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This week, the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school again. Their gunmen went from classroom to classroom, mowing down young students and teachers alike. The death toll was around 132 children and 9 adults. This crime occurred in the same moral universe as Afghan Taliban attacks on civilians, Islamic State atrocities and the endless tally of suicide bombings by various Jihadis. The same moral universe boasts non-Muslim religious actors as well, including Hindu attacks on mosques in India and religiously-justified Christian massacres of nonbelievers not so long ago.
The atrocities committed in the name of religion beg the question: Who needs an elaborate religious code of rules to know right from wrong? Only sociopaths, I should think. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘sociopath’ as “someone who behaves in a dangerous or violent way towards other people and does not feel guilty about such behavior.”
Especially in the Middle East, people think atheists lack a code of conduct that religion provides, including fear of God should someone transgress His rules of behavior. People commonly seem to think that atheists reject ethics and morality in their denial of God, while those of another religion at least try to be moral and ethical but often fall short because they rely on the ‘wrong’ code.
"Religiously devout" should not be synonymous with 'moral' or 'good,' however. All it really means is that someone is good at observing the rituals and rules of a religion. Good people, on the other hand, simply know when something is wrong – they can recognize cruelty and evil when they see it. They refrain from inflicting evil on others not because they fear punishment from God or remember the Sura or Biblical passage forbidding it, but simply by virtue of a functioning moral compass. Those who are religious may turn to their religious code for further elaboration about their ethics, while those who are not religious may believe in a sort of natural law concerning such things. Many others do not even think it through so much – they just know right from wrong in their heart.
The sociopaths, on the other hand, need to be restrained by explicit religious codes and laws. Even in the presence of such restraints, however, they appear quite capable of interpreting things to suit their preferences. Does your religion forbid the intentional killing of innocents? No problem! Redefine them as non-civilians or martyrs for the cause! Do you want slaves? Abraham and the Prophet had them!
The theologians with a functioning moral compass, on the other hand, manage to find in their diverse religious texts a deeper meaning exhorting kindness and tolerance. They discount passages that seem to permit evil by looking at them “in context.” The sociopaths look for the letter of the law. They work hard to indoctrinate people with a functioning, natural moral compass to accept the evil they wish to commit. The process is perhaps similar to how most army recruits must be trained intensively and harshly if they are to set aside their natural reluctance to kill.
A good example comes from one of the Islamic State’s recent pamphlets (December 2014), “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves." Although the loathsome document is too long to reproduce here, two of the questions and answers deserve a closer look:
"Question 3: Can all unbelieving women be taken captive?” “There is no dispute among the scholars that it is permissible to capture unbelieving women [who are characterized by] original unbelief [kufr asli], such as the kitabiyat [women from among the People of the Book, i.e. Jews and Christians] and polytheists. However, [the scholars] are disputed over [the issue of] capturing apostate women. The consensus leans towards forbidding it, though some people of knowledge think it permissible. We lean towards accepting the consensus…"
"Question 13: Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not reached puberty?” “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse."
Whether or not they are religious, the average person knows that slavery, rape and pedophilia are wrong. It takes a lot of indoctrination to convince them otherwise.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
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