies that operate in immoral industries, such as gambling or pornography, are considered out of bounds. So too are companies that have too much borrowing defined as having debt totalling more than 33 percent of the firm’s stock-market value. Such criteria mean that sharia-compliant investors steer clear of highly leveraged conventional banks.

Islamic financiers are confident that they can create their own versions of the useful parts of conventional finance. What is allowed or not allowed under sharia is decided by boards of scholars. They act as a kind of spiritual rating agency working closely with lawyers and bankers to create instruments and to structure transactions that meet the needs of the market without offending the requirements of the Islamic faith. The distinctions between conventional finance and Islamic finance may seem contrived. An options contract to buy a security at a set price at a date three months hence is frowned upon as speculation. But a contract to buy the same security at the same price, with 5 percent of the payment taken up front and the balance taken in three months upon delivery, is sharia compliant.

Who is the ultimate authority on sharia compliance? There are no simple answers and diverging interpretations. Malaysia has tackled the problem by creating a national sharia board. The Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain is attempting to lay down the ground rules for common standards. But differences between national jurisdictions, e.g. between pious Saudi Arabia and more liberal Malaysia, are likely to remain. Both countries feature in the top three markets for Islamic finance, measured by the quantity of sharia-compliant assets. In 2007 Iran stood at the top with $154.6 billion, Saudi Arabia with $69.4 billion and Malaysia with $65.1 billion. The Gulf States, awash with liquidity and a roster of huge infrastructure projects to finance are seen as the most dynamic markets. Britain is the most developed Western centre. France, with a much larger Muslim population, is working to close the gap.

Islamic banks are opening their doors across the Gulf and sharia-compliant hedge funds have been launched. firms and banks are expanding their Islamic-finance teams. Indonesia announced in 2008 that it would issue the nation’s first sukuk (sovereign wealth fund). The British government, keen on retaining its lead as the West’s front-running centre for Islamic finance, has also taken steps to issue a short-term sovereign sukuk.

Compared to the highly questionable American sub-prime lending, the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds look attractive. They frown on speculation and support risk sharing. In 2008 the amount of Islamic assets under management stood at around $700 billion, with much scope to grow, provided that their ethical standards are met. Sharia-compliant mortgages are structured in such a way that the lender itself buys the property and then leases it out to the borrower at a price that combines a rental charge and a capital payment. At the end of the mortgage term, when the price of the property has been fully repaid, the house is transferred to the borrower. The additional complexity adds to the direct transaction costs since the property changes hands twice – which makes it liable to double stamp duty. Britain, as can be expected, ironed out this complexity in order to get the business.

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It is argued that with increasing volumes, economies of scale would cut costs: recycling documentation, using standard templates, streamlining processes. Sharia-compliance is constantly redefined. An example is the use of hedge funds, which are essentially based on the principle of selling something that an investor does not actually own. After several years of cutting corners and redefining terms, the financial wizards developed a technique called arboon. This technique ensures that investors, in effect, take an equity position in shares before they sell them short! Persons with a knowledge of Islamic law and Western finance, as well as fluency in Arabic and English, have become highly prized members on the boards of banks with Islamic clients. Assets have also become a bottleneck. The ban on speculation means that Islamic transactions must be based on tangible assets, such as commodities, buildings or land. Exotic derivatives are frowned upon. This limits the scope for securitization that is not backed by sharia-compliant assets. Islamic financiers are concerned about a possible mismatch between the duration of a bank’s liabilities and their assets.

The flexibility imposed on Islamic finance by Western financial architects and manipulators holds the danger of sharia being twisted for short-term business purposes. Scholars are paid for their ingenuity to evade strict sharia standards instead of producing functionally sound innovations. Unscrupulous operators could harm the reputation of the entire industry. (See Briefing called “Islamic Finance”, The Economist, September 6th, 2008, pp.72-74)

Theocratic Politics A specialist in Islamic Studies at Princeton University, Bernard Lewis, remarked early in 2009 that throughout the Islamic world there are two opposite trends competing for ascendancy: Islamic theocracy at one end of the spectrum and secular liberal democracy at the other end. The Islamic theocracy movement is currently by far the most prominent. The momentum of secular liberal democracy is sporadic and faces many severe obstacles.

The forces representing Islamic theocracy have several obvious advantages. Their messages are cast in religious rather than secular political terms. They express both their critiques and their aspirations in terms that are familiar and easily accepted, unlike those of Western-style democrats. They have access in the mosques to a communications network that bears the authentic stamp of Islam which therefore provides the tools to disseminate propaganda. Secular democratic opposition groups are required by their own ideologies to tolerate the propaganda of their opponents, whereas the religious parties have no such obligation. Rather, it is their sacred duty to crush the anti-religious, anti-Islamic movements. Their diagnosis of the ills of the Islamic world is all due to infidels and their local dupes and imitators. The remedy is to resume the millennial struggle against the infidels in the West and return to God- given laws and traditions.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are the secular liberal democrats who argue that it is the old ways, represented by degenerate and corrupt power centres, that are crippling the Islamic world. For them the cure is openness and freedom in the economy, society and the state – in genuine democracy. But the road to democracy, and to freedom, is long and difficult with many obstacles along the way.

The bulk of the Islamic populations find themselves somewhere between the opposite positions of the political spectrum, depending on the national political complexion where they live. 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 democratic process.

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“Across the Muslim world, a new generation of activist bloggers and preachers is discovering ways to synthesize Islam and modernity”. This claim is made in an essay in Time Magazine (March 30th, 2009, pp.28-32) by Robin Wright. The title of the essay is “Islam’s Soft Revolution”. Is this wishful thinking or an empirically based factual description of current trends?

Wright contends that this revolutionary change is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. It is decidedly anti-jihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally it is deeply conservative, but its aim is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically it rejects secularism and Westernisation, but craves changes compatible with modern global trends: it is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. According to Wright the new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them Islam is a path to change rather than the goal itself: trying to mix modernity and religion. The new Muslim activists are said to be part of a post 9/11 generation, disillusioned with extremists who fail to construct credible alternatives, to advance their aims. They seek answers within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. Wright claims that the “soft revolution” is to be found in hundreds of schools from Turkey to Pakistan. Its themes echo in Palestinian hip-hop, Egyptian Facebook and the flurry of Koranic verses text-messaged between students. Telephones are answered by young Egyptians saying “Salaam Alaikum” (Peace be upon you) instead of “Hello”. When discussing everything from weather to politics, they add the tagline “bi izn Allah” (if God permits). They watch satellite broadcasts of young preachers explaining that you could be a good Muslim and yet enjoy life – exploiting the middle ground between being devout or liberal. Traditional clerics denounce the televangelists for preaching “easy Islam”, “yuppie Islam”, or even “Western Islam”. Elvis Presley is used as an example to illustrate that life without spirituality is empty.

In Egypt several bloggers have emerged within the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood who argue that Muslims should eschew both the Iranian-style theocracy and the Western-style democracy. They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them. As a consequence Islamic parties are increasingly placed under intense scrutiny. In Turkey a group of scholars at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara have initiated a “Hadith Project” to investigate the recorded actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad in order to substantiate their validity and consistency within Koranic scripture, e.g. the stoning of adulterers, honour killings and the tradition which says that women are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind. There is a growing awareness about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society. The West is no longer the only world view to look up to.

Forty years ago, Islamic dress was rare in Egypt. Today more than 80 percent of women are estimated to wear the . Piety alone is not offered as explanation for the change in dress. It is claimed that the veil is the mark of Egyptian women in their power struggle against the dictatorship of men. The veil gives women more power in a man’s world – it provides protective cover and legitimacy for her campaigns.

Many young Arabs are angry at the outside world’s support for corrupt and autocratic regimes such as the Gulf States and Libya. At the top of their gripe-list is the West’s support for Israel and its neglect of the suffering of the Palestinians.

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Profile of Islamic States in the Arab World

The Islamic states of the Arab World present a bleak economic, political and social picture.

Authoritarian Regimes Throughout the Arab world, authoritarian rule is the order of the day. Hardly any of the 21 actual states can plausibly claim to be a genuine democracy. The cartel of authoritarian regimes is well practised in the arts of repression in order to stay in power. In Egypt radical Islamist movements such as Islamic Jihad and the Jamaat Islamiya continue to claim lives. One of Egypt’s jihadists, Ayman al- Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, founded and led al-Qaeda.

The stubborn conflict in Palestine has created a deadly international stalemate – despite continued efforts by American presidents – or, perhaps on account of continued American support of Israel. Much of Arab opinion remained fixated on the struggle with Israel. After the 9/11 attack George W. Bush sent in the American Army to destroy the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq – ostensibly to rid America of an unpredictable enemy suspected plausibly of weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were not found (despite the fact that Saddam Hussein found it necessary to expel the UN’s weapons inspectors). President George W. Bush pressed on with his “Freedom Agenda” to spread democracy in the region – perhaps naively, not realising that if he had been more successful in his campaign, several of the Arab kings, emirs and presidents (who depended on American markets, aid and military protection) would be thrown out of their positions in the advent of real democracy in their countries. The “Freedom Agenda” of the Bush administration failed and the Obama Administration decided to bow out respectfully. The fundamental problems relating to the political stagnation of the Arab world was left unresolved.

Although the local details vary, most Arab regimes maintain their power in remarkably similar ways. At the top of the system sits either a single authoritarian ruler (a monarch or a president), or an ever- ruling party or royal family. The ruler is shored up by an extensive makhabarat (intelligence service) employing a vast network of informers. Some estimates of the Egyptian internal security apparatus are as high as 2 million people. The second instrument of control is the government bureaucracy. With rotation of power, Arab countries have blurred the distinction between the ruler and the state. Bloated civil services provide the regimes with a way to dispense patronage and “pretend jobs” to mop up new university graduates. The size of these administrative armies is staggering. In 2007, Egypt’s civil service was about 7 million (population 83 million). As a proportion of their population, the Gulf oil producers’ public sector payroll is higher still.

The most effective instrument of control used by the Arab regimes is “sham democracy”. Most Arab countries have parliaments and they hold formal elections, but parliaments have few powers and elections are rigged to ensure that the ruler or his party cannot be unseated. News media are government controlled.

Hosni Mubarak has remained President of Egypt for 28 years. In 2007 a new constitutional amendment banned political parties with a religious orientation and increased the extensive powers of the president – including the emergency laws under which Egypt has been governed for most of the past half-century. The government has stopped broadcasting of parliamentary debates or reporting them in newspapers. Members of the opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood claim that they are repeatedly harassed by the police.

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Elsewhere in the Arab world the democratic outlook is equally bleak. In Syria, Hafez Assad died after 30 years as the country’s ruler, but his son Bashar Assad took his place. Ali Abdullah Saleh has been president of Yemen for more than 30 years. Jordan is still run by the Hashemite family and Morocco by the Alouite family, Saudi Arabia by the al-Sauds and Kuwait by the al-Subahs. Muammar Qaddafi has been imposing his unique brand of “Islamic Socialism” on Libyans since 1969 and is grooming one of his sons to take over. In Egypt there is also talk of a favoured son inheriting his dad’s position.

It is clear that for the Arab world the reality of government of the people, by the people and for the people still lies in the distant future. Change will have to come from within. But it is not clear how this change might come about. One possibility is that the impetus for change might grow as power passes down the generations, bringing to the fore a brand of leaders (and followers) with a more modern outlook. Morocco’s King Muhammad is more of a moderniser than was his father, King Hassan. Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, who eventually ascended to the throne in 2005 at the sprightly age of 80, has cautiously accelerated the careful reforms he initiated during his time as crown prince when his older half-brother Fahd was king. Jordan has not advanced since Abdullah took over from Hussein. It seems that change will have to come from below.

Economic Stagnation With the exception of the oil-rich areas such as Libya and the Gulf States, the economic statistics of the Arab world paint a bleak picture. The broad pattern is one of under-performance in investment, productivity, trade, education and social development.

The total manufacturing exports of the entire Arab world is lower than those of the Philippines (with less than one-third the population) or Israel (with a population the size of the Saudi city of Riyadh). In the booming Gulf States, much of the migrant workers are drawn from Asia, but they are also sucked in from poorer Arab countries. Many Arabs serve as migrant workers in Europe. The remittances of migrant workers are estimated to make up around 20 percent of the GDP in Lebanon and Jordan. Millions of Egyptians work abroad, many of them in the Gulf. Some of the countries that lack oil, but are close to European markets and influence, such as Morocco and Tunisia, have begun to create diversified economies. It is clear that all the Arab countries, both oil and non-oil states, are disproportionately dependent on collecting rents – if not from oil from some other form such as remittances or foreign aid or loans.

The Arab countries need to address the imbalances in their economies: skills shortages, rigid labour markets, over-sized bureaucracies and an over-dependence on rent collection. They are hampered by chronic weaknesses in their government bureaucracies, defective judicial systems, a lack of political transparency or accountability and exploitative vested interests.

Over the last quarter of a century, real GDP per capita has fallen throughout the Arab world. In 1999, the GDP of all the Arab countries combined stood at $531.2 billion, less than that of Spain. Today, the total non-oil exports of the Arab world (which has a population of around 360 million people) amount to less than those of Finland (a country with only 5 million inhabitants).

The situation regarding science and technology is as bad or worse. The number of patents registered in the USA between 1980 and 2000 coming from the Arab world totalled 867 – compared with 16,328 from South Korea and 7,652 from Israel. The Arab countries also have the highest illiteracy rates. Only sub-Saharan Africa has a lower average standard of living.

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Family Dynasties A remarkable characteristic of the Arab world is the resilience of the family dynasties. The archetypical example is the Al Sauds. Several observers have commented on the surprising degree of acceptance enjoyed by the ruling dynasties. Saudi Arabia (population 29 million) is the site of the holiest places in Islam, which carries with it both heavy responsibilities and wide influence among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. It has been created by holy war (jihad). Its present territory was captured between 1902 and 1925 by a crusading puritan army under Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, who declared himself king in 1932 – the same year that oil was discovered in the east of the kingdom. Oil and Islam define Saudi Arabia in many ways: the relationship between citizen and state, between effort and reward in the workplace. The immense wealth and continuous patronage financed by the income stream derived from oil and its strategic importance to the oil-hungry world at large.

The sheer size of the Al Saud clan is quite remarkable. There have been eight generations of Saudi rulers dating back to 18th century sheikhs who held sway in a few oasis towns near the present Riyadh. Many have been prolific. Abdul Aziz himself sired some 36 sons and even more daughters. The first son to succeed him, King Saud, fathered 107 children. King Abdullah is believed to have 20 daughters and 14 sons. The extended Al Saud family is now estimated to number some 30,000, with around 7,000 regarded as princes. Of these around 500 occupy government positions, perhaps 60 in important decision-making roles. Tribal links are maintained through strategic marriages and the selective manning of key institutions such as the Saudi National Guard. Forty years ago, King Feisal, a renowned reformer, decreed that the royal family’s take from oil exports should be capped at 18 percent. State budgets are too opaque to audit the current percentages, but the combined wealth of the family is estimated to add up to hundreds of billions of dollars. The Al Sauds and their loyalists control all of the dozen Saudi daily newspapers. The two most respected pan-Arab dailies, as well as four out of five of the most popular Arab satellite TV channels (al-Jazeera excluded).

Despite the lack of any constitutional constraints, the Saudi King is restrained by the Wahhabist religious establishment. Although kings appoint senior members of the clergy, they have no direct oversight over the 700 judges who run the sharia courts, the backbone of the Saudi legal system. The king must also answer to his own enormous family. By tradition, succession is not vertical, passing to sons, but horizontal, passing to brothers in order of age. The king’s sons, of whom dozens are still in line for succession, have used their long wait to create their own powerful fiefs. All have appointed their sons to top positions.

The Suppressed Condition of Women In most Arab countries women have no political power. The depressed and down-trodden status of women is one of the main reasons for the under-development of their society as compared with the West and the rapidly developing East. Some countries such as Iraq and Tunisia have made significant progress towards the emancipation of women by increasing opportunities for them: access to higher education and a widening range of professions. The spectacle of women peeping out of small holes in burkas is still a familiar sight. It symbolises the perspective on the world accorded to female Arabs.

How can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? Despite development initiatives over the recent few decades, one in every two Arab women still cannot read or write. In nearly all Arab countries women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements.

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The Gulf States and the Oil Bonanza Barely eight decades ago, all six desert monarchies that make up the Gulf Co-operation Council (Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait) were wretchedly poor, thinly populated and so loosely governed that they could barely claim the status of nation-states. All were catapulted into modernity by the discovery of 45 percent of the world’s known oil reserves by American prospectors in 1932 and its subsequent extraction and marketing around the world. In 2006 oil revenues contributed 80 percent of government revenue in the abovementioned GCC countries with their combined population of around 40 million people.

The oil bonanza brought many benefits to the GCC countries. In a special report on the Gulf States in 2002, The Economist noted that the six desert monarchies since 1970 had trebled literacy levels to 75 percent, added 20 years to average life expectancy and created a world-class infrastructure by spending a total of $2 trillion. Dubai, with relatively little oil and gas, has become a successful business, shopping and tourism hub along the lines of Singapore and Hong Kong. Kuwait pioneered the idea of safeguarding its own future by becoming a long-term investor in the economies of others. Huge sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf States have turned the Arab countries into a big force in the world economy as strategic investors.

A quick glance at the demographic trends in the Gulf States shows that there is huge scope for investment in the development of the home region. With 60 percent of the Gulf’s native population under the age of 25 and with more of its citizens in school than in the workforce, the region faces at least a generation of rocketing demand for employment. In every single GCC country the native workforce will double by 2020. In Saudi Arabia it will grow from 3.3 million in 2002 to 8 million. This challenge is particularly daunting for the Gulf region for several reasons. The first is its lopsided labour structure which was caused by importing millions of foreign workers to do the heavy lifting and to dispense cosy jobs to locals. The result is a two-tier workforce, with outsiders working mostly in the private sector and locals monopolising the public bureaucracy. In 2002 in Kuwait, for example, 93 percent of the natives who have jobs were employed by the government, whereas 98 percent of the 900,000 people working in the private sector were foreigners. Private sector workers were found to be productive, whereas government workers were found to be worth only a quarter of what they were paid. The second is the poor quality of their education systems which were largely based on outdated Egyptian models – largely designed to instil patriotism and religious values. The system discourages intellectual curiosity and channels students to prestige certificates rather than gaining marketable skills. Of the 120,000 graduates that Saudi universities produced in the period 1995 to 2000, only 10,000 had studied technical subjects. They accounted for only 2 percent of Saudis entering the job market.

Government largesse tended to spoil Gulf-state citizens. Jobless youths do not bother to find work because their families are wealthy and willing to keep them in comfort until “appropriate” positions arise. Years of easy money and state coddling seem to have weakened the work ethic. Businesses are said to be reluctant to hire locals because they “won’t show up, won’t care and can’t be fired”. Indians form the largest proportion of foreign workers. They work long hours for low wages. Their wages are determined by the marginal productivity of labour – not determined by the levels in the Gulf States, but the levels in Bangladesh where many come from. Non-residents cannot acquire citizenship, nor have they been allowed to own property – unless they form a minority partnership with a local.

The security of the oil-rich Gulf States has long been a strategic problem for the oil-dependent world. Saddam Hussein, as Iraq’s leader, invaded Iran, gassed Kurds, invaded Kuwait, lobbed ordnance at the 86

Saudis and developed (concealed?) chemical weapons. Iran also tends towards erratic behaviour, is armed with missiles and harbours nuclear ambitions. As a result of its volatility, the Gulf States have enlisted American military protection. Although the USA tends to keep a low profile, it keeps upwards of 30,000 troops in the region at Kuwait and at the Prince Sultan air base near Riyadh. America’s 5th fleet is headquartered at Bahrain. The USA also keeps military facilities at Qatar, Oman and the UAE. These facilities are crucial to the American campaign in Afghanistan.

Profile of non-Arab Muslim States

By far the large majority of Muslims live in the non-Arab Muslim World of close to 1 billion people spread over around twenty-six countries. In the Muslim majority countries they form around 80 percent of the national population. In Western countries they total around 20 million.

Turkey Turkey under Mustafa Kemal (also known as “Ataturk”) played a powerful role to initiate a reform process based on republicanism and secularism. He pushed Turkey into a process of modernisation, abolishing the “caliphate”, restricting , separating state and religion, using the power of the state to promote the national interest, abolished religious courts, adopted the Gregorian calendar and abolished the wearing of the fez or the veil. However, after the death of Ataturk in 1938, the conservative Islamic movement gradually clawed back special religious privileges and status, religious schools, Arabic and radio readings of the Koran and relaxed Kemalist policies of secularisation. For a period between 1960 and 1980 the Turkish Army intervened in an effort to promote secular reform, but subsequently, since the first decade of the 21st century, the AKP government of Erdogan restored Islamist fundamentalism and imprisoned more than half of the army’s generals and officers on counts of conspiracy. As a result Turkey with its 75 million people is steadily retreating into the fold of orthodox Islam.

Iran A similar effort to modernise Iran was attempted by Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the post-World War II era. He was overthrown in 1979 by Shi’ite cleric Ruhallah Khomeini, who then established an Islamic Republic which immediately set about to suppress Western influence. Today Iran is again a self-proclaimed Islamic theocracy moving relentlessly closer to building nuclear weaponry. Their strategy, developed over several decades, is to wait patiently until the Western powers lose heart in the face of setbacks and internal divisions, and then to acquire nuclear weaponry. They believe Muslims know how to wait patiently. That is why they have been able to weave carpets for hundreds of years.

Afghanistan Afghanistan is a highly fractured and complicated country that verges on being a failed state. Without military and financial support from the USA and its allies, the Afghanistan regime will revert back to Taliban control. To sustain a stable democratic regime would require much advancement in the social, economic and political spheres for generations.

Pakistan Pakistan with its total population in excess of 150 million is a complex mix of indigenous peoples who have been conquered by successive waves of , Persians, Greeks, Pashtuns, Mughals and Arabs. They speak around five languages and their official religion is Sunni Muslim. As a “nation state” it was born of expediency when the British Colonial Office partitioned India into independent “dominions” to 87 be known respectively as India and Pakistan. Pakistan was to consist of two parts: West Pakistan and . In 1971 East and West Pakistan were formally split into two separate countries called Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan is based on the “Durand Line”, a line drawn during British colonial times. This borderline cuts the Pashtun tribe in two: one part living in Afghanistan and the other in Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan. Tribesmen move freely across the border. Many tribesmen on both sides of the border are Taliban supporters. The colonial era of governance on both sides of the border is based on malicks (tribal leaders) who mediate with the central government through political agents. These interlocutors are mostly ulema (religious scholars) who are amongst the most active militants. The potential instability along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border makes it one of the most dangerous hot-spots in South Asia.

Bangladesh Bangladesh is a low-lying riverine land traversed by many branches and tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. The delta region is annually inflicted by floods and cyclones during the tropical monsoon period. The Bengalis converted to Islam when the region fell under Mogul rule. It fell under British rule from 1757 until Britain withdrew in 1947. An estimated 1 million Bengalis were killed in the fighting between East and West Pakistan. Millions took refuge in India, but in February 1974, Pakistan agreed to recognise Bangladesh as an independent state. It has a population of around 160 million living in an area about half the size of the UK. Its per capita income is amongst the lowest of all countries in the world.

Central Asian Republics The central region of Asia extends from the Caspian Sea to the border of Western China in the east. In the north it borders on Russia and in south it borders Iran, Afghanistan and China. The region consists of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan with a total combined population of around 54 million of whom 90 percent is Muslim. The various ethnic groups speak languages related to Turkish with the majority adherent to the Sunnite branch of Islam. Although populated for more than 40,000 years, the region was gradually Islamised in the 11th to 15th centuries. From the 13th century the area was ruled by the Mongols until it was conquered by the Russian tsars in the 17th century. After the Communist Revolution of 1917, the area was divided into five Soviet socialist republics of the USSR. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 they became sovereign independent nations.

Indonesia Indonesia comprises some 17,500 islands, covers 1,860,360 square kilometres and carries a population of around 240 million people, divided into 300 ethnic groups speaking close to a similar number of languages. The predominant religion is Islam, but there are significant pockets of Christians, and traditional beliefs. More than half of the population live on two major islands, Sumatra and Java. The other populated islands include Bali, Lombok, Surabaya, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas and the western portions of Timor and New Guinea. The islands are characterised by rugged volcanic islands and tropical rainforests. About 20 percent of the land is arable and rice is the staple crop. Petroleum, natural gas, coal, timber products, garments and rubber are major exports. Indonesia is a republic with a two-chamber legislature and an elected president. Indian traders brought Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist influences into the country. Today Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world. European influences began in the 16th century when the Dutch East India Company established a major trading post in Java. It held control until the Japanese invasion in 1942. 88

After World War II, Indonesia went through a period of military dictatorship, first under Sukarno and then Suharto until its democratic Reformasi in 1998 with the introduction of an elected parliament. In April 2003 former general Susilo Bambang Yudhyono was elected president. These elections reaffirmed the potential strength of moderate Islam in Indonesia under the constitution of 1945. The Indonesian armed forces (TNI) still cast a long shadow over the political life of Indonesia. It has an effective veto over important decisions. Yet the underlying “primordial” societal structure encompassing the rural peasantry (abangan), the secular aristocracy (priyayi) and the Islamic clerics (santri) represent the influential “currents” that permeate predominant trends and policies.

Indonesian progress is hampered by several impediments: an unreliable judicial system, a weak banking system and widespread corruption. The country needs to build up a vibrant public press, dynamic non-governmental organisations and improved standards of public accountability to reinforce business confidence. It also desperately needs to step up its internal war on terrorism which is egged on by its own groups of Muslim fanatics. Jamaah Islamiyah is an example of religious fanaticism that can spread like a forest fire.

Urgent Need for Reform in Islamic States

Closed Societies Because most Islamic states are relatively closed societies, 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, Indonesia, 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.

Plutocratic Cliques 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 slowed down and stalled. It is clear that a democratic lifestyle can only be built on a deep-rooted process of modernisation in education, training, regulations and cultural habits. Although Muslim societies across the Arab world today enjoy unprecedented access to information and divergent opinions through al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, much needs to be done to penetrate closed societies such as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia.

Over-sized Public Sectors Islamic states desperately need to reform their public sectors. Dictators and one-party states have long treated the civil service far more as an employment agency for loyal supporters and family members, than as a provider of essential services. It results in absorbing the bulk of national budgets and diverting skilled workers from the more productive private sector and depressing economic growth. The Economist of November 14th, 2015, p.43, reports that the public-sector employment as a percentage of total employment in 2013 for a few selected examples in the Arab world are as follows: Kuwait 78 percent, Saudi Arabia 65 percent, Iraq 45 percent, Algeria 38 percent, Egypt 28 percent, Tunisia 25 percent (compared with an OECD average of 20 percent). Although there is mounting pressure for change, vested interests stand in the way of reform. The public sectors of most Arab states are mainly part of entrenched systems that distribute jobs to loyal supporters. 89

Socio-economic Stagnation 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 properly. They suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements.

Theocratic Predominance It seems that today, throughout the Islamic world, there are two opposite trends competing for ascendency: Islamic theocracy 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 infidels and their local imitators and declare it the sacred Islamic duty to crush the anti-religious, anti-Islamic secular movements of infidels.

Religious Intolerance and Harsh Criminal Justice Tolerance varies between Islamic countries. In contrast to the many thousands of mosques that have been built in Western Christian-oriented countries, Christianity is not tolerated in the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia bans the practice of Christianity and the UAE restricts proselytisation. Immigrants cannot become citizens or own real estate. To set up and run a business you need a local partner.

Enforcing Islamic morals and values is considered a crucial function of governance. Across the Islamic world gay people, atheists and dissidents are punished for their supposed transgressions. Vice squads enforce bans on the use of alcohol and infringements of dress codes. Laws relating to indecency or offensive behaviour are vague and open to abuse. Violators are often flogged or more severely punished.

Apostasy and atheism are widely punished by hanging or beheading. Social censure is pervasive. Even in moderate countries, men sometimes kill women to uphold family “honour”. Unfortunately the vice police are not equally strict on cracking down on hypocrisy.

The harshness of the Islamic criminal justice system is reflected in the general practice of stoning, amputation, beheading, hanging or shooting of persons considered guilty of some kind of transgression. The court systems do not follow the adversarial approach to establish innocence or guilt. Self-incrimination and confessions of guilt are common in order to stop prolonged interrogations. Fabricated evidence is not properly questioned. The conditions in Islamic jails rank amongst the cruellest in the world. The media seldom report on the penal system’s cruelty.

The missing ingredient in the world of Islam is a basic respect for human rights, for diversity, for systems of accountability, for lawmaking that recognises the will and interest of the general public and not simply conforms to the religious texts and whims of clerics.

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Exposure to Jihadism Is jihadism limited to isolated lone wolves, or is it rooted in the religion of fundamentalist Islam? The political purpose of jihadism is to strike terror into the minds of infidels and place them in a constant state of apprehension and desire for reconciliation. The concurrent strategy is to infiltrate into the minds of potential jihadists the idea that fighting and dying in the path of Allah is to be with Allah – it is a path to paradise.

It is clear that not all Muslims are jihadists or susceptible to the appeal of jihadist sentiments, but all jihadists are devout Muslims. Their message to “infidels” is simply “submit or die”.

It is not clear what proportion of Muslims are susceptible to extremist jihadist sentiments. But the challenge of jihadists does not necessarily lie in large-scale military operations as occurred in the earlier stages of Islamist conquest. In today’s world the danger lies in the terrorist activities of lone wolves who specialise in clandestine operations. Organised society finds it extremely problematic to defend itself against the onslaughts of ad hoc lone wolf operators. They should not allow themselves to turn a blind eye to the danger of Islamist fanatics.

Suppression of Women The oppressed and down-trodden status of women is one of the main reasons for the backwardness of Islamic societies. If half of the Islamic world’s productive human potential is stifled across many generations, it is inevitable that Islamic countries would lag behind the rest of the world. Islamic women are discriminated against in all Islamic societies. Forced gender segregation, discrimination and isolation from mainstream life is the common pattern in all Islamic societies. In several Islamic countries the practices of female genital mutilation and forced child-bride marriages are generally tolerated. Of course, these practices do not apply to the life of every Muslim woman, but it is common in many Muslim countries. With few exceptions, women in most Muslim countries suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements.

Hatred for Israel 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 . 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.

Stirrings of Social Change

Apart from the plutocratic cliques at the heart of the various Islamic regimes, there are feint signs of stirrings: scattered street demonstrations, protesting voices in the social-networking sites of the blogosphere, some courageous newspapers nibbling at sensitive subjects such as bureaucratic excesses and corruption. But these stirrings manifest themselves within severely circumscribed limits.

Satellite television plays an important part to spread information about the world, private investors and entrepreneurs are playing a growing role in economies that used to be dominated by the state, 91 business associations and chambers of commerce are increasingly involved in public policy making in several countries. Although most businessmen avoid “politics”, they press the need for “modernisation” – of procedures, regulations, education and training. The expanding role of business means that the circle of consultation and decision making has grown beyond the theocratic and plutocratic elite.

Arabs today enjoy unprecedented access to information and divergent opinions. After 1996 the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa, established the al-Jazeera television station in his capital, Doha. The new station was allowed to broadcast news from across the Arab world. Although al Jazeera chose not to dwell much on the blemishes of Qatar itself, its many Palestinian journalists tackled sensitive issued elsewhere in the region and soon spawned imitators and competitors. Leaders were obliged to explain and justify themselves as never before. The Saudi-sponsored al-Arabiya subsequently also entered the terrain. Both stations pay a lot of attention to the plight of the Palestinians and take a strong stand against the American support for Israel and its involvement in Iraq. Both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have been careful not to antagonise their respective Qatari and Saudi sponsors, but they have created platforms for debating Arabic issues and for exposing problem areas. Much more needs to be done.

The Muslim Diaspora and its Consequences

Since Islam started its march out of Arabia in all directions by the year 1000, Muslims have settled in more than forty countries. By some estimates, Mohammedanism now represents the largest religious category in the world. The scale of the Muslim Diaspora beyond the boundaries of recognised Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries is indicated in the accompanying table.

The Muslim Component in Selected non-Muslim Countries*

Country Percentage Projected Estimated of Total Percentage 2001 Population 2030 Argentina 1,000,000 2.5 2.6 Austria 475,000 5.7 9.3 Australia 400,000 1.9 2.8 Belgium 638,000 6.0 10.2 Canada 940,000 2.8 6.6 China 23,308,000 1.8 2.1 Denmark 226,000 4.1 5.6 France 4,704,000 7.5 10.3 Germany 4,119,000 5.0 7.1 India 177,286,000 14.6 15.9 Israel 1,287,000 14.1 20.0 Italy 1,583,000 2.6 5.4 Macedonia 620,015 30.0 35.0 Netherlands 1,000,000 6.0 7.0 Norway 144,000 3.0 3.5 Russia 16,379,000 11.7 14.5 South Africa 737,000 1.5 2.0 Spain 1,021,000 2.3 3.0 Sweden 451,000 4.9 9.9 Switzerland 235,700 4.6 5.0 United Kingdom 2,869,000 4.6 5.0 USA 4,000,000 1.4 2.0 * Based on Pew Research Data

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Muslims have lived for many generations in countries such as India, China, Russia, the UK and the USA in considerable numbers. India has the largest component of Muslims totalling around 177 million (14 percent). China has in excess of 23 million (1.8 percent) and Russia more than 16 million, around 12 percent of its population – even after the Central Asian Republics broke away when the USSR collapsed in 1991. The remainder of Muslims in Russia have been living there for many generations. In most instances a large proportion of Muslims have failed to assimilate with the dominant population culture.

India Of India’s 172 million Muslims, the largest concentrations are in the states of Srinagar, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, , Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Utar Pradesh. With the exception of Kerala in the southwest, the concentration of Muslims is to be found in the north and northeast of India. Muslims in India have a much higher fertility rate than other religious communities. It is claimed that Indian Muslims are poorer and less educated compared to their Hindu counterparts. Muslim women have a larger fertility period since they get married at a much younger age than Hindu women. Shia Muslims form around 30 percent of India’s Muslims. caste system also penetrated the Muslim population such as the division between Ashrafs and Ajlafs which divides Muslims into grades and sub-grades. There is also the Arzai caste among Muslims who are regarded as the equivalent of the “untouchables” among the Hindu.

Out of the 12 presidents of the Republic of India, three were Muslims. Compared to Hindus and Sikhs, Muslims are under-represented in the armed forces of India. During British rule, Muslim Personal Law (shariat) was introduced to govern certain civil matters of jurisdiction such as marriage and inheritance. It is not the same as Sharia Law but is interpreted as the application of Muslim Laws as part of Common Law.

The conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the Indian sub-continent has a complex history which dates back to the Jihad of the Umayyad Caliphate in in 711. During the Islamic expansion in India during the medieval period, the was characterised by the destruction of Hindu temples. The in 1947 saw large scale sectarian strife and bloodshed. Various riots and massacres occurred. Kashmir, a Muslim majority region in north India, is particularly prone to violent outbreaks. Gujarat, West Bengal and are also considered perennial trouble spots. Muslim-Sikh conflict originated as early as 1606.

Ghettoisation among Indian Muslims began in the mid-1970s as a result of the outbreak of widespread communal riots. The Muslim populations in several cities moved into segregated areas for the sake of protection and anonymity. However, such ghettos became easy targets and enabled the profiling of “residential colonies”. Increased ghetto living has also shown a strengthening of social stereotyping due to the lack of cross-cultural interactions.

Russia Islam is the second most widely professed religion in Russia and Muslim minorities make up a seventh (14 percent) of Russia’s population. Muslim nationalities are concentrated in the North Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and include the Circassians, Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Kabardin, Karachay and several Dagestani peoples. The Tatars and Bashkirs in the Volga basin are also mostly Muslim.

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The Dagestani people were the first converts to the Muslim religion as early as the 8th century. They were later followed by the Caucasian Turkic people and the Crimean Tatars who conducted a massive slave-trade with the Ottoman Empire. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Transcaucasia and Dagestan were ruled by successive Iranian empires (Safavids, Afsharids and Qajars) as well as by the Ottoman Turks. Both Shia and Sunni Muslims penetrated the Caucasian areas. Various Russian Tsars tried to suppress Islam through policies of exclusion and discrimination. Total expulsion was not feasible as a result of the large numbers involved. Other policies such as displacement by Russian and non-Muslim populations were followed. Emigration to Ottoman Turkey and neighbouring Persia was encouraged. The Russian army drove people to ports on the Black Sea where they were shipped to the Ottoman Empire. Many ended up in Anatolia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Kosovo. Many Caucasian Muslims ended up in Iran. Inside Russia the process of Russification continued in the Tsarist and Soviet periods.

Since the 1990s, Russian governments showed a more conciliatory attitude towards Islam. The Union of Muslims of Russia was formed to protect the economic, political and cultural rights of Muslims. Kazan and Moscow have large Muslim populations. Several madrassas (religious schools) have been established and under Putin, Sharia Law has been allowed to operate in Chechnya in respect of polygamy and enforced veiling. The majority of Russian Muslims adhere to the Sunni branch and only 5 percent are said to be Shia. In Dagestan and Chechnya there is a tradition of Sunni Sufism.

Moscow has 1 million Muslim residents and up to 1.5 million more Muslim migrant workers. There are a total of 8,000 mosques in Russia.

China Islam has existed in China for more than 1400 years. Today there are around 23 million Muslims (2 percent of the population). The greatest concentration is in Xinjiang province (a significant Uyghur population) with lesser numbers residing in the regions of Ningxia, Qansu, Yunnan, Henan and Qinghai. Islam was first introduced to China in 616-18AD by Sahaba compassions of Prophet Muhammad. They were essentially focused on trade rather than religious propagandism. The Mongol- founded Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) allowed large numbers of Muslims to settle in China. The Mongols used Persian, Arab and Buddhist administrators to act as officers of taxation and finance. The term “huihui” was used to describe these foreigners. Genghis Khan and his successors forbade Islamic practices like halal butchering and circumcision. During the all foreigners were forced to marry Chinese women and men not of their own race.

Over several dynasties the Muslim element in the Chinese population managed to survive. When SunYat-Sen established the Republic of China in the 20th century, the Muslims were recognised on an equal footing as the Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Miao peoples. The Kuomintang party appointed Muslim warlords as Military Governors of several . During the Sino-Japanese war, Hui Muslims were persecuted by the Japanese. During the of Nanking, mosques were desecrated and Hui girls forced to serve as sex slaves.

During the Communist Dictatorship in China since 1948, mosques along with the temples, churches and monasteries of other religions were destroyed by the Red Guards. After 1978 Deng Xiaoping relaxed control of religious practices and there are now many mosques in China. Hui Muslims are allowed more freedoms than the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.

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Islamification of Europe

In recent decades, the Islamification of Europe has taken on astounding proportions. In the middle of the 20th century there were relatively few Muslims in Europe and North America. However, since the 1960s, growing waves of Muslims arrived in Western countries: some as migrant labourers from Turkey and North Africa, but growing numbers as refugees from Arab countries, particularly Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan and North Africa. Filling job shortages, immigrant numbers continued to grow under flexible “family reunion” rules. As a result of the large influx of immigrants, many Western societies became “multi ethnic”. At the turn of this century, Muslim immigrants accounted for close to 10 percent of the total population of most European countries and up to 40 percent in some cities such as Rotterdam, , Cologne, Duisburg, Berlin, Paris and Marseille. For decades policy makers assumed that immigrants would quickly adopt the mores of their host societies and there are many examples of upward mobility and successful integration of immigrants. But a surprising number of immigrants have proved to be “unmeltable”. Muslims, in particular, failed to assimilate in large numbers. Thousands of mosques were built all over Europe, generously financed by sources in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

It became a touchy question how to help Muslims to integrate into Western countries – providing a decent education, offering language training, enforcing anti-discrimination laws to ensure access to jobs and discouraging the formation of ghettos. The more highly skilled settled fairly easily, but tackling an extremist minority or its sympathisers proved to be more difficult. Areas with high levels of immigrant residents seemed to experience a decline in social capital – such elements as trust, community co-operation and shared values. Muslims, in particular, failed to assimilate in large numbers.

It is not clear how many Muslims there are in Europe – or for that matter in Western countries at large. In some countries secular authorities do not ask questions on religious matters in their census forms. Current statistics are at best only educated guess work. According to estimates there were around 20 million Muslims in Europe in 2010, making up the majority of new immigrant arrivals. The majority of the 4 million Muslims in Germany have their origin in Turkey and those in the Netherlands come from Turkey and Morocco. France is the home of the largest Muslim population estimated to range 10 percent of the total French population of around 66 million.

Pim Fortuyn, a Dutch political leader, was murdered during his election campaign in 2002. Fortuyn argued that the rise of a Muslim fundamentalist sub-culture in the Netherlands threatened the country’s democratic values and had to be seriously addressed before it was too late. He argued that immigration communities that refuse to align their values to those of Western democracy are ticking time bombs – and that too much scope had been given to accommodating divergent values and faiths in the Netherlands and in Europe at large. The heir to Fortuyn’s political legacy, Geert Wilders, has to be provided full-time armed protection and is constantly harassed by legal campaigns initiated by Muslim sympathisers.

Most of Britain’s Muslims come from Pakistan and Bangladesh. A small proportion of the women go to work which explains why, statistically, Muslims remain at the bottom of the economic pile – compared to British Hindus and Sikh’s. Yet some Muslim sub-groups, such as Ismaelis who come from South Asia via East Africa, have soared ahead, showing that Islam itself is no barrier to economic advancement.

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With more than a million migrants arriving in Germany since 2013, it is the most popular destination in Europe. But in recent months an anti-immigration movement called Pegida, or “patriotic Europeans against Islamisation of the Occident” was established in Saxony. Convinced of a press conspiracy of “” they organised peaceful marches against the large-scale inflow of asylum seekers and immigrants into Germany. Political leaders such as and previous SPD Chancellor, Gerhard Schreuder, denounced Pegida marchers. But the simple fact remains that the majority of Germans perceive Islam as a “threat” according to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation. Members of the new political party called “Alternative for Germany” not only opposes Germany’s “euro” association but is also opposed to increased “Islamisation” of Europe.

For the same reason as in France, the USA statistical services do not ask questions about religion. Hence it is hard to estimate the size of its Muslim population. The guesses range between 3 million and 10 million. American Muslims do not see themselves as being radically at odds with American society. Freedom to practice and preach Islam is protected by the American system. Americans are used to exuberant displays of religiosity. So the daily prostrations of a devout Muslim are less shocking to an American than to a lukewarm, secular European Christian. Hence Americans are less gloomy about Islam than Europeans. America’s free speech culture offers many opportunities for Muslims to express their opinions. The right to say almost anything on most subjects is deeply entrenched in the American political culture – in contrast to European “political correctness”.

Europe’s Muslims are not a homogeneous group. In fact they fall into several categories: those from Eastern Europe (Bosnia, Albania and bits of Russia); first-generation immigrants; second- or third- generation Muslims born in Europe who speak only European languages and are indistinguishable from others; converts; those who have become largely secular; and now the hundreds of thousands who are fleeing from the Syrian quagmire.

Despite some success stories, there are also ominous trends emerging in the “Islam diaspora”. According to several surveys, there is a clear trend amongst European Muslims to see Islam increasingly as a symbol or badge of identity. Their faith, rather than their passport, is seen as the main thing that defines them. Islam, rather than the country or city where they live, is their true home. European Muslims claim that their experience of the “Islamic diaspora” makes them feel that the umma – worldwide Islam – tugs hardest at their heartstrings.

British specialists say groups of young, disaffected Muslims goad one another down the path to extremism. They develop a common interest with suffering Muslims across the globe. Websites and satellite television channels then supply visual images and incendiary rhetoric from any place where Muslims are fighting non-Muslims. The favourite war used to be Chechnya, then it was Iraq and later still Afghanistan or Syria. The internet is a major source of training and inspiration for militant Muslims.

These patterns of self-recruitment and self-radicalisation are a headache for security services. The target groups are recent arrivals, second-generation members of immigrant communities and converts. As long as some people feel economically deprived or socially excluded, the pool of potential killers and bombers will grow. Many countries are tightening their immigration laws, shifting to a skills-based immigration system and setting citizenship tests for would-be immigrants. The old welcome-mat has been removed.

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Christopher Caldwell who writes for the Financial Times as well as the Weekly Standard, and who has spent more than a decade studying European immigration patterns, has expressed deep concerns about Western Europe’s naive and lax immigration policies. In a recent book entitled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (Penguin Books, 2010), he states that Europe is no match for Islamic self-confidence: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

The strongest challenge facing Western democracies is how to respond to the dangers of terrorist enemies within their own borders. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, the train bombings in Spain in 2004, the 7/7 bombings in London, the “Charlie Hebdo” killings in Paris, 2015, and the Paris massacre of November 2015, illustrate the possibility of a “clear and present danger”. In the first instance the atrocity was initiated by people in some distant war zone who then used Hamburg, Germany, as an easy platform to launch their attack on the USA. In the second instance, a small band of British-born malcontents travelled by train from Leeds to London in order to plant bombs killing themselves and many others. The third and fourth instances were also perpetrated by French-born and Belgian-born Islamists. They were influenced by ideas, images and interpretations of Islam that circulate electronically on a continuous basis.

