The Undivided Past Read online

  It has rightly been observed that one of the prime justifications for studying and writing history is to free ourselves from the tyranny of present-day opinion, and these pages seek to contribute to that liberating endeavor by questioning the conventional wisdom of single-identity politics, the alleged uniformity of antagonistic groups, the widespread liking for polarized modes of thought, and the scholarly preoccupations with difference. Most academics are trained to look for divergences and disparities rather than for similarities and affinities, but this relentless urge to draw distinctions often results in important connections and resemblances being overlooked.16 Despite constant urgings to the contrary, humanity has not been, is not now, and should not be best or solely understood in terms of simple, unified homogeneous collectivities locked in perpetual confrontation and conflict across a great chasm of hatred and an unbridgeable gulf of fear. The real world is not binary—except insofar as it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is not. For it is in the very range, complexity, and diversity of our multifarious and manifold identities, and in the many connections we make through them and across them, and in the varied conversations we sustain as a result of them, that we each affirm and should all celebrate the common humanity which is the most precious thing we share.17

  ONE

  Religion

  The Christian and Muslim worlds have been religious, geographical and economic rivals and competitors since their point of first contact, and it is no wonder that words of hate rather than words of love have predominated … to define communal differences between “them” and “us.”

  —Andrew Wheatcroft,

  Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 638–2002

  If one thing should come out of what follows, it is that there was (and is) nothing quintessential, ineluctable or necessary about conflict and misunderstanding between Crescent and Cross, East and West, Muslim and Christian.

  —James Mather,

  Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World

  IN THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER of the Gospel according to Matthew, Christ sets out his vision—and his division—of humanity, proposing two very different and seemingly irreconcilable collective categories: those in this world who are believers in the one true religion and the one true God, and those who lack such a faith and reject such a single omnipotent deity. And this earthly cleavage in turn anticipates and explains the eternal distinction that will be drawn in the next world, between those who will be saved and comforted, and those who will be lost and damned. On the final day of judgment, Jesus tells his listeners, when “the son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him,” he will sit upon his throne, and from there he will sort out all humanity, “as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.” Those he will place on his right hand, the blessed and the elect, will inherit the kingdom of heaven prepared for them since the creation of the world; but those positioned on his left will be condemned to endure the everlasting fire and perpetual punishment that have been “prepared for the devil and his angels.”1 Here is exemplified what some have seen as the most fateful legacy of Zoroastrian Persia to the Christian religion, namely “a belief in the absolute division of the spiritual world” between good and evil powers, between angels and demons: a permanent schism in the hereafter already prefigured in this life on earth, where humanity is split and sundered between the true believers who are destined for heaven, and the unrighteous and the ungodly who are equally certain to be headed for hell.2

  The Persian prophet Zoroaster, from whom Zoroastrianism, an ancient Near Eastern religion, takes its name, is believed to have flourished during the late fifth and the early fourth centuries BCE. He is often credited with having first proclaimed that the universe is divided between the principles of light and of darkness, the cosmic struggle between their respective forces continuing to the end of time, and he believed it was the duty of all human beings to join the angels in the battle against the devil. This prototypical fissure between the righteous and the unrighteous has since proved extraordinarily and continually appealing, finding expression not only in Christianity but in other creeds, too.3 Nearly three-quarters of a millennium after Zoroaster, in the middle of the third century CE, another Persian prophet, named Mani, whose followers were scattered across both the Persian and the Roman empires, and all the way from South Asia to Spain, would once again partition the populated universe, this time between the children of the “Father of Greatness” and those of the “Father of Darkness.” He bolstered his claims with stories and evidence derived from both the Old and the New Testaments, though this was not enough to keep the early church from dismissing Mani as a heretic. His most enduring legacy is the term “Manichean,” which is often used to describe the views of those of whatever religious conviction who insist on seeing human circumstances in such stark and simplistic terms, with the respective partisans of good and evil slugging it out for supremacy in this world and sometimes in the next as well.4

  For at least two millennia, from the time to which the origins of the major religious belief systems can be traced, there has been division and difference with (literally) a vengeance, as humanity has often seemed irreconcilably polarized by competing and conflicting faiths—whether pagans versus Christians, Islam versus Christianity, or Catholics versus Protestants. The leaders of most of these faiths (all of them, with the exception of paganism, being monotheistic) have claimed exclusive monopolies on both human wisdom and divine revelation, and at certain stages in their histories they have condemned, scorned, denounced, ridiculed, humiliated, assailed, oppressed, imprisoned, maimed, tortured, and killed their religious opponents and competitors for being, by contrast, the very embodiment of sin, error, wrongdoing, folly, wickedness, depravity, and iniquity. In such ways have religious groupings defined themselves against each other and gone to war, with each faith convinced of the supremacy of its own unique deity and thus of its own unique cosmic superiority. From this perspective, and as the American religious scholar Martin E. Marty notes, in a book aptly titled When Faiths Collide, “the history of religions often appears to be little more than the history of conflict among those who are strange to each other.” Or as his fellow countryman Walter Lippmann put it more than seventy years earlier, “every church in the heyday of its power proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.” Or as Jesus Christ himself observed, elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, in fighting words that may also stand proxy for other religious militancies, “he that is not with me is against me.”5

