The
blood is the life, Mr Rumsfeld! By Spengler
Photos: Ashura in Karbala, Iraq, 2004, by Nir Rosen
Never before has the Shi'ite current in Islam, the religion of the
disenfranchised, held power in the Persian Gulf. Washington hopes that Iraqi
Shi'ite quietism will prevail over Iranian Shi'ite militancy; detractors of
American policy warn that Iran will dominate her Arab co-religionists. Spurious
logic underlies both of these scenarios, which derive from secular political
science. Shi'ite Islam is a religious movement, and policy makers must learn
its theology in order to predict its responses. Neither a democratic Iraq nor
an expanded Iranian empire will emerge from the shift to Shi'ite dominance, but
rather a perpetually erupting pattern of insurgencies.
As Dracula told the traveling salesman, "The blood is the life, Mr Renfield!"
[1] All religion is about blood, because all religion is
about life. Shi'ite Islam, though, displays an affinity for real blood that
disturbs the West. On their holiest day, the Feast of Ashura, Shi'ites cut
themselves until they bathe in their own blood. Jafariyanews.com, a Shi'ite
information service, reported from the holy city of Karbala in Iraq on February
20:
Thousands of mourners slit open their heads with swords, big knives
and razor blades streaming their blood to signify their grief over the
martyrdom of [the Prophet Mohammed's grandson] al-Imam al-Hussein [in 680 AD] -
the tragedy which caused the sky to rain blood and the earth to bleed. [2]
Spurting blood is the preferred symbol of Iran's Islamic revolution. Fountains
shooting red dye at Tehran's Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery
recalled the blood of the young Iranians interred there, who fell in the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's suicide battalions during the Iran-Iraq war of
the 1980s.
This turns Western stomachs, despite the universal presence of blood symbols in
Western religion, as we observe in the Eucharist as well as the blood
sacrifices of the Hebrew Bible. Catholics drink Christ's blood literally (and
Protestants symbolically) to attain eternal life, while lambs' blood kept the
Angel of Death from the doors of the ancient Hebrews on the eve of their
exodus.
One dies a vicarious death in order to secure eternal life. Unlike Christians
or Jews, whose religions are based on vicarious sacrifice, Islam demands the
self-sacrifice of its adherents, in keeping with its essentially militant
character. Revealed religion puts blood at a distance; Abraham sacrifices a ram
and spares his son Isaac, and God sacrifices his own son in order to spare
humankind. That is why blood in Judaism became taboo, to be handled only by the
priest or his surrogate, the ritual butcher. Usually a Catholic priest
administers the Eucharist. (an acolyte or lay person can give communion when
not enough clergy are available, though only a priest or bishop can consecrate
the host.) Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam has no ritual of sacrifice,
nor does it need one, for the sacrifice that Islam demands is that of the
Muslim himself. That is the secret of Ashura.
To understand the promise of Islam, and the aspirations of Shi'ite Islam in
particular, we first must understand what religion offers to begin with. All
religion is about life, that is, about life eternal. Humankind cannot bear
mortality without the hope of immortality, and for this men will sacrifice
their physical existence without hesitation. That is true of paganism as much
as it is true of revealed religion. The young men of the tribe march to war to
protect the existence of the tribe, confident that the perpetuation of their
blood and their memory will compensate them for their death in battle. But the
expansion of the great empires of Macedonia and Rome made the tribes themselves
sentient of their mortality; that is the dawn of history, namely of the
knowledge that every nation has a history, and that this history must have an
end. As Franz Rosenzweig (1886 - 1929 - one of the most influential modern
Jewish religious thinkers) wrote:
Just as every individual must reckon
with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their eventual
extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the peoples for
their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love
is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal object, and the
secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death.
Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers
and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell
there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers
have lost their living power.
The pagans of the pre-historic
world found immortality in the gods and totems of their tribe; when history
intruded upon their lives on horseback, the power of the old gods vanished like
smoke, and the immortality of the individual faded before the prospect of a
great extinction of peoples. Among all the tribes of the world from
the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, only one claimed the eternity of its
bloodline under a covenant with a universal God, namely the Jews.
The blood of the pagan was his life; to achieve a life outside of the blood of
his tribe, the pagan had to acquire a new blood. It is meaningless to promise
men life in the Kingdom of Heaven without a corresponding life in this world;
Christianity represents a new people of God, with an existence in this life.
