Can we make sense of beheading?
It was surely simply going to be a thing of time, following the execution of 2 Americans, that a British citizen was going to be the next victim of the brutal violence of the self-styled 'Islamic State.' David Haines was, past all account, an impressive individual, someone of 'unstoppable free energy' who was deeply committed to humanitarian relief. After 11 years working with the RAF, he was involved in a wide range of relief work, nearly recently with the French agency ACTED. He was no stranger to unsafe situations, only it is incommunicable to imagine the trauma for his family and friends caused by, beginning, his 18 months in captivity, and then the very public nature of his murder. Justin Welby plant the most apt words to describe this:
We are living through a time when it seems that daily the darkness deepens, the shadows fall, the weight of human evil seems to grow and even those who stand up for what is good find themselves assailed on every side.
All of us today volition have heard this morning of the brutal, cruel murder of David Haines. He was in the Middle East on humanitarian piece of work, he had gone to serve the people of Syria and Iraq, and his captors captured him, held him, toyed with the hopes of freedom, and so killed him.
And and then where is Christ in that? On Holy Cross Day nosotros are reminded above all that he is with David Haines, that he is in the depths of evil and the depths of our own suffering because of the cantankerous.
Before reading any further, pause for a moment to pray for his blood brother, Michael, his kickoff wife Louise and their daughter Bethany, 17, and his 2d wife Dragana, who is Croation, and their four-year-old daughter.
Is it possible to make any sense of the brutality of IS and their strategy? The most common response in the media was underlined by David Cameron in his press statement: 'These are non Muslims; these are monsters.' James Dawes, author of a study of the manifestly inexplicable, entitledEvil Men, sets out the paradox here. On the 1 manus:
We must not demonize considering to demonize is to adopt a stance that shares features with the demonic – namely, a dismissal of the other's full humanity. This is no mere theoretical concern. When moral outrage becomes, at its farthermost, moral rejection of the other, information technology can go difficult to distinguish from hate, just every bit the cry for justice tin become difficult to distinguish from the cry for retribution. This has consequences that are not only dangerously political, but also deeply interior. When we demonize we are committing ourselves to an idea well-nigh who the other is,and to an idea about who we are.
But on the other hand:
So that is why we shouldnot call up of evil as something other or demonic. But here is why we should. If we do not maintain our sense of the otherness of evil, we lose our capacity for making crucial philosophical distinctions. Our feeling that some acts defy comprehension, that they are conflicting to our nature, is not a "mere" feeling; information technology is an indicator of categorical distinctions. Our moral language is impoverished if information technology cannot account for those acts which shock our censor, acts whose enormity cannot be encompassed by the linguistic communication of the wrong, bad, or fifty-fifty wicked.
And then nosotros do demand to both categorise these atrocities as inexplicable evil—and yet seek to empathise. The disasters that have unfolded in Iraq and Transitional islamic state of afghanistan have largely been built-in of Western intervention which was based on a lack of understanding; the forces involved had long been labelled 'an centrality of evil', and this blindness led to disastrous controlling earlier, during and after the main disharmonize.
Ian Robertson, Professor of Psychology at Trinity Higher Dublin, offers one way of agreement extremism through exploring 'the science behind Isil'due south savagery.' He notes the spiralling of savagery, the importance of grouping identity, the demonisation of the other (particularly in religious groups), the fuel of revenge, and the role of disciplinarian leadership. The piece makes uncomfortable reading, peculiarly for anyone who is religious, since these characteristics tin be seen in many religious groups. Just the one that stood out for me was the comment about revenge.
Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part in perpetuating the savagery. Of course vengeful retaliation for savagery begets more savagery in a never-catastrophe wheel. Just more, while revenge is a powerful motivator, information technology is also a deceiver, considering the bear witness is that taking revenge on someone, far from quelling the distress and acrimony which drives information technology, really perpetuates and magnifies it.
Here there is a marked dissimilarity with Jesus' educational activity, and the thrust of the New Testament. Greg Boyd has offered a profound annotate under the challenging title 'How are nosotros to beloved the soldiers of ISIS?', and he starts past noting this teaching:
To brainstorm, it'southward first important to remember that the education of Jesus, Paul and the rest of the New Testament well-nigh never retaliating and well-nigh instead choosing to love, bless, pray for, and do good to our enemies is emphatic, unambiguous, and never one time qualified (e.g. Mt 5:21-six, 38-48; Lk half dozen:27-36; Rom 12:fourteen-21). Indeed, Jesus goes then far as to make our willingness to unconditionally love enemies the pre-condition for beingness considered a "child of your Father in heaven" (Mt 5:44-5; Lk vi:35-6).
