Scholarly Contributions | Spirituality and Global Politics

FAITH AND RELIGION IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Professor Abdul Aziz Said began writing about the importance of understanding faith and religion within international politics as early as the 1970s, at a time when mainstream thinking was dominated by secularist and positivist frameworks. Witnessing the resurgence of religion in communities across the globe and the limitations of a purely Western secularist approach, Said urged scholars and policymakers to take seriously religious and spiritual values and traditions in order to better address the urgent issues facing our world. In particular, he asserted that the spiritual values of unity and connection will help individuals see the common humanity within each other and realize the possibilities of a more peaceful, cooperative global politics.

Said observes that “the dominant Western view of politics as objective reality does little to explain the present global system” because it “delegitimizes values and culture”; in fact, “politics devoid of values becomes reduced to brokerage of destructive power.”¹ The dominant notion of a “clash of civilizations” has also pitted the secular West against the more religious East, in which “cultural diversity appears as a security threat.”² This perspective toward religion reveals an attitude of cultural imperialism, Said argues, in which “a literary, abstracting, generalizing, scientific culture is thought of as presenting a ‘higher’ form of truth than oral-aural, folk anecdotal cultures.”³ When the approach taken within international politics is “in terms of rational order or problem solving predicated upon reason,” the effect is that “peace is not an end itself, but rather a means to such ends as military security, freer commerce, and enhanced prosperity.”⁴ Indeed, Said asserts, “we try to maximize U.S. ‘interest’ and then wonder why our policies backfire or produce the opposite effect. It is because we use a wrong unit of analysis.” The correct unit of analysis, according to Said, is “nation-plus-environment, interest-group-plus environment,” which takes seriously both context and the wholeness of society.⁵ Ultimately, “using linear, cause-and effect thinking to map a world that is a complex, interdependent network of feedback circuits involving choices and changes of mind leads to inappropriate actions that return to haunt us. Such thinking leads us to falsely regard the world as an object that can be manipulated, rather than a home within which we reside.”⁶ As a result, the academic study of international politics falls short theoretically (see International Relations Theory) and “also fails practically – it doesn’t come to grips with fundamental issues of life and death on a large scale occurring right now. Loss of contact with reality is tragic here.”⁷

While it might seem like a “pipe dream” to move beyond the competitive mechanisms of international politics and “into a new context for humanity as a whole,” Said says it is simply a matter of epistemology. “We know it is possible in practice because that is the way Earth’s biosphere has been functioning for some hundreds of years.”⁸ What we need is a new cooperative approach to global politics that examines “a wider variety of potential alternative world order systems,”⁹ and that can “meet the needs of a truly integrated, multicultural, and multireligious world.”¹⁰ Indeed, Said asks, “what other choices do we have? Our reason and conscience tell us that the old ways continue to threaten our survival … And so, our consciousness begins to direct us as we begin to view ourselves and our relationship to one another in a new context befitting our rapidly changing environment.”¹¹

In his essay Bridges not Barriers, Said writes that “given the shrinking attraction of universal secular ideologies, spirituality has a vital role to play in efforts to fashion a new compass capable of guiding humanity toward a culture of peace.”¹² His scholarship has focused extensively on the role of culture and ethnicity in global politics and religion in conflict resolution, especially Islam and peacemaking, demonstrating how all religious traditions possess peace-seeking precepts and practices that are “both universal in significance and uniquely particular in form,” although it is also true that “triumphalist interpretations of communal purpose have sometimes led to intolerance and conflict.”¹³ Understanding the role of faith and religion in global politics is likewise critical. Said explains that “religion and spirituality can take us beyond the short-term, top-down, pragmatic model for engineering peace agreements, complementing it with culturally vital precepts and practices that point us to holistic understandings of peace as both task and experience.”¹⁴

Professor Said also moves beyond specific religious institutions or theologies to focus on the role of spirituality and personal transformation in international politics. “A spiritual perspective filters out the superficial and ephemeral, allowing the essential to emerge.”¹⁵ (See also Personal Transformation.) Likewise, he defines the sacred as “any process that explicitly links us back to the largest possible context to which we belong … sacred activity is not separate from immediate, personal, and interpersonal experience. Our being together on this planet becomes, then, a sacred day-to-day reality, and what we call God becomes human.”¹⁶ Considering the role of the sacred in international politics, Said writes that “when nations associate the Other with their own interests, they experience a sense of oneness, ultimately recognizing that international stability and security is a shared benefit.”¹⁷ Drawing on the Sufi concept of tawhid – unity – leads to “a view of development as an historical process through which we change and create a humanist and creative future within the context of our environment,”¹⁸ which is in line with his writings on cooperative development. Tawhid also leads to “a profoundly healing vision of cooperative global politics” as well as “cooperative global economics based on love, sacrifice, and cooperation supporting individual and communal self-reliance, a fair distribution of the earth’s limited resources, care for the planet, and control of large-scale human destructiveness.”¹⁹

Dr. Said’s overall approach to international politics can perhaps be summed up by his frequently stated assertion, “the whole world needs the whole world.” For Said, faith, religion, and spirituality play a critical role in enabling individuals, communities, and nations to recognize themselves in each other. As he stated at the 2002 Congress for the Dialogue Among Religions and Cultures in Cyprus,

From the spiritual perspective, First, Second and Third Worlds (also known, respectively, as the industrial north and the global south) are recognized as a single world. The oppressor and the oppressed are seen simply as people, experiencing life with its vicissitudes. Reason and intuition are seen as twin faces of truth … When we reconcile the two, we come to terms with ourselves, as a whole, and bridge the gap between appearance and reality, without which there can be no vision. Only then do we cease seeing one another as rivals; indeed, we discover that the whole world needs the whole world.²⁰

Notes