Angels And Demons

To the Illuminati, and to those of science, let me say this. You have won the war.

The wheels have been in motion for a long time. Your victory has been inevitable. Never before has it been as obvious as it is at this moment. Science is the new god.

Medicine, electronic communications, space travel, genetic manipulation… these are the miracles about which we now tell our children. These are the miracles we herald as proof that science will bring us the answers. The ancient stories of immaculate conceptions, burning bushes, and parting seas are no longer relevant. God has become obsolete. Science has won the battle. We concede.

But science’s victory has cost every one of us. And it has cost us deeply.

Science may have alleviated the miseries of disease and drudgery and provided an array of gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience, but is has left us in a world with out wonder. Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident. Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal. Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history? Does science hold anything sacred? Science looks for answers by probing our unborn fetuses. Science even presumes to rearrange our own DNA. It shatters God’s world into smaller and smaller pieces in quest of meaning… and all it finds is more questions.

The ancient war between science and religion is over. You have won. But you have not won fairly. You have not won by providing answers. You have won by so radically reorienting our society that the truths we once saw as signposts now seem inapplicable. Religion cannot keep up. Scientific growth is exponential. It feeds on itself like a virus. Every new breakthrough opens doors for new breakthroughs. Mankind took thousands of years to progress from the wheel to the car. Yet only decades from the car into space. Now we measure scientific progress in weeks. We are spinning out of control. The rift between us grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFOs, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests — all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. They are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology.

Science, you say, will save us. Science, I say, has destroyed us. Since the days of Galileo, the church has tried to slow the relentless march of science, sometimes with misguided means, but always with benevolent intention. Even so, the temptations are too great for man to resist. I warn you, look around yourselves. The promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species… moving down a path of destruction.

Who is this God science? Who is the God who offers his people power but no moral framework to tell you how to use that power? What kind of God gives a child fire but does not warn the child of its dangers? The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad. Science textbooks tell us how to create a nuclear reaction, and yet they contain no chapter asking us if it is a good or a bad idea.

To science, I say this. The church is tired. We are exhausted from trying to be your sign posts. Our resources are drying up from our campaign to be the voice of balance as you plow blindly on in your quest for smaller chips and larger profits. We ask not why you will not govern yourselves, but how can you? Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur. So you move on. You proliferate weapons of mass destruction, but it is the Pope who travels the world beseeching leaders to use restraint. You clone living creatures, but it is the church reminding us to consider the moral implications of our actions. You encourage people to interact on phones, video screens, and computers, but it is the church who opens its doors and reminds us to commune in person as we were meant to do. You even murder unborn babies in the name of research that will save lives. Again, it is the church who points the fallacy of that reasoning.

And all the while, you proclaim the church is ignorant. But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power? This church is reaching out to you. Reaching out to everyone. And yet the more we reach, the more you push us away. Show me proof there is a God, you say. I say use your telescopes to look to the heavens, and tell me how there could not be a God! You ask what does God look like. I say, where does that question come from? The answers are one and the same. Do you not see God in you science? How can you miss Him! You proclaim that even the slightest change in the force of gravity or the weight of an atom would have rendered our universe a lifeless mist rather than our magnificent sea of heavenly bodies, and yet you fail to see God’s hand in this? Is it really so much easier to believe that we simply chose the right card from a deck of billions? Have we become so spiritually bankrupt that we would rather believe in mathematical impossibility than in a power greater than us?

Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this. When we as a species abandon our trust in the power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faith… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable… With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. If the outside world could see this church as I do… looking beyond the ritual of these walls… they would see a modern miracle… a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

Are we obsolete? Are these men dinosaurs? Am I? Does the world really need a voice for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the unborn child? Do we really need souls like these who, though imperfect, spend their lives imploring each of us to read the signposts of morality and not lose our way?

Tonight we are perched on a precipice. None of us can afford to be apathetic. Whether you see this evil as Satan, corruption, or immorality, the dark force is alive and growing every day. Do not ignore it. The force, though mighty, is not invincible. Goodness can prevail. Listen to your hearts. Listen to God. Together we can step back from this abyss.

Pray with me.

... Angels And Demons, Dan Brown

The Wings Of The Dove

"Did she know?" 

"I think you know what she knew." 

"I knew something, but not what you knew of what she knew. 

I still don't know." 

"I know." 

"So she knew something." 

"Yes. We all knew something." 

I said, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest."

... The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

The Portrait Of A Lady

"...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, 

was that you could go everywhere and do everything." 

... The Portrait Of A Lady, Henry James

The Age Of Innocence

"The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done."

Ellen: "Newland. You couldn't be happy if it meant being cruel. If we act any other way I'll be making you act against what I love in you most. And I can't go back to that way of thinking. Don't you see? I can't love you unless I give you up."

... The Age Of Innocence, Edith Wharton

The End Of The Affair

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."

"I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever." 

Sarah: Love doesn't end, just because we don't see each other.

Maurice Bendrix: Doesn't it?

Sarah: People go on loving God, don't they? All their lives. Without seeing him.

Maurice Bendrix: That's not my kind of love.

Sarah: Maybe there is no other kind.

... The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

84 Charing Cross Road

Dear Cecily -

Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said: "Then it's there."

Dear Katherine -
I take time out from housecleaning my bookshelves and sitting on the rug surrounded by books in every direction to scrawl you a Bon Voyage. I hope you and Brian have a ball in London. He said to me on the phone: "Would you go with us if you had the fare?" and I nearly wept.

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there."

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.

The blessed man who sold me all my books died a few months ago. And Mr Marks who owned the shop is dead. But Marks & Co is still there. If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me! I owe it so much.

Helene.

... 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff

Wuthering Heights

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it."

"Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend - if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all, when I am pushed to extremity!"

"It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not?"

"You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!"

... Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Brave New World

"And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. 

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.

Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior. Murder kills only the individual - and, after all, what is an individual?"

... Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves

Thus they twain conversed with friendly conversation, and presently the guest rose to depart and said: "O my lord, thy slave must now farewell thee, but on some future day- Inshallah- he will again wait upon thee." Ali Baba, however, would not let him leave, and asked: "Whither wendest thou, O my friend? I would invite thee to my table, and I pray thee sit at meat with us and after hie thee home in peace. Perchance the dishes are not as delicate as those whereof thou art wont to eat, still deign grant me this request, I pray thee, and refresh thyself with my victual." Quoth Khwajah Hasan: "O lord, I am beholden to thee for thy gracious invitation, and with pleasure would I sit at meat with thee, but for a special reason must I needs excuse myself. Suffer me therefore to depart, for I may not tarry longer, nor accept thy gracious offer." Hereto the host made reply: "I pray thee, O my lord, tell me what may be the reason so urgent and weighty." And Khwajah Hasan answered: "The cause is this. I must not, by order of the physician who cured me lately of my complaint, eat aught of food prepared with salt." Quoth Ali Baba: "An this be all, deprive me not, I pray thee, of the honor thy company will confer upon me. As the meats are not yet cooked, I will forbid the kitchener to make use of any salt. Tarry here awhile, and I will return anon to thee." So saying, Ali Baba went in to Morgiana and bade her not put salt into any one of the dishes, and she, while busied with her cooking, fell to marveling greatly at such order and asked her master, "Who is he that eateth meat wherein is no salt?" He answered: "What to thee mattereth it who he may be? Only do thou my bidding." She rejoined: "'Tis well. All shall be as thou wishest." But in mind she wondered at the man who made such strange request, and desired much to look upon him.

Wherefore, when all the meats were ready for serving up, she helped the slave boy Abdullah to spread the table and set on the meal, and no sooner did she see Khwajah Hasan than she knew who he was, albeit he had disguised himself in the dress of a stranger merchant. Furthermore, when she eyed him attentively, she espied a dagger hidden under his robe. "So ho!" quoth she to herself. "This is the cause why the villain eateth not of salt, for that he seeketh an opportunity to slay my master, whose mortal enemy he is. Howbeit I will be beforehand with him and dispatch him ere he find a chance to harm my lord." Now when Ali Baba and Khwajah Hasan had eaten their sufficiency, the slave boy Abdullah brought Morgiana word to serve the dessert, and she cleared the table and set on fruit fresh and dried in salvers, then she placed by the side of Ali Baba a small tripod for three cups with a flagon of wine, and lastly she went off with the slave boy Abdullah into another room, as though she would herself eat supper. Then Khwajah Hasan- that is, the captain of the robbers- perceiving that the coast was clear, exulted mightily, saying to himself: "The time hath come for me to take full vengeance. With one thrust of my dagger I will dispatch this fellow, then escape across the garden and wend my ways. His nephew will not adventure to stay my hand, for an he do but move a finger or toe with that intent, another stab with settle his earthly account. Still must I wait awhile until the slave boy and the cookmaid shall have eaten and lain down to rest them in the kitchen."

Morgiana, however, watched him wistfully and divining his purpose, said in her mind: "I must not allow this villain advantage over my lord, but by some means I must make void his project and at once put an end to the life of him." Accordingly the trusty slave girl changed her dress with all haste and donned such clothes as dancers wear. She veiled her face with a costly kerchief, around her head she bound a fine turban, and about her middle she tied a waistcloth worked with gold and silver, wherein she stuck a dagger whose hilt was rich in filigree and jewelry. Thus disguised, she said to the slave boy Abdullah: "Take now thy tambourine, that we may play and sing and dance in honor of our master's guest." So he did her bidding and the twain went into the room, the lad playing and the lass following. Then, making a low congee, they asked leave to perform and disport and play, and Ali Baba gave permission, saying, "Dance now and do your best that this our guest may he mirthful and merry." Quoth Khwajah Hasan, "O my lord, thou dost indeed provide much pleasant entertainment."

Then the slave boy Abdullah, standing by, began to strike the tambourine whilst Morgiana rose up and showed her perfect art and pleased them vastly with graceful steps and sportive motion. And suddenly, drawing the poniard from her belt, she brandished it and paced from side to side, a spectacle which pleased them most of all. At times also she stood before them, now clapping the sharp-edged dagger under armpit and then setting it against her breast. Lastly she took the tambourine from the slave boy Abdullah, and still holding the poniard in her right, she went round for largess as is the custom amongst merrymakers. First she stood before Ali Baba, who threw a gold coin into the tambourine, and his nephew likewise put in an ashrafi. Then Khwajah Hasan, seeing her about to approach him, fell to pulling out his purse, when she heartened her heart, and quick as the blinding levin she plunged the dagger into his vitals, and forthwith the miscreant fell back stone-dead.

Ali Baba was dismayed, and cried in his wrath: "O unhappy, what is this deed thou hast done to bring about my ruin?" But she replied: "Nay, O my lord, rather to save thee and not to cause thee harm have I slain this man. Loosen his garments and see what thou wilt discover thereunder." So Ali Baba searched the dead man's dress and found concealed therein a dagger.

Then said Morgiana: "This wretch was thy deadly enemy. Consider him well. He is none other than the oil merchant, the captain of the band of robbers. Whenas he came hither with intent to take thy life, he would not eat thy salt, and when thou toldest me that he wished not any in the meat, I suspected him, and at first sight I was assured that he would surely do thee die. Almighty Allah he praised, 'tis even as I thought." Then Ali Baba lavished upon her thanks and expressions of gratitude, saying, "Lo, these two times hast thou saved me from his hand," and falling upon her neck, he cried: "See, thou art free, and as reward for this thy fealty I have wedded thee to my nephew." Then, turning to the youth, he said: "Do as I bid thee and thou shalt prosper. I would that thou marry Morgiana, who is a model of duty and loyalty. Thou seest now yon Khwajah Hasan sought thy friendship only that he might find opportunity to take my life, but this maiden with her good sense and her wisdom hath slain him and saved us."

