(The written text of a lecture given at Rewley House, University of Oxford, 30 August 2019)
The complex, multifaceted and dynamic relationship between religion and politics has always played a significant role throughout the history of human development, nowhere more so than in the Middle East that has been the cradle of many world religions, including Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Mithraism, Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam, which have exerted the greatest influence on the lives of millions of people over many centuries.
Religion is an early and, it seems, an inherent characteristic of human beings. Even in primitive societies, most people believed intensely in a deity, often out of fear, and they worshipped it to the extent of sacrificing their own children to appease that angry god, even if that god was an idol made by their own hands. This reminds me of a poem by the 12th-century Persian mystical poet Sana’i, who said:
خود بخود شکل د یو میکرد ند
پس زترسش غریو میکرد ند
(They made an idol with their own hands in the shape of a demon, then they cried out of fear of it).
Of course, idols can be made either with metals and stones or with ideas and concepts. They can be stories that we invent and then gradually enlarge and sanctify in order to explain our human condition.
One of the main reasons for the evolution of religious thought has been the effort to make sense of our human condition, with all its uncertainty, pain, sickness and death. On the surface, our lives seem meaningless. In the words of Shakespeare in Macbeth
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In the words of the great Iranian agnostic poet, Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward Fitzgerald
How sweet is mortal Sovranty! – think some;
Others – “How blest the Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!
Or
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes – or it prospers, and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,
Lightning a little Hour or two – is gone.
Religion as a source of hope and solace
These are not notions that warm our hearts and arouse the multitudes. On the contrary, they give rise to unbearable anxiety that forces us to try to find a way of coping with them. In the face of life’s tribulations, people seek a belief system that appears to justify those tribulations, or provides solace, enabling them to minimise their effect.
Instinctively, we turn to religion to find an answer or at least solace for our precarious condition. This is why even a leading atheist such as Professor Richard Dawkins says that religion has been hardwired into our brains. Another prominent atheist, Jean-Paul Sartre, described the result of the awareness of an indifferent universe, devoid of meaning and purpose, as a factor that has given rise to a “God-shaped hole” in modern consciousness.
At their best, religions inspire noble thoughts and deeds and uplift us to a realm beyond our mundane world. During the Middle Ages, when lives were short and miserable, religion provided a great deal of solace and support. Even at the present time, when people are faced with tragedies, religious rituals and association with fellow-believers reduce the extent of loss and bereavement and enable us to cope better with pain and loneliness.
It is believed that religions started when early human beings began to imagine worlds beyond what they experienced with their senses. There is some evidence that even the Neanderthals buried their dead, which is evidence of the use of ritual and perhaps belief in the afterlife. The use of burial rituals is evidence of religious activity.
Some scholars believe that religious thought evolved after the discovery of language and communication. The psychologist Philip Lieberman states: “Human religious thought and moral sense clearly rest on a cognitive-linguistic base”. The religious mind is one consequence of the development of the human brain that is capable of formulating religious and philosophical ideas. The biologist Paul Ehrlich states: “Religious ideas can be traced to the evolution of brains large enough to make possible the kind of abstract thought necessary to formulate religious philosophical ideas.”
The development of human imagination played a big role in the rise of religions. As it can be clearly seen from a study of comparative religion, what people imagined in different parts of the world was quite different from each other, giving rise to completely different religious beliefs. The Greek mythology, the pantheon of Hindu gods, the Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Muslim views are all very different from each other, yet all of them provided a set of beliefs and dogmas that were regarded as sacred by their adherents. It would be futile to try to argue which of those belief systems is correct and which is false, or which one is better than others, because they all concern faith and have little to do with logical or scientific proofs.
Despite all their clear differences, all religions have emerged out of the cultures and circumstances in which they were born. The followers of different religions have sincerely believed in the truth of those religions and have derived a great deal of meaning and satisfaction from them. Their adherents believed so strongly in those religions that, often in the course of history, we have seen many bloody wars between the followers of different religions, because they regarded their myths or versions of religious beliefs as the only divine and correct path, to the exclusion of all others.
