Holy nonsense
The 10,000 Maniacs cover of the Cat Stevens song “Peace Train” is still unavailable on CD, 16 years after it was released on vinyl and cassette. The band had the song deleted from the album’s track list after Cat Stevens essentially condoned the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 death warrant against British writer Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie had apparently “blasphemed” against Islam in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” and though Stevens, called Yusuf Islam since 1979, indicated that he was not suggesting that anyone break the laws of the UK, he still refused to back down from his conviction that the Iranian leader’s call for Rushdie’s killing was theologically correct. In fact, in a press release issued at the time of the incident, he went so far as to say that Muslims should become more involved in the political process, so as to make such punishments possible in the years to come.
All this should be rather amazing to consider, that the man who wrote and recorded “Peace Train” would desire to see a world in which those who voice their opposition to his faith are to be put to death.
It all seems unbelievable until one comes to understand that the man formerly known as Cat Stevens and, of course, the Ayatollah who ordered the fatwa, were acting on the convictions they held as a result of their embrace of religious fundamentalism. People who believe they are acting on orders from some sort of supernatural intelligence have an excuse to do just about anything, no matter how destructive, murderous, foolhardy and/or idiotic.
To such people, logic goes out the window. I recall a debate that took place one lunch period during my junior year of high school. Organized by a group of students I enjoyed calling “The God Squad,” it pitted them against an ad hoc gathering of the school’s intelligentsia in a debate over “Evolution vs. Creationism” or something to that effect. Actually, I use the word “debate” loosely, since hardly any structured debate took place. The two sides could hardly communicate.
Each side existed in a different world, and no measure of attempted argumentation could bridge the gap that lay between them. Interestingly, the Christian fundamentalists had been preparing for the occasion well in advance, long before the rest of us had even known that anything was planned. This would seem to undercut the moral framework such people are always yapping about, but I think the irony was lost on them, no matter how strenuously I tried to point it out.
Of course, the problem for the world today goes far beyond trying to debate with android-like people. It even goes beyond the domestic misdeeds of those pushing for homophobic/heterosexist legislation, advocating censorship of one form or another, and perpetrating a terrorist campaign against women’s health facilities.
The global crimes of Islamic extremists are well known, but similarly destructive activities carried out by extremists of other faiths receive substantially less coverage. In the chambers of the United Nations, American Christian fundamentalist lobbying organizations have routinely exerted pressure on the American delegation in order to scuttle resolutions intended to improve the rights, protections, status and health of homosexuals, women and children around the world. On certain occasions, these organizations have allied with the delegations of predominantly Islamic nations in order to actively prevent progress on similar measures. To me, this seems suspiciously close to treason.
Most ominously, American Christian fundamentalists have also entered into a bizarre partnership with Jewish extremists in Israel. Both believe in and work toward a perceived “solution” to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that involves the uprooting and removal of the entire Palestinian population, and extending the boundaries of Israel to encompass all the land on which a Palestinian state could someday occupy.
Naturally this is not likely to happen as they envision, but in their pursuit of a myopic Biblical dream, these groups could easily end up dragging the Israeli and Palestinian publics into a level of carnage only hinted at up to now.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution that swept the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran caught many observers completely by surprise. Few guessed that hardcore religious extremism still had such a hold on people, but the truth became starkly evident in the years to follow.
If anything, the situation is even worse today, with the aforementioned extremists acting in the name of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, not to mention nationalist Hindu hardliners in India sitting impatiently on a cache of nukes and a strong conventional military.
Those of us in intellectual positions worlds away from the madness enveloping much of the planet might be tempted to listen to pleas for sanity like “Peace Train,” asking, in effect, “Where have you gone, Cat Stevens?” The answer is hardly encouraging.