Jihadist Infiltration

The best terrorist-hunters in Europe and elsewhere can do is to trace how disaffected people from their own tranquil suburbs form connections with ideological mentors and ultimately terrorist sponsors who live overseas. Militant Islam has deep roots in Wahhabi religious fundamentalism, the ideological fountain of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and now Islamic State. Confronting Islamic extremism will require not only containment of their military threat, but also offering a convincingly superior ideological alternative. It is not clear which trend will prevail among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims: violent confrontation or peaceful co-existence – it will require a battle between secular-minded middle-class democrats and Islamic fundamentalists.

Many Jihadists take advantage of the West’s civil rights guarantees of freedom of conscience, assembly and speech – civil rights which do not exist in Muslim countries. 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 flourish in the West. Western intelligentsia do not seem to understand this 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. Host countries in the West will have to deal with a growing demographic of disaffected Muslims. (See Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic – Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Harper Collins Publishers, Fourth Estate, 2015, for a penetrating analysis of militant Islamism)

Extremist Muslim Jihadists are generally inspired by their belief that non-Muslims are lovers of life whereas Muslims are lovers of death because they die in the cause of Allah. They are martyrs sacrificing themselves in the expectation of immortality while non-Muslims abandon themselves to meaningless hedonism. This mindset is spread ceaselessly by imams in mosques and madrassas, Arab television programmes and internet videos. The distinction between sedition and rousing theology has become a very fine line. Killing in the cause of Allah has been elevated to an eschatological element of militant Islamism. Heroic death and martyrdom are being sanctified: death is the price to pay to reap the reward of paradise. There are no limits on the brutalisation of adversaries. 97

The Western World was rudely awakened by Al Qaeda’s 9/11 onslaught on the World Trade Centre in New York and HT off-shoot’s 7/7 bombings in the UK. Western Allied Powers responded by military action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and by removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq after his campaign in Kuwait. In the USA the passage of the “Patriot Act” enabled the creation of the gigantic National Security Agency (NSA) to expand existing surveillance activities. Other Western countries also expanded their security systems. However, the challenge remained open-ended: subversive Islamist organisations continued to take advantage of the West’s own civil freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly and the internet to spread hate-filled anti-democratic ideas. They mobilised a widely distributed network of fifth column activists engaged in undermining the very systems under which they are allowed to live and operate.

According to the research findings of Olivier Roy, a French academic (Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah), when Muslims are torn away from their traditional moorings – customs, family life and cuisine – they tend to seek attachment to fundamentalist or even fanatical expressions of Islamism. Alienated from their parents’ way of life and their host societies, young European Muslims can be easily attracted by a simple, electronically disseminated, back-to-basics version of Islam that acknowledges no national boundaries and that has been disseminated with the help of plenty of Arab State oil money. For such disorientated young Muslims, such forms of Islamism provide simplistic solutions to complicated challenges: the proper status of Muslim women in modern society; the inherent conflict between the pluralistic, democratic model of society in the West and the rigid, doctrinaire, authoritarian hierarchies of the Muslim world; the differentiation between religion and politics in Western societies; the accountability to the civic society in which they live in contrast to the dictates of the Sharia Law preached by Muslim clerics with their limited educational horizons; reconciliation of allegiance to Allah as an act of faith with obligatory duty to a Western state as an act of reason. Young groups of disaffected Muslims (often estranged males) goad one another down the path to extremism. Websites and satellite television channels supply visual images and incendiary rhetoric from places where Muslims fight non-Muslims (infidels). The internet appears to be not only a major source of training and inspiration for militant Muslims, but also provides platforms of recruitment and radicalisation of people who feel economically deprived or socially excluded. The Western cultural environment with its malleable, relativistic, accommodating, tolerant orientation is no match for people seeking anchored, self-confident, simplistic and doctrinaire certainties.

When the Western World faced its previous epic ideological struggle during the Cold War period which lasted half a century, it was only able to prevail after coming up with an effective and durable strategy. That strategy was to contain the enemy’s military threat while offering a better ideological alternative which was based on personal and political freedom combined with widespread economic prosperity coupled with free trade on a global scale.

The Ideological Struggle

It is clear that another ideological struggle is unfolding on the Islamic front of 1.4 billion people which requires a comparably durable strategy. This time, however, in excess of 20 to 30 million Muslims live in Western democracies. Another 160 million live in India, 160 million each in Pakistan and Bangladesh, 240 million in Indonesia, 60 million in Central Asia, 80 million in Turkey and 70 million in Iran, and in excess of 400 million in the Arab world and Africa. In addition, the West is saddled with a perceived in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is a major binding factor in the Muslim world. 98

The Western World will be obliged to deal with its disaffected Muslim minority problem. It will require an effective ideological campaign highlighting values common to both the Western and Muslim worlds. It will also require an even-handed treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. It will require finding effective ways of helping moderates and reformists win the theological and ideological civil battles taking place within the world of Islam. It can assist them in developing school curricula that emphasize critical thinking, ethics and interpretations of Islamist values that could be compatible with democracy and secularism. It will have to realise that any strategy would require patience and determination.

In her remarkable text Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation (op.cit.), Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls for five fundamental “amendments” in Islamic belief and practice in order to achieve a genuine Muslim Reformation: 1. Renunciation of Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Koran, particularly those parts attributed to Muhammad’s sojourn in Medina where he started to resort to violence against unbelievers; 2. a shift from investment in an imagined life after death to concentration on life in the actual world, before death; 3. abandonment of sharia law in favour of civil law; 4. abandonment of the practice of commanding “right” and forbidding “wrong” which empowers families or vigilante groups to harass others in the name of strict religious codes; and 5. radical revision of teachings about the imperative to wage jihad or holy war in order to spread Islam by force against infidels.

What Hirsi Ali really wants to see is not merely a Reformation of Islam theology, but also an infusion of Enlightenment values. It involves not only the reformation of the Papacy that Luther and Calvin demanded, but also the toleration, freedom of religious belief and civil authority over religion that Locke and Voltaire called for in the age of Enlightenment. These are changes that took Europe almost 300 years to achieve – after having already gone through the circumvolution of the Renaissance.

The world of Christianity survived by transforming itself from a narrow focus on theological dogma, to a wide-angled focus on the ethical principles applicable in a secular, liberal culture not particularly dominated by a specific religious dogma. The world of Islam has remained stuck in a theological dogmatic rut. It has failed to come to terms with modernity because it has experienced neither a Reformation nor an Enlightenment. Ayaan Hirsi Ali demands from the West to square up to Islam. It should not give ground. It will require a long and principled campaign of critical appraisal in the same way as Christianity has been subjected to a step-by-step revision. This task will be complicated by the divisions within Islam. But there should be no moratorium on criticism of Islam or on concerted efforts to constrain violent Islamists.

According to Hirsi Ali’s interpretation there is a contest within Islam for ownership of the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. One group, she calls them the “Medina Muslims”, are fundamentalists who live by the strict letter of the creed based on sharia, Islamic religious law, and they take it as a requirement of their faith to impose it on everyone else. They see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty. Even if they do not themselves engage in violence to promote the Islamic caliphate, they do not hesitate to condone it. They consider Jews and Christians as followers of “false religions” and they prescribe beheading for the crime of “non belief” in Islam, death by stoning and hanging for adultery. They put women in burkas and beat them if they are improperly veiled. They believe that murder of an infidel is imperative if he refuses to convert voluntarily to Islam. They 99 preach “jihad” and glorify death through martyrdom. The men and women who join groups such as Al- Qaeda, IS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and many more jihadist organisations, are all part of this fundamentalist, extremist wing of Islam. Hirsi Ali calls them the “Medina Muslims” because it was during his stay in Medina that Muhammad attacked persons and put them to the sword if they refused to convert. Muslims who belong to this group – numbering in excess of 50 million – are not open to persuasion or engagement by either Western liberals or Muslim reformers.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s second group, she calls them the “Mecca Muslims”, the clear majority throughout the Muslim World, is loyal to the core creed and devoutly but is not inclined to practice violence. They attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear. But Hirsi Ali maintains this predominantly large group of Muslims face a major problem: “... their religious beliefs exist in an uneasy tension with modernity – the complex of economic, cultural and political innovations that not only reshaped the Western world but also dramatically transformed the developing world as the West exported it. The rational, secular, and individualistic values of modernity are fundamentally corrosive of traditional societies, especially hierarchies based on gender, age and inherited status,” (op.cit. p.18)

There is a third group which Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls the “Modifying Muslims” who have sought to think critically about the faith they were raised in. This group includes dissidents – only a few of whom have left Islam altogether – who are deeply engaged in the debate about Islam’s future. Some are braving death threats and “official punishment” but are steadfastly calling for the reform of Islam. They are urging either a fundamental reinterpretation of Islam or a change in the core doctrines of Islam. They speak out on the basis of reason and conscience. Their arguments focus on the importance of viewing the Koran and the hadith in a historical context and on respecting man-made civil laws as legitimate, overriding sharia religious law.

It is of critical importance to find influential political leaders in the world of Islam who are prepared to take up the banner of reform. But, are there political leaders somewhere in the world of Islam who are influential and powerful enough to carry the reform process forward? On October 1st, 2015, an important voice of authority from the ranks of Muslim political leaders was heard condemning the violent message of militant Islamic jihadism. Najib Razak, Prime Minister of Malaysia, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, condemned the horrific acts of cruelty perpetrated by the so- called “Islamic State”. Najib Razak said “it is sickening, and there could be no greater a slur on Islam – a religion of peace, moderation and justice”. He said that as Prime Minister of Malaysia, he recently called for a Global Movement – of Moderates of all religions, of all countries – to marginalise extremists, reclaim the centre and shape the agenda towards peace and pragmatism. He claimed that Malaysia has followed up with practical action and by building intellectual capacity to spread awareness of what he called “authentic Islam”.

Najib Razak claims that Islam unequivocally “prohibits killing civilians during war”, explicitly protects minorities and respects those of other faiths. It urges the pursuit of knowledge, and stresses both justice and compassion. He quotes the Prophet Muhammad as saying “you will not enter paradise until you have faith; and you will not complete your faith, till you love for one another what you love for yourselves”. Najib Razak says this means there should be no strife among Muslims (eg. Shia and Sunni taking different paths to the same destination) and that they must combat IS’ warped ideology to destroy historical sites, their evil actions, their incoherent theology and travesty of Islam which commands its followers to be knowledgeable, compassionate and humble.

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Najib Razak said that the Malaysian Government has assisted the development of an important body of scholarship, an international group of Sunni and Shia scholars in , with its mission to define an Islamic State based on the continuity of Islamic religious thought through the past 14 centuries. These scholars unanimously emphasised that an Islamic State must deliver justice in all its forms – political, economic and in the courts – to its citizens. It must be based on the objectives of Shariah, or Maqasid Shariah, which is to protect and enhance life, religion, intellect, property, family and dignity. Also that an Islamic State must defend the different people under its rule and preserve their religions, languages another”. and historic sites .In order to test us he orders us to compete with each other in being virtuous – in knowledge, kindness, compassion and humility. These are Islam’s true principles.

Najib Razak said that the so-called “Islamic State” (IS), knows nothing about Islam’s noble ideals, they are violating Divine will and desecrating the name of the Islamic religion. He calls on the Umma to rise with one voice to say to IS “You do not represent us”. Najib Razak urges military and intelligence services to strive harder to combat the IS threat together. They need to share information and countries need to collaborate more, “daring to pre-emptively arrest as necessary”. When evidence is irrefutable, legislation should allow action to be taken. It would be negligent of citizens’ trust not to intervene before it is too late. Forward-thinking leaders put their people’s interests first.

Najib Razak also complains about decades of impunity in the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians through increasing violence, increasing illegal settlements and increasing violation of human rights. He said the frustration and anger felt by Palestinians resonates with Muslims worldwide. He appeals to the Israeli government “... to live up to Judaism’s highest ethical principles and the essential message of the Torah as succinctly expressed by the first century BC sage Hillel, (who) when asked to describe the Torah in a sound bite, he said ‘That which is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow human being’”. Razak said that this dictum, known universally in all religions as the Golden Rule, could herald the dawn of a much needed revised relationship between Muslims and Jews. Najib Razak, said tackling extremism and dealing with migration requires new mechanisms and moderation. To be moderate is courageous and shows strength to push for peace and put people first. It is a principle that runs through all civilisations and faiths. Islam embodies it in the concept of “wasatiyyah”, Confucianism as “chung chung” – both of which mean “middle path” or the “Golden Mean”. At the 26th ASEAN Summit in Malaysia in April 2015, commitment to this approach was reaffirmed in the adoption of the Langkawi Declaration on the Global Movement of Moderates.

As Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak states that Malaysia stands ready to share its experience of upholding Islam and marginalising extremism, of implementing the objectives of Shariah while practising democracy; of maintaining a multi-ethnic society where different faiths coexist and prosper; and showing that Islam cannot only succeed, but drive progress and successful economic development.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali welcomes the idea of millions of Muslims coming to the West to seek a better life for themselves and their families. But her concern is with the attitudes that many of these refugees and immigrants will bring with them – attitudes on capital punishment, courtship and marriage, sharia law, the morality of Western entertainment, honour killings of women, inter-marriage with Christians and others, polygamy, religious observance and suicide bombings in defence of Islam. The argument raised by Hirsi Ali is that Islamic doctrines do matter and that they are in need of serious reform. When people commit violent acts in the name of religion they are not merely expressing socio- economic or political grievances related to marginalisation or the lack of assimilation or dearth or opportunities for upward mobility. The real problem lies in finding convincing and conclusive answers 101 to questions such as: Is the Islamic creed inherently an ideology of peace? Can the Islamic creed coexist peacefully with “infidels”, “heretics” and “apostates”?

There are many interpretations of the key passages of the Koran supporting violence which lead to contradictory doctrines – ranging from peaceful coexistence with the non-Muslim world to Salafi- jihadist groups embracing a cult of violence. Which is the right methodology to interpret Koranic scriptures: the literal path or the revisionist metaphorical path? Islamic fundamentalist violence propagated and perpetrated around the world by Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabab, al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are examples of violence justified by reference to the dictates of Islam. The way forward requires an honest conversation about the true essence of the Islamic faith. It is necessary to realise that any strategy would require patience and determination. Ideological and theological struggles can last for many generations.

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Hinduism’s Renunciation of Worldly Things

Hinduism is indigenous to India and is also known as “Brahmanism” – the original name derived from the caste of priests who first developed the notions of into a creative and adaptable religious practice. The word “Hinduism” was a term coined by the Muslims who were advancing into India to designate all Indians who were not Muslims. They derived the name “Hindu” from the River “Indus”.

Essence of Hinduism

Hinduism has no founder, prophet, specific creed or ecclesiastical institution. Grasping its meaning is as elusive as water escaping through your fingers. It is richly diverse in religious practices and it is also extremely creative and adaptable. The bond that is holding it together is the continuity of its development from ancient times to the present day. For this reason the Hindus themselves call their faith the “Eternal Religion” (satana ).

Because it has not been “founded” by anyone, has no fixed dogma and is enigmatically Indian, it is a religion that has “developed” and is still developing. The Hindus believe that like the world itself, there is no absolute beginning or a unique process leading to an end in salvation. The world is eternal and is constantly renewing itself. There is no particular being as a creator or saviour at the centre of Hinduism. Hence different systems of thought and cults have equal rights and validity. At different times wise men and religious teachers appear and proclaim their teachings in different forms – each with his own following.

Some Hindus proclaim having a personal creator God while others adhere to the idea of a non- personal law governing the world. The paths to salvation are many and varied. However the faith is not completely arbitrary. There are a number of specific central philosophies: that the cosmos is an ordered whole ruled by a universal law (dharma); the earthly representation of this order by a strictly hierarchical caste system and its purity laws; a belief in cosmic cyclical periods (calpas) constantly ending and beginning again; and the belief that this natural world order also acts as a moral order.

Indigenous Character

Hinduism is resolutely Indian. It undertakes no spiritual mission beyond that culture. Hindus have been engaged in missionary work in South-East Asia and in winning over devotees during the “India Craze” of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the USA. But winning “individual souls” is not an established Hindu custom.

Two distinct religious traditions merged to form Hinduism: ancient indigenous nature worshipping and Aryan beliefs invading from the North. The original Indian population were probably Negroid people who were pushed further and further south by intruders advancing from the north. The Aryans advanced over the mountains of the North West into India during the second millennium BC. They overpowered the indigenous people. Their faith implied a Supreme Lord who directed the universal law with other gods also active in subordinate fields. The Aryans introduced the caste system when they advanced around 1000 BC from the to the fertile Ganges Plain. The Aryans themselves made up the top three while the indigenous people and their descendants became the fourth class (sudras). A complicated system of rituals and gave the caste superior influence. The were the priests and they claimed superior knowledge, a position they 104 retained right through to contemporary Hinduism. The Brahmin priests used , an artificial language employed for religious purposes. Ordinary Indians used Prakrita. They also introduced the gods , and and reserved the officiating of ceremonies and sacrifices to male members of the three highest castes.

Hindu Scriptures

Hindu scriptures are a diverse assemblage, but are considered to be the authoritative source of knowledge about the moral world order, the law of cause and effect of deeds, the rights and duties of all living beings and natural, spiritual and social hierarchies. The most important texts are the four (Holy Hymns), the associated (Holy Treatises and the Uphanishads (Secret Teachings). These scriptures are considered by Hindus to be of supernatural origin and constitute the “basic dogmas” of all Hindu systems. They set out the broad outline of the domains of Hindu gods, initiation rites, the social rules of the caste system, the belief in an eternal law (dharma) and the system of retribution through a hierarchy of . The works are still written in the scholarly language of Sanskrit and are divided in two parts: superhuman revelations (sruti) and those created by human hand and are handed down from memory ().

The Multiple Deities of Hinduism

The word for is from “div” (to shine or radiate). The three gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are all-powerful figures in the Indian Pantheon. They are connected () through the theory that they are only three different aspects or forms of the one original being in its activity as creator, preserver and destroyer of the universe. Some Hindu theologians see the different Gods as subordinate incarnations. Brahma is the creator God, but he did not create the world according to his free will, nor did he create it out of nothing. He is the personification of the eternal self of each individual and also the merging of other cosmogonic figures mentioned in Brahman texts. Most Hindu theologists see Brahma as the architect of worlds who constantly re-orders the existing components of the world. He gives the souls caught up in the cycle of the world new bodies each time they are reborn. Vishnu, the preserver, embodies the principle of the preservation of the world through ethical or heroic deeds. Vishnu comes to the rescue whenever the world or humanity is in danger of falling into decay due to evil forces or moral decline. Shiva, the destroyer, is the most popular god in Hinduism. He sends diseases but also drives them away again. Shiva is double-headed and embodies both creative and destructive forces of the cosmos – depending on his different incarnations. Shiva is seen by his followers as the highest Lord of the World because he has the greatest number of different forms and facets. He is the god of storm, illnesses and death. He has more than 1000 different names. There are also countless other deities in Hinduism such as , the potbellied god with the head of an elephant who is the god of wisdom; , the sun god, the giver of life; , the god of water; , the god of death; , the god of wealth; Kubera, the god of fire, , the god of misfortune; Indra, the god of thunder, etc.

Hindu cosmology is a complex network of continents and seas; netherworlds (populated by demons), hells as places of punishment for evil-doers; upper worlds stacked one on top of the other, where the spirits and gods live. The whole world is surrounded by a shell as part of an infinite number of “world- eggs” moving in empty space. An infinite number of things inhabit the world, each consisting of a soul made of pure spirit (jiva) and a material body. Souls have always existed since time has no beginning, and depending on their (deeds performed) they repeatedly take on new bodies. Immortal souls really do not form one unity with their mortal bodies.

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Many Hindus believe the Ganges River is the utmost symbol of what Hinduism means. It is the gift of the god Brahma to the Indian people and its flow symbolises the circulation of life, death and over billions of years. Throughout India, temples abound like wayside shrines and Hindus invest much time and energy in their elaborate decorations. Everything in the form of paintings, architecture, finely sculptured figures carved in wood or stone reflects symbolism.

The Process of Renunciation

Since you can’t take your wealth with you, letting go of earthly things lies at the heart of Hinduism. Temples and shrines are monuments to the process of renunciation – the giving up of worldly things. The god Shiva, the destroyer who brings death, is the patron of , the place where millions of dead have been brought to be cremated so that their ashes could be spread in the water of the Ganges. Death is as important as birth: both are transition points in the path of life. Many believe that at Varanasi everyone attains liberation from the great circular motion of birth, death and reincarnation. Because they believe at Varanasi you go straight to heaven, millions flock to Varanasi in that hope.

Hinduism does not expect converts from other religions, because other religions are considered to be alternative pathways leading to Brahma. Hinduism explicitly teaches that there are many pathways to Brahma. Each of the many other gods and are symbols of the alternative pathways. The intercourse of male and female reflects the creative love of Brahma. It gives life to every living thing. When the gods of Fire and Water combine, the world is in harmony.

Foreign Invaders

From the 4th century BC, Hinduism was challenged by the emergence of Buddhism. After the suppression of Buddhism, Hinduism was overpowered by the advance of Islam from the North by the 8th century AD. Subsequently the Sikhs split off in the Punjab region where they still survive as a separate faith combining Hindu and Islamic elements.

In the 16th century first the Portuguese then the Dutch and afterwards the English set up export monopolies at major Indian ports and by 1857 overthrew the remnants of Mogul rule. In 1877 Queen Victoria of England accepted the title of Empress of India. India was finally granted independence on 15 August 1947 after partitioning off East and West Pakistan. This partitioning of India was accompanied by an extremely violent persecution and re-settlement process. Gandhi was murdered in 1948 by a fanatic Hindu who saw Gandhi’s tolerance as a betrayal of Hinduism. A large number of Muslims (about 160 million) still live in India, which implies that the potential conflict between Hindus and Muslims remains very real.

The Legacy of British India

Indian nationalists have long claimed that British rule of India was good for the Brits but not good for Indians: complaining that the wealth of India was systematically being drained into the pockets of foreigners. Between 1757 and 1947 British per capita gross domestic product increased in real terms by 347 percent, Indian by a mere 14 percent. A substantial share of the profits, which accrued as the Indian economy industrialised, went to British managing agencies, banks or shareholders. The free trade imposed on India in the 19th century exposed indigenous manufacturers to lethal European competition at a time when the USA sheltered its infant industries behind high tariff walls.