Similarities and differences between different religions
Although one can see some similarities between the religions emanating from similar backgrounds, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam that originated in the Middle East or Hinduism and Buddhism that developed in the Indian subcontinent, there are not many similarities between religions that developed under different cultures. There are some similarities between the religions that developed among the Semitic people, starting from the old Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian religions, right up to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are also many similarities in the worldviews of religions that developed among the Indo-Europeans, such as Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc., but there is very little in common between those two religious traditions, or between them and many other forms of religion in Africa, the Far East, or Greek and Roman mythologies, etc.
Regardless of their differences, religions have widened the scope of human imagination and, as a result, have had an enormous impact on the production of literature, philosophy, ethics, arts, politics, and human civilisation as a whole. Some historians, including the late influential British historian Arnold Toynbee, believe that religion’s influence on man’s life has been so pervasive and all-encompassing that we should regard human culture and civilisation as a byproduct of religion. Toynbee maintained that instead of talking about Indian, Chinese, Iranian, Hebrew or European civilisations, it would be more appropriate to speak of Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian civilisations.
The main attraction of religion to successive generations has been due to its claim that it can help us find some real or perceived answers to the existential issues we face, including the meaning of life and the purpose behind our existence. Therefore, together with science, philosophy and ethics, religion has also tried to provide some answers to man’s fundamental questions.
Kaikhosrow Irani, a former professor of philosophy at City College in New York, put forward his four principles or four ways of understanding the world: 1- Making sense of the outside world – science. 2- Making use of science in our daily lives – technology. 3- Learning how to get on with our fellow men – ethics and morality. 4- Trying to understand ourselves and where we come from, and where we go – Religion. For most people, the last of the four principles is of the greatest importance as it deals with the basic questions of who we are, where we have come from and where we go to.
But religion is not merely an aspect of the psychological need of human beings to believe in a deity and an abstract ideology, but it is also a form of social interaction. The great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, made a distinction between belief that is private and religion that is communal. Therefore, religion by definition involves some form of social interaction with others, and it affects the way that we live in society or approach politics.
Religions have had and continue to have an enormous impact on social interactions in different societies. Consequently, the study of the relationship between religion and politics forms a fundamental part of the disciplines of history, politics, political philosophy, ethics, law, sociology, anthropology, literature and the arts.
We normally inherit our religious beliefs
Most people are not conscious of the fact that we inherit our religious ideas from our parents in the same way that we learn the language that we speak. A child hears his or her parents speak, and after a while unconsciously picks up the sounds, words, structure and grammar of the parents’ language and learns to speak it in perfect accent and vocabulary. In the same way, quite unconsciously, we learn our religious and cultural ideas from our parents too. This is why, as a rule, a child born into a Christian or a Jewish or an Islamic family follows the parents’ religion in the same way that he or she learns the language that they speak. In the same way that our language stays with us for the rest of our lives, most of us also adhere to our inherited religious and cultural ideas, with rare exceptions of conversion or rebellion. This is an important point to bear in mind that the language that we speak or the religion that we follow is not a mark of distinction or pride, but is merely an accident of birth and an inherited attribute.
The next point to bear in mind is that religion is not merely an abstract concept, but is often associated with some rules and rituals. This is why most religious scriptures are full of commandments, thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that. That is also why most religions have a hierarchy and a form of priesthood to enable or often to force the believers (and even non-believers) to live by those codes. Even though most religious founders have rebelled against the oppressive influence of the priests of a previous religion, the fact remains that nearly all religions have developed some powerful hierarchies of gurus, shamans, rabbis, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, popes, imams, ayatollahs and grand-ayatollahs.
Even in religions such as Christianity and Islam that started with a pronounced hostility towards rabbis who served in the Jewish temple or pagan religious leaders such as those serving in the temple in Mecca, both religions soon developed powerful clerical establishments that often became even more influential than kings and secular rulers. As an old Zoroastrian writing says: “Religion and state are one, brothers born of one womb and never to be parted.” Once the authority of the chief priests had been asserted, deviance was not only heresy but treason. Even now, in most religions, leaving the fold of the believers is regarded as apostasy, sometimes punished by death.
Of course, it is futile to argue whether religions are true or false, because for the believer, religion is a matter of faith, not rational arguments. In a sense, it is the same as asking if literature is true or false. It is simply an aspect of human imagination and mental capabilities. This is why religions, like all forms of arts and literature, are varied and differ from one culture to another. They all reflect the societies out of which they have emerged.
