religion and politics

People all over the world have been shocked to discover that Mother Agnes Mariam, heroine to many women and men all over the world and peace activist on the ground in Syria, withdrew from speaking at a UK peace conference because two British supposedly 'left-wing' male speakers and journalists - Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones - threatened to withdraw from speaking if she spoke. Neither speaker has given any substantive explanation for their objections to Mother Agnes, but it seems that both have succumbed to propaganda that the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad is brutal and that Agnes Mariam supports the government. This treatment of Mother Agnes Mariam is tragically bizarre, when she has eclipsed professional peace negotiators in so many spheres at once: In her physical bravery in rescuing thousands of people in the war-torn region; as a nun-pacifist woman-leader in the male-dominated politics of church and war; and as a local peace-activist in an internationalised field of jihadists. The article below seeks to highlight just some of these injustices. See links at the end of this article, under "Notes," including a filmed interview with Mother Agnes Mariam done by Susan Dirgham of AMRIS in Australia July 2013.

A few weeks ago, following months of siege in a suburb of Damascus, over 5000 civilians were helped to safety during a ceasefire negotiated by Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross. This suburb of Moadamiya al Sham was one of several around Damascus held by armed rebel groups and foreign jihadists, with the residents trapped there and facing serious food and supply shortages.

Whether these residents were supportive of the 'revolution' - or insurgency - or not, it was in the rebel groups interests to hold them there as 'human shields'; negotiating their release. Movement to the safety of government shelters in Damascus was therefore fraught with difficulties and dangers.

Mother Agnes risked life and got 5,400 people released from rebel capture

A 'negotiating team' was assembled to go into the heart of rebel territory, led by Mother Agnes - not just figuratively. She went ahead with a white flag, risking her life and faith that a sniper would not put an end to this humanitarian mission. Joined by the rest of the team she then came to a reconciliation and agreement with rebel leaders on the release of some 5,400 people, mostly women and children.

While this was a great success, perhaps more significant was the voluntary surrender of over 500 'rebel fighters', who had clearly been impressed by her entreaties to give up the fight and return to 'fight for Syria', accepting the Government's offer of amnesty.

In her report on the 'rescue of Moadamiya' she emphasises that the Government for its part kept to its word, and faith - that those men who genuinely surrender will not be punished or ill-treated.
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Syria inspired

It is as though the spirit of reconciliation and peace embodied in Jesus' preachings and actions 2000 years earlier in this land is being reborn, and it is happening through the agency of people of such genuine good will and faith as Mother Agnes. Such a spirit is infectious, and others are inspired to forgive and to reconcile and to trust; this is the spirit now which can heal Syria's dreadful wounds.

Treacherous foreign powers

The spirit that could heal those wounds .... were it not for the treachery and ill-intent of foreign powers who have already invested so much in destabilising Syrian society and destroying its wealth and infrastructure with their proxy armies of fanatics and mercenaries. The regaining of control by the Syrian government threatens the whole project for regional influence and control that is the driving force behind 'the West's' behaviour over Syria. It is increasingly clear that the West has lost the battle, in the absence of military intervention.

What should the 'Western powers' do?

So what should 'We' do? How can the West stop the truth of the last two and a half years emerging? The truth behind the many 'massacres' confected to excuse Western intervention? The truth of Syrians fleeing from rebel 'liberated' areas? ("Liberated from their inhabitants," as Mother Agnes points out.) The truth of the 'Chemical Weapons attack' on Ghouta that nearly brought about a regional war, despite not a single proven victim? ( The OPCW team did no autopsies.)

Perhaps those responsible for the recent denigration of Mother Agnes Mariam were inspired by biblical history, realising that a 'betrayal' from those who would be her supporters could deliver a mortal blow. And so it came to pass that contributors to the Stop the War Peace Conference in the UK refused to share a platform with this true peacemaker.

Have we learned anything in two thousand years?