  Yet, as so often in the history of collective identities (and of the antagonisms and animosity that they express and engender), open war has never been the whole picture in the history of religion, for alongside (and even during) periods of wrenching disagreements and searing spiritual conflicts, there have also been times of toleration and episodes of peaceful interaction, even accommodation—certainly among individuals, but among groups, too. Indeed, the virtue of such amity across religious lines is implied, even in the passage from Matthew’s Gospel already mentioned, for while it proposes an unbridgeable gulf between the saved and the damned, it also plainly distinguishes those destined for paradise from those doomed to perdition by the former’s kindness to “strangers”: their willingness to take them in, and to befriend, feed, and clothe them.6 It may be no surprise that the identity of such outsiders is unspecified, in terms (as we would now say) of their age, gender, race, or sexual orientation—but religion isn’t mentioned either. It is because of their humanity, not their faith, that “strangers” should be cared for. Whatever his churches would later do in his name, Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemies and to turn the other cheek suggests that even religious difference was no grounds for mistreating one’s fellow human beings. Unfortunately, and too often, it has been the imperative to make war in his name that has seemed easier to heed literally. But not always, for though less well attested than the violence resulting from religious difference,
toleration and cooperation have a history all their own.7

  This point has been well made by the historian John Wolffe, when he observes that in addition to deeply rooted, widely held, and frequently publicized religious animosities, based on antagonistic collective identities, “there is another equally important side to the coin.” To be sure, he goes on, “religious conflict has always been what catches the headlines, both in history books and in newspapers,” but it has also been the case that

  [n]umerous states and societies, from the Roman Empire to the contemporary United States, have for long periods experienced considerable religious diversity without significant overt conflict. Even in eras seemingly characterized by religious conflict, such as the Crusades and the Reformation, for many at the grassroots, daily life involved peaceful, if sometimes uneasy, co-existence with people of other faiths and traditions.8

  The conversations and encounters that have often taken place (and that still do) in various forms across the supposedly impregnable boundaries of religious identity provide the essential counterpoint to the dangerously oversimplified master narrative of inevitable and perpetual faith-based animosity—a story that has been revisited and reinforced in certain quarters in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War (which will be taken up in the final chapter). But this latest attempt to depict the world in terms of Manichean religious conflict merely remind us that, as with all master narratives, the reality of religious encounters and identities is never so tidy or simple.

  PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS

  For many in the West, the prototypical case of two religious communities locked in inexorable conflict, from which it was thought only one could emerge victorious, is still the one that preoccupied the first half millennium of the Common Era, when the pagan Roman Empire was undermined and overwhelmed by the rise of what has been termed “Christian Europe.”9 Within three hundred years of the crucifixion of Jesus, a small and localized religious sect in the eastern Mediterranean, having survived relentless and murderous imperial persecution, came to be recognized as an official religion by the emperor Constantine in 313 CE under the so-called Edict of Milan, and went on to vanquish paganism across the whole of Rome’s realms. This extraordinary story, of one religious collectivity defeating and conquering another, was recounted in heroic terms by the earliest chroniclers of the Christian church, such as Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, and was only much later to receive an exhaustive (and much more skeptical) treatment by Edward Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.10 Gibbon would describe and explain Rome’s collapse as “the triumph of barbarism and religion.” What barbarism meant to Gibbon will be treated in a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that by religion, Gibbon meant Christianity, a vigorously assertive new belief system that would prove fatal not only to paganism but to the Roman Empire as well.11

  Gibbon was much influenced by the Enlightenment ideas of his time, which helps explain why The Decline and Fall is shot through with so many contrasts, polarities, dichotomies, and antitheses, of which that between paganism and Christianity is one of the two most prominent (along with that of barbarism and civilization). Having been attracted at different times to Protestantism and to Catholicism, Gibbon in his mature attitude to the Christian religion was by turns cool, ironic, skeptical, and detached. He disliked priests, monks, and ecclesiastical hierarchy; he was suspicious of saints and scornful of miracles; he deplored religious asceticism and the “superstition” on which it was based; and he thought the historic role of the church had been more destructive than creative. But Gibbon was also an ardent follower of theological disputes, and he recognized that religion was a major force in history, albeit one that needed to be understood in human terms rather than just accepted uncritically and credulously as the preordained working out of the divine will and providential purpose.12 As he once observed, “For the man who can raise himself above the prejudices of party and sect, the history of religions is the most interesting part of the history of the human spirit.” More than half a century after Gibbon’s death, Cardinal Newman grudgingly admitted that he was the most incisive historian of religion that Britain had ever produced, and Gladstone (who was no less alert to religion’s importance in human motivation and identity) regarded Gibbon as one of the three greatest historians of all time.13

