Rama Mani

Conference on Religion University of Denver 15 April 2010

Malady or Remedy? Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding

Dr. Rama Mani

Project Director Ending Mass Atrocities: Echoes in Southern Cultures Senior Research Associate Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford Councilor of the World Future Council

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Introduction In the 16th century, the courageous visionary St. Theresa of Avila proclaimed: Why this great war between the countries the countries inside of us? What are all these insane borders we protect? What are all these different names for the same church of love we kneel in together? For it is true, together we live, and only at that shrine where all are welcome will God sing loud enough to be heard.1 St Theresa was invoking the reason of the heart in a place and at a time when fanatical extremism was tearing apart the Catholic Church. Inquisition Spain was corroding its rich civilization in a paroxysm of self-destructive violence in its zeal to exterminate what it deemed spurious and heretical. Already centuries before St. Theresa, Rabia, the Sufi slave-turned-saint of Basra, had expressed: In my heart, there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church, where I kneel. Prayer should bring us to an altar where no name and no walls exist.2 These two devout mystics, one a Christian and the other Islamic, could clearly perceive the self-evident role of faith as a bridge of harmony between people; yet they were only too aware of religions dangerous proclivity for division and domination. In the then wondrous Babylonia - now ruined by internecine and interfaith violence Rabia could portend the divisions that would fracture human society in the guise of opposing religions. St. Theresa could presage how fanatically violent the borders within mens hearts, churches and nations would become. How prophetic these wise womens words are today, as we consider at once the tendency of religions to build meaningless borders and defend them violently on one hand, and yet to give birth to sages of such wisdom who can point in the dark with compassionate and illumined reason towards religions true purpose to unite and not divide, to be a remedy and not an incurable malady for humankind. Overall, despite courageous interfaith initiatives in many troubled areas of the world, most notably the Middle East itself, the aptitude of religions to unite and dissolve disputes has been overpowered by the capacity of religious institutions of various faiths and denominations to divide and conquer. Why is this so? Today, I wish to examine critically with you the controversial and paradoxical role that religion has played in both fuelling conflict and feeding peacebuilding. I shall argue that religion has ceased to serve as a remedy for violent conflict; indeed more often than not it has become either a convenient crutch or cudgel for belligerents of all faiths. I shall spell out the reasons that I see for these pitfalls into which religions have fallen hoping of course that you will see fit to challenge me on any and all of them, and perhaps even prove me wrong! Addressing you here in the Great Hall of the School of Theology at the University of Denver, and benefitting from the presence of several esteemed theologians and peacebuilding experts in our group, let me clarify that I do not overlook the important role that religious leaders
1 2

St Theresa of Avila, in Ladinsky, Love Poems from God, p. 290. Rabia, in Ladinsky, Love Poems, p 11.

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have often played in crystallizing peace processes in Mozambique, in Liberia, in Sudan. By no means do I undermine either the symbolic or practical importance of the now-regular meetings of Imams and Rabbis in the Middle East to bring faith and reason amidst continuing violence and despair. Nor do I wish to sideline the importance of a growing movement of interfaith leaders who are determined to sow harmony amidst discord. Indeed I shall enumerate a few of the remarkable initiatives whereby religions have indeed played their part in sowing the seeds of peace, often at great risk, and shall look forward to learning from you of many more such efforts that I may as yet be unaware of. Let us acknowledge, nonetheless, that these initiatives are as yet the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the relationship between religions and violence is more robust than that between religions and peace. Religions of all hues and shades, and especially the major religions which hold sway over the vast majority of the worlds faithful, have variously condoned, incited, financed, sanctioned, or exhorted violent conflict. Nor is religious violence restricted only to violent armed conflict a la Sudan and the Middle East. Even beyond the cases that qualify, according to the measures of political scientists and statisticians, as violent armed conflict reporting over 1000 battle related deaths a year are all the other forms of violence within society associated with religions. There is violence within religions, between religions and between the religious and secular, between believers and heretics. There is the structural violence, the negative peace of injustice, exclusion and discrimination that religions birth and breeds or fails to condemn and eliminate: the distinctions between believer and non-believer, between high-caste and untouchable, between saved and heathen souls, between pure and infidel. And yet, my main purpose is not to denigrate religions for their violence but rather to argue that they have a tremendous largely untapped potential to serve as a bridge for peacebuilding. The projection that with modernity the world would undergo an inevitable secularization has been proven largely wrong. Religion claims the hearts and minds of 90 percent of our living population today, with 75% of them belonging to the 4 major religions out of the over 10,000 religions or religious denominations that claim to exist with smaller bodies of faithful. All four major religions and many of the others, particularly those harking back to the earlier periods of human history the Cosmotheandric or so called animist religions preach notions of compassion, love for fellow beings, peace and harmony as normal and desirable goals, and exhort both the individual believer and religious leaders or teachers to pursue these tirelessly. If this mass of human population could but awake to this potential embedded in each of their religions, it could unleash a force as no other single other factor to sow seeds of peace in the minds of men and still their hands from violence. In concluding, I shall enumerate five ways I believe that religions could shift from its current detrimental role as warmonger to a positive role as peacebuilders. These, I hope, speak not only to the religiously oriented, but also to all of us: faithful or secular, agnostic or atheist. And I warmly invite you all to debate and challenge my arguments voraciously with me thereafter.

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Where did it all Begin? Religion Then and Now Religion is as old as human civilization. Religion emerged, understandably, as the human response on all parts of our Earthly home to the wonderment of this planet: the bounties of the red earth, the nurturing gifts of the celestial skies and the unpredictability of both. No wonder then that all early religions cherished and worshipped Mother Earth and, with her, the inscrutable fertility of women that allowed life on earth to continue generation upon generation. No wonder then that Cosmotheandry prevailed the notion that the entire Cosmos was divine or inhabited by Theos. Everything in the universe, under ones feet and above ones head was considered sacred. No wonder that it was unthinkable for early man to be anthropocentric, to believe that all of this marvelous creation was for his benefit alone and hence could be used and disposed of according to his whims. It was self-evident to humans then that their species was but one link in this indivisible chain of life, where all was interconnected, all infinitely different yet seamlessly one. Living in this unbroken union with earth, human beings found innumerable geographically specific ways to celebrate, venerate and entreat these natural forces that surrounded them. Jagged mountains or flat plains; swarming oceans on tiny islands or elusive oases in endless deserts; fertile valleys or arid dryland all terrains were deemed worthy of worship; all were sacred. The closer they came to the secrets of the earth, the more they were able to reap her boundless gifts. They learned to cultivate lands and enrich their diet; they learned to befriend and cooperate with animals to multiply the force of their limbs. They knelt in gratitude to their prey before their arrows could fell them for sustenance. They found awe-inspiring names to describe the Creator, the forces of nature, the Mother Goddess and the Earth. They whispered stories of creation that became their founding myths.3 And thus were the cultures and civilizations of the world born, in all their diversity. Rituals emerged, fed by the unique features and riches of that particular part of the earth, replete with timeless wisdom, redolent with symbolism. As cultures evolved and with them these ancient religions, they devised unique culturally appropriate ways to manage the affairs of humankind. They shaped mechanisms to resolve emerging disputes without recourse to violence. It is not that conflict was alien to these cultures, or that violence bypassed them. However, they developed communal and common sense ways to intervene early, mitigate when violence erupted, and to reconcile fairly thereafter. Over time, as man became less nomadic and more sedentary, more urban and concreteconfined and less conjoined to mother Earth, religion too found refuge in temples and mosques, churches and synagogues. In the early days, when humans umbilical cord to Mother Earth was still vibrant and sensate, the wise knew which spots on the soil were most sacred, most replete with electromagnetic energy, most connected with myriad other spots on the surface of our one earth. Sites of worship were purposefully built on these spots manmade offerings to the whisper of the divine. Little did it matter if this rock harbored a church, synagogue or mosque, if in this cavern with the eternal spring a stupa or a temple was built. And as the walls were built to enshrine the enchantment of these sacred venues, so too, unwittingly the difference grew between these different manifestations of the divine. Over time, awareness and awe of the sacred interconnectedness of these spaces between this mosque and that church, this synagogue and that stupa was lost. The walls were no longer there to bring together and bind all those who were drawn from far afield to the pull of the sacred, but rather to cut off those within from those without. They became walls of demarcation, of separation rather than union. Cut off from what lay under their feet and above their heads, they came to consider only the material and temporal wealth contained

See e.g. Von Franz, Creation Myths; Campbell, Creative Mythology.