Ali Baba's nephew straightway consented to marry Morgiana. After which the three, raising the dead body, bore it forth with all heed and vigilance and privily buried it in the garden, and for many years no one know aught thereof. In due time Ali Baba married his brother's son to Morgiana with great pomp, and spread a bride feast in most sumptuous fashion for his friends and neighbors, and made merry with them and enjoyed singing and all manner of dancing and amusements. He prospered in every undertaking and Time smiled upon him and a new source of wealth was opened to him.

For fear of the thieves he had not once visited the jungle cave wherein lay the treasure since the day he had carried forth the corpse of his brother Kasim. But some time after, he mounted his hackney one morning and journeyed thither, with all care and caution, till finding no signs of man or horse, and reassured in his mind, he ventured to draw near the door. Then, alighting from his beast, he tied it up to a tree, and going to the entrance, pronounced the words which he had not forgotten, "Open, Sesame!" Hereat, as was its wont, the door flew open, and entering thereby he saw the goods and hoard of gold and silver untouched and lying as he had left them. So he felt assured that not one of all the thieves remained alive, and that save himself there was not a soul who knew the secret of the place. At once he bound in his saddlecloth a load of ashrafis such as his horse could bear and brought it home, and in after days he showed the hoard to his sons and sons' sons and taught them how the door could he caused to open and shut. Thus Ali Baba and his household lived all their lives in wealth and joyance in that city where erst he had been a pauper, and by the blessing of that secret treasure he rose to high degree and dignities.

... Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves, The Arabian Nights, Sir Richard Burton (trans)

Layla And Majnun

These two friends are one, eternal companions. He is Majnun, the king of the world in right action. And she is Layla, the moon among idols in compassion. In the world, like unpierced rubies they treasured their fidelity affectionately, but found no rest and could not attain their heart's desire. Here they suffer grief no more. So it will be until eternity. Whoever endures suffering and forebears in that world will be joyous and exalted in this world...

Whoever would find a place in that world must tread on the lusts of this world. This world is dust and is perishable. That world is pure and eternal... Commit yourself to love's sanctuary and at once find freedom from your ego. Fly in love as an arrow towards its target. Love loosens the knots of being, love is liberation from the vortex of egotism. In love, every cup of sorrow which bites into the soul gives it new life. Many a draft bitter as poison has become in love delicious... However agonizing the experience, if it is for love, it is well.

... Layla And Majnun

Letters To A Young Poet

I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.

And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by him? But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him - what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost?

Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? Must he not be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed?

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?

Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.

And be glad and confident.

Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke.

Simple Man Of Faith

"A man might spend a life reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences."

... Charles le Gai Eaton

Speak, Memory

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm then the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note - unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigit religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, for an aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought - with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went - to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits...

... Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vladimir Nabokov

The Metamorphosis

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

"What a strenuous career it is that I've chosen! Travelling day in and day out." 

... The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

Atonement

"So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for... and deserved. Which ever since I've... ever since I've always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? 

So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I'd like to think this isn't weakness or... evasion... but a final act of kindness. 

I gave them their happiness."

... Briony Tallis, Atonement

Seducing Jihad (6)

The Element Of Seduction

This brings me to a brief final point regarding the nature of jihad. Jean Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra argues that we are living in a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal – that signs, symbols and logos mean nothing to reality but are socially and culturally constructed to identify with the real. Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. As such, our exercises are always reversible: proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression or proving work through striking. 

In his follow-up book, Seduction, Baudrillard suggests the game of seduction by leaving reality and the search for meaning to reconstruct oneself in an illusion created by rules; rules that are arbitrarily made up by the seducer. Even though modern society values production over everything else, seduction is stronger because it is a reversible process and has an elusive quality that denies meaning of all things and demands play. While production produces meaning, seduction absorbs it. According to Baudrillard, although seduction is the source of all power, at the same time it holds none of its own. He states, “For if production can only produce objects of real signs, and thereby obtain some power; seduction, by producing only illusions, obtains all powers, including the power to return production and reality to their fundamental illusion.”

There are two ways in which the concept of seduction and the play of symbols are relevant to the concept of jihad. The terrorists engaging in “jihad”, whilst trying to re-establish the Islamic identity, are using the signs, the symbols, the logos of that means through its dialectical rhetoric and the threat of physical acts of destruction. Those acts in themselves mean nothing to others and its impact will never lead to its desired objective. The effects of those threats which disrupts our daily lives: tightening of securities around our borders, the stringent checks on ‘suspicious’ baggage, the right to tap into citizen’s personal tele-conversations and the policies set up to minimize the actuality of the dreaded event, are the effects of the symbol which the threat of the acts of terrorism imply – though the act itself does not occur. Herein lies its power, whilst holding none of its own. The uncertainty of the rules of engagement, the perpetual fear of having another terrorist attack, the guessing game by the authorities gives phenomenal power to the seducer, in this case, the terrorists. This is precisely because “seduction ... plays triumphantly with weakness, making a game of it, with its own rules.” A terrorist cannot break laws (by being sympathetic, or unwilling to sacrifice himself), but he can play by the rules and create a world of illusion (that he is under the illusion of contributing to paving the way to re-establish the lost Islamic identity). Baudrillard states, “precisely because rules are arbitrary and ungrounded, because they have no referents, they do not require a consensus, nor any collective will or truth. They exist, that’s all. And they exist only when shared, while the Law floats above scattered individuals.” It is in this arbitrariness and the play with signs and symbols that seduction becomes a force to reckon with. 

