Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Cradle of Civilization
Tuesday, December 26, 2006

One question has haunted my travels in the Middle East over the last decade, and all of my recent work, particularly Where God Was Born, which took me through Israel, Iraq, and Iran, visiting biblical sites. How can the Middle East, the rightly called Cradle of Civilization, the Birthplace of the Bible, now be home to such persistent violence? I'm asked about this a lot. One answer of mine is that violence is endemic to the Bible, so the conflict was there long before the patriarchs arrived, and has been there long after they left. It's not fair to blame religion, as has become popular in recent years, when religion hardly created the problem. Abraham, for one, was violent toward his own children. Moses was even hostile, at times, in his conduct toward God. Also, chaos exists in the Bible before order, as the opening sentence of Genesis suggests. Violence is there, order is artificially imposed. By God.

I was thinking of these issues while reading an interesting exchange on the website of Haaretz, the Israeli daily, between a prominent Arab and Israeli journalist. Here's an excerpt from the Arab journalist:

One must question whether the politics of despair are responsible for the kind of violence we have been witnessing in the last few years. Is the absence of hope for Palestinians a recipe for further violence against Israel and among Palestinians themselves? This is a question that needs to be answered if we are to understand what drives these extremist and fanatical groups to wreak havoc in the Middle East and beyond.

It is naive to think that religion is responsible for the violence in the Middle East, even if it is often used as a convenient excuse for achieving political goals. Violence is the product of weak and desperate people suffering unaddressed grievances, real and imagined. The failure of states in the region to provide peaceful means for political change through a democratic process has largely contributed to the growing phenomenon. Threats to regional and global security are the product of current realities in the Middle East that must change before we can hope that the cradle of civilization can once again become a beacon of light upon nations.

But how do we change these realities, dear Akiva?

Note that the person saying that religion is not the reason for the violence is the Arab writer. The exchange is quite revealing. I recommend it.

Labels: Interfaith Relations, Middle East

Posted by B Feiler at 9:14 PM
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