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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
3 0 October 2016
W
e struggle in the consumerist war-free West
with the other, with Strangers.
When someone with a credit card and pale
skin settles in another land we often hear
them referred to as an ‘expat’. Others perma-
nently abroad are deemed ‘migrants’, ‘illegals’ or
‘asylum-seekers’.
Few of us have direct experience of the conflicts that
devour post-colonial states, where diffuse identities and
profound inequality fuel endless conflicts which displace
innocents, and sometimes not-so-innocents: humanity in
its manifold complexity. But not only wars push a person to
leave home: malnutrition still afflicts almost a billion; cli
-
mate change will drive drought, flooding and disease; many
of us are pulled simply by an evolutionary urge to improve
our lot.
The legal definition of a refugee as a person fleeing con
-
flict or persecution is archaic and unfair on migrants and
host nations; it takes no account of internal displacement
or the soon-to-be-felt-impact of ecological wreckage.
Migrants have understandably used the process as a way
of bypassing dead-end legal channels, and who would
blame them?
But most of those forming the recent five-million-strong
Syrian exodus fall squarely inside the legal definition of a
refugee. Many Europeans shudder at this unprecedented
encounter. Alone among politicians Angela Merkel has
shown moral leadership, perhaps informed by a Christian
ethos, even if she has wavered and in the end apologised.
Nonetheless, civil society (especially in Western Europe)
has displayed a remarkable generosity.
Up to now the Irish State has responded to ‘the problem’
with the banal savagery of Direct Provision where asylum-
seekers are denied employment and cooking facilities, and
live on a pittance.
In response to the Syrian exodus, in contrast to the
We must learn to find
the Divine in the Stranger
and the alien Other
by Frank Armstrong
The Irish State
has been painfully
slow at fulfilling its
commitment to take
even 400 Syrians;
apparently 870 will be
resettled by the end of
the year
POLITICS
October 2016 3 1
charity and sympathy of most Irish citizens, the
Irish State has been painfully slow at fulfilling its
public commitment to take four thousand, itself
derisory; the Department of Justice claim that
870 will be resettled by the end of the year. We
may speculate that there is a fear in government
circles that they will eventually be ‘punished’ for
favouring the foreigner over the indigenous
Irish; and perhaps there is a calculation that
compassion will easily dissipate in the event of
any problematic integration of a predominantly
Muslim population.
We might attribute the present moral muddle
to a post-modernit world where we have diffi-
culty determining Significance, especially
against a background of declining appreciation
of the narratives contained in sacred traditions.
Insignificance, according to Milan Kundera in his
last novel 'The Festival of Insignificance', has
become “the essence of existence. It is all
around us, and everywhere and always. It is pre-
sent even when no one wants to see it: in horror,
in bloody battles, in the worst disasters”.
For understandable reasons, many consider
religion a dirty word identified with a patriarchy
where women’s bodies have emerged as a key
battleground. But the philosopher Richard Kear-
ney in his book 'Anatheism [Returning to God
after God]' (2010) proposes “the possibility of a
third way beyond the extremes of dogmatic
theism and militant atheism: those polar oppo-
sites of certainty that have maimed so many
minds and souls in our history”.
Similarly, as the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bon-
hoeffer awaited execution in a Nazi concentration
camp for his apparent participation in the plot to
kill Hitler, he proposed a reformed Christianity
after the “Death of God” heralded by Nietzsche,
Freud and totalitarianism. He wrote: “The God of
religion, of metaphysics and of subjectivity is
dead; the place is vacant for the preaching of the
cross and for the God of Jesus Christ”. To Kear-
ney: “Christianity thus becomes not an invitation
to another world but a call back to this one, a
robust and challenging 'Christianity of this
world', a secular faith that sees the weakness of
God as precisely a summons to the rekindled
strength of humanity”. This is a call for compas-
sion where we set aside our selfish desires.
Kearney finds in the Abrahamic faiths as well
as in Eastern traditions valuable responses to
the alien stranger. Thus Jacob sees the face of
God in his mortal enemy: “The message is this:
the divine, as exile, is in each human other who
asks to be received in our midst”. He recalls a
Passover prayer: “You shall not oppress a stran-
ger, having yourself been strangers in the land
of Egypt”.
