Hell: Into everlasting fire

Hell: Into everlasting fire

    Friday, December 28, 2012   No comments

TO MANY in the West, Hell is just a medieval relic. It went out with ducking stools and witchcraft. It should have disappeared with Plato, who said he wanted to delete every reference to future pain from Homer as damaging to moral character; or with Cicero, who said not even old women believed it; or with Seneca, who thought it a fable only for not-yet-shaving boys.

Hell hardly hurts any more. In everyday parlance (“What the hell are you doing?”), it is merely a bark, not a place. As a place, it is anywhere nasty: the London Underground in summer, the worst bits of Lower Manhattan, department stores at sales time, a publisher’s party. Philosophically, Jean-Paul Sartre has encouraged the idea that Hell is other people. Theologically, even the Vatican now defines Hell as a state of exile from the love of God. The devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and wailing souls, have been cleared away, rather as a mad aunt might be shut up in the attic.

But hold on. For many people in the world, Hell still exists; not just as a concept, but as a place on the map. “Hell is Real,” declare the billboards across the American South: as real as the next town. To make it an abstraction is comforting and tidy, but doesn’t work. Religion thrives on fear, as well as hope: without fear, bad behaviour has no sanction and clerical authority wins scant respect. “[People] must have hell-fire flashed before their faces,” wrote General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, “or they will not move.” And there can be no fear of a place that is not detailed and defined. Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists all still have a Hell, and those who are devout believe in it. So do fundamentalist Christians. For some decades now they have specialised in “Hell Houses” in which terrified American teenagers, herded by “demons”, are shown graphic strobe-lit scenes of brawlers, suicides and drug-takers, as plausibly infernal as any medieval imagining.

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Why Tunisia ignored sharia law

Why Tunisia ignored sharia law

    Monday, December 03, 2012   No comments

The Arab Spring countries of North Africa are struggling to balance their secular and Islamic roots, but the leader of Tunisia’s ruling party thinks he has the answer.

Rached Ghannouchi co-founded the Ennahda party, but only returned from 22 years in exile after Tunisia became the first country of the Arab Spring to oust its leader.

Secular Tunisians and national media have questioned how much sharia law would be enshrined in Tunisia’s new constitution, but Ghannouchi told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday that the problem has already been bypassed.

“There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 

While Islam has always been the main religion in Tunisia, politics have long been secular.

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Egypt Brothers mix pragmatism, ideology on Israel

Egypt Brothers mix pragmatism, ideology on Israel

    Friday, January 20, 2012   No comments

The Muslim Brotherhood is trying to maneuver its way between its fierce anti-Israel ideology and the realities of governing as it ascends to leadership in Egypt for the first time in its history and faces the key question of how to deal with the country's peace treaty with the Jewish state.

The fundamentalist group's stance on the accord — opposition but not renunciation — is a telling sign of its broader style of politics. It can play down its hardline doctrine in favor of short-term pragmatism as it looks to the long term, leaves its options open and engages in a degree of double-talk to pave the way.

The stance could also reflect the group's own evolution as its new political party, whose members will be the ones actually involved in governing, gradually has to distinguish itself from the hard line of the Brotherhood itself, an 83-year-old organization whose leadership worked for decades in a hive-like secrecy because of state repression.

"The Brotherhood is in a real challenge and real crisis. For the first time, they are in power, which forces them to be rational when it comes to foreign policy because any miscalculations might blow their gains," said Khalil al-Anani, an Egyptian expert on Islamic movements.

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Muslims and the Koran

Muslims and the Koran

    Monday, January 02, 2012   No comments

In the beginning were the words

Muslims revere the Koran. But its study is not taboo—and is in some quarters increasingly daring

RELIGIONS invite stereotypes, holy texts even more so. Non-Muslims often see Islam as a faith followed by people who hew so closely to an unchanging set of words that they ignore awkward new facts sooner than contradict its message. For critics, this attachment to a text encourages extremists—like Boko Haram, a group that in December attacked Nigerian churches: hotheads can generally find a passage that seems to justify their violence.

Such passages abound in the Koran, just as they do in the founding texts of Christianity, Judaism and many other religions. There is also a long tradition of interpreting such verses in reassuring ways. For example, it is often stressed that the Koran’s injunction to “slay the unbeliever wherever you find him” relates to a specific historical context, in which the first Muslims were betrayed by a pagan group who had signed a truce.

But when it comes to parsing holy writ, there is one big difference between Islam and most other text-based faiths. Barring a brief interlude in the ninth and tenth centuries, and a few modern liberals, Muslims have mostly believed that the Koran is distinct from every other communication. As God’s final revelation to man, it belongs not to earthly, created things but to an eternal realm. That is a bigger claim than other faiths usually make for their holy writings.

The Koran may be interpreted but from a believer’s viewpoint, nothing in it can be set aside. Yet, at least in the calm, superficially courteous world of Western academia, debating the precise text of the Koran is increasingly common—as at a conference hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London, in November. One organiser was Muhammad Abdel Haleem, an Egyptian-born professor who has translated the Koran into stylish modern English, drawing acclaim from many, but grumbles from purists. Other contributors included a professor from Turkey, and a scholar based in Iran. But most were non-Muslims who study the text as they would any other written material—as prose whose evolution can be traced by comparing versions. New techniques, such as the use of digital photography, help compare variations and solve puzzles. All participants implicitly accepted the idea that methods used to analyse Homer, say, or German myths might elucidate the Koran.

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Islamists, elections and the Arab spring

Islamists, elections and the Arab spring

    Sunday, December 11, 2011   No comments

IS THE Arab spring turning into bleak midwinter? Earlier this year the revolutions sweeping through the region seemed encouragingly modern and secular. Indeed, the young Facebookers and Twitterers braving the bullets in Cairo and Tunis seemed to give the lie to the dictators’ claims that the only alternative to the thuggery of a strongman was mullah-led theocracy. But look across the Arab world today and political Islam has jumped to the fore (see article).

Egypt offers the most dramatic example. The relatively mild-mannered Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organised of the Arab movements espousing an ideology that bases its message on the texts of Islam, is winning the three-stage election to Egypt’s parliament by a wider margin than pundits predicted, with 46% of the seats so far. Far more frightening is the party coming second, with 21% of the seats. The Salafists, whose name denotes a desire to emulate the “predecessors” who were early followers of the Prophet Muhammad, decry alcohol, pop music and other aspects of Western lifestyle. They want to ban interest in banks, think women should cover themselves and stay at home, would segregate the sexes in public, might turn Christians, around a tenth of Egypt’s 85m people, into second-class citizens and denigrate Jews, not to mention the people of Israel. Assuming that the two Islamist parties do no worse in the next two rounds this month and next, generally in more conservative areas, they will control a clear majority of seats; the only question is whether the Brothers will keep their promise not to team up and rule together.

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