The resurgence of religious belief
Far from seeing the demise of religion as the result of scientific developments and the intellectual advances during the Age of Enlightenment, in recent decades we have seen a resurgence of religious belief. The establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, or an Islamic state in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, the growing Islamisation in Turkey, the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, the Hindu Nationalist government in India, the rise of a nationalist Buddhist government in Myanmar resulting in the ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Rohingyas, the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia, the decisive influence of the Christian Right and evangelical churches in US politics, etc. show the growing influence of religion on politics.
Then, we have the rise of various terrorist groups that act in the name of a religion. In Islamic countries, we have seen the rise of al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 outrage, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that tried to establish an Islamic caliphate in those countries, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabab in Somalia and East Africa, etc. In Christianity, we have had the Lord’s Resistance Army or the Taiping Rebellion, the Ku Klux Klan, the Branch Davidian Sect, etc. In Judaism, there have been several extremist groups, such as the Haganah, the Irgun, Lehi, etc., that have engaged in terrorism to advance their religious or nationalist agenda.
Many terrorist acts have also been carried out by various Hindu and Buddhist groups. The term “Saffron Terror” has been used to refer to terrorist acts carried out by the members of extremist Hindu national organisations, such as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Abhinav Bharat. All of this testifies to the continuing influence of religion and its ability to control or to distort the minds of religious believers in different communities.
The impact of religious beliefs on political developments
There are many political or territorial disputes in different parts of the world, but religious justification for those disputes makes them so much harder to resolve. Take the case of Kashmir, which is once again at the centre of a major crisis between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed states. It is basically a territorial conflict over the Kashmir region, which started after the partition of India in 1947. However, in addition to being a conflict over territory, it has also been turned into a religious conflict between the Muslim majority of Kashmir and its Hindu minority, backed by India.
In the Middle East, we have the main conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians over the establishment of the state of Israel and over the partition of Palestine. Both communities try to justify their claim to the land by referring to their scriptures. Religious Jews claim that the land was given to them by God, while religious Muslims stress Jerusalem’s association with Prophet Muhammad’s Mi’raj or “Ascension to Heaven”, apart from the fact that Palestine and Jerusalem were under Muslim rule for over 1,300 years before the establishment of the State of Israel with a short interregnum during the Crusades.
Jerusalem’s significance as a religious city and its temples that are sacred to both Jews, Christians and Muslims go back to a date before the arrival of the Hebrews in Canaan. There was already a Jebusite temple in Jerusalem as early as the fourteenth century BC, long before the Hebrews arrived in Canaan. However, the Jews trace the beginning of their history to their connection with Jerusalem, and look to Biblical justification for their claim of the ownership of the land. In the Bible, we have the story of Abraham and his brother Lot when they allegedly returned from Egypt. Abraham dwelt in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain. “And the Lord said to Abram, after Lot had parted from him, ‘Look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward: for all the land which you see will I give you, and your descendants for ever.’…” [Genesis 13:14]
It should be added that not only is it not possible to provide the exact dates of Abraham’s birth and death, it is even difficult to say in which century or even which millennium he lived. He is a figure that plays a prominent role in both Jewish and Islamic myths. According to the Muslims, he was an Arab who first preached monotheism and built the Ka’bah, also referred to as Bayt Allah (House of God) in Mecca, while Jews regard him as a patriarch who was the founding father of the special relationship between the Jews and God. Many modern scholars who have examined the patriarchal stories believe that the names and social milieu strongly suggest that they were Iron Age creations and that Abraham was just a mythical figure revered by both Jews and Arabs.
Biblical verses allegedly promising the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants
When Abram was 99 years old and Sarah his wife was 90 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said to him: “I am God Almighty; and I will make my covenant between me and you and will multiply you exceedingly. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, ‘Shall a child be born unto him that is one hundred years old? And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear a child?’ [Genesis 17:17]
There are a number of references to Yahweh, the national god of ancient Israel and Judah, promising the land to Abraham and his descendants. However, others, including early Christians, interpret those verses differently. According to the New Testament, the promise is interpreted not according to genealogy but along religious lines. For instance, in Galatians 3:16, St Paul draws attention to the formulation of the promise, avoiding the term “seeds” in the plural, choosing instead “seed”: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say ‘and to seeds,’ meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed,’ meaning one person, who is Christ.” In Galatians 3:28-29, Paul goes further and argues that the promise did not have a genetic/physical association, but a spiritual/religious one: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
In other words, the promise was not territorial but spiritual, which passed on from Abraham to Christ or from Judaism to Christianity. This, of course, puts quite a different emphasis on the issue of the inheritance of the land to which most Jews adhere. If one is going to take the promise to Abraham literally, we have to accept other Biblical verses literally too. According to the Bible, the world was created some 6,000 years ago. God made Adam and then took one of his ribs and made Eve. According to the Book of Genesis (chapters 6-9), ten generations after the creation of Adam, God saw that the earth was corrupt and he decided to destroy what he had created.