Kearney contends that: “The very fact that the
Lord must repeatedly enjoin justice to prevent
hatred of the foreign is itself an acknowledge-
ment that initial responses to aliens are more
likely to be fear than love”. He acknowledges
that “for every Francis of Assisi there is an Inqui-
sition and for every Saint James, a Jim Jones”, but
points to the Golden Rule to treat ‘thy neighbour
as thyself’ found in almost all faith traditions -
which demands hospitality to the outsider.
We may easily wash our hands of responsibil
-
ity for that alien other. The welcome of an
unknown person is surely irrational, or we can
imagine the possibility of an encounter with “the
divine as exile,” and overcome any fears. Kear-
ney acknowledges, however, that there are
“limits to hospitality, at least for finite beings”.
A particular challenge to our hospitality lies in
a prevailing distaste for the Islamic faith from
which is drawn most of the Syrian exodus, and
which has been tainted by association with ter
-
rorism, especially after the 9/11 atrocities. Since
the 1970s in the Middle East and elsewhere polit-
ical grievances are often articulated through a
resurgent Islam. This is in contrast to Christian-
ity which has faded from politics, at least in
Europe, mostly surviving in conservative forms
that have little in common with Bonhoeffer’s
idea of a “Christianity of this world”, or the early
voices of Liberation Theology in Catholicism.
The example of the Prophet Muhammad who
began the conquest of an empire is quite differ
-
ent from that of Jesus Christ who demanded that
his disciples put down their swords at the critical
moment of his arrest. But Christianity also draws
on an Old Testament replete with savagery and
the wide-ranging Islamic corpus contains many
teachings complementary to the New
Testament.
Notwithstanding the peaceful sentiments of
Jesus Christ, Christianity has been used as an
Terrorism is a copycat
disorder that feeds off its
own appalling spectacles
and it originates in the
West, with anarchists
3 2 October 2016
excuse for more slaughter than Islam through
history, especially in Central and South
America.
All too often religion is used as a tool of power
but, conversely, contained in these traditions is
the bedrock of our ideas on human rights. As
Jonathan Swift put it: “We have just enough reli-
gion to make us hate, but not enough to make us
love one another”. In any faith of note there is
surely a kernel of goodness otherwise it would
not have won adherents in the first place.
We must decouple religion from power and
permit debate and discussion in that sacred
space while asserting universal red lines to
which we can all subscribe, such as a prohibition
on torture.
No less than other traditions Islam has a sense
of the sacred stranger. An important saying of
the Prophet was that: “Islam began as a stran-
ger, and it will become a stranger. So blessed are
those who are strangers”. Some years ago, living
in Damascus for a few months I was struck by the
value given to hospitality in Syria where the
ancient phrase ahlan wa sahlan (“welcome to my
home”) greets entry to any establishment.
Rather than identifying the particular values
of any religion in a single text, the French
sociologist Olivier Roy sees so-called ‘Islamic’
terrorism within the context of Globalisation and
not within the fabled Clash of Civilisations imag-
ined by Samuel Huntingdon. In 'Globalised
Islam: The Search for a New Ummah' (2006) he
argues that a sacred book, such as the Koran “is
not Napoleon’s Civil Code or an insurance policy,
where everything is put in unequivocal terms”.
Roy says the “key question is not what the
Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the
Koran says”. He proposes that:
“The real genesis of Al Qaeda violence has
more to do with a Western tradition of individual
and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal world
than with the Koranic conception of
martyrdom”.
Perhaps Roy goes a little too far in ignoring
scriptural injunctions, but it is a point worth
making that so-called Islamic terrorism is a prod-
uct of its time and there are other peaceful
narratives that Kearney points to.
The wider phenomenon of Political Islam has
its origins in the failure of the alien model of the
nation state in many warring post-colonial soci
-
eties especially since the 2003 US-led invasion
of Iraq, combined with the gross inequalities of
rentier states drawing a foreign income from
natural resources such as oil. To attribute the
appalling spiral of terrorism to something pecu-
liar in the Islamic tradition is historically
inaccurate. Terrorism is a copycat disorder that
feeds off its own appalling spectacles and it orig-
inates in the West.
