Bartholomew's Notes

The conflict between Christians and Muslims in Northern Nigeria is well-known. Killings of Christians are widely reported, as well as the problems non-Muslims face in those areas that have adopted Sharia. The perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure decision of Ibrahim Shekarau, the Governor of the province of Kano, to ban polio vaccines in case Westerners were trying to make Muslim women infertile has added grist to the mill (1).

What’s less reported are a) when Christians retaliate and b) the baneful outside forces that exacerbate the conflict.

Local Christians have long suffered the attentions of Reinhard Bonnke, the German Pentecostal faith healer who operates mainly in Africa (no doubt Shekarau has provided future customers for him). During the 1980s, Bonnke held a series of revivals across sub-Saharan Africa, where he was welcomed by despots such as Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, who liked Bonnke’s message that poverty was caused by demons rather than poor leadership. As Bonnke headed north, the climax was to be his “breaking down the gates of Islam” in North Africa. Eventually his huge rallies reached Kano in 1991, where his virulent anti-Islamic rhetoric led to riots and his hasty departure. Local Christians were left to face the Muslim wrath, and hundreds were killed. Bonnke’s toned it down a bit since then, but he’s still a regular visitor to Nigeria.

Meanwhile, local Muslims have to endure Saudi cultural imperialism. Most Muslims in Kano are followers of the mystical Qadiriyya Sufi tradition. Like most fundamentalists, the Wahabi Saudis can’t cope with the ambiguities of mystical religious experience, and Sufism is banned in Saudi Arabia. They also devote massive sums on spreading Wahabism abroad – a story the media have belatedly picked up on since 9/11 (although, alas, neo-con demagogues seem to be noticing more it than anyone else in the US). A report in yesterday’s Vanguard newspaper (Lagos) describes how:

THOUSANDS of Nigerian followers of the Sufi branch of Islam protested yesterday in Kano, and demanded the closure of the local office of a London-based Muslim charity accused of sponsoring extremist violence…The crowd marched on the Kano State Assembly, chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), to demand that the group, which promotes the Wahhabi strain of Islam on behalf of wealthy Saudi donors, be banned.

However, here’s why we’re unlikely to here much about it in the foreign press:

The protest remained peaceful.

(1) After an expensive investigation during which God knows how many children have been exposed to the disease, a committee in Nigeria has declared the vaccine to be safe, but Shekarau’s response is unknown. Beliefs based on paranoid delusions tend to be non-falsifiable anyway. See also my entries here and here.

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Hot on the news that Saudi Arabia was banning Jewish tourists (since retracted) comes a report that the Iraqi Governing Council is appalled at the thought of the ancient Jewish Iraqi community returning to the land they fled from in the 1950s and 1960s:

Late last year, the council approved proposed legislation that would have allowed thousands of Iraqis who fled or were expelled from the country to reclaim their Iraqi citizenship — unless they were Jewish, council members said. The proposal did not specifically mention Jews, they said, but it contained language that would have kept in place the revocation of citizenship of tens of thousands of Jews by the Iraqi government in 1950.

Muhammad Bahaddin Saladin,  a member of the council, argues that “as long as the Palestinian problem exists, as long as there is a state of war, then we should not allow the Jews to return…The minister of defense in Israel is an Iraqi Jew. Should we let him return?”

Somehow I doubt that particular problem is likely to arise, and the idea that Jews in general (or even Israelis in general) are responsible for Israel’s actions is a depressingly common one in the region. To his credit, Paul Bremer has declined to sign off on the legislation, while one member of the council, an Assyrian Christian named Yonadam Kanna, had the guts and vision to say that “I think we should allow everyone to return. It should not matter that they are Jewish.”

Israel, of course, refuses to allow Palestinian refugees from 1948 to return to their homes in Israel proper, despite evidence from scholars such as the Israeli Ilan Pappe as to how their accomodation could be perfectly feasible. Allowing Jews to return to Iraq would not only be just, but would put pressure on Israel to treat the Palestinians more fairly. But I suppose that’s a bit too subtle for some.

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With Jean-Bertrand Aristide in exile from Haiti, the Christian Religious Right are rejoicing. Aristide, of course, was a proponent of liberation theology and had given state recognition to voodoo – an attempt “to rededicate Haiti to Satan”, according to Jim Uttley, a former second-generation missionary to the republic. Reports from ASSIST Ministries describe a corrupt tyrant, and contrast the evil dictator with the good old days of Paul Magloire.

Uttley describes Aristide’s nefarious cunning: “He used his position as a priest to gain power and then used that power as president to sway the hearts and minds of his citizens as well as foreign powers, to do his bidding.” What a shocker! Thank God for people like Uttley who can see past the façade and know better than the Haitians what’s good for them. Meanwhile, Joanne Derstine of Gospel Crusade tells of “pro-Aristide” thugs attacking a boys’ home (Derstine is the daughter of Dr. Gerald Derstine, who set up Christian Zionist groups in central America back in the 1980s.)