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It is also argued that Indian indentured labourers supplied much of the cheap labour on which the British imperial economy depended. Between the 1820s and the 1920s, close to 1.6 million Indians left India to work in a variety of Caribbean, African, Indian Ocean and Pacific colonies, ranging from the rubber plantations of Malaysia to the sugar mills of . The conditions under which they travelled and worked were often similar to those inflicted on African slaves a century earlier.

On the other side of the balance sheet were the large British investments in Indian infrastructure: irrigation, industry, railways and roads. By the 1880s the British had invested £270 million in India, not much less than 20 percent of their entire investment overseas. By 1914 the figure had reached £400 million. They created the Indian coal industry from scratch and increased the number of jute spindles by a factor of 10. There were also marked improvements in public health which increased Indian average life expectancy by eleven years. The British introduced quinine as an anti-malarial prophylactic, carried out public programmes of vaccination against small pox and laboured to improve the quality of water supplies. The British also believed that there were some advantages in setting up an incorruptible bureaucracy to serve as the Indian Civil Service. The British had called into being an English-speaking, English-educated elite of Indians, a clan of civil service auxiliaries on whom their system of administration had come to depend. (See Niall Ferguson, Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin Books, 2004, pp.216- 220)

Independence and Partitioning

The formal roots of Indian nationalism and partitioning sentiments can, inter alia, be traced to British India’s decision to partition the Province of Bengal between Muslim and Hindu regions. In 1909 the Morley-Minto reforms provided for a limited extension of Indian participation in government and introduced separate electorates for the country’s different religious communities.

After World War I, British trained lawyer, , emerged as the leader of the nationalist movement. Gandhi advocated extra-constitutional, but non-violent, methods of struggle. His first civil disobedience campaign began in 1920 but ended in 1922 when violence erupted. Gandhi and his Congress Party dominated the nationalist movement for the next 30 years, supported by lieutenants Vallabhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru. Throughout the next fifteen years sporadic civil disobedience campaigns were undertaken.

In 1935 the colonial British government introduced elected responsible government at the provincial level, based on a narrow franchise. The Congress Party agreed to participate in the ensuing election and gained 8 out of 11 provincial governments. The Muslim League, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, did poorly. It marked the beginning of a growing rivalry between the League and Congress. In 1939 the Congress Party withdrew from the provincial administrations in protest at the British decision to declare India a party to World War II. The Muslim League, however, co-operated with the British administration during the war and called for “independent states” in Muslim majority areas. In August 1942 Gandhi launched the “Quit India” movement to force the British to leave. In an effort to contain mass civil disobedience, the administration imprisoned thousands of Congress Party supporters, including Gandhi and Nehru.

The end of World War II saw a major upsurge in nationalist sentiments. The British Labour Government began to prepare for Indian independence. In February 1947 the British government announced its intention to withdraw from India by June 1948 and appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten 107 as Governor-General to oversee the process. In the face of escalating communal strife, particularly between Muslim and Hindu groups, Mountbatten, after widespread consultation, recommended partitioning: a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. A London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was commissioned to determine the borders. The Punjab and Bengal provinces were to be partitioned between Muslim and Hindu majority areas.

On August 15th, 1947, British India was partitioned into two independent “dominions” to be known respectively as India and Pakistan. Pakistan was to consist of two parts: West Pakistan and East Pakistan with a thousand-mile stretch of India in between!

As the appointed day of partition approached, Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab region began to commit appalling atrocities against their neighbours. Mobs rampaged through villages, destroying property and murdering indiscriminately. Rape and mutilation was common. Men killed their own wives and daughters as “pre-emptive” steps. A usually peaceful population became militant and blood thirsty. The police and army were as partisan and factionalised as the population at large. Sikhs were targeted in the Punjab by Muslims. In turn the Sikhs formed militia groups to execute revenge attacks on Muslims. In a two-way migration, millions of people moved across the borders. An estimated ten million Sikhs and Hindus came to India from Pakistan territory and six million Muslims escaped Hindu violence by moving into Pakistan. This vast impromptu migration was not anticipated. Some travelled in buses or on bullock carts, but most went on foot. Marauders constantly attacked the columns. Sometimes entire trainloads of refugees were slaughtered.

Although the populations of East and West Pakistan were Muslim, the East was mostly Bengali and the West was Punjabi – each set aside by regional identity, cultural heritage and language. Many Bengalis continued to live just across the East’s frontier in the Indian federal state of West Bengal. When the conflict between East and West Pakistan boiled over in March 1971, millions of the East’s Bengalis took refuge across the border in India – many of them Hindu Bengalis. Pakistan’s inter- became a full-scale international conflict. By the end of 1971, Indian troops and planes were fighting West Pakistan’s forces. The USSR supported India and East Pakistan and the USA and China found themselves backing Pakistan.

With the help of Indian forces, the Bengalis regained control of the East’s capital, Dacca, and declared Bangladesh an independent nation. The dominant political grouping, the Awani League, had to come to terms with the militant Mukti Bahini guerrillas who had provided a major portion of the armed forces for the nationalist movement, as well as the Biharis, a major ethnic minority in the East, which showed sympathy with the West Pakistani forces. On December 15th, 1971, Pakistan in turn was split in two: East Pakistan became Bangladesh and West Pakistan continued to be called Pakistan.

India’s Cultural Diversity

India is a unique laboratory of diversity: linguistic, religious and caste. These cleavages have all played an important role in defining areas of conflict. In some areas caste and language have proved to have similar boundaries and have been mutually reinforcing. Religion divided the population along different lines and tended to overshadow linguistic differentiation.

Indian linguistic clusters have deep roots in Indian history. As early as the 12th century, the major regional languages had not only scripts, but also scholars and literatures. In the 13th century an alien language, Persian, was introduced by the Islamic conquerors as a language of administration to 108 supplant Sanskrit. Under the Moghuls as well as under the British, linguistic frontiers were ignored in the determination of administrative regions. The first evidence of the recognition of linguistic sentiments came in 1920 when the Congress Party introduced linguistic sections in its internal organisational structure.

Linguistic cleavages paled into insignificance when the Muslim League polarised India into two religious communities, culminating in the holocaust of 1947 with 500,000 dead and 12 million refugees. The influence of religion was so strong that the decision in 1947 to make Hindi the official language for all of residual India was met with little objection in non-Hindi areas.

The excision of Pakistan removed the Hindu-Islam conflict from the centre of domestic concerns. It also brought an end to linguistic tranquillity. A cry for linguistic self-determination and the redrawing of provincial frontiers along linguistic lines was raised from all corners. Since the language of the independence movement was English, it also became the lingua franca of the new Indian elite. Though the shared use of the English language and spirit of nationalism unified the elite at the top, a contrary process was underway at other levels – expressing a new social consciousness through their own languages. It created a new market for films, literature and newspapers – all in the regional languages. The bulk of schoolchildren received their education in their own regional language.

Although approximately 40 percent of the Indian population are Hindi speaking, the balance, especially in the Dravidian zone of southern India, have developed an intense antagonism towards Hindi. The problem is further complicated by the fact that there is no consensus over what Hindi is. Purists demand a return to the Sanskrit sources, others prefer a standardisation of the Hindi of the marketplace or varying degrees of Urdu admixture. Village Hindi is a diverse series of dialects, often mutually unintelligible and far removed from the Hindi of the towns. Beyond this, there are major sub- categories in Hindi such as Rajasthani, Bihari and Punjabi.

In 1953 a States Reorganisation Commission was established to look into the merits of linguistic boundary claims. In 1956, on the basis of the Commission’s report, a major reshuffling of the provincial boundaries took place. In 1960 the last remaining bilingual state in Bombay collapsed with its partition into Gujarat and Maharashtra provinces. Assam declared itself a unilingual state.

Caste identity has been extended over broader areas by social change, but it halts at linguistic frontiers. Marriage or kinship across the language boundary remained relatively rare. Three castes, the , Kayasthas and Banias, favoured by a literary tradition, were the first to take advantage of British education. This resulted in their domination in the services and professional sectors, where they tended to form closed preserves, excluding members from other castes. Individual failure and frustration tend to be translated into caste terms and result in increased tension and bitterness. Elections to village councils heighten caste feelings through electoral invocations of caste loyalty. Traditionally dominant castes struggle to preserve their hegemony, the others strive to overthrow their control.

India’s diversity has come into sharper focus since independence as a result of the emotional power of sub-national sentiments and feelings of solidarity. With linguistic states a reality, linguistic loyalties have become more firmly rooted. Since inter-ethnic conflict in South Asia does not neatly confine itself within national boundaries, India itself has to accommodate its large Bengali population in the federal state of West Bengal. The state has long been plagued by severe poverty and has given rise to both Maoist and more orthodox Communist parties. 109

Indian Politics

In 1950 the new Indian constitution came into effect declaring the country a republic and a “federal union” with a parliamentary system of government. The first post-independence elections in 1951-52 gave the Congress Party 364 of the 489 seats, but only 45 percent of the popular vote. Under Nehru the government pursued moderate left policies centred on state-directed industrial development at home and non-alignment in foreign affairs.

Elections in 1957 and 1963 confirmed the influence of the Congress Party and Nehru’s personal popularity. In the autumn of 1962 a border conflict broke out with China, which culminated in a Chinese invasion of the north-east border area and a humiliating defeat for India.

Nehru died in May 1964 and was succeeded by L.B. Shastri. In August 1965, war broke out again with Pakistan over Kashmir. The Indian army repelled Pakistan’s forces. Both countries accepted a Soviet offer of mediation and peace talks were concluded at Tashkent in January 1966. Shastri died at the end of the peace conference and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi.

In 1971 war broke out with Pakistan as India intervened in support of the secessionist forces in East Pakistan, underwriting the emergence of independent Bangladesh. In 1974 opposition to the Congress Party escalated leading to campaigns of civil disobedience. In 1975 Gandhi responded by imposing a state of emergency, suspending established civil and postponing the 1976 elections. When elections were finally held in March 1977, Gandhi’s Congress Party lost more than half of its seats to the Janata Party. Under Morarji Desai, the Janata Party formed the first non-Congress Party government since independence. However, factional conflict and the lack of a coherent set of policies forced Desai to resign as Prime Minister in July 1979. He was briefly succeeded by Charan Singh as Prime Minister but he did not succeed in forming a viable government and resigned a month later.

The January 1980 elections restored Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party to power. Her autocratic style of leadership weakened the party and distorted the conduct of public affairs. Beginning in 1983, serious unrest developed in the state of Punjab over Sikh demands for regional autonomy. Although Prime Minister Gandhi opened negotiations with Sikh political leaders, political influence in the Punjab shifted towards the militant factions led by Jamail Bhindranwale. His supporters organised the murder of political opponents and attacks on security forces. In June 1984 the army launched an assault on the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the power base of the militants. The militants were routed after a fierce battle. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards in revenge. Communal violence swept over the capital and some 2500 Sikhs were massacred. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, succeeded her within hours after her death and called elections for December 1984 which the Congress Party won in a landslide.

During the period 1984 to 2004, India was governed by a succession of unstable, corrupt coalition governments. Much of the strife within the various political parties was caused by the enduring conflict between Hindu and Muslim supporters. However, a landmark budget in July 1991 opened the Indian economy to trade, foreign capital and competition. As Minister of Finance, Dr. Manmohan Singh took the first steps to throw off the shackles of bureaucracy, protectionism and state-dominated business that had held India back for so long.

In the 2004 elections, Italian-born Sonya Gandhi led the Congress Party to victory. She asked former Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh, to become Prime Minister. He became India’s first Sikh and first 110 non-Hindu to occupy the Prime Minister’s office. During his period in office, Manmohan Singh faced several national emergencies: Maoist Naxalite guerrilla insurgencies in the north-east states, a massive earthquake in Kashmir, a series of Pakistan-based bomb attacks on commuter trains and stations in Mumbai, separatist violence campaigns in Assan and violent protests in West Bengal over the establishment of special economic zones (SEZ) designed to stimulate foreign investment. But the aged Manmohan Singh persevered with his remarkable reform programme to build a better economy in India. He also signed a nuclear co-operation treaty with Pres. Bush in which India would separate its military and civilian nuclear programmes and a degree of IAEA scrutiny in exchange for uranium supplies and access to US technology.

When the Congress Party returned to power in 2004 after eight years in the wilderness, it only won 145 seats out of the 522. To form a government, for which 272 seats were required – Congress had to put together the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) with 12 other parties. Putting together a coherent support base under this arrangement would have been hard enough, but the UPA was still short of a majority. So Congress recruited “outside” support from another five parties, the most important of which was a coalition of Communist parties, the “Left Front”.

This absurdly complicated and unrepresentative coalition government turned out to be more enduring than expected. Much credit must be awarded to Prime Minister Singh, but his lone effort had its limitations. The Communists proved to be the most obvious blockage, opposing every liberal proposal on principle. Like India’s vast bureaucracy, the government was forced to expend far too much energy merely to sustain itself in power.

In 2007 the Communist contingency walked out over the civil nuclear co-operation pact with the USA. The government only survived after Mr. Singh threatened to resign and the government coalition survived by recruiting a new ally, the low-caste Samajwadi Party (SP) from Uttar Pradesh. It is a troubling fact is that the Indian government is forced to take risks and to make concessions to get support for any bold, but essential, policy initiatives. The fragmented polity makes reaching a consensus virtually impossible. Every government is bound to be a coalition: either led by the Congress Party or the BJP.

The Congress Party ruled India for almost four decades by relying on three main groups for support: Muslims, high-caste Hindus and Hindu (“untouchables”). The Congress Party also relies on a residual fondness for the Gandhi family. But Mrs. Gandhi’s son, 38-year-old Rahul Gandhi, does not appear to display obvious leadership qualities. The Congress Party does not have a clear-cut ideological base to unite its squabbling factions.

The BJP is the only major alternative source for coalition building. It is built on a base of about 15 percent of Indian voters – typically high-caste and from the north – who feel attracted to its Hindu- chauvinist creed, known as , or “Hinduness”. It occupies the right-of-centre nationalist stance, but has recently relinquished overt stress on its Hindutva image in order to avoid offending potential Muslim support.

Indians are proud of their democracy. It has been interrupted only once, in 1975, by Indira Gandhi’s 21-month state of emergency. At the next opportunity India’s voters threw out Mrs. Gandhi and her Congress Party for the first time in its history. They thereby indicated the importance of timely elections. India’s Election Commission enjoys much status and effective power. It can, and does, remove any official suspected of undue bias. Every five years India holds a reasonably orderly and fair 111 election. Its 29 states do the same, according to their own electoral calendars. These must be considered significant accomplishments.

The Indian political scene is a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting coalitions. It reflects the highly fragmented structure of the complex Indian society influenced by region, religion, caste, language, ideology, traditions, loyalties and constantly changing public opinion. It imposes very demanding tasks on its leaders to muster enough support to move the country forward.

According to a December 2008 survey by The Economist, of the 522 members of the 2008 Indian parliament, 120 were facing criminal charges. Around 40 of these were said to be accused of serious charges, including murder and rape. Sadly, most Indian politicians are presumed to be corrupt. In view of India’s poor and fractious society, patronage politics is virtually inevitable. The Economist claimed that Indian politics had become much murkier in recent years because of two factors: the use of regional caste-based parties, nakedly dedicated to delivering patronage – and the mutinous coalitions engendered thereby.

India’s Economy

India’s GDP in 2008 was estimated at $US1,362 billion (per capita $1,190) with an economically active population of around 530 million and unemployment estimated at around 7.5 percent. The agricultural sector employed around 60 percent of the workforce and contributed around 21 percent of the GDP; industry employed around 17 percent of the workforce and contributed around 28 percent of GDP and services employed 23 percent of the workforce and generated around 51 percent of GDP.

In 2008, India produced around 1 million barrels of crude oil per annum at its Assan oil fields and around 32 billion cubic metres of natural gas. It produced around 450 million tonnes of coal and has the fourth largest coal reserves in the world, based in the states of Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. The bulk of its electricity (83 percent) was based on fossil fuel and 14 percent on hydro.

About 50 percent of the land is arable and since agriculture is the principle industry, much of India’s vast population is dependent on the land for a living. India is self-sufficient in food grains (rice and wheat) and a net food exporter. India is a legal producer of opium poppy for pharmaceutical trade, but also produces opium poppy and cannabis for the international drug trade.

The total cattle stock was estimated (2007) at 180 million, as well as 62 million sheep, 124 million goats, 475 million chickens, 100 million buffalo and 630,000 camels. A total of 23 percent of the country is forested. In 2006 a total of 7 million tonnes of fish were caught.

India’s exports in 2007 totalled $US141 billion, mainly textile goods, gems and jewellery, engineering goods and leather manufactures. Imports of $US224 billion included crude oil, machinery, fertiliser and chemicals. Its main export destinations were the USA (17 percent), the UAE and China. The main sources of its imports were China, the USA and Germany. Around 4 million tourists visited India annually.

Some Indian companies have achieved considerable global success. Prime examples are Wipro, Infosys, Tata Steel (with its acquisition of Britain’s Corus) and Mittal, which is now one of the largest companies in the world. But more impressive than the success of India’s best companies is the zest for 112 business shown by millions of Indians in dusty bazaars and shack factories. Indians are truly entrepreneurial and have prospered everywhere outside India.

Inside India the challenge is daunting. Shifting the bulk of the population from subsistence agriculture to more productive livelihoods would be very difficult even if the number of people of working age was not growing at such a rapid pace. In 2008 it was estimated that roughly 14 million Indians were being added to the labour market each year and that the figure was rising. Half of India’s people were under 25 and 40 percent under 18. Only about 20 percent of jobseekers had had any sort of vocational training. But job-creating economic growth is stifled by India’s cumbersome labour laws. To escape throttling labour laws, Indian entrepreneurs tend to keep their operations small: 87 percent of manufacturing jobs are with companies that employ fewer than ten people.

For the period 2003 to 2007, the Indian economy managed to grow at an average annual pace of over 8.8 percent, compared with around 6 percent in the 1980s and 1990s and a measly 3.5 percent during the three decades before 1980. In earlier years interventionist policies shackled the economy. Since the start of the new millennium India has been reaping the rewards of reforms that were made in the early 1980s – chiefly under the positive influence of Manmohan Singh’s deregulation. These reforms lowered barriers to trade and liberalised capital markets. As a result total trade in goods and services leapt to 45 percent of GDP from 17 percent in 1990.

The biggest obstacle to higher growth levels is India’s lagging infrastructure – especially roads, ports and power. According to the World Bank, the average manufacturing firm loses 8 percent of sales each year from power cuts. India annually spends 4 percent of its GDP on infrastructure compared to China’s 9 percent. India’s government has indicated ambitious plans to increase total infrastructure spending. The idea was for the bulk of it to be financed by public-private partnerships. Private investors, particularly foreign ones, seem to shy away from sectors like electricity and roads because they are uncertain of earning a reasonable return. It is said that only half of all electricity used is paid for because power is stolen and bills are left unpaid. Regulatory reforms are required to protect the interests of both investors and consumers.

Another big obstacle to growth in manufacturing is India’s labour laws which are among the most restrictive in the world. Firms employing more than 100 people cannot fire workers without government permission. This is a major impediment to employment growth since it discourages expansion. Central government, relying on the Communist Party as a coalition party, is totally hamstrung and cannot reform the system. In theory the state governments can apply the laws with more flexibility in the special economic zones, but this exemption has not yet led to more flexible labour markets.

A major obstacle is the dreadful quality of public services. This problem is felt across the board from education and health to water supplies and refuse collection. Half of urban households lack drinking water within their homes; one-quarter have no access to a toilet, either public or private. It is claimed that public services have worsened in recent years. In Bangalore water is irregularly available for only three hours per day. It partly explains why people are reluctant to move to towns and cities.

Another major obstacle is the quality of education and healthcare. A survey in 2003 found that only half of paid teachers were actually teaching during school hours. Another survey found that healthcare centres in poor parts of Delhi had a more than 50 percent chance of prescribing a harmful therapy for common ailments. Government spending accounted for only 21 percent of total health spending and 113

40 percent of education spending. People went to sub-standard private providers because public provision was even worse.

Despite the strong reformist instincts of Manmohan Singh, as Prime Minister, the need to maintain the coalition of splinter groups overwhelmed the appeal of reform. Yet, many economists in Delhi reckoned that annual growth of 8 percent was sustainable even without significant reform despite the formidable supply-side constraints of infrastructure, labour laws and public services. This view seemed over optimistic. Better education, labour market flexibility and less red tape were essential prerequisites for sustained growth. The country needed to put in place the right policies.

If infrastructure suffers from too little investment, the rest of the economy is burdened by a too heavy government hand. Seven of India’s ten biggest companies, measured by sales, are majority-owned by the state (five oil-and-gas firms, a steel producer and a bank); state-owned banks control nine-tenths of deposits; the railways employ more people than any other commercial organisation in the world.

Privatisation started in 1991 with the sale of minority stakes in some state enterprises. However, in 1999 the previous BJP-led government shifted the focus to the sale of ownership and control to strategic investors. Then, in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that sales required parliamentary approval. Subsequently, in deference to its left-wing allies, the Singh government agreed that “generally” profit-making companies (i.e. those that investors might want to buy) would not be privatised. The government also mooted that the proceeds of privatisation would be earmarked for social-sector schemes.

The private sector is hamstrung by many controls. The over-active “control raj” is alive and well: for example, some 670 items including 21 textile and hosiery products, are “reserved” for small-scale producers. The Institute of Planning and Management, a think-tank, reported in 2004 that each industrial unit is visited by between 40 and 60 inspectors in the course of a month. It estimated that Indian manufacturers spend 16 percent of their time dealing with government officials.

It has also been hinted that the government considered extending policies to the private sector. These policies would “reserve” a proportion of jobs for minorities and “backward” castes. The business community argued that it would impose a further restraint on investment and open another door to corruption. They stressed that more flexible labour laws and fewer bureaucratic obstacles would be a more cost-effective remedy.

Since Mr. Singh left the finance ministry, the public sector deficit, including state and central governments, has been hovering around 9-10 percent of GDP. This deficit was financed domestically by a timid banking system that kept 40 percent of its assets in government debt. This debt, however, stands between the government and its development targets. A large chunk of tax revenue goes into interest payments, civil service payments and pensions, defence and subsidies. The deficit also threatens to choke private-sector investment by pushing up the cost of credit.