NOTES

Related material:

Richard Edmondson, "‘Investigative Journalist’ Scahill Takes Swipe at Mother Agnes" of 17 Nov 2013.

Neil Clark, Mother Agnes and the ‘liberal’ hawks out to silence her of 20 Nov 2013.

Candobetter.net's Mother Agnes Mariam pages.

Mother Agnes Mariam's letter withdrawing from the Stop the War conference (pdf, 66K).

Internet Site of the UK Stop the War Conference.

My first conscious half hour today, Good Friday 2013, was occupied by a radio program where people rang in to talk about what fish they planned to celebrate with today.

I thought that Good Friday, if one acknowledges it, was sober sort of day where one reflected on the death of Christ, maybe went to a church service and ate a simple vegetarian or fish meal in lieu of the meat one might normally eat.

This is apparently not so for today's Ozzie radio listeners. They were comparing notes as to how much they had paid for flathead fillets, oysters or marinara mix and detailing recipes for cooking fish fillets. They were going off to bar-b q' s and all sorts of what sounded like celebrations and fishy banquets. A discussion on the availability and sourcing of fish for Australians followed. A fisheries expert told 2 radio presenters to their surprise that Australia was surrounded by a marine desert which supported little in the way of fishy biomass.

What are we doing in Australia that we would seemingly celebrate the most mournful day on the Christian calendar with the over eating of a resource that is obviously scarce locally?

There were also descriptions of today's events with Easter eggs as prizes. I thought Easter eggs were for Easter Sunday, a happy day celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

It seems that in Australia, the cue to celebrate is nothing to do with religion but the fact that we have a few days holiday. The actual significance of Good Friday is now corrupted into a rather Bogan sounding, Sylvania Waters, Kath and Kim celebration. Maybe they do it complete with Baileys Irish crème.

Do the Jewish or Muslim celebrations become as confused? Does any of it matter?

Candobetter Editor's comment: That's not the half of it. Easter signifies the end of winter and the beginning of Spring - hence the eggs, as in things get born in Spring. It is mad to celebrate Spring, in Australia, as we do through Easter, in Autumn, heading for winter.

What Quark describes here sounds like an added conflation of crassly commercialised foodie swarming. This explains why I hardly ever listen to radio or turn on TV at these times.

We can only look forward to worse, at Christmas, when the European festival marked the middle of winter, when presumably people tried to pool their resources to survive - hence all those preserves: hams and fruitcakes. In Australia - and Costa Rica (another hot place with much threatened biodiversity) - we mark this event in mid-summer.

The disorientation that accompanies colonialism and globalism is very far reaching, especially when commercialised. Soon we will be compelled by law to consume festively 365 days a year as Christmas runs into Rammadan.

Here is a very topical, historical account by E.J. Hobsbawm of the rise of Islam in the so-called undeveloped world which occurred in reaction to the disruption caused by colonialism. People who are interested in why there is still apparent opposition between Western “democracy” and capitalism and Islam, might find it interesting.

Great revival of Islam in the period of 1789-1848 [1]

“In purely numerical terms it is evident that all religions, unless actually contracting, were likely to expand with the rise in population. Yet two types showed a particular aptitude for expansion [over the period of the massive colonisation during the British Industrial Revolution]: Islam and sectarian Protestantism. This expansionism was all the more striking as it contrasted with the marked failure of other Christian religions – both Catholic and Protestant – to expand, in spite of a sharp increase in missionary activity outside Europe, increasingly backed by the military, political, and economic force of European penetration. […]

