Women, Oneness and Peace

Women, Oneness and Peace

Oneness of God series

By John Taylor; 26 March, 2006

I mentioned Machiavelli lately, or at least his popular stereotype as
a coach for ruthless, amoral princes. Yet in a sense the sound bite
has been around long before the invention of television journalism.
Many original thinkers have long been distorted and mangled in the
popular mind, among the greatest victims being Jeremy Bentham,
Heraclitus, and Niccolo Machiavelli. While it is true that Machiavelli
wrote The Prince, a how-to manual for autocrats, he also wrote a much
longer work advising the leaders of a republic in how to do a much
harder task, learn from history and rule by the principles derived
there from. In my view, Machiavelli was not only a major founder of
political science, he also laid the groundwork for world government,
the rule of principle. Consider what he says here:

"This leads me on to consider how it sometimes happens that, when many
powers are united against a single power, though in combination they
are much more powerful than it is, yet more is always to be expected
from the single power, though less strong, than from the many even
though very strong, for apart from the many advantages which a single
power has over the many -- and they are countless -- there is always
this: it will be able by using a little industry to break up the many,
and to make what was a strong body weak." (Discourses, 438)

Here Machiavelli is predicting the quandary in which our world has
been sunk for many centuries, the inability of the many to stand
against a single, united sovereignty. I am not only thinking of
Napoleon, the tyrant who delighted in being matched against alliances,
but also of the current World Superpower. The American hegemony can
easily disperse any opposition it may encounter from the world
community. Right now its most urgent worry is Iran's nuclear
ambitions, which would fuel the "dirty bombs" of its terrorist client
network around the world. Once these evil-eyed purveyors of violence
carry the big stick, it would be the dawn of anarchy, a permanent end
of centralized governance. In Machiavelli's terms, nothing ever again
could be expected from a single power. Every city and large population
would be vulnerable to easily built, cheap bombs made of fertilizer
and fissile material. Any grouping with a point to make and a leaning
to violence would bring civilization itself -- Machiavelli's "many
powers" --to its knees.

Bill Clinton made a point in Montreal not long ago that I think
strikes at the heart of the issue. He said that as soon as any
religious group is willing to countenance murder to get its point
across, they have denied any role for God in their beliefs. Violence
is denial of the One True God; to deny Him is to deny life. I think
that historians will soon come to regard the Iranian revolution of the
late 1970's as the ultimate consummation of all previous revolts, all
the revolutions that started in idealism and then, inevitably, ate
their own children. This victory of fanatics marked the heart of
darkness; it began a network of terror, domestic and foreign whose
virulence was matched only by its Sunni spawn, the Taliban and Osama
Bin Laden.

It is no coincidence that many important Western feminist leaders came
to Tehran as events unfolded early on to protest the misogyny breeding
like vermin among Iranian revolutionaries. Had the world understood
the importance of women as bellwethers of danger, as markers of peace
and war, the protests would have been much more widespread. I did not
realize how true this was until I came across the following prayer for
a woman, a prayer that identifies with startling clarity the
importance of violence to the denier of One God, and how it blocks the
advance of women in particular. Here is the complete prayer:

"Thou seest, O my God, how the wrongs committed by such of Thy
creatures as have turned their backs to Thee have come in between Him
in Whom Thy Godhead is manifest and Thy servants. Send down upon them,
O my Lord, what will cause them to be busied with each others'
concerns. Let, then, their violence be confined to their own selves,
that the land and they that dwell therein may find peace.
"One of Thy handmaidens, O my Lord, hath sought Thy face, and soared
in the atmosphere of Thy pleasure. Withhold not from her, O my Lord,
the things Thou didst ordain for the chosen ones among Thy
handmaidens. Enable her, then, to be so attracted by Thine utterances
that she will celebrate Thy praise amongst them.
"Potent art Thou to do what pleaseth Thee. No God is there but Thee,
the Almighty, Whose help is implored by all men." (Baha'u'llah,
Prayers and Meditations, CXV, p. 196)

Peace then is not a complete cessation of violence; it happens when we
redirect violence (struggle or Jihad) inward to one's own self in a
fervent struggle to perfect virtue. Seen from the outside, peace is
what happens when this internal struggle fuels effort outward in
positive ways, "busying oneself with the concerns of others." This
allies the one with the many; it endows the general interests of
humanity with Machiavelli's singular power of One.

--
John Taylor

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