But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
A Revisionist Historian Looks at Religious Toleration - New York Times, November 24, 2007
At this moment, there may be no more important story than the one Europeans and Americans proudly tell themselves about the rise of religious toleration. So please take note of Benjamin J. Kaplan’s argument that the story may be dangerously flawed.
Mr. Kaplan makes that argument in “Divided by Faith,” just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book’s subtitle is “Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” The crucial word is “practice.” Compare it with “idea” in “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West” (Princeton, 2003), a recent overview of the same history by Perez Zagorin.
In his account, Mr. Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, moves swiftly from St. Augustine’s case for the persecution of heretics to the Protestant Reformers, who challenged the Roman Catholic monopoly on doctrinal authority but not the belief in using coercion to defend true teaching. Finally, Mr. Zagorin marches through his pages a regiment of champions of religious toleration.
They begin with the admirable Sebastian Castellio. Castellio protested the execution in John Calvin’s Geneva of Michael Servetus, the anti-Trinitarian theologian who had run afoul of both the Catholic Inquisition and Protestant officialdom. Dutch and English defenders of toleration next pass in review until, on the cusp of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the story culminates with the philosophers John Locke and Pierre Bayle.
A brief coda brings in Voltaire, James Madison, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty.
This is a familiar kind of triumphal history. It pits the forces of progress, i.e., those who share our modern values, against the forces of resistance, i.e., those who don’t. Whatever the struggle, each step mounts another rung on a single ladder leading, by natural stages, to ourselves.
Mr. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, does not set out to refute this account but to shift the focus, from elite thinkers and theories to popular beliefs and behavior.
His first achievement is to convey the communal nature of early modern religion. Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.
Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750.
This was the age of frightful religious wars, as rulers yoked religion to dynastic ambitions. But religious wars did not usually mean neighbor against neighbor. Religious violence among neighbors tended to be sporadic, often ignited when one religious group engaged in public rituals that a rival group felt contaminated communal space.
Munson: Scheuer ignores the fact that Sunni militias armed by the US have been defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq and bin Laden knows it. Bin Laden can of course portray Iraq as a great victory in the sense that the US is bogged down in a prolonged and ultimately unwinnable war that has intensified the hostility toward the US that facilitates recruitment by militant Islamic groups like al-Qaeda. But the fact remains that Shiite fundamentalists–supported to various degrees by Iran–will continue to control most of Iraq. Such people are fundamentally hostile to the anti-Shiite fundamentalism of Sunni groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq, which have absolutely no chance of ever taking control of the Iraqi government. Al-Qaeda’s vision of a Wahhabi state in Iraq is as chimerical as the Bush administration’s vision of a docile pro-American state that would serve as a model of “the new Middle East.”
Scheuer, Bin Laden talks of victory, not defeat, Asia Times Online, November 22, 2007
Nearly a month since Osama bin Laden published his message to “our people in Iraq”, it is worth taking a look at what bin Laden really said versus what the media, Western leaders and some prematurely mirthful pundits claim he said.
In the most obvious sense, bin Laden’s October 23 statement is a post-Iraq war statement and a further development of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2005 message to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the now dead leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. From al-Qaeda’s perspective, the war is over and Islam has won; Washington’s announcement last week that it intends to begin the withdrawal of 3,000 troops, as well as the US Congress’ recess without renewing war funding, will bolster this perception. Bin Laden’s message is, however, a warning to all Iraqi mujahideen - Sunni and Shi’ite - that the hardest task is yet to come: namely, the creation of an Islamist state in Iraq.
Bin Laden’s October 23 message builds on the July 2005 letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi. At that time, Zawahiri told Zarqawi that the mujahideen had beaten the US-led coalition and urged him to prepare for US withdrawal, which might, he added, be “precipitous”. Bin Laden’s October message mirrors Zawahiri’s in concluding that the US coalition has been beaten, and in stating that the only unknown is the precise moment of its withdrawal.
There is nothing in bin Laden’s statement that criticizes the mujahideen for not fighting well - indeed, he refers to “magnificent victories” that make Americans “prisoners of their bases and the Green Zone” - much less anything that suggests they are losing. “The world has stood stunned, amazed, delighted and wonder-struck” over the Iraqi mujahideen’s effectiveness and perseverance, the al-Qaeda chief said.
AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07
AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.
Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.
“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.
“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”
Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.