Charles Cameron

The fine jihadist-media-monitor Aaron Zelin has a Halloween special by that title today featuring a piece by Omar Bakri Muhammad, founder of the UK group “Al Muhajiroun”, regarding the holiday of the season:

Realising this reality of Halloween, the true believer in the One and Only true God (Allah) we must ask what is the Islamic ruling on: Belief in false gods, pretending to be a false god, offering sacrifice to a false god and praying for the dead from the non-Muslims? What is the Islamic ruling on celebrating Halloween i.e. Dressing up in costumes, asking for treats, offering treats, decorating houses, displaying pumpkins? [ … ]
 
As Muslims we are responsible for purifying the lands from any corruption hence we are duty bound to eradicate all evil and the worst is Shirk (giving the right of Allah to another).
 
Dear Muslims we must realise and understand that any practices, celebrations that do not come from Islam are evil, because if it was good then Allah (SWT) would have included it in our Deen. Halloween is an evil celebration which promotes worship and sacrifice to false gods, an evil that pollutes one’s belief and worship to Allah. Halloween is a form of Shirk and disobedience introduced by Shaytaan in the form of a trick, enjoyment and celebration.

That set me off on a bit of a holiday spree…

According to other Muslims, Valentine’s day is just as bad…

Conservative Muslims opposing St. Valentine’s Day took to the streets of Lahore on Feb. 14 demanding an end to what they call an un-Islamic tradition.
 
About 100 protestors gathered in front of the Lahore Press Club to condemn the “un-Islamic, unethical day.” The Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP), a religio-political party and Lahore Cultural and Heritage Society jointly staged the protest.
 
The participants, most of them women clad in black burqas (a head-to-toe garment worn by Muslim women) waved banners which said “It is a conspiracy to corrupt Muslim children” and “it is treachery to culture.”

At least that’s one thing some conservative Hindus can agree with some conservative Muslims on:

India’s Hindu hard-liners are showing no love for Valentine’s Day. A few dozen protesters briefly blocked a road in downtown New Delhi on Wednesday, burning Valentine’s Day cards and chanting “Down with Valentine.” In the nearby city of Lucknow, extremists threatened to beat up couples found celebrating their love.
 
“We are deadly against Valentine’s Day,” said Sapan Dutta, a regional leader of the hard-line Shiv Sena group. “We are for civilized love and affection.”
 
The protests by groups like Shiv Sena, who say they are defending traditional Indian values from Western-style promiscuity, have become an annual media event.

But then, you know, not all Hindus feel that way:

A unique Hindu temple of Sri Krishna dedicated to the concept of Valentine’s Day will be consecrated in April 2010 at Sholingur in Vellore District in Tamil Nadu (140 km from Chennai). The unique temple which tries to amalgamate the ideas of Saint Valentine and Hindu God Krishna both synonymous with love is being built by R. Jaganaath, a former food and beverages manager and the author of a book on cocktails.

And here’s another approach to Valentine’s Day from some Muslim women in the Maldives:

A group of self-styled “underground feminists” calling themselves the ‘Rehendhi’ movement claim to have bombarded Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed with women’s underwear on Valentine’s Day, in protest “against misogyny in Maldivian society.”

That sounds more like a Tom Jones concert!

Thing is, St Valentine, whose day February 14th supposedly is, wasn’t a lover in the romantic sense he was a lover of God who died for his faith — a martyr:

A group of parents in Texas’s Katy Independent School District got a judge to issue a restraining order today to make sure that children can pass out Valentine’s Day cards with religious themes. The school district, however, says it doesn’t understand what the parents’ lawsuit is all about, and was never contacted by the parents about the issue. [ … ]
 
In any case, kids in the district get to give out religious cards today. But did you ever consider what historically accurate religious Valentine’s Day cards might look like? Here are some ideas: “I Love Your Martyr Complex.” “Baby, I’d Rather Die Than Renounce Our God.” “If Love Is Blind, Maybe I Can Cure It.” “I May Not Exist, But My Love Is Real.”

