The anarchists claim that popular self-organization could provide those new forms of social organization which, as Kropotkin put it in an observation I have cited earlier, would undertake ‘those social functions that the state fulfills through the bureaucracy’. However, these are not the only issues that are raised when skeptics dismiss anarchism as a primitive ideology that is simply not relevant to the modern world. They have a different reason, as they observe the modern nation state and the intense hostilities and rivalries arising between the government of any major state and others. Or, indeed, the lethal hatreds visible among different factions within one territory that has been designated as a state, and the frightening antagonisms that emerge between the adherents of different religions. They may notice especially the poisonous legacy of European imperialism to the territories that the empire-building powers seized and colonized.

It is probably still important to remind the British, French, Belgians, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Dutch, Austrians, Greeks, Turks, Russians, and Americans, among others, that most of the intractable disputes around the globe today are a direct result of the imperialist policies of their one-time rulers, with their fatal fascination for seizing some other part of the world, and their cynical application of the slogan ‘Divide and Rule’. All around the world people are suffering today as a result of the activity of the empire-builders, and militant attitudes usually succeed in making matters worse. For nationalist movements, as Avi Shlaim has expressed it,

have an in-built tendency towards extremism and xenophobia, towards self-righteousness on the one hand and demonizing the enemy on the other. History is often falsified and even fabricated to serve a nationalist political agenda.

It is hard to see how the anarchists, with an absolute hostility to both religious rivalries and territorial politics, can engage in these disputes, beyond the direct rejection of imperialism, except to wish that they were in the past. Abstention itself can be a perilous, though necessary, attitude, and we have all observed around the globe instances when the zealots have turned their most vicious attention to those who dare to attempt an accommodation with the people on ‘the other side’. Martin Buber, who, half a century ago, made some valuable contributions to an assessment of anarchism, warned his fellow Zionists as long ago as 1921 that if the Jews in Palestine did not live with the Arabs as well as next to them, they would find themselves living in enmity with them. When he died, 44 years later, the obituarists noted that his advocacy of bi-nationalism caused him to be ostracized by the orthodox as ‘an enemy of the people’.

These 20th-century responses were certainly not anticipated by the 19th-century anarchists. Their classical statement on religion as a social phenomenon came from the most widely circulated work of the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, God and the State. In this fragment, written in 1871, he deplores the fact that belief in God still survived among the people, especially, as he put it, ‘in the rural districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the cities’. He thought this faith in religion was all too natural, since all governments profited from the ignorance of the people as one of the essential conditions of their own power; while weighed down by labor, deprived of leisure and of intellectual intercourse, the people sought an escape. Bakunin claimed that there were three routes of escape from the miseries of life, two of them illusory and one real. The first two were the bottle and the church, ‘debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution’. Social revolution, he asserted,

will be much more potent than all the theological propagandism of the freethinkers to destroy to their last vestige the religious beliefs and dissolute habits of the people, beliefs and habits much more intimately connected than is generally supposed.

Bakunin then turned to the powerful, dominant classes in society who, while too worldly-wise to be believers themselves, ‘must at least make a semblance of believing’ because the simple faith of the people was a useful factor in keeping them down. Finally, in this particular statement of his attitudes, Bakunin turns to those propagandists for religion who, when you challenge them on any specific absurdity in their dogma, relating to miracles, virgin births, or resurrection, loftily explain that they are to be understood as beautiful myths rather than literal truths, and that we are to be pitied for our prosaic questions, rather than them for propagating mythology as truth.

Bakunin’s opinions were much the same on this matter as those of his adversary Karl Marx, one of whose best-known phrases was his description of religion as the ‘opium of the people’. And the historians of ideas would categorize liberalism, socialism, communism, and anarchism all as products of the period known as the Enlightenment, the result of the Age of Reason, the ferment of ideas and the spirit of inquiry between the English Revolution of the 1640s and the American and French revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s.

In parochial English terms, one slow, grudgingly conceded result of the Enlightenment was religious toleration. We tend to forget that England has a state church, founded because of a row that Henry VIII had with the Pope over one of his divorces. It too claimed its martyrs, as the long history of the suppression of dissenters reminds us, as does the continual struggle for religious freedom. It wasn’t until 1858 that legal disabilities were lifted from believing Jews, and not until 1871 that people who could not subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Church of England were admitted to the ancient universities. The Church of England may be an irrelevance to the majority of the British people, but it is a reminder of an important social and political fact. One result of the Enlightenment was that the people who wrote the constitutions of many states sought to learn the lessons of history and the horrors of religious wars by insisting on the absolute separation of religious practices from public life. Religion was to be a private affair.

This was true of the founding fathers of the United States of America, whose ancestors had fled religious persecution in Europe; it was true of the French Republic, and consequently of those countries which, with immense loss of life, liberated themselves from French imperialism. And it is true of many new republics similarly founded as a result of the collapse of imperialism in the 20th century. Some key examples are the republics of India, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Israel.

Now, all over the world, the secular state is under threat. Secular political regimes in North Africa and the Middle East are confronted by militant religious movements, and there is a growing fundamentalist threat to the secular constitution of the United States. This isn’t what Bakunin or Marx, or any other political thinker of the 19th century, from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, predicted.