However, God found only one righteous man, Noah, and to him he confided his intention: “I am about to bring on the Flood … to eliminate everywhere all flesh in which there is the breath of life.” God instructed him to build an ark, and Noah entered the Ark in his six hundredth year. Rain fell for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered to a depth of 15 cubits, and all life perished except Noah and those with him in the Ark. Noah and his three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, together with their wives, were saved from the Deluge to repopulate the Earth. So, all the people of the world are descended from Noah’s three sons.
One can hardly find anyone these days who believes in those tales, but only God’s meeting with Abraham and his promise to him and his descendants are taken literally and form part of the political discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries. Given the mythological nature of those verses and different interpretations of what they really mean, it is quite disheartening when we see that many otherwise intelligent and educated people still speak of the “Promised Land” and the “Chosen People”.
Muhammad’s Night Journey
For Muslims, Prophet Muhammad’s mystical Night Journey was one of the most significant events during his prophetic mission. The Mi’raj is almost a re-enactment of the Revelation of God to Moses through the Burning Bush. We read in the Koran: “He carried His servant [Muhammad] by night from the sacred temple (in Mecca) to the temple that is more remote (in Jerusalem) whose precincts we have blessed, that We might show him of our Sings.”
Concerning this miraculous journey, which took place in the twinkling of an eye, we further read:
“It is not but a revelation that was revealed: One terrible in power taught it him, endued with wisdom. Evenly poised, he stood in the highest part of the horizon; then came he nearer and approached, and was at the distance of two bow-shots, or even closer. And He revealed to His servant what He revealed; his heart falsified not what he saw. Do ye then dispute with him concerning what he saw? He had seen Him also another time, near the Sidra-tree which marks the boundary, near which is the garden of repose. When the Sidra-tree was covered with what covered it, his eye turned not aside, nor did it wander, for he saw the greatest of the signs of His Lord.” [The Koran: Surah 17, al-Isra]
To a non-believer, these verses seem sheer fantasy, the same as a 90-year-old woman giving birth or Jesus rising from the dead, but to the believers, these are the most important mystical verses in the Koran that speak of a time when Muhammad was ushered into the presence of God. According to some Muslim commentators, the bow-shots refer to the arch of heaven and the earth when the two met, and God almost touched his Prophet. One can also clearly see similarities between Muhammad’s first Revelation on Mount Hira and the Revelation of God to Moses on Mount Sinai. These are what Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences.” Therefore, both Muslims and Jews find verses in their ancient scriptures to back their claim to Jerusalem and to Palestine/Israel.
Mythos and Logos
As Karen Armstrong, one of the most prolific and prominent religious scholars of recent times, has observed:
“Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity…”[https://andreaskluth.org/2009/09/22/mythos-and-logos-armstrong-v-dawkins/]
However, most fundamentalist believers confuse logos and mythos. The story of Abraham and Sarah having a child at an old age and God blessing the child and giving his descendants the ownership of the land is not “logos” and cannot be justified by any logical argument. God did not physically come down and talk to Abraham. It belongs to the realm of “mythos”, imagination and mystical vision that has no bearing on history or reality. Similarly, Muhammad’s Night Journey to Heaven, visiting various levels of Heaven and meeting different former prophets on the way, did not happen in reality but was a mystical vision that cannot be used as a justification for any religion’s ownership of a piece of land.
Christian Zionists
As though the conflict between the Jews and the Muslims over the interpretation of some verses in the Bible or the Koran was not enough, we have the phenomenon of Christian evangelicals and Christian Zionists in the United States that adds fuel to that conflict. In addition to the attachment of the Jews to Israel, we also have the added issue of Christian Zionists, mainly in the United States, who see the return of the Jews to Israel as a part of the divine plan for the Second coming of Jesus.
