Islam and the absence of Chinese
terrorists By Chan Akya
In the wake of the most recent eruption in
terrorist activity, whether interrupted or
successful, the world's media have been full of
stories and op-ed pages citing the failures of the
West in coming to terms with Islam.
For
their part, Islamic scholars have pointed out that
a very large proportion of Muslims are not
terrorists, and thus to confuse the
religion with terrorism is
pointless. That is contentious. Let us think for a
moment of the two ways of wording a statement, and
because this is a contentious topic, let's look
elsewhere at an older, more sinister albeit
state-sponsored terrorist organization, the
Waffen-SS.
In 1933 (and I have
specifically chosen a period well before wartime
atrocities began) there were 52,000 members in the
Waffen-SS within a population of 66 million
Germans. "The Waffen-SS comprised a ridiculously
small minority of Germans" or "All members
of the Waffen-SS were Germans."
In effect,
both statements are correct, but their
implications are vastly different. It is in
recognizing the second version that post-World War
II Germany achieved meaningful introspection, and
why the country does not pose a military threat
now, nor is ever likely to in future. Prolonging
the comforting fiction afforded by the first
version of the statement would not have helped
Germany repent for its actions collectively.
This is the same problem confronting the
Muslim world today. The linkage between Islam and
today's terrorists can be framed very similarly to
the German pyramid of the early 20th century.
Then, frustrations and anger within the wider
population were radicalized progressively, until
they reached the fanatical breadth of the
Waffen-SS. The progression of terrorists through
Islamic society, one imagines (because one doesn't
really stand around witnessing the birth of new
terrorists), is a similar process where a number
of local frustrations have fueled the nucleus of
modern terrorism.
For lessons on how to
avoid the spillover of such extremist tendencies
toward action, Muslims may want to examine the
Buddhist example from history, in particular
focusing on its evolution within Chinese culture.
Very similar to the schism that developed
in Islam between Sunnis and Shi'ites is the one
that developed in Buddhism in the 1st century AD.
Then, the arguments between the literal sayings of
the Buddha and a theological expansion from those
sayings laid the ground for the evolution of
Mahayana (Greater Wheel) Buddhism, which is the
version that thrived in India and was later
exported to China and Japan. The older, and
arguably truer, form of Buddhism was thenceforth
cited as Hinayana (Lesser Wheel) and was primarily
followed in countries such as Ceylon (Sri Lanka),
Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand).
Mahayana and China As the
Mahayana school spread in China, its greatest
appeal was among those following Taoist thought.
The antipathy of Confucian scholars to Buddhism is
well recorded. They objected to the idea of a man
giving up his worldly possessions and abjuring
sex, as these violated the importance of relative
standing upon which Confucian values of a person's
importance are founded. Confucians also opposed
the foreign-looking imagery of the Buddha, and in
particular to his depiction in statues of exposing
one shoulder, as this was barbaric to them.
Taoist beliefs, on the other hand, cited
the value of a person unto himself - and it was
here that the lower classes in China found a solid
echo in Buddhism. By promising rebirth in a better
position, and promising besides that oppressors
would themselves suffer in a rebirth, Buddhism was
able to fill the poor with greater optimism about
their lot.
The transition meant that
stability across the classes was achieved for
China and, over a period of time, the Confucian
elite managed to strengthen its hold over the
country's thought. This was compensated across the
lower classes, who focused on self-maximization as
guided by Taoist principles, while the more
literate among the lower classes focused on the
Buddhist principles of seeking an escape from mere
bodily pleasures. Needless to add, such people did
not procreate, and therefore failed to perpetuate
their discontent.
The contribution of
Buddhism to Chinese culture and language has been
immense. The "butterfly dream" poem of Chuang Tzu
in particular occupies a core of Zen thought now.
This is a situation where the learned scholar
wakes from his dream, where he remembers dreaming
of himself as a butterfly. He then inquires
whether he did indeed dream that he was a
butterfly or whether his current state of being,
as a human, could be the dream of a butterfly. The
idea of non-attachment (as against detachment) is
core to Buddhist thought, and explains away the
injustices millions of people have suffered for
the past few millennia. I believe that this core
of thought, suffused with a Taoist instinct for
self-preservation (and maximization), forms the
essence of Chinese practicality. It informs the
philosophy of action, and can be seen as a guiding
hand of common sense in the works of Sun Tzu,
which are more popular in the West.
Hinayana and Ceylon The core
practices of Buddhism that were initially exported
at the time of Emperor Ashok were to become
foreign in their land of birth as India took to
the Mahayana form of Buddhism. In foreign lands,
Buddhism nevertheless encountered one of the key
objections to Mahayana thought, namely the need
for deifying the Buddha (which was frowned upon by
the Buddha himself) to spread the message wider.
That the Mahayana school succumbed to the
temptation to deify the Buddha and widen the
discussions on his thoughts remains the key reason
for the Hinayana school's derision of the other
school's adherents.
The natural pessimism
attached to Buddhism centers on the sheer
pointlessness of one's existence should one fail
to secure separation from self. While this is
optimal for an individual to examine at some
length, it does not form the basis for nationhood.
Indeed, much as the Confucians observed, true
Buddhists do not form armies and do not join
government, as these acts necessarily injure
others. Thus challenged, the Hinayana school in
practice adopted the sacred relics of the Buddha
as its guiding force. The transition of focus from
the immutable self to an object proved successful
as a way of guarding the basic culture from
foreign invasion.
It is thus no accident
that all the main adherents of the Hinayana school
Buddhism - Ceylon, Burma and Siam - succeeded in
creating military societies (I define that term as
a society ever-focused on external threats to its
culture, with less focus on internal reforms).
Indeed, the Hinayana school has a basic openness
on religion that is somehow combined with a basic
disdain for exceptional behavior.
The key
exception for Buddhism with respect to terrorism
is thus to be found in its oldest school - it does
not take any leap of faith for us to examine the
modern-day barbarism shown by the Myanmar junta on
its own people, nor the atrocities heaped on
minority Tamils and Muslims by the majority
Sinhalese (Buddhists) in Sri Lanka, as having
philosophical underpinnings not in Buddhism, but
in the organization of the state around the idea
of protecting the religion.
Back to
Islam As with the Hinayana school, today's
Islam organizes itself around the sacred
experience of visiting Mecca and Medina, and
adhering to other tenets laid down many centuries
ago. And as with the experience in Burma and
Ceylon, this led to the successful establishment
of a military society.
The evolution of
Shi'ite thought was on similar lines to that in
the Mahayana school, and very similar to the
history of Buddhism: circumstances (ie, history)
played a great part in rendering the divide on
nationalist lines. The lack of open debate in
Sunni Islam today harks back to the Hinayana
experience, although with a key difference, namely
that while Buddhism's strictest thoughts survived
away from its place of origin, the same cannot be
said of Islam today.
Evolution has been an
integral feature of all expanding religions, be it
Christianity's incorporation of pagan beliefs in
Europe or Buddhism's adoption of Taoist principles
in China. While Islam itself underwent similar
evolution - witness the Sufi school of thought,
which borrowed much from Buddhism - today's voices
speak from the core alone.
Thus the
statement that terrorists do not represent a
majority of Muslims may indeed be true
mathematically, but that does not absolve the rest
of the Islamic community of their failure to
address the narrowness of the core. This silence
forms the basis of the global terrorist pyramid.
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