Maybe we should just forget about Valentines. What about Christmas? It seems even Christmas isn’t exempt from suspicion…

What ought to be a time of meditative joy and happy celebration has become a time for combat. December, say scores of the faithful, is a time for war—the Christmas wars. Happy holidays is denounced as a godless substitute for Merry Christmas. The Christmas wars are now as much a part of the season as mistletoe and reindeer.
 
Which brings us to one of the principal battlegrounds of this annual Christmas debate: Santa Claus.
 
Millions of Christians accept Santa uncritically, but some denounce the attention given to him as idol worship. Many pastors crusade against images of the jolly old man’s presence in churches.

Santa Claus? Let’s just get back to Halloween…

While our modern tradition of Halloween has no substantial ties to any paganism or occultism, there remains a strong cultural association and perception of Halloween as occultism and anti-Christian. Christians should be cognizant of the negative cultural implications of partaking in cultural festivals and willingly refrain when appropriate. This is true also of “Christian” holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, as well as holidays that are currently understood in more secular terms, such as Valentine’s Day and Independence Day. The practice of the Days of the Dead is a Mexican tradition that is associated with Mexican culture, so for us from another culture to borrow that practice with new meanings and interpretations was, in my opinion, culturally insensitive and inappropriate.

Independence Day? Independence Day?

I think that pretty much covers everything. Happy All Hallows all, and Feliz Dia de los Muertos.

I’ve been slowly prepping this series of pieces about my analytic approach — and the mysterious business of “connecting the dots” — for a while, but.. Jeff Jonas, whose work I only recently ran across, has given me “another piece of the puzzle” and a slew of new dots to connect, so here’s a quick impression of some new (for me) terrain that connects with other areas I have long been familiar with.

1

What it comes down to in my post today is this: I would like to reconcile “connecting the dots” with “putting together the pieces of the puzzle”.

Both metaphors have to do with “seeing the big picture”, and one of them (“connecting the dots”) has to do directly with nodes and edges, i.e. with those systems we call graphs and networks, while the other suggests a far subtler set of connections.

Consider this: n+1 is the next dot in the series of integers after n, with “+1” being the only link necessary — you can represent that on a graph with two nodes and an edge. But if you had the sky of the northern hemisphere in one hand (hey, this is a thought experiment) and five square miles of landscape around Winchester Cathedral in the other, finding just where to fit the cathedral (and the surrounding, branching, leafy trees nearby) snugly into the sky would be a far trickier business, and the links between air and leaf and stone molecules would be very many — we should be grateful for the ease with which the sky accommodates itself in reality to the cathedral and the trees (and the cathedral and the trees to the sky) — and for the ease with which a painter like Turner can capture the effect…

Two puzzle pieces, I mean, may have to fit along many aspects of their intersection, while dots can be connected by a single common thread.

2

I’ve only recently “met” the mind of Jeff Jonas, but he has some remarkable things to say about puzzles — for one thing, he writes about the levels of, well, computation involved in solving a jigsaw puzzle:

The first piece you take out of the box and place on the work surface requires very little computational effort. The second and third pieces require almost equally insignificant mental effort. Then as the number of pieces on the table grows the effort to determine where the next piece goes increases as well. But there is a tipping point where the effort to determine where to place the next piece gets easier and easier … despite the fact the number of puzzle pieces on the table continues to grow.

That in itself is a fascinating thought to dwell on, in fact it’s the sort of piece of the puzzle that gives me an epiphany — Jonas talks about puzzle pieces that provoke epiphanies, too:

Some pieces produce remarkable epiphanies. You grab the next piece, which appears to be just some chunk of grass – obviously no big deal. But wait … you discover this innocuous piece connects the windmill scene to the alligator scene! This innocent little new piece turned out to be the glue.