Islamic expansion among peoples disorganized by colonialism and slavery

As against this, Islam was continuing that silent, piecemeal and irreversible expansion unbacked by organized missionary endeavour or forcible conversion which is so characteristic of that religion. It expanded both eastwards, in Indonesia and North-western China, and westwards from the Sudan towards Senegal and, to a much smaller extent, from the shores of the Indian Ocean inland. When traditional societies change something so fundamental as their religion, it is clear that they must be facing major new problems. The Moslem traders, who virtually monopolized the commerce of inner Africa with the outside world and multiplied with it, helped to bring Islam to the notice of new peoples. The slave trade, which broke down communal life, made it attractive, for Islam is a powerful means of reintegrating social structures. [2] At the same time the Mohammedan religion appealed to the semi-feudal and military societies of the Sudan, and its sense of independence, militancy, and superiority made it a useful counterweight to slavery. Moslem Negros made bad slaves: the Haussa (and other Sudanese) who had been imported into Bahia (Brazil) revolted nine times between 1807 and the great rising of 1835 until, in effect, they were mostly killed or deported back to Africa. The slavers learned to avoid imports from these areas, which had only recently been opened to the trade.

Islamic resistance to colonialism in South East Asia

While the element of resistance to the whites was clearly very small in African Islam (where there were as yet hardly any), it was by tradition crucial in South-east Asia. There Islam – once again pioneered by traders – had long advanced against local cults and the declining Hinduism of the Spice Islands, largely as a means of more effective resistance against the Portuguese and the Dutch, as ‘a kind of pre-nationalism,’ though also as a popular counterweight to the Hinduized princes. As these princes increasingly turned into narrowly circumscribed dependents or agents of the Dutch, Islam sunk its root more deeply into the population. In turn, the Dutch learned that the Indonesian princes could, by allying with the religious teachers, unleash a general popular rising, as in the Java War of the Prince of Djokjakarta (1825-1830). They were consequently time and again driven back to a policy of close alliance with the local rulers, or indirect rule. Meanwhile the growth of the trade and shipping forged closer links between south-east Asian Muslim and Mecca, served to increase the number of pilgrims, to make Indonesian Islam more orthodox, and even to open it to the militant and revivalist influence of Arabian Wahhabism.

Within Islam the movements of reform and revival, which in this period gave the religion much of its penetrative power, can also be seen as reflecting the impact of European expansion and the crisis of the old Mohammedan societies (notably of the Turkish and Persian empires) and perhaps also of the growing crisis of the Chinese empire. The puritanical Wahhabites had arisen in Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1814 they had conquered Arabia and were ready to conquer Syria, until halted by the combined force of the Westernizing Mohammed Ali of Egypt and Western arms, though their teachings spread eastwards into Persia, Afghanistan and India. Inspired by Wahhabism an Algerian holy man, Sidi Mohammed ben Ali el Senussi, developed a similar movement which from the 1840s spread from Tripoli into the Sahara desert. In Algeria Abd-el-Kader, in the Caucasus Shamyl, developed religio-political movements of resistance to the French and Russians respectively (see chapter 7) and anticipated a pan-Islamism which sought not merely a return to the original purity of the Prophet but also to absorb Western innovations. In Persia, an even more obviously nationalist and revolutionary heterodoxy, the Bab movement of Ali Mohammed, arose in the 1840s. It tended, among other things, to return to certain ancient practices of Persian Zoroastrianism and demanded the unveiling of women.

Expansion of Protestantism

The ferment and expansion of Islam was such that, in terms of purely religious history, we can perhaps best describe the period form 1789 to 1848 as that of world Islamic revival. …The expansionist movement of Protestant sectarianism differs from that of Islam in that it was almost entirely confined to the countries of developed capitalist civilization. […]

New Protestant sects in Anglo-countries mirrored rise of Atheism in Catholic Europe

[… ] The reasons for the geographical and social limits of Protestant sectarianism are evident. Roman Catholic countries provided no scope for and tradition of public sects. There the equivalent break with the established church or the dominant religion was more likely to take the form of mass dechristianisation (especially among the men) than of schism. (Conversely, the Protestant anti-clericalism of the Anglo-Saxon countries was often the exact counterpart of the atheist anti-clericalism of continental ones.)”