Now, Aristide was far from perfect, but there is another side to the story, as described by Peter Hallward yesterday (although Hallward is critiqued by Christian Aid today). I also fail to see why Aristide was worse than Uttley’s hero Magloire, who modernised the country, but who also, according to his Guardian obit in 2001:

scored a time-honoured 99% of the poll when the new system [of elections] was first used soon after his 1950 coup. But corruption, growing repression, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and the theft of subsequent relief funds turned the tide against Magloire.

The difference, of course, was that Magloire was a strict ant-Communist, and in such cases (as with Chiang Kai-Shek or Rios Montt), politically-minded conservative Christians are generally rather more indulgent of corruption and repression.

As for the voodoo, The Revealer weblog currently has a good analysis of how the media are failing to say anything sensible about this religious tradition.

UPDATE (8 March 2004): Turns out that the voodoo priests themsleves are claiming credit for Aristide’s flight to the Central African Republic:

Mr Aristide…adopted as his symbol the cockerel, a voodoo icon. Mr Aristide…was guilty of the voodoo equivalent of hubris and then struck down by its version of nemesis, several voodo priests said this week…

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Knocking off a religious book to piggyback on a movie has a venerable history, going back to at least 1976 when the aptly-named Frank Allnut brought out After the Omen to cash in (sorry, “provide an evangelistic tool”) in the wake of the great 70’s schlocker.

Now Crossway Books brings us The Passion of Jesus Christ, with a cover designed in such a way that it just about avoids treading on Mel’s copyright (This book is not to be confused with Tyndale’s official movie tie-in, mentioned a couple of posts ago). Playing Schrader to Gibson’s Scorcese, the author is a Calvinist named John Piper, and the book provides “Fifty Reasons Why He [Jesus] Came to Die”.

Piper first, though, decides to tackle the anti-Semitism issue head on, with an introduction titled “The Christ, The Crucifixion and the Concentration Camps”. Although it tries to be sensitive, this section seems likely to wind Jews up:

Is there a way that Jewish suffering may find, not its cause, but its final meaning in the suffering of Jesus Christ? Is it possible to think, not of Christ’s passion leading to Auschwitz, but of Auschwitz leading to an understanding of Christ’s passion? Is the link between Calvary and the camps a link of unfathomable empathy?…And perhaps a generation of Jewish people, whose grandparents endured their own noxious crucifixion, will be able, as no others, to grasp what happened to the Son of God at Calvary. (p. 16)

In fairness, Piper uses Elie Wiesel’s mention of the word Calvary in relation to the Holocaust as a springboard for these reflections. However, I suspect many Jews will be rather annoyed that the Holocaust should be interpreted in Christian terms, and the implication of “oh well, the Holocaust was bad but look on the bright side: Jews might understand Jesus better than anyone else” is likely to appal.

I’m also uneasy with Piper’s implicit mysticism. Yes, the Holocaust was unique. It was an industrialised, bureaucratic death machine aimed against a people ultimately not because of what they believed, nor because of their behaviour, nor because they had land or assets that their persecutors wanted to steal, but simply because of their existence on the earth. It can be therefore be distinguished from other horrors, such as, say, the Armenian genocide or the Atlantic slave trade – events that are also sometimes called “Holocausts”. But the idea that the descendents of Jewish Holocaust victims (not just the victims themselves, and not the non-Jewish victims of Hitler at all!) therefore have a unique insight into suffering is mystical and problematic. It seems to me that Piper is working with an abstract idea about “the Jews”: a romantic stereotype based on his theology rather than on spontaneous human encounter, with all its complexities and ambiguities.

This is a pity, as Piper is clearly opposed to anti-Semitism and racism. He’s a critic of Christian Zionism, a theology that also stereotypes Jews and Arabs. But he’s also a man who cannot think of people as just people rather than as types fitting some predetermined role. I note his writings against Evangelical feminism, where he approvingly quotes J.I. Packer’s absurd claim that “‘a situation in which a female boss has a male secretary’ puts strain on the humanity of both”, because (Piper says) “The God-given sense of responsibility for leadership in a mature man will not generally allow him to flourish long under personal, directive leadership of a female superior” (p.43). If not having a female boss is what Piper needs in order to feel good about himself, he’s really rather sad. But I digress…

UPDATE (3 March): According to AP

A book unrelated to Gibson’s film, “The Passion of Jesus Christ,” by Baptist minister John Piper, came out in January. Published by Crossway Books with a first printing of 175,000, “The Passion” now has 1.6 million copies in print…Tyndale reports that a 150,000 first printing of the film’s companion book, called “The Passion,” sold out so quickly that some stores may have to wait up to two weeks before an additional printing of 250,000 fully arrives…

Meanwhile sales of Gibson’s source, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, “have jumped from under 3,000 for all of 2002 to 17,000 just last month”. This last work has obvious anti-Semitic content, by the way. As well as “cruel” Jewish mobs, it has this bizarre story (not in the film or the Bible) about how the cross was built, not by the Romans, but by the Jews:

A short time before when Judas had received the price of his treason, a Pharisee had gone out, and sent seven slaves to fetch wood with which to prepare the Cross for our Saviour…They procured this wood from a spot about three-quarters of a mile distant, near a high wall, where there was a great quantity of other wood belonging to the Temple, and dragged it to a square situated behind the tribunal of Caiphas.(section 124)

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According to Arnold Toynbee, the arrival of Buddhism in the West “may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century”: clearly taking a long view that has yet to be proven (although Cardinal Ratzinger takes the “threat” seriously: “In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn’t come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right.”) A new book, Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West, by Jeffrey Paine, describes at least part of this story, and explains (among other things) how Tibetan Buddhism came to influence, among others, Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac and my favourite composer, Philip Glass.