I’m processing this as a theologian / philosopher / poet, and Jonas has just given me a new angle on the theme of the intersection of frames of reference that Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation takes to be the fundamental element in insights ranging all the way from casual jokes about rabbis to — let me give you a more powerful example — the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture which, if I’ve understood the layman’s version correctly, began as a hunch that the otherwise entirely distinct mathematical zones known as “elliptic curves” and “modular forms” could be mapped onto each other – and wound up once proven, successfully bridging algebra with analysis.

Now, I am no no no no mathematician — but I am a student of conceptual bridges, so if I’ve phrased myself poorly here, please bear with me. The point is to think freshly about how one idea connects with another.

Koestler’s insight at the intersection between two fields (for this is essentially a matter of multiple-frame, and thus cross-disciplinary, thinking) is, I’d suggest, Jonas’ epiphanic piece of the puzzle.

Awesome.

3

But as we are trying to figure out the puzzle pieces — and this applies to “what is the meaning of life?” as much as to “what threat should be uppermost in our concern?” — Jonas has more to throw at us:

There may be more than one puzzle in the box, some puzzles having nothing to do with others. There may be duplicate pieces, pieces that disagree with each other, and missing pieces. Some pieces may have been shredded and are now unusable. Other pieces are mislabeled and/or are exceptionally well crafted lies.

I would like to add that puzzles may not be the only thing in the (universal) box. There’s a quote that originates somewhere in Heidegger, to the effect that “A puzzle is the unknown, to be solved, while a mystery is the unknowable, to be entered into and dwelt within.” As I say, I’ve only just run into Jonas’ thoughts, but I’d like to integrate that piece of the puzzle in with the ideas he’s providing why not have a go at the mystery too while we’re about it?

4

So what happens with ideas? How do they connect?

Hermann Hesse, the Nobel laureate in literature who gave us Siddhartha and Steppenwolf and The Journey to the East, won his Nobel for his most ambitious novel, The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, also known in English as Magister Ludi). It is an amazing piece of work that inspired at least one other book by another Nobel laureate — Manfred Eigen’s Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance — gave John Holland (he of genetic algorithms) the ruling metaphor for his life’s work, was an early and profound influence on Christopher Alexander’s thinking about pattern languages, and in general serves as a catalyst for grand scale creativity among a disparate crowd of very bright minds.

It is about a game — a game on the order of the complete works of JS Bach. And the essence of the game is the juxtaposition of thoughts.

It is about “connecting the dots” and “putting together the pieces of the puzzle” on the grand scale, to create not a single link between ideas, not a small “bigger picture” deploying a half-dozen or so insights, but a vast architecture of ideas that encompasses all “deep” human thought and connects all “beautiful” cognizable patterns. Hesse uses the image of an organist playing an organ to describe the play of ideas that composes his Game, writing:

All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.

And in Hesse’s central, musical metaphor, the myriad thoughts that comprise what he terms the “hundred-gated cathedral of Mind” are linked one with another by likeness — by identity, isomorphism, homology, symmetry, parallelism, opposition, analogy, metaphor…

5

I’ll have to move us deep into the territory of the arts and humanities here, because Hesse himself was supremely versed in those areas, but in doing so I would remind you that John Holland wrote of his life’s work, “If I could get at all close to producing something like the glass bead game I can’t think of anything that would delight me more.”

Here’s Hesse on the analogical / isomorphic nature of the moves that connect ideas — “only connect!” said EM Forster — in his great Game:

Throughout its history the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeded according to musical or mathematical rules. One theme, two themes, or three themes were stated, elaborated, varied, and underwent a development quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue or a concerto movement. A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations. For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis.

It is Bach, it is Hegel, it is the very essence of creativity, it is the associative, metaphoric nature of mind and brain (and I won’t get more than toe-deep in the “deep problem” of consciousness here).