  According to The Decline and Fall, paganism was one of the two principal reasons why the Roman Empire managed to expand and endure long enough to reach such heady heights of achievement by the time of the death of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. The Roman belief system was capaciously and inclusively polytheistic, while also effectively reinforcing the imperial virtues of civic duty and public commitment.14 Across the empire, a great variety of gods were worshipped and venerated, many of them carried over from indigenous cults that had long thrived before the arrival of the conquering legions. These diverse deities provided Rome’s many peoples with the comfort of local loyalties, while an overlay of official Roman idols and cults ensured that the fortunes of the empire actively engaged the hopes and concerns of its citizens and subjects. As Gibbon described and acclaimed it, this “mild,” eclectic, flexible, nonproselytizing civic religion, devoid of any separate priesthood or church hierarchy, and without any agreed scriptural authorities, was a great source of strength, and the resulting imperial culture of tolerance and forbearance, enforced by local magistrates, effectively prevented religious discord or doctrinal conflict.15 In an oft-quoted summation, he writes, “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” However cynical Gibbon’s admiration, he recognized in paganism’s practice a tolerant spirit that engendered among the subjects and citizens of the empire not only a disinclination toward religious strife, but also actual social concord.16

  Christianity, by contrast, was a very different kind of religion: it was monotheistic, it was dogmatic, it was all-consuming, it was proselytizing, it was exclusive, it was well organized, and it had its own priesthood and hierarchy.17 Gibbon outlined five reasons why, from its unpromising beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, it eventually triumphed over paganism to become the state religion of the Roman Empire.18 To begin with, the early Christians were “obstinate” in their faith: once converted, they felt zealously that they were on the right side of an absolute, Manichean divide between the godly and the unrighteous. Moreover, in a world where life was hard for most, Christianity benefited from its doctrine of the immortality of the soul and its promise of future glory in heaven, which boosted conversions and stiffened the morale of the faithful. In the third place, the many early claims of miracles and visions established Christianity’s truth and efficacy, appealing especially to what Gibbon lamented as the “dark enthusiasm of the vulgar” (although it was hardly a faith restricted to the lower echelons of society). Fourth, it was difficult not to respect the Christians for their superior conduct and rigid rectitude; in aspiring to holiness and salvation, they were highly moral, sometimes extraordinarily ascetic, and often exemplary in their fortitude in the face of persecution. Finally, Christianity was remarkably well organized, with its cellular network of churches and its hierarchy of priests and bishops. So it was scarcely surprising that in the aftermath of the emperor Constantine’s conversion, and with unprecedented official support, Christianity “was received throughout the whole empire” in “the space of a few years.”19

  Yet Gibbon saw a great irony in Christianity’s triumph as the official religion of Rome, in the faith’s subsequent destruction of the empire itself. In stark contrast to paganism’s reinforcement of the quintessential Roman virtues of imperial patriotism and public duty, Christianity undermined them from within. Being so preoccupied with the life in the hereafter, Christians were far less interested in fruitful engagement with the affairs of this world; indeed, many of them repudiated and disdained the political and cult
ural and technological achievements of the Roman Empire. The result, according to Gibbon, was a corruption of the civic and martial values of Rome: “the active virtues of society were discouraged, and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.”20 This preoccupation with otherworldliness was especially true of Christian ascetics, whom Gibbon scorned and ridiculed not only for their self-indulgent self-denial, but also for their lack of civic commitment and neglect of public duties: “the lives of the primitive monks were consumed in penance and solitude, undisturbed by various occupations which fill the time and exercise the faculties of reasonable, active social beings.” There was also the fanatical dogmatism of Christian theology, unleashed in the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion, which further destabilized the empire. “Tolerance” disappeared and “concord” vanished, the persecution of pagans by Christians was more savage and bloody than the persecution of Christians by pagans had been, and “the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods [and] the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny.”21

  Such, as Gibbon saw it, were “the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity,” and this in turn explained “by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth.”22 The narrative that would later be celebrated as “the rise of Christian Europe” was far from being a happy story or a triumphant outcome in Gibbon’s eyes, for “on the ruins of the [Roman] Capitol,” Christianity had “erected the triumphant banner of the Cross,” an ironic gesture of an empire’s self-conquest in which he took no pleasure.23 As he explained in a letter to his friend Lord Suffield, “The primitive Church, which I have treated with some freedom, was itself, at that time, an innovation, and I was attached to the old Pagan establishment.”24 Indeed, Gibbon would later claim that it was a sudden realization that Christianity had ruined a once-great empire that inspired him to undertake his great historical work—an awakening that occurred on his only visit to Rome, in 1764, as he had “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter.”25