The Qur'an: Hell and the Solution
Blogging has been slow for me during last few weeks. I was stressed about delivering a paper at the “Girard and World Religions” symposium in Berkeley. It was asked to present a paper on Islam. Like many, Islam has been a growing interest for me since 9/11. After 9/11, I began to wonder what everyone else was wondering: “What within Islam could lead Muslims to commit such horrendous acts of violence?” It feltlike American culture was becoming obsessed with that question. It got old for me. So, I began to ask its opposite: “What within Islam could lead Muslims to love and non-violence?” I explored that question in my master’s thesis. Well, I actually posed the same question to Christianity, too. It was entitled Love and Nonviolence in Christianity and Islam.
When I started delving into mimetic theory, I began to see that, on the whole, the first question is false. It’s a red herring. Of course there is violence within Islamic scriptures, Islamic history, and Islamic theology. But that is not because violence is endemic to Islam in a way that it is not to other religions or other people. One of the many things I appreciate about mimetic theory is that it takes violence seriously. Violence is like a disease that infects us all. All human institutions, including religious institutions, create an “us” and a “them.” Our identity seems to depend on that distinction. We know that “we” are good because we accuse “them” of being bad. The accusations against one another are mimetic, that is, we non-consciously imitate one another’s accusations. Soon, the accusations escalate and we commit even more verbal, emotional, and physical violence against one another. Unfortunately, it is easy for us to get sucked into this trap. It is human. So, of course the distinction between “us” and “them” shows up within Islam. It shows up everywhere. The important question is: Does Islam have the tools to critique the human propensity to violently divide the world into “us” and “them”?
Before I left for the conference, I tried to write something productive about Rob Bell’s latest book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. (Click for parts 1, 2, and 3) It’s a controversial book because he challenges popular notions of hell. I worried about getting sucked into the mimetic rivalry in the blogosphere concerning Bell. It seems as though you either love him or you hate him. I love him. I think he’s asking the right questions, but it is easy for me to get sucked into a rivalry with those people and accuse them of being jerks.
While researching Islam during that time, I discovered that the Qur’an has a lot to say about hell, and I discovered that it describes hell in very mimetic terms. In fact, hell in the Qur’an is a place of mimetic accusations. “This is how it will be,” claims the Qur’an. “The inhabitants of the Fire will blame one another” (38:64.)
So, hell is a place, even a way of life, which is based on accusations. The Qur’an provides the alternative way of life that is based on the hope of reconciliation. “Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend” (41:34). In his commentary on this passage, Abdullah Yusuf Ali states that “what is better” is love. “You repel or destroy evil with something which is far better, just as an antidote is better than poison. You foil hatred with love.”
Accusations, according to the Qur’an, are the mimetic actions of hell. But how might the Qur’an lead us to be saved from hell? The only way out is to repel those accusations with something better, which is love. It’s an intentional love that hopes for the transformation from “us” against “them” into “us” in a relationship of love with “them.” We do this by finding our common humanity. As the Qur’an states, “People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should know one another [not that you should despise one another]” (49:13).
In the end, there are violent aspects within all human institutions that make us uncomfortable. Some form of violence is found everywhere. Maybe the most important thing we can do is critique our own violence and help one another to see the good that exists in the “other.” Then we may begin to know one another without accusing and despising one another. We may even begin to love one another.
Book Review: Rob Bell's Love Wins: Part 2: Sacrifice and Archaic Religions
Near the beginning of his book Love Wins, Rob Bell asks a series of provocative questions about Christian faith and salvation. He sets up the specific question I want to explore in this article by wondering if our salvation is dependent on something we do. He then asks:
How is any of that grace?
How is that a gift?
How is that good news?
Isn’t that what Christians have always claimed set their religion apart—that it wasn’t, in the end, a religion at all—that you don’t have to do anything, because God has already done it through Jesus? (pg 11.)