India needs faster growth to create more jobs for its expanding population and to relieve poverty. Although the educated middle class has made significant gains, the 60 percent of the population close to or below the poverty line has been left behind. Measured by the commonly used Gini coefficient, India has less income inequality than China or America. But it has much more poverty. An estimated 260 million people still live on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. Half of all children under five are malnourished. 114

Better education, improved infrastructure and better public services can not only increase growth, but also spread the rewards. As The Economist commented, India’s economy is not likely to sprint ahead like a tiger, it would rather amble along like an elephant. But an elephant has a lot of stamina and can travel far if its way is not blocked. (See The Economist’s briefing “India on Fire”, February 3rd, 2007)

The Infrastructure Handicap

It was estimated in 2008 that more than 1000 children die in India every day of diarrheal disease. The Ganges in Varanasi contained 120 times more faecal coli form bacteria per 100 millilitres than is considered safe for bathing. Four miles downstream, with inputs from 24 gushing sewers and 60,000 pilgrim-bathers, the concentration was 3000 times over the safety limit. In places the Ganges turned black and septic. Corpses of semi-cremated adults or enshrouded babies drifted slowly by.

India’s sanitation is abhorrent. In 2008 it was estimated that only 13 percent of the sewage its over 1 billion people produce is treated. An estimated 700 million Indians had no access to a proper toilet. Water-borne diseases caused by poor sanitation proved to be a big reason why so many of India’s children were malnourished.

The constricting impact of India’s infrastructure on its economy is particularly illustrated by the derelict condition of its roads, ports, railways and airports – all operating close to or beyond capacity. In 2008 it took an average of 21 days to clear import cargo in India. In Singapore it takes three. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, which handles 60 percent of India’s container traffic, has berths for nine cargo vessels. Singapore’s main port can handle 40. With the number of air passengers in India growing at 30 percent a year, the inadequacy of its four main airports is obvious.

India’s 3.3 million kilometre road network is the world’s second-biggest, but most of it is “pitiful”. Its national highways account for only 2 percent of the total. Only 12 percent or 8,000km are dual carriage ways. China, by contrast, had some 53,000km of highways with four lanes or more by the end of 2007. India’s urban roads are choked. The average speed in Delhi has fallen from 27 kph in 1997 to 10 kph. All of the country’s roads are perilous.

India’s shortage of power is an even bigger concern. Demand usually outstrips supply by almost 15 percent. In some industrial areas businesses are cut off for 24 hours at a stretch. According to the World Bank, 9 percent of potential industrial output in India is lost to power cuts. Some 600 million Indians have no mains electricity at all.

The Singh government has pushed public-private partnerships for building roads and airports. New airports were opened in Hyderabad and Bangalore in 2008. The airports in Mumbai and Delhi were scheduled to be modernised by 2010. Government plans have scheduled 1,500km of new road and rail linkages between Delhi and Mumbai, studded with manufacturing hubs. India has introduced a planning scheme to double its investment in infrastructure to $475 billion over a five-year period, representing 8 percent of GDP per annum. In 2008 the investment had already been trimmed down to only 4.6 percent of GDP.

A major obstacle to mobilising the necessary capital resources for infrastructure investment is the shallowness of India’s corporate debt markets. In addition, innumerable bureaucratic and legal 115 impediments stand in the way – colloquially referred to as the “permit raj”. Private and public sector projects get equally bogged down. Attracting private investment to where it is most needed, in power generation, is the most difficult. Private investors fear they will not get paid for their electricity because state governments like to give it away for free to voters, or allow it to be stolen.

The central government tried to “unbundle” power generation, transmission and distribution. But the state governments have undermined this scheme so that 35 percent of India’s power is still stolen. In Delhi where distribution has been privatised, the theft rate has dropped from 48 percent to 18 percent. Five of the states contribute 80 percent of the losses of India’s state utilities and five better- governed ones contribute 78 percent of cash profits.

Education and healthcare have an equally abysmal record. Illiterate children cannot be taught basic hygiene. Illiterate men are not equipped for productive employment. In 2001 only 65 percent of the population was defined as literate (compared to 90 percent in China). In 2007 the overall education budget represented 2.8 percent of GDP, about half the figure in Kenya. Where children are attending school the problem is quality. According to a World Bank Study, only half of India’s teachers show up for work and half of Indian children leave school by the age of 14.

The higher education system is also appalling. It has been called “the collateral damage of Indian politics”. Politicians, or their lackeys, collect bribes for appointing faculty, admitting students and awarding good grades. They insert their supporters to run the racket. Having destroyed the public universities, they then grant themselves permission to open private universities from which they milk the profits.

Policy Paralysis

India’s major obstacles are well-known: a lousy infrastructure, bumbling and burdensome regulation and restrictive labour laws. But its reform efforts seem to be perpetually stalled in political recriminations and horse-trading.

Delicate coalition arrangements have kept Manmohan Singh in office as Prime Minister for almost ten years. A co- committee was set up between the left-of-centre Congress Party and its coalition partners (the United Progressive Alliance or UPA) on the one side and the Left Front of Communists and other left-wing parties on the other. The Communists staged a four-month boycott of the co-ordination committee to press their policies and then, in concert with the trade unions, called a one-day strike. The banks along with the Communist stronghold of Kolkata (Calcutta) were paralysed.

As finance minister in the 1990s, Manmohan Singh pushed through the measures that kick-started reform in India. Without the support of the Left Front, his reform efforts were stalled. Singh introduced a measure that guaranteed 100 days’ employment to every household in India’s poorest districts to appease the Left Front. Much of the money, as much as 1 percent of GDP by some estimates, has been wasted or stolen. The list of what Singh was prevented from doing is much longer. Progress in liberalising India’s notoriously rigid labour laws is a key political battleground. Any company with more than 100 employees cannot make redundancies without obtaining approval from local labour boards. According to the Left Front this protects workers from unscrupulous employers. In fact, it made employers wary of taking on new staff, opening new factories or growing beyond the threshold of 100. It protected unionised labour at the expense of those not in work. The Left Front benefited from the system in West Bengal and Kerala, the two biggest states where Communists are strong. 116

Those who were losing out as a result of unreformed labour laws are hundreds of millions of people who are marginally employed in the countryside – despite the booming labour-hungry textile industry.

India’s antiquated laws are preventing India from exploiting the textile boom – in contrast to China’s successful expansion of its textile industry. India is also losing out in terms of direct foreign investment. China attracted $60 billion in 2004 alone and benefited because of technology, expertise and marketing relationships that this money represents.

One chief reason for the discrepancy is that India imposes caps on Foreign Direct Investment in a host of economically important but politically sensitive sectors: insurance, aviation, coal mining, media, retailing, etc. Direct foreign ownership in retailing is banned, which explains why even Delhi’s smartest shopping areas are scruffy and chaotic. The Left Front is violently opposed to lifting the rules for FDI.

With the recalcitrance of the Left Front and their pivotal position in the coalition, Mr. Sing’s hands were tied. The same applied to privatisation, or its younger sibling disinvestment, meaning the selling of minority stakes in state-controlled companies. The coalition was prevented by the Left Front from privatising nine so-called “crown jewels”, or leading state-owned companies – most of which were loss-making operations.

Nothing could be done since 2004 to reduce the mountain of subsidies that distorts the Indian economy. These subsidies consume a shocking 14-15 percent of GDP. Worst of all were the heavy hand of bureaucracy. The “inspector raj”, the “licence raj” and the “permit raj” were kept alive by the left- wing members of the coalition. It lived on in the cascading excise and sales taxes, one of the biggest handicaps facing manufacturers. It was also reflected in the chronic budgetary deficits of around 8 percent per annum. Much of the deficit went into interest payments (40 percent of recurrent spending), defence, subsidies and civil service wages and pensions. It left little scope for capital investments to reduce the infrastructure deficit.

West Bengal was a state of 82 million people with Kolkata (Calcutta) as capital, run for 28 years by the Communists and their allies. It is ironical that the “free market model” works more freely in Communist China than in democratic India – thanks to India’s own democratically elected Communist and left-wing politicians. (See The Economist’s Special Report on “Reform in India”, October 29th, 2005, pp.23-25)

Intergroup Conflict and Violence

India is a prime example of a pluralistic country where solidarity patterns exist that rival the commanding loyalty which the state itself is able to generate. These solidarity patterns have been produced by India’s convoluted history and are based upon shared religion, language, ethnic identity, race, caste or region. Historically, in some situations or regions of India, it led to the constitution of autonomous political communities such as Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. Today India still faces the fall-out or remaining conflicting solidarity patterns in Kashmir, on its frontiers with Pakistan and on its north-eastern frontiers in Assam and Bihar. In many ways India remains a veritable compound where some of the most durable and persistent cleavages which cause men to rise up against other men are piled up within the confounds of a single political system. It produced a horde of peasant revolutionaries, regional separatists, low-caste champions and Muslim jihadists. It implies that India has a much larger conflict potential than is commonly supposed. 117

In the recent past several troubling “hot spots” erupted. Towards the end of November 2008 an outrageous terrorist attack was carried out in the commercial heart of Mumbai by Pakistan-based Islamist militants that indiscriminately killed 180 people, including foreign tourists and businessmen. India’s response was mercifully restrained – possibly because Indians have long been used to conflict and terror.

Even before the Mumbai terrorist attacks, 2008 had been a violent year. In , Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi, dozens of people were killed in summer bombings by a terrorist group. They seem to have sprung from a long campaign by Pakistan and Bangladeshi militants to stir revolt amongst India’s 150 million Muslims. Poor and often marginalised, they have many grievances. The Indian Mujahedeen circulated a list of allegedly state-sanctioned crimes against Muslims and went on to say: “If you still think that the arrests, expulsions, sufferings, trials and tribulations inflicted on us will not be answered back, then here we remind you ... those days are gone.”

Apart from Kashmir, which carries the threat of an international conflict, appears to be the most troublesome of India’s conflicts. The rise of the BJP is symptomatic of the rise of Hindu consciousness. It advanced from the Ayodhya mosque issue into a widespread sense of animosity against Muslims. Under Vajpayee, the BJP also became known for its liberal economic management and many of its leaders are less Hinduist than nationalist. But the Hindu fanatics are strongly based in BJP-ruled Gujarat, one of India’s most prosperous areas. Also in BJP-ruled Orissa there is an ongoing campaign against Christians, in which many Christian houses and churches have been torched by Hindu fanatics.

In most of India, Hindus, Muslims and Christians live together peacefully. Secular Indians also constitute a growing category. But the conflict pattern seems to have been set, terrorism from aggrieved Muslims drawing a violent response from Hindus. Kashmir is India’s only Muslim majority state with an ever-present potential for pro-independence protests.

India’s north-eastern states are among India’s poorest and most rebellious. In , on the border with Myanmar, there are more than 20 tribally based separatist groups. The army’s counter- insurgency strategy in Manipur and across the north-east has been to bribe the insurgents to keep quiet and to quash those who refuse to co-operate. India has made major investments in the region’s road network to boost its economy.

The Maoist insurgency, known as the Naxalites in the West Bengal area, has formed the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Its influence has spread to 220 of India’s 611 districts of which 76 are considered “seriously affected”. The Naxalites’ stronghold is in the roadless forests of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra where they hide an army of 12,000 ragged revolutionaries. They crop up wherever there are local grievances, thriving in poor and crowded parts of Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, where the district administrations are weakest. They represent a law-and-order problem which can only be solved by the Chinese formula: rapid economic development.

Economic development has already lessened India’s caste divisions. Despised dalits have migrated to India’s cities where the caste system has diminished. It only survived in the marriage market and advertisements for a spouse. This centuries-old separation will not die soon, but the urban trend is against endogamy. Some observers predict that as caste stratification reduces with economic development, religious conflict may increase. 118

India’s Potential

Ever since independence from the British Empire, India stuck to its creed of pacifism and non- alignment. India has never been run by generals and its foreign service is one-tenth that of China. Its nuclear capabilities are smaller than those of Pakistan, its unstable neighbour. Both its army and its navy are much smaller than China’s. In 2015, India’s comparative military capabilities were as follows:

Defence Active Sub- Combat Budget Forces Tanks marines Aircraft $bn India 1,325,000 6,464 15 1,905 38.5 China 2,333,000 9,150 67 2,860 145.0 Pakistan 642,000 2,411 8 423 5.8 Indonesia 395,000 ? 2 69 7.7

Up to the present time, India has been reluctant to enter into the arms race and shuffled along with a weak strategic culture. On the positive side, it helped India to avoid the costs of arms race participation. On the negative side, its strategic shortcomings may become a liability.

On its economic front, India possesses untold promise. The entrepreneurial potential is there to be unleashed. In 2014 the growth rate of the economy approached 7.5 percent, even potentially outpacing China, with a raft of promising trends: declining inflation after floating above 10 percent for years, a shrinking current account deficit, a firm rupee and a booming stock market.

In 2014 Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a huge election victory on the promise of a better-run economy. Technology development has made export-led, labour-intensive manufacturing less attractive as a development strategy. As a result India has to look at a mixture of industry and services to absorb its 100 million youngsters entering the labour market every decade.

After struggling with inefficient power networks and over-regulated labour relations for many decades, India is still battling along, in 2015, with the same obstacles to growth. But Mr. Modi’s victory has introduced a business-friendly policy programme and taken the first steps to tackle the perennial obstacles of unpredictable electricity supply and red-tape constraints. A new regime of auctioning licences was introduced in February 2015. The Reserve Bank of India managed to drive inflation below 8 percent and is set to bring inflation down to 6 percent by 2016. Mr. Modi also indicated that his government is pushing forward plans for a national goods-and-services tax to replace a welter of state taxes and levies that serve as protectionist barriers. Mr. Modi is also working on a scheme to provide cash benefits for the needy because less than half of the spending on welfare reaches its intended recipients. The introduction of millions of no-frills bank accounts, linked to biometric identity cards, is reducing the problem of corrupt leakages and improves poverty relief.

About half of India’s 1.2 billion people are under the age of 26. Over 100 million voters have been added to the electorate since 2009. Around 50 cities have more than 1 million residents and more than two-thirds of Indians still live in villages. The country has more poor people than anywhere else in the world with 230 million living on less than $2 a day. Almost half of all rural households (250 million people) have no electricity. Mr. Modi came to power promising to bring to India “good times” by which 119 he meant jobs and prosperity. The voters gave him the biggest parliamentary majority in 30 years. The country has to grasp this opportunity to transform itself.

India’s Challenges

India’s main challenge in the next few decades lies on its domestic front. It has to lift the bulk of its huge population out of abject poverty and provide the necessary quality of public services and the enabling policy environment for its economy to grow.

Nandan Nilekani, a prominent young Indian businessman (co-founder of Infosys, the country’s second largest IT company) recently wrote Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation – an interesting analysis of India’s prospects. The first part of the book explains why democratic, English-speaking India is starting to achieve its potential and how that could lead to a globally influential position for the country. The second catalogues the alarming reasons why the country could still fall apart. Nilekani believes India now stands evenly balanced between the reluctance to change in the face of immense challenges on the one hand and the possibilities that could arise out of tackling these issues head-on. India will either become a country that greatly disappoints when compared with its potential, or one that surpasses all expectations.

India has already taken some steps to reduce the dead weight of bureaucracy with its near-infinite paperwork and corruption, to maintain its food security, to cut its patronage-based subsidy system, to build an integrated national gas grid to transport India’s growing supply of relatively clean natural gas, to deregulate its labour market, to strengthen its “deliberative democracy” and to bridge the yawning gap between rich and poor.

Unfortunately no outline has been provided of the steps to be taken to transform Indian politics into a reliable vehicle for reform. India’s economy is the vehicle required to transport its people to a better future with better schools, health services, housing, job opportunities and a higher standard of living. It requires a sustained high rate of economic growth. As long as that happens, India’s emergence will continue. Bibliography

Anderson, C.W., Issues of Political Development Van der Mehden, F.R. & Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc. Young, C. (1967) Astill, James (2008) “A Special Report on India”, The Economist, December 13th, 2008 Bashan, A.L. (1997) Hinduism, Encyclopaedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble Duncan, E. (1995) “India Survey”, The Economist, January 21st, 1995, pp. 4-30 Enloe, C.H. (1973) Ethnic Conflict and Political Development, Boston: Little Brown & Co. Ferguson, Niall (2004) Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World, New York: Penguin Books Long, Simon (2005) “A Survey of India and China”, The Economist, March 5th, 2005, pp. 3-20 Long, Simon (2006) “A Survey of Business in India”, The Economist, June 3rd, 2006 Nilekani, N. (2009) Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, London: Penguin Wolpert, S. (1993) A New History of India, New York: Oxford University Press 120

Confucianism Combined with Buddhism and Taoism as Modernising Forces in East Asia

The three belief systems predominating in South East Asia, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, differ fundamentally from the Abrahamic monotheistic religions. Their teachings resemble a philosophy more than a religion. However, much depends upon the way the underlying precepts are defined. Each of these belief systems has its own ontological explanations as a confirmation about the wisdom of its teachings on the nature of reality; its own cosmology in terms of which the origins or beginnings of reality or nature can be understood; its own teleological views of the destiny of all living things; and its own prescriptions of how the individual devotee can experience the revelations made by the belief system.

The doctrines of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism have often been melded together to become embedded in the culture of East Asian societies over many centuries and generations. By virtue of the numerical preponderance of its people and its geographical size, China stood at the centre of East Asian societies over many centuries.

Buddhism

Buddhism is a name given comparatively recently by Westerners to the vast synthesis of teachings more than 2500 years old, attributed to a man called Siddhattha, a member of the Gotama family, who was to become the supreme Buddha. He lived among the Sakyan clan in the foothills of Nepal which was part of India. In his own days, the teachings of the “Sage of the Sakyans” were known as Dhamma (Sanskrit “Dharma”) meaning a description of what is right and what ought to be.

I.B. Horner, in his essay on “Buddhism: the ” in the Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, says that religion is perhaps not a very good term to use in connection with Buddhism since it recognises no God or godhead. Life here on earth is not regarded as a preparation for eternity, but as a discipline for governing man’s attitude to the here and now, the present conditions, and, if properly and diligently carried out, will lead gradually but surely to what is best, the highest good.

Over the centuries Buddhism split into several strands, the most important of which were the Therevada and the Mahayana branches. The former is the original format directly descended from the times of the Founder in India. Its basic precepts are closely related to the Indian cultural environment from where it spread into Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. These Buddhists regard the Pali Tipitaka as the source not only for a right and skilled method of the conduct of life but also for their spiritual aspirations. The Mahayana branch took firm root in China, Japan, Tibet and Mongolia. They have much in common with Theravada but differ in respect of the recognition of Bodhisattvas (beings set on Enlightenment) and Buddhas.

The Teachings of Buddha

The life of Siddhattha (Sanskrit Siddhartha) began as a member of a family of nobles and warriors. His mother died a week after he was born. He was brought up by his aunt (foster mother) Mahapajapati and lived in luxury until he was twenty nine. He married a beautiful Sakyan girl who bore him a son, Rahula (meaning “bond”). He abandoned his sense-pleasured environment to find his Nirvana – the sorrowless, undying, stainless, undecaying world of Enlightenment or Awakening. After several years of austerity and suffering Buddha Gotama found his Night of Enlightenment or Awakening and he 121 became a sammasambuddha, a fully self-Awakened One, perfectly equipped to teach the eternal Dharma, setting out his precepts of right conduct, honourable, virtuous, just and good.

He delivered his teachings to those around him and soon found a growing following. His devotees were ordained by cutting their hair and beard and by wearing yellow robes. They set up monasteries where the teachings of the Buddha were recited: it is by denying oneself that self is found. For about 45 years after the Night of Awakening, Buddha Gautama continued to teach an ever-increasing number of followers, men and women, lay and monastic, royal and common, while he toured North India. He spoke on many subjects, often illustrated by similes. He presented himself as a man, neither a god nor a creator, nor a myth or legend. The purpose of his quest was to find Nirvana. When he was over eighty years of age, he entered parinirvana, the final waning-out and ending. After his death, his place as Way- shower was taken not by any one monk, but by Dharma.

Buddha set his “wheel of the law” (dhamma) in motion in about 527 BC when he delivered his first sermon after achieving Enlightenment. That sermon on the four noble truths embodied his message and was to become the philosophical core of Therevada (Teaching of the Elders) Buddhism.

The first noble truth was “suffering” (Dukkha) and how all existence was inexorably bound up with it: from birth to death, through sickness and old age, sorrow was everywhere, gaining poignancy in separation from those we love, intensified by proximity to those we hate; no facet of life could escape it. The second noble truth was “ignorance” (avidya), the basic cause of suffering. The root of suffering lies in ignorance of the fundamental nature of reality. Buddha spent much of his wandering years trying to understand the nature of reality. He explained in his sermon at Sarnath that had we the wisdom to understand reality’s soulless, transient misery, we would be able to elude or diminish suffering. Buddha suggested abandonment of the passions of sense organs and cravings which chain us to the wheel of cyclical suffering, reborn and redying. Buddha prescribed as his third noble truth that any “ill” which was understood could, in fact, be cured. The fourth and final of the Buddha’s truths was the noble eightfold path to the elimination of suffering: to hold, practice and follow right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right . The difficulty, of course, was in properly defining “right”. But Buddha taught that if one followed the eightfold path without misstep, the goal of nirvana (which literally meant “the blowing out” as of a candle’s flame) could be achieved and the pain of suffering would finally be overcome. Nirvana was thus the Buddhist equivalent of , a “paradise” of escape rather than pleasure.

The Buddha spent the next forty-five years of his life teaching these four noble truths to disciples who gathered around him in such numbers that he established a monastic “order” (sangha) which continued to grow and to spread throughout the world after his death. Initially only men could join the sangha and the vow of chastity (brahmcarya) was as important as those of non-violence () and poverty (aparigraha) – three vows that would become integral to Hindu concepts of piety (all three were taken by Gandhi during the latter half of his life). Nuns were also admitted to the sangha, but he warned against the nature of female influence upon men. His foremost disciple, Ananda, warned followers to “keep alert” in the company of women!

All members of the sangha are expected to pursue a rigorous course of “right discipline” (sila), yogic concentration and thoughtful study in their search for nirvana. Not only did they have to abandon all family bonds and prospects of progeny, but they were enjoined daily to beg for their food, bestowing “merit” upon those who placed rice in their bowls. With heads shaved, the saffron-robed, barefoot disciples of the Buddha marched the length and breadth of the Gangetic plains and beyond, teaching 122 his message of moderation, non-violence and love for all creatures. The idea of achieved such popularity that it attracted religious leaders in other parts of the world, spreading to the West, to the Near East and to Europe, wandering north and east to China and Japan.

