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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 9, 2002
Beyond belief
When on holiday recently I found myself composing a long letter to a Pakistani friend a certain Ahmed in Lahore in the 18th-century style containing almost everything I could think to say To the Muslims . I am possibly more Christian than he is Muslim which would make us seem unrepresentative of our respective cultures. Nevertheless he wrote for my correction There is no such thing as a 'lapsed' Muslim, as you have lapsed Christians in the West, people who are still Christian in some of their habits but have lost their faith in God. If you understand Islam at all, you are either a Muslim or a non-Muslim. ... I am not an ex-Muslim he added modestly, so I must be a bad Muslim." Bad enough to write to me and to discuss the fate of our two worlds. Widely enough travelled that he has some good idea of life in England (where he went to college) and by extension at least the English-speaking West. And Muslim enough to condemn what he found there to agree with me that our "post-Christian" civilization is in bad shape no matter how technologically advanced or commercially dominant it remains. "The body seems to work just fine but any doctor could tell you that the heart is missing. How long can you continue like that?" I replied What a pair we make. Your heart is still there, but your head is gone. (I don't think he found this amusing.) "A Wounded Civilization." This is the expression V.S. Naipaul used to describe India in one of his earlier long essays on that huge subject. It was meant almost to give offence; it had the edge of being true; I think it also describes our own situation. We are staggering not economically but morally spiritually intellectually from a wound we have inflicted on ourselves and which can be described from outside. George Orwell: "The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality." Here from the horse's mouth perhaps the greatest purely secular writer in English on politics in the 20th century. Not merely the cost in outward human behaviour from the loss of belief in the immortal consequences of our mortal acts but the loss of that faith that kept us whole that filled and sustained us with a hope that reached for the divine in all things. And while that hope can be twisted and has often been twisted it has the power to untwist and regenerate itself. This is my hope for the Muslim world that it will indeed regenerate. Lose your rage and recover your faith! "Beyond Belief" was his phrase when Mr. Naipaul turned his attention to the Islamic world extending beyond the Arabian cultures in which it was founded. And Pakistan is a strange country in the overlap of those two zones entirely Indian or entirely Islamic depending how you hold it to the light. The phrase plays at several levels of meaning one of which I think the author didn't fully intend. For in the face of almost all the appearances I have come to at least the hunch that the Muslims today are in something like the fix of the Christians (and the Jews for that matter). That while it is true there are cells of believers for the most part faith has been lost. That religious observance continues outwardly as it did in for instance late Victorian England but inwardly people no longer believe have gone "beyond belief". Of course this is a wild generalization. How can I read the minds of a billion people none of whom share my native language or cultural traits? (The reader is always free to dismiss my hunches.) And the truth is I myself have felt large exceptions: that for instance the Egyptians are still a religious people Muslims and Copts alike that there is "hope in them". But almost everything I can see happening elsewhere in Muslim countries persuades me that the opposite is the case that there is a loss of hope and that it must be founded in a loss of belief. They are in a phase which I think is a commonplace of religious psychology. Within the individual human soul the loss of faith is accompanied by a sense of guilt. Perhaps the same is true within civilizations: that the first few generations after religious belief is gone are informed by an oppressive guilt internalized but sometimes suddenly externalized in outpourings of self-righteous fury. I even think we can partially explain the violence with which in the 20th century Europe tore itself to pieces by referring to this commonplace of religious psychology. A wild generalization it could be taken too far. But for me it helps to explain some things that would be otherwise inexplicable. How for instance my Lahori friend the intended recipient of my letter though a sophisticated intellectual and a man who would consider himself utterly unlike the "average Pakistani" might be typical after all. The yearning in so much of the Muslim world for the various Islamic Golden Ages the invocations -- of for instance Al-Andalus and the glorious city of Cordova where Europe went in the Middle Ages to learn Greek and some manners to see paved roads and street-lighting plumbing and irrigation ladies in splendid finery international banks -- is an important part of this sense of loss. For at the heart of every great civilization and "within" its material accomplishments is a great spiritual self-confidence; something the Muslims remember they once had. And I think they themselves fear that they have lost the faith to rebuild in such a manner; the faith that can move mountains. I never sent my long letter to Ahmed; never even finished writing it. The tone was all wrong and could not be put right. Even when I tried to avoid it I found myself falling into the trap of "blaming the victim" of subconsciously blaming Islam itself for what is really a falling away from Islam. For faith is large not small; and the fanatic message of Osama bin Laden and his ilk is small not large. The appeal of the terrorists in so many parts especially to the Wahabite sectarians among the Arabs is such an appeal "beyond belief". We assume out of our own disbelief that the men who murder innocents must be "true believers". I have come to think we have this exactly backwards. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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