The book observes that in 1968 there were only two Tibetan Buddhist centers outside Asia: in Scotland and Vermont. By 2000, nearly every sizable American city had one, with eight in Washington, D.C., 25 in Boston, and about 40 in New York. One of every 35 French citizens is a Buddhist. Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, with the Tibetan variety drawing the most converts.

This enthusiasm has drawn to a great extent on a very romanticised image of Tibet (described in Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, by Donald Lopez and published in 1998). There has also been some renegotiation: many of the Buddhist Westerners I know try to take the vegetarian bit seriously, but the sexual restrictions less so. I once asked a gay follower of Tibetan Buddhism what he thought of the Dalai Lama’s views on homosexuality. He shrugged and said, “well, the guy was brought up in a monastery in the middle of nowhere. What can you expect?” On the other hand, it has been fun to see sympathisers appalled that Steven Segal could just buy the status of reincarnated lama: surely Martin Luther told us religion was not supposed to be like this!

One element of the story that I think deserves to be better known is the hilarious case of Lobsang Rampa. Rampa’s real name was Cyril Hoskin, and he was a surgical truss salesman from the west of England (here (scroll down)). Once his true identity was discovered, he claimed that he had merely possessed Hoskin’s body, and explained away his inability to speak Tibetan as due to a hypnotic block he had put on himself to prevent himself from revealing secrets to the Chinese. Rampa/Hoskin wrote many books, the most famous of which was the first, The Third Eye. In it he explains how he had the front of his forehead opened up, revealing a third eye capable of seeing auras. Although scholars of Tibet were dismayed, a few intellectuals were taken in and massive public interest followed.

Still, I suppose if it made people aware of the Chinese occupation some good was done. I urge everyone who wants to give a bit of cash to the cause to buy this CD, which features a very nice reggae version of the prayer Om Mani Padme Hum.

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British film critic Mark Kermode offers a horror-movie buff’s take on The Passion:

The Passion seems to me a quintessential horror film, a visceral cinematic assault which is no more or less ‘Christian’ than Ken Russell’s The Devils or Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. All are examples of extreme movie-making from flamboyant film-makers who are passionately obsessed with the mysteries of Catholicism.

He also notes that in the credits we find make-up effects stalwarts Keith Vander Laan and Greg Cannom, horror graduates who honed their skills on shockers such as the vampiric epic Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the grisly modern-gothic chiller Hannibal. I was also interested to see elsewhere that Benedict Fitzgerald, who worked with Gibson on the script, provided the screenplay for Wise Blood, a brilliant piece of Southern Gothic from John Houston that had the great Brad Dourif (Lynch movies, Wormtongue) playing a very disturbed atheist preacher who sets up “the Church of Christ without Christ”.

Meanwhile, the book-of-the-film has been put out by Tyndale House, an odd choice as Tyndale’s Left Behind novels have been described as anti-Catholic by the Roman Catholic bishops of Illinois. Other movie tie-ins include nail pendants, the inevitable T-Shirt and a jewellery line from the man who brought us WWJD bracelets.

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Today’s big news where I live (Japan) is the sentencing of Chizuo Matsumoto, better known as Shoko Asahara, the man who promoted nihilistic religious terrorism before it was fashionable. The epic trial (during which arrests were made in Russia of followers reportedly planning a rescue mission) ended, as was expected, with the death sentence, although with the appeals procedure about to get underway it’ll be many years before we get to see The Passion of Shoko Asahara. Asahara’s group, Aum, now rebranded as Aleph, is a tiny, despised sect, with not many future prospects…sound familiar?

According to the BBC,

Members of the cult, who had not demonstrated violent tendencies before they joined Aum, were fed a diet of violent apocalyptic teachings.

What, like Left Behind and The Late Great Planet Earth?

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The two big religious news stories of the day, the release of The Passion and Bush’s War on People Different From Him Getting Married, have been covered in depth everywhere else already. I’ll just briefly note the crowing in Charisma magazine over Bush’s move, and point American readers in the direction of this report concerning the London Partnerships Register, set up Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London.

If anyone wants my own views, I knew a gay couple in their fifties in London who had been together twenty years. When one died, the widower (they had had a religious wedding ceremony) had less rights than the deceased partner’s other relatives. This meant that the widower was overruled on the burial arrangements and had to fight a legal battle to keep his house. How this situation served the protection of civilisation is rather baffling to me.

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