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within these places of worship to be worthy of devotion, while excluding from consideration not only the people but also the earth that lay without. This, it could already have been portended then, was the beginning of the end, the slow descent into the lethal rivalry that religions have descended into through the subsequent centuries. Anthropologists of religion, primarily European and American, since the late 19th century have adopted a more scientific approach to the origins and development of religion in human history than the simple narrative I have presented here. Their explanations, as varied and as at odds with each other as their methodologies, provide a kaleidoscope of edifying perspectives. All the great early anthropologists and sociologists proposed theories on the origins of religion. For Herbert Spencer, influenced by Charles Darwin, social evolution underpinned human society and religion originated in ancestor worship. Edward Burnett Tylor, following Spencer, saw the soul as central to the origin of religion. He coined the term animism from the Latin anima (soul) to denote the belief that inanimate and animate objects including humans can have souls or life forces. James Frazer opined that magic was the precursor of religion. Bronislaw Malinowski and the functionalist school focused on the interrelations between social systems and the attitudes people bear toward them: thus the realm of the sacred was that which inspired awe. Emile Durkheim saw religion as the projection of a societys social values.4 Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Claude Levi-Strauss developed the method of structural analysis, while Franz Boa in North America developed an approach of historical particularism to explain cultural differences in religions.5 As human society advanced with scientific discoveries and greater knowledge of the cosmos, scholars believed, religion too evolved, progressing from magic to animism to polytheism and finally towards monotheism. With the Enlightenment and Reformation, as scientific rationality replaced blind belief, scholars believed that even religion would cease to serve a purpose and fade away. Thus Europe was thought to be the precursor for a global evolutionary trend towards secularism or atheism. However, this theory of secularization that became popular in recent decades has been proven fallacious. Since the early 1990s it has been increasingly apparent that the world has become apparently desecularized, despite technical and material progress.6 Today, religion seems at once irrelevant and all-important, depending on ones vantage point and geographical position. Measuring with any accuracy the state of religious belief and practice in the world is tricky, understandably enough. There are a large number of organizations and polls that attempt to keep up to date figures in published and online formats. One useful measure is the Gallup Millennium Survey that covered 60 countries representing 1.2 billion people. It recorded in 2000 that an astounding 87% of the global population claimed to believe in or belong to some religion. A part of its result is reproduced below.7 The number that practice religion are lower, particularly in Western Europe, but high in the developing continents.

Bowles, Anthropology of Religion, pp. 12-17. See also Ninian, World Religions; Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds. 5 See Berger, The Desecularization of the World 6 Berger, The Desecularization of the World 7 http://www.gallup-international.com/ContentFiles/millennium15.asp
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Gallup Millennium Survey

BELONG

TO

ANY

RELIGIOUS

DENOMINATION

Footnote: Excludes DK/NA = (2%)

It is widely believed that Islam is growing rapidly and has perhaps overtaken other religions as the worlds largest. As yet, Christianity remains the worlds largest religion with 33 % of the total faithful, though this represents all denominations and churches. Islam is catching up but still claims only 21 %. The third group is the non-religious, including the agnostic and the atheists, whose share is 14%. According to other surveys, 13% are considered to be atheists. Hinduism claims 14%. Primal-indigenous religions, Chinese traditional and Buddhism all claim 6% each. Judaism represents 0.22% of the total.8 These figures vary slightly from one study to another, but most seem to tally roughly. What is perhaps most significant is the shift in locus of many religions. Few decades ago, Europe could be called authoritatively a Christian nation, with 68% of the worlds Christians living there. Today, only 26% of the worlds Christians live in Europe, while 24% live in Latin America, 19% in Africa and 17% in Asia. China alone is now home to 54 million Christians due to rapid evangelization. It is not only believers but also religious groups and denominations that have mushroomed. With more than 9,000 different religions in the world today, existing in just over 200 recognized nation-states, conflict is inevitable.9 Secularism, or laicit has persisted in some parts of the world. France, where I now live, is certainly one of them, with strictly enforced secularism applied in schools and all government run institutions where any sign of religious affiliation is prohibited. Sweden is another. However, Eastern Europe has reverted vibrantly back to religious belief after the fall of Communism; while in some parts like Poland, where religious practice during Communism was a sign of political opposition, it has now subsided with the passage of Communist rule.10 Despite secular appearances, therefore, the world today is vibrantly religious or claims to be. If close to 90% of the worlds population claims to adhere to some faith, it suggests that nine out of ten of us in this very hall tonight are potential peacemakers or warmongers! Religions Inherent Capacity as Peacebuilder Today, it is far easier to make a case for religions association with war than its capacity for peacebuilding. However, I would like to begin with the latter, for the real purpose of this session is to bolster the inherent aptitude of all religions, major and minor, to serve as building blocks for peace. In theory, there has never been dispute about the central place all
www.adherents.com. This website claims to cover over 43,000 religious citations and sources and 4,200 religious groups, and aims to provide researchers with extensive data on religions. 9 Larsson, Understanding Religious Violence, p. 1 10 Grace Davies, Europe: The Exception that Proves the Rule? in Berger, Desecularization, pp. 65-84.
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the major religions and many of the minor ones attribute to peacemaking and peacebuilding in society. Assertions of the duty of love and care to ones fellow beings, whether near or distant, are sown throughout the religious scriptures of all religions. Detailed analyses of such scriptures are available and I will not repeat them here.11 Rather, let us undertake a brief survey of some of the noteworthy initiatives that have sought to resolve conflict. In the very region of the Middle East, where the Arab-Israeli conflict has proven most intractable, interfaith leaders have been tirelessly energetic in their efforts to bring harmony to this venerated blood-soaked piece of land. One of many such initiatives, the World Conference of Rabbis and Imams for Peace has met three times, first in 2005, then in Seville in 2007, and last in December 2008 in Paris at UNESCO, while violence was spiraling out of control in Gaza. The conference issued a declaration voicing a passionate plea for the immediate cessation of violence: First and foremost, the Imams and Rabbis, joined by the Christians, hereby reiterate their commitment to denouncing and condemning henceforth, ceaselessly and publicly, all forms of violence, terror, and individual and collective injustice committed in the name of God and/or their respective religions or Holy Scriptures. They also reiterate their determination to be active custodians of the Sacredness of Peace. 12 The Conference had declared 2008 as the year of Reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, but it ended in bloodshed, and peace remains elusive despite such efforts. Religious initiatives have scored some concrete successes in mediating civil wars, notably in Africa. Mozambique was a path breaker where the SantEgidio Roman Catholic community was able to broker a peace between irreconcilable parties, due to its long and trusted presence in the country. The general peace accord itself was signed in Sant'Egidio in Italy on October 4, 1992.13 The SantEgidio community has been approached and has offered its mediation services in a number of other conflicts, including DRC, Uganda and Sudan, and has won several awards for its peacebuilding offices.14 In the violence-racked region of Acholiland in Uganda, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative was established in Gulu in 1997. It brings together Muslim, Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox leaders to prevent and mitigate conflict. The Initiative participated in the Juba Peace talks, and its activities to promote conflict resolution and reconciliation won it the prestigious Niwano Peace Prize in 2004.15 In Nigeria, the film The Imam and the Pastor has rendered famous the case of two religious leaders who started as sworn enemies but created a Muslim-Christian interfaith initiative in Kaduna Nigeria. Originally, Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhammad Ashafa were heads of their respective communities armed rebellions pitted against each other. The Pastor lost an arm and the Imam lost his spiritual guide and his close relatives in the fighting. Over time they forged a partnership and established the Muslim-Christian Interfaith Mediation Centre that they co-direct to resolve religious conflicts in Nigeria.16 This proliferation of religious attempts to foster peace in Africas conflicts merits special attention. As recently as 23-25 March 2010, the African Council of Religious Leaders held
11