6

And it does involve combining the understanding of both puzzle and mystery, to return to that distinction from Heidegger:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Hesse is proposing his intuition that the world of ideas is a mandala-form array of symmetries with a “vanishing point” in the center.

Well, I have leapt far from my original topic, Jeff Jonas’ comments on piecing together a puzzle, but I hope the bungee-cord I’ve been depending on has held your attention, and now as always, at the far end of the extension there’s a bouncing-back.

7

The human mind “connects the dots” and “pieces together the puzzle” by recognizing likenesses — pattern recognition, if you like.

But just how human analogical thinking functions is not exactly an easy question…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Let’s call this one Hopscotch across the disciplines.

…our intelligence community failed to connect those dots…
President Obama, Remarks on Security Reviews, Jan 05, 2010

I’ve been giving quite some thought over the past fifteen years to this issue of connecting dots.

My internet handle, hipbone, does double duty for me, since it refers to Ezekiel’s apocalyptic prophecy as featured in the lyric, “hip bone connected to you back bone”, in the old spiritual, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones. On the one hand it points to apocalyptic, by which I mean the soon expectation of a sudden and complete transformation in world affairs, very possibly accompanied, triggered or accomplished by extreme violence, with the end result being a highly favored “new heaven and new earth” or “new world order” depending on who is doing the expectation. On the other hand, it points directly to the idea of “connecting the dots” itself, since the entire song is about connections. I have been working on both fronts at least since 1995.

1

Connecting the dots is a matter of thinking, and there are two basic strategies of thought available to the human mind: linear thinking, which proceeds via cause and effect along a single track, and which is the major style of thought used within disciplinary silos, and lateral thinking, which skips sideways across silos and disciplines on wings of metaphor and analogy. Machines can crunch numbers and do some of our linear thinking for us: but it’s up to the analysts to cover the lateral front.

2

Let’s go aphoristic:

Expectation is algorithm: there are no algorithms for the unexpected.

I’d like to connect the dots … to blind spots.

Blinds spots are the spots we can’t, or won’t, and in any case don’t see. They fall into the category of the invisible. Visionaries are those who can see the invisible, who peer into our blind spots, into those places where we can’t see the connections between the dots, and can therefore easily be blind-sided. There’s an almost Borgesian thickness to the way things tie into one another here: the unexpected is by definition what we can’t predict, what blunt force thinking can’t predict — but it’s not invisible to those whose practice is to peer into the invisible, to aficionados of the subtler associative / metaphorical strategy…

3

Let’s go mythic.

There are two major strategies in life, two main ways of tackling problems, just as there are two heroes in the ‘Spider Woman” myth, which Joseph Campbell said was the central myth of the Americas. In Navajo terms, these twin heroes are called Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water, and their names may already give us the sense that one represents a brute force approach while the other is cannier, subtler — and able to achieve things his twin could barely imagine.

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator may be able to penetrate 60 feet of concrete, but the Grand Canyon was created by the natural flow of water — and as Lao Tzu said, “Nothing under Heaven is more soft and yielding than water, yet for eroding the hard and strong, nothing can surpass it.”

You can pitch this one-two punch at a variety of levels. The military can be seen as the nation’s Monster Slayer, its intelligence community as the Child Born of Water. You could see Thomas Barnett’s Leviathan as Monster Slayer, his SysAdmin as Child Born of Water. Or within the IC, you could say that software that can “crunch mega amounts of data” takes the Monster Slayer approach — but it requires cognitive skills and insight of a Child Born of Water sort to know when a student’s slightly eccentric interest represents a threat to the lives of three thousand office workers…

4

Let’s go analogic.

I’m thinking of the flight school students who “focused on learning to control the aircraft in flight, but took no interest in takeoffs or landings” — who asked one instructor where they could take lessons on jets without learning to fly smaller planes first, a request he concluded indicated they were “either joking or dreaming”.

