Alright. Finally finished reading up
From The Holy Mountain after three-odd months of reading while commutting. For those of you who haven't been paying attention to hints I've been dropping all along, it's a rivetting contemporary travelogue through the last remnants of the ancient Byzantine empire. The Byzantine empire, the book asserts, is an era when Christianity had just supplanted the earlier Pagan beliefs, to become the sole choice of the religiously inclined, in the Middle East.
Indeed, the most startling of the messages of the book was that Islam, in its nascent stages during the inter-regnum between the decaying Byzantine empire and the still pre-pubescent Islamic civilizational centers, was once considered as one of the many theological branches in Christianity no different from Gnostics, the Suriani, the Maronites, Coptics and other assorted sects that dot the Holy Land. It's a long-forgotten tale of how the Christian practice of kneeling down before a cross became the Muslim namaz, of how fasting during the month of Lent became Ramadan, of Jerusalem-facing square church-towers becoming round Mecca-facing minarets. The setting is evocative, three religions co-operating in their religious imagery for a thousand-odd years, before tragically replacing each others in the past one hundred years, with genocides in Turkey and Lebanon, occupation in Palestine and Israel, and fundamentalist terrorism in Egypt.
In many ways, this ties in with the larger politico-ideological commentary of the book. There's this strong undercurrent in the book on how Christian communities in the Middle East seem to have been forgotten by their co-religionists in the West, at a time when their very existence is in question. Why do the US and UK support Israel uncritically when the regime there seems to be extremely eager in destroying any non-Jewish community, Muslim, Palestinian Christian or Armenian, in Jerusalem and West Bank? Clearly, if this was a clash of civilizations, shouldn't the Christian-majority West be concerned about Israeli settlements in Bethelhem or Nazareth, for example?
The answer, I believe, lies not just in the apparent power of the Jewish lobby in the US (personally I don't quite think it exists, but that's besides the point) as many would suggest, but more importantly in the hagiographies involved of the modern Israeli nation. Consider, for example, the official narrative for a West Bank settlement mentioned in the book, Ariel:
Aliyah & Absorption
Thousands of new immigrants, from the four corners of the world, have chosen to build their homes in Ariel and have been successfully integrated into the community. Today, over 45 % of Ariel's population are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Many special programs and projects, from Hebrew Ulpan classes to rent controlled housing for senior citizens, have been established to let the newcomers know they are wanted and welcome in Ariel. [emphasis mine]
Consider the values the City would like to espouse. This, unlike similar gated communities in the US for example, doesn't mind people who might be different in a few respects, and in fact, offers abundant housing options and efforts at e-governance. The operative word here is that bad L word; this is a
liberal town, the website seems to say, a forward-looking, technologically-oriented, open-minded muncipality established in an exotic, Biblical land.
The untold part, of course, is what has been white-washed; Ariel, despite being in the middle of a thick coat of orange in the map, is actually war-zone central:
Ariel is the first reported case of colonizing efforts in the Salfit district, which at the present time has a 1:1 ratio of Israeli settlers to Palestinian residents. The Salfit district has become an extremely important location for Israeli settlement policy, and now Israeli settlements (24) outnumber Palestinian villages (22) and cover almost 10% of the land area of Salfit. Ariel settlement is the most well known and largest of the Salfit settlements, and with its own college, municipal court, and police station, has long been thought of within Israeli society as just another "town", rather than a settlement in the West Bank. Some of the factors that help to explain Ariel's significance within Israeli settlement policy include the abundance of water and agricultural resources in the Salfit district (known as the breadbasket of the West Bank). Additionally, a major "Israeli population center" in the geographical heart of the West Bank ultimately acts as a "fact on the ground", cementing Israel's control of the area and acting as an impediment to Palestinian territorial contiguity.
Smart City it might be, but all said and done, Ariel a strategic land-grab, not unlike
basti-dwellers squatting over at the National park in Borivili, Mumbai, only more tragic in its human cost. However, and this is where the conflict is at its most interesting, narratives in Israel seem to emphasise a liberal basis for the nation; this is an open nation with a functioning multi-party democracy, they seem to say, but one that has had to take some unfortunate decisions that's best not discussed in public.