Of many illuminating and erudite exposes, I recommend Mutombo Nkulu Nsenghas, It takes a village to protect a child: Bumuntu spirituality, for its detailed analysis of the core of compassion and care in the scriptures of all religions. 12 See http://www.imamsrabbis.org/en 13 See http://www.santegidio.org/en/pace/pace3.htm. Also see Accord 3, The Mozambican Peace Process in Perspective, and Puig, E. and Anouilh, P., "Charity, Social Capital and Legitimacy. 14 http://www.santegidio.org/en/pace/pace1.htm. 15 www.arlpi.org. 16 See http://www.iofc.org/imam-pastor

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their Religions for Peace meeting in Kigali bringing together Christian, Muslim and Hindu religious leaders from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The gathering's theme was, "Advancing shared security: strengthening multi-religious collaboration for peace building, reconciliation and sustainable development". The Council, a vigorous voice for peace on the continent, launched a campaign against the arms trade at this years meeting and urged African leaders to redirect arms budgets towards development.17 As far back as September 2000, in response to the violence across the Great Lakes region, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Kimbanguist and Muslim leaders from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo met at a 3day conference and called upon the international community to act for peace in their warwracked region.18 The continent associated in the media and public imagination with brutal conflict has been the most active as well in interfaith activism to build peace. In my own country of origin, India, where genocidal violence has accompanied every stroke of history, starting from the twin independence of India and Pakistan, interfaith activism to promote peace has gone apace with religious fundamentalism that foments violence. Swami Agnivesh is a particularly inspiring example. He has campaigned relentlessly against the religious dogma that oppresses women, girls and low castes and fosters violence, and championed social justice for the marginalized. Through the decades, he worked hand in hand with Muslim, Christian and other faith leaders to mobilize them and intervene rapidly to quell communal violence as soon as it erupts, and to rouse and inform public opinion. He initiated a peace mediation missions to Kashmir when violence reached a peak and succeeded in reducing hostilities, and mobilized massive interfaith peace marches when communal violence threatened to spill over. In 2007 he convened and established the Sarva Dharma Sansad, or Parliament of Religions in India, to bring together religious and civic leaders of all major and minor religions in India, insisting on the meaningful inclusion of women who are normally marginal in interfaith groups due to their exclusion from religious authority. The Parliament of Religions adopted and campaigns actively on a seven-point agenda of the social ills that most afflict India including communal violence, extremism, religious dogmatism and casteism, and violence and discrimination against women.19 While religious fundamentalism is still rampant in India, these efforts have made a tangible impact. It is not only in specific conflict-affected countries or regions that interfaith activism for peace has been influential but also at the international level. For instance the conflicts in the Sudan have not only mobilized Sudanese religious leaders but also international interfaith efforts. In March 2010, an interfaith march upon the US Congress was undertaken with prominent leadership by Jewish and evangelical Christian leaders to urge Congress not to forget Darfur.20 1883 is marked by some as the beginning of formal inter-religious dialogue with the Worlds Congress of Religions held in Chicago, bringing together for the first time Eastern and Western spiritual leaders. In 1988 the Council for the Parliament of World Religions was established to revive this meeting and celebrate its centennial in Chicago with a global gathering of religious leaders. The objective of the CPWR is to contribute to creating a just peaceful and sustainable world and it has met every five years in international cities including Cape Town, Barcelona and most recently Melbourne in December 2009.21 Several other international interfaith initiatives have emerged over the years. For instance Religions for Peace, founded in 1970 claims to be the largest international coalition of representatives from the worlds great religions dedicated to promoting peace, and among it successful
Ecumenical news International at http://www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=3939 http://allafrica.com/stories/200009260111.html 19 www.sarvadharmasansad.com 20 Nathan Guttman, With Prayer and Nursery Rhymes, Religious Leaders Call Attention to Sudan, March 02, 2010, Forward (http://www.forward.com/articles/126398/) 21 www.parliamentofreligions.org
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interventions lists the creation of a favorable environment in Iraq and in Sierra Leone. It holds global assemblies every five years, the most recent in 2006 in Kyoto.22 In advance of the United Nations Millennium Summit for political leaders in September 2000, a group of religious leaders and theologians convened over about two thousand religious leaders of all faiths to a Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders from 28 to 31 August 2000. Religious leaders from several of the worlds conflict zones attended. The Summit issued a declaration to the UN Secretary General declaring the commitment of religious leaders to peace and their rejection of violence and delineating the areas in which religion could play a role in preventing conflict. The Summit also established the World Council of Religious leaders with the aim of providing its religious resources to support the UNs work for peace, and has a prestigious global array of religious and political leaders providing leadership and advice.23 The Global Peace Initiative for Women was born out of the same peace summit. 500 women religious leaders met again in 2002 in Geneva and launched an initiative to identify the particular ways women spiritual leaders could contribute to peacebuilding.24 These are but a small sampling of the diverse and numerous interfaith and religious initiatives at communal, national, regional and international level that have sought to resolve particular or generic violent conflict and promote peacebuilding, and their methods and impact has been thoroughly studied.25 These initiatives are all important markers of what is possible. Even when they have failed or only partially succeeded, they are of significance because they are signposts. No doubt, religious or interfaith leaders have their particular strengths and their inevitable weaknesses as peacemakers, just as other peacemakers do. 26 These initiatives indicate the tremendous potential of all religions to act through their leaders and believers as innovative and compassionate peacemakers and peacebuilders. It is important to start here and to hold in mind this aptitude for peace in the heart of all religions when we descend now into the darkness of violence that have seized all religions and from which they must now emerge, or else face the ghastly consequences of their complicity in and impunity for violence. It has been noted that there is a disjuncture between the literature on religion and violence and the emerging literature on religion and peacebuilding.27 Indeed there is an odd disconnect not only in the literature but in the reality of religions capacity for peacebuilding on one hand and its penchant for warmongering on the other. Religions and Violence: Varying Forms and Degrees of Guilt Emphatic assertions are frequently made that religion is the greatest cause of violence, conflict and concomitant suffering, both today and through history. A cursory glance at history seems to confirm this view. The unredeemed oppression of the Semites by the Egyptian Pharaohs, the brutal repression of the early Christians by the Romans, the Crusades that pitted Christians against Muslims in holy war, the fratricidal divisions that tore apart the Christian Church, the genocidal conquests of far-flung lands to proselytize and save heathen souls, the Thirty Years War in Europe and its far-reaching devastation wherever on the globe one glances, there is evidence of the lethal nexus between religion and war. When a war was not launched expressly for religious motives, it bore the blessing of the high authorities of religion, whether in Europe or Asia, the Americas or Africa.
www.religionsforpeace.org. http://www.millenniumpeacesummit.com/news000829.html 24 www.gpiw.org 25 e.g., Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, Smock, Religion in World Affairs, Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon. 26 See e.g. Harpviken and Roislien who note the strengths and weaknesses of religious peacemakers and their suitability in different contexts. 27 Harpviken and Roislien p. 1
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The relationship between violence and religion is more nuanced and contradictory than such a selective reading of history suggests at first glance. 'Religion can be a contributing factor in conflict or an inhibitor, and occasionally both at the same time. It has the potential to complicate military intervention or facilitate its success. There are people with no religious faith who use religion for political ends. There are others who see their faith and political action as co-terminous and yet more who view religion (a human construct) and faith (God given) as distinct, preferring private faith to be uncorrupted by politics'28 This paradoxical range has generated a variety of interactions between religions and violence, which has also shifted with time and geography. A religion that has been predominantly benevolent and facilitated social progress in one area at one period in time could assume repressive or oppressive features in another time and place. Violence associated with religion manifests in many different forms that elude generalizing presumptions.29 It is generally presumed that religiously motivated violence is primarily between distinct religions. This inter-religious violence is the first category of religiously motivated violence, and the most prevalent and visible both historically and today. The Crusades between Christians and Muslims in Medieval Europe or the violence between Christians and Muslims today in Nigeria; the Hindu-Muslim genocidal violence at the partition of Pakistan and India, and its ugly reappearance since the 1990s, are examples. A second type is violent conflict between different sects or factions of the same religion. The Catholic-Orthodox conflict within the Christian Church and the subsequent CatholicProtestant split are historic examples, while the Northern Ireland conflict is a more recent manifestation. The historic Shia-Sunni conflict within Islam that finds recent reflection in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is another. A third type goes beyond violence between believers divided by their religions or denominations, but refers to violent conflict between believers and non-believers or heretics, and in such cases, the use of brute force may be on either side. Theocratic governments whose rulers hold a particular extremist version of a religion have used brute force against its own citizens who are deemed insufficiently pious or chaste as in Iran or Taliban-run Afghanistan. However, secular governments have been equally brutal in deploying repressive and military means to squelch extremist religious movements witness Algeria, Egypt and Turkey although the rulers may notionally share the same religion. Another brutal form of secular violence was that of the Russian and Chinese Communist regimes against religious believers and institutions. In all these distinct categories, religion is the explicit or major implicit cause that has precipitated the violent conflict or inflicted violent suffering on people. These are but the acute cases, the visible tips of the iceberg that attract attention due to their excesses of violence and their linkage with political conflict. The kind of religious violence that tends to get overlooked very often are the chronic cases of societal and structural violence that permeate societies and are often the hardest to overturn or eliminate. A clear example is the caste system in Hinduism particularly prevalent in India. Despite Hindu philosophys central belief in the unity of all existence, the ritual practice of untouchability and the violent discrimination against lower castes has diminished only marginally over the centuries despite legislation outlawing it. Another blistering example across religions is the violent treatment and exclusion of women with religious justifications. This ranges from their social exclusion during their menstrual periods, denial of religious or spiritual authority, to violent and lifethreatening practices of female circumcision, lapidation, bride burning, honor killings and
Durwood and Marsden in their editors introduction (p.2) to Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention. 29 Tanner in particular delineates the different types of religious violence, in Violence and Religion.
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the treatment of widows. The condemnation of gay and lesbian individuals even today by religious communities, justified by religious prohibitions on sodomy is another example. The recent attempt to institute extreme anti-gay legislation in Uganda, allegedly with the financial support of fundamentalist Christian groups in USA, is a brutal manifestation of the insidious and far-reaching effects of such discrimination.30 Such instances of violent discrimination and structural injustice are not aberrant exceptions but widespread across religions. Each has found ways to institute and justify social discrimination and injustice and ignore the resultant violence and suffering they cause in the name of religious dogma. A dangerous reductionist argument that has gained currency is that Islam is a uniquely belligerent religion. The rise of Islamism is in itself not new. Scholars began to document the rise of Islamism several decades ago, with the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo serving as the fountainhead, mushrooming into the influential Muslim Brotherhood.31 Irans successful Islamic revolution created shock waves but was not widely replicated elsewhere, as predicted. The early successes of the Front Islamic de Salut (FIS) in Algeria met the iron fist of a secular military response that arrested incipient democratization and precipitated the violent confrontation with the military and a protracted civil war. The arming of Islamist militia in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets also played its part in stoking violent pan-Islamism, with the consequences we are still experiencing. However, the hypothesis that Islam was particularly or congenitally violent gained attention only with the unfortunate popularity of Huntingdons weak and flawed but insidiously resistant thesis in his Clash of Civilizations. The timing of 9.11 catapulted The Clash of civilizations to notoriety, and lent it the flavor of what Sudanese scholar An-Naim and others refer to as a self-fulfilling prophecy.32 The continuing war on terrorism and the diffuse spread of Osama Bin Ladens holy war against western infidels, as well as the degenerating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have reinforced this effect. The allied notion that Islam is inimical to democracy is refuted by the leading scholar of democratization, Alfred Stepan, who underlines that over half the worlds Muslims live today in democracies.33 The hope that a new era in US politics ushered in by President Obama might lead to a gradual demise of the age of terror and anti-Islamic sentiment may be short-lived or yet to materialize. On 1 April 2010, 9 years after 9.11, the Obama government authorized tighter security measures against travelers to the US from foreign countries suspected of potential terrorist connections, most of which are countries with predominantly Muslim populations.34 The impact of such measures on the perceptions of Muslim populations should be considered. It is now a given in sociology and psychology that when a group is stigmatized and targeted, moderate members of the group tend to empathize and identify with their stigmatized peers, and harden their own feelings. Many moderate Muslims bristle at what they feel is an unfair stigmatization of their religion, and are sliding towards harder religious beliefs. Many youth, as we are seeing across Europe and USA, are also drawn to more extreme expressions of their Islamic faith than in other circumstances. Muslim scholars argue that there is an impressive renaissance of liberal thinking within Islam, but it is being

