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Rant Number 564 26 November 2013
‘Jihadists in Syria chop off magic oak tree’ the media report. Al-Qaeda boys themselves – a.k.a. the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams - proudly tweeted their brave deed. The guilty tree was the object of idolatrous cult – it was wicked - so it got hacked down, that’s it.
Hostility to arboreal veneration is pure Wahhabism – the ideology that inflames and drives the fierce foes of President Assad. Harking back to the founder in 18th century Arabia, Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab. A fervent religious reformer who wrote a treatise on God’s Unity and inveighed against fellow Muslims like Sufis and Shia’. However, not everybody warmed to the theologian’s zeal. Historian Eugene Rogan writes that when al-Wahhab had a woman stoned to death for adultery the local folks resented it and sought to have him executed. He found exile a better option.
Later in the oasis of Diriyya the wandering preacher forged a close alliance with Emir Muhammad ibn Sa’ud. A highly successful political-theological pact which still legitimises the raison d’etre of the oil-rich state known as Saudi Arabia. A rare case of a nation named after a dynasty. Saudi: a country autocratically ruled by the House of Sa’ud and underpinned by the militant theology of al-Wahhab.
Alas, tolerance was not the reformer’s forte. He forbade a host of things as unlawful Islamic innovations. From smoking to the shaving of the beard and to…you will guess: reverence to trees. Revered, say, for their association with a pious companion of the Prophet, a shahid or a saint. A practice deemed incompatible with the stern doctrine oftawhid – absolute Divine Unicity. Hence the poor thing in Syria – ‘Tree of Chairs’ was its name – stood no chance at the hands of the shaggy Wahhabi warriors. It was a wicked tree. It had to go. Tough.
The priest is not a tree-hugger. Still, he does care for the natural world and feels a little bit sorry for the hapless Tree of Chairs. But he can’t keep the shade of a Christian Saint out of his mind. St Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon monk from Crediton, Devon. In 718 AD he travelled to Germany to preach the One True God to the heathen Teutonic tribes. A challenge arose in Geismar when he came upon a huge oak sacred to Thor, the top Germanic deity. Boniface knew pagans sacrificed to sacred groves and springs, openly or in secret. The Thor tree was held in idolatrous awe. The Saint faced the challenge: he wielded the axe. A multitude of polytheists looked menacingly on but Boniface did not weaken – he hacked away till the big bulk came crushing down. Then the heathens, realising the impotence of their false god, came forward to embrace Christ: happy ending. (I fear today the Saint may be stoned to death by irate German Greens.)
Question: was St Boniface like the al-Qaeda guys? You dig the similarity. They both took it out on a tree, didn’t they? In the name of opposition to idolatry. Strict monotheism. So, birds of a feather? Just two different varieties of jihadism? Is that it?
First, St Boniface was unlike many Syrian fighters in one chief thing. He did not go around killing. He did not cut off human heads, did not kidnap people, did not torture prisoners and did not rape women. He was no shrinking violet, I am sure (how can an Englishman not be a toughie?), but there is no record of his using violence against men to pursue his mission. Hence the Christian’s jihad was a bloodless one – take note.
Second, the Saint was unlike the jihadists in another key way. Much later in his life, aged 75, he was in Friesland, preaching to another polytheist lot and converting many. By a river a band of armed, enraged pagans marched towards him and his companions. Servants urged Boniface to defend himself with weapons but he refused: ‘The day I have long waited for has come. It will bring me to the eternal joys of the Lord.’ So Boniface died a martyr, a shahid, if you like. The crucial difference is that, again, he chose not kill, even in self-defence.
Third, superstition is spiritually wrong and silly. To believe that a tree brings good luck – as the Tree of Chairs is supposed to have done – is childish and regressive. However, Christian theology distinguished between two Greek concepts, latria and doulia. Latriameans adoration or worship. The same word that appears in ‘idolatry’. Adoration is owed only, exclusively to God and to nobody and nothing else. Worshipping anything other than God – idolatry - is abhorrent to any genuine person of faith. Doulia by contrast means
veneration. A kind of devout respect. You could venerate a holy person or even an object or a relic without thereby at all meaning to worship it. ‘Venerable’ in the Church of England is a title given to an Archdeacon – the priest usually in charge of money matters. Whatever her scarlet sins, the C of E does not yet equate Archdeacons with God, believe you me.
Of course, popular, folk spirituality is prone to blurring the distinction between worship and veneration. A statue in a Catholic Church, an icon in an Orthodox one, the bones of a saint are not there to be worshipped like divinities. The hope is that by focussing on them the votary may better direct his attention and prayer on what the lifeless thing symbolises, what it points to. Some pious people get confused, led astray and run into excess. Superstition always lurks. A real problem the Reformation had to contend with.
Despite Islam’s uncompromising tawhid monotheism, a luxuriant and polymorphous spirituality is manifest at Mevlana’s tomb in Konya; in Egyptian villages, each with its respected tomb of a sheikh; in Morocco, where women victims of domestic violence find comfort in shrines of saints; in Sufi brotherhoods in Indonesia … and innumerable other Muslim places.
If the jihadists want to destroy them all, they have a big job ahead.
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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