People of Faith Find the Power of Peace

Secular commentators dismiss religion as a malign force in the world. But from Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi to the Arab Spring, faith is inspiring the new peaceful protest : Mehdi Hasan

The names Yahya Shurbaji and Ghiyath Matar might mean little to people outside Syria. Inside the country, however, they are considered heroes by many, having helped to inspire, organise and mobilise the non-violent protests against the despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad before being arrested, detained and, in the case of the 26-year-old Matar, tortured and killed in custody by Assad’s secret police in September. In Daraya, the Damascus suburb where they lived, Shurbaji and Matar pioneered the tactic of distributing roses, dates and bottles of water to young soldiers sent by the government to open fire on unarmed demonstrators. The former earned the sobriquet “the man with the roses”; Matar was nicknamed “Little Gandhi”.

What are the roots of this non-violence? In 1966, the Islamic scholar Jawdat Said, born in Syria in 1931 and a graduate of al-Azhar University in Egypt, published a book called The Doctrine of the First Son of Adam: the Problem of Violence in the Islamic World. It was the first book to be published by a scholar associated with the modem Islamic movement that explicitly advocated a philosophy of nonviolence. 

Said argued, Muslims should react “like Adam’s first-born son, who did not defend himself against the attacks of his brother”. The non-violent conduct displayed by the God-fearing Abel is, in Said’s view, “a position to be aspired to by all mankind, and adhering to it is one of God’s commandments”. For Said, violence goes against the teachings of the Koran. His is a provocative view: that Islam and pacifism go hand in hand, rather than the traditional view of Islam as a religion of the sword, founded by a warrior-prophet. Said points to Muhaamad, not in Medina.from 622 to 632AD, where he took to the battlefield against pagan and Jewish tribes, but his 12 years as a prophet in Mecca (610-622AD), where he struggled non-violently against his oppressors.

Now in its fifth edition, Said’s book has been pored over by Syrian protesters—including Shurbaji and Matar. Their decision to renounce violence and opt for a strategy of civil disobedience and peaceful protest was an ethical and faithbased choice rather than a pragmatic or tactical decision. “We chose non-violence not from cowardice or weakness but out of moral conviction; we don’t want to reach victory by having destroyed the country,” Matar wrote in one of his last Face book posts. “We want to arrive morally, so we will stick to this path until God works His will.”

Credit should be given where credit is due. Arab Muslims have been at the forefront of the nonviolent protests against the region’s tyrants and autocrats—and not just in Syria.In Yemen, the hijab-clad Tawakkol Karman, a leading organiser of the non-violent struggle against the tottering dictatorship of US-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, is a devout Muslim and a senior member of alIslah, the country’s conservative Islamic opposition party. In October, Karman became the youngest person, and only the second Muslim woman, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “We refuse violence and know that violence has already caused our country countless problems,” she declared in an interview this year.  So what do Harris and the socalled new atheists make of Karman, one wonders? Or Shurbaji and Matar? This isn’t just about the Middle East or Muslims—yet it does seem strange that members of a faith group notorious for its suicide bombers and militant jihadists have been behind the most impressive and inspiring non-violent movement of 2011.

The truth is that the doctrine of non-violence can be found at the heart of every religion because, as the Catholic priest .and pacifist John Dear puts it, “Non-violence is at the heart of God.” In every major religion, he says, “We discover the root of non-violence.” Take Christianity. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount. In Judaism, the most common greeting, “shalom”, means “peace”. In Islam, Allah is often referred to as “the source of peace” and paradise as the “abode of peace”.

Meanwhile, ahimsa (literally, the avoidance of violence, or himsa) is a critical tenet of the ancient Indian religions Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. That is not to say that there aren’t verses and parables in almost every holy book that can be—and have been—used to justify violence and “holy war” against “infidels”, “sinners” and the rest. However, to refuse to acknowledge or engage with the non-violent tradition in each and every major religion is a sign of intellectual cowardice.  Whether new atheists like to admit it or not, the messages of peace, brotherhood and non-violence can be found at the core of every faith. Countless non-violent campaigns across the world today have been inspired by individuals and groups rooted in religion. Tibetans have been protesting non-violently against their Chinese occupiers and in defence of their faith and culture since 1959. Much of their resistance to communist rule is driven by Buddhist monks and nuns. In Buddhist Burma, the 66-yearold opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has, like the Dalai Lama, consistently rejected violence as a method of resisting the country’s rulers, even after spending 15 of the past 22 years incarcerated by the junta. 

In Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories this year, liberal and reform Jews have joined peaceful Palestinian protests against the takeover of Palestinian homes by Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. Again, faith is a motivating factor. Meanwhile, ultra-Orthodox Jews have joined mass rallies in the West Bank in support of Palestinian statehood. To try to decouple the rise of non-violence in recent decades from religion and religious believers is a hopeless task. Indeed, the two undisputed icons of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience in the 20th century were both men of faith: Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu, and Martin l.urher King, a Christian pastor. Gandhi made it clear that his adherence to non-violence was based on religious, not secular, principles. King, a Southern Baptist minister, often invoked the Sermon on the Mount, in which the “Son of God” told his followers not to “resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew, 5:38-39). 

Today, elements of the Christian Right in the US agitate for war against Iran and, let us not forget, it was George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, who ordered the invasion of Iraq. Practising Christians can be as violent as practising Muslims; the history of Christianity is steeped in bloodshed. But to blame Christ, or Christianity, for the wars and crimes carried out in the name of God is wrong and ahistorical. As is so often the case—and as Mark Kurlansky notes in his recent book Non-Violence: 25 Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea—it is when religion becomes entangled with, or embraced by, the state that “the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its non-violent component and becomes a force for war rather than peace ... This is not an exclusively Christian phenomenon. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism - all the great religions have been betrayed in the hands of people seeking political power and have been defiled and disgraced in the hands of nation states.”

In 2011, however, as the grip of nation states and national governments continues to weaken, believers may have started toreacquaint themselves with the ideology of non-violence. Energised by their faith and their morals, growing numbers of Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists have started to shake off the violence that has disfigured their religious traditions for so long. Faith-based non-violence is on the rise and, in adopting peaceful and non-coercive methods of reform and revolution, religious people have reasserted their belief in our common humanity, as well as in God. As Gandhi put it, “Nonviolence requires a double faith: faith in God and also faith in man.”  New Statesman FBA056 The Weekend Australian Financial ReviewDecember 22-27 2011