Published in France in 2006, Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes sold over 700,000 copies and won the Prix Goncourt. Translated into English as The Kindly Ones, it made much less of an impact. This is a shame, because it’s surely one of the greatest literary achievements of the century, both a historical novel involving detailed and apparently accurate recreations of Nazi atrocities, and a study in individual and systemic evil.

The novel’s great set pieces include the Holocaust by shooting in Ukraine, the later Holocaust by starvation and gassing in the death camps, the siege of Stalingrad, and Germany’s descent into apocalyptic chaos at the end of the war, culminating in the fall of Berlin. The action is seen through the eyes of an SS officer, Max Aue, and told in his voice many years later – for he survives the war, no doubt unjustly, and lives a bourgeois life now under an assumed name, with a family and a job in the lace industry.

‘It was the systematically cultivated nature of the Holocaust that makes it unique in the annals of genocide,’ writes Richard Appignanesi in his essay ‘Evil in the Absence of God’; and Littell’s Max Aue is a cultivated man. Even as a young man, Aue is highly cultured, a man of taste, intelligence and education. But he is also a convinced Nazi, emerging from a society of convinced Nazis. When stationed in the Caucasus he engages in fascinating scholarly discussions of the local ethnicities’ tribal, linguistic and religious affiliations, and all with the purpose of determining which communities are to be exterminated.

Aue is an enthusiastic organiser of and participant in the bloodshed. Even as he remembers it later, he is largely unrepentant, though he demurs finally from justifying his crimes by reference to any political end. He starts off as an ideological Nazi but the horror he helps to unleash, its pointlessness, becomes its own end. At a late stage in the narrative Aue goes properly mad, but this only begs the question of what sanity means, given his murderous behaviour while calm, collected and supposedly healthy. The most decent thing he does in a thousand pages is suffer a breakdown, but he soon recovers, and is able to resume normal functioning in his second, staid, lace-manufacturing life. A monster, but all too human, and ultimately rather ordinary. The novel opens with this invocation: ‘Oh my human brothers …’

So why is such a book of cruelties titled The Kindly Ones? In reference to the Eumenides, or Furies, Greek deities of vengeance who were named ‘the kindly ones’ euphemistically, because the reality was too awful to name – and alluding too to the standards of Greek morality, which disconnect the notions of good and evil from the idea of intention. Actual results are what count, as the Greek tragedies illustrate. Oedipus doesn’t know that the man he kills is his father, nor that the woman he marries is his mother. Nevertheless, these crimes are terrible, and Oedipus must pay the price.

To an extent Islam agrees that the result of an act determines whether it is good or evil. ‘You may hate a thing, but it is good for you,’ says the Quran, and the story of Khidr shows that apparently evil actions can have good results. In general, though, Islam follows the logic of the hadith: ‘Actions are judged according to intentions’.

In his essay ‘Ordinary Folks’, Julian Baggini disaggregates evil thus: ‘The seriousness of a bad action is related to consequences, but its basic nature – foible, misdemeanour, wicked – is generally related to intention.’ 

We cannot know the end results of our actions – perhaps this is the point of the Khidr story – so it’s important at least that we mean well, that we attempt to engage life in a moral sense. That’s what we do when we call something or someone ‘evil’. At least, it’s one of the things we may be doing when we use the word.

Because that’s what ‘evil’ is – it’s a word. An intensifier of ‘bad’. Like all words, its referent is debatable. Unlike most words, its referent is often debated. As it is here. In this issue of the Critical Muslim, evil is considered morally, psychologically, philosophically, socially, politically, and artistically.

In John Liechty’s reading of the complementary stories of Nabi Yunus in the Qur’an and Jonah in the Old Testament, evil is found in a denial of responsibility, a refusal to do what you should, a rejection of your God-given purpose. Yunus/Jonah, ordered to preach to Nineveh, tries to escape from God by boarding a ship. But the ship is beset by a storm. Yunus ends up overboard, and then is swallowed by a fish. At last, he repents and accepts his mission. Freed from the fish, he preaches to Nineveh, causing the city’s repentance and reform, which leads to God’s forgiveness.

