Ideology and innocence

Everybody believes in something, but the world is divided into two extremes. There are those who die for belief and others who kill for it. But a vast majority are innocent bystanders, people who believe in varying degrees, but are not ready to kill or die for what they believe. While everybody in the world believes in something, only the ideologue believes with extreme prejudice.

Now an ideologue is someone who adheres to an ideology, which is a collection of ideas that forms the basis of social thinking. Facts are interpreted according to belief, and every society has an ideology that remains invisible to most people but quietly influences their ability to think. This is the dominant ideology, as opposed to all others that differ from the norm, which are known as radical thinking.

Once science was considered radical against religion, and religion itself was considered radical against pagan thinking. Communism was radical against both religion and capitalism. Mathew White, an atrocitologist, wrote in Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century (2001) that in the 20th century almost 92 million lives perished in the struggle for communism compared to 96 million over other conflicts.

Ideology is the headiest thing in the world, because nothing intoxicates like the mind soaked in the frenzy of strong beliefs. Every time a sword drew blood in the ancient world, and every time a bullet or shrapnel spilled the blood of modern men, there is a trajectory of belief that worked from head to heart to hand of those who vowed to defend the pure and the sacred. But the interpretation of the pure and the sacred varied from person to person, land to land, time to time and ideology to ideology. One of the greatest sources of human conflict is this variance of interpretation, followed by the paradox of understanding.

In 2004, George Bush described this paradox when he visited Goree Island, a holding place for captured slaves in Africa. "Small men," he said, "took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice." In another century, it will show that while George Bush captured the essence of truth, he also spoke for himself.

The truth is that whenever the "small men" played big roles, history registered wars, massacres, slaughters, and oppressions. Then comes a time when the hypocrisy is separated from injustice and nations roil in regret and apology. The Americans are preparing to apologise for the mistakes of their ancestors and come to terms with the guilt of slavery. The second largest US bank JP Morgan Chase & Co. has publicly disclosed that two of its predecessor banks had received thousands of slaves as collateral prior to the Civil War. It offered a formal letter of apology and said it was creating a 5 million dollar scholarship fund for the African-American students from Louisiana. There is a recent Senate resolution on lynching, while the clamour for a proper national apology is growing across the United States.

History is rife with examples of proper apology for past misdeeds. The Japanese apologised for the cruelty committed by its troops in the Far East during World War II. Germany apologised for the suffering caused by its actions toward Jews and others. More recently Tony Blair apologised on behalf of Britain for its treatment of the Irish during the potato famine of the 1840s. Pope John Paul II apologised for the past sins of the Roman Catholic Church against non-Catholics. Australia apologised for its mistreatment of the country's aborigine population.

While all crimes eventually catch up with conscience, the innocent is always the victim of history. Take your pick of a day in Iraq, and it is just a question of how many people have got killed. Take London bombing or any other explosion for that matter, and you have innocent people who are getting killed. An average of 4,000-5,000 children died every month in Iraq when the US imposed sanctions on the country to create pressure on Saddam Hussein.

It is one of the starkest mysteries of history that innocent people died in the conflict of ideology. If you think about all the people who went to Nazi gas chambers, died in wars, revolutions, political struggles, and other ideological confrontations, it is always the sparks started by a few men, which set fire to engulf many. Perhaps there is a parallel between crimes of men and natural calamities. The meek and the weak always perish in the wrath of the haughty and the mighty.

An Islamic scholar named Abu-Hamed al-Ghazali espoused this concept in the 12th century when he introduced the principle of "tattarrus" in his book Al-Mustafa. The word "tattarrus" basically meant "dressing up," which referred to the practice of using ordinary Muslims as human shields by Islamic combatants in their fights against infidels. Later, in the 13th century, theologian Ibn Tayimiah further developed a "tattarrus" doctrine to justify the killing of non-combatant Muslims during battles with Mongol invaders. The doctrine was subsequently repudiated within Islam.

Until it resurfaced in 1995, when Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian mentor of Osama bin Laden, argued that killing of Muslims, including women and children, was not a sinful act if required in the fight against the enemies of Islam. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq, claimed that according to the hierarchy of values in Islam, killing of the mutumarresoun i.e, civilian Muslims who live under the control of the infidel, was necessary to prevent the faith of the infidel from striking root in the land of Islam.

Yussuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian sheik working in Qatar took a harder line. He initially ruled that only three categories of unarmed individuals could be killed: apostates, who have turned their back to Islam, homosexuals, who "dirty" the pure society, and Israelis, including unborn children, who could grow up to join the Jewish army. Now, however, al-Qaradawi has expanded his doctrine to allow for the killing of innocent Muslims in Iraq, because that is necessary for the larger interest of the Muslim Ummah.

This is where you have the catch. All ideological conflicts have claimed innocent lives in the name of larger interests. Mao Zhe Dong is responsible for over 30 million deaths in the name of communism in China. Lenin sent 4 million and Stalin sent 20 million Russians to death over their struggle for communism. Adolph Hitler's Nazi madness cost 35 million lives during the Second World War. Pol Pot killed 2 million Cambodians and Che Guevara ordered hundreds of people to execution under his watch. All the deaths of earlier centuries due to ruthless persecution and carnage were similarly led by ideologies driven to their logical ends.

Between the mortar and the pestle of ideologies, innocence has been crushed like chilies. It has happened in the past and it is happening now, the same old bottle while labels kept changing. Religion, nationalism, patriotism, communism, socialism, democracy and freedom, all have drawn innocent people into the fray to change their lot.

If "to be or not to be" is an ideological question, then the answer is that innocence is guilty. Because an ideology cannot work until the innocent is convinced.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.