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At least a decade before the South Indian state of Kerala became a hub of terrorist activities and earned an entry into Frederick Forsythe’s “Afghan,” I remember going to a Muslim friend’s house for dinner. His father had just converted to the virulent Islamic branch of Wahabbism, and he quoted magazines from neighboring Kerala as unassailable proof for his stand – later I would learn that some of those magazines were official organs of the now-banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India.
One main insistent argument repeated in those magazines stated that evolution as a theory, and not true science, was actually a ploy by Satanic atheism to deceive people, particularly students. Sometimes the propaganda also implied that evolution was a Zionist plot.
Soon the pattern became clear. Every Wahabbi evangelist attacked evolution because it is a strong rebuttal to a literal interpretation of the scripture. If one part of the scripture – particularly one as central as the creation of the universe and life – becomes poetic and symbolic, then so does every other part of the scripture. Every part becomes subject to interpretation as per the inner spiritual needs of the individual. That is the last thing that a Wahabbist – or, for that matter, any religious fundamentalist – needs. Hence the fervent attempts to reject evolution.
Unlike Islamic fundamentalism, which is throbbing with suicide bombers and Fiyadheen attacks throughout the world against the secular culture, Christian fundamentalism is essentially a spent force, at least in the West. One just has to watch that old movie “Inherit the Wind” to see the last deathblows that scientific humanism dealt to the Bible-thumping fundamentalism in the Bible belt of the United States.
But now, as a counter to Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism is again raising its ugly head. There is again a pattern here. In the case of the Wahabbist jihad, the suicide cannon fodder is usually derived from those in Third World nations’ Islamic populations who have been lured into being outsourced for the jihadi industry by Wahabbist preachers.
But in the case of Christianity, the outsourcing is at a much higher level. One has such eminent theologians from India as Ravi Zachariah, right-wing political writers like Dinesh D’Souza, and fundamentalist politicians like Bobby Jindal at the frontlines of the pro-creationist camp, working to enter creationism into the national curricula of the United States, surreptitiously camouflaged as a scientific theory: “intelligent design.”
If one goes to any Wahabbist bookstore, one would find there books by Harun Yahya; many times my Wahabbist friends have recommended his books to me, saying, if only I would read Harun Yahya with an open mind, I would give up on the delusion of evolution. But what do I find in Harun Yahya? There exists in those professionally designed pages simply recycled lies and half-quotes of Western creationists.
Misquoting evolutionist Douglas Futuyma or misinforming about the whale evolution or the oft-repeated lie about fossils not supporting evolution – each one of the lies nailed down by evolutionary scientists – here repeated in glossy books prepared with extravagant pictures for consumption by students in schools run by Islamic establishments. The same schools, I discovered, also teach toddlers the alphabet through charts that say “J is for jihad.”
Interestingly, with increased Christian evangelism in India, one finds in that quarter also a propensity toward creationist fundamentalism. The churches of India in fact are becoming backwaters of outdated theologies from the West. When religious Indian masses are converted to Abrahamic faiths by evangelical organizations with billion-dollar budgets, they embrace the most fundamentalist worldviews which no respected Christian theologian would touch in the West with pair of tongs. Thus the church regains its medieval clout making innocent masses of the third world its own version of theological cannon fodder. Again evolution is an obstacle to proselytization.
Let us just imagine: If every seminary, every madrassa were to teach its students evolution, how would their worldview change? If every student of theology of whatsoever religion were to undergo a course in cosmology with no theological strings attached, could such students ever live in a vision wrapped between the covers of their scriptures? When bathed thus in the immensity of the cosmos, where comes the need for proselytization, crusades, jihads and other holy wars?
A cosmic vision as unveiled by science today preserves the feeling of the sacred that we see in the scriptures of humanity but transcends the visions of deities which claim to be creators and sole custodians of the ultimate truth. Evolution shows us the value and wonder of life. The value of life we see around us – the result of billions of years of organic evolution – provides us with an ethics that compels us toward the preservation of nature and a resource sharing that unites us across petty national barriers into one planet.
The codes of Hammurabi, Moses, Muhammed and Manu never achieved such wonderful heights and spiritual depths as the codes which the vision of the web of life, as revealed by science, compels us to live by for our survival as a species. Yet it is a pity that our religious theologians fail to grasp this beauty of science. Carl Sagan questioned this attitude of religious people so forcefully in his book, “Pale Blue Dot”:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
If the literalist backbone of fundamentalism is broken then perhaps religious terrorism will die a natural death – or, in evolutionary terms, will become extinct. How better to break the literalist stranglehold of religion than by demonstrating to the believers of one true book, the genomic unity of chimpanzee and humans?
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz." ©Copyright S. Aravindan Neelakandan).