Fundamentalists Tied to Uganda's Antigay Law, by Advocate.com Editors, November 25, 2009(http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2009/11/25/Fundamentalists_Tied_to_Ugandas _Antigay_Law/)
30 31

For a recent analysis see, e.g., Zahid, Mohammed, The Muslim Brotherhood.

An-Naim, Abdullahi Political Islam in National Politics and International Relations, in Berger, Desecularization. pp.103-122. 33 Stepan, Alfred, 'Religion democracy and the 'twin tolerations', in Diamond et al. pp 3-23. 34 New York Times, 1 April 2010.
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given scant attention.35 This is important but not the central point. As long as Islam is portrayed, explicitly or implicitly, as an inherently more violent religion than others, and all Muslims or Muslim-look-alikes treated with suspicion for the acts of the few, this feeling of victimization and resulting hostility will grow, and the clash of civilizations will continue to hold the potential of a self-fulfilling prophesy, despite its vacuity. In reality, and taken over time, Islam is no more or less belligerent than other major religions have shown themselves to be. The hard truth is that none of the major religions are untainted; all of them have cavorted with violence. And they have done so in dogma and in deed, in rhetoric and in practice. The Old Testament of the Bible, considered sacred not only in Christianity but also in Judaism and Islam, is replete with the wrath of God who calls for quasi-genocidal retribution. The sacrosanct Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, is a dialogue between God (Krishna) and Man (Arjuna) that transpires, tellingly, on a battlefield where a fratricidal war in being waged. Throughout history, royal priests endorsed and blessed the conquests of Kings, whether Chinese or Japanese, Indian or Persian; the Church in Christian Europe blessed mercenaries and missionaries embarking on royal ships to colonize foreign lands with ethnocidal force. Even a religion like Buddhism that upholds nonviolence as its central tenet has consorted with conflict. The adoption of violence by some Sinhalese Theravada Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka in the civil war against the Tamil Tigers; the genocidal rage of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia; the brutality of the military junta in Myanmar/Burma that the peaceful rebellion by revered Buddhist monks in 2007, all depict that even Buddhism has not been immune from violent conflict. Mark Juergensmeyer, the prolific scholar of religion and religious violence has described the range of religious violence found across all the major religions in his Terror in the Mind of God, showing how there are no exceptions and many variations on the justifications and rationales for the resort to violence.36 Yet, we must be cautious in condemning all the 10,000 or so religions that claim existence today as being equally prone to violent conflict. This is not true. While asserting the ubiquity of violence in most religions, it has to be underlined that there are certainly few religions whose entire vocation is pacifism and who have assiduously avoided violence. Quakerism stands out in the Christian realm for championing peace, with its active involvement in UN peace and disarmament activities. The Bahai faith emerging from the Islamic tradition has become increasingly active as well in UN related peace initiatives and is expanding rapidly especially in the continents of the south. Jainism, with 4 million adherents today has adhered to its strict creed of non-violence perhaps more successfully than its contemporaneous Buddhist brethren. More noteworthy even than these pacific peacemaking religions are the traditional or so called animist religions of Africa, the Americas and Asia. Many of these Cosmotheandric spiritual traditions have survived and maintained their values and practices of non-violence and harmony with the universe and all forms of life despite the devastating violence they have themselves faced at the hands of the major religions over the last several centuries. As the USIP special report on Religion in World Affairs by David Smock acknowledges, No major religion has been exempt from complicity in violent conflict. Yet we need to beware of an almost universal propensity to oversimplify the role that religion plays in international affairs. Religion is not usually the sole or even primary cause of conflict.37

