Fields of Blood Read Free

and gave them a violent dimension. But the relationship between modernity and religion has not been wholly antagonistic. Some movements, such as the twoGreat Awakenings and theMuslim Brotherhood, have actually helped people to embrace modern ideals and institutions in a more familiar idiom.
    Modern religious violence is not an alien growth but is part of the modern scene. We have created an interconnected world. It is true that we are dangerously polarized, but we are also linked together more closely than ever before. When shares fall in one region, markets plummet all around the globe. What happens inPalestine orIraq today can have repercussions tomorrow inNew York,London, orMadrid. We are connected electronically so that images of suffering and devastation in a remoteSyrian village or an Iraqi prison are instantly beamed around the world. We all face the possibility of environmental or nuclear catastrophe. But our perceptions have not caught up with the realities of our situation, so that in the First World we still tend to put ourselves in a special privileged category. Our policies have helped to create widespread rage and frustration, and in the West we bear some responsibility for the suffering in the Muslim world thatBin Laden was able to exploit. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” The answer must surely be yes.
    War, it has been said, is caused “by our inability to see relationships.Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. Our relationship with our fellow-men. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.” 4 We need ideologies today, religious or secular, that help people to face up to the intractable dilemmas of our current “economic and historical situation” as the prophets did in the past. Even though we no longer have to contend with the oppressive injustice of the agrarian empire, there is still massive inequality and an unfair imbalance of power. But the dispossessed are no longer helpless peasants; they have found ways of fighting back. If we want a viable world, we have to take responsibility for the pain of others and learn to listen to narratives that challenge our sense of ourselves. All this requires the “surrender,” selflessness, and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades andjihads.
    We all wrestle—in secular or religious ways—with “nothingness,” the void at the heart of modern culture. Ever sinceZoroaster, religious movements that tried to address the violence of their time have absorbed some of its aggression. Protestantfundamentalism came into being in theUnited States when evangelical Christians pondered the unprecedented slaughter of theFirst World War. Their apocalyptic vision was simply a religious version of the secular “future war” genre that had developed in Europe. Religious fundamentalists and extremists have used the language of faith to express fears that also afflict secularists. We have seen that some of the cruelest and most self-destructive of these movements have been in part a response to theHolocaust or the nuclear threat. Groups such asShukri Mustafa’sSociety in Sadat’sEgypt can hold up a distorted mirror image of the structural violence of contemporary culture. Secularists as well as religious people have resorted to the suicide attack, which in some ways reflects the death wish in modern culture. Religious and secularists have shared the same enthusiasms. Kookism was clearly a religious form of secularnationalism and was able to work closely with theIsraeli secular right. The Muslims who flocked to join the jihad against theSoviet Union were certainly reviving the classical Islamic practice of “volunteering,” but they also experienced the impulse that prompted hundreds of Europeans to leave the safety of home and fight in theSpanish Civil War (1936–39) andJews to hasten from the diaspora to support Israel on the eve of theSix-Day War.
    When we confront the violence of our