Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 35

I have no doubt that this discourse, beginning with its very title, will achieve the prodigious wonder of bringing into agreement, at least for this once, the two irreconcilable enemy brothers called Islam and Christianity, particularly as regards the universal (that is, catholic) pinnacle to which the first aspires and which the second still mistakenly believes itself to occupy. In the most benign of possible reactions, the well-meaning will cry that it is an inexcusable provocation, an unforgivable offence to the religious feelings of believers on both sides, and in the worst (assuming there is anything worse than this) I will be accused of irreverence, sacrilege, blasphemy, profanation, disrespect, and whatever other offences of the like order they might be able to discover, and thus, who knows, deserving of a punishment that would be a badge of dishonor for the rest of my life. If I belonged to the Christian club myself, Vatican Catholicism would have to interrupt the Cecil B. de Mille–style spectacles it currently indulges in to take the trouble to excommunicate me; however, once they had fulfilled this disciplinary obligation they would find themselves losing their nerve. They already lack the strength for bolder deeds, now that the tears wept by their victims have dampened—forever, we hope—the firewood that made up the technological arsenal of the first Inquisition. As for Islam, in its modern fundamentalist and violent variety (as violent and fundamentalist as Catholicism was in its imperial version), the watchword par excellence, insanely proclaimed every day, is Death to the infidels. Or, in a free translation, If you don’t believe in Allah you are a filthy cockroach, which, even though it, too, is a creature born from the divine fiat, any Muslim who cultivates expeditious methods has the sacred right and duty to crush under the slipper with which he will enter Muhammad’s paradise to be received into the voluptuous bosoms of the houris. Allow me therefore to say now that God, who has always been a problem, is now the problem.

Like any other person who is not indifferent to the pitiful situation of the world in which he lives, I have read some of what has been written by others about the political, economic, social, psychological, strategic and even moral motives in which aggressive Islamic movements have taken root, movements that have cast the so-called Western world (and not only here) into a state of disorientation, fear, even the most extreme terror. Relatively low-powered bombs (we should remember that they have almost always been carried to the site of attacks in rucksacks), just a few here and there, have been enough to shake and begin to crack the foundations of our so very luminous civilization, bringing nearer the grand collapse of the ultimately precarious structures of collective security that have been set up and maintained at such labor and cost. Our feet, which we thought were shod in the strongest steel, have turned out to be feet of clay.

You might say it is the clash of civilizations. Perhaps, but that is not how it seems to me. The more than six thousand million inhabitants of this planet, all of them, live in what we might accurately call a global oil civilization: even those who are deprived of the precious “black gold” are not outside its domination. This oil civilization creates and satisfies (unequally, as we know) multiple needs that bring to the same well the Greeks and Trojans of classical renown, along with Arabs and non-Arabs, Christians and Muslims, not to mention those who, being neither one thing nor another, still, wherever they may be, have a car to drive, a digger to set to work, a cigarette lighter to light. Clearly this does not mean that beneath this civilization that is common to all we should not be able to discern the traces (or more than mere traces in some instances) of ancient cultures and civilizations now engaged in the technological processes of westernization as though on a forced march—a westernization that has managed to penetrate the substantial core of these cultures’ personal and collective mentalities only with great difficulty. And for some reason they say that the habit doesn’t make the monk . . .

An alliance of civilizations, were it to be realized, could represent an important step toward the reduction of global tensions, a step from which we seem to be ever further away, but it would be inadequate, if not totally impracticable, if it did not include an interdenominational dialogue, for without one there would not be even a remote possibility of an alliance . . . As there is no reason to fear that the Chinese, Japanese, or Indians, for example, might be finalizing their own plans to take over the world, spreading their various beliefs (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) by peaceful or violent means, it should be more than obvious that when I speak of an alliance of civilizations I am thinking particularly of Christians and Muslims, the enemy brothers who across history have alternated—now one, now the other—in their tragic and apparently eternal roles of executioner and victim.

Hence, whether you like it or not, we have God as a problem, God as a rock in the middle of the road, God as a pretext for hatred, God as an agent of disunity. But no one dares mention this most prima facie evidence in any of the many analyses of the question, be they political, economic, sociological, psychological, or strategically utilitarian in nature. It is as if a kind of reverential fear, or a resignation to what is established as politically correct, has prevented the analyst from seeing what is present in the threads of the net, the labyrinthine weave from which there has been no escape—that is to say, God. If I were to tell a Christian or a Muslim that the universe is made up of more than four hundred thousand million galaxies, and that each one of them contains more than four hundred thousand million stars, and that God, whether Allah or some other, could not have made this, and even better would have had no reason to make this, they would reply indignantly that for God, whether Allah or some other, nothing is impossible. Except apparently—I would argue—making peace between Islam and Christianity, by way of reconciling the most wretched of the animal species said to have been born from his will, the one made in his image, that is, the human species.

In the physical universe there is neither love nor justice. Nor is there cruelty. No power presides over the four hundred thousand million galaxies and the four hundred thousand million stars that exist in each one. No one makes the sun rise each day and the moon every night, even when it is not visible in the sky. Since we were put here without knowing why or what for, we have had to invent everything. We have invented God too, but he didn’t go beyond our thoughts; rather, he stayed inside our heads, at times as a fact of life, almost always as an instrument of death. We’re able to say, “Here is the plough we have invented,” but we cannot say, “Here is the God that invented man who invented the plough.” We cannot eliminate this God from our minds—even an atheist such as myself cannot. But let us at least discuss it. It is no use saying that killing in God’s name makes God a killer. To those who kill in God’s name God is not only the judge who will absolve them, he is also the powerful Father who in their minds used to provide the firewood for the autos-da-fé and now prepares and orders the planting of bombs. Let’s discuss this invention, let’s solve this problem, let’s recognize at least that the problem does exist. Before we all go crazy. And from there on, who knows? Maybe that will be how we’ll manage not to go on killing one another.