See e.g. Sources of Enlightened Muslim Thought, by Abdou Filali-Ansary in Diamond et al, Religions and Democracy, (pp 197-211), where he highlights some of the leading Islamic reformist thinkers and writings. 36 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God 37 Smock, David, Religion in World Affairs, p. 1.
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Despite this, religion and violence have cohabited in a variety of ways as we have discussed earlier, without religion necessarily being the primary or trigger factor in precipitating conflict. While it is facile and fallacious to hold religions responsible for any and all violent conflicts, religions cannot be exempted from accountability for their both the direct and indirect violence they have been associated with through history and at present. Karl Jaspers identified four different kinds of guilt in his seminal book on German guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical.38 So too, we could describe the roles that religions have played in violent conflict in shades of guilt. At their lowest spectrum, religions have remained glaringly silent in the midst of violent conflict. An example is the Catholic Church during the Nazi Holocaust. This, we could liken roughly to metaphysical guilt. While not acting actively to either condemn or condone violence, the silence of religious authorities in the face of such gross violations of their own religious beliefs is a metaphysical guilt that they cannot escape. Sometimes, religions have condoned violence. Often, this has been done carefully with reference to specific mitigating circumstances that, notwithstanding the religions general proscription of violence, make violence justifiable in the circumstances under consideration. This would have been the justification of Sinhalese Buddhist monks who advocated violence and even took up arms to defend their divinely ordained Buddhist island of Sri Lanka from the Tamil Tigers secessionist bid. This we could liken roughly to Jaspers category of moral guilt. Despite their justification, there is no escaping the moral guilt of violating the core values of ones faith. In other cases, religions have sided openly with political power: they have endorsed the violent conquests of kings or warlords and thus been complicit in violence. My ancestors in India, Brahmin priests are an example. The sole interpreters of the scriptures and performers of rites, they alone could decide whether and when a king could wage war and whether he would be victorious. The missionaries who accompanied mercenaries to civilize heathens and colonize new lands with the blessings and bounty of their Kings or Queens were complicit in the tremendous suffering that ensued. This we could liken to political guilt. In the extreme, religions did not simply endorse but actively exhorted violence as an acceptable and even necessary means to save the faith or achieve religious ends. In some cases, this happened is specific historical circumstances of oppression or existential battles for survival, such as the Prophet Mohammeds jihad or the Sikh Guru Gobind Singhs arming of his faithful to defend the faith. However, Osama bin Ladens call for an external Jihad against those he deems infidels or fundamentalist Christian anti-abortionists acts could be likened to criminal guilt. Theirs are specific acts that violate national, international or customary law, deny rights and natural justice, and they bear criminal responsibility regardless of their religious justifications. In conclusion then, despite the notable examples discussed earlier in this paper, most religions have failed to play the role of peacebuilders, and have been more present in societies as oppressive forces for violence. They have much to account for. Why have religions failed as peacebuilders? Numerous studies have tried to extrapolate the precise conditions under which and ostensible reasons why religions have led to war. Many have resorted to statistical analyses. 39

38 39

Jaspers, Karl, 2000. The Question of German Guilt, New York: Fordham University Press. e.g. Elbadawi and Sambanis (2001) and Collier and Hoeffler 2001.

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Others have tried to find reasons in theology, psychology, philosophy, economics or history.40 Fear and anxiety are frequently cited causes.41 A real or perceived threat, especially to the very existence of the religion and its followers is another. Some would argue that violence is not an irrational but rather a rational and logical choice or outcome adopted by religious believers.42 It is not my wish to repeat well-worn territory, or to cite or refute the theories and findings of the many other scholars who have pondered this nexus.43 Today, I would like to take advantage of our quite unique conjuncture as a mixed group of theologians, political scientists and conflict resolution experts, and our inter-generational mix of learned professors and enquiring young students; I would like to reflect deeply on and debate with you the reasons for religions proclivity to violent conflict that I find most pertinent but perhaps also most pernicious and resistant to change. Here, I put forward seven propositions that I believe have led and can still lead religions ineluctably towards violence, both chronic and acute; that make them maladies for social conflict rather than remedies for peace. I raise these seven propositions because it is my hope that through our reflection and debate we might be able to find ways to contend with them, and potentially transform them and thus the role of religions themselves. To summarize, they are: 1. Bowing to power rather than to justice, and tolerating injustice for power 2. Promoting exclusion versus inclusion 3. Proselytizing and homogenizing versus permitting heterogeneous co-existence 4. Adopting anthropocentric versus Cosmotheandric attitudes to the universe 5. Prioritizing form over substance 6. Stagnating and oppressing versus innovating and adapting. 7. Sowing division versus union Each of these is self-explanatory, and it is fairly transparent to observe how some of the major religions have fallen prey to some or all of these pitfalls at different times. All seven are inter-linked and feed into each other, as we shall see in our brief examination below. Bowing to Power rather than Justice All the major religions emerged from their founding fathers championing of justice. In periods of great oppression, religions did indeed stand in solidarity with the oppressed, and often they confronted might with right. Buddhism offered a route of out Hinduisms oppression of the low caste, Christianity was an avenue for compassion away from the Romans brutality, and Islam was a haven of equality and inclusion for the most downtrodden in society. However, opposing injustice inevitably sets one on a collision course with power. And the tendency of major religions has been to not oppose power but to ally with it. Religions increasingly came to tolerate injustice and even, at times, condone or justify it in religions name in their desire to curry favor the powerful. Their alliance with power reaped them rich rewards, as ever-more magnificent temples, churches, mosques and stupas were built, and land and wealth were attributed to religious authorities by triumphant kings to mark each conquest blessed by God. Liberation theology that emerged from the Christian church to oppose power and domination and express rebellious solidarity with the colonized and oppressed bucked this trend. Emerging primarily out of Latin America and
See e.g. De Vries and Moghaddam and Marsala. Basedau and De Juan provide a short literature review. See also Tanner, and Berg and Roislen. 41 Tanner. 42 Larsson, and Juergensmeyer would argue this. 43 Of the many reasons proposed by scholars as to why religions are conducive to violence, Larssons are robust and to some extent overlap with mine: religious truth, cosmic dualism, fear, evil, survival, and anthropomorphism. Larsson, pp. 110-129.
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wildly popular across the Caribbean and Africa, it was hardly embraced by the religious establishment. So too the Arya Samaj movement of Dayanand Saraswati, which returned to the Vedic scriptures and opposed the dogmatic rituals, casteism and exclusion of women, liberated Hindu society but was bitterly opposed by conservative Hindus. Today, the alliance of religions with power and their blind eye to spiraling social injustice and inequity at a time of unprecedented creation and concentration of wealth is not only unacceptable but self-destructive for religions. Studies have shown that inequality between groups horizontal inequality is a major underlying cause for war.44 It is not only the poor and wretched that rise violently against the rich and powerful; it is as or more often the powerful that deploy incommensurate brute force to prevent the poor from seeking redistributive justice, witness South Africa. By ignoring or justifying injustice in their cozy relationship with political and economic power, religions are facilitating, abetting and fuelling conflict, when they should be mitigating conflict, fostering equity and justice and building peace. Promoting exclusion versus inclusion While all religions preach a single family of God, in practice they have instituted and enforced strict exclusion of certain social groups. In some religions it is communities deemed to be untouchables, in others it is gays, or specific minorities. The quasi-exclusion of women that was near ubiquitous in the major religions particularly Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism, is noteworthy as it epitomizes the system of exclusion used by religions. The exclusion of women is a relatively recent phenomenon dating to the emergence of the newer religions of Christianity and Islam and new and more conservative forms of older religions like Hinduism and Judaism. They subsumed and overrode pre-existing spiritual traditions that gave a central role to women and Goddesses. While the earliest religions worshipped the female creative energy as the source of all things, newer religions condemned female creativity and deemed it impure, thus conveniently excluding women from religious service. Exclusion has also meant the inability of religions to treat non-believers of their faith as equals, and justifies on occasion treating them as sub-human. This was certainly the motivating drive behind the proselytizing of heathens in colonized lands. The resistant belief that heaven or the afterlife is reserved only for the believers of ones own faith and illtreatment or violence against those of other faiths is permissible remains a pernicious cause of violence today. Proselytizing and homogenizing versus permitting heterogeneous co-existence Most religions contain within their scriptures reference to the Oneness of God and the legitimacy of the different paths leading to the Divine, and carry injunctions for tolerance with other faiths. Yet, this is overlooked in the zeal of proselytization, without concern for its potentially devastating and unpredictable after-effects. The decimation of the indigenous population across North and South America, the enforced disappearance of the aboriginals in Australia, the descent into genocide in Rwanda are all direct and indirect consequences of forceful proselytization and the desire to homogenize and eliminate religious difference. Proselytizing was not simply a feature of the early years of newly born religions, or a bygone vestige of colonial times. Proselytizing is in its heyday today. Religions, denominations and cults are mushrooming on all continents, each dependant on spreading their faith for their material and moral survival. Evangelical Christian churches have spread across once-Catholic Latin America as also Africa and Asia aided by massive infusions of financial aid.