That is why Christianity requires that the individual undergo a new birth. To
become a Christian, every child who comes into the world must undergo a second
birth, to become by blood a new member of the Tribe of Abraham. Protestants who
practice baptism through total immersion in water simply reproduce the ancient
Jewish ritual of conversion, which requires that the convert pass through
water, just as he did in leaving his mother's womb, to undergo a new birth that
makes him a physical descendant of Abraham. Through baptism, Christians believe
that they become Abraham's progeny.
Unlike the tribes who encountered Christianity in the fullness of its power, in
4th-century Rome or 9th-century Europe, the Arab tribes of the 7th century
occupied the borders of a Roman Empire, then in a demographic death-spiral. The
New Israel of the Christians was at its historic nadir. First the Alexandrine
Empire and then the Romans crushed the traditional life of the nations,
imposing their own gods and customs; faced with overwhelming force, the
traditional society of the pre-historic world lost confidence in its own
hearth-gods and submitted to baptism. Not so the Arabs. Whether the Arab
tribesmen conquered Byzantine armies, or merely took over borderlands that the
Byzantines abandoned, as a minority of scholars believe, the great movement of
Arab tribes against the old empires found no solace in the floundering "New
Israel". In the fullness of their new self-confidence, the Arabs declared
themselves to be the true descendants of Abraham, risen up against the
falsifiers and usurpers. Islam gave traditional society the weapons to beat
back the threat of extinction.
Muslims require no ritual of rebirth, for in their doctrine they already are
the descendants of Abraham, through the supposed true line of Ishmael, the
favored son of the patriarch whose heritage was usurped by the crafty
descendants of Isaac - the Jews and their emulators the Christians. [3] Allah
sent prophets to all the nations of the world, but the Jews falsified the
message of the prophets to favor their ancestors at the expense of the true
successor of Abraham. In the revolt against the usurpers, all the tribes of the
world enjoy the equality of the horde.
Revolt against usurpation, the revenge of the pure life of traditional society
against the corrupt mores of the metropole, is the heart of Islam. The Muslim
rejects the supposed chosen people of God as usurpers, and defends traditional
society against the crucible of peoples that is the Christians' New Israel. But
Islam also forms a new people, the Umma, the collective of Muslims to
which the individual must submit. In the pagan world the young men of each
tribe march out to fight their enemies, and delay the inevitable moment when
their tribe will be overwhelmed and its memory extinguished from the earth.
Islam summons the tribes to unite against the oppressive empires to its West,
to march out together and fight until their enemies, the Dar-al-Harb, exist no
more.
Islam has no ethnicity; it is not an Arab movement; it is a new people, but a
people defined first of all by militancy. The individual Muslim does not submit
to traditional society as such, no matter how many elements of traditional
society might be incorporated into Muslim doctrine; he submits to the movement
of the tribes. That is why jihad is the most authentic form of Muslim religious
activity, and why the blood rituals of Ashura the most authentic form of Muslim
worship.
If
the individual Muslim does not submit to traditional society as it surrounds
him in its present circumstances, he submits to the expansionist movement. In
that sense the standard communal prayer of Islam may be considered an
expression of jihad. Again Rosenzweig: "Walking in the way of Allah means, in
the strictest sense, the spread of Islam by means of the holy war. The piety of
the Muslim finds its way into the world by obediently walking this way, by
assuming its inherent dangers, by adhering to the laws prescribed for it."
But the rising of the tribes against the usurpers must give rise to a new form
of usurpation. Victors in war do not wish to campaign forever; at an opportune
moment they will become the new tyrants of the territories they conquer. In the
Shi'ite version (as Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis writes):
...the
reigning caliphs appeared more and more as tyrants and usurpers, while for
many, the claims of the kin of the Prophet, embodied first in Ali and then in
his descendants, came to express their hopes and aspirations for the overthrow
of the corrupt existing order and a return to pure, authentic, and original
Islam. [4]
The "Twelvers", the Shi'ite mainstream, expect the
return of Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th of the Imams (the canonical descendants
of Ali) at the end of time. Facile identification of this doctrine with the
Christian belief in the return of Christ or the Jesus expectation of a Messiah
leads some in the West to think of Shi'ism as closer in spirit to Western
religion. But the hope for the Mahdi expresses not a quasi-Christian sort of
quietism, but rather an encysted revolutionary impulse, and that is what we
observe in the Shi'ite fascination for blood.