It’s the earlier part of the story that interests Liechty most (and in the Old Testament version, the latter part too, because Jonah falls back into petulance, becoming ‘angry enough to die’ when God relents from destroying Nineveh). The point is that Yunus knows what he must do but runs from doing it – a very common human response. ‘The reluctant messenger does not seem to be an isolated type, so much as a universal one,’ Liechty writes, linking the figure to ‘people aware of a calling in life who get side-tracked or lose the plot altogether, owing in part to circumstances beyond their control, but above all to their own Jonah-like propensity to fly from responsibility.’

Perhaps the ISIS fighters who destroyed Mosul’s Nabi Yunus Mosque in 2014 were aware of better callings. Perhaps their lives had been sidetracked from more wholesome plots. Mosul is the successor city to Nineveh, built on the same spot. God spared the city, but ISIS – rather like the Old Testament version of Jonah – decided they knew better.

They also decided to vandalise churches, and to shoot non-Sunni truck drivers dead at checkpoints, and to rape and enslave Yazidi women and children. In the name of Sharia law, they made a mockery of law. In the name of submission to God they forced submission to their own gangster rule. According to Liechty, this is everybody’s business: ‘God’s initial call to go to Nineveh suggests that rising to the challenge of evil is a human responsibility.’ Furthermore, we can’t escape responsibility by claiming ignorance, because ‘at bottom we know evil when we see or feel it. Human beings are equipped with the capacity to know right from wrong, good from bad – that we are not always willing or able to use the equipment does not mean it isn’t there.’

We can use the equipment in various ways according to our means. This is reminiscent of one of the hadith on jihad, which states that we should fight evil physically, with our hands, and if that isn’t possible then with our tongues, by speaking out, and if that isn’t possible then with our hearts, by at least feeling that the evil behaviour is evil.

Whatever our means, we must use the equipment. Remaining silent over enormous injustices and cruelties, failing to offer solidarity to the victims, is itself a form of evil. Oz Katerji’s Last Word ‘On Denial’ focuses not just on cowardly and irresponsible silence but, worse, on the active denial of war crimes. War reporting done properly, by contrast, should be a force for good: ‘If conflict journalism isn’t a direct opponent of atrocity denial, then it is nothing but war tourism and propaganda.’ For Katerji, open-source intelligence (OSINT) – this age’s key addition to the journalistic toolkit – is a practical means to resist evil.

Sometimes evil is not a matter of ignoring a good intention or calling, or of stifling the voice of conscience, but of following a misguided intention, of causing harm from a state of ignorance. Nazism, for instance, followed the pseudo-science of social Darwinism and – in a way – the values of evolutionary humanism. If a Nazi actually believed the nonsense that certain ‘races’ were ‘subhuman’, and that their genes, if mixed with those of ‘superior races’, would pollute those races and cause them to degenerate – and such nonsense was taught in German schools – then the total segregation and even complete annihilation of the ‘subhumans’ became a necessary act, a duty to future generations. Yes, on the one hand, it was hard to burn babies and gas old men, but on the other, it would be worse for untold millions of future humans to fail to reach their superhuman potential and to be sunk in disability and disease instead.

Here the evil of the belief, the ideology, precedes the evil of the act. When the weight of social authority is added to bad ideology, we arrive at the casual, bureaucratic evil of ‘office murderers’ and those who ‘followed orders’, at what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. Arendt’s studies of twentieth century totalitarianism are, unsurprisingly, referenced in several of the essays collected here, usually approvingly, but Richard Appignanesi strikes a critical note, pointing out that the anti-totalitarian scholar fell in love with the ‘shifty Nazi’ Martin Heidegger, and arguing that Heidegger’s perspectives clouded her work. ‘The student has reconfigured the secret king’s philosophy to produce an exoneration of evil,’ he writes, ‘to the dismay of her own sense of morality – and to the bewilderment of ours … No one can be anything but appalled by Arendt’s conclusion that evil is a matter of “banal thoughtlessness”.’