The other perspective to this concept of seduction is that it opens up to different ways of understanding religious categories. Seduction acts as a different way of approaching them: that color is not restricted to a specific idea, but it provides a way for scholars to work with the concept to gain more insights on humanity and his environment. It belongs to everybody: those who study them, those who read them or those who practice them. Relating back to the metaphor and structurality of color, it is clear that religious categories are co-constructed by all of the above, just as colors are co-constructed by the environment and the perceiver.

Jihad, as a mode of understanding, represents a feedback loop: how we understand the concept gets transported around within conversations between scholars, Muslims, the media, the west etc. Jihad exists as a combination of inextricably linked notions between Islam and the Other. The logos, the symbols and the signs exist through the synergy and communication between these two.

Jonathan Z. Smith’s claim that scholars invent religion is worth another re-visit. As scholars are making meaning of others, in turn, they are also making meaning of themselves. Herein lies the reversibility of seduction in this context. As scholars invent religion, the media, the clerics, the politicians are simultaneously re-constructing religion. Seduction, in this sense, is in recognizing the reversibility and playing with that notion. 

Performing destructive terrorist acts is arguably not a natural human tendency. A terrorist has to condition himself mentally, physically and emotionally to contribute to the cause. Baudrillard states, “When seducing, her body and desires are no longer her own … without a body of her own, she turns herself into a pure appearance, an artificial construct with which to trap the desires of others.” In the threat of a terrorist act, or the game of seduction, the terrorist constructs an artificial existence, including sacrificing his own body for the cause, by aligning himself to the cause believing that he will make a significant difference in re-capturing the lost Islamic identity, which now has become a sign without any reality, as a concept which is being continuously reinvented. Many Islamic-Muslim scholars are making arguments for Islamisation through the re-establishment of the Ummah. But none, in my personal experience, have provided a satisfactory concept of that organic term called “the ummah” – connoting that Muslims merely need to re-establish “the ummah” – it does not matter what that notion constitutes or critically examining whether it was lost in the first place: creating a deeper conundrum, a situation exacerbated by scholars, of Muslims existence/identity for the last century. Once the destructive act of terrorism is done, the game of seduction collapse and returns to reality, where those rules no longer apply as the act in itself is a production.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, we can see how color presents a useful structurality in understanding religious categories, a structurality in which seduction is a methodological tool appropriate to studying these interactive and co-constructed phenomenon. 

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Re-Understanding Islam And Jihad

The historical account given earlier was meant to illustrate how religion as a category only exists through an embodied process, just as we have seen how we perceive colors and categories through the workings of the human brain and body. The birth of Islam was a response to the literal cleaning of the idols around and within the Kaabah – in itself has a physical similarity with the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. If the ritualistic structures of Islam are itself physical, it is not surprising that the five pillars of Islam is also embodied in nature: that a Muslim must physically perform the five daily prayers, fasts in the month of Ramadhan, provide alms to the poor and perform the physical pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. Even the establishment of the Islamic law (Syariah) is not based on the theological construct of the Quran alone but a large proportion of it was a contextual application to the actual situations occurring in Mecca and Medina. In the present time, when jurists are called upon to make a legal verdict, it is to that same factual method of application that either the principals of ijma’ (juridical consensus) or qiyas (deductive reasoning) was applied. The loss of the Islamic identity and the desperate search to re-establish it (irrespective of religiously valid means) are also a physically embodied experience. Finally, the performance of jihad – be it taken to mean an internal strife or an external declaration of war, is embodied in each and every Muslim.

I will now return to the four main thoughts that the study of colors has lead me. Firstly, just like colors, our environment exists so that we may perceive, translate and understand them. Just as we perceive colors through our translations of “white” distinguishable by wavelengths, the case is also similar to translating religious activities/rituals. Members belonging to the same set of community, religious or otherwise, are conditioned to perceive, categorize and translate their environment in a certain constructed way understood by members of that specific community. To illustrate by using a specific example, the embodiment of and interplay of historical, social and political settings to a certain group of Muslims lead them to translate their predicament in a certain way paving the way for them to answer the call of jihad. Once they situate this particular translation to their personal embodied physical self, it does not matter to them that those calling for jihad has absolutely no religious authority to do so. Muslims answering the call for “jihad” (in light of September 11) see themselves as performing a religious obligation sanctioned by God but scholars of religion and other Muslims translate their acts as categories within Islam, of which they are at liberty to agree or disagree as a matter of discourse. These categories are not intrinsic to the act of performing jihad itself, or as my earlier engagement with the metaphor, color to the object. On its own, jihad holds little meaning beyond a theological philosophy. Once it is awaken and manifested in a devastating act, it assumes existence at tangent with its intended spirit.

Secondly, that there are immense amount of information available out there that our brain are not able to digest them all. Hence, to a large extent, we perform selective perceptions and create categories of our environment and our existence to ‘reduce’ this vast amount of information for a working understanding of their meanings. It is instructive to return to the structure of color and the way we perceive them. There are immeasurable amount of electro magnetic waves in the universe that we cannot understand or fathom. But what our brain can detect is only a meager 0.00037 of wavelength of which there are an astounding ten million variations! That to me is already a marvelous feat for the brain to achieve. Imagine if the brain can actually process all the information available out there in the universe, if at all possible, the brain will be overloaded with too much information that it will break down – akin to the image of a computer heating up and exploding right before our eyes. The idea of selection is at play to make sense of the magnitude of information it can absorb and process so that we can understand them. Just like the structure of color, humans perform this selection process and create categories to make sense of their own reality, for otherwise, everything will be too overwhelming to be decipherable. Just as our brain creates categories (“color”, “smells”, “sounds”) to make priorities, humans are trained to view their world in categories. I can provide a perfect example to illustrate my point: my essay has a title and sub-headings (categories) which guides me in my way of thinking. Out of the many information available on Islam, some Muslims chose to put priorities on performing “jihad” for the “good” of all Muslims by blowing themselves in public places. At a glance, we cannot understand why they rather not choose to put their efforts into other categories such as performing charities or helping the poor. They chose to understand, or their brains are conditioned to attract them to that category, of performing their Islamic obligation by suicide bombing: that is how they find their meaning. 