Egypt and revolutions

“Nationalism in the East was thus the eventual product of Western influence and Western conquest. This link is perhaps most evident in the one plainly Oriental country in which the foundations of what was to become the first modern colonial nationalist movement [other than the Irish] were laid: in Egypt. Napoleon’s conquest introduced Western ideas, methods, and techniques, whose value an able and ambitious local soldier, Mohammed Ali (Mehemet Ali), soon recognized. Having seized power and virtual independence from Turkey in the confused period which followed the withdrawal of the French, and with French support, Mohammed Ali set out to establish an efficient and Westernizing despotism with foreign (mainly French) technical aid. European left-wingers in the 1820s and 30s hailed this enlightened autocrat, and put their services at his disposal, when reaction in their own countries looked too dispiriting. The extraordinary sect of the Sain-Simonians, equally suspended between the advocacy of socialism and of industrial development by investment bankers and engineers, temporarily gave him their collective aid and prepared his plans of economic development. […] They thus also laid the foundation for the Suez Canal (built by the Saint-Simonian de Lesseps) and the fatal dependence of Egyptian rulers on vast loans negotiated by competing groups of European swindlers, which turned Egypt into a centre of imperialist rivalry and anti-imperialist rebellion later on. But Mohammed Ali was no more a nationalist than any other Oriental despot. His Westernization, not his or his people’s aspirations, laid the foundations for later nationalism. If Egypt acquired the first nationalist movement in the Islamic world and Morocco one of the last, it was because Mohammed Ali (for perfectly comprehensible geopolitical reasons) was in the main paths of Westernization and the isolated self-sealed Sherifian Empire of the Moslem far west was not, and made no attempts to be. Nationalism, like so many other characteristics of the modern world, is the child of the dual revolution.”[3]

NOTES

[1] The source of this article is a highly readable and famous book by historian, E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789 to 1848, New American Library Publishing, 1962, pp.268-270. This was also the period of the rise of the Industrial Revolution and British imperialism, which won out over other contenders in the European trade and slaving wars that had gone on since the 14th century due to the chance coincidence of huge stores of coal and iron on that island, plus an army of dispossessed workers who could be forced to dig it up and man the foundries.

[2] The writer gives as his reference for this statement, J S Trimmingham, Islam in West Africa, Oxford, 1959, p.30. I am personally not aware of the reasons given there and would welcome comment or articles on why this might be so.

[3] Source, E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789 to 1848, New American Library Publishing, 1962, p.177.

A new website - http://CensusNoReligion.org - has been designed as a resource for interested Australians in the lead up to the next Australian Census being held on 9 August 2011. It gives people information about how the results of this question can be misused to allocate funds, overstate the number of actively religious people in Australia, and exaggerate the importance of religion in modern Australia.

AFA launches new website

The Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) has launched a new website designed to encourage individuals and families to think about the importance and impact of their answer to the Census question: "What is the person's religion?"

This campaign is part of a wider education and communication campaign being run by the Atheist Foundation of Australia that draws attention to the fact that the wording of this question means many people will select the religion of their baptism or initiation at youth, despite not being a religious person at all.

This website - http://CensusNoReligion.org - has been designed as a resource for interested Australians in the lead up to the next Australian Census being held on 9 August 2011. It gives people information about how the results of this question can be misused to allocate funds, overstate the number of actively religious people in Australia, and exaggerate the importance of religion in modern Australia.

AFA President David Nicholls said, "Data from the Census is used by parliamentarians and religious leaders to sway politics and social policy in favour of complying with religious tenets and ecclesiastical notions. In fact in many cases, it makes a situation where a decision that should rely on empirical evidence is overridden by religious demands.

"The coming Census in Australia is an important chance to make sure your interests are met in decision making and funding and that views you do not hold are not over-represented in the coming years," Nicholls said. "I encourage everyone to visit the website and make sure they are informed of the implications of their answers, and if you are not religious now to mark 'No religion' on August 9."

For more information go to: http://CensusNoReligion.org