Category: General

A fascinating new report on religion, violence and peace from the Institute for Economics and Peace looks closely at common views of religion propounded by the the media — and finds that most of these views do not check out:

* Despite so much news on religious terrorism, religion is not the main cause of conflict in the world today.

* A country’s level of religious belief — and its level of atheism for that matter — does not determine its propensity toward conflict.

* The demographic spread of Sunni and Shia Muslims explains far less violence than one would think at first glance.

* Factors other than religion are far better correlated with violence.  Religious repression, though — both from the state and from society — does explain violence.  Religious freedom, then, is strongly supported as a desired goal.

* Religion can and does play a positive role in peacebuilding.

 

 

 

The case of Yara Sallam, Egyptian human rights activist and graduate of the Center for Civil of Human Rights’ LL.M. program, came to a denouement today when an Egyptian court sentenced her and 22 other activists to three years in prison and a 10,000 Egyptian Pound fine.  Here is the story.  Let us keep her in our prayers and remain in solidarity with her and her comrades.

Egyptian dissident and graduate of the Center for Civil and Human Rights’ LL.M. program in human rights Yara Sallam was mentioned in a column today on repression in Egypt in the New York Times.  We’ve been tracking her plight here at Arc of the Universe; word has it that she will receive her verdict in a few days.  She is in our thoughts and prayers.

The column details vividly the repression of the el-Sisi regime, not to be obscured by his recent address at the United Nations or by slick advertising for the “new Egypt” in Times Square.  Resonant with this blog’s stress on religion and politics, one might say that Egypt has gone from the repressive secularism of Mubarak to the Islamist repression of Morsi back to the repressive secularism of el-Sisi, who has jailed some 16,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  It’s not just about religion, of course.  The hopes for democracy of the Arab Spring have been quenched for the foreseeable future.  Sallam is being tried for exactly the sort of protest that gave the world such great hope during the Arab Spring.

 

An earlier post brings attention to John Gray’s criticism of secularists’ common view that religion is is both disappearing and inherently violent — a criticism with which I heartily agree.  Sometimes, though religion IS violent.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Central African Republic.  This dynamite piece of journalism by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker tells the story of how the country’s Muslims took over the government and terrorized the population and were then resisted by Christians, who engaged in brutal revenge killings.

Even here, though, can be found examples of religion manifesting mercy and reconciliation, crossing boundaries through courageous initiatives of healing and refuge.  Anderson tells of the work of Father Bernard Kinvi, who has assisted thousands of the wounded without regard to whether they are Muslims or Christians.

I commend the piece, which makes for both inspiring and gruesome reading.

I was distressed to read that a Pakistani high court upheld the death sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was accused of blasphemy.  Typical of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, the charges were flimsy, the punishment is wildly disproportionate, and the case has begotten further violence, in this case the murders of two politicians who came to her defense, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and Minority Affairs Ministry, Shahbaz Bhatti.  Pakistan’s blasphemy laws arose during the 1980s in the wake of an Islamic resurgence.  Bibi remains in solitary confinement as she awaits appeal.

John Gray, book reviewer for The New Statesman, reviews Karen Armstrong’s book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, in The New Republic.  Though I have not read Armstrong’s book, I find much to recommend in Gray’s analysis of religion and world politics.  Echoing Armstrong, he takes on a view of many contemporary secularists that, as I have often noticed, proves a contradiction.

The idea that religion is fading away has been replaced in conventional wisdom by the notion that religion lies behind most of the world’s conflicts. Many among the present crop of atheists hold both ideas at the same time. They will fulminate against religion, declaring that it is responsible for much of the violence of the present time, then a moment later tell you with equally dogmatic fervor that religion is in rapid decline. Of course it’s a mistake to expect logic from rationalists. More than anything else, the evangelical atheism of recent years is a symptom of moral panic. Worldwide secularization, which was believed to be an integral part of the process of becoming modern, shows no signs of happening. Quite the contrary: in much of the world, religion is in the ascendant. For many people the result is a condition of acute cognitive dissonance.

Gray goes on to challenge standard blanket views of religion as “violent” or “peaceful.”  He points out that warring on religion was endemic to some of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century.

This NPR story carries more on the theme articulated by John Lindblom in his post a few days back.

My friend Richard Hyde with some reflections on architecture and American freedom:

Architecture is embodied values.  From the humblest temporary dwelling to the grandest monument, buildings reveal what a society values.  As Kenneth Clark put it at the beginning of Civilisation, his famous television series of some forty years ago: “If I had to say which was telling the truth about society:  a speech by the minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time – I should believe the buildings.

I have spent much of the past two decades studying the buildings of the nation’s capital as a way of understanding this vast nation, now doubled in population since I was born in 1951.  The waves of building up and tearing down in Washington indeed parallel what has happened in the rest of the nation:  enormous growth and confidence in the 1950s and early 60s; vast upheavals and disruptions in the late 60s and 70s, the era of the downtown street demonstration, the growth of the suburbs and interstate system, and the withering of the inner city.  More recently we are observing in Washington and elsewhere a resurgence of the inner city as the population continues to increase and suburbs outgrow the ability of railroads and highways to get people back into the city to work and to recreate.

As a scholar of religion, what I study in particular are the memorials in this city whose task it is to put up monuments that proclaim our common values, evaluate our history and pass on to future generations the lessons that the living have so painstakingly learned.

In this regard, despite the growth and turmoil, Washington has changed remarkably little.  It is still a city iconically defined by five classical buildings that mark out east, west, north, south and center, making the city itself an enormous compass:  Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, White House, Jefferson Memorial, Washington Monument.  Each one is sedulously classical, or traditional, if you prefer, especially the Capitol, with domes, pillars, pilasters, porticos, pediments, architraves, the works.  You might say that the Washington Monument is even older than classical, being an obelisk, of Egyptian origin.  These buildings have not changed significantly in over sixty years, nor are they likely to, and their fundamental message remains the same:  what Americans value over everything else is freedom.

A lot of water has come down the Potomac and a lot world-shattering events taken place since this configuration reached its completion in the still-dark days of World War II.  At the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 1943, Jefferson’s birthday, President Roosevelt said, “Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.”  At no time in world history before or since had freedom been so threatened and the need for united action against its enemies been so great. Fortunately this nation and its allies mustered the necessary unity and a greater percentage of people on earth now enjoy some measure of any number of freedoms than ever.

Nonetheless, many threats to freedom remain and we Americans argue amongst ourselves, as we must, about how to face these threats and how to balance freedom with unity.  How the other classical memorials and the many recent ones reflect this argument will be the subject of subsequent postings.

Richard Allen Hyde is interested in the religious background of contemporary politics and policy.  The roots of this interest are various, but perhaps the deepest is simply a suggestion made by mathematician Freeman Dyson in Disturbing the Universe: “We shall not understand the dynamics of science and technology just as we shall not understand the dynamics of political ideology if we ignore the dominating influence of myths and symbols.”  There is no better place to investigate this interaction than the nation’s capital, he says.