The Buddha had never regarded his words as sacrosanct or held that his teachings must be believed as a whole, taken on trust or repeated faultlessly by his disciples on pain of incurring blame or ineffectualness. He advocated each person investigating and testing the Teachings for himself. But the Buddha still maintained that there is One Sole Way for the purification of beings and for overcoming that covetousness and dejection rooted in the world of the senses, which Buddhism teaches them how to break free of. Narrow and straight is the Way that must be followed for the escape into the undying and unchanging. Though Buddhas can point out the Way, each person must discover it anew for himself. If he does not put his whole energy into the struggle, he will fall short of his aim. No one can purify another, it is for each aspirant, by his own energy, efforts, striving and diligence to walk on the Way leading to the bliss of emancipation from the ubiquity of impermanence.

Branches of Buddhism

At the time of the Founder there were no known materials in India suitable for writing or engraving anything more than the briefest proclamations. As a result many of his sayings, utterances and discourses had to rely on human memory and word-of-mouth transfer. So for many centuries the teachings of the Buddha were carried in the memories of his disciples and their disciples in a long succession, or various successions of teachers and pupils. Divergence of opinion was inevitable leading to the emergence of various “schools” or sects in subsequent centuries – most residing in different monastic centres and localities.

To reconcile different interpretations of the true Dharma, the First Council was held by hundreds of disciples at Rajagaka, shortly after the Teacher’s passing away. His Dharma was recited out loud so as to come to agreement on the accuracy of the memory and to establish the genuine version to be preserved, learnt, mastered and followed. In time several “baskets” were assembled of the Teachings, believed to have been uttered by the Buddha and by his monastic disciples. Three of these “baskets” constitute the Tipitjaka or collection of canonical written texts which goes by the name Therevada –the doctrine, speech or profession of the Elders. In time several Therevada Councils were held with the object of “purifying” the records – at first spoken but later written down. The Sixth Council was held in Rangoon in 1956.

A different branch of Buddhist thought is called Mahayana, or “Great Vehicle”. The concept of vehicle represents the raft or ship that carries followers across the ocean of this world of suffering to the “beyond” of salvation or nirvana. The Mahayana school of Buddhist thought distinguish themselves from the Hinayana, meaning “inferior vehicle”. The northern half of the Buddhist world, including Buddhists in Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, are mostly Mahayanists. The south is dominated by the Theravadins, one of the traditional sects of the Hinayana and their form of Buddhism is the national religion of Ceylon, Burma and Siam. Other Hinayana sects disappeared when the Muslims swept into Northern India 700 years ago and destroyed its flourishing Buddhist monasteries. Its persecution against centres of Buddhist monasticism was so unrelenting that the religion of Buddha was sent into exile from the land of its birth.

The Mahayana tenets of Buddhism spread in South East Asia at the same time as the beginning of the Christian era. It gathered momentum in the first post-Christian centuries. Edward Conze, in 123

“Buddhism: The Mahayana” in the Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, p.293, lists three parallels between the Mahayana and Christianity.

First, loving kindness and compassion as a virtue. Secondly, bodhisattvas which calls for the sacrifice of lives for the welfare of all. Thirdly, an eschatological interest in the “second coming” of the Buddha. Each of these teachings is closer to the spirit of early Christianity than it is to the older Buddha doctrines. There are also verbal coincidences between the Mahayana and the Christian Scriptures. Conze speculates that the Mahayana originated in the south of India which was in close trading relations with the Roman Empire. In North West India, the second centre of original Mahayana Buddhism was also the area where traces of the successor states of Alexander the Great kept open a constant channel for Hellenistic and Roman influences. Most of the Mahayana literature was composed in Sanskrit, but also in Chinese, Tibetan and Central Asian languages.

Several offshoots of Buddhism developed in India and elsewhere. Janaism practiced ascetism, self- torture and even death by starvation. Its central doctrine is that all of nature is alive: everything from rocks and earthworms to gods have some form of “soul” called jiva. All jiva is eternal. Also central to Janaism is the concept of non-violence (ahimsa). Thanks to Janaism, ahimsa became a significant aspect of Hinduism – all following the Buddhist prohibition of killing any living creature. The Janaist taught that “... all things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should not be slain, or treated with violence, or insulted, or tortured, or driven away”. Like Buddhism, Janaist philosophy soon acquired all the characteristics of a religious faith, practiced by an order of male monks, joined later by nuns and a supportive lay community. The Janaist community, centred in Gujarat refrained from agriculture, but turned to commerce and banking. They became wealthy and remained a mercantile community. Gandhi revived the “fast-into-death” as a political weapon.

Buddhism in China

The arrival of Buddhism in China was a concomitant of the expansion of Indian culture into Central Asia at a time when Chinese political and commercial connections with that area increased. A number of prosperous city states had arisen in the watersheds of the great rivers. The source of their prosperity was the trade between China, India and the Roman Empire. Central Asian art combined Hellenistic, Indian and Persian elements, but the Indian cultural influence was the strongest. Buddhist monks moved back and forth, travelling with the traders’ caravans.

The Chinese terminus was the city of Tun Huang. It was said that thirty-six languages were spoken at the market place. The penetration of Buddhism into China began in earnest with the arrival of translator-missionaries around AD150, mostly Central Asians. Assisted by Chinese monks and laymen they translated the Buddhist texts into Chinese. With the Han dynasty crumbling, thoughtful Chinese embraced the exotic Buddhist doctrines and spread Buddhism along the Yangtze valley. By AD300 Buddhism became the dominant faith of China. Different schools of interpretation developed in search of the true meaning of the scriptures. During the 5th century Buddhism completed its domination of Chinese religious life. It was patronised by the kings of several Chinese principalities and the majority of the population adhered to Buddhism. Cave-shrines were constructed at Yün-kang near the Great Wall and employed thousands of families. Dozens of caves were cut out of a cliff face and sculptures were carved out of the walls, ceilings and pillars. Royal favour was lavished on teachers at the many schools and monasteries. Chinese Buddhism reached its prime in the 7th century. Thousands were taught at Buddhist schools and many distinct sects emerged. Several Emperors were Buddhists or favourable to Buddhism. 124

In 845, Buddhism was attacked by Taoists. Temples and libraries were destroyed but the discovery of the technique of block-printing had stimulated the printing of the scriptures. Buddhism again flourished under the Sung dynasty in the 11th to 13th centuries.

The Mongols who ruled China during the 13th and 14th centuries adopted a Tibetan variety of Buddhism. They patronised Buddhism lavishly. The Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) also favoured the Lamaist version of Buddhism and published scriptures in Chinese, Tibetan and Manchu. In 1756 there were 5 million monks in a population of around 500 million.

Buddhism’s main religious rival was Taoism. The superstitious elements of both are similar: concerned with magical powers and miracles. Both preach detachment and rising above worldly affairs. Buddhism starts from an analysis of the mind. Taoist doctrine centres on a cosmology – asking questions about the beginning or prior cause of every beginning – such as something supernatural. These two religions have remained in opposition throughout the ages.

But Buddhism’s most formidable enemy is the earthly literate classes. The literati’s basic philosophy is an ideal of worldly happiness in a well-run state where everyone fulfils his social duties. Other classes have the duty to produce goods and services and pay taxes – not to live as celibates in a life of poverty where they could produce no commodities and could pay no taxes. They felt Buddhists were radically subversive making light of success in this world turning men’s thoughts away from producing towards spiritual realms. Buddhism was not likely to survive the growing secular trends in China – least of all the onslaught of modern science.

Richard H. Robinson describes the impact of Chinese Buddhism as follows: “Chinese Buddhism is entitled to a place of honour among the world’s faiths for many reasons. Its devotees have been numerous and have exemplified the varieties of religious experience on a wide scale. It counts many saintly men among its followers, both past and present. Its monuments in literature and art are imposing. It is both the most distinguished offshoot of Indian Buddhism, and the parent of Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese Buddhism. And, even in its present weakness, it is in a position to contribute to the religious life of world civilisation.” (R.H. Robinson, “Buddhism in China and Japan” in R.C. Zaehner (ed), Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, New York, 1988)

Buddhism in Japan

Japanese Buddhism does not differ much from Chinese Buddhism in doctrine, but its institutions and social role are different. Japanese Buddhism also succeeded in meeting the impact of the modern world and westernisation more successfully than Chinese Buddhism. In Japan the Buddhist sects are corporations owning land and temples. Allegiance is hereditary giving Buddhism an enhanced durability. Buddhism first came to Japan by way of Korea. Various Korean princes sent gifts and images to the Japanese imperial court. Buddhist monks also played an important part in the imperial administration. Monks served as engineers in building roads, bridges, dikes and irrigation systems. They also served as clerks and scribes.

In time Buddhism became an established church. All families were required to register at their local temple. Buddhism responded to Western influence by learning both from Christianity and secular scholarship. At universities modern critical techniques are applied and contemporary Western 125 currents of thought are debated. Japan is predominantly a Buddhist country. It has retained its classical culture and has assimilated modern civilisation with outstanding skill. Buddhism is securely entrenched.

Taoism

Taoism is a religion as well as a philosophy. It gradually came to the fore in the period 450-220BC, arising from ancient myths and practices. The famous Tson Yen, a prominent figure in an academy of philosophers called the academy of the Chi-gate, was the first to formulate a Chinese “scientific” view of the universe as a system based on two universal energies – Yin (dark, female) and Yang (light, male), combined with five moving forces or elements (wu-shing).

The majority of scholars of this academy belonged to several Taoist schools that followed the doctrines of Yang Chu who advocated the concept of individual salvation, i.e. keeping out of harm’s way. Yang Chu mixed his ideas with ancient physical theories about “fine parts” connected with Ch’i which means air or breath. Ancient Chinese views were held that air was the physical basis of the universe acting through the agency of the “fine parts”. These, the subtlest parts of the air, were believed to be the essence of all life – for instance, being embedded in the five species of grain and by being eaten these “fine parts” were taken into the human body. Accumulating these “fine parts” within one’s body preserves and prolongs life. Numerous practices were developed in Taoist circles in order to accumulate “fine parts” in the body and so to obtain immortality.

The School of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu This school of thought, known as “Mysterious Learning” developed the theory of Tao as the fundamental basis of all being in the 3rd and 4th centuries. It is the source of all being , and not-being. This not-being is described as emptiness or oneness, making Tao universal, all-pervading, all- embracing and indestructible. To avoid death and annihilation, nothing was more efficacious than to become like Tao or to unite oneself with Tao. Because Tao was emptiness, it was also silent, retiring and clear. Therefore, if one wanted to be like Tao one had to become silent, to retire from worldly affairs and empty of all personal desires. The sages of this school lived like hermits in rural retirement. Unification with Tao could be achieved by deep thinking and meditation. Throughout Chinese history, advanced thinkers were attracted by the philosophy of Taoism. All being originated from not-being and all beings must finally revert to not-being. All movement and existence originates from a silent, unmoving background to which it inevitably returns. Tao is the basis of every possible movement – it is the Way. The ancient , the progenitor of all beings, is described by the philosophical term Tao.

Although Tao is emptiness, not-being and above all, non-action, it is not without its efficacy which is Te (Virtue). Although Tao is not-being, the mysterious power of Tao is the potentiality of all-being. Tao produces and Te rears all beings. It is by Te that Tao becomes manifest as the unifying One, the unity behind the multiplicity of beings.

The actual process of living depends on the harmonious binding of Yin breath with Yang breath. But the Yang principle has to be increased and the Yin principle be suppressed. However, this controversy was never resolved.

Immortality to the ancient Chinese always meant physical immortality. After his death, they believed man leaves his old body and soars off to the spheres of happiness. Taoists believed in two kinds of 126 practices to prolong life: religious – the observation of commandments, moral conduct, prayer, incantations; and physical – diets, medicines, chemicals, breathing methods, gymnastics, etc.

The political theories of Taoism were quite unique. They believed the Emperor should refrain from governmental affairs and occupy himself with meditation and the purification of himself in order to unify with Tao. The government was under the guidance of an old wise Prime Minister, well versed in all the ways of Tao. He should practice non-action. The government of the people should be such that one did not even know there were rulers. Hence the Emperor was to be prevented from interfering in the administration of the Empire (this theory sounds very much like John Locke’s advice that “government governs best that governs the least”!)

Revisions of Classic Taoism In the year 470 one of the Emperors of the Liu-Sung dynasty created a new “Academy of General Learning” which introduced Taoism as one of the main subjects of study. The representatives of this school were literati who closely linked their Taoist philosophy with the tenets of Confucian thought – the traditional philosophy propagated by the literati.

This group of scholars considered Confucius as the greatest sage of all ages and therefore tried to combine Taoism and Confucianism. Confucius, as the sage, was identical with “not-being”, but since “not-being” could not be made the subject of instruction, they felt bound to be dealing with “being”. Hence they revived classic Taoist philosophy with a new interpretation based on a link between Taoist and Confucian thought.

The new interpretation was tinged with the general spirit of the period and the class-mentality of the literati. Stress was laid on “oneness” as the natural justification of monarchic leadership. They argued that “... the many cannot be governed by the many since it is the supremely solitary that governs the many in order that the many may be equally sustained ... the ruler must to the highest degree maintain his oneness”.

This new interpretation was fundamentally different from the almost anarchic views of classic Taoism. It also rejects the insistence on non-activity (wu-wei) of classical Taoism. Folding one’s hands does not produce anything worthwhile. The new Taoist philosophy gave rise to a new movement among literati which was called “following nature”. It inspired artists to produce outstanding works of poetry and painting. Taoism was merged with Confucianism into what was known as Neo-Confucianism.

Through the centuries, Taoism underwent many changes, mostly influenced by fads and superstitions amongst the common folk. Taoist canon the Tao-tsang emerged with the technology of block-printing in the first half of the 15th century. It consisted of hundreds of works arranged in three sections in imitation of the Buddhist Tripitaka, corresponding to the “Three Domains of Purity”. The Tao-tsang became the most important source work for all aspects of Taoism.

Taoism was gradually absorbed in the vast sea of popular – a complex of superstitions and practices. From time to time these cults have been branded as heretical and were outlawed. This led to these cults further splintering into many little groups hidden in the mountainous regions of the vast countryside of China. Taoism was kept alive despite sporadic efforts to exterminate “superstitions”.

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The Secret Societies Since the end of the 13th century a noticeable difference between the Taoism of the South and that of the North emerged. The southern sects were dominated by secret societies built around secretive “celestial masters” who were often practitioners of magic arts and sorcerers or exorcists of “evil spirits”. In the North several sects developed, combining elements of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. They played a role in defending the realm against invasions of the Tartars and the Mongols.

Taoism also played a leading part in the secret societies which dominated political movements from 1644 to 1911. During the 20th century several secretive sects such as the “Society of the Tao and Te” were established which operated over a vast area in Northern China. They worshipped a Taoist god T’ai-i but their eclectic theology also enlisted the names of Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha as well as the symbols of Christianity and Islam. They emphasised the community of Heaven and Man in matters of the spirit and the brotherhood of man in earthly matters. It later assumed the name of the “Universal Red Society”.

After the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 the secret societies seemed to hold the real power in China. They practiced gangsterism on a large scale, filling important positions with their partisans and terrorising the people. When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, one of the first measures was to exterminate these degenerate organisations. Large numbers apostatised, particularly those identified with Chiang Kai-shek.

Taoism Today Werner Eichhorn writes that Taoism is by no means defunct as a religion. It is as much alive as ever. But it is a peculiarly Chinese religion and was never propagated among non-Chinese peoples. It remains an integral part of the Chinese way of life. It makes a direct appeal to the innate love of the Chinese for the beauty of their landscape. Taoism was always a worship of Nature within and without man and an attempt to bring both into harmony with each other. The Taoists believe the way of Nature should not be obstructed, but requires mankind to live in harmony with Nature. These sentiments have always been reflected in their traditional temples, architecture, artistry and lifestyles. Temples are now being repaired and cult images are being protected. Taoism is once again officially recognised and allowed to re-open their monasteries and national organisations. It is believed that Taoism is a force for good: promoting peaceful coexistence and fair social conditions for everyone. In Taiwan Taoism is the leading religion. (See Werner Eichhorn, “Taoism” in Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, op,cit. pp.374-392)

Confucianism

When the Chinese seek answers related to mystical philosophy or religion, they turn to Taoism or Buddhism. When they seek answers relating to what a gentleman should do or should not do they turn to Confucius. What is called in the West “Confucianism” is not a religion, but the traditional view of life and code of manners of the Chinese gentry for two millennia. Confucius did not found a religion, nor was he a philosopher. He was a Chinese gentleman whose sense of what is done or what is not done has made him the most famous Chinese person who ever lived.

It is claimed that Confucius lived around the period 550 to 480BC. He was a scholar from the small feudal state of Lu. The scriptures of Confucianism are known as the “Classics” of which only four of the original six books survived. But it should be realised that the “Classics” were established by Imperial decree so that the questions relating to its origins are unsettled. 128

Although Chinese civilisation is the most stable in the history of the world it has, apart from some violent upheavals, undergone gradual transformations. Confucius did not claim originality for himself, nor was it claimed for him by his followers. It must also be emphasised that “Confucianism” was so named by Westerners who assumed that it was a religion founded by Confucius as Christianity was founded by Christ and Muhammedanism by Muhammad.

The Analects of Confucius, a collection of his sayings and the Mencius, the sayings of the most prominent of his successors together with other Classics formed the basis of the education of the ruling class and formed the set texts of the examinations by which the bureaucracy was recruited.

Confucius was not a prophet appealing to divine revelation, nor was he a philosopher appealing to reason. He makes no claims to supernatural authority and he seldom gave reasons for the views he expressed. He presented himself merely as a transmitter or chronicler of the teachings of the ancients – often reading moral lessons into traditional love songs. He was a gentleman whose sense of propriety was matured by conscientious study of the best models. A customary morality, in his view, needed no justification except for “This is how it was done in the Golden Age, although in these degenerate times people do it differently”.

Since the times of Confucius himself, there has been a close connection between Taoism and Confucianism. It is reflected in the “Classics” and other commentaries by Confucius and his followers. Taoism was deeply embedded in the cultural life of China and the emphasis placed by Confucius on moral tradition meant that he and his followers kept many Taoist concepts and precepts alive – returning to the “natural Way of Tao”. Certain strands of Taoist thought and Confucianism in particular, won ascendancy within the bureaucracy which it retained for more than two thousand years.

The Core of Confucianism

The core of Confucianism is its humanism and focus on the secular life. Confucianism is not about the gods or afterlife. It is about life in this world as families, as communities, as righteous and moral people and the norms and propriety that determines a good lifestyle. This stance rests on the belief that human beings can be taught, improved and perfected through personal and communal endeavour – especially through self-cultivation and self-creation. In Confucian thought, the cultivation of virtue and the maintenance of ethics depend particularly on three basic elements: yen, yi and li. Yen is an obligation of altruism and humaneness towards other members of the community. Yi is the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do good. Li is a system of norms and propriety that determines how a person should properly act within a community. Confucianism holds that one should sacrifice your life, if necessary, for the sake of upholding the cardinal moral values.

Confucianism has influenced the cultures of several countries: China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as well as other territories settled by Chinese people. Although few people explicitly identify themselves as Confucian, its ideas and customs prevail in many cultural ways in these areas. Confucian ethics are often seen as a complementary guideline for other ideologies, beliefs and practices. It is remarkable that around 500BC Confucius proclaimed as a cardinal virtue the moral code that we still cherish as the “golden rule”: “... what you do not like yourself, do not do to others”. The wording changed somewhat, but the underlying principle is the same “do not do to others as you would not be done by”. 129

The “Way of Tao” as the “Way of Heaven” The Confucian way of life is in harmony with the natural world since all that happens on earth is due to a “decree of heaven”. All things have regular courses to follow – the “way of heaven”. This is reflected in the succession of day and night, the sequence of the four seasons, the harmonious conduct of father and son, ruler and minister, husband and wife, elder and younger, friend and friend. All under heaven (the world, that is China) is under the Emperor, the “Son of Heaven”, who owes his power to the “decree of heaven”. Within this all embracing harmony, the moral power of the Emperor and his conduct of ritual have immediate, magical effects on the natural and social order. The sage Emperors of antiquity did not have to govern at all, since the moral influence which emanated from them was enough to bring about peace and prosperity.

This conception of the place of man in the world goes back as far as the history of China can be traced. It underlies Taoism and Confucianism. In the more primitive phase, the Emperor was conceived as a ritual head who reigned “without action” (we-wei) – a phrase prominent in Taoist literature and used by Confucius. The underlying political philosophy is that the Emperor reigns by performing ritual functions, while the practical work of government was left to his ministers. When the Emperor rules badly his subjects have the right to rebel and institute a new dynasty. Flood, famine, rebellion, omens in the sky, are signs that the Emperor no longer deserves to rule and that heaven has withdrawn the decree by which he reigns. This theory was used by the founders of the Chou dynasty to justify their overthrow of the last Shang Emperor. Chinese dynasties were not branches of a single line of Imperial descent. Although usually a member of the gentry, they could come from the ranks of the common people. Examples are the founders of the Han and the Ming dynasties. An Emperor’s success in building an orderly and lasting government is enough to prove that he rules by the “decree of heaven”. Mencius declared that the way to become the heir of the Emperor was to govern in the interests of the people: “If your majesty governs the people with benevolence, is sparing with punishments, reduces taxation, and encourages agriculture, so that adults have time to cultivate filial piety and fraternal duty, loyalty and good faith, serving their fathers and brothers at home and their elders and superiors abroad, your subjects will be ready to fight with sticks against ... (the enemy)”. (Quoted by A.C. Graham, “Confucianism”, op.cit., p.362)

Contrast to Christianity and Islam In Europe and Western Asia this kind of “nature-worship” has been replaced, first by worship of gods with elaborate mythologies, then of an absolutely omnipotent good God. Moral development has been accompanied by increasing differentiation between the divine and the devilish and by the idea of a supernatural reward or punishment. (See A.C. Graham, op.cit. p.362)

In contrast to Christians and Muslims for whom the existence of God is of primary and supreme importance, Confucianism by-passes religion. For a short period in the 5th century BC a rival school of -tzu claimed that heaven rewards the good and punishes the wicked on earth. Later the Buddhist idea of reward and punishment in the next world took root among the common people of China. But the Confucians turned their back on religion and developed their moral code without any appeal to religious sanctions. The expectation that all things should follow the “Way of Heaven” was either taken for granted, or rationalised as a philosophical order, without any intervening stage of personal religious conviction.