Despite many UN resolutions that declare that the final status of Jerusalem must be left to an agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the establishment of a Palestinian state, President Donald Trump with the active participation of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been a fervent supporter of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian lands, transferred US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The annexation of Jerusalem violates many UN Security Council resolutions. For instance, Resolution 476, 30 June 1980, reaffirmed the “overriding necessity for ending the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967” and reiterated that all measures which had altered the status of Jerusalem were “null and void” and had to be rescinded.
Resolution 478, 20 August 1980, condemned in “the strongest terms” the enactment of Israeli law proclaiming a change in the status of Jerusalem. The resolution called on all states “that have established diplomatic missions in Jerusalem to withdraw them from the city.”
Yet, in clear violation of these resolutions, Trump ordered the US Embassy to be transferred to Jerusalem, which he declared as the “undivided capital” of the Jewish state, to the acclaim of Christian evangelicals and Christian Zionists.
The May 2018 ceremony marking the opening of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem featured many Christian Zionists, as well as Israeli and American politicians. Two evangelical Christian megachurch pastors from Texas who acted as advisers to Trump, Robert Jeffress and John Hagee, earnestly prayed and thanked God for making the state of Israel possible, and praised Trump for having the courage to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people.
Jeffress intoned: “Father, we are…grateful as we think about [the founding of the state of Israel in 1948], when you fulfilled the prophecies of the prophets from thousands of years ago and regathered your people in this promised land.” Jeffress is a regular guest on Fox News where he preaches the Christian Zionist ideology.
In his address, John Hagee identified Jerusalem as the city “where Messiah will come and establish a kingdom that will never end.” Hagee is the founder of the main US Christian Zionist organisation, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which allegedly has more than ten million members. Hagee has been a recipient of the Zionist Organisation of America’s Israel Award.
However, not all will benefit from this end of times. While Christians will be saved and “live forever with Christ in a new heaven and earth,” those adhering to other religions who do not convert to Christianity, including the Jews, will be sent to hell.
Jeffress, for example, once said that Judaism, Islam and Hinduism “lead people…to an eternity of separation from God in hell,” and Hagee suggested in a 1990s sermon that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get Jewish people “back to the land of Israel.”
The pastors and their white evangelical followers, who comprise a significant portion of Trump’s base, with over 80 per cent of them having voted for him in 2016, had lobbied the president hard to move the embassy to Jerusalem. In an interview with the far-right site Breitbart, Hagee related that he had told Trump: “The moment that you [move the embassy], I believe that you will step into political immortality.”
About a quarter of US adults identify as evangelical Christians, and over eighty per cent of them express the belief that the modern state of Israel and the “re-gathering of millions of Jewish people to Israel” are fulfillments of the biblical prophecy that shows that the return of Jesus is drawing closer. Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, argues that Christian Zionism is now the “majority theology” among white US evangelicals. This shows the significant influence of Christian Zionism, particularly under the Trump Administration, when White House leaders, such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are avowed evangelical Christians. Indeed, in 2017, Pence was the first sitting vice president to address CUFI.
It is not only Christian Zionists who have messianic expectations; former Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad also belonged to an Islamic sect that fervently expects the imminent return of the Hidden Imam (a Messianic figure for many Shi’is). He often started his lectures with a prayer for the speedy return of the Hidden Imam. Jamkaran is a village near Qom, one of Iran’s leading religious centres. There is a beautiful tenth-century mosque in Jamkaran, which some Shi’a Muslims believe will be the venue for the return of the Hidden Imam. At times, Ahmadinejad used to take his entire cabinet to that mosque to pray for the speedy return of the Imam.
What can be done?
It is important to bear in mind that religious belief is not just a matter of personal choice and a victimless conviction, but often in history and in our own time it has led to many conflicts as we can see in the recent history of the Middle East, the wars of partition between India and Pakistan, recent conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, etc. Therefore, it is time to address the issue seriously and to find ways of at least softening the effect of religious radicalism and fundamentalism.