Since the 1890s terrorism – involving the
propaganda of the deed which exploits a media
fascination with the macabre – has been
employed by alienated individuals representing
a wide variety of political credos, beginning with
anarchists. The extreme instability we find in
Syria/Iraq and at least until recently in Afghani-
stan gave its execution free reign which has
occasionally, and devastatingly, spilt into the
West. In Europe while individual attacks have
seen far greater loss of life than previous terror
campaigns from the IRA and others the outrages
have also been less frequent. It usually takes a
desperate, damaged and highly marginalised
person to commit crimes of the magnitude we
have witnessed.
An immigrant is almost by definition attempt
-
ing to improve his quality of life. The suicidal
alienation required for a terrorist act is extremely
rare, especially if people see the prospect of
their families prospering; there are forty-four
million Muslims in Europe many third generation
immigrants and even indigenous converts, the
overwhelming majority getting on with life. The
vast majority of their religious leaders condemn
the taking of innocent civilian lives, which is
explicitly prohibited in the Koran.
The attractions of Islam to immigrant groups
in the form of solidarity and transcendence is
obvious. It may be that we in the West actually
have something to learn from their sense of com-
munity and charity, even if we have serious
problems with aspects of their moral teachings
particularly on issues like gender and homosex
-
uality. But respectful dialogue can be fruitful. As
Kearney puts it: “How can one discover the God
of hospitality in one’s own tradition if one is not
open to dialogue with others”.
It is also important to situate prevailing atti
-
tudes towards Third World immigrants, of whom
Muslims are the most numerous in Europe (with
Trump-targeted Catholic Latinos more prevalent
in the US), in the context of rising inequality
To Kearney Christianity
becomes not an
invitation to another
world but a call back to
this one, a secular faith
Richard Kearney
POLITICS
October 2016 3 3
under Neoliberalism. Zygmunt Bauman argues
that they become scapegoats as long as the real
powerbrokers of a Neoliberal Globalisation are
untouchable. He claims they are treated as:
“waste products of civilisation” in his book
'Wasted Lives' (2010). He further contends:
“Refugees and immigrants coming from ‘far
away’ yet making a bid to settle in the neigh-
bourhood, are uniquely suitable for the role of
the effigy to be burnt as the spectre of ‘global
forces’, feared and resented for doing their job
without consulting those whom its outcome is
bound to affect. After all, asylum-seekers and
‘economic migrants’ are collective replicas (an
later ego? fellow traveller? mirror images? cari-
catures?) of the new power elite of the globalised
world, widely (and with reason) suspected to be
the true villain of the piece”.
Like that elite, he considers, “they are untied
to any place, shifty, unpredictable. Like that
elite, they epitomise the unfathomable ‘space of
flows’ where the roots of the present-day pre-
cariousness of the human condition are sunk.
Seeking in vain for other, more adequate outlets,
fears and anxieties rub off on targets close to
hand and re-emerge as popular resentment and
fear of the ‘aliens nearby’. Uncertainty cannot be
defused or dispersed in a direct confrontation
with the other embodiment of extraterritoriality:
the global elite drifting beyond the reach of
human control. That elite is much too powerful
to be confronted and challenged point-blank,
even if its exact location was known (which it is
not). Refugees on the other hand, are a clearly
visible, and sitting, target for the surplus
anguish”.
He adds that they: “bring home
distant noises of war and the
stench of gutted homes and
scorched villages that
cannot but remind the
settled how easily the
cocoon of their safe
and familiar (safe
because familiar)
routine may be
pierced or crushed
and how deceptive
the security of their
settlement must be”.
Refugees remind us of
the cruelty and division in
other parts of the world
linked to our excessive consump-
tion of oil and other resources.
It remains to be seen whether the wave of
sympathy shown by Irish people will rapidly
dissipate.
At the heart of this is whether we have the spir-
itual resources to accommodate the
impoverished Stranger.