Thirdly, that we are in a constant state of co-constructing and co-communicating with our environment to continuously make meaning of existence. This may seemed to be a simple point, but the notions around it are fascinating. The concept of neuroplasticity enables us to know the background of our conditioning and determining processes. The malleability of our brain enables us to form and re-shape our ideas through our understanding of our environment, but as Doidge pointed out, it can lead to both rigidity and repetition in our brains – establishing patterns and habits. This may help to explain why certain Muslims are engaging in “jihad” that their “roadblock” shaking their earlier beliefs are re-shaped by the constant drumming into their minds that Muslims are being oppressed, that they have no identity despite a rich history and that they have a valid reason sanctioned by Islam to perform those horrible acts in the name of God. Over time, that indoctrination becomes real for them and once it has established itself, those “habits” are very hard to change. Just like the winter hill experiment, they found identity with the “oppressed” through their engagements and conversations which leads to a certain way of thinking. Surrounding themselves with like-minded people, their perspectives become entrenched as they find their comfort zone with their comrades. Their brain become deeply patterned which then defines them. They find that their common categories reflect their world as it is separate from us and that members of their common category all share the same distinctive trait: suicide bombing as a way to punish others and their death a martyrdom. 

Colors are a constructive category as a tool and its structurality a useful model to understand how jihad is constructed. Colors neither exist in the environment nor do they exist in the eye of the perceiver alone but are constructed out of an interactive process, just like jihad. There are historical elements, there are individual contributions, but only in their interaction does the category of “jihad” really exist. Qutb lapped the opportunity of the Muslim’s social and political condition of that time to re-invent the Islamic identity. Just like Muhammad’s ministry was not borne out of a vacuum, Qutb’s ideology is a perfect example of how he co-constructs the issue of Islamic identity to produce an ideology which was attractive to a certain section of Muslims. Another example is how post September 11, the western media co-construct the notion of peace, direct the agenda for interfaith dialogues and re-packaged Islam even to the Muslims. This richness in a religious understanding is productive as we juxtaposed it with John Dewey’s Theory of Continuity and Interaction that one’s past accumulated experiences influences and interact with the present situation to effect future experiences. With that environment, Qutb not only influenced his generation, but later generations in the form of bin Laden and az-Zahiri.

Finally, that because we are structured biologically in a rather similar way, to an extent, these translations of our environment hold a similar structural understanding which relates and connects us. This finding enables us to explain how Qutb or bin Laden managed to recruit so many followers to their ideology. Although in many ways we are distinct, there are still many ways which connects us – and if sufficient re-shaping is done to a mode of thinking, one may find many people in agreement to a certain translation, perception or understanding of a certain event in history which sparked one to perform suicide bombing. To those who find such ideology/practices perplexing and cannot distinguish between jihad, holy war or terrorism, it may be because we know little or nothing about Islam as we are shaped and habitually constructed in a different way.

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Understanding Jihad

Islam has so often been portrayed, even by contemporary scholars such as Bernard Lewis in The Political Language of Islam, as “a military religion, [with] fanatical warriors, engaged in spreading their faith and their law by armed might” that the image of the Muslim horde charging wildly into battle like a swarm of locusts has become one of the most enduring stereotypes in the Western world. “Islam was never really a religion of salvation,” wrote the eminent sociologist Max Weber in The Sociology of Religion, “Islam is a warrior religion.” It is a religion that Samuel Huntington has portrayed as steeped “in bloody borders” in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In recent times, the call for jihad was made more pronounced by the devastating events such as the September 11, 2001 or the Madrid bombings of 2004.

Yet the doctrine of jihad, like so many doctrines in Islam, was not fully developed as an ideological expression until long after Muhammad’s death. The concept was first physically manifested in the first battle in Islam, the Battle of Badr (624 AD) whereupon attaining victory, Muhammad was reported to have said in a famous hadith: “We have returned from the lesser jihad (battle) to the greater jihad (jihad of the soul).” Although many Muslims and non-Muslims render jihad as “holy war,” the word, as it occurs in the Quran – jahada – means “striving” or “struggle,” and not war, much less a holy war, whose defining purpose is to propagate and/or enforce religious beliefs. In fact, there is no scriptural sanction in Islam for a holy war; hence, using the holy war template to explain jihad obscures the specificity of Islamic, and specifically Quranic, formulations of jihad. 

To ascribe therefore these intolerant strains in some contemporary thought to Islam ignores that religions do not interpret themselves – people do. We therefore need to ask who is interpreting, how, and in what particular contexts. It is this failure to do so that leads both Muslims and their critics alike to misinterpret Islam and thus also its teachings on jihad. In part, misrepresentations of Islam by its critics are related to their own epistemologies, psyches, and modes of “othering.”

In the Quran, the word “jihad” (and its derivatives) occurs thirty-six times and refers in all cases to a moral-ethical struggle. Thus, the Quran speaks of the jihad of the soul, the tongue, the pen, of faith, of morality – which together are said to constitute the “greater jihad.” The lesser jihad is considered to be the jihad of arms, but the Quran itself uses the word “qital” (fighting) and its derivations (not jihad) for the practice of warfare. James Turner Johnson in The Holy War Idea In Western And Islamic Traditions states that it is due to the construct of Muslim tradition that “very early associated the two concepts.” Thus, jihad, as signifying the waging of war, is a post-Quranic usage and must be understood in light of how Muslims interpreted the Quran at a particular political and historical conjuncture. 

Unlike the five pillars of Islam (declaration of faith, prayers, giving alms, fasting and pilgrimage), jihad is not a ritual practice. It is a constructed notion of what and how one should be, thus it is predicated by opinions, cultures, socio-historicity and agendas. Through the passage of its history as illustrated in the previous section, jihad developed around the context of military expeditions and militant philosophies conveniently crept in.