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When asked for a definition of wisdom, Confucius said: “Devotion to one’s duties as a subject, and respect for the spirits while keeping them at a distance, may be called wisdom.” (Quoted by A.C. Graham, op.cit. p.363)

The attitude of Confucianism to the supernatural is illustrated in its approach to the question of survival after death. Confucius claimed that men have no business except with the living and should not concern themselves with what happens after death. According to the Analects, Confucius said “Until you can serve men, how can you serve spirits? ... Until you understand life, how can you understand death?” (See A.C. Graham, op.cit. p.363)

Confucius regarded sacrifice to one’s ancestors principally as a means of expressing reverence; what matters is that reverence should be sincere, not that the spirit addressed should exist. The motives of sacrifice are remembrance and longing. By it, loyalty, faith, love and reverence reach their utmost. Consciousness ends at death, it does not survive after death.

Confucius rejected the popular Buddhist doctrine of reward and punishment after death as an attempt to back morality by self-interest which could deceive only the ignorant. Similarly they dismissed the Taoist appetite for personal immortality as a selfish refusal to accept the natural rhythm of things, by which death follows life as night follows day and autumn summer. The question of survival mattered only in connection with the duties of the living to their ancestors.

Neo-Confucianism The articulation of Confucian thought is to be found in the commentaries and teachings of several scholars and schools that followed in his footsteps through many centuries. The transformation of the old Confucian world-view into a philosophy took place during the Sung dynasty (AD960-1279). The chief scholar leading the transformation was Chu Hsi who systematised the traditional beliefs in order to defend them against Buddhism. Chu Hsi, like Confucius himself, did not claim to be original. He referenced all his discoveries into the “Classics” and the official recognition of his teachings took the form of prescribing his commentaries on the “Classics” for students taking civil service examinations.

Cardinal Virtues Confucianism recognises five cardinal virtues. These are jên (benevolence) which shows itself in the feeling of sympathy for others; yi (duty) reflected in the feeling of shame after a wrong action; li (manners) such as propriety, good form, deference; chih (wisdom) reflected in the sense of right and wrong; and hsin (trust) good faith and trustworthiness.

The moral code based on these five virtues may be described as secular rather than religious except the general assumption that by following it one follows the “Way of Heaven”. Confucians who offend these virtues are expected to feel ashamed in their own eyes. Confucianism did not provide for private worship or prayer, nor for rites of atonement, confession and self-mortification to take away sin. The highest of the five virtues is jên which seems to be a collective name for the qualities which distinguish the noble or gentle from the vulgar. It marks the stress laid by Confucius on moral rather than ritual considerations. Confucius associated five things with jên: politeness, liberality, good faith, diligence, generosity. Being polite, you will not be slighted; being liberal, you will win over the people; having good faith, you will be trusted by others; having diligence, you will be successful, being generous, you will be worthy to employ others. Confucius believed the single principle behind jên is “love of others”. In the Analects xii, 22, he says “what you do not like yourself do not do to others”. And in Analects vi, 28, he says “The jên, wishing to stand themselves, help others to stand, wishing to arrive themselves, 131 help others to arrive ... An ability to appreciate the needs of others by comparing them with one’s own may be said to be in the direction of jên.”

The Confucians believed that the social order must be maintained by as little force as possible and as much as possible by customary rules defining the relations between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, elders and younger, friend and friend. Statute law should have a small role compared to customary law. If you govern people by regulations and punishment, the people will only observe the rules to keep out of trouble. If you govern by moral influence and keep order by a code of manners, they will have a sense of shame and obey the rules by their own accord ... They will become more and more well-mannered and dutiful ... If you rule them by punishments, you will need more and more punishments. If punishments multiply, people will resent it and rebel: if manners and duties are increasingly respected, they will be harmonious and friendly.

Destiny The Confucian does not question that riches and long life are unmixed blessings bestowed by the “decree of heaven”, but neither does he expect them as a reward for living rightly. He accepts the alternation of good fortune and bad as part of the natural rhythm of things. He does not, like the Buddhist, regard all life as suffering, nor does he, like many Western humanists, support himself by faith in a future Utopia on earth. So long as he fulfils his duty, failure and adversity should not trouble him, since they are due to heaven, not to any fault of his own. But it is believed that Confucius himself was hoping that his own mission to restore the way of the sages would not be in vain.

About 400BC the Confucian view of destiny was attacked by Mo-tzu, founder of a rival school. Mo-tzu argued that morality requires the ultimate sanction of reward and punishment by heaven and the spirits. If the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper the motives for moral action would be undermined. The Confucians answered that, on the contrary, one who understands destiny knows that it is a mere accident if selfish action is followed by material success. They preferred to strive to right action instead of self-interest with an undivided mind. This Confucian fatalism does not deny free will. Confucius regarded his understanding of destiny as one of the decisive steps in his own moral development.

Human Nature What man cannot alter is decreed by heaven. This includes not only external events which are beyond our control, but also everything which is innate in us by nature. Is human nature good or evil? Is morality a fulfilment of man’s nature, or is it something against the grain of human nature? Confucius kept a profound interest in these questions and dismissed certain speculative answers: that human nature is neutral, that it is a mixture of good and bad, and that it is good in some men and bad in others. Confucius refused to provide a speculative answer, but his follower, Mencius, took the view that man’s nature is good. Every man will be moved at the sight of a child about to fall into a well. This proves that moral education merely develops impulses which are in us by nature. Mencius wrote “That in man which is decreed by heaven is what is meant by ‘nature’; to follow his nature is what is meant by the ‘Way’; cultivation of the Way is what is meant by ‘education’”.

This point of view became Confucian orthodoxy and in the 12th century AD, Chu Hsi grouped the Mencius views, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects of Confucius and the Great Learning as the “Four Books” in which Confucian doctrine was most fully expressed. Hsün-tzu took the opposite position that nature is evil. He held that the principles followed by natural phenomena are morally neutral, and that morality is not the Way of heaven but a human invention. The desires planted in us by heaven are 132 dangerous unless restrained by the morality which the sages invented to save us from the consequences of the primeval war of all against all. Men can conquer their natural inclinations by educating themselves. His scepticism about human nature was carried further by the Legalist school. They argued that few men are capable of altruism, and that the majority can be kept in order only by laws imposed from above.

The founders of Neo-Confucianism in the 12th century, Chêng Yi and Chu Hsi finally revived the Mencian theory in qualified form. They held that every man can discover moral principles inside him without being taught, but the extent to which he can see and follow it depends on the transparency or opaqueness of the “ether” of which he is composed. The moral principle within him is his true nature, which is therefore good. The endowment of “ether” received at birth, which determines his innate personal characteristics is his “physical nature”, which varies with different individuals and is alterable by education.

Confucianism is not a body of ideas to which an unbeliever can be converted. It is a way of life which is practiced only within traditional Chinese society. A ju (the nearest equivalent in Chinese to the world “Confucian”) was not simply a believer in Confucian ideas, but a scholar educated in the Confucian Classics. Confucius thought that barbarians outside the “Middle Kingdom” would benefit from coming under the rule of the Son of Heaven, becoming civilised and learning to follow the “Way of Heaven”. But the idea of missionary activity to convert outsiders never occurred to Confucius.

After the introduction of Communism in China, Confucian ideas were not given much scope. It was assumed that Confucianism required a leisured class educated to practice it. The Communists maintained that a person who lived by Confucian standards was a chün-tzü (“lord’s son”) or “superior man”, much like an English “gentleman”. His opposite was a hsiao-jên (literally a “small man”), the knave or villain. Since book-learning, good manners and administrative ability were essential features of the chün-tzü, one could not hope to become a sage without the benefits of leisure and education. However, Confucius explained merit by environment rather than by heredity, by education rather than by a mystique of blood. Hence Confucians accepted that the qualities of the gentleman might be latent in the members of any class. That explained the introduction of the examination system by which the bureaucracy was recruited. The Confucian was on the whole content with the idea that common people should combine Confucian virtues with Taoism or Buddhism. The people could be made to follow Confucianism but could not be made to understand it.

Evaluation of Confucianism Confucianism as an ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the ancient philosopher Confucius (the Latin name of K’ung-fu-tzu), who lived around 551-479BC. For long periods it was held as the official ideology of the Han tribe who predominated in China for a long period. After the disintegration of the Han domination in the second century AD, the way was opened for the spiritual doctrines of Buddhism and Taoism to enter the spiritual and intellectual life in China and the surrounding regions. However, Confucianism remained prominent as the basis of the imperial examinations and as the core philosophy of the scholarly official class. Official Confucianism was only ended when the examination system was abolished in China in 1905. The “New Culture” intellectuals blamed Confucianism for China’s weaknesses in comparison with the Western powers. However, during the 20th century, Confucianism was revived and by the late 20th century, Confucianism was credited by some observers with the rise of the East Asian economies.

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Western Missionary Work in East Asia

Western powers such as the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and British have been active in East Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries as traders from their colonial outposts. All of them were also engaged in some form of cultural transfer. This involved trade and manufacturing skills, government and administration systems, language skills, education and Christian missionary work.

In 1572, a Jesuit, , sailed in a Portuguese trading ship to Kagoshima in Japan where he established a small missionary station where the people converted by him totalled 150,000 when he died in 1557. But by 1630 Christianity was totally banned in Japan. So strong was the pressure for seclusion that Japanese individuals, even sailors, were forbidden to travel abroad. The Jesuits also penetrated China using the port of Macao as their first missionary station. The Chinese Emperor was friendly to the Jesuits for they were skilled in mathematics and astrology.

Many regions of East Asia had long been closed to Christian missionaries when in 1858 the Treaty of Tientsin allowed them to enter the interior of China and a stream of North Americans arrived. In the 1870s Japan was again opened to European and American missionaries and they soon were permitted in Korea too, where they won more success than in any other part of the East Asian mainland. In Korea the missionaries were welcomed as allies against the invading Japanese.

China was for long the focus of intensive missionary work. Catholic schools alone had taught some five million Chinese students by 1949. Catholic hospitals and doctors served around 30 million people and Catholic orphanages alone numbered 1500. When Mao’s Communists took over, these schools and hospitals passed into government hands and churches were closed. Foreign priests, pastors, nuns and medical staff returned to their homelands. Many of those were Americans and Canadians.

The leader of the Nationalist Government, General Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were Methodists and they retreated with their followers to Taiwan. The Buddhists who had been active in China for centuries could still sound their temple gongs in the provincial towns, but only older people answered their calls.

After 1949, Christians were largely excluded from large areas of East Asia: China, North Korea and much of Indo-China. The YMCA for China continued to function, but its leader Y.T. Wu was soon imprisoned where he died 20 years later in 1979. The Red Guards closed all Christian churches and many Chinese priests and pastors were imprisoned. All foreign cultural influences were seen as toxic. A Handful of remaining Christians continued to assemble in houses privately. However, by 1980 some surviving Protestant congregations were again allowed to meet in the old church buildings that remained standing. In 2002 the Vatican estimated that around 8 million Chinese Catholics still worshipped “underground”.

The period 1945-1954 was characterised by enormous upheaval in East Asia: the Communist takeover in China in 1949, the Korean War 1950-53, and the post-war reconstruction and development of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. These momentous events brought about paradigmatic changes in the paths of development followed in the affected countries.

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Japan’s Reconstruction

After the Second World War ended, in the West with Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Japan kept on fighting until September when Japan’s Emperor surrendered to the Americans in 1945 after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan was devastated, humiliated by absolute defeat, its industrial plants and more than a third of the country in rubble and ashes. There was hardly anything to eat. The confrontation with American power had overwhelmed the Japanese and driven home the fact of superior American economic and technological prowess. The occupation that followed brought them fact-to-face with American standards. Japan had to accept a new constitution which ended the divinity of the Emperor and gave sovereignty to the people. An independent judiciary was established, free labour unions were permitted and war was renounced.

There were many determinants in Japan’s post-war success. The US occupation implemented land reform and broke up the zaibatsu, the large industrial financial combinations. The zaibatsu were succeeded by keiretsu, groupings of banks and industrial companies with links that were less tight than before and thus created more scope for new entrepreneurs like Akio Morita, the cofounder of Sony. The country had a large and educated workforce, low inflation and a very high savings rate. The Japanese set out on a forced-pace campaign to obtain and absorb technology from America and Europe and, coupled with their strong work ethic and desire to succeed, established a series of highly successful companies that sought continuing quality improvement as a competitive weapon to win market share.

Amongst other factors that played key roles was Japan’s commitment to exporting its way to growth. International trade won over inward-looking policies and Japan benefited enormously from the increasingly open international trading system that America took the lead in shaping. America did not see Japan as a competitor, but as a source of cheap, low-quality goods. Japan’s own protectionist policies were overlooked. As an exporter, Japan moved up the product chain: from textiles and simple manufactures to ships and steel to complex mechanical goods, electronics and high technology.

The Thrust of Soviet Communism into Korea

The other major paradigmatic influence on the post-war events in East Asia was the thrust of Soviet Communism into the area during the final months of the Second World War. Stalin was kept informed about the progress of American nuclear technology by a few renegade Jewish informers. After the fall of Berlin, Stalin realised that the conquest of the Japanese Empire and the areas it occupied was imminent. Having already occupied much of Eastern Europe, Stalin realised that the countries lying on his eastern frontier could be pulled into his sphere of influence. At the Potsdam Conference the question of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war with Japan was mooted. In reality Soviet armies were already heavily engaged in driving Japan out of Manchuria, the northeast corner of China and strengthening its bonds with Mao Zedong’s forces in China. When Japan surrendered, the Communist forces already stood at the 38th parallel which later became the border between North and South Korea. For Korea, Japan’s defeat ended the harsh Japanese colonial regime imposed in 1910, but it also brought a division of their country: a Communist North and an anti-Communist South.

When the Korean peninsula was partitioned in 1945 into a Communist north and an anti-Communist south, South Korea had been left with very little. Most of the existing industry – largely Japanese built hydro-electric stations on the Yalu River and the nearby chemical and fertiliser plants – had ended up in North Korea. In June 1950, 135,000 North Korean troops invaded the South. Communist China (and 135

Russia) entered the war in support of North Korea and for a while it seemed as if South Korea might not survive. Seoul, its capital, changed hands several times. The USA entered the war in support of the South, using Okinawa in Japan as the military base for General McArthur.

The Impetus of the Korean Wars to Japan’s Economic Growth

The Korean War, 1950-53, and the military build-up that went with it, provided a major stimulus to economic growth throughout the industrial world, but particularly to Japan as the supply base for the American forces. Japan rose from recovery to strong and sustained economic growth under Prime Minister Ikeda. Within 20 years Japan’s national income approached those of Western European countries. By the end of the 1980s, the capitalisation of the Tokyo Stock Exchange was equal to that of New York and of the world’s ten biggest banks, eight were Japanese. Its economy was controlled by what was called the “iron triangle”: bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians. At the centre of the jukyu chosei – the apparatus of economic management – was one agency that controlled both domestic and external strategy: the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). It channelled information and knowledge and facilitated the flow of new technologies and used an array of tools, price setting, quotas for imports and market share, licences, quality standards, administrative guidance, organised mergers and encouraged the specialisation of small and medium-sized companies. It also restricted foreign competition within Japan through a host of tools and barriers. MITI acted as the single coordinator. It was staffed by the top graduates from the top universities. A key feature of Japan’s growth was its flexibility in pursuing economic objectives. In the 1950s the focus was placed on heavy industry shipbuilding and iron and steel. In the 1960s it moved into high- technology consumer manufactures largely for export. From the 1970s Japan concentrated on technological innovation and higher value-added products while transferring the production of lower value-added goods overseas. Then began an era of massive Japanese investment in Asia, America and Europe. In the 1990s Japan had the world’s strongest economy with the larges per capita GNP and the largest holding of foreign assets and debt.

South Korea’s Emancipation

In 1953 the Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty. Kim Il Sung, first of North Korea’s megalomaniac leaders, never wavered in his relentlessly hostile policy. South Korea was devastated by the war, with 7 percent of its population killed and two-thirds of its industrial capacity destroyed. President Syngman Rhee, a Ph.D. graduate from Princeton University under Professor Woodrow Wilson, remained in power to 1960. But Rhee’s forte was politics, not economics. After a military coup in 1961, General Park Chung Hee ran the country from 1962 to 1979. He adopted the Japanese growth model: highly interventionist with a strong export orientation. Korea promoted big companies – national champions called chaebols – which were holding companies that controlled diversified industrial conglomerates. Their names are globally known: Hyundai, Samsung, Lucky Goldstar, Kia and Daewoo.

It was only after 1979, under the influence of economic adviser Kim Jae-Ik, with a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, that South Korea dismantled its government interventionist apparatus, sold off most state-owned enterprises, liberated the financial sector, reduced import barriers, promoted foreign investment in the country and increased accountability for business leaders. After Kim’s death, South Korea continued to pursue policies aimed at less intrusive planning, an expanded role for the market and financial and import liberalisation. The powerful bureaucracies were reluctant to lose their power, but the South Korean leadership persisted with its free market policies and the country’s 136 impressive growth continued. South Korea was unrivalled, even by Japan, in the speed with which it advanced from poverty levels to one of the world’s most industrialised, prosperous nations.

Along the way upwards, South Korea went through a stage of massive corruption, kickbacks, bribes and political payoffs. Many of its generals, managers and politicians grabbed too much profit for themselves and several of the heads of chaebols were given prison terms. Two former presidents (Chin and Roh) were arrested: one imprisoned for 20 years and the other sentenced to death. It appears that even today, south Korea is still in the grips of powerful chaebols and political cliques, but its reforming and restructuring process is an ongoing challenge.

Taiwan’s Confucian Capitalism

In 1949 the forces of Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek was defeated by the forces of the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. The Communists took control of mainland China and the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan where they relied on the protection of the American military umbrella based in Japan. Taiwan had been a colony of Japan and then briefly a province of china after World War II ended. It became a separately functioning country again in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek sought refuge there with around 2 million soldiers and civilians.

Although heavily outnumbered by the Taiwanese Chinese by three to one, the refugees from the mainland took control of Taiwanese life. Survival of Taiwan became the paramount issue. The Chinese civil war was, in effect, still ongoing as Chiang and the Nationalists refused to acknowledge that Taiwan was not China and talked for many years about retaking the mainland. In time, Chiang’s resolve shifted to become an aspiration, then a myth, then a “liturgy”. Initially its challenge was to withstand an onslaught from the mainland, then later to weather Taiwan’s isolation as the People’s Republic of China took its place in the international community. It faced an almost constant struggle for legitimacy in the international system. It had to strengthen its own national unity on the island and build the economic infrastructure required for survival. Things did not look promising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The country had few resources, few established entrepreneurs, no savings and was heavily damaged during the war. Questions were also asked about the compatibility of the Chinese culture with the requirements of modern capitalism. However, the experience of Taiwan is a monument to “Confucian capitalism”.

The remarkable success story of Taiwan with its 20 million people even surpassed that of Japan and south Korea. After a process of serious soul-searching, they identified the societal pathology they wanted to avoid methodically: corruption, inequality, arbitrary government power, hyperinflation and failure to embrace modern science and technology. On the positive side, they aimed at creating an anti- corruption ethos, creating an environment for entrepreneurs to flourish, use planning to create a market system, to depoliticise the economic system, to invest in good infrastructure and to promote exports of manufactured goods. The government supported export industries through low-cost loans, enterprise zones and aggressive sourcing for technology. The results were spectacular.

The Taiwanese success was assisted by their reliance on the many overseas Chinese and many Chinese who had gone abroad for their education. These overseas Chinese were turned into a “brain bank” and an effective network for technology transfer. Taiwan also had the good fortune of enjoying the inputs of a few “supertechnocrats” K.Y. Yin and K.T. Li who acted like Confucian advisors for several decades.

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K.Y. Yin was an electrical engineer who read economic texts and K.T. Li a graduate in nuclear physics from Cambridge who believed in “replacing the arbitrary political power of government with the automatic adjustment mechanism of the market”. They adopted the Japanese policy formula: “competing out and protecting in” – on condition that Taiwanese firms should be gradually subjected to the rigors and tests of international competition in their home market. They also insisted that Taiwan should aim to continue the transition from authoritarianism to democratic rule and the broadening of the middle class.

The Kuomintang established by Chiang Kai-shek kept a tight grip on power for decades, appointing rather than electing the president. The biggest challenge is to define Taiwan’s relation to the People’s Republic of mainland China. Taiwan has remained by far the biggest investor in mainland China, despite the fact that the People’s Republic regards Taiwan as an errant province that need to be regathered. The Taiwanese insist that their distinct status ought to be respected and that the gulf between them would be narrowed as China’s brand of socialism becomes more like Confucian capitalism.

Singapore and the Impetus of Overseas Chinese

Singapore started its life as an entrepôt centre for the region as a British colony. Its economic architect, Dr. Goh, was sent to England where he earned a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. He teamed up with Lee Kuan Yew who went to Cambridge University and came back to lead the anti colonial movement. After an unsuccessful effort to form a federation with Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore to become a city-state. Lee Kuan Yew and Dr. Goh formed a formidable partnership with a remarkable ability to adapt their policies to changing situations and achieve an economic growth rate of 7 to 9 percent over four decades.

Both leaders began their careers as committed socialists but turned to market-friendly policies with a strong government say. They forced civil servants to think like businessmen. They financed social services like health care and housing, but tried to foster as much personal and family responsibility as possible. They promoted the Chinese propensity to save through the Central Provident Fund which, at one stage, took 50 percent of all wages. The Fund was used to finance infrastructure, industry, housing and a vast industrial park on a wide expanse of swamp, called Jurong.

They decided no public services should be free: the government is a facilitator, not a provider. It was the agenda keeper, long-range planner, strategic player and the manager of resources. A small elite of bureaucrats, selected on merit, ran the whole system. The whole of Singapore worked like a cohesive company. The basic principles which they selected to underpin its operation were: stable and predictable rules, low inflation, a high savings rate, an anti-corruption ethos and a climate friendly to business.

A basic component of the Chinese culture is the hua ch’ia (“Chinese across the bridge”), the ethnic Chinese who live, trade, work, invest and collaborate across the East Asian region and across the world. An estimated 30 million Chinese live in South East Asia. They make up around 30 percent of Malaysians, 15 percent of Thailand and 4 percent of Indonesia. In these countries they play an inordinately large entrepreneurial and commercial role (like the Jews in America). They are famous for doing their deals without contracts, lawyers, bankers and consultants – even when large amounts are at stake. Kinship-based rules of the game assume the role that contract law performs in the Western world, facilitating trade, investment and the movement of capital. 138

Mainland China’s Oppressive Communist Regime

China’s modern history was marked by a century of internal conflict and disintegration which was exacerbated by external aggressors. The Opium Wars waged by Britain in the 1840s, forced the Chinese Emperor to allow free trade access to British traders who wanted to sell opium to the Chinese. Britain secured control of Hong Kong for a period until 1997 and provided a secure trading outlet and a safe haven for assets of businessmen and industrialists. The revolution of 1912 that overthrew the led to turbulent decades in which southern China was the terrain of raging battles among nationalists, communists and warlords of varying allegiances. The warlords were battling for control of various regions and the nationalists and communists were initially collaborators and shared objectives to modernise China. Wealthy nationalists were financing the training of young revolutionaries in Moscow with the hope of restoring China’s dignity. Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-huo, all studied at the Sun-Yat-sen University. They returned to China where Deng became chief secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party at the age of 23.