It would, of class, exist a PR disaster for David Cameron to suggest that Islam was a religion of violence, and Christianity was a faith of peace—not least because the histories of these two religious movements would not support such an easy distinction. You don't have to know much well-nigh the Crusades, Europe in the Middle Ages, or even Britain'south ain history to run across that plenty of people felt quite happy enacting savage violence on others in the name of Christ. (In fact, they were oft a lot more than savage than IS; in some periods of history, beheading has been regarded every bit the privileged way of beingness executed.) But the pressing question is how this action relates to the life and teaching of Jesus himself—a question which is unavoidable for anyone who wants to bear the proper name 'Christian.'
Kenneth Cragg, who was an Anglican bishop and widely respected scholar of Islam for a previous generation, identified a cardinal distinction between Christianity and Islam in the lives of the 2 religions' founders. InThe Call of the Minaret, he sees the central conclusion of Jesus'southward life in the turn to the path towards Calvary, to rejection, humiliation and decease on the cross. By dissimilarity, the central decision of Mohammed was to embark on the Hijra, the migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 with his followers, to avoid betrayal and death and establish himself as political and military leader. And the personal instance of Mohammed is of key significance in Islamic discussions nigh ideals and action.
Where on earth would a British Muslim go ideas of beheading your enemies? Equally Douglas Murray points out, from reading the Quran.
I open i of my copies of the Qu'ran (Arberry translation, OUP) and read Chapter eight ('The Spoils [of war]'). Verse 12 has God saying:
'I shall bandage into the unbelievers' hearts terror; then smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them.'
And he goes on to highlight the importance of the example of Mohammed:
Muslims are brought up to believe that the founder of their faith was the perfect man – a man to be revered and indeed emulated. So what do they do when they read the early accounts of their prophet'southward life and detect that among his exploits in war was the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men of the Banu Qurayza tribe? I've only been flicking through my copies of the Hadith (sayings of Muhammad). Plucking at random, what do Muslims practise when they come across advice similar that in the administrative collection by Bukhari which includes (in 'The Book of Jihad') an answer to the question 'If a heathen burnt a Muslim, should he be burnt?' Of one such a grouping who displeased Muhammad we learn: 'He (The Prophet) had their hands and anxiety cut off. And then he ordered that nails should be heated and passed over their optics, and they were left in the rocky land of Medina. They asked for h2o, but none provided them with h2o till they died.' [3018]
Mohammed was and then fond of beheading his enemies that his sword was named Zulfiqar, which means 'cleaver of the spine.'
Murray is conscientious to point out that this is not the end of the discussion. Subsequently all, many Muslims don't know their Quran very well, and these ideas have certainly not shaped large periods of Islamic history and learning. It is non unreasonable, for instance, to fence that the European Renaissance would not have happened without access to Greek texts that had been preserved in Islam.
But what he is pointing out is that Cameron and others are quite mistaken when they state that the behaviour of IS has 'zippo to do with Islam' or (as Michael Haines stated) 'this has zilch to practice with organized religion.' It is to do with Islam, but non all Islam is similar this. There is division, debate and a ability struggle within Islamic history, and some argue that it is time to recover some cardinal lost ideas from the past, such every bit those expounded by Sufism:
Prior to the advent of colonisation, Muslim populations stretching from Persia, Anatolia and the Indian sub-continent opened themselves to a range of understandings of the Islamic tradition based on flexible and non-dogmatic interpretations of approved texts, which saw the peaceful integration of unlike cultural and customary practices into the Islamic mainstream. A big function of this social and political soapbox – grossly neglected in the past few centuries – tin can exist credited to the cultivation of Sufi practices that featured prominently in many of Islam's intellectual fields.
And why the contempo neglect? Primarily considering another key movement in Islam, Wahhabism, has come to boss in the Islamic world, not to the lowest degree because it has taken root in the places where the West buys its oil:
The oil-rich Wahhabi movement, which derives nearly of its religious cognition from literal readings of scripture, has aimed much of its criticism towards Sufi orders for "distorting" accurate Islamic practices. Along with ultra bourgeois sects of the Muslim customs, the Wahhabi-Islamist sect has condemned a multitude of Sufi practices, including Sufi pilgrimages to shrines of venerated Saints (inferred to as idolatry), metaphorical interpretations of the Qur'an as well as their boosted ritualistic ceremonies.
Our response, then, to the beheadings (and in that location volition certainly exist more) needs to combine an abhorrence at the violence, pity for the victims, a commitment to Jesus' didactics rejecting revenge—and with all these an agreement of the debate and dynamic within Islam. At present, with its refusal to empathize, and its unquestioning thirst for oil, the West very much looks like it is on the incorrect side of the statement.
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