First, I would like to thank the President of the General Assembly for convening this meeting and inviting me to speak. It is a great honour, but more important, there is nothing more vital in the world than to have this conversation at this particular time, especially here in the United Nations, which I have always felt provides our best hope against barbarism, selfishness, cruelty and the perils that we have just been thinking about.
Now, my approach on this is going to be from the religious angle. Of course, religion is often seen as part of the problem. I have lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when they ask me what I do for a living, immediately inform me that religion has been the cause of all the wars in the world. This is not true, but we are in a terrible mess, and I want to look today at the role of religion in our terrible, terrifying predicament, but also to wonder how we can use religion to help us out of it.
On the one hand, we are living in a world that is asymmetric, where there is great inequality, where the power is confined to very few people and very few countries; on the other, we are living in a very violent world. Our modernity has been astonishing in many ways. As a product of modernity, I cannot imagine any other period of the world when, as a woman, I would have felt remotely comfortable. But I have had a very privileged life. And we have also to recognize that this has been one of the most violent periods of world history. We are violent creatures, we human beings. We kill each other, and our technological genius has enabled us in the modern period to do this on a scale that was hitherto unimaginable. In the twentieth century, I believe, between 1914 and 1945 it is said that 70 million people died as a result of armed conflict. And, of course, the violence continues. The killing continues – every night we see it – but also in our own societies: we have the school shootings here in the United States. Football, which used to be a friendly family game and activity, is now often the cause for great violence. A few weeks ago someone was even killed because of the result of a cricket match.
Now, it should not therefore surprise us that religion has also been affected by this climate of violence, especially in regions of the world where warfare and conflict have become endemic: in the Middle East, for example, in Afghanistan and in Chechnya. Where you live in an atmosphere of violence, violence affects everything you do. It affects your dreams, your aspirations, your relationships, your fantasies – and naturally it also affects your religion, which comes from that part of the human spirit, of the psyche. But the conflict that we have at the moment is not caused by religion itself. People do not read the Koran and then rush out to bomb a London bus. If they have decided to blow up a London bus they can probably find something in their scriptures to give them some justification for this crime, because our scriptures represent the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. In my researches I have found that most religions began in a recoil from violence, in a disciplined recoil from violence. That state of mind the Muslims call jahiliya, a term often used to describe the pre-Islamic period in Arabia and is often translated as “ignorance”. But as it is used in the early Muslim texts it also means irascibility, aggression, chauvinism, the conviction that our way of life – our Sunnah – is more valuable than anybody else’s, and a prickly sense of honour that makes you rush to attack anything in your way. We are seeing quite a lot of jahiliya in the world at the moment, and by no means only in the Muslim world: jahiliya and aggression and a love of the preemptive strike and a passionate sense of honour and a desire to see one’s own way of life come to the fore.
But if religion is not the cause of our problems, what is? In our report in the Alliance of Civilizations, we all agreed that the chief cause of our dilemma was politics: that uneven distribution of power in the world; the ongoing rumbling of unresolved conflicts, some of which, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, have become symbolic, surrounded by a nimbus of absolute significance for all participants. And that, of course, makes it all the more difficult to find a solution. In a sense, the political situation – the ongoing images of horror beamed nightly into our television rooms from Iraq, from Palestine, from Israel – helps to exacerbate the sense of despair and hopelessness that some people have felt. When one of our London bombers made his suicide video, he did not mention the freedom or liberality or culture of the West; what he mentioned was Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan: the ongoing political slaughter.
So, we have a kind of symbiotic relationship, in a sense, where the political horrors or our time feed religious disquiet and where religious disquiet – people express their discontent often in a religious form for the reasons we have enumerated, because of identity – exacerbates the political situation. So, we have a destructive symbiosis going on here.
