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Islam,
de Karen Armstrong (Modern Library; 222 páginas; 70 reais)
A ex-freira inglesa Karen Armstrong é uma das principais
autoridades em história das religiões na atualidade.
Esse seu livro oferece um belo aparato informativo: mapas, bibliografia,
cronologia, glossário de termos árabes e uma lista
das figuras muçulmanas de maior destaque ao longo dos séculos.
Uma constatação atravessa a narrativa: enquanto na
maior parte das religiões o mundano e o espiritual formam
reinos separados, no islamismo eles caminham juntos. "Na maioria
das fés", escreve Armstrong, "o clamor da história
é visto como incompatível com a verdadeira vida religiosa.
Mas a escritura sagrada dos muçulmanos lhes deu uma missão
histórica. Sua salvação não está
na remissão dos pecados, mas na criação de
uma sociedade justa. Isso significa que os assuntos de Estado formam
a própria essência da religião islâmica."
A autora estuda as conseqüências dessa união entre
política e fé, abordando temas como o fundamentalismo,
as relações do Islã com a modernidade e a possibilidade
de aplicar o conceito de democracia a um Estado muçulmano.
. Trechos do livro (em inglês)
The external history of a religious tradition often seems divorced
from the raison detre of faith. The spiritual quest is an interior
journey; it is a psychic rather than a political drama. It is preoccupied
with liturgy, doctrine, contemplative disciplines and an exploration
of the heart, not with the clash of current events. Religions certainly
have a life outside the soul. Their leaders have to contend with
the state and affairs of the world, and often relish doing so. They
fight with members of other faiths, who seem to challenge their
claim to a monopoly of absolute truth; they also persecute their
co-religionists for interpreting a tradition differently or for
holding heterodox beliefs. Very often priests, rabbis, imams and
shamans are Just as consumed by worldly ambition as regular politicians.
But all this is generally seen as an abuse of a sacred ideal. These
power struggles are not what religion is really about, but an unworthy
distraction from the life of the spirit, which is conducted far
from the madding crowd, unseen, silent and unobtrusive. Indeed,
in many faiths, monks and mystics lock themselves away from the
world, since the clamour and strife of history is regarded as incompatible
with a truly religious life.
In
the Hindu tradition, history is dismissed as evanescent, unimportant
and insubstantial. The philosophers of ancient Greece were concerned
with the eternal laws underlying the flux of external events, which
could be of no real interest to a serious thinker. In the gospels,
Jesus often went out of his way to explain to his followers that
his Kingdom was not of this world, but could only be found within
the believer. The Kingdom would not arrive with a great political
fanfare, but would develop as quietly and imperceptibly as a germinating
mustardseed. In the modern West, we have made a point of separating
religion from politics; this secularization was originally seen
by the philosophes of the Enlightenment as a means of liberating
religion from the corruption of state affairs, and allowing it to
become more truly itself.
But
however spiritual their aspirations, religious people have to seek
God or the sacred in this world. They often feel that they have
a duty to bring their ideals to bear upon society. Even if they
lock themselves away, they are inescapably men and women of their
time and are affected by what goes on outside the monastery, although
they do not fully realize this. Wars, plagues, famines, economic
recession and the internal politics of their nation will intrude
upon their cloistered existence and qualify their religious vision.
Indeed, the tragedies of history often goad people into the spiritual
quest, in order to find some ultimate meaning in what often seems
to be a succession of random, arbitrary and dispiriting incidents.
There is a symbiotic relationship between history and religion,
therefore. It is, as the Buddha remarked, our perception that existence
is awry that forces us to find an alternative which will prevent
us from falling into despair.
Perhaps
the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence,
a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but
that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality
in earthly, physical phenomena. People have sensed the divine in
rocks, mountains, temple buildings, law codes, written texts, or
in other men and women. We never experience transcendence directly:
our ecstasy is always "earthed," enshrined in something
or someone here below. Religious people are trained to look beneath
the unpromising surface to find the sacred within it. They have
to use their creative imaginations. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the
imagination as the ability to think of what is not present. Human
beings are religious creatures because they are imaginative; they
are so constituted that they are compelled to search for hidden
meaning and to achieve an ecstasy that makes them feel fully alive.
Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention
on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own, and to teach themselves
to see the divine in it.
In
Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture,
the Koran, gave them a historical mission. Their chief duty was
to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak
and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect. The experience
of building such a society and living in it would give them intimations
of the divine, because they would be living in accordance with God's
will. A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state
affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of
religion itself The political wellbeing of the Muslim community
was a matter of supreme importance. Like any religious ideal, it
was almost impossibly difficult to implement in the flawed and tragic
conditions of history, but after each failure Muslims had to get
up and begin again.
Muslims
developed their own rituals, mysticism, philosophy, doctrines, sacred
texts, laws and shrines like everybody else. But all these religious
pursuits sprang directly from the Muslims' frequently anguished
contemplation of the political current affairs of Islamic society.
If state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if
their political leaders were cruel or exploitative, or if their
community was humiliated by apparently irreligious enemies, a Muslim
could feel that his or her faith in life's ultimate purpose and
value was in jeopardy. Every effort had to be expended to put Islamic
history back on track, or the whole religious enterprise would fall,
and life would be drained of meaning. Politics was, therefore, what
Christians would call a sacrament: it was the arena in which Muslims
experienced God and which enabled the divine to function effectively
in the world. Consequently, the historical trials and tribulations
of the Muslim community-- political assassinations, civil wars,
invasions, and the rise and fall of the ruling dynasties-were not
divorced from the interior religious quest, but were of the essence
of the Islamic vision. A Muslim would meditate upon the current
events of their time and upon past history as a Christian would
contemplate an icon, using the creative imagination to discover
the hidden divine kernel. An account of the external history of
the Muslim people cannot, therefore be of mere secondary interest,
since one of the chief characteristics of Islam has been its sacralization
of history.
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