An essential aspect needs also be examined: who has the legitimate authority to call upon Muslims to wage war in the name of God? Muhammad and his succeeding caliphs are no longer available to provide these answers, but guidelines were laid out. The Muslim jurists have not declared war simply because the two main requirements for jihad namely, the existential threat to Islam and/or the defensive nature of warfare, is not present for the call of jihad to be made. Calls for “jihad” have only been made by characters such as bin Laden, Mawdudi and Qutb – who are themselves not experts nor jurists in Islamic law. What defines jihad or terrorism depends on who gets to define it. To the extent that the power of naming is contingent on other (material) forms of power, hegemons always will be able to make opportunistic distinctions between jihad and terrorism. In fact, this definitional power also allows political dissent to be recast as terrorism or as conducive to terrorism.

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Understanding Islam

Let us now return to the story of Islam. It is a story anchored in the memories of the first generation of Muslims and catalogued by Muhammad’s earliest biographers, ibn Ishaq (d. 768), ibn Hisham (d. 833), al-Baladhuri (d. 892) and at-Tabari (d. 922). At the heart of this story is the Quran – the divine revelation to Muhammad which he received during a span of some twenty-three years in Mecca and Medina. While it reveals very little about Muhammad’s life, it established the ideology of the Muslim faith in its infancy: that is, before the faith became a religion, before the religion became an institution.

In its own history, Islam was born in Mecca at a time of jahiliyah (age of ignorance: the term given to pre-Islamic society) to deride the idolatry that occurs within the Kaabah, being viewed as paganistic – as opposed to the common understanding that it was born as a response to polytheism. This is so because clearly there already exists Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism – all being monotheistic religion. Muhammad’s initial ministry was focused on “cleansing” the Kaabah of the three hundred and sixty idols surrounding it. This mission creates historical consistency to both the Islamic and pre-Islamic era, and re-established the worship of that one god which can be traced to Abraham who was acknowledged to have built the Kaabah with Ishmael, hence the common reference to the Abrahamic faiths. It is also interesting to note that the Kaabah has a striking physical resemblance to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem – particularly being cube-like, one door and no windows. 

Apart from the religious aspect, Muhammad’s establishment of Islam has a social dimension akin to the Abrahamic way of life. He appeared at a time of social upheaval, religious dilution and the arrival of a new social order in Mecca and Medina. The Quran became the lens and pillar in which the new establishment and ministry was shaped. The Quran, coupled with the physical territories of Mecca and Medina, became an important constitution of Islamic law. A careful study of Islam will reveal that it is not merely based on Quranic laws, but that a large component of its laws are based on the contextual application in these two cities through the hadith and the sunnah, being the second most important source of law after the Quran. Naturally, all queries and clarifications of law were referred to Muhammad – who acts as a final arbiter in its interpretation. When he passed on, the responsibilities of determining the correct interpretation of those laws rests with his four succeeding caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali) who were known as the khulafah ar-rashidin, the rightly guided caliphs. They were not prophets, nor are they intimate with the knowledge of God as Muhammad was, but their intimacy with and rigorous trainings by Muhammad placed them in that special position.

Fast-forward this scenario to the present day. The role performed by Muhammad or the four rightly guided caliphs rests on jurists, who through their mastery of the language of the Quran placed them in this special position. After all, the understanding of religion, as in many other aspects of life as discussed earlier in this paper, revolves around translations: be it language, symbols, myths or rituals. A new dimension has also evolved through time in translating these laws: jurists are performing translations behind the backdrop of significant historical events – the loss of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the collapse of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Seljuks and Ottoman Empires, imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, middle-east conflicts, loss of Palestine and the creation of Israel, loss of territorial lands and political influence, the political and economical influence of powerful nations over it, secularism, terrorism and the like. Understandably, Muslims are careful to limit the jurists’ authority subject to human frailty, bias and individual agendas. 

From that initial historically consolidated and powerful position, Islam’s identity has also disintegrated and Muslims are in a state of diaspora. Recent world events led to this situation, to mention just a few: birth of the Republic of Turkey (1923), Treaty of Balfour (1946), invasion of the Suez Canal (1956), Year of the Catastrophe (1967), the Yom Kippur war (1976), Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), invasion of Lebanon (1982), invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003). These historical events were not only caused by non-Muslim countries, but by Muslim ones. 

By the 20th century, all notions of an Islamic empire have collapsed. Israel, to many Muslims, represented a dividing point to the issue of Islamic identity, as it was an organic state positioned in the middle of Arab lands. That becomes a sore point for Muslims, as their Islamic identity was very tied to the land of Palestine – firstly, it represented Islamic rule for hundred of years, and secondly, it was where Muhammad was believed to have been raised to heaven. At the same time, the Muslim world was also broken up: the French took over Algeria, the British took over India whilst Iraq and the Arab world (particularly Egypt) were dominated by the British and French empires. It was only in 1947 that the first nation state tried to re-establish some form of Islamic identity: Pakistan. That experiment, as we know it, was not highly successful. Then, there was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which we are currently seeing its disintegration even amongst Iranians.

All these historical stories formed an important element in understanding the present Muslims and their state of “wilderness”: they experimented themselves as an ethnic identity devoid of any religious feature and this pan-arabism move was headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s establishment of the United Arab Republic (1973) between Egypt and Syria, on the notion that since Islam originates from the Arabs, Muslims should unite under the identity of the Arabs. This philosophy naturally collapsed as it failed to take into account the millions of Muslims who were not of Arab descent and cannot identify with that forged identity. 