Perhaps evil is not mere thoughtlessness then, but a kind of incomprehension. Gwen Adshead, whose essay ‘The Seven’ explores ‘how the concept of the seven deadly sins might fit with contemporary psychiatric ideas about evil,’ writes that ‘evil is associated with a state of mind in which victims are reduced to things and objects to be owned.’ This state of mind, again, is a form of ignorance, perhaps a willed ignorance, but certainly a failure to properly understand. The ideological killer, or the genocide-denying conspiracy theorist, or the operator of a totalitarian state, suffers a failure of empathy and imagination, a failure to recognize the reality of the victims. Once humans have been reduced to a fictional status as mere resources or threats, then it’s a simple matter to arrange their annihilation. To some will fall the unpleasant job of cutting throats, but many others will contribute simply by arranging the provision of sharp knives. This is not to let anyone off the hook – for we must punish evil to deter it, even if we aren’t sure exactly what it is or what causes it – but only to understand that evil can be endlessly amplified by organisation.

Indeed, in recent centuries, complex organisation combined with bad ideology has very often led to genocide. Lutfiye Zudiyeva’s essay describes repeated assaults by Russian imperialism against the Muslims of Crimea, starting in the eighteenth century and still continuing under the Russian occupation today. The period of most intense suffering was under Stalin: ‘According to official data,’ Zudiyeva writes, ‘183,155 Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea on 18 May 1944, most transported in cattle cars. In the first year and a half after this date, 46 percent of those deported died.’ It was the beginning of an expulsion of over 200,000 children, adults and the elderly – the entire Tatar population. Furthermore, ‘many other Muslim peoples in the Soviet Union – Karachais, Chechens, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars, Ingushes and others – were forcibly deported from their homelands. Muslim religious and cultural values interfered with the Soviet regime’s demand for faith in the leader and the party rather than in God. Muslims’ collective spirit and mutual devotion irritated and frightened the authorities, so Stalin chose a tough anti-religious policy.’

But Muslims weren’t the only victims. Non-Russian nationalities suffered the most, but Russian dignity too was violated by a slave labour regime. In general people’s fates were determined by arbitrary decisions from on high. Powerful humans treated weaker humans as if they were mere possessions. Powerful humans granted themselves powers which should belong only to God.

The world is full of evil examples. Look at Vietnam, which in the twentieth century was ravaged by colonialism (French), neo-colonialism (American), and neo-neo-colonialism (Chinese), as well as by its ‘liberators’ who forced hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese into ‘re-education camps’ and many more into exile. Or look at Afghanistan, wrecked by Communists and Islamists, by Russians and Americans, by Pakistanis and Iranians, by third-world obscurantism and state-of-the-art technology. Or look at Syria, where so many forms of evil have thrived at the expense of human health and happiness –the various distinct evils of individuals, the institutional and organisational evils of militias, states and empires, and the ideological evils of fascism, nationalism, Salafi-Jihadism and sectarianism.

During the war precipitated by the Syrian regime’s violent counter-revolution, the country became an arena in which the world’s evils fought their battles, and a magnet attracting the angriest of misfits. But even before the war, sadism was a central ruling strategy. (This was of course one of the first causes of the revolution.) The works of Syria’s expansive prison literature provide a glimpse of the seemingly senseless cruelty perpetrated against dissenters, and through them against society as a whole. Another kind of insight is provided in Salwa Ismail’s academic study The Rule of Violence, a book which explains how categories more suited to horror films – the grisly, the uncanny – were employed to inculcate dread and passivity in the populace. For quite a while it worked. Syria appeared to be a ‘kingdom of silence’ (in the words of leftist dissident Riyad al-Turk) until the dam burst in 2011.

Such evil governance was echoed by ISIS, ‘secular’ Assad’s ‘religious’ mirror image, as the organisation tortured and killed its victims in ever more public and technologically polished ways, not hiding but glorifying in the horror.

The aim of such performative violence, whether it calls itself secular or religious, is to stun its audience into apathy, an evil