In the not-so-terror-conscious atmosphere pre-9/11, a lack of interest in takeoffs and landings might have seemed quirky — but the “connections” weren’t obvious enough for the info to travel all the way up the FBI food-chain to the very top, as it would today. In post-9/11 retrospect, such things look a bit different but I presume it still took reasoning by analogy for an instructor in a SE Asian diving school to recognize that a student who appeared less interested in the business of avoiding the bends and surfacing safely than in learning underwater swimming might pose a similar threat.

With 20/20 hindsight, this sort of thing seems glaringly obvious: even Monster Slayer could see it.

4

Let’s think about ignorance for a moment.

There’s Rumsfeld’s famous quip about known unknowns and unknown knowns, there are the genres of black swans and unintended consequences, there is what’s obvious and non-obvious, there are blind spots and hidden assumptions — and it’s the non-obvious that blindsides us, right?

We could rephrase the Spider Woman idea to state that Monster Slayer proceeds in terms of the obvious, while Child Born of Water works with the non-obvious. Jami Miscik, at that time Deputy Director for Intelligence at CIA, once remarked, “To truly nurture creativity, you have to cherish your contrarians and give them opportunities to run free”.

Child Born of Water is the contrarian, the maverick, the one whose oblique angle on things provides insight by… making non-obvious connections between the non-visible dots.

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I’ve been struck by a couple of passages I’ve run across in my reading recently that remind me of what I can only call “brutality with religious overtones”.

1. Mexico

There have been a fair number of articles about the various Mexican cartels, but the excerpt from Ed Vulliamy’s book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline that’s now online at Vanity Fair is the one that caught my eye yesterday.

Here’s Vulliamy’s account of a conversation with Dr. Hiram Muñoz of Tijuana:

He explained his work to me during the first of several visits I have made to his mortuary. “Each different mutilation leaves a message,” he said. “The mutilations have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means the person talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who has informed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth.” This makes sense: a traitor to a narco-cartel is known as a dedo — a finger. “If you are castrated,” Muñoz continued, “you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel.”
 
Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball.

That’s the brutality — I haven’t see the book itself yet, but I gather it also gets into the narco-corrida music and the “quasi-Catholic cult of Santíssima Muerte” — which brings me to the second part of my interest the religious aspect.

As Vulliamy mentions, there’s the cult of Holy Death, to be sure, a sort of shadow or inverse of the Blessed Virgin — a Dark Mother for dark times, or perhaps a revival of the ancient Mictlancihuatl, lady of the Dead? — with her own liturgy, too:

Almighty God: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we ask for your permission to summon Saint Death. Welcome, White Sister: we find ourselves gathered here at this altar of the Romero Romero family and of each one of us, to offer you a Mass that we hope you will like…

Which brings us to the Robin-Hood-like bandit and folk-saint, Jesus Malverde, to whom prayers such as the following [FBI .pdf, see p. 20] are offered:

Lord Malverde, give your voluntary help to my people in the name of God. Defend me from justice and the jails of those powerful ones. Listen to my prayer and fill my heart with happiness. For you shall make me fortunate.

There are even miracles attributed to him:

Oh Malverde! The Vatican did not believe you to be holy and would not canonize you, but when they brought the Caterpillars to tear down your hood, you broke one machine and nobody could move you away, you broke another, leaving those who disrespect you speechless — and when the third one broke, they said, “Let Malverde’s chapel alone.”

Right beside the syncretistic quasi-Catholicism, there’s also a Protestant angle: La Familia is the group that, in Vulliamy’s words, “made its ‘coming out’ known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque.” Time magazine reported on what it termed Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos:

Federal agents seized one copy of La Familia’s Bible in a raid last year. Quoted in local newspapers, the scripture paints an ideology that mixes Evangelical-style self-help with insurgent peasant slogans reminiscent of the Mexican Revolution. “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work,” Moreno writes, using terms that could be found in many Christian sermons preached from Mississippi to Brazil. But on the next page, there’s a switch to phrases strikingly similar to those coined by revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. “It is better to be a master of one peso than a slave of two; it is better to die fighting head on than on your knees and humiliated; it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.”