It was Sayyid Qutb’s formation of the Muslim Brotherhood whose ideology influenced and takes advantage of the many angry and identity-less Muslims: that Arab identity is insufficient to galvanize Muslims, instead it is the return to the Islamic identity that should prevail. However, there is one distinct component to Qutb’s ideology which was different from before: that Islam is now still living in the period of jahiliyah. As a result, he declared that it is religiously valid to not only engage war against non-Muslims, but to Muslims who are not living a pious life or who are closely associated with the Western non-Islamic way of life. For the first time since Muhammad established his ministry, that distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims became meaningless. Qutb set up an institutional system where the re-establishment of the Muslim identity can be advanced through militant means, irrespective of religious categories. This is the ideology adopted by bin Laden and his deputy, az-Zahiri in establishing the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which interestingly means “the method”. Qutb’s ideology is a powerful one and gained ground because it binds all Muslims together, irrespective of race and religious sects within Islam, coupled with the diasporic condition of Muslims and the search for an identity that it seeks to reckon with.

The questions that beset Muslims are fundamental: what does it mean to be a Muslim? What does it take to have a Muslim identity? Reza Aslan’s No God But God argues that this is the reformation that Islam is undergoing at the present moment: finding itself and re-establishing its identity after experiencing various failures in its earlier experiments the past two centuries. The real question is hence, whether that reformation would occur fast enough to counter the disastrous repercussions of these fast growing radical movements.

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Understanding How We Function: Perceptions, Categorizations And Habits

How humans understand and make meaning of their existence is a deeply profound process. In Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z Smith made a strong case that scholars in academia invent religion. He posits, “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.” This is an intriguing thought that seems to run contrary to our common understanding of religion. It does not mean, however, that religion does not exist: instead, this notion paves the way and mode of thinking of how we understand and perceive what we term as “religion” or the “story” of faith. What becomes abundantly clear is that religion is an extremely complex subject which does not, and cannot, exist or be understood on its own as a sui generis category. It is surprising therefore that we are less conscious of and are unaware of this continuous invention that we make on a daily basis. In trying to unravel this “story” of faith, religion will have to converse with its environment, context, socio-history, socio-politics, socio-economics – and the deeper we ponder over it, it soon become clear that the surrounding environments affecting it are indeed endless. As religion is also constituted from a personal experience and understanding, equally important is the knowledge of how our physical body process that understanding and meaning making. What we see, understand and perceive as “religious” are effects at a subconscious and bodily level which shaped what and who we are.

The studies on color are fascinating in this regard as it can point towards understanding how our physical bodies (via our vision) works, the way we perceive, categorize and make productive meaning of ourselves and our environment. Using color as structurality and metaphor in cultural and religious studies is a productive way to understand religion in general, and for the purposes of this paper, the place of jihad within Islam, in particular. At a cursory level, we are conscious of and discern the various effects of color on ourselves. For example, we have been conditioned to accept that blue connotes calm and tranquility, red reflects anger and restlessness, and purple conveys the notion of royalty. In fact, the interpretation extents to how we comprehend religion: green is associated with Islam, yellow is associated with Buddhism and red is associated with the Mayan priests. How this identification becomes ingrained in us is a fascinating process.

Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette is instructive. She posits that colors exists only through our minds interpreting the vibrations around us, and because our brains cannot find a useful understanding of them, it translate these interpretations into concepts like “objects”, “smells”, “sounds” and of course “colors”. What is more fascinating is her thesis on how colors are formed. As objects are in themselves “color-less”, they reflect colors as wavelengths or electrons are rearranged in “transition” – absorbing and rejecting some wavelengths to form a certain color-image in our brain. To explain this process through a very simplified example, we see the color green on an apple through two distinct processes: firstly, out of a universe of electro magnetic waves, the eye can only detect a very small portion (between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters) which our brain categorized as “light”, with an astounding ten million variations within that minute vibration. If our eyes can see the whole spectrum, that light appears as “white” but if some wavelengths are missing, it is perceived as “colors”. Out of that category of “colors”, the chemical colors appear as green because it absorbs the red and orange wavelengths from the white light around it, whilst rejecting the green wavelength bouncing it back to our vision through our cortex – hence our eventual perception of the apple being green. This intriguing study leads me to think of colors, and of ourselves, in four main ways:

(a) that just like colors, our environment exists so that we may perceive, translate and understand them. By themselves, they hold little meaning until they are ‘discovered.’ The next question for me is how;

(b) that there are immense amount of information out there that our brain are not able to digest them all. Hence, to a large extent, we perform selective perceptions and create categories of our environment and our existence to ‘reduce’ these vast information for a working understanding of their meanings; 

(c) that we are in a constant state of co-constructing and co-communicating with our environment to continuously make meaning of existence; and

(d) that because we are structured biologically in a rather similar way, to an extent, these translations of our environment hold a similar structural understanding which relates and connects us.

Such close interaction and interdependence is referred to as “enaction” in Varela, Thompson, and Rosh’s The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience and states that “color categorization in its entirety depends upon a tangled hierarchy of perceptual and cognitive processes, some species specific and others culture specific. They also serve to illustrate the point that color categories are not to be found in some pregiven world that is independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities. The categories red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orange – as well as light/warm, dark/cool, yellow-with-green, etc. – are experiential, consensual, and embodied; they depend upon our biological and cultural history of structural coupling.” Therefore, in addition to having a common biological structure that translates similar understanding as seen in Finlay’s studies above, we clearly do have a fairly embedded sense that categories reflect the world as it is separate from us and that members of a common category all share the same distinctive trait.