Religious belief is often based on faith, rather than on rational arguments or academic and scientific investigation. Nevertheless, it is possible to think of ways to encourage the believers to look at their beliefs with a more open mind. This can be achieved through the following means:
1- Education. Religious scriptures belonged to a prescientific age, and most of their contents can be proved to be wrong by the standards of our modern understanding. Take their view of creation. For many Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, creation was a single occurrence that happened by the will of God some six thousand years ago, “let there be and there was”. This formed the basis of the belief not only of uneducated masses but of some highly learned and educated people.
James Usher (1581-1656) was the Irish Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was also a friend of Sir Thomas Bodley, who founded the Bodleian Library. He was a prolific scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the Creation, which he calculated of having occurred at “the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October… the year before Christ 4004”, that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC according to the Proleptic Julian calendar.
We have a more or less similar account in the Hebrew Calendar. The current Jewish year 5779 is calculated from the Jewish date of creation based upon the Seder Olam Rabbah (or chronology) of Rabbi Jose ben Halafta, a 2nd-century AD scholar. According to him, the creation started on Monday, 25 Elul, or 6 October 3761 BC, in the Julian calendar. These dates clearly do not correspond with what we know now.
Most astrophysicists now estimate the age of the universe to be about 13.75 billion years since the Big Bang. On 23 April 2009, a gamma-ray burst was detected, which was later confirmed to be over 13 billion years old. Astronomers estimate that there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
The Solar System is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. However, organised religion traces its roots to the Neolithic period that began 11,000 years ago in the Near East, but may have occurred independently in several other locations around the world.
2- Learning about the Scriptures. We must familiarise ourselves with the contents of the scriptures. The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscript dates to about the 2nd century BC. The oldest record of the complete text survives in a Greek translation (Codex Sinaiticus) and dates from the 4th century AD, and the oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic (Aramaic) text, upon which modern editions are based, dates from the 9th century AD.
In the case of the New Testament, the Chester Beatty Papyrus II is the earliest piece of the New Testament known to exist. This contains most of St Paul’s letters copied circa AD 100. The John Rylands Manuscript contains part of the Gospel of St John copied in AD 130. It can be found in the John Rylands Library of Manchester. The Codex Vaticanus is a Greek copy of the entire Old Testament and most of the New Testament, and it was copied between the years 325 and 350 AD.
The process whereby the text of the Bible was divided up into chapters and verses for ease of reference and of public reading took even longer, with the establishment of chapter divisions usually being attributed to Stephen Langton (died 1228), a lecturer in the University of Paris who later became archbishop of Canterbury. The further subdivision of the chapters into verses was accomplished first for the Old Testament, by Rabbi Isaac Nathan in around 1440, and then a system was established for the New Testament in Geneva around 1550 by Robert Stephanus.
It should be remembered that when these old scriptures were communicated orally and then written down, often many centuries later, there were very few literate people and there were no reliable means of recording, documenting and preserving those texts. This is why, practically in all old scriptures, we see many borrowings from earlier sources, and also many differences and even contradictions in the texts.
The Koran: Even in the case of Islam and the Koran, which are much closer to our times, we do not have any reliable documents from the time of the Prophet himself. There are many problems with our sources on early Islam. The Koran, which is roughly the size of the New Testament, consists of the revelations allegedly made to Muhammad over the 23 years of his mission, in which God is the speaker most of the time. The Koran (Qur’an), meaning Recitation, has 114 surahs or chapters of varying length, and there is no chronological sequence of these chapters in the book; generally, they have been listed from the longest to the shortest. Paradoxically, most of the earlier surahs are at the end of the book and the later surahs at the beginning. Each surah has a title, usually taken from a distinct word or name in its text.
Parts of the Koran were initially memorised by early companions of Muhammad and passed down orally. Following Muhammad’s death in 632 AD, many of those scribes and early companions of the Prophet were killed in the Battle of Yamama. Therefore, fearing that soon most of those who were with Muhammad and had memorised parts of the Koran would die, the third Orthodox Caliph (khulafa Rashidun) Uthman ibn Affan (r. 23–35/644-655) appointed a commission consisting of Zayd bin Thabit (d. 655) who was one of the early scribes of the Prophet to compile the Koran. The surviving Koran was compiled by Zayd and his commission between 644-656 (some 12 to 24 years after the Prophet’s death and some 35 to 47 years after the first surahs were revealed).
