On Religious Fanaticism and Passionate Intensity
By
Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam
22 April
2024
“Much of what is greatest in human achievement
involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by
passion. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it
is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history.
It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.”
Bertrand Russell
Nat Turner in Gaza - The story as told by
Norman Finkelstein
(Norman Finkelstein is the author of “Gaza:
An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.” This story first appeared on Norman
Finkelstein’s Official Substack).
“In 1831, a
slave named Nat Turner organized an insurrection in Virginia. It proved to be
the largest slave revolt in American history. Turner hoped to stir the whole
slave population into action but could only enlist 70 others. It’s unknown
whether Turner expected to achieve a military victory or, short of that, force
a national reckoning with slavery.
(Photo: The Daily Guardian)
------
He exhorted
his fellow insurrectionists to “kill all the white people.” (It appears that he
intended to spare women, children and surrendering men once the insurrection
gained a firm foothold.) The unfolding scene was ghastly: babies decapitated,
other whites disembowelled and hacked to pieces.
With only
the rarest exception, for 48 hours, no white in their tracks was spared the
slaves’ accumulated wrath and fury. Some 60 whites perished: “whole families,
fathers, mothers, daughters, sucking babes and school children butchered,
thrown into heaps, and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs or to putrefy on
the spot.” (Turner himself, it seems, displayed forbearance. He killed only one
person.)
In the
course of quelling the rebellion, whites randomly murdered and mutilated some
120 Blacks “in ways that witnesses refused to describe,” often severing heads
and mounting them on poles as a portent “to all those who should undertake a
similar plot.”
A
biographer of Turner (Stephen Oates, “The Fires of Jubilee”) observes that his
“rage” sprang from the “prodigious chasm” that separated his talents and
aspirations – by all accounts, Black as well as White, he was a match for any
White man’s wits – and the slave’s fate which Turner was born into and to which
he was consigned for his terrestrial existence.
Possessed
of a “prodigious knowledge of the Bible,” Turner was a religious zealot. He
contrived that God ordained his bloody revolt, he was the vehicle and executor
of God’s will, and God had sanctioned his actions.
But it’s
also true that he found in scripture a “rational” vision of divine retribution
and earthly redemption that resonated with his plight. After the insurrection
was repressed, Turner’s rage was ascribed by whites to his religious delirium
to obscure the slave uprising’s real taproot: not “fanatical delusion” but the
system of bondage that stoked the flames for vengeance. White Southerners,
Oates muses, “had to believe that the insurrection sprang from religious
fanaticism, which had bewildered and deranged Nat’s mind and had led him and
his “band of savages” to commit atrocities beyond the capacity of ordinary
slaves. whites could not blame the rebellion on their slave system – they were
too much a part of it to do that.”
Whites
demonized Turner after his death, the honourable exception being the White
Abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery Liberator,
championed moral suasion to win the public over to manumission. Yet, whereas he
stated that the “excesses” of Turner’s revolt could not be justified and that
he was “horror-struck at the late tidings,” Garrison conspicuously did not
condemn the slave revolt. Instead, he railed against the hypocrisy of those who
sang paeans to the sanguinary struggles for liberty then being fought out in
Europe but who fell deathly silent when it came to the enslaved, lacerated
Black population in their midst.
It took
uncommon courage to take Garrison’s stand. A $5,000 price was put on his head
in North Carolina, while Georgia offered the same amount to anybody who would
kidnap him and drag him for trial. The “radical” podcasting universe of our day
wouldn’t risk two “likes” and one “share.”
Even as
none contested the gruesome facts of the rebellion, Southern Blacks did not
recoil in horror at Turner’s name. On the contrary: “He became a legendary
Black hero … enshrined in an oral tradition that still flourishes today. They
regard Nat’s rebellion as the ‘First War’ against slavery and the Civil War as
the second. So in death, Nat achieved a kind of victory denied him in life – he
became a martyred soldier of slave liberation who broke his chains and murdered
whites because slavery had murdered Negroes.”
Oates wrote
the above words in 1973. In 1988, a book on Turner’s life (introduced by
Coretta Scott King) was selected for inclusion in children's “Black Americans
of Achievement” biography series. By now, Nat Turner occupies an honoured place
in American history.
The
Story of John Brown
Similarly,
slavery abolitionist John Brown imagined himself the instrument of God's will,
and he had that crazed look in his eyes. And guess what? He's among the most
honoured figures in American history. He's probably one of the only figures
after whom a song was written, “John Brown's Body”. And that was sung by the
Union Army troops during the Civil War: “John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in
the grave…”
The
Story of Gaza
The 2,000
young men who burst the gates of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, had been born into a
concentration camp. For fully two decades they had been immured in a 25-mile
long by 5-mile-wide sliver of land that was among the most densely populated
places in the world. The vast majority of them could never hope to leave but
only to pace each day the camp’s suffocating perimeter; never aspire to gainful
employment or eat a full meal; never expect to marry or raise a family.
Abandoned
by everyone, they were “remaindered” to languish and die. To expedite this
process, Israel periodically launched “operations” visiting death and
destruction on Gaza: thousands methodically mowed down; homes and critical
infrastructure systematically pulverized. It might sound like the script of a
bad B-movie, but on the night of Oct. 6, each of those 2,000 men probably
kissed his mother, then his father, goodbye. Forever. And then each silently
vowed to vindicate the remorseless torture of a twilight existence and to
avenge the murder of a grandparent, sister, brother, niece, or nephew by that
satanic power that cursed their lives.
Dolores
Ibarruri, La Passionaria, famously exhorted during the Spanish Civil War,
“Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees.” If we honour Nat Turner’s slave revolt, and
John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery, if we honour the Jews who revolted in
the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honour the heroic
resistance in Gaza.
“The owl of
Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. One only acquires
wisdom into an epoch with the ripeness of time”, Hegel famously said. It’s
still high noon, and thus, it's too soon to resolve what verdict history will
cast on the slave revolt in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.
-----
A frequent contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Naseer
Ahmed is an Engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur and is an independent IT
consultant after having served in both the Public and Private sector in
responsible positions for over three decades. He has spent years studying Quran
in-depth and made seminal contributions to its interpretation.
URL: https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/religious-fanaticism-passionate/d/132179
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism