Not in God's Name (25 page)

[Averroës’] words hold true for religion as well…It is not proper that we despise the words [of our adversaries], but rather we must draw them as close as we can…Therefore it is proper, out of love of reason and knowledge, that you should not summarily reject anything that opposes your own ideas, especially so if your adversary does not intend merely to provoke you, but rather to declare his beliefs. Even if such beliefs are opposed to your own faith and religion, do not say [to your opponent], ‘Speak not, close your mouth.’ If that happens, there will take place no purification of religion.

On the contrary, you should, at such times, say, ‘Speak up as much as you want, say whatever you wish, and do not say later that had you been able to speak you would have replied further’…This is the opposite of what some people think, namely, that when you prevent someone from speaking against religion, that strengthens religion. That is not so, because curbing the words of an opponent in religious matters is nothing but the curbing and enfeebling of religion itself…

When a powerful man seeks out an opponent in order to demonstrate his own strength, he very much wants his opponent to exercise as much power as he can, so that if he defeats him his own victory will be more pronounced. What strength is manifested when the opponent is not permitted to fight?…Hence, one should not silence those who speak against religion…for to do so is an admission of weakness.
²⁹

Several decades later, John Milton made the same point in his defence of free speech,
Areopagitica
(1644): ‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’

Two centuries on, John Stuart Mill reiterated the argument in
On Liberty
(1859):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
³⁰

It is fascinating to see how in this conversation across seven centuries, first a Muslim, then a Jew, then a Christian, then a secular humanist come together to agree on the importance of free speech and
making space for dissent
. Greater is the pursuit of truth than the exercise of force.

Religion acquires influence when it relinquishes power
. It is then that it takes its place, not among the rulers but among the ruled, not in the palaces of power but in the real lives of ordinary men and women who become extraordinary when brushed by the wings of eternity. It becomes the voice of the voiceless, the conscience of the community, the perennial reminder that there are moral limits of power and that the task of the state is to serve the people, not the people the state. That is why we remember prophets and continue to be inspired by them, while the names of emperors and tyrants are lost to collective memory. To paraphrase Kierkegaard: ‘When a king dies, his power ends. When a prophet dies, his influence begins.’
³¹
When religion divests itself of power, it is freed from the burden of rearranging the deckchairs on the ship of state and returns to its real task: changing lives.

Religion – as understood by Abraham and those who followed him – is at its best when it resists the temptation of politics and opts instead for influence. For what it tells us is that civilisations are judged not by power but by their concern for the powerless; not by wealth but by how they treat the poor; not when they seek to become invulnerable but when they care for the vulnerable. Religion is not the voice of those who sit on earthly thrones but of those who, not seeking to wield power, are unafraid to criticise it when it corrupts those who hold it and diminishes those it is held against.

Elijah was a great prophet. He was ‘zealous’ for God’s honour and bitterly opposed to the false prophets of Baal. He challenged them to a test on Mount Carmel. He won; they lost; the people were persuaded; the false prophets were killed – as convincing a demonstration of religious truth as any in the Bible. But the story
(1 Kgs 18–19) does not end there. Summoned by an angel to Mount Horeb, he witnesses an earthquake, a whirlwind and a raging fire. But ‘God was not in’ the earthquake or the wind or the fire. He came to Elijah in a ‘still, small voice’. When religion becomes an earthquake, a whirlwind, a fire, it can no longer hear the still, small voice of God summoning us to freedom.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness.

Martin Luther King
¹

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

James Arthur Baldwin

To be free, you have to let go of hate.

There is an extraordinary moment in the Hebrew Bible, a passage so brief that you hardly notice it, but it may contain the truth most important for the twenty-first century. Here is the scene. Moses has spent forty years leading the Israelites. He has taken them out of slavery in Egypt, through the sea, across the desert and to the brink of the Promised Land. He has been told by God that he will not be allowed to cross the Jordan and enter the land himself. He will die outside, within sight of his destination but not yet there.

He understands this. It became a principle in Judaism: it is not for you to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it. When it comes to social transformation, even the greatest cannot live to see the fulfilment of their dreams. For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross. Once we know this, one thing becomes important above all others. Leave guidance to those who will follow you, for it is they who will continue the work. Be clear. Be focused. Be visionary.

That is what Moses did. The way the Hebrew Bible tells it, he spent the last month of his life addressing the nation in some of the most visionary speeches ever delivered. They exist today as the book of Deuteronomy. This is the book that contains the great command that defines Judaism as a religion of love: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might’ (Deut. 6:5). It contains the most important inter-human command: ‘Love the stranger for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt’ (Deut. 10:19). Deuteronomy contains the word ‘love’ more than any other of the Mosaic books.