The blood is the life, and men pass to eternal life only through blood - but
whose blood? Self-sacrifice in war is the fundamental religious act of
paganism, for it is only by the sacrifice of the young men of the tribe that
the tribe has surety of survival among a forest of enemies. Human sacrifice,
especially among warrior-cults, is a common religious expression among pagans.
But with the notion of a universal God comes also the prospect of universal
peace: if all men one day might worship one God by the same name, then the
perpetual warring among tribes fighting for survival also might cease.
In proud defiance of revealed religion, the destroyer of the tribes, Islam
holds to the primal demand of self-sacrifice. The jihadi's self-immolation in
war, symbolized by the drawing of blood and the bleeding of nature itself, is
the fundamental act of worship. The immortality of the individual, put at risk
by the encroachment of the metropole upon the life of the tribe, is regained
through the revolt of the endangered tribes against the usurpation of the
empire that forms its motivation. Shi'ism therefore represents the original
impulse of Islam in its purest form, and the shedding one's own blood an
authentic response. The victors of the revolt against the usurpers become
usurpers in turn, and so on in never-ending cycle. Again, Lewis:
Most
Sunni jurists, even while recognizing the evils of the existing order,
continued to preach conformism and submission, generally quoting yet another
principle, that "tyranny is better than anarchy." The Shi'ites, on the other
hand, even while submitting, maintained their principled rejection of the Sunni
order, and from time to time, more frequently in the early centuries than in
the later, rose in revolt in an attempt to overthrow the existing order. [5]
President George W Bush still hopes that Iraq's Shi'ites will bring core
support to the constitutional project in Iraq. When he warned the National
Endowment for Democracy on October 6 of "evil Islamic radicalism, militant
jihadism" or "Islamo-fascism" he referred specifically to the Sunnis of
al-Qaeda. As he said:
Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others,
militant jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this
ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism
exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by
terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies
all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad
into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus - and
also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.
Shi'ite Iran seemingly no longer belongs to the "axis of evil", but is merely an
"ally of convenience" of al-Qaeda's Sunni extremists. That is an odd way of
looking at the matter, for the Sunnis of Iraq no longer can threaten American
strategic interests, whereas the Shi'ites of Iran soon will threaten everyone's
strategic interests. Short of massive and sustained bombardment, there is
nothing America can do at the moment to prevent Iran from building nuclear
weapons. Perhaps the president does not want to engage Iran for fear of
provoking the Iraqi Shi'ites. Washington's acceptance of Hezbollah as an
electoral party in Lebanon has the same motivation. It may be that the
president has little to say about Iran because there is nothing he can do about
Iran.
Iraq's proposed federal constitution will be defeated in the October 15
referendum, not only because the Sunni minority rejects an arrangement that
encourages rule by the Shi'ite majority, but because Shi'ite radicals led by
Muqtada al-Sadr repudiate the pro-constitution Shi'ite establishment headed by
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Intra-confessional strife among Shi'ites
represents a nastier obstacle to constitutional democracy than the Sunni
insurgency.
The future lies neither in the radicalism of Muqtada or the caution of Sistani,
but rather a recurring war among new Muqtadas and Sistanis. More than in the
7th century, indeed more than at any time in recorded history, the encroaching
metropole jeopardizes the life of the tribes. More than ever, the Shi'ites will
bathe in their own blood rather than submit to it.
Notes
[1] That is an inside joke, for Dracula is quoting the Jewish Talmud. "Thou
shalt not eat the blood, for the blood is the life" - Sanhedrin 59. In the 1931
film version, Dracula is shown wearing a six-pointed star, a Jewish symbol, and
serving wine in what appears to be a Jewish sacramental cup. I am not sure
whether that was meant ironically or as an anti-Semitic image.
[2] http://www.jafariyanews.com/2k5_news/feb/20ashur.htm
[3] Professor Khaleel Mohammed observes that the earliest exegetes of the Koran
identified the son whom Abraham is asked to sacrifice with Isaac, not Ishmael,
in keeping with the Biblical version. The version with Ishmael, he argues, was
a later effort at usurpation. See http://www.meforum.org/article/717
[4] In From Babel to Dragomans (Weidenfeld: London 2004), (p362)
[5] Op cit (p 365)
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
0„8 Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd.
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
The
blood is the life, Mr Rumsfeld!
recalled the blood of the young Iranians interred there, who fell in the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's suicide battalions during the Iran-Iraq war of
the 1980s.
the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, only one claimed the eternity of its
bloodline under a covenant with a universal God, namely the Jews.