Another captivating concept relevant to this paper is that of neuroplasticity to illustrate the malleability of our brain. It helps to explain how we structure our perception of color and its structurality to understand the place of jihad in Islam. Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself is an enlightening look at how neuroplasticity in our brain, which promotes change, can lead to both rigidity and repetition in our brains. He cites the work of Pascual-Leone who uses “Play-Doh” plasticine – a very impressionable and malleable matter – to describe how our brain function: that no matter how frequent we repeatedly perform a function, they cannot be an exact repeat performance every time. In his words, “"if you start out with a package of Play-Doh that is a square, and you then make a ball of it, it is possible to get back to a square. But it won't be the same square as you had to begin with. Outcomes that appear similar are not identical. The molecules in the new square are arranged differently than the old one. In other words, similar behaviors, performed at different times, use different circuits.” To protect the brain, as according to him is being so easily altered, from endless changes, he used the metaphor of sliding down a winter hill. As we repeatedly slide down that hill, we create tracks that are so embedded on the slope that it becomes difficult for us to avoid. Out of convenience, for the need of comfort and security, and being creatures of habit, we slope along as close to those established tracks as much as possible. In such a case, those tracks are not genetically determined anymore. Rather than resulting in a state of chaos due to our malleability, our human nature as creatures of habit always complexly strive to be as close to established norms as possible, something it finds definable and familiar, though not necessarily similar. How we are made to be so is a densely scientific and biological explanation beyond the scope of this paper.

Relating back to how our brain function, those mental “tracks” that get laid down can lead to habits, good or bad. Once a habit is established, it becomes very difficult to amend – although not impossible. This is because once habits are formed, they become really convenient, efficient and comforting that as they are entrenched through the passage of time, they become increasingly difficult to change. A major roadblock of some kind is necessary to help us change our habits, perspectives and understanding. This concept enables us to acknowledge that not only is our brain physically growing and developing but it is also continually being trained and shaped as we go along. From the reading of Doidge’s work, this leads me to the conclusion that our brain’s malleability, adaptability, growth and change does take place throughout our entire life cycle, or at least, that it has the potential to do so. This change is closely interconnected with our experience, our environment and through our conversations with them.

This concept of brain plasticity is powerfully connected with the kinds of experiences we may describe as cultural or religious. Our brain becomes deeply patterned through enormous repetition of sensorimotor activities – it is the seat of our kinesthetic selves which through high repetition defines the way we associate and perceive our culture and our concept of religion. It is only through a rigorous, repetitious, kinesthetic process that we can re-condition how we situate ourselves in a new set of meaning making. Hence, our agency to either be or not to be of a certain established construct rests heavily on these brain patterns rather than a definitive conscious choice.

Fortunately, we realize that our brains are more than equipped to create stories and have the mission to do so in order to explain and justify the world we live in and the actions we take. Michael Gazzaniga’s Nature’s Mind illustrates this through his experiment of connecting the shovel with the chicken shed. This gives us another dimension of richness with how we can understand the functioning of our brains, how we relate to our environment and make meaning of our existence.

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Introduction

Religion is the story of faith. It is constituted and predicated by an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors, rituals and myths that provides a common language within a set community of believers. As similar stories are repeated over generations, they developed different versions, meanings and understanding of the original. In order to give structure and meaning to the system, a rigorous exercise of interpretations are continuously carried out to provide a common identity, aspiration and hence, a “common story” to its believers – past, present and future. The question that religious studies scholars frequently pose is: “what do these stories mean?”

The deep-rooted stereotype of Islam as a “religion spread by the sword” has its origins dating in the papal propaganda of the Crusades, when Muslims were depicted as soldiers of the Antichrist in blasphemous occupation of the Holy Lands. Today, the image has been replaced by that of a Muslim terrorist strapped with explosives, eager to rob away innocent life and ready to be martyred in the name of God. Between these two, one common notion consistently remained: that Muslims have been engaged in a perpetual state of “holy war”, or jihad, from the time of Muhammad to the present day. In order to make meaning of this concept, I will have return to this “story” later.

In this paper, I will attempt to link the structurality of color to the critical study of religion, in particular, the concept of jihad, to understand the process of how we perceive, understand and make meanings. As jihad is not sui generis and due to the embodied nature of religion, I posit that color is a productive metaphor to understand how it is co-constructed between the environment and opposing interest groups such as the scholars, the historians or the media in the same way colors are perceived by the body, brain and movement.

Utopia

Utopus having understood that before his coming among them the old inhabitants had been engaged in great quarrels concerning religion, by which they were so divided among themselves, that he found it an easy thing to conquer them, since, instead of uniting their forces against him, every different party in religion fought by themselves. After he had subdued them he made a law that every man might be of what religion he pleased, and might endeavour to draw others to it by the force of argument and by amicable and modest ways, but without bitterness against those of other opinions; but that he ought to use no other force but that of persuasion, and was neither to mix with it reproaches nor violence; and such as did otherwise were to be condemned to banishment or slavery.

This law was made by Utopus, not only for preserving the public peace, which he saw suffered much by daily contentions and irreconcilable heats, but because he thought the interest of religion itself required it. He judged it not fit to determine anything rashly; and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire man in a different manner, and be pleased with this variety; he therefore thought it indecent and foolish for any man to threaten and terrify another to make him believe what did not appear to him to be true. And supposing that only one religion was really true, and the rest false, he imagined that the native force of truth would at last break forth and shine bright, if supported only by the strength of argument, and attended to with a gentle and unprejudiced mind; while, on the other hand, if such debates were carried on with violence and tumults, as the most wicked are always the most obstinate, so the best and most holy religion might be choked with superstition, as corn is with briars and thorns; he therefore left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause.

... Utopia, Thomas More

Books

I suggest that the only books that influence us 

are those for which we are ready, 

and which have gone a little further down our particular path 

than we have gone ourselves.

... Two Cheers For Democracy, E M Forster

The Reader

"Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain? " 

"What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever." 

... The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

The Odyssey

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,

many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,

fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove -

the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,

the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun

and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.

Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,

start from where you will - sing for our time too.

... The Odyssey, Homer

The Lady With The Little Dog

He explained that, too. He talked, thinking all the while that he was going to see her, and no living soul knew of it, and probably never would know. He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth -- such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his "lower race," his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities -- all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

... The Lady With The Little Dog, Anton Chekhov