Tag: Karen Armstrong

Categories
Books & printed materials

[2899] My 10 books for the decade

Inspired by Barack Obama’s book list, here are my top 10 books that I have read during the past decade, in no particular order.

This is quite a hard list to compile because there are so many books. And if such a list is possible, then ten is such an arbitrary number. Nevermind that this assumes the decade began with 2010, and not 2011. Nevertheless, let us not get such debate in our way.

So, what would be the criterion for listing a book? I think mine would be the book’s influence on my understanding of the world.

There is no order to the list. Listing only 10 is hard enough and I do not want to complicate it. Be warned though as there might be recency biased. I cannot remember all of the books I have read earlier during the decade.

Here we go.

  1. Orientalism by Edward Said. This makes the list because of several things but the one thing I appreciate the most is not about orientalism — though it was enlightening — but on how history is textual: we understand history based on what has been written, not on what happened per se. That is such a revelation to me despite it being so obvious. Orientalism is also in the list because of its influence other books that I have read. The Myth of the Lazy Native by Syed Hussein Alatas for instance clearly adapted Said’s ideas within Southeast Asian context.
  2. The Malays by Anthony Milner. This should be read together with Kerajaan by the same author. The book describes and proposes the definition of Malayness and its justification will make you question the meaning of becoming a Malay. Bangsa Melayu by Ariffin Omar and Leaves of the Same Tree by Leonard Andaya are probably useful further reading.
  3. The Malay Dilemma by Mahathir Mohamad. This is an important book to read in order to  understand Malay politics. You can disagree with the content of the book, but you cannot deny its relevance in this age of heightened ethnonationalism (and during the administration of Mahathir II).
  4. Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy by James Puthucheary. The book highlights the fact that the debate between Malay and non-Malay wealth distribution in the early days of Malaya and Malaysia totally ignored European control over the Malayan economy. The book also created a whole new research line in Malaysia.
  5. The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya by Timothy Harper. What I love about the book is its tracing of pre-independence Malayan history that sheds light on the Chinese Malaysian community’s dynamics, particularly the pre-war rivalry between the Kuomintang and the Communists, as well as the origin of Sino-Malay rivalries deep during the Japanese occcupation. The citation here is massive. In some ways, this book compresses classics like Willam Roff’s The Origins of Malay Nationalism and Boon Kheng Cheah’s Red Star Over Malaya.
  6. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson explains the creation of national identity. I think the book is particularly interesting when read together with Milner’s work. The two authors do offers competing explanations, but I think together both explain the creation of the old (classical?) and modern Malay identities, and in doing so,outline the full evolution of the Malay identity.
  7. A History of God by Karen Armstrong. The book traces the history of the Abrahamic religions, and it will make you realize how smooth the evolution of beliefs from the earliest of Judaism to Islam. I recommend reading Heirs to the Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell for a view of what happened to all the heterodox Abrahamic beliefs, and other pre-Abrahamic religions as a minor companion to Armstrong’s excellent work.
  8. The Theory of The Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. It is all about signalling!
  9. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. Essentially, the Reformation in Europe had removed the Church as a means of salvation. This led to the evolution of values, which suggested that work was the new means of salvation. This led to capital accumulation among individuals.
  10. The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. A great broadbrush take about western philopshy. Durant’s work really feels like an brief encyclopedia to help you decide which work do you want to read first. Additionally, it also traces multiple ideas and how it evolved across time, from ancient Greece to industrial Europe and early 20th century. This book might be fun to read together with the fiction Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder.

Other notable mentions include:

  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is about racism in America. Some profound observations made by the author here.
  • Empire by Niall Ferguson. An apologist for the British Empire.
  • Identity by Francis Fukuyama. He describes the rise of communalism/nationalism in the 21st century and the reasons behind it, with plenty of references to Plato’s The Republic.
  • Capitalism by Juergen Kocka. This is a history of capitalism and a little bit about capital accumulation.
  • Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism by Benedikt Koehler. Self-describing.
  • The Opium War by Julia Lovell. This is a great retelling of the Opium War, critical of both Imperial China and the British Empire.
  • A Sudden Rampage by Nicholas Tarlings. A great work detailing the Japanese decisions that led to its invasion of Southeast Asia during World War II. Be ready to revise your assumptions about the war.
Categories
Conflict & disaster Society

[2823] It is wrong to say ISIS has nothing to do with Islam

As an individualist, I do not condemn a whole community for wrongs of the few. I do not subscribe to collective blaming for individual crimes. Each person is responsible for his or her action. In the context of terror acts frequently committed by Islamic extremists these days, I would not ask a random Muslim to apologize for killings done by his coreligionists located thousands of miles away. To make such demand is just dumb.

It is dumb because Islam as practiced all over is diverse and its interpretation varies from group to group. The interpretations range from puritan to liberal, from medieval to modern, from mystical to logical. One interpretation can even be hostile to the other, making the act of blaming one side for the other’s violence as nonsensical.

The same diversity makes it wrong to claim ISIS and all of its terror acts done in the name of the Islamic god has nothing to do with the religion. As if there is one true Islam and only those Muslims subscribe to it. On the contrary, ISIS has everything to do with the religion.

