Between crescent and cross

“Questions want more than an answer can give
Our answers grow weary the longer they live...”
From Jawabnama by Bachchoo

Dear Karl Marx,
I am not sure whether this will get to you but am certain that you didn’t believe in an after-life or heaven. But then, certainly influenced by you, I stopped believing in hell until I found myself there several times in my short and happy life. Someone said “hell is other people”. I don’t think it was you — not your style. (“There is a spectre haunting Europe...” Wow!). It could have been Robinson Crusoe or even Woody Allen — but maybe not.

No, your famous quote was “Religion is the opium of the masses.” It’s what I am writing about. In my misspent youth I used your quote to annoy my pious Zoroastrian aunt. I doubt if she quite grasped your meaning, but I am sure she knew it wasn’t being nice about God. Now I begin to have my doubts.
I am not attributing the change of heart to my first experience of opium. That was in Iran in the dangerous days of the Shah, before the even more dangerous days of Khomeini and now the dapper little President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad with his designer stubble and tie-less menace.
I don’t suppose many people have attempted to describe coherently the effects of smoking opium, though Thomas de Quincy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge tried. For me, it was being gently led into a dimension half-way between sleep and wake with the boundaries much blurred. Nothing, I might add, like the sometimes flowery sometimes sharp certainties of the altered consciousness that LSD brings.
When you said religion is like that, I didn’t examine the proposition closely enough. Come to think of it, trying to memorise my Parsi prayers when I was seven years old didn’t in any way resemble the opium experience.
Still, I thought I knew what you meant. You were getting at the fact that religion gets people to be docile and not want to bring about immediate Communist revolutions. You probably meant also that a belief in heavenly rewards for hard work, diligence and not coveting your neighbour’s property or wife stopped you wanting things here and now and got you to be less of nuisance to capitalists. Religious conviction would lead to a postponement of pleasures and a resignation to one’s peasant or proletarian fate in this one. Fair enough.
My question and challenge to you is that perhaps your 19th-century formulation has ceased to apply. Time and tide have moved on, boss!
If I could raise you (Eek! Blasphemy!) from the crypt in Highgate cemetery in North London I would buy us both cheap cut-price airline tickets and take you (your first aeroplane ride? Be my guest) to Afghanistan, Syria and other stops in West Asia.
Religion is no longer taking people into dreamy states of inaction there. Only the other day some idiot American soldiers set fire to copies of the Quran which they had confiscated from the local believers, those suspected of being Taliban fighters or terrorists. All hell broke loose on earth. The religious President of the United States, Barack Obama, himself apologised and admitted that it was done in grave error. Nevertheless, the feelings or ire of thousands of Afghan people were aroused and the Taliban swore revenge.
One wouldn’t think that many other books were worth the exchange in human lives, but then Muslims believe the book was dictated by God and is, even symbolically, inviolable. British and American soldiers were bombed and killed in the aftermath. It may have been in retaliation or it may have been business as usual, but those who say that the incident is “political and not religious” are being disingenuous. Without the religious content those politics would not exist.
The “politics, not religion” argument is very much what you have taught the world to think. Look for the qui bono of historical events. So we Marxists would say that the Crusades were not a clash between crescent and cross but a prolonged war for control of the trade routes of West Asia.
One may take a similar view of the contemporary conflicts that we call the Arab Spring. The revolts against the dictators of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria may be fundamentally revolts against the unfair distribution of wealth or power in these countries, but the world is close to realising that the only coherent force, one which can establish a uniformity of purpose and one which will inevitably win elections there is organised Islam. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Brotherhood will rule West Asia, but it does mean that the evolution of classes and therefore political forces based on material wellbeing will not be the immediate phase.
There are other maniacal indications. Whether it was a retaliatory act for the burning of the Quran or for some other affront, a few weeks ago vandals in “free” Libya ransacked the graves in the War memorial graveyard in Benghazi. Buried here are European soldiers who fought and died in the Second World War. The graves of those who were Christians were marked with a Cross and those of the Jews with the Star of David. The marauders, desecrating graves, were literally attacking the dead, in the name of their own conviction in Islam.
So Karl (ji), this particular religion is certainly not pacific and shares nothing with the effects of opium. It is, at most, some extreme form of amphetamine, what the drugee underground of the Western world calls “speed”. Either that or it’s a mind-destroying drug that stimulates violent acts.
When Col. Muammar Gaddafi, before he fled, issued public statements saying those who were against him were drug addicts and dope heads, the world laughed. Now I am not so sure, Karl (ji). Maybe the mad Colonel had stumbled upon my interpretation of your quote before me.
No need to reply,

I remain, yours in traces of historical science and sanity, Farrukh Dhondy