When Religion Becomes Monstrous

There is a story attributed to the 13th century Muslim saint Khwaja Moinud’din Chisti, who is widely credited with establishing the practice of Islam across the Indian subcontinent, and whose tomb in Ajmer is still visited and revered up to today. According to the story, when Chisti faced a group of Brahmin gurus prepared to argue the superiority of their Hindu faith over Islam, he smiled and simply said, “Please, you tell me your names for God and I will tell you mine.” He established a spiritual order across India that co-existed peacefully with Hindu culture and attracted millions of adherents through a focus on renunciation of material goods, self-discipline, personal prayer and fasting, generosity to others, and tolerance and respect for religious differences.

The roots of religion are transcendent. The aim of all authentic religious practice and belief is to transcend the material world and purify the heart through prayer, fasting, renunciation and generosity, and emptying the heart of the distractions of the world and forgetfulness of God so that these are displaced with the light of the divine. This is universal across every confession. This is where we have unanimity. When the heart is overwhelmed with light the soul is abased and the person who experiences this is overcome with humility and awe, not with pride and a sense of superiority.

Religion becomes monstrous when it is turned into something other than this; when it is turned into an ideology; when it is used to reinforce a sense of identity, personal and collective self-satisfaction and the illusion of superiority over others. Religion is quintessentially about the sacred; about sanctity, about God; not about itself. What characterizes religious extremism of all kinds is that it’s not about God, it’s about religion in hostile contradistinction to something else and there is an overt denial of sanctity because sanctity transcends ideology and even theology. Extremism demands a rejection of the sacred. When religion becomes worldly, ideological and political it veers towards xenophobia and violence.

True religion is infused with compassion, love and tolerance. The great Mediaeval Islamic scholar Imam Abu Hamid Al Ghazali wrote: “The hypocrite looks for faults. The believer looks for excuses.”

As communicators we cannot even begin to bridge the gap between religious beliefs until we understand these issues.