The alliance between communists and nationalists broke down as they competed for power. Mao led the Long March of 1934-35, the 6000 mile trek to escape the nationalists. It began with 90,000 communist soldiers and ended with 5,000. This march later provided the leadership cohesion that carried the communists to victory and rule over all of China in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established.

The regime that was created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under leadership of Mao Zedong was a totalitarian one-party dictatorship. It displayed all the typical characteristics found in previous examples of totalitarianism: nationalist or socialist ideology, utopian goals, conflation of party and state, bureaucratic rule, leader glorification, mass propaganda, dialectical enemy as motor for psychological hatred, pre-emptive censorship, genocide and coercion, collectivism, militarism, universalism, contempt for liberal democracy and moral nihilism. Mao was inclined towards mass mobilisation projects such as “the Great Leap Forward” which ended in a devastating famine. Farmers were herded into regimented communes and families were encouraged to start backyard pig iron furnaces – all intended to quickly catch up with the capitalist world. Millions of people died of starvation as industrial production and internal trade collapsed.

The death of Mao in 1976 was the beginning of China’s liberation. The “Gang of Four” who masterminded the , including Mao’s wife, were arrested. After a bitter power struggle against Mao’s anointed successor, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping emerged as permanent leader by the end of 1978.

The Revival of Confucian Capitalism

December 1978 became a major turning point in 20th century Chinese history. A fundamental decision was made at the third plenum of the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party to reorient China toward a market economy. There was no grand plan, but rather a few practical steps to break with Maoism. Whatever worked economically was good, results were what counted. Deng wanted to create a wealthy and powerful china, not a utopian or messianic paradise. Deng was essentially a Chinese nationalist who used communism and the party as mechanisms to reach his objectives. Deng declared, “I have two choices. I can distribute poverty or I can distribute wealth”. He had seen enough of the 139 former under Maoism. Deng’s initial reforms centred on agriculture. He introduced a revised “household responsibility system” to allow a family to keep some of the benefits of their labour. Material incentives replaced the Maoist strictures. The commune system and collectivisation were undone. Peasants had to deliver a certain portion of their production to the state. Above that they could keep the output, consume it or sell it. With that free enterprise was launched.

The results were stunning. Output increased by 50 percent over sixteen years. Markets in agricultural products generated an entire new trading apparatus: transportation, repairs, food markets, building and hiring workers. By 1990 as much as 80 percent of agricultural output was sold in open markets. In six years, the real income of farm households rose 60 percent. The rapid improvement in agriculture spilled over into other economic reforms. It provided momentum for the next steps in the remainder of China’s economic life.

The leadership under Deng embraced economic reform and liberalism even while striving to maintain political control. Deng sought to ensure those who were concerned that China would loose its socialist and communist moorings with the explanation that what was happening in China was a process of “building socialism with Chinese characteristics”. That became the title of a book he published at the end of 1984. To transfer his “incentive” scheme into the industrial sector, Deng introduced the “contract responsibility system”, which echoed the agricultural “household responsibility system”. It meant that state enterprises were allowed to keep earnings above a certain target. By December 1987, 80 percent of China’s large and medium-size firms had adopted such a system. But state-owned firms remained inefficient. The next reform measure involved the creation of property rights. Only ownership could introduce responsibility into decision making and channel motivation.

Deng then turned to building up industries geared to export, particularly in coastal regions. This meant adopting the export-led growth strategy that the Chinese could see working in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. It offered solutions to multiple problems. These industries would earn hard currency; absorb surplus labour coming from the country’s interior. It meant taking part in international competition and pushing the coastal regions into the international market. At the centre of the strategy were Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These SEZs engendered China’s engagement with the world economy. The first SEZs were created in 1980 in Guangdong province, including Shenzhen (near Hong Kong) and in Fujian province, across from Taiwan. They were essentially export-processing zones and acted as magnets to draw in foreign investment. From then on the coastal cities drove the Chinese economy forward.

In April 1989 Deng experienced a serious setback when the democratic aspirations among students brought thousands of demonstrators to Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of the purged reformer Hu Yaobang. To “old guard” members such as Deng it was an act of rebellion challenging the sacred supremacy of the Party, which they considered the bulwark against disorder and chaos. It reminded Deng of the Cultural Revolution and its militant students. He felt that survival and order were paramount and authorised the use of the army to quell the demonstrations. About a thousand people are thought to have been killed. Retrenchment and controls were stepped up in view of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the time. Chinese conservatives decided to rein in reform and reassert control. Deng’s opponent, Chen Yun, was in ascendency again and “Chen Yun Thought” was celebrated similarly to “Mao Zedong Thought”. Chen attacked Deng directly, charging that his policies were responsible for the trends that had culminated in both the overheated economy and the events in Tiananmen Square. Chen charged that the SEZs were capitalist in character and conduits for forces that would destroy communism in China. 140

Pushed into the defensive again, Deng undertook his last campaign, the nanxun (southern journey) when he spent four weeks in his private railway car, slowly observing what was happening in the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province and the Shenzhen SEZ which borders Hong Kong. When he saw the enormous changes from what he had viewed in 1984, he realised that despite the growth problems, the resulting high-rise urban area was a stunning success – he called it a “flying leap” and a model for the future. He remarked that socialist systems can have markets too and that plans and markets are simply economic stepping stones to universal prosperity. He advised his fellow Party members “... to watch out for the Right, but mainly defend against the Left”. Replying to Chen’s reading list of communist classics, Deng said that he never bothered to read Marx’s Das Kapital because he neither had the time nor the patience. His nanxun report became the subject of extensive press coverage and much discussion. At the 14th Party Congress in 1992, Deng’s “brilliant thesis” was hailed and it was decided that China would shift from a “socialist planned commodity economy” to a “socialist market economy”. Reform was back on track and it was Deng’s final victory. At 88 he was reaffirmed as the paramount leader.

Between 1978 and 1995, China’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.3 percent. It also moved from a Soviet-style command economy toward being governed by market forces. “Collective” enterprises, owned by villages and localities and the army continued to operate next to completely private enterprises. Foreign investment, particularly from Taiwan and from overseas ethnic Chinese (called guanxi) played an important role, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian provinces. A large proportion of the overseas Chinese trace their origins to Guangdong and they have, in recent years, invested billions in the province and assisted in the marketing of their products all over the world. Between 1978 and 1993, Guangdong’s economy has grown at around 14 percent, well above the national average. The Pearl River delta’s growth was still higher at more than 17 percent. A region that hardly contains 2 percent of China’s population generates around 40 percent of China’s exports.

Deng Xiaoping’s influence in China’s rebirth can hardly be over-estimated. As a boy he started in a Confucian school, and throughout his long life, he was fond of quoting Confucian aphorisms. He shifted the Chinese Revolution away from ideology toward the more pragmatic objectives of wealth creation as a source of power and welfare. At the Central Party School in Beijing, familiar courses on Marxism, Leninism and the history of Communism have given way to courses on marketing, accounting and international business practices. Deng Xiaoping died in 1997 at the age of 93 at the end of a remarkable life. Bibliography

Blainey, G. (2011) Christianity – A Short History, Penguin Books, London Ferguson, N. (2011) Civilization – The West and the Rest, Allen Lane, London Johnson, P. (2003) A History of the Jews, Phoenix Press, London Hattstein, M. (1998) World Religions, Krönemann, Cologne Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations, Simon & Schuster, New York Yergin, D. & Stanislaw, J. The Commanding Heights – The Battle Between Government (1998) and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, Simon & Schuster, New York Zaehner, R.D. (ed) (1997) Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, Barnes & Noble, New York New York

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Concluding Remarks

The Abrahamic Religions

Viewed in retrospect, the detailed content of the scriptural narratives of the major religions must be approached with circumspection. There are several reasons why circumspection is essential.

The first reason is the ancient, incomplete and unreliable format in which these scriptures were reclaimed. The history of these religions and moral codes cover the best part of four millennia – more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilised humanity. The historical record of the earliest period is very sketchy and was compiled in written form centuries later. Much of the scriptural narrative originated as orally transmitted legend and only reached written form hundreds of years later. Legends were inevitably conflated and adapted over the centuries to provide justification for the interpretations, practices and rituals of later generations. Ancient texts had to be transcribed by families of scribes on scrolls and clay tablets. During the third to first millennia before the Christian era and for more than a millennium afterwards, very few people were literate and script was little more than hordes of complex symbols that stood for whole words and concepts. As a result the early written records of religious events and precepts in Mesopotamia, Arabia, India and China are extremely fragmentary. The detailed contents of the scriptural narratives have been a matter of intense controversy among many generations of scholars and believers.

The monotheism of the early Israelites was inspired by Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion. The doctrinal foundations of Judaism as the religion of the Jews crystallised over a period of more than two millennia. It started during the Old Testament Biblical period, was then consolidated by rabbinical councils and enshrined in the Talmud and faced several reformist trends in the Modern Era. The part of the Scripture that is commonly known as the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Five Books of Moses (The Torah or Pentateuch) which form the first part of the Bible, are considered by the Jews to be a direct and most fundamental divine revelation as delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. Every letter of the contents of the Pentateuch is hallowed by traditional Judaism. But in today’s world it has become necessary to provide answers to questions relating to the authenticity of these historical claims. What is fact and what is fiction? Who wrote the Pentateuch, when was it written? Of the several accounts or texts that are available, which are accurate? Can the Old Testament qualify as a reliable record of actual history or is it a religious interpretation of the Israelites’ experience? Judaism has remained an ethnic religion, related to the Jewish people in an exclusive and intimate way. It is ethnically exclusive and remained integrated and intertwined with the concrete history of the Jews as God’s “chosen people”. Did the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh mean more privileges for Jews, or more responsibilities and an existence that is constantly exposed to divine judgement?

The second reason is the essential need to follow symbolic rather than literal interpretations of the scriptures. The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam originated in the same region and all three claim direct lineage to the biblical figure of Abraham. Christianity began as a splinter of Judaism and Islam arose in Arabia in the 7th century – also incorporating elements and precepts of Judaism and Christianity. All three religions are monotheistic and conceive of God as the transcendent creator of the universe and the source of all moral law. All three believe that humans and nature are subordinate to God and that nature and the Earth are subordinate to humans. All three Abrahamic religions affirm one eternal God who also created the universe, who rules history, who sends prophetic and angelic messengers and who reveals the divine will through inspired scriptures. They believe that obedience to that creator God is to be lived out historically and that in the end God will unilaterally intervene in on the Day of Judgment. All three religions believe there is 142 a choice between good and evil which is related to obedience to God’s Divine Law. God works through history which ends with resurrection of the dead, final judgment and to the world to come depicted as Heaven and Hell.

In the parts of the world influenced by Judaism and Christianity, perceptions of Heaven and Hell as described in the Bible have become less literally understood. For a growing proportion of believers, Heaven and Hell are not understood as specific places on the planet or in the universe. The creation myth of the Bible and its depiction of Heaven and Hell is today mostly interpreted in symbolic terms and understood as allegoric. In the Muslim world, the bulk of believers still tend to interpret the text of the Koran as literal history.

Thirdly, it is necessary to understand that the Bible and the Koran were written in a period when religious scholars and scribes had to rely not only on a limited vocabulary to describe the world around them, but also on a limited understanding of cause and effect relationships of events they experienced and the phenomena they observed. The telescope, the microscope and other technological aids were not yet available to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Today we have the benefit of access to a massive array of research tools and findings coupled with the skills of rational analysis to make sense of it all.

Modern science provided the biggest challenge to the Abrahamic religions. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution suggested that life on Earth evolved through a process of evolution by way of natural selection. Darwin’s theory removed the need for some kind of divine intervention in the creation myth. Christian Churches conceded that the world was not literally made by God, but they cling to the idea that God made evolution possible as a foundational idea. This implies that the theology of modern Christianity is now fundamentally different from what it was four hundred years ago. Islam has not yet made the adjustment to its creation myth.

There are still millions of believers who maintain that God created the world. Where science contradicts faith, in the eyes of fundamentalists, faith prevails. But there is a growing proportion of believers who do not believe in the literal truth of the Bible or the Koran. Like philosophers such as Augustine and Spinoza they prefer to explore what the Bible has to offer on a broader level: the wisdom of its commandments and the beautification of its teachings.

Fourthly, there can be no doubt that the chronology of events in the creation myth of the Old Testament or the Koran, does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. But eminent scientists are also unsure of their own chronology of the evolution of all things in the universe. Perhaps it is wiser to cling to the Socratic docta ignorantia rather than to over-confident, dogmatic half-truths. Epistemologically speaking it is generally agreed that the scientific method is unable to establish the validity of value judgments. We cannot intersubjectively prove any proportion of faith or belief to be true or false. Hence, religious references cannot be scientifically verified. Today, theologians tend to refrain from attempts to offer “proof” of God’s reality, focussing attention instead on the inner experiences that cause people to turn to religion.

Throughout modern history, religion has been a major foundation for feelings of identity, cohesion and moral values. The world’s major religions have all provided politically relevant affiliations and value orientations. These belief structures have a profound hold upon the emotions and imaginations of people. As a result religious cleavages are particularly intractable. Experience has shown that the common bond of religious beliefs can produce both a militant cultural identity and a sense of sacred 143 mission. The role of religion takes on an added importance where religion regards the sacred and the secular realms as inseparable – as is the case in Islamic countries. As a result coexistence of different religious 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 a threat to their religion. The accommodation of fundamentalist Jihadist Islam in Western societies has become particularly problematic.

Doctrinal Divergence Between Islam and “the People of the Book”

Christianity is based on the idea that Jesus was not simply a prophet but the definitive prophet – the Saviour or Messiah or historical redeemer that Judaism had anticipated. Because Jesus as Messiah was the completion of the Old Testament promise of redemption, Christians believed that the Jews, having rejected Jesus, forfeited divine favour and protection. Hence Christians had become the “true Israel”.

Islam, in turn, believed that the revelations of Moses and Jesus could not have been definitive or perfectly transmitted. Hence the Abrahamic revelation of true monotheism found its completion in Muhammad. But the dispute between Christendom and Islam was not merely a doctrinal argument between theologians. It had more to do with the basic rivalry between the two civilisations and the political regimes that faced each other across the Mediterranean Ocean.

Christendom decided not to accept Muhammad as a true, Messianic prophet. Simultaneously Christendom rejected the authenticity of the Islamic theology. The crusades were followed by centuries of polemical theological campaigns and hostile confrontations. To counter the rejection of Muhammad by the Christian world, the Islamic world rallied to the defence of Muhammad’s prophetic authenticity and his historical reputation.

After the Second World War, the World of Christianity started the process of decolonisation coupled with the civilisational retreat of the West. The Western World entered a post-Christian phase which was no longer inspired by a transcendental idea of a providential mission in life. Having abandoned its religious and moral inheritance in its march to modernity, the Western ideal of a good life was now focussed on self-interest, gratification and consumerism in the here and now.

In medieval and feudal Europe, the predominant pre-occupation was with man’s spirituality as inspired by the scriptures as administered by the Catholic Church. During this period the Greco-Roman valuation of man’s speculative intellect was assigned a subordinate significance. Mankind’s rationality was seen as an instrument for the glorification of God.

During the five centuries following the end of the Middle Ages, the earlier subordination of rationality to ecclesiastic spirituality was gradually reversed. While still recognising mankind’s spirituality, the modern Western world view seeks fulfilment here and now using ethical consciousness to direct the use of rationality in the service of societal objectives. The guiding inspiration of the modern Western world view is the ideal of maximised welfare here on earth.

The philosophy of maximised secular welfare has guided modern post-Christian Western societies towards a variety of material and organisational achievements. By inspiring the interplay of scientific research, new forms of energy, productive technology and means of rapid communication, the masses of modern mankind have been enabled to attain standards of living undreamed of in ages past or in much of the world of Islam. The greatest possible secular wellbeing has been elevated to become the 144 highest modern objective. People everywhere have been inspired to seek the same welfare-minded way of life and the same this-worldly betterment. In many instances (such as in much of the World of Islam), it involved far-reaching disruptions of traditional ways of life and resulted in comprehensive cultural and psychological dislocations.

In the Western World the rise of secular intellectualism since the 18th century brought about a post- Christian culture. The secular intellectual replaced the clerical authority in capturing the ear of society. Secular intellectuals were not bound by the rules of revealed religion, the collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition. The codes of ancestral experience were subjected to unrelenting critical scrutiny and replaced by new precepts of purity and truthfulness. New judgmental criteria of right and proper were introduced. The existence of cultural differences was used as justification for cancelling single accepted standards of evaluation. Cultural relativism coupled with value relativism came to replace traditional perceptions of universal truth. Timeless, incontrovertible standards dissolved into some form of regressive circular reasoning where there are no limits to tolerance of deviant standards and practices. Opinion leaders and intellectuals led the way to taking toleration of weird ideas and cultural practices to new levels. New terminology and concepts were invented to describe a range of behaviours that were formerly frowned upon. The term “” was invented to accommodate cultural diversity as an ideal. Others preferred to speak of “pluralism” to proscribe the recognition of diverse guiding principles as the political essence of society. Today’s “multiculturalists” and “pluralists” tend to believe that society should ideally be viewed as consisting of several groups accommodating each other in their competition for influence. An offshoot of this way of thinking was the formation of the which required all members to subject their national interests to the requirements of defining the common good – a task that is primarily left in the hands of a new generation of unelected office bearers that emerged as the new ruling elite of Europe.

The “new elite” occupying the EU offices in Brussels, relies heavily on their perception of the “rule of law”. In reality, the “rules” that have become “law” in the European Union context, suffer from a serious “democratic deficit”. Their authenticity does not depend on “grassroots” support, but on the fiat “legality” proclaimed by a cohort of unrepresentative decision-makers that are occupying the stages of international agencies.

With millions of refugees from the World of Islam flocking to Western countries in recent years, it is to be expected that a cultural gulf is likely to arise between the newcomers and the bulk of existing European communities. The gulf between the affluent, liberal, secular Europeans and the Islamic newcomers from Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are likely to be reflected in the many culturally determined ways of doing things: courtship and marriage, family structures, entertainment practices, employment practices, assigning domestic roles to men and women, regulating sexual interaction and sex crime, dress codes, political participation, maintaining law and order, etc. The flow of refugees needs to be managed, asylum seekers ought to be subjected to effective pressures to respect the local law and to comply with local norms of behaviour. The process of absorbing or assimilating millions of Islamic refugees is likely to require a period of adjustment and assimilation stretching over several generations.

India’s Emergence

India is an example of a country where the cleavages, based on a compound of religion, race, language, ethnic identity, region and caste identity, are stronger than the solidarity the state itself is able to generate. It has led to partitioning and the creation of autonomous political communities such as 145

Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971 after millions were killed in internecine strife. India still faces remaining conflicting solidarity patterns in Kashmir, on its frontier with Pakistan and on its north-eastern frontiers of Assam and Bihar. In many ways, India remains a veritable compound where some of the most durable and persistent cleavages which cause men to rise up against other men are piled up within the confounds of a single state. It produced a horde of peasant revolutionaries, regional separatists, low-caste champions and Muslim jihadists that are constantly on the verge of violent conflict. Religious violence appears to be the most troublesome of India’s conflicts.

India’s economy is the most likely vehicle to transport its people to a better future with better schools, health services, sanitation, housing, job opportunities and a higher standard of living. It requires a sustained higher rate of economic growth because as long as that happens, the emergence of India’s people will continue.

East Asian Modernisation

The wellsprings of the spectacular growth and transformation of much of East Asia over the past three decades included several forces. At the top of the list stood sound macroeconomic policies in the sense of getting the fundamentals right. But equally important was the impact of cultural factors that were deeply embedded in East Asian societies.

Getting the fundamentals right involved providing incentives for increasing productivity, openness to foreign ideas and technology, an export orientation, the development of human resources, broad- based development and an efficient bureaucracy. A positive government role was crucial – not as a rigid central planner or owner of industrial enterprise, but as a guide and facilitator, a developer of infrastructure and a framework for effective policy implementation, encouraging the accumulation of physical and human capital and allocating it to productive activities. International competitiveness was recognised as an important objective and reliance was placed on the private sector as the engine of growth. The East Asian success stories demonstrated that targeted and controlled government activity can be beneficial to the common good when it is kept within proper limits.

The East Asian achievements also illustrate that modernisation can proceed without fully-fledged cultural westernisation. Western countries put a high value on individualism, freedom of expression, competitive politics, loose-jointed societies and diverse lifestyles. East Asians are more comfortable with easternisation: working in groups, accepting discipline and conforming to traditional values, socially conservative relationships and roles, hierarchical structures of power and authority. These cultural factors play an important role in determining attitudes to work, personal discipline, family practices and the high value placed on learning and education.

The Correlation Between Religion-based Ethical Values

After completing a survey on the impact of the world’s major religions and its associated moral codes, the question arises whether this exercise led to more clarity on the proper sources, grounds and practical manifestations of ethical values. Believers inevitably believe that all values must rest on God’s Will as revealed through direct revelation to some anointed individual such as Moses or Mohammed or Jesus of Nazareth. However, history has shown that God’s spokespersons do not deliver a unified and unambiguous message. Ethical philosophers tend to hold that ethical values largely rest on preferences which may vary across time and place. Still others believe ethical values must rest on natural laws which can be universally acquired through reasoning. 146

A comparative analysis of the footprints of the major religions does show that there is a high degree of correlation between the various religion-based ethical values. It also confirms that the value preferences people hold are mostly universal in applicability. This is likely to be the case because people’s preferences are essentially human. Could it be that there are universal and inescapable elements in the human way of thinking about ethical issues – especially about something being just and fair?

Many centuries ago Confucius listed the following as cardinal virtues: benevolence, duty, propriety, deference, wisdom and trustworthiness. Confucius believed that the single principle supporting a sound social order is “love of others”. In the Analects xii, 22, he says “what you do not like yourself, do not do to others”. It is remarkable that confirmation of the Golden Rule was made by an ancient Chinese philosopher who lived 551-479BC.

______* Dr W B Vosloo, PhD, Cornell 1965, is a retired former professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (1966-1981) and was Chief Executive of the South African Small Business Development Corporation, Johannesburg (1981-1995). He is now retired and has been living in Wollongong, NSW, since 1998.