Stewart, Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict. Stewarts work is building on over a decade of indepth research that is finally being acknowledged by policy makers and aid donors. See also, Mani, Beyond Retribution and Mani. 2007. Looking back and moving forward. The nexus between development and transitional justice, Expert paper at (http://www.frient.de/en/publications/detaildoc.asp?id=756)
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It must be clarified that not all proselytizing is negative. In some cases it has meant survival or a new lease of life for oppressed groups and individuals. The conversion of huge numbers of untouchable low-caste Hindus to Buddhism and of the very poor to Islam has given them renewed dignity and an opportunity for a more decent life. The penalization of proselytization in some countries is a cause of concern. The restrictions on religious freedom imposed in some countries that constrain people from adopting a faith different from the one they are born into but within which they find greater resonance can also take violent turns and warrant attention.45 However, there are at least three dangers of proselytizing that make it violence-prone. First, proselytizing is rooted in a belief of the superiority of ones own religion as the unique path to salvation. This belief creates an inherent source of violence against all those outside the faith, and a willingness to deploy and justify violence to preserve and spread the faith. Recent converts tend to be more militant than long-established ones, and their proclivity to violence to defend or spread their new faith cannot be predicted or controlled. Second, proselytizing is often accompanied by financial incentives particularly in poor countries. This is unsustainable and creates new horizontal inequalities and social fissures between haves and have-nots divided along new religious lines without a past history of co-existence, creating grounds for violent conflict. It also feeds the temptation of proselytizers to bribe would-be believers with social goods like healthcare and education, and to withhold these from the recalcitrant, as happened during the colonial period. Third, the rapid transformation of religious demographics across whole continents in less than a generation has profound destabilizing effects whose long-term impacts cannot yet be predicted. The speed of proselytization in the eagerness to increase the flock necessarily leads to shallow belief and practice rather than a deep imbibing of the spiritual and often harmonious philosophy of the religion. Even benevolent and peace-loving religions might win inadequately informed converts who are prone to violence to defend or spread their new faith. On the surface, the mass conversions to evangelical Christianity appear non-violent today, but it cannot be predicted how these new converts will interact with their unconverted compatriots in years to come. USA and Uganda have seen the wrath of terrorist violence emerging from Christianinspired cults. For all these reasons, it is proselytization rather than restrictions on religious freedoms that I highlight here as a cause of violent conflict. Adopting anthropocentric versus Cosmotheandric attitudes to the universe The earliest religions were deeply conscious of the unbroken chain of life, the deep interconnectedness between humans and all dimensions of the universe, and of human existence as but a part of an interdependent whole. Yet, as these Cosmotheandric values that considered the entire cosmos as divine were replaced by purportedly more evolved, monotheistic, modern and institutionalized religions they sowed the seeds of social and environmental violence. These new religions believed in the supremacy of a single God made in the image of man. Man himself represented the apex of Gods creation, at whose disposal and for whose convenience God had created all other beings on earth. This single belief that lies at the centre of the creation myth common to Jews, Christians and Muslims - of Man, not woman, made in the image of God has had violent repercussions throughout human history. Despite the nuanced discourses of theologians to explain the symbolic rather than factual basis of this creation story, the myth of human supremacy persists. Notwithstanding powerful mythological stories like Noahs Arc to depict the equal sanctity of all forms of life, and cautionary notes within all religions towards moderation and respect for the integrity of all creation, these are all too easily dismissed.46 This anthropocentricism and consequent disregard for other sentient beings and for the earth itself has led to a chronic lack of any
See the annual International Religious Freedom Reports with extensive coverage of each country, submitted to Congress each year by the US State Department (at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/) 46 See the comprehensive treatment of the religious sources of concern for the universe and environmentalism in the treatise of former International Court of Justice Judge Weeramantrys Tread Lightly on the Earth.
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sense of proportion of mans place within the vast universe and the absence of any limit to his greed and destructiveness. Environmental destruction and climate change as much as unbridled materialism and consumerism are fed and justified by anthropocentric religious beliefs that encourage man to enjoy the fruits of his Fathers creation, with no awareness of the self-destruction and deprivation to others it involves. It can be seen how this belief reinforces all the others discussed so far: it has bolstered his drive to proselytize, suppress difference, cavort with power and tolerate injustice. The violent denigration and suppression of Cosmotheandric spiritual values that were prevalent across all the continents among indigenous peoples must be acknowledged and these values restored across our societies, as the anthropocentric view of life propagated by the major and monotheistic religions is unsustainable, inherently violent, and is threatening the survival of the planet. Prioritizing form over substance The Upanishads, the timeless philosophical wisdom of Hinduism albeit known and understood by but few Hindus clearly distinguish between Sruti and the Smrti or what could simply be called the changeless and timeless substance and the ever-changing form of religions. The Sruti refers to the universal truths in all religions, such as their insights about human nature, the meaning of existence, and the universe. The Smrti by contrast refers to the rules and regulations, the practices and rites that come and go and change age after age. The Upanishads clearly indicate therefore that the Smrti is always subordinate to the Sruti in spiritual matters.47 Each religion in fact has this distinction between the spiritual seed of wisdom that has universal validity and its particular set of laws, practices, prayers and rituals that express these universal truths differently. Hindu scriptures including the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita clarify that the true spiritual path is to discover the inner Self through contemplation, at which time ritual becomes meaningless. Effectively, ritual or daily practice and obedience to rules and regulations are seen as a temporary substitute, a path towards philosophical understanding and awakening, after which ritual is futile. Yet is there a religion that is more bogged down with ritual and more divorced from the path of self-realization and awakening than Hinduism? Even Buddhism, which more directly exhorted its believers to eschew ritual and directly pursue enlightenment through meditation and moderation, has, in many traditions, fallen prey to ritual and dogma. Yet, every religion has had its prophets and mystics who have discovered that the real wealth of their religious tradition lies beyond blind dogma and habitual practice and is unfolded through contemplation of the inner world and cultivation of compassion. The Hermetica, the condensed wisdom of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismajestus, which influenced Western theologians and philosophers ever since, noted: By thought, (Man) may come to knowledge of Atum, the one-God.48 Those that bathe themselves in Mind find True Knowledge and become complete.49 Let us clarify: rituals are fundamentally important in human and social life - they are replete with symbols of profound and ancient meaning that orient life and push us towards evolution, often unwittingly. However, if they remain unconscious and unexplored, their meanings abstruse but their practice imbued with god-fearing repetition, they can lead nowhere.

Swami Ranganathananda, The Message of the Upanishads, p. 9 Hermetica, p. 91. 49 Hermetica, p. 136
47

