Richard Simpson MSP and others
Andrew Watterson and Rory O’Neill
Cain and Abel
Is fratricide the inevitable result of brotherhood? Tom Lehrer was a Harvard maths teacher who wrote terrific satirical songs. One I recall was about America’s ‘Brotherhood Week’, promoting love thy neighbour. It went something like this: ‘Brotherhood! Brotherhood!
The Catholics hate the Protestants, the Protestants hate the Catholics. And everyone hates the Jews! Brotherhood! Brotherhood!’
The first and greatest fratricide tale comes from the Hebrew Bible. Genesis, chapter four, tells the story of two brothers, Abel and Cain. The former kept sheep; the latter tilled the gound. Both brought offerings to God. That turned out to be a competition. Abel brought a lovely, fat lamb, while Cain brought some (indescribable?) ‘fruit of the ground’. Guess who won? So the elder brother, Cain, slew the younger, Abel. Dirt farmers tend to be suspicious of sheep breeders.
Described by the New York Times as ‘probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain,’ Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, is a deservedly applauded journalist. Based in Beirut, he has covered battles throughout the region, viewed blood-stained corpses, and has himself been injured in the line of duty. But, unlike so many frontline reporters, he is not content with mere blow-by-blow description. No, owing to his academic training (PhD in political science with a historical dissertation on British-Irish relations, a topic not free of conflict), Fisk has a penchant for battlefield analysis, going deeper than skin wounds.
In the Independent on Sunday Fisk writes about the civil war in Syria. He says that all America’s Muslim ‘friends’ are Sunnis, while its enemies are Shiites. America’s allies, he continues, are also Sunnis: the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, not only including territories from Egypt to Morocco, but also Turkey and Jordan. Yet, he adds, these are ‘the very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11 September, 2011’.
Fisk, historian as well as journalist, goes back to the very root of the Sunni-Shiite fratricide, so destructive of Muslim brotherhood. At the very heart of what Fisk terms this ‘titanic Islamic struggle’, ‘this great schism’ between fellow Muslims arose in the seventh century with the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Who would be Muhammad’s true successor, the caliph of the Muslim world? The Shias believed that it should be Ali, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. The Sunnis disagreed. War followed that disputed succession and Ali was murdered. And so the fighting rages on and on. Fisk appositely quotes ‘a 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, [who] compared this Muslim conflict to that between "Papists and Protestants".’ And that provides a further murderous example of the corpse-strewn transition from brotherhood to fratricide.
Christendom was a medieval formulation – a territory in theory under papal auspices, with ever shifting boundaries – but conceptually it represented the brotherhood of all Christians, the people of God (populus Dei), who dwelt within it. Christendom was heir to the wreckage of the Roman empire, and from Christendom’s wreckage emerged the idea of Europe.
Crucial to the living reality of the idea of Christendom was the crusading movement which, for a time, brought western and eastern Christians together in a war against the infidels, namely, the Muslims. What, my revered Edinburgh University teacher, Denys Hay, in a fine book, ‘Europe the Emergence of an Idea’ (1968), called ‘the disintegration of Christendom’ really began with the Great Schism (1378-1417), when the papacy, symbol of a united western Christendom, was divided.
Then, after the Reformation of the 16th century, the doctrinal unity of western Christians was severed, although, as Hay insists, not until ‘the 17th and early 18th centuries did Christendom slowly enter the limbo of archaic words’. During the 30 years war (1618-1648) Catholic Europe fought Protestant Europe. That fratricidal slaughter of Christian brothers continued until exhaustion eventually culminated in the idea of tolerance.
The Karaites, the early medieval sect which broke from rabbinic Judaism was, unlike the Samaritans, made up of recognised Jews. There was literary controversy and hostility between the traditional rabbinic party who accepted the oral law in the Talmud and the Karaites who did not. Some rabbinic scholars urged tolerance. Hostility never led to fratricide. In the 19th century, the German Jewish Reform movement began a major split with rabbinic tradition which persists in progressive Jewish movements today.
In Edinburgh, a shrinking Jewish community now has a liberal congregation, Sukkat Shalom – without a permanent synagogue, they are the Wandering Jews of Edinburgh – as well as a much older, established orthodox congregation. Discussions about closer ties between them are continuing. Happily, fratricidal strife never threatens to undermine fundamental fraternity.
In my own case, brotherhood ceased with my brother’s death in 2009. Rob was born in San Francisco and died of a sudden heart attack in Dubuque, Iowa, USA. He was the adopted brother I emphatically told my mother I wanted.
He got his BA degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he lived with his first wife Lorri, and raised three children. In the US navy, he served in Japan and Vietnam. At his grave, taps were played and military rites were accorded by the American Legion. He worked as a diver-photographer, but for many years he was employed as an environmental inspector for various gas pipeline construction companies. Rob excelled at doing all the practical things I was incapable of doing, especially getting behind the wheel. (Because of my decision not to drive in Scotland, people walking around now unknowingly owe their lives to me.)
Rob once sat in on a university lecture I was giving in Wisconsin and promptly fell asleep. This was fair comment on how stimulating it was and, how he found it. I was the bookworm in the family, Rob more the man of action. We were different, but bonded. The happiest period of his life was his 18-year marriage to Peggy.
Directly opposed to how I began – the unhappy story of Abel and Cain – my family tale demonstrates that brotherhood need not come to a dying fall in fratricide.
Gary Dickson is formerly a reader in history and is an honorary fellow at the school of history, classics and archaeology, University of Edinburgh
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