In other words, a clash of civilization exists, but at two levels; at the ground level, there are religions, Muslims, Jews, Christians (and Christian sects, Armenians and Palestinians), competing for land and other resources. At a higher level, there are political systems, in terms of competing for influence and power. Israel, being a Jewish democracy, fights for the Jews on the ground, but as a liberal democracy. That is to say, while it operates at this ground-level clash as a representation of the Jewish civilization, at the higher-level clash, it operates as being the only representative-democracy out there. When it comes to supporting regimes, whom would you support; an elected, multi-party democractically-elected government, or a known fundamentalist, dare I say terrorist, organization? We in a center-of-right, liberal-democractic world, would like to support the former.
But clearly, it isn't easy to do so, perhaps even troubling to uncritically take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Armenian sector in East Jerusalem, the book suggests, has been systematically neglected in preference to the Jewish quarter. Ancient monasteries and churches remain buried under newly built highways, while recently excavated sites of Jewish interest get a touristy makeover. They all want us out, says an Armenian Father, in 20-30 years, there'd be no Armenian presence in Jerusalem for the first time in a thousand years. I'll freely admit to not following the Israel-Palestine conflict as closely as I probably should have, so my thoughts here might come out as being näive, but it'd be very interesting indeed to read Israeli responses to the book; I, for one, had to stop ask: why? Why is it so difficult for an apparent liberal democracy to simply give full citizenship to everyone within your stated borders, and be done with it? Why did a (Palestinian) village find it necessary to organize itself to kill a corrupt, authoritarian, Israel-supported Palestinian mayor, and not vote him out, as we'd do even in the most violence-prone parts of India, in Kashmir or Manipur?
This lack of democracy, quite clearly, is the story in the rest of the Middle East too. With the exception of Turkey (and even there, it'll be possible to argue that the Kurd homelands are under military rule), none of the other countries in the book have free and fair elections; there are guards, governmental minders, refugees, nuns, warlords, mysterious spies, but troublingly for me, no competing political ideologies. Which is a pity, really, given that none of the countries involved are actually Islamic nations in the Wahaabist notion of the term; they might be authoritarian and dictatorial, but at heart, they've been founded on secular principles. It is possible to be Arab and not be Muslim, it seems, so much so that calling the Middle East as the "Muslim World" is perhaps as erroneous as calling Western Europe as "Christendom"; sad, really, that there's so little civic society participation in what goes on there.
Which brings us to my final thought-worthy point from the book, that on defending artistic freedom. We've had a heated debate here a few months back on art depicting religious motifs, and indeed, one of the finer points was that Islam seems to different from other religions in its frowning over sacred art. Given the earlier discussion on how Islam and Christianity had so much in common, it now seems strange to note this difference in sentiment. Why do Islam, and apparently Judaism, abhor sacred art, while Christianity seems to revel in it? Interestingly enough, iconoclasm, the destruction of religious icons, did exist in (Christian) Byzantine spheres as well, and indeed, is something that I see as a stark contrast to later Ottoman era miniatures which excelled in depicting Islamic motifs. Much of the theological support for iconophily was, however, Dalrymple suggests, opposed by the writings of a Byzantine monk, a certain St John Damascene, who was perhaps the first to oppose iconoclasm on theological grounds:
If I have no books I go to church, pricked as by spines by my thoughts; the flower of painting makes me look, charms my eyes as does a flowering meadow and softly distils the glory of God in my soul. (from the book, p. 300 - 301)
Art, we're asked to ponder, has the soul of God, and therefore needs to be protected. This is a sentiment that I find myself whole-heartedly applauding; religious art is what drives this otherwise, non-religiously-inclined Advaitist to Hindu temples, Buddhist shrines, Islamic mosques and Christian churches. Where would we be, hadn't it been for the Angkor Wats, the Hagia Sofias, and the Mecca Masjids of our imaginations?
Along with Gladwell, Amartya Sen, Ram Guha and others, Dalrymple is one of the more contemporary thinkers I seem to be tuning into for quite some time. In fact, the manner in which he's been exerting his intellectual ideas on yours truly is rather fiend-ish, given his apparent penchant for mystical tales involving demons and djinns. Should be interesting to read his narrative of what appears to be one of the greatest jihads the world has ever seen.
(Update - 2006.5.21 & 2006.5.22: Significant re-editting.)