There is no one Islam anymore. However strongly many Muslims would want to stress on the unity of the religion, the truth is that the successful proliferation of Islam beyond Arabia is due to its ability to absorb local beliefs, among other things. Its syncretic nature gives rise to its diversity.

All Muslims share several core tenets but that does not make all Islams as the same. The nature, the nuance, the outlook and the way of life of a Malaysian Muslim is very different from that living in the Middle East. Even within Malaysia, the general Islam experienced in Kuala Lumpur is very different from that in Kota Bahru.

War did advance Islam but war alone could not guarantee lasting belief. The religion had to be tolerant of some local practices to entice and keep people to its side. You could observe the result of the syncretism among the Malays in Malaysia. Traditional Malay wedding ceremony for instance has hints of Hindu influence. The Malays after all, were largely Hindus, Buddhists and animists before the arrival of Islam in the 1100s-1400s to Southeast Asia. Archipelagic Islam developed based on that old Malay (and others like the Javanese) foundation. Post-independence nation state context further influences the interpretation and practice of Islam in Malaysia and elsewhere in the region, that the state used religion to promote nationalism. Brunei is the other example where religion is a subservient tool of nationalism.

The idea that there is one Islam is not only untrue across geography. It is also untrue across time. Karen Armstrong in her book A History of God shows that early Muslims believed they were part of the Christian community. While mainstream Muslims today accept all of the Christian prophets, they do not consider themselves as Christians. Early Muslims did not share such a strong distinction. A separate Islamic identity developed only after the hijra. Indeed, before meeting the Medina Jews, Muhammad thought Christians and Jews were of the same belief and Islam was merely renewing the two religions that came from the same god. The conflation between Christianity and Judaism would not have been a mistake if Muhammad had lived centuries earlier when Jesus was preaching. Armstrong demonstrated that early Christians thought they were Jewish in religious terms and that they themselves thought they were renewing the religion of Moses.

Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms chronicling the old communities of the Middle East shows how minor religions like the Mandaenism sprung out of the Abrahamic beliefs by holding on to dogmas modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam now reject. Apart from the rejected beliefs, these minor religions are or were similar in so many ways to the major three faiths. These minorities are fossils from the days when the three world’s religions were rapidly evaluating their creeds and figuring out what worked and what did not. They are the living proofs that religion evolves over time, just as dinosaur fossils are proof that the Earth is older than 4,000 years.

All religions evolve and adapt to time, geography and culture and whatever other secular forces.

The one Islam may exist as a Platonic idealism but that model is irrelevant to the material world. The Islam that matters are the practical ones: the interpreted ones.

And so I do disagree with the claim that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. ISIS’s is a disagreeable brand of Islam but it is a brand of Islam nonetheless. It is a brutal brand as a reaction to the disastrous 2000s war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

There is a parallel to this. A harsh puritan form of Islam appeared after the massacre and the razing of Baghdad in the 1200s-1300s by the Mongols. That Islam sought to return the religion to the early Meccan and Medinan days, rejecting intellectual progress achieved in the previous 700 years that made Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus the great capitals of the world during its times.

There is a Muslim tradition that leads to ISIS. That post-Mongol puritan Islam as rationalized by Ibn Taymiyyah informed modern day wahabbism and the salafism, which in turned influenced ISIS.

We should go further and explain why ISIS’s interpretation is so problematic. Their interpretation is that theirs is the true form and everybody else’s is false. ISIS believes theirs is the one true Islam while rejecting the diversity that exists in the religion.

That similarity, between ISIS and those who claim ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, amuses me. Both sides build their argument that their version is the one true Islam.

That logic shared by the two parties is not merely a source of amusing coincidence unfortunately. There is something more sinister about it.

Because there is only one true interpretation, then there is only one way of doing things and everything else is wrong. The religious diversity is rejected altogether. The magic word here is puralism. The corrupt Malaysian state is also guilty of this by politicizing Islam to legitimize its increasingly undemocratic hold to power, that the state is the guardian of the supposedly Platonic Islam. To add to the sense that the religion is being manipulated, I should write, the guardian of Platonic Malaysian Islam.

From where I stand, I feel the difference between the two sides is only a matter of degrees of intolerance and coercive force. I would not be shocked if it really about the ability to exert coercion for a large minority in Malaysia. After all, did a survey last year not show 11% of Malaysian Muslims sympathize with ISIS?[1]

And this is a problem. When you want to fight ISIS yet you share the same intolerance however different the degree is, your fight is logically unconvincing and turns out into choosing the lesser of the two evils.

Sometimes, we can reject all evils.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — See In nations with significant Muslim populations, much disdain for ISIS. November 17 2015.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

p/s — Tolerance to diversity itself does not make ISIS okay. There are other values more important that blind diversity, like individual rights.

Categories
Society

[2820] A god to justify us

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in the human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality. [Page 209-210. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong. 1993]

Categories
Society

[2818] God in the marketplace

There are times when books of different focus and field would run parallel with each other and reveal new insight on a specific idea, making that particular idea richer.

I recently finished Jürgen Kocka’s Capitalism where he touched on, among others, the shift of power from feudal lords to the merchant class. I am currently reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God and this is what she has to say on the (somewhat) same subject:

The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene. The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in the market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism. [Page 27. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong. 1993]

Heh.