This, I think, is the most important question in this debate about salvation. Bell moves in the right theological direction when he asserts that God is love, but he misses a crucial anthropological point. He comes close to making this point in Love Wins, and in his DVD The gods Aren’t Angry, when he discusses archaic religions. His point about archaic religions is that humans experience a deep seated anxiety that needs an outlet. That outlet was found through sacrifice. Bell claims that
In the ancient world, people regularly sacrificed animals—bulls, goats, sheep, birds. You raised or purchased an animal and then brought it to the temple and said the right words at the right time. Then the animal was slaughtered, and its blood shed on an alter to show the gods that you were very sorry for any wrong you’d done and you were very grateful for the rain and crops and children and any other gifts you could think of that the gods had given you (123-124).
Bell makes the very important point that in archaic religions you had to make a sacrifice to appease the gods. When Bell claims that Christianity is not a “religion,” he means “religion” in this archaic sense. He is correct that the Judeo-Christian tradition critiques archaic sacrificial religions. But Bell misses a crucial point. Archaic sacrifice indeed involved an individual's anxiety concerning the gods, but what Bell doesn’t emphasize is the social benefits of archaic sacrifice. Archaic sacrifice washed away the anxiety individuals felt in their relationship with the gods, but more significant was the role archaic sacrifice had in washing away the social anxiety humans felt in their relationship with one another. As anthropologist Rene Girard has observed, humans naturally desire the same things. He calls this mimetic (or imitative) desire. If we can’t share the thing we both want, whether it is a water hole, a significant other, an Xbox 360, or a position of power or control, we are going to experience conflict and anxiety. The outlet that archaic religions provided for conflict and anxiety was the ritualization of a spontaneous and unconscious mechanism for forming community. Here's how it worked: Communities in crisis united against a common enemy. The innocence or guilt of that enemy didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the group had a common enemy to unite against. As Girard states in his book Sacrifice, “what desire for the same object can never accomplish—reconciliation of the adversaries—hatred for a common enemy does” (26). The expulsion or murder of a common enemy washed away social conflicts and anxieties. The community was "saved" and peace was found through this process, a process that Girard calls the sacrificial mechanism because of its unconscious nature. The mechanism was unconscious because the victimizers were always convinced of their victim’s guilt and, thus, always convinced of their own innocence. This is the process that became ritualized as ancient sacrifice.
Don’t miss the true, but very unfortunate, fact that archaic sacrifice worked. But the peace and social cohesion of uniting against a common enemy was always tenuous. For mimetic desire always led to more conflicts and anxiety, which always led to more sacrificial victims.
Bell misses this crucial anthropological point. It is crucial because this anthropological point has implications for any discussion about theology and salvation. I will be discussing those implications in my third and final installment of this series on Love Wins.
The Prophets Eminem and Rihanna: Love the Way You Lie, Violence, and Hell
Huffington Post Author Speaks at Making Peace with Revelation
Tio Hardiman of the acclaimed anti-gang-violence organization, CeaseFire, will lead a break-out session at the workshop. Mr. Hardiman has long worked to help change the lives of people caught in the cycle of poverty and crime. In May 2006, he signed on to start helping dogs as well—and now leads outreach efforts for The HSUS's End Dogfighting in Chicago campaign. His article for the Huffington Post is titled Searching for Peace Summit. Join Tio at this engaging workshop. Register online.
Making Peace with Revelation: Suzanne Ross
Dr. Jim L. Papandrea
Here are some highlights from one of the keynote speakers from the Making Peace with Revelation workshop held on Nov. 6, 2010.
The Definition of Apocalypse
The Definition of Eschatology
What does Armageddon Mean?
666 - The Number of the Beast
End Times Promises
The Rapture
The 144,000
Prophecy or Warning
The Woes
The Slain Lamb
What is Apocalyptic Eschatology?
The Woman in Labor
Idolatry Today
Tribulation
The Four Horsemen