Religions and the Wolf of Ideology

Mohamed Omara Taqi alden
One of the major crimes committed by extremist and violent groups against religion is their attempt to cast it in an iron ideological mold that makes it impossible to understand religion except through it, and then all the beliefs of the religion are harnessed to justify this ideology, so we find ourselves in the end facing a new religion that is completely different from the founding religion and even opposed and hostile to it in many cases.

Of course, a person cannot think without ideology, but rather a group of intersecting and interacting ideologies that are capable of continuous updating and development, as they enable him to crystallize a vision of the self and the world at the same time.

However, what we mean here are the closed iron ideologies that acquire an exclusionary racist character, which can create what is called ideological immunity, i.e. placing you inside an iron fence´-or-cage of ideas that makes you unacceptable to any other new ideas, considering that the old ideas are quite sufficient.

The ideological mentality is a reductive, simplistic, superficial mentality that refers all issues to one magical solution, which is what its ideology proposes, and therefore all other solutions are necessarily wrong. In religions, ideologies with religious preambles employ all religious beliefs to legitimize their theses in a way that undermines religion from within by tampering with its purposes.

When religion turns into a closed, iron ideology and then attempts to force everyone to live according to the priorities and theses of that ideology, religion in that case loses the essence of compassion dormant within its doctrinal system, as specific religious texts are invoked and reinterpreted in an unfair manner to become a justification for the processes of imposing that ideology and applying it to reality in a coercive manner according to a methodology through which the means are sacrificed on the altar of ends, with the values of morality, justice and compassion in favor of violence, killing and genocide under the pretext of achieving an ultimate goal and an earthly paradise at the end of time.

If the --function-- of religion is to produce meaning, a meaning for human life, as it gives his existence its purpose and why he exists on this planet, and what mission he must undertake, in other words, if the --function-- of religion is to end the tension between man and his world, then ideology fuels this tension and mobilizes him for an impossible mission that often ends in failure, causing him to despair and frustration,´-or-he resorts to excessive violence in order to forcefully impose his ideology on everyone, turning over time into the behavior of the jungle in a world that will only be governed in this case by the rule of survival of the fittest.

While all religions in their pure source and first edition require us to listen to the developments of the age and its requirements and to submit to its constraints without compromising our central values, hence the flexibility of the sacred texts and their referral to more than one reading, the ideology that religious extremism groups embrace always has one literal and rigid reading of religious texts - often the reading of their founders that has been outdated - and then seeks to impose it on everyone.


Followers of any extremist religious group with closed ideological visions and without realizing it, you find them relying on the thought and texts of the founding leader more than the religious text itself,´-or-they read the religious text in light of the theses of that founding leader, so the sacred texts are twisted to agree with those theses, hence the distortion of the purposes of religions.

While religion, as I understand it, is likely to make the future open to all possibilities out of respect for human freedom and its role in shaping its world, ideology always seeks to confiscate the future and put it on only one path, which is the path of achieving its goals and vision as an inevitable matter.

While God s law in His universe is movement, everything moves, otherwise it is destined for destruction and ruin: if the water stops flowing, it will collapse, if the planets stop rotating, the universe will be destroyed, if the blood stops flowing, it will clot, and so on, while this is God s law in His universe, in contrast to all of this, you find ideology always calling for stagnation and petrification at a certain effort and historical moment, so life withers and dies´-or-its theses become unacceptable in a changing world, so its adherents resort to imposing them by force. From here, the plant of violence emerges from the womb of reality, and the danger is that instead of --dir--ecting blame at ideological thought as the cause of this violence, we find fingers pointing towards religion itself, for what killed religions is ideology and attempts to cast religious texts in its iron mold, from here it is imperative to re-read religion with a new reading, a reading based on knowledge and thinking, not ideology and justification.

The danger of ideological thinking is that it seeks to change the world according to its own vision.

It does not merely interpret this world and then let the masses choose their vision of change. Rather, it imposes a specific change and a single vision for the future of the world according to its convictions. In logic, we find an explanation for this phenomenon, the phenomenon of casting religion in an iron ideological mold, which is called the fallacy of stereotyping´-or-the Procrustean bed.

This fallacy goes back to an ancient legend that says that the criminal Procrustes would take his victims and place them on his iron bed and then kill them by cutting off the excess parts of their bodies beyond the size of the bed if they were larger than it,´-or-by tearing them apart by pulling them to the edges of the bed if they were smaller than it.

He was arrested and sentenced to death in the same way as punishment.

Therefore, this fallacy indicates, as Dr. Adel Mustafa argues in his book Logical Fallacies, any tendency to impose ready-made intellectual molds by interpreting texts´-or-fabricating data in order to forcibly fit into a pre-existing mental plan and a deliberate result that was ultimately intended to be reached.

Mustafa calls this attempt to ideologize religious texts the hermeneutical Procrusteanism, which is evident in our attempt to impose our preconceived vision on the texts, that is, to burden the text with more than it can bear´-or-even the opposite of what it can bear in order to agree with our preconceived ideology.

One of the strategies to corrupt the closed ideologies of religion is to tamper with the priorities of religions by rearranging those priorities in accordance with their presentation, by summoning some marginal religious beliefs´-or-duties and then repositioning them as a central priority in religion,´-or-rather the entire religion, striking the purposes of those religions against the wall, that is, bringing issues from the margins and throwing them into the center to gain a fundamental position in religion and over time swallowing this religion and devouring it within it,

and then we find ourselves in front of a religion that is completely different from the founding religion through the strategy of rearranging its priorities and repositioning the beliefs within it, for example we find the violent groups in Judaism have reduced the Jewish religion to the belief in settling the land and building the temple, and the violent groups in Christianity, such as the Christian Zionist group, we find them reducing Christianity to the belief in salvation and prophecies of the battles of the end of time, while in Islam the theses of the violent groups have centered on establishing the caliphate regardless of the primitiveness and bloodiness of the means leading to that goal. But what should be done about these endless attempts to ideologize religions and employ them politically and for the sake of interest?

We believe that it is something that cannot be escaped without escaping the captivity of these iron and closed ideologies and the inevitability of openness to all modern visions and theses through the human and moral interpretation of the sacred texts, that interpretation that would inaugurate a new relationship between the text and the circumstances and data of reality without absolute submission to its constraints, a relationship that is based on the higher purposes of religions and proceeds from them.

This is something that would open the door wide to reinterpreting and interpreting religious texts within the framework of a comprehensive, holistic vision, and in a way that allows for reviewing the human religious heritage, criticizing it, and dealing with it as a human achievement governed by a special temporal and spatial conditionality, and stopping what Abdul Jabbar Al-Rifai called “the suspicious position haunted by apprehension of the conquests and discoveries of the mind of the other and stopping the phobia of fear of everything new in human sciences and knowledge.”

The belief that attempts to cast religion into a certain ideology and force the world to accept it as the only good in this world and thus classify everything else as absolute evil is a perception that fuels conflicts and wars in the world, while religion, as I understand it, came to spread peace and establish values of tolerance by reducing those conflicts to a minimum.

Rather, it is imperative to accept this world with all its intellectual, religious and political differences and diversity.

There is no doubt that the tendency to unify the world in one belief´-or-one ideological mold is something impossible and against the movement of history and the laws of God in His universe. In this regard, the Greek poet Hesiod says: “Competition is the white hand on humanity.

It is the condition for the existence of religions, arts, sciences and everything that deserves our study and admiration. If the forms of worship were the same for all people, religion would have had no effect long ago… Just as runners in the arena head each from his own position towards the same rule, so we all owe throughout the stages of our lives to one sovereign and just rule, the paths leading to which are many… If it is necessary to tell the truth, we dare to assert that the agreement of opinions is the dream of ignorant people, for God himself forbids the similarity of worship and wants each individual to worship Him in his own way.”


In sum, the strategies followed by religious extremist groups to subject the free religious text to ideology and attempt to cast it within the iron mold of this ideology are tyranny over the text, they are the tyrant himself, they are the conflict with God in his sacred text, they are in sum the undermining of this religion from within, and accordingly it can be said that there is a religion of ideology (i.e. priesthood and isolation), and a religion of epistemology (i.e. free knowledge).

In the final analysis, everyone, and I am one of them, must fight the wolf of ideology crouching within us, not imprison our minds within a closed intellectual, political´-or-religious ideology that we try to justify all the time only to find ourselves in the end, if we may borrow from Max Weber, prisoners of an iron cage of closed ideas, but we must open up to all ideas and trends and stand at an equal distance from everyone in order to establish a true public awareness based on knowledge and interpretation, not ideology and justification.

( Mohamed Omara Taqi alden : Egyptian academic in political sociology and Arab-Zionist conflict)

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