Demons &
Demonization
It's time to put in a few good words for the Devil.
by Rabia Terri Harris
Sooner
or later, everyone comes face to face with the reality
of evil. It's hard to imagine a more painful encounter, or one more
laden with consequences for the development of a human being. Our
meeting with human evil is as central to the formation of our character
as our meeting with human love. The habits we form in response to
such meetings -- whether we embrace what comes toward us, reject
it, contest it, or ignore it -- go far toward defining who we are.
For the nonviolent activist, the issue of evil is of particular relevance. Evil, so to speak, is our daily bread. To work for justice means to work against injustice. To work for love means to work against separation and contempt. To work for peace means to work against the imposition of fear by force. We deal with the manifestations of evil every day. Where do they come from, the injustice, the contempt, the coercion, and all the rest? Without some notion of the origins of these things, our work must necessarily lack focus: we are playing at blind man's buff. Without a decent hypothesis, no experiment can proceed -- and nonviolence is a grand experiment.
The innocent presumption of many a person -- a presumption that rapidly becomes far less innocent -- is that bad things are done by bad people. If your Daddy yells at you, that's a bad Daddy. If your child doesn't obey you, that's a bad child. If you're afraid of the family across the street, that's because it's a bad family. This simple process rooted in the early brain has survival value in infancy. When left unchallenged, it continues as habit in adults, among whom its survival value is less certain. It does help to keep the group together -- the circle that's felt to be good. Anthropologists have observed that tribal groups often speak of themselves as "the human beings" while the other folks out there are referred to as something else. What's good, what's human, is what's familiar and comfortable: the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, issue from strange creatures indeed. If somehow those strange creatures injure us, they must be monsters in human form.
Nonviolence workers are well aware of the flaws in the "bad people" hypothesis, for they lead directly to the genesis of war. The vast carnage of wars in our time, together with the great upheavals brought on by movements for human equality, have made us very alert to the dangerous alienating process we call "demonization."
Demonization
is fairly easy to counter intellectually, so long as the person
we aim to persuade is rational when we try. Do you think all Serbs
are bad? Let us show you some good Serbs. Do you think all Germans
are bad? Let us show you some good Germans. Do you think your mean
Daddy, your insolent child, is bad? Let us point out the fine qualities
in each. Do you think I am bad? Watch me behave well. The problem
is that the level at which the "bad people" hypothesis functions
is rarely rational. The words sound good, lip service is easy, but
secretly we continue to feel the threat of those scary bad people
-- and may act on it.
Rational demonstration has limits as a peacemaking technique. But the "bad people" hypothesis has internal limits, too. It doesn't really address the problem of evil as experienced by adults. It leaves us with the perplexity that very bad things can sometimes issue from good people -- a fact that leaves demonizers usefully unsettled. Yet rejecters of the "bad people" hypothesis cannot feel smug either, for they are left with a different fact, which is that bad things can issue from certain people, good or not, on a more or less continuous basis.
The 20th-century Left put forward an alternative theory. People are not good or bad: evil is a product of environment. Improve the environment, and evil will disappear. In nonviolence circles, the explanation is often quite specific: evil behavior originates in woundedness. (Probably the most famous exponent of this view is the psychologist Alice Miller, whose study of child abuse, For Your Own Good, culminated in an analysis of Hitler as victim.) The woundedness theory has much to recommend it, for the "cycle of violence" is an often-observed fact. Abused children do regularly turn into abusers. And in the political realm, plenty of oppressors either really were, or claim to have been, oppressed. Meanwhile, laboring to improve the social environment is surely a good thing in itself, whether or not the effort drives evil from the world.
But this hypothesis has problems too. Not every abused person turns into an abuser, and not every oppressed person mechanically begins to oppress. What makes the difference? There must be some other factor involved. And as the twentieth-century Right never hesitated to point out, to blame behavior on environment effectively negates personal responsibility. It turns individuals into passive social statistics. Consequently, though unintentionally, the liberal view is insulting. Leonard Bernstein's theatrical juvenile delinquents gleefully lampooned such condescending "compassion" in West Side Story: "My mother wears a moustache, my father wears a dress. Golly, Moses, that's why I'm a mess!" I'm not a human being, I'm a social problem? "Gee, Officer Krupke... Krup you!"
