Religion, compassion and Post-modernism

Dr Moeed Pirzada
My childhood fantasies were driven by Alladin’s lamp and Smokey Djinn that used to grant wishes. But times have changed. Now smart organisations can do that.
And one such organisation is the Technology, Entertainment & Design (TED) in the US. They describe themselves as a community of knowledge seekers. Each year they select three gifted individuals to win TED Prize and part of the prize is granting a wish to change the world. Among those who have won prize and the wish since 2005 are Bono, the lead singer of U2, Bill Clinton, the former US President and Jehan Noujaim, the Al Jazeera producer of the famous documentary: Control Room.
Bono, as one could expect, wanted a call for action on Africa; Bill Clinton wanted a health care system in Rwanda and Jehan Noujaim, the quintessential media person, wished the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion. Every wish is a unique challenge for TED, but I guess this year represents a special case. One personality selected is: Karen Armstrong—the eminent scholar of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. And guess what her wish is?
She wants TED to help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of leading inspirational thinkers from three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect.
As TED decided to brainstorm with its partners and supporters world wide, I too was granted a wish by a different organization: GEO TV. Our CEO called and asked me to go to London and represent him in the meetings with TED. Going to London, escaping Karachi’s summer cocktail of heat and load-shedding, would have been great but topping it on with meetings to discuss Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion and the role media can play was a rare treat indeed.
While changing planes at Dubai, I picked up all the Middle Eastern papers that were stacked at the entrance of the Emirates aircraft. And soon I had an electric wave passing up and down my spine. This was 15th May, and most if not were filled up with graphic stories and strong comments on Israel’s creation and what Arabs called Nakba—the great disaster. Will they in London be able to understand the depth of these feelings? Can these fault lines ever be bridged? Will I be able to touch these issues? I repeatedly asked myself.
Surprisingly they did. The small group of writers, producers and executives TED had assembled for its meetings was an unusually aware selection of humanity sensitive to the whole range of emotions and mistrust breeding at the interface of religion and politics. They were a kind of people who knew they had no control on the political decision making, but who nevertheless aspire to change the mindsets and the context in which most decisions are taken.
We learn through steps and stages, and I gradually realised that TED could be best understood as a loosely arranged conglomerate of communities and this allows it to mushroom diverse resources to achieve what it sets out to. Despite this awareness I thought that in selecting Karen Armstrong and granting her the wish TED had accepted a new kind of creative challenge—consciously or unconsciously it has moved into new frontiers.

And this is abundantly clear from TED’s own website. An interesting debate rages around this prize nomination and under the Creative Commons licence is open for quotation and use. Many wonder how come other religions like Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism could be left out? How could Armstrong expect a charter to be created by the Muslims, Christians and Jews and then signed and supported by other religions?
But far more interesting are the arguments of the various non-religious people and that may include atheists, and humanists of various sorts. They argue that how come religious people think that virtue and morality are somehow tied into a set of rules dictated by religion? One person who identifies himself as a secular anti-war activist asks that how those who go to Church and practise Christianity support the Iraq war? He ends up asking which one of us is less Christian.
Humanists argue that religion is an individual’s search within to find their connection with their creation and meaning and everything external is politics and how could these massively corrupt organisations we call religions possibly effect the type of change she is speaking of? They point out that there is no precedent of the world’s religious institutions to be harbingers of unity and reconciliation and whatever evidence exists shows them to be the guardians of their own truths.
And finally how anyone really serious about the idea of compassion can exclude the atheists, humanists, new agers and pagans out of this? Especially at a time when in the western world the number of people practising one or the other kind of faith or belief outside the organised religion is increasing.
I am afraid TED communities have now an interesting challenge at hand. They are essentially post-modern people and Karen Armstrong’s work and her influence stretches across more traditional world. After all few scholars of Christian origin are so widely known and respected across Muslim communities from South Asia to Middle East to UK.
Working to fulfil the wishes of Bill Clinton and Bono is essentially a question of collecting and mushrooming resources around a cause that is more easily understood. Even Jehane Noujaim’s vision of tapping film to strengthen tolerance and compassion is essentially post-modern and thus easy to build consensus around.
The difference is: Karen’s Charter of Compassion demands reconnecting with the traditional world. Most post-modernists have failed to identify that nowhere has she argued that religions or religious establishments have been harbingers of unity and reconciliation; far from that she points out that fault lines between religions of the Levant add to the political conflict.
And she is looking for at least a theoretical construct where these traditional religions can somehow rediscover the forgotten elements of compassion in their folds and help in reducing the fault lines rather than adding to the divisions.
No doubt this represents a challenge that stretches the imagination. But I am sure to many inside TED communities, looking for new frontiers, this offers a truly global opportunity as well.
[Moeed Pirzada, a broadcaster and political analyst with GEO TV, has been a Britannia Chevening Scholar at London School of Economics & Political Science. He can be reached at mp846@columbia.edu]