As I commented on Zenpundit a while back,

What’s troubling here is that there is only one undoubtedly “evangelical” phrase in all those that Time quotes, and it is one of then ones said to resemble the aphorisms of Emilio Zapata. “It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion” is a pretty direct borrowing from Ecclesiastes 9.4 in the King James Version: “To him that is joined to all the living, there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.”

But that’s not actually all. I didn’t mention it at the time, but “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work” is almost word-for-word the same as a poem attributed to Islam — or Judaism for that matter. Indeed, it can be hard to tell who is borrowing from whom but one final source for the La Familia bible is known it’s the book Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, the pastor of a ministry in Colorado Springs, who must have been surprised at the uses to which his writings were being put.

In any case, as I said on Zenpundit: These people have a theology, and we should be studying it.

2. Africa

My thoughts turned to Africa when I read another paragraph recently, this one from Johann Hari’s review, The Valley of Taboos, of V.S. Naipaul’s new book, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief:

I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a “witch” who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with “impotence, obesity, and then leprosy” for asking insistently why he charged so much to “cure” his patients. (I’m still waiting for the leprosy.) Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation.

That sent me in search of some early military anthropology related to guerrilla warfare I’d come across in earlier readings.

James R Price and Paul Jureidini’s 1964 Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and Other Psychological Phenomena and their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo, and Roger D Hughes’s 1984 Emergency in Kenya: Kikuyu and the Mau Mau Insurrection are both of considerable interest here — but it is LSB Leakey, the world-class British archaeologist initiated as a boy into the Kikuyu ways, who has written the most provocative summary of the relationship between political and religious violence and ritual that I’m interested in tracking.

I’m quoting here from the chapter on “The Mau Mau Religion” in Maj. Hughes paper:

Leakey’s original hypothesis in Mau Mau and the Kikuyu: “Mau Mau was nothing more than a new expression of the old KCA … a political body that was banned … because it had become wholly subversive.” Furthermore, “Mau Mau was synomomous with the new body called the in school, Kenya African Union…” However, Leakey admits to a reversal of his original hypothesis in Defeating Mau Mau, and goes on to say, “Mau Mau, while to some extent synonymous with these political organizations, was in fact a religion and owed its success to this fact more than to anything else at all.”
 
He then proceeds to attribute the origin of Mau Mau to an “ideology transfer,” wherein the religious beliefs of the Kikuyu transitioned from their ancient tribal religion to Euro-Christianity to Mau Mau. The first transition took place artificially, as the missionaries stripped away the traditional beliefs and supplanted them with “20th Century Europe’s concept of Christianity.” The second transition was more natural and evolutionary than the first. A reactionary hybrid of the old and the new developed, because the supplanted concepts would not hold up in their society. There were too many contradictions between the old and the new, mainly due to the 20th Century European “add-ons.”

Most of us have a pretty fixed view of what religion is, should be, or isn’t. Some of my readers no doubt hold to a evangelical Christian position, some are Catholic, some perhaps Buddhist, agnostic or atheist, and some perhaps Muslim. Each of us tends to take our own view of a particular religion as normative, but the reality is that the history of each of the great world religions contains sanctions for both peace-making and warfare — and human nature itself encompasses a range of behaviors that run from the kind of atavistic violence described above to the forgiving and compassionate impulse behind the Beatitudes…

And while economic pressures and political frustrations may be enough to power great struggles, when religious rituals, beliefs and feelings are added into the mix, it can quickly become even more lethal.

3. And Zarqawi?

All of which leaves me wondering how close the parallels are between the Mau Mau in LSB Leakey’s account, La Familia and the other Mexican cartels — and the brutalities of jihadists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.