That is not surprising. Moses had spoken about love before, most famously in the command, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18). Abrahamic monotheism was the first moral system to be based not just on justice and reciprocity – do for others what you would like them to do for you – but on love. What is really unexpected is what he says about hate:

Do not hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land. (Deut. 23:7)

This is a very counter-intuitive command. Recall what had happened. The Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites. They had initiated a policy of slow genocide, killing every male Israelite at birth. Moses had begged Pharaoh repeatedly to let the people go and he had refused. Moses also knew that this entire chapter of Israelite history was not accidental or incidental. It was their matrix as a nation, their formative experience. They were commanded to remember it for ever, enacting it once a year on Passover, eating the unleavened bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery. All these, on the face of it, were reasons to hate the Egyptians or at the very least to look back with a sense of grievance, resentment, animosity and pain. Why then did Moses say the opposite? Do
not
hate them, because you were strangers in their land.

Because to be free, you have to let go of hate. That is what
Moses was saying. If the Israelites continued to hate their erstwhile enemies, Moses would have succeeded in taking the Israelites out of Egypt, but he would have failed to take Egypt out of the Israelites. Mentally, they would still be there, slaves to the past, prisoners of their memories. They would still be in chains, not of metal but of the mind. And chains of the mind are sometimes the worst of all.

On 7 May 2002, Iqraa, a Saudi Arabian–owned television channel, broadcast an interview that goes to the heart of the subject of this chapter. The programme was called
Muslim Woman Magazine
, its host was Doaa ’Amer, and she was interviewing a young child:

’Amer: What’s your name?

Child: Basmallah.

’Amer: Basmallah, how old are you?

Child: Three and a half.

’Amer: Are you a Muslim?

Child: Yes.

’Amer: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?

Child: Yes.

’Amer: Do you like them?

Child: No.

’Amer: Why don’t you like them?

Child: Because…

’Amer: Because they are what?

Child: They’re apes and pigs.

’Amer: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?

Child: Our God.

’Amer: Where did he say this?

Child: In the Qur’an.

The interviewer concludes: ‘Basmallah, Allah be praised. May our God bless her. No one could wish Allah could give him a more believing girl than she. May Allah bless her and her father and mother. The next generation of children must be true Muslims. We must educate them now while they are still children so that they will be true Muslims.’

There was a storm after the interview was shown. Yet, as we saw in
chapter 4
, the world of radical political Islam is awash with hate, above all with antisemitism. Indeed, the people who write most eloquently and critically about this are themselves Muslims, often women. They know that there is something fundamentally wrong about this, that it is not merely destructive but also self-destructive. They also know that this is not the traditional voice of Islam. As
chapter 4
made clear, though there are negative verses about Jews in the Qur’an, antisemitism as such has its roots only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Blood Libel and
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
were transplanted from Europe to the Middle East.

Religion leads to violence when it consecrates hate. That was the tragedy that befell the Church in the fourth century. It took six centuries for the violence to follow, but it was inevitable. Enshrine hate within a culture, and it will remain dormant but still alive and potentially deadly. Christians did not kill only Jews. They killed Muslims, heretics, witches and sectarians, for the greater glory of God and in the name of the religion of love. Yet Christianity changed, not least because Pope John XXIII and his successors knew it had to change. Today the epicentre of hate is radical and neo-traditionalist Islam, sadly because Islam was immune to the virus for so long.

You cannot create a free society on the basis of hate
. Resentment, rage, humiliation, a sense of victimhood and injustice, the desire to restore honour by inflicting injury on your former persecutors – sentiments communicated in our time by an endless stream of videos of beheadings and mass murders – are conditions of a profound lack of freedom. What Moses taught his people was
this: you must live
with
the past, but not
in
the past. Those who are held captive by anger against their former persecutors are captive still. Those who let their enemies define who they are have not yet achieved liberty.
²

I learned this from Holocaust survivors. I came to know them when I became a rabbi, and they became one of the great inspirations of my life. At first it was difficult to understand how they survived at all, how they lived with their memories, knowing what they knew and having seen what they saw. Many of them had lost their entire families. The world in which they grew up was gone. They had to begin again as strangers in a strange land.

Yet they were, and are, some of the most life-affirming people I have ever met. What struck me most was that they lived without resentment. They did not seek revenge. They did not hate. They cared, more than anyone else I knew, when other people were being massacred in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Sudan. They let their pain sensitise them to the pain of others. In later life they began to tell their stories, especially to young people. They used to visit schools. Sometimes I went with them. They spoke about what had happened, and how they survived. But their fundamental message was not about the past at all. What they wanted young people to know was how precious freedom is, and how fragile; what a miracle it is that there is food to eat, windows you can open, gates you can walk out of, a future to look forward to. They spoke about tolerance and how important it is to care for the people who are different from you. Never take freedom for granted – that was their message. Work for it, fight for it, stand up especially for minorities, and never give way to hate even when others do.