The first way out of our dilemma is to address ourselves with the utmost seriousness to the sorting out of these political conflicts. However hard it is, however hopeless it is, however often the peace initiatives seem to fail, we have somehow to go on. But one of the things we must not do is to assume that the best way to deal with these difficult extremist groups is to attack them. In my research into the fundamentalist movements – I do not like the word “fundamentalism” but I have only got 10 or 12 minutes – these groups, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are all rooted in a profound sense of fear, a dread and terror of annihilation. Every single one of these groups is convinced, in one way or another – even here in the United States, Protestant Christians believe this – that modern secular or liberal society wants to wipe them out. In, say, the Muslim world, for example, secularism has been imposed so rapidly and in such an accelerated fashion that it has often been experienced as a lethal assault on faith, unlike in the West, where we had time to develop our secular institutions over the course of three centuries or so and the ideas had a chance to trickle down.
This fear is absolute and must always be remembered. Sometimes, this fear, as we have seen, has hardened into ungovernable rage. But therefore, when you attack these groups – and this I have found in my researches of these groups in Christianity, Judaism and Islam – they become more extreme, and that is because, when you go after them either in the media or with guns, you convince them that they are right, that the liberal, or the secular, or the powers that be really do want to get rid of them.
So, attacking, violence, is not the answer. What can we do? We have heard a lot about dialogue. We heard a lot about that yesterday, and we heard a lot about talking. I have not yet heard much about listening. This is something we do not do very well in our modern world; we are great talkers, where people are chatting endlessly on their cell phones – even here. We are a very opinionated people; we are bombarded with information on all sides; we all have strong opinions. But we are not very good at listening. Our democratic logos speech is often quite aggressive and confrontational. Very often I notice in panels such as this or in debates on television or in parliaments, when somebody is making a case people are not really listening carefully to what is being said. They are thinking of the next clever thing that they are going to say.
What we really need to do is listen carefully – and not just listen to the words, but listen to the underlying text. Very often these extremist groups, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, speak about a mythology or an ideology that seems alien, even deranged. But if you learn to listen and to decode this speech, you see that it is expressing fears and anxieties that no society can safely ignore. We must learn to listen to each other and go into dialogue not simply to win over the other side or to impose our point of view, but to be ready to be transformed. And here, I think our model is Socrates, perhaps the inventor of the dialogic form. People who came to Socrates usually thought that they knew what they were talking about, but after a few minutes they discovered that they did not even know the basic meaning of such words as “courage” or “honour” or “justice”.
We are in a similar situation, because our world is changing as we speak, and we are moving into an uncharted realm. I think the world changed on 9/11. In one sense we had a terrible revelation as that crime was committed: that small groups would increasingly have the powers of destruction that were previously the preserve only of the nation-State. And that has transformed life. Suddenly our big armies are looking slightly otiose. We have seen that in Iraq, in Lebanon last summer: the big conventional armies of the Powers are somehow no longer effective against these small groups. That is just one example of how our world is changing. We are moving into a world where the old ideas do not apply. So, we are in the position of Socrates’s interlocutors: of discovering the depths of our ignorance.
I am coming on to: What can religion do? What we need is a new kind of religious discourse that goes back to the core values of the religion: every single one is based on compassion and on the golden rule, first propounded by Confucius 500 years before Christ: do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstance to inflict that pain on anybody else. The world religions also insisted that we could not confine this compassion to our own group. We had also to have what another Chinese sage called jian-ai: concern for everybody. “Love your enemies,” said Jesus; “Love the stranger; honour the stranger”. That does not mean we have to be filled with soggy affection for the likes of Osama Bin Laden, but we have to have concern and to prevent the kind of situation – spiritual, social, political, economic – which makes a Bin Laden and future Bin Ladens possible.
This is civilization. The golden rule is the basis of civilization.
One last point: This is not just simply a nice, pious ideal. We are now living, as we heard at the beginning, in a global world, where we are more closely connected than ever before. Now, as we have seen to our horror, what happens today in Iraq or Gaza or Afghanistan will have repercussions tomorrow in London, Washington or New York. Unless we are able now, globally, to put the golden rule into practice – right here in the United Nations – to treat other nations as though they were as important as our own, to treat other points of view as being of importance and to be treated with absolute respect, to be ready to be changed and transformed by what we hear, I doubt that we will have a viable world to hand on to our children. What we want are religious leaders. Compassion is not a popular virtue; religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. But what we need are religious people who will bring compassion to the fore, because it lies at the heart of all of our great world traditions.