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This is why, in most religions, there are inbuilt mechanisms whereby the universal truths are maintained and periodically clarified through theological reflection, dialogue and consensus, while the ritual practices are continually updated to reflect changes in society. However, this distinction has broken down. In many religions the confusion and conflation between the form and substance, the Smrti and Sruti has become total. In the fear of diluting the religion, or deviating from the will of the founding father who lived thousands of years ago, both are ossified and change or adaptation become quasi-impossible. Religions then succumb to fear, perceive threats, and become anxious about their survival, thus susceptible to conflict. This is why religious authorities cling to the practice or form of religion and enforce it ruthlessly, but violate the substance of the religion in doing so. The Talibans religious police in their Department of the promotion of virtue and the prohibition of vice offer a ludicrous but vivid example. And this is how violence creeps into religion. If there is the serene recognition that each religion contains its kernel of universal truth that cannot be dented by any attack on its external manifestations, religions will lose their defensive streak. If they can go further and realize that these universal truths mirror each other infinitely across different religions, they will also lose their offensive strategy of proselytization. Stagnation versus innovation There are two impulses for adaptation and innovation that may emerge within religion. The first is from within, and is stimulated by the desire and need to give enhanced meaning to the scriptures in changed circumstances, or due to the observed changes in society and the needs of religious communities. The second is due to pressures from without. When new religions for example rise, there is a ready invitation to older religions to also adapt and innovate in response. Very often throughout history this is what naturally transpired. Each birth of a new religion in the Indian subcontinent with its particular spiritual fertility led to a ferment of innovation and adaptation within Hinduism which rightly recognized the challenge and the risk of losing adherents to new faiths. The greatest reformist movements within Hinduism occurred partly as responses to such challenges from without. Challenged by Buddhisms path of moderation and non- violence, Hinduism softened its aggressive edge. Shaken from its slumber by Islams promise of equality and inclusion, Hinduism reexamined its unjust and exclusionary practices and reformed them. Reformers like Dayanand Saraswati, Raja Rammohan Roy, and more recently Mahatma Gandhi fought to remove the oppressive practices of Hinduism and revitalize instead its universal truths of unity and interconnectedness. Yet, Gandhi himself became the victim to the fundamentalist rise of Hinduism, which has continued unchecked ever since. This inclination towards stagnation rather than innovation within religions emanates from the lack of distinction between form and substance discussed earlier. The religion becomes stuck in devotion to the form, as a self-preserving survival instinct, but increasingly loses touch with its spiritual core or substance. All extremist or fundamental expressions of religion fall prey to this vice, although they claim to uphold the essence of the religion. The act of murdering doctors who perform abortion to demonstrate ones belief in the sanctity of life is an all too real example that makes the point. When stagnation is preferred to innovation in the face of a challenge or social development, it can degenerate rapidly into violence. The infinite creativity of innovation does not need to repress, as it has found a way to contend with the challenge. The confines of stagnation have few other choices but violence, because it has only circumvented the threat, which remains to haunt it. Sowing Division rather than Unity. Finally, a central reason why religion has become a warmonger rather than a peacebuilder is because it has failed to fulfill its core function, derived from its semantic origin of uniting or linking. It has instead done the reverse and become a force for division. Religion, for all its multiple meanings that the religious scholars present here know far better than I do, traces

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its semantic origin to the Latin word re-ligare or to link, tie, or bind. The re is significant, as it seems to acknowledge that an original bond might have been snapped, original unity fragmented into duality, and it is the purpose of religion to re-bind or re-link once again. From one perspective it could be argued that religions performed a very effective role of binding they oppressively convinced generations of believers that their only link to salvation was through unquestioning obedience to their religious authority, and thus they bound the fate of these humans and their tremulous souls to their own. The function of religion, I would argue, was not only this single link between man and God through the religious authority a link that quickly became a one-way bondage. Rather, I believe and argue, religion or spirituality has as its chief function a triple linkage. First, it serves to link human beings primarily to themselves to their own inner consciousness; second it exists to link humans to each other in society; and third, it serves to link human beings to the Universe or the Divine and all its diverse manifestations and life forms. All religions begin with the first injunction or universal truth to seek out the true nature of life and the true purpose of their existence through contemplation. Second, they call upon humans to live in harmony and with compassion towards each other and all sentient beings. Third, they create a link between humans and the divine, whether expressed as a single god or as divinity incarnate in the cosmos. The three were necessarily linked and mutually reinforcing, and it was through the combination of the three that humans achieved salvation, moksha, liberation, or a place in paradise. However, this triple linkage was surreptitiously reduced to a single linkage between individual human beings to a single all-powerful God, through the intermediary of his infallible representatives on earth: the ministers, priests, imams, pundits and rabbis of our religious institutions. The first task of self-enquiry and reflection that would enable individuals to find themselves was slowly discarded, and thus the role of debate and enquiry within the religious institution also disappeared. Second, the injunction of living in harmony with fellow humans, and eventually with the earth and all sentient beings was also whittled down. Finally, it was left to these human interlocutors of God to determine according to their whims and vagaries how the rules and regulations must be applied to win unquestioning obedience of the faithful. This thin linkage ineluctably became a source of control rather than union, and, therefore, of fear and division in order to better control. Those that did not obey had to be excluded and suppressed. They had to be feared and fought against for their potential threat to the faith. The scriptures are resonant with messages of the unity of all life. The Hermetica, the precursor to modern religions, still vividly encapsulated this unity. like the Cosmos (Man) is a whole made up of different diverse parts.' You think that things are many When you view them as separate But when you see they all hang on the One And flow from the One You will realize they are unitedLinked together And connected by a chain of Being From the highest to the lowest All subject to the will of Atum50

50

Hermetica, p. 91; pp.46-47.

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However, when this realization is absent, we are susceptible to the fear that is bred in ignorance. Until we realize the unity of life, we live in fear 51 (Upanishads, Taitirriya Upanishad, verse 8.0, p144) Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.52 (Tao de Ching, 47) Bereft of this realization of the unity and interconnectedness of all things that lay at their origins, religions have sown division rather than unity and fuelled the fear of otherness that has spawned violent conflict. What now? Reversing Course and Becoming Peacebuilders The erudite Rabbinic scholar of religion and peacebuilding Marc Gopin pointedly observes, As religion becomes more important in the lives of hundreds of millions of people, the political power generated by this commitment will either lead to a more peaceful world or to a more violent world, depending on how that power is utilized.53 The increased turn to religion, and more worryingly to religious dogma, as a panacea in uncertain and volatile times suggests that the potential of religion to cause violence will only increase if there is not an urgent attempt to change course. Diagnosing the tacit, the unspoken but loud underlying sources of violent conflict within religions, as we just did, is a first step. The next and more challenging step is to undertake the necessary changes to overcome this penchant for violence and transform it towards peace. Yes, stimulating and encouraging the kinds of interfaith initiatives we discussed earlier and training religious leaders and young believers in conflict resolution is desirable. But such measures will be piecemeal until religions change course en masse. A precursor is for religions to cease their aggressive tendencies in order to create the conducive conditions for them to assume their role as peacebuilders The five steps that I believe are most urgent today across religions are the following: 1. Let justice trump or marry power each time. 2. Include and integrate what you hitherto rejected, particularly women, minorities and the marginalized. 3. Undertake and encourage critical enquiry 4. Pursue contemplation, self-examination and personal evolution 5. Embrace spiritual expression over religious freedom Let justice trump or marry power each time. If religions are to become a force for peacebuilding, they first will have to stop ignoring and avoid fostering the very conditions of injustice that cause violent conflict. For too long the marriage of convenience and mutual advantage between religious and political power made the former complicit with the latter in trumping justice in favor of power. Now, all religions and not just few must champion justice and speak and act against all forms of injustice, particularly those that hide behind religious justifications. A concrete example is the courageous seven-point platform of the Sarva Dharma Sansad in India, evoked earlier, that opposes many of the forms of injustice that the political and economic elite benefit from and are loath to eliminate. Siding systematically with justice will not be comfortable initially for
Easwaran, Upanishads (Taittiriya Upanishad, verse 8.0 p. 144) Mitchell, Tao de Ching, 47. 53 Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon, p. 35.
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religious establishments or their leaders, and they may well fall from political favor, but at last they will be upholding the values of their founders and speaking for the masses of their often most committed believers, and not for the opportunistic elite. Include and integrate what you hitherto rejected The second urgent task is for religions to become integrators and forces for inclusion, while so far they have been dividing and excluding what they deemed extraneous or threatening. Religions will have to proceed in two steps: first they would have to include and accord equal treatment to all the marginal groups within their own religions that they treated so far as inferior or pariah the gays, the disabled, the untouchables. An essential starting point would be to integrate once more the fifty percent of the population that was shut out for a few thousand years ago women. Women would need to be restituted their place within all religions, as the Anglican and other Protestant churches have already done. Religious institutions would need to systematically reverse the structural injustices and gender discrimination ingrained in their doctrines, rituals and practices. The second step would then be that of adopting an inclusive and integrative approach towards other religions, recognizing without fear and anxiety, the common core across all monotheistic and Cosmotheandric, modern and ancient religions and spiritual traditions. Just as in agriculture, monoculture may be productive in the first years of cultivation but over time is self-destructive. Life and culture thrive on diversity. Where syncretism has led to the overlayering and co-existence of older and newer religions they have deeper roots due to long generations of acculturation. Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan; Quechua, Mayan and Aztec spirituality and Christianity in Latin America; Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity in India; Ubuntu and other varieties of African traditional spirituality with Christianity and Islam in Africa, of Judaism with Abyssinian culture in Ethiopia; of Maori wisdom with Catholicism in New Zealand, these marriages of spiritual and religious traditions have borne rich fruit which may not always have eschewed or prevented violence but which has provided resilience and cultural wealth. The interfaith initiatives for peace we cited earlier are all drawing on the capacity of committed religious believers to unite their aims with believers of other faiths without fear of dilution or contamination, in pursuit of a higher goal. Until such integration and inclusion becomes the rule and not the exception, religions will not be able to realize their potential for peacebuilding. Undertake and encourage critical enquiry, questioning Third, religions must open themselves up to critical enquiry and internal debate. This is not something new or alien to most religious traditions. It is simply a return to the ancient traditions of internal debate and critical enquiry that kept religions alive for centuries, often without the aid of written scriptures. The oldest religions survived for centuries without written scriptures not simply through unquestioning recitation, but through constant dialogue and enquiry between disciples and teachers. Even the written religions for hundreds of years simply did not have enough copies of their scriptures available, and oral transmission and the active culture of enquiry and debate were frequent. Nor was such enquiry restricted to learned theological scholars in the confines of their monasteries, but it was open to all, men and women, old and young. In Hinduism, now partially crippled by fundamentalists, this spirit of enquiry led believers to fearlessly question their gods and the tenets of their traditional faiths in the pursuit of truth, such skepticism is but the prelude to rational faith.54 This culture of enquiry that existed across cultures and faiths was replaced at some point by the culture of fear, and the repression of any criticism or dissent. As two Iranians scholars note, our incapacity to apprehend reality lies at the root of our paranoia. If we were to take a clear and careful look at the West, we would see that it draws its strength from its capacity for
54

