In the ancient city of Aachen, on the westernmost edge of Germany, stands a tower named for the Romano-Celtic god Grannus. Today, no one is quite sure quite where to place Grannus in the Celtic and Roman panoply. He is “associated” with Apollo, a sun god, also with diverse water deities (Aachen is a spa town) as well as with fertility. He may have had a role as a harvest deity (Grannus, granary, grain), but none of this is certain.

The world is not kind to yesterday’s gods. Worshipped today, forgotten tomorrow. In one century, people are prepared to fight and die and sacrifice their livestock to you. A few centuries later, no one is entirely sure why. Religions are seasonal: they have their spring, their summer, their autumn and winter. These seasons may last for hundreds of years and their organic wax and wane may provide the historical and cultural framework for an entire civilisation. But winter is still winter: no more scientific breakthroughs, no more significant cultural movements, no more spiritual insights are likely to occur. Eventually the religion dies a natural death and is replaced in its social forms and functions by another. Why? … because we all need someone to lean on.

However, in modern times we are faced with the phenomenon of religious communities sharing structural similarities with large corporations, either on the top-down hierarchical model (many Christian denominations, in particular the Roman Catholic Church) or the affiliated divisional model (Shia and Sunni Islam, although not exactly with one another) and, much like large corporations, it can take a very long time before they realise they are becoming irrelevant or are spiritually bankrupt.

One reason for this, to continue the corporate analogy, is that these vast entities are effectively living on subsidies, preferential contracts and kickbacks, rather than in the free market. The great faiths have become so identified with the physical communities, political parties, organizations, nations and international alliances within which they exist, that their raison d’être is seldom questioned. In other words, a religion, in the modern world, can be a dead letter and yet still ostensibly very much alive, even expanding, much as a putrefying corpse might expand in the sunlight before it finally bursts to reveal its maggoty interior to all.

Whenever I hear a reasoned, loving approach to any issue taken by a Muslim scholar, I get the feeling that I am listening to the words of a good man (they are nearly always men) in a lost cause. Islam, the great faith that forged the civilization of the crescent, is no more. It has become so corrupted by the virulent agendas of influential, media-savvy manipulators, that today it is largely associated in the public mind with violence, intolerance, intransigence and the muscular promotion of an absolutist vision.

Three recent events: the death of an eight year old girl in Yemen, who did not survive her “wedding night”, the deadly attack on a Christian church by Taliban operatives in Peshawar, and now the occupation and fatal hostage-taking by Al Shabaab in Nairobi have only served to underscore this image and heighten the general sense of insecurity that is fast becoming the emotional bow-wave of Islam: the first inkling you get of its arrival in your neighbourhood. I think it is now legitimate to pose the question: can we afford the faith of Mohammed? Is the price we are all paying: the latent fear, the endless check-in lines, the almost permanent need to justify our own cultures, the unpleasantness of having our wives and daughters, who have fought for the liberties they rightly deserve, treated like whores by Muslims and the Arab media – is any of this actually worth the benefits of social cohesion that this community of faith is meant to be providing?

Yet as with any entity that is subsidized (and I mean that socio-culturally and ideologically, not only in the financial sense), these giant multinational agglomerates of faith have become “too big to fail”. Their role as the social fly-wheel: maintaining rotational equilibrium in the gyroscopic engines of state, providing the values by which people pretend, more or less convincingly, to live their lives – has become too important to be left up to chance or nature. Recent events in Egypt and Syria are proof of this. And we can no more imagine Pakistan without Islam than we can imagine America without Christianity. But the versions of these that most easily spring to mind are the fanatical, chest thumping and patriotic kind.

So, when one of the great behemoths of belief begins to malfunction in an increasingly outrageous manner, we need to be able to ask ourselves whether we, as a global society, can legitimately continue to subsidize it. After all, how many such social regulators do we need?

Christianity, at least as the new Pope Francis is trying to redefine it, is quickly moving away from an issue-driven existence (gays, celibacy, female priests, abortion, etc), which tends to be divisive, towards a more value-driven movement of inclusion. Thus the meta-pope, as I jocularly described him/her/it in these pages not long ago (see Papal Division Bell, 19 February), the Pope for all people (even non-affiliated atheists) and all weathers, may not be so far away. Bring him on, I say!

In the meantime, the Islamic gyroscope continues to wobble dangerously out of kilter, threatening to take us all down with it if something is not done soon to stop the rot. Al Qaeda recently issued a directive to all its cohorts and foot-soldiers in the west, instructing them, more or less, to fire at will (poor Will) and, in particular, to engage local and regional targets. Shall we see more mall hijackings? Does this mean bombs on the village green, at Tesco’s, or down at the pub? Are they, along the lines of the Boston Marathon attack, now going to disrupt Henley, Wimbledon or Ascot? Heaven Forbid! And I mean that literally. As a people, we western Europeans are a patient lot. We’re not very good at backlash. But I’m sure, sooner or later, that we’ll manage something.


© Edwin Drood, September 2013



Illustration above:

Basalt relief of the storm god Haded of Aleppo, Late Hittite period, 9th century BC.
Placed in the Palace Museum of Nebuchadnezar II, Babylon, as part of the booty
from a military campaign against a Late Hittite kingdom.

Istanbul Archaeological Museum, Inv. No. 7816.

Photos above and below by © David John.