There is very little information about Muhammad’s life in the Koran. Aside from a few Koranic references, all the sources that we have about him were written down after the Abbasid Revolution of 750 AD against the Umayyads. The first author to compile a complete biography of Muhammad, the chronicler Muhammad ibn Ishaq of Medina, was born around 704 and died sometime between 761 and 770.
He may have been commissioned to write down his epic biography in the 750s by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur. In other words, he wrote his biography more than a century after Muhammad’s death and, as a result, his account that formed the basis of later biographies of the prophet was based on hearsay, rather than on personal knowledge.
Much of what Ibn Ishaq alleges about the Prophet contradicts the Koran. Since that account was composed 125-30 years after Muhammad’s death, out of some material that had long circulated purely in oral form, it was deeply shaped by later controversies and pious additions, and is anachronistic. Ibn Ishaq collected oral traditions and dictated them to his pupils, which are collectively known as Sirat Rasul Allah (Life of the Messenger of God). Unfortunately, the original text has not survived. What we have now is an edited copy or recension of his work, which was further edited by Ibn Hisham, who died in 833 AD, or about two centuries after Muhammad’s death.
Therefore, our knowledge of the Koran, the Gospels and the Hebrew scriptures is based on accounts written posthumously, and in some cases hundreds of years later. Although they give us a good idea of what their authors believed, they can hardly be relied upon as the exact words of God or as the most authentic records of the beliefs of these ancient prophets.
3- Emphasising the positive and beautiful parts of the scriptures. As they stand, most scriptures have many positive, moral and ethical teachings, but they also contain many violent passages, even some advocating killing and genocide that are completely at variance with our modern ideals about individual liberty and human rights. Some radical and fundamentalist believers dwell mainly on the restrictive, dogmatic and violent interpretations of some verses that support their own radical and fanatical views. This is how terrorists in all religions take a few verses out of context, through which they justify their own twisted, narrow and harsh views. Therefore, it is essential to concentrate on the more positive and constructive verses and realise that some of the violent verses reflect the views of the time when they were written and have to be discarded now.
4- Enjoying the scriptures as examples of great literature. No rational person can regard the scriptures as the exact and authoritative word of God. In the same way that we have great literary, philosophical, artistic and scientific texts that are testaments to man’s great intellect and imagination, religious scriptures also reveal another aspect of man’s spiritual and mystical faculties. Clearly, each of us has a favourite poet or literary text, but this does not mean that we reject all other great literary works. It is quite natural that we may also prefer one scripture to another, but this does not mean that only one text contains all the truth and all other ones have to be rejected.
In fact, this may be the only way that we can ensure the continued relevance of different scriptures in the future. These days, even a child with a primary school education and a rudimentary knowledge of science cannot accept the literal meaning of most scriptures. Judging by what we know of the lives of the leaders of most religions, it is difficult to regard them as infallible individuals whose lives can set an example for the present or future generations. It is only by accepting the human limitations of those prophets and regarding different scriptures as great works of literature that we can defend their relevance for the present and the future. By enjoying the beauty of all the scriptures and freeing ourselves from blind devotion to any one of them we can rescue them from unfair criticism, and free ourselves from deliberately closing our minds to greater truths that the advancement of science and human ingenuity provides us. This may also be the best way to rescue religions from the narrow and dogmatic interpretations of the fundamentalists and terrorists.
As the great American poet, essayist, and mystic Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.” In an entry in his Journals in 1839, he wrote:
“People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in the world it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it came out of profounder depth of thought than any other book, and the effect must be peculiarly proportionate – I have used in the above remarks the Bible for the ethical revelation considered generally, including that is, the Vedas, the Sacred writings of every nation and not of the Hebrews alone.”
5- Stressing the spirit, rather than the letter, of the scriptures. Most scriptures contain verses that can be taken literally, or we can look for deeper, mystical meanings behind the superficial meaning of the words. We should try to provide the widest mystical meaning of the verses, rather than sticking to the literal text and more limited interpretations. As the Gospel teaches us: “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” [2 Corinthians, 3:6]
Often, the literal interpretations of the scriptures can result in fundamentalism and dogmatism, while the more mystical interpretations of them can help us transcend dogma and see some spiritual truths in all the scriptures. In the following poem, the great Persian mystic poet Rumi speaks of the more universal and spiritual message of the scriptures that one can find in all religions:
Nor Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens,
With wandering talk it closes.
The recorded speech
F Jahanpour 