Swami Ranganathananda, p. 15.

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introspection, and its intransigent self-criticism. Yet even in the West, this introspection was stamped out by the recourse of religion to a wrathful God who demanded absolute obedience, despite the rational march of the Enlightenment and European Reformation. It is time to heal the long divorce of Smrti and Sruti, of philosophy and religious ritual, of substance and form. It is no surprise that in many religious traditions Wisdom, a female deity represented knowledge and truth: Athena in Greece, Sophia in Roman, and Saraswati in Hindu mythology. In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Amaat stood not only for Wisdom but also for Truth, Justice and Order itself. With the suppression and exclusion of the female, the pursuit of wisdom through enquiry was suppressed as well. Reopening the door to critical enquiry, to the pursuit of truth, would be emblematic of the reintegration of women and feminine values within religions. Pursue contemplation, self-examination and personal evolution It is easy to criticize religions and accuse them of their many failings, but far more difficult to question oneself and pursue the path of self-realization. Most religions provided a path for this inner journey, which alone could reveal the purpose of life. As Lao Tzu inimitably stated: Knowing others is knowledge Knowing yourself is true wisdom Mastering others is strength Mastering yourself is true power55 (Tao de ching 33 p The Vision Quest was a fundamental part of the individual life journey of indigenous Americans, which despite their communally oriented spirituality, each individual had to confront and undertake alone. The ancient Hermetica said, The mind of the Cosmos is known through thought alone. The Buddha preached thought-free meditation as the path to liberation, and this Buddhist to enlightenment is rooted in human psychology, as is the Hindu path that it emanated from. Yet, while 90 percent of the worlds population claim to believe in a faith, and in some continents a good proportion of them practices their faith diligently, only few pursue this path of self-realization. It is the lonelier path than the social one of ritual and communal practice, and a scary one with none of the clear markers of time space and designated prayer that makes religious practice easier than spiritual pursuit. Yet, amidst todays world of fast-paced technological change, of constant competition and mindless consumption, of striving and strife, there is no way out of conflict and towards peace with this individual step. UNESCOs oft-quoted preamble observes the self-evident truth that wars begin in the minds of men. How then can religions become a force for peace unless each individual believer first examines his or her own mind to recognize and reject our violent practices and gradually adopt more peaceful thoughts and actions? As each individual awakens to the potential for wisdom and peace within her or himself, each religion will be empowered to build peace to society. The Final Proposition the Inevitability of Spirituality, Humanity and Cosmotheandry The final proposition is the easiest, the most essential, and yet perhaps the most challenging if we are to convert religions - and ourselves - from warmongers to peacemakers. I would put it thus: I believe that today religion choosing to be religious might still be a choice, but spirituality adopting a spiritual attitude to life - is no longer a choice. What do I mean by this? Let me clarify first that by spirituality I mean simply a sense of ones space in the universe and ones connection to all other humans, to all sentient beings and to the earth
55

Mitchell, Tao de Ching, 33.

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itself. It could embody the triple linkage that religion was to deliver: to oneself, to other beings and to the universe. At minimum it encompasses the notion of humanity or secular humanism. Philosophically, it is synonymous with the Smrti or universal truths that are the kernel of all the worlds religions and spiritual wisdoms. Practically, it is the values of compassion and solidarity, of justice and inclusion that characterize the secular humanism represented by many of the 13-14 percent who prefer to declare themselves atheist or agnostic, and who understandably feel they have caused less harm and more good than the worlds religious majority. However, our conception of humanity or secular humanism has no choice today but to expand beyond our species to include other life forms and the earth itself, given the irreversible harm we have inflicted upon them and our far greater scientific and moral recognition of our intrinsic interconnectedness. This constitutes, in effect, a call to return to the Cosmotheandric values that were prevalent across the Earth in her early days, and that have persisted in pockets of the world, despite persecution. In earlier centuries, Cosmotheandry was rejected and suppressed as primitive by zealous missionaries. Today, we can return to the Cosmotheandric values of cherishing and respecting the sacredness of all life, the fragility of the planet and our duty of care from a more informed perspective as rational beings of the 21 st century, conscious of the peril of living an unexamined life bereft of these values. Religions have caused untold violence throughout history but they have also brought harmony and solace, and profound wisdom, beauty and grace to humankind. By separating themselves from their spiritual core, and pursuing the external form rather than the inner substance, religions have more often become battlefields than gardens. Religious freedom has been kinder to humankind than religious oppression, but it has not brought peace. As Swami Agnivesh puts it wryly, we dont need freedom of religion as much as we need freedom from religion, referring to the oppressive aspects that religions have often donned. Religious freedom, deciding to practice a religion or not is today a choice. But if every human being, religious or atheist, practicing or agnostic does not awaken to his or her humanness and belonging to an interconnected universe, we may well be doomed to a continuing vicious cycle of violence and conflict. If, instead a majority or even a conscious minority starting with us, right here today, does seize this opportunity, we could already envision an unfolding panorama of real structural, cultural and social peace not a distant utopia, but an ourtopia of our own will and making.56 --------

56

Ourtopia is a word I coined in 2003 and have used since to describe the real opportunity we have today to shape an accessible and real ideal world with the sum-total of our existing knowledge, wisdom, resources, creativity, and boundless will and compassion, right here and now, without bemoaning the horrors of the present and the impossibility of reaching a distant utopia.

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Biography of Dr. Rama Mani Rama was born in India into a conservative Hindu Brahmin family, and rebelled early against the violence and injustice fomented by religion in her society, despite her deep love for her cultures diverse spiritual values. She decided to devote her life to the elusive quest for justice that must underpin peace, and lived, as a scholar, activist and policy advisor, in disparate parts of the globe: USA, Algeria, France, Italy, India, UK, Ethiopia, Uganda, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, and France. In the course of her work on conflict in Africa in 2000, she first came to the realization that without the cultural, spiritual and creative wisdom of local populations, the efforts of international peacebuilders remains ephemeral. She has tried to find ways to elicit this wisdom and instill it in the understanding of and approaches to peacebuilding efforts ever since. She has been the Executive Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Sri Lanka, the Director of the New Issues in Security Course in the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the Africa Strategy Manager and Policy Coordinator for Conflict for Oxfam GB based in Ethiopia and Uganda, and the Senior External Relations Officer for the Commission on Global Governance, in Geneva. She currently directs a multi-disciplinary research project that analyses from a southern cultural perspective the UN norm of the responsibility to protect populations from mass atrocities. She is a Senior Research Associate with the University of Oxford Centre for International Studies, and a Councilor of the World Future Council that promotes best policies to preserve the Earth for future generations. She is also the initiator of Justice Unlimited, a small non-profit that supports grassroots initiatives for social transformation, and seeks peace and justice through cultural, creative and integral approaches.