How, I wondered, had they exorcised the pain that must have haunted them nightly, and led many, including Primo Levi, to
commit suicide, sometimes many years later? Eventually I realised the answer. For decades they did not speak about the past, even to their spouses, even to their children. They focused single-mindedly on the future. They learned the language and culture of their new home. They worked and built careers. They married and had children. Only when they felt their future absolutely secure, forty or fifty years on, did they allow themselves to turn back and remember the past. That was what I learned from the survivors.
First you have to build the future. Only then can you revisit the past without being held captive by the past
.

That is what the biblical story of Lot’s wife is about (Gen. 19:17–26). Messengers – angels – come to tell Lot and his family that they have to leave. The city is about to be destroyed. Lot hesitates, prevaricates, but eventually they depart. ‘Don’t look back,’ say the angels, but Lot’s wife does, and she is turned into a pillar of salt. As a child I thought this was a silly story, but as an adult I felt its power. Look back on a painful past, and you will not be able to move on. You will be immobilised by your tears. You will become a pillar of salt.

The people Moses was addressing were not survivors, but they were children of survivors. Their parents had lived through the first collective tragedy of the Jewish people. It was essential that he teach them to focus on the future, not to look back in anger or pain but to use the past constructively, creatively. The Mosaic books refer time and again to the Exodus and the imperative of memory: ‘You shall remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ Yet never is this invoked as a reason for hatred, retaliation or revenge. Always it appears as part of the logic of the just and compassionate society the Israelites are commanded to create: the alternative order, the antithesis of Egypt. Don’t enslave others, says Moses, or – because that was too much to ask at that stage of history – treat slaves honourably. Don’t subject them to hard labour. Give them rest and freedom every seventh day. Release them every seventh year. Recognise them as
like you
, not ontologically inferior. No one is born to be a slave.

Give generously to the poor. Let them eat from the leftovers of the harvest. Leave them a corner of the field. Share your blessings with others. Don’t deprive people of their livelihood. The entire structure of biblical law is rooted in the experience of slavery in Egypt, as if to say: you know in your heart what it feels like to be the victim of persecution, therefore do not persecute others. Biblical ethics is based on repeated acts of role reversal: the principle we saw in the Joseph story in
chapter 8
. You cannot stay moral in hard times and towards strangers without something stronger than Kantian logic or Humean sympathy. That ‘something stronger’ is memory.
³
In Exodus and Deuteronomy, memory becomes a moral force: not a way of preserving hate, but, to the contrary, a way of conquering hate by recalling what it feels like to be its victim. ‘Remember’ – not to
live
in the past but to
prevent a repetition
of the past.

The Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies. That is a supremely beautiful idea, but it is not easy. Moses offers a more liveable solution. Help your enemy. You don’t have to love him but you do have to assist him. That is the basis of the simple command in Exodus:

If you see your enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him. (Exod. 23:5)

Behind this law is a simple idea: your enemy is also a human being. He has a problem. Besides which, his donkey is suffering. Hostility may divide you, but something deeper connects you: the covenant of solidarity. Pain, distress, difficulty – these transcend the language of difference. A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another’s aid when they need help. If
someone is in trouble, act. Do not stop to ask whether they are friend or foe. Do as Moses did when he saw shepherds roughly handling the daughters of Jethro, or as Abraham did when he prayed for the people of the cities of the plain.

The rabbis noted that in Deuteronomy (22:4) a similar law appears, but this time in relation to friend, not foe: it speaks of ‘your brother’s donkey’. The Talmud rules that in a case of conflict, where your brother and your enemy both need your help ‘you should first help your enemy – in order to suppress the evil inclination’.
⁴
Both may be equally in distress, but in the case of an enemy, there is more at stake: the challenge of overcoming estrangement, distance and ill-will. Therefore, it takes precedence. The ancient Aramaic translations (
Targum Onkelos
, and more explicitly
Targum Yonatan
) say something fascinating at this point. They take the phrase ‘You shall surely release’ to mean not just the physical burden weighing on the donkey, but also the psychological burden weighing on you. They translate the verse as: ‘You shall surely
let go of the hate you have in your heart
towards him.’

What is powerful about this provision is that it is not utopian. It does not envisage a world without animosities. Your enemy may still be your enemy. Until the end of days, people will still fight over land, wealth and power. But strangers can still come to one another’s assistance. During 9/11, in the World Trade Center, a Hassidic Jew rescued a Muslim at prayer. During the attack on the Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015, a Muslim worker at the shop rescued twenty Jewish customers by hiding them in a cold storage room. No one in real crisis stops to ask whether the person they are about to rescue is ‘one of us’. That is when crisis brings out the best in us, not the worst.