A belief is a powerful lever. Once you have it and pull it, the lever brings into being all kinds of consequences. If you believe that people go to hell unless they share your faith, you may be driven to go abroad in an attempt to convert the world. If you believe people who leave your faith should be put to death, you would probably feel justified in killing them. If you believe that blood transfusions are wrong, you would be prepared to commit suicide by refusing a life-saving transfusion. If you believe that 70 virigns in paradise await male martyrs, you may be willing to blow yourself and others to pieces, literally, despite the massive repression of sexuality within your faith and the claim that you revere women. Beliefs are powerful levers that make things happen.
If you are part of a faith community, it is important that those beliefs have some sense of unity, otherwise there would be chaos and loss of identity. The established churches often point out that after the Reformation, Protestantism disintegrated into the chaos of a myriad of different denominations. Individuals started to read and interpret the bible for themselves and threw off the ’shackles’ of the central, unifying authority of the pope and the Church’s interpretation of scripture.
An interesting article in the International Herald Tribune has described a similar threat of confusion facing Islam. The religion is facing what Egypt’s official news agency, MENA, has described as “fatwa chaos”.
A fatwa is a pronouncement by Islamic religious leaders intended to shape the actions of the faithful on everything from sex to politics. Clerics are supposed to have religious and legal training on which to base their authority. The problem is that more and more clerics are issuing fatwas. Dissident clerics argue that establishment leaders are out of touch and issue abtruse rulings, and even trained scholars are issuing contradictory ones (over whether suicide bombings and attacks on civilians are justified, for example).
Fatwas came to the attention of non-Muslims in the West in 1989 when the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a death sentence on the author Salman Rushdie for supposed blasphemy in the novel “Satanic Verses”. Other more recent fatwas have banned sculpture, authorized female circumcision, and urged women who meet alone with men to breast-feed them in an attempt to establish a maternal bond with them and therefore prevent them from having sex with the women. Cairo’s Al-Azhar University’s fatwa department (which now turns out around 1000 rulings a day) currently has fatwas on keeping dogs indoors (no, because ‘dogs are filth’) and on using stolen credit cards to strike back at the US and Israel (no, because it does not conform to the teachings of Islam). Other fatwas urge women to cover their bodies from head to foot and to travel in taxis only in the company of a male relative.
Two forces in particular are driving this proliferation and confusion forward. The first factor is the rivalry between revered leaders. Not a week goes by without a fatwa that is issued in one country being ‘out-done’ or contradicted by a fatwa in another country. And there is also the rivalry between the traditional leaders and the new television clerics. The second factor is that Muslims can now seek rulings from a multitude of sources relatively easily. Muslims are able to use the internet and television to seek guidance from clerics from around the world - unless they follow the fatwa issued in 2004 by the Dar ul-Ulum Islamic seminary in India, ruling that the faithful should not watch TV.
While there is a proliferation of confusing fatwas about suicide bombings, that may be weakening for Islam, but it may be good for humanity. If there is ever a degree of unity in favour of suicide bombings across the Muslim world, all of us need to be worried. A male, predominantly medieval mindset, attached to a faith advocating jihad, would be creating the belief levers.
________
See also: Religious Communication is Usually Vague, and the humorous fictional account by Kevin of an ex-Christian arriving at the Pearly Gates.
________
Update: 13/11/07 An Islamic Council have issued a fatwa against the use of the call to prayer and recitations of parts of the Koran as mobile phone ringtones. See full story.
Can you explain what you mean by the last paragraph? I have read it several times but can not grasp what you are trying to say.
If you have read sources pertaining to recent fatwas concerining female genital mutilation(circumcision) please tell me where I can find them.
A very complex but interesting read which deserves being read again to think about all the issues raised here.
The sources for the article are the International Herald Tribune (link in text) and Libby Purves’ Faith Online blog at http://timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2007/11/fatwa-chaos-onl.html
If you type - fatwa + “female circumcision” - into Google you will get several articles. Here are just two contradictory rulings (which illustrates the main point of the article above):
1) http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?pagename=IslamOnline-English-Ask_Scholar/FatwaE/FatwaE&cid=1119503543886
2) http://www.safiyyah.ca/wordpress/?p=337
In my last paragraph I was saying:
1) There are disagreements in the Muslim world about whether or not suicide bombings are ok.
2) This disagreement is good for the rest of us, but it weakens the unity of Islam.
3) If the issuers of fatwas ever agree that suicide bombings are ok, we had better look out … not just because of suicide bombings, but
4) because the people who are issuing fatwas tend to be male and those with a medieval mindset believing in a religion that supports holy war.
Thanks. I pretty much had seen the first two points but not the last two.
Thanks for the links too, though I have just looked under your post headings under circumcision and found some pointers there and a blog just replied too.
Really excellent article this, if a little difficult to understand by myself.
I think it is important to remember that the human world operates entirely on “belief”. We may react angrily to religionists saying that secularism and atheism are also beliefs but whether or not the accusations can be supported, even the most logical of us still base our actions on belief.
Is it true that our beliefs are “better” than those of the religious faithful because unlike them, who base their behaviour on the sayings of an old book, we think things through, make decisions logically and generally choose rational, evidence-based solutions? No.
We are continually making decisions whether about what to get for lunch, where to go on holiday or how to answer points in a debate. We cannot go back to first principles each time and work everything out from there. We carry with us a huge package of assumptions, things we “take for granted” (often without realizing it), rules of thumb, useful approximations. We may be prepared to change these in the light of new evidence but until we do, we take them as read and base our thinking on them. They are our “beliefs”.
I am a vegetarian and have been for a long time. Choosing food “suitable for vegetarians”, avoiding leather or products tested on animals, etc. is now a reflex. I am sometimes asked justify my vegetarianism and would like to make out a logical, evidence-based case. I can’t. Vegetarianism is a moral, not a scientific, position. It is one of my beliefs, one that determines much about how I live my life and how I judge and treat others. Some claim that vegetarianism is not just a belief, that it is my faith. I have some sympathy with that view because, as I say, you can go only so far in justifying vegetarianism rationally; “faith” cements the gaps.
Well, at least our beliefs are good ones, we rationalists claim. But are they? How do you judge? Whatever your beliefs and however good they seem to you, someone somewhere will find them abhorrent. So what is the way forward, the safe path through the maze?
I am not sure there is one. I would like to think we could all sit down together and decide which behaviours are acceptable and which are not and all agree to adopt the former and repudiate the latter. But I see no hope of that. If we won’t give way on our principles, how can we expect that they will? We claim that we have reason and logic on our side but our claims are sometimes exaggerated. They claim that not everything can be solved by reason and logic (love? altruism? preferring red to blue?) and I have to concede the point. Can we agree to disagree and to live parallel lives without interfering with one another? That is difficult to do when we all live together on a small and shrinking planet.
I totally agree that we all operate on beliefs and assumptions, sometimes hidden. That is the whole basis of cognitive behavioural therapy that I practise. I, too, am also in favour of allowing people to believe what they want.
However, if those beliefs have consequences that harm others, or threaten the existence of humanity itself, then I would want to argue that there is a case to be made for a) getting concerned and even angry about that, and b) challenging those beliefs.
[...] See also: Faith Out Of Control [...]