The Ayatollah and the Pope

"Men are either brothers by religion or they are created equal,” said the Grand Ayatollah Sayed Ali al-Sistani in his conversation with Pope Francis during the latter’s visit to Najaf in Iraq on March 6. This profound observation, recounted by the Pope to his entourage, encapsulates the essential dichotomy between a religious as opposed to the secular view of Man and Creation. Two of the three concepts in this thought, ‘religion’ and ‘equality’ are man-made abstractions or social categories of perception, while ‘creation’ is an objective reality.

What Ali al-Sistani meant is that in society, we can either have a ‘brotherhood’ of believers, with an innate but benign hierarchy that creates a bond of belonging with empathy and warmth, or we can have a relationship of ‘equality’ between unrelated strangers, as a notional status but enforced legally through the power of the State.

In the religious cosmos, the State doesn’t come first. It is Bhagavan, God or Allah. It’s His commandment that you follow, and the State has to align itself to the laws of the ‘faith’ or ‘morals’. In a secular world, however, man’s position is defined not in relation to God but to other men. Everyone is equal in facing a hostile universe that is neither orderly nor predictable, but they have to unite in purpose and effort to strive for the common good. This secular State need not be irreligious, as faith is pushed into private life, but it has to imagine morals without religion and a saint in the absence of God. Philosophers of Existentialism, such as Albert Camus, have examined this human contingency. The men of robe conferring in Najaf seem to be confronted with similar questions.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the now-famous dictum that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” as a foundational idea in the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, was he playing tricks with ‘evidence’? What is “self-evident”? Is it evidence looking at itself in the mirror? Men are certainly not born equal in this world. Whether they are born in America or Somalia, their skin colour, race and religion, to rich or poor parents makes all the difference to their position in society and their journey in life. It is, of course, a noble ideal and an empowering one that has incited men to revolutions. But is it true as a belief? Perhaps it’s as true as religious beliefs, for instance the ‘Immaculate Conception,’ are.

More importantly, Jefferson was breaking 1,700 years of Christian tradition that emphasised a ‘brotherhood of believers’ and asserting a fictional ‘equality’ of strangers, of atomised individuals that were to become the centrepiece of Liberalism, Democracy and Secularism. Did he mean ‘Equality’ as a verb, a state of occurrence in society, or did he see it as a promise to be fulfilled by the State?

‘Brotherhood’ in both the Semitic religions has had a long history, but it was conceived more as a protection against the ‘Other’. For instance, the legendary armed religious order, the Knights Templar, born after the First Crusade in the early 12th century, was created as an army of Roman Catholics to protect pilgrims marching to Jerusalem against murderous attacks by Muslim militias. British historian Dan Jones explains in his book The Templars how they went from protecting pilgrims during the Crusades to controlling a vast financial empire, how their belief in religious martyrdom is shared by groups like ISIS, and why the Templars’ crusading spirit and anti-Muslim rhetoric is attracting a new generation of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. And more recently, we saw how the Christian church groups in America heavily funded and rallied in support of former President Donald Trump, an unabashed supporter of white supremacists.

In Islamic countries, ‘brotherhood’ is mainly associated with the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, an insurrectionary organisation founded by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, a party that came to power for a year from June 2012 under the leadership of Mohamed Morsi, following the January 2011 Arab Spring. What was once conceived as a liberating force to fight against the monarchs and dictators in the Islamic world is now labelled a terrorist organisation. Further, the monarchs and dictators have become ever more powerful to sustain themselves in power by creating organisations such as the Taliban and the ‘Islamic State’ that are savagely violent and nihilistic, without any liberating or positive ideology of hope. All in the name of religion.

Hinduism and ‘Brotherhood’

In Hinduism, where people are essentially seen as ‘Homo Hierarchicus,’ a religion that sanctioned a stratified society of unequal people, the notion that “all men are created equal” is perhaps non-existent. The notion of ‘brotherhood’, too, is difficult to imagine because Hinduism is not a monotheistic religion but an amorphous theology of multiple Gods and Goddesses, with each caste appropriating its own God. And in the absence of a monotheistic God, the brotherhood of believers gets dispersed into caste-wise aggregation. So, we have a religion with neither equality nor brotherhood.

Nevertheless, the effort to create a ‘brotherhood of Hindus’ began with the RSS in 1925 when they took up the task of protecting and promoting their interests through militant nationalism, not against British rule but against rising Muslim mobilisation. It is now the world’s largest voluntary organisation. How far has it succeeded in creating a ‘brotherhood of Hindus’ is open to question, particularly in view of allegations of upper-caste bias in its leadership. Nevertheless, this ‘brotherhood’ was not much of a force, either political or religious, till its ‘kar sevaks’, led by L K Advani’s ‘Rath Yatra’ destroyed the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Only when it turned malevolent and violent, the ‘brotherhood’ of religion became a weapon for capturing State power.

Can there be a ‘brotherhood of men’ without religion? And can it be a force for peace and good? Wonder what the Ayatollah and the Pope have to say on that.

(The writer is a former Cabinet Secretariat official)