Generally, rather than identifying with the sto-
ries of refugees and other marginalised groups,
the consumer of news media in Ireland and else-
where prefers titillation. News providers draw
increasingly on the mundane experiences of the
usually privileged writer (the best Irish exemplar
is the Irish Times’ Róisín Ingle; “Will I start my
Saturday with Fintan O’Toole or Róisín Ingle?”.)
reflecting an attraction to confessional and usu-
ally light-hearted stories valued primarily for
their online hits.
Reflecting this, Brian Boyd reported in
the Irish Times (8/8/16) that the “sig-
nature assignment” of the US
journalism teacher Professor
Susan Shapiro is where stu-
dents confess their most
humiliating secret. She does
this so they have a chance of
selling their work in today’s
marketplace. This is a hall-
mark of her own work: “In
December my husband stopped
screwing me”, was the opening
line of one of her recent articles in the
New York Times.
We swipe away humanity’s problems as if on
the smart-phone dating application Tinder, pro
-
ceeding to the next click bait in search of relief
from the boredom that assails our waking hours.
We sublimate our anger at our own lives or the
state of the world by venting it on immigrants,
cloaking intolerance with tame excuses: ‘just
look at the way they treat gays – why should we
accept them into our society’. We use their preju-
dice as an excuse for our own.
Lurking in the background is that fear of what
lies on the horizon. We assume, without
really interrogating the matter,
that our government will do
the right thing, but as
Kearney puts it: “The
stranger, from beyond
the limits of our
familiar nation or
state, comes to
remind us that
there is always
more to justice
than meets our
present legal code”.
Rather than showing
moral leadership most
politicians seem to
prefer to examine what
focus groups are saying and
input the data into policy.
We react with lazy emoticons and GIFs to the
plight of a dead child on a beach but our inten
-
tion is soon diverted by a cute shot of a living
one. Worryingly Facebook recently adjusted its
algorithm for its News Feed to promote posts
from friends and family members over posts
from publishers, and so recedes the prospect of
social media being an agent of social change.
It is worth bearing in mind that our ancestors
in Ireland who fled famine and pestilence in the
1840s would not have qualified as refugees. In
the United States their presence stimulated the
birth of the Know-Nothings, a nativist movement
reacting against the emergence of a multicul-
tural America. They attacked the Catholicism of
the Irish claiming it was inconsistent with Amer
-
ica’s democratic values. Today we attack Islam
with the same arguments.
But American society for all its
genocidal faults, did hold firm to
the ideal of religious tolerance
and diversity. The rising ine-
qualities of our Neoliberal
Age pose new challenges
to that accommodation in
the US and Europe while a
global religious fundamen
-
talism both Christian and
Islamic brooks no diversity.
Kearney’s idea of Anatheism –
religion after religion denying
fundamentalism – proposes that we can
still draw inspiration from the challenging ideas
contained in the sacred traditions that a Post-
Modern assumption of Insignificance belittles.
In the book of Genesis we discover a first exile
which may be seen as an allegory for humanity’s
departure from nomadic lives as hunter-gather-
ers (or more accurately scavengers); then arose
social hierarchies to preserve the seed and
breeding stock imposing great constraints on
freedom, including the ubiquitous institution of
slavery. In 'Paradise Lost' John Milton character-
ises the ensuing alienation from our true wild
nature in the endless disputes between Adam
and Eve after they succumb to the temptation of
the Tree of Knowledge: “Thus they in mutual
accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but nei-
ther self-condemning, / And of their vain contest
appeared no end”.
Our Original Sin of farming and its attendant
despoliation of the Earth’s natural environment,
brought a competition for resources that
demanded a scapegoat, according to the French
philosopher Renée Girard. The rejection of
wealth and privilege by Jesus Christ and his ulti-
mate self-sacrifice may be interpreted as a
valiant effort to remove the need for such a
scapegoat.
We now see a rampant consumerism that
increases the need for that scapegoat. Poor
immigrant populations are a convenient target.
In us all there is a capacity for great compassion
and blind greed, but the drift of our post-moder-
nity makes us lose focus on that which is really
Significant and the compassion embedded in
the sacred traditions ebbs away.
By locating the Divine in the Stranger we over-
come a primitive response to an alien Other,
freeing ourselves to contemplate societies that
accommodate a joyful diversity.
Refugees are
treated as: ‘waste
products of
civilisation’
The Stranger