How
many of us, attempting to act as peacemakers to bring good into
evil circumstances, have been wounded ourselves by the rejection
of our earnest efforts? After all, we were only trying to help!
Perhaps the "social problem" hypothesis is simply not powerful enough to guide us in doing the job. We could do with another theory.
Traditional religious views of evil, with centuries of reflection behind them, tend to have a little more depth. But to take advantage of that wisdom, we need to fit ourselves to participate in a different kind of conversation. We have to stake out the border territory between the rational and the irrational. For that we need to learn different words, and we have to get comfortable with using symbols. We especially have to get comfortable with talking about God. And sometimes, with talking about the Devil.
Some religions make do without the Devil, the active force of evil (or at least they wish they could!). But Satan cuts quite a figure in the Islamic spiritual tradition. His tale is well worth telling, for it contains a host of insights. Many anecdotes about the Chief Deceiver come to us from generations of teachers, including some from the Prophet Muhammad himself. But the essentials are given in the Qur'an, the holy scripture of Islam. That story (freely related) follows. Once upon a time...
God, after creating the universe, looked out upon it and called a conference of the angels. "I am going to set a representative in the earth," God announced.
The angels were horrified. "Will you place someone there who will cause corruption and shed blood?" they protested. "We already glorify You and sing Your praise!"
"I know things that you do not," God told them.
So God formed our primordial parent, Adam, out of earth, and breathed the divine spirit into Adam, and taught Adam, as the mysterious phrase goes, "all the Names." (This was before the separation of the sexes: Adam, at this moment, contained us all.) Then God led Adam before the angels. "Do you know these Names?" God asked them.
"We know only what You have taught us," they confessed.
"Adam," said God, "teach them the Names." And Adam did so. "Now," said God, "prostrate yourselves before Adam!" And the whole company prostrated before the primal human being. All, that is, except one.
This skeptic who refused to honor the divine calling of humanity is of somewhat ambiguous nature. The Qur'an calls him "one of the jinn," meaning an invisible spirit; extra-Qur'anic tradition regularly terms him an angel. If he wasn't an angel, he was certainly hanging around in august company... and at this sublime moment, he stuck out like a sore thumb.
"Why won't you prostrate yourself to that which I have created with My Two Hands?" asked God.
"You have created me from fire, and this from clay," said the one who despised us. "I am superior." It was the first sin in the universe, this disdain. God didn't like it.
"Out!" said God.
"Wait!" said Satan. "I'm right, You'll see. Give me until the Day of Judgment, and I'll show You their unworthiness. I'll beguile them all -- make them false promises, introduce fake desires. We'll find out who Your sincere servants are!"
God said, "Whoever wants you can have you. You have no power over My servants. Hell is waiting. Go ahead and try."
And so he did... with the famous apple, and afterwards. And so, to the end of time, he will continue to do.
One other thing is essential to understand. When the Devil tricked our parents out of Paradise and into the world of corruption and bloodshed -- as had been foreseen by the angels -- they repented, and were forgiven. Adam is counted the founder of the whole long line of Messengers of God.
"Of knowledge you have been granted only a little." So the Qur'an, in process, reproved a questioner who sought information outside the scope of his understanding. For its revelation was targeted: every item in it was intended to be first heard by the people who first heard it. Everything came in context, and served a purpose. Of the numerous purposes served by letting us in on the Devil's beginnings, one was immediately practical. The Prophet's community was involved in a struggle for social transformation, a struggle that lasted for twenty-three years. The Qur'an was revealed over the course of those twenty-three years. It provided guidance and consolation to individuals who had given up everything for the sake of a distant chance: a just society in conscious unity with the spiritual order of the world. For this vision they were persecuted and cast out by their own families, who finally faced them across the battlefield.
It was a moral problem of the highest poignancy for tribal people, intricately connected and defined on every side by family ties. The "human beings" of my old intimate circle are all over there, on the other side of the fight. What am I doing side by side with this stranger? Why is my uncle against me? How can I oppose my own father? Yet if I give in and go back, the vision dies. Why can't my family see this overwhelmingly beautiful thing I see? Why are they so cruel now? What has got into them?
The story of the Devil addresses all these aching questions, which are not so far distant from our own.
Look at what it does.
It interposes between the two sides of the conflict a common enemy. The human beings on the other side have been misled by a malevolent force committed to the ruin of us all, a force extrinsic to their genuine nature. We see it for what it is, they don't, but it is not in their interests not to see it. We may be physically persecuted, but it is they who are in the truly dangerous situation.
It changes the object of the conflict. They may be trying to destroy us, but (whatever they believe) we are not trying to destroy them. It is the course they were following, before our opposition, that is leading them to destruction. In opposing them, we hope to rescue them. At the very least we aim to rescue ourselves.
It clearly defines the common enemy. The Devil is less the enemy of God than the enemy of humanity. Wherever our common humanity is abused or derided, wherever our link to the Unity is broken, our enemy has been at work. It establishes the necessity of continuous internal accounting. If we find ourselves longing to destroy the opposition, we are assisting the enemy, who shares that aim. If we esteem ourselves to be better than the opposition, we have been infiltrated by the enemy, who shares that conviction. "You have created me of fire, and this of clay." The only way to best our common enemy is to oppose it on all fronts, especially within ourselves.
It denies the enemy any coercive power. The Devil can threaten or insinuate or beckon, but cannot make anybody do anything at all. We are free to refuse his whole agenda as soon as we grasp our freedom, so a large part of that agenda aims to keep us from realizing we are free. Whatever obscures human freedom -- which is identical with human responsibility -- assists the enemy, and whatever strengthens the realization of human freedom weakens the enemy's hold.
It affirms the transformation of hearts. Everyone is redeemable, though there is no telling who will be redeemed. People who are misled may, at any moment, see through the illusion that afflicts them. No matter what they have done, or even what its consequences have been, those who turn back to the divine unity and the dignity of humanity are accepted by God and returned to themselves. And life can go on again from there.
"My religion requires that I love all people, even my enemies and him who would do me harm," Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked, in one of his less-quoted statements. "But it does not require that I like him, or his evil deeds." The difficult combination of generosity of spirit with an unwavering moral clarity that holds all actors responsible for the impact of their acts is one of the highest developments of conscience, and wholly in harmony with the social ethics of the Qur'an. It's an attitude that tends to produce results. It changed the laws, and the whole meaning, of the United States of America in the twentieth century, just as it had changed the Arabian peninsula from a backwater of bloodthirsty tribal vendettas into the seedbed of a global civilization fourteen hundred years before. But the Devil keeps creeping back. He always will.
If people expect that, and don't quail at it, and learn how to recognize him, we have a fair shot at throwing him out every time, for humanity can count on the help of the greatest of all allies -- the creator of the universe and the whole of the cosmic order. "The universe bends toward justice." But if we think the Devil is us, we are in trouble, because the injustices we commit are as ugly as sin. Seeing that ugliness in ourselves, there is no end to the guilt. And with the guilt comes denial; and with the denial comes fear; and with the fear comes hate. And then we are demonizing somebody else... so that it needn't be ourselves whom we must loathe.
But the great statement of repentance in the Islamic tradition is not "I am loathsome; I have offended against you." Adam and Eve, seeing what they had done, exclaimed, "We have tyrannized ourselves."
That's an action one can choose to stop doing. It's an urge one can choose to stop obeying. And the realization of that freedom means an end to the tyranny. It leads to liberation from the Devil's yoke for both oppressor and oppressed. It puts us back in harmony with God, where we belong, for God loves the repentant. And life can go on again from there.
Without that realization, we sleep, and the Devil laughs.
So if we must demonize somebody, let's demonize the Devil! After all, it's what he's there for. He's the only force in the universe that really truly deserves the treatment -- the hater of all humanity, who puts us all on the same side. With the enemy clearly in view, we can love one another.
If the Devil didn't exist, we would have to invent him.
Rabia Terri Harris is associate editor of Fellowship magazine, and coordinator of the Muslim Peace Fellowship.