The unexpected and unwelcome change in the religious atmosphere which we call fundamentalism arose from a trend in religious revivalism in the United States after the First World War, which insisted on belief in the literal truth of everything in the Bible. The use of the term has spread to describe trends in the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Shinto religions which, to outsiders, present similar features. They are a threat not only to the hard-won concept of the secular state, which anarchists may not feel to be important, but to the hard-won freedoms of every citizen. The anarchist and secularist propagandist Nicolas Walter urged us to take this threat seriously, stressing that

Fundamentalist Christians are trying to suppress the study of evolution and the practice of contraception and abortion in the West and the Third World. Fundamentalist Jews are trying to incorpoate the whole of Palestine into Israel and to impose the halachah, the traditional law of Judaism. Fundamentalist Muslims are trying to establish Muslim regimes in all countries with Muslim populations (including Britain) and to impose the sharia, the traditional law of Islam. And fundamentalists of all faiths are using assassination and terror all over the world to suppress freedom and discussion of such matters.

This is an absolute tragedy for that majority of citizens in any country who are simply concerned with the ordinary business of living, feeding a family, and enjoying the daily pleasures of life, as well as for those who aspire to improve conditions through community action and social justice.

Governmental suppression of religion never works. The Soviet Union witnessed 70 years of state hostility, sometimes violent and sometimes benign, to religious activity. When the regime collapsed, there was a huge revival of the Orthodox faith and a happy hunting ground for American Protestant evangelists. In Soviet Central Asia, Malise Ruthven suggests,

the local elites, attached to Islamic customs and recognizing a degree of affinity between Islamic and social values, cheated on their anti-religious activities as assiduously as they faked their cotton-production figures. Gatherings of old men reading the Koran would be described to zealots of the Society for Scientific Atheism as meetings of Great Patriotic War veterans.

In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who also shared Bakunin’s views on religion, embarked on a dictatorial policy of what we might call ‘de-Islamification’. His current successors are prevented from instituting even a façade of democracy precisely because of the threat of the return of religion. On a different time-scale, the Shah of Iran, who was a ruthless Westernizer, was succeeded by a fundamentalist regime that no one predicted. Egypt and Algeria are torn apart by rival elites of the secular or religious state. In the United States the most powerful of all political lobbies is that of the Christian Coalition, with a growing influence in the Republican Party. It denies any responsibility for the murder of the last doctor to perform an abortion in the American South.

It is disappointing and unexpected for secularist anarchists, who thought that wars of religion belonged to the past, now to have to confront issues of the recognition of difference, while they are trying to move on to the issues that unite rather than divide us. One approach they can take is that of the anarchist propagandist Rudolf Rocker, a century ago, in the Jewish community of Whitechapel in east London. Some secularist allies had chosen the propaganda of provocative behavior on Sabbath mornings outside the synagogue in Brick Lane. Asked his opinion of these demonstrations, Rocker replied that the place for believers was the house of worship, and the place for nonbelievers was the radical meeting. But the scene has changed. For the same building that has seen many faiths come and go, as a Huguenot church, a dissenting meeting-house, and a Jewish synagogue, is now a mosque. Anyone harassing the emerging worshipers today is not a secularist Bangladeshi but an English racist, menacing and heavy, bent on instilling fear and making trouble.

It has been said, for example, of the Bharatiya Janata (‘Indian People’s’) Party (BJP) in India, who succeeded in spreading communal violence into parts of the Punjab where different communities had previously lived in harmony together, that the name of the disease is not fundamentalism but ethnic nationalism. This view fits other parts of the globe, and in such instances, including many areas of the Islamic world, we can again choose to blame the endless humiliations and devaluations of the local culture inflicted by Western imperialism.

The fear and terror induced by the overscale images of ‘terrorism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ – call them the figures of an international or transnational imagery made up of foreign devils – hastens the individual’s subordination to the dominant norms of the moment. This is as true in the new post-colonial societies as it is in the West generally and the United States particularly. Thus to oppose the abnormality and extremism embedded in terrorism and fundamentalism – my example has only a small degree of parody – is also to uphold the moderation, rationality, executive centrality of a vaguely designated ‘Western’ (or otherwise local and patriotically assumed) ethos. The irony is that far from endowing the Western ethos with the confidence and secure ‘normality’ we associate with privilege and rectitude, this dynamic imbues ‘us’ with a righteous anger and defensiveness in which ‘others’ are finally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our civilization and way of life.

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)

Edward Said’s difficult diagnosis (see box below) envelops big truths. The countries of the Near and Middle East were for centuries subjected to one imperialism or another, their cultures ridiculed or patronized, and even their boundaries formed by lines drawn on the map by European governments and business. They are valued today according to their oil resources or as potential markets, while they are awash with weapons left over from Cold War bribes. The Western secular religion of conspicuous consumption was readily adopted by Middle Eastern rulers, but they offered nothing but frustrated hopes to the poor majority of their subjects.

Another vital issue was raised by the Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi, when she was asked to provide a preface for the English translation of her book on Women and Islam.

When I finished writing this book I had come to understand one thing: if women’s rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Koran, nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite. The elite faction is trying to convince us that their egotistical, highly subjective and mediocre view of culture and society has a sacred basis.

In common with all the other left-wing factions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the anarchists saw territorial and religious separatism as irrelevant preoccupations that human society had outgrown. Their only possible message is the hope that zealotry will lose its impetus when its leaders find they have no followers, as people discover more interesting, more enjoyable, or at the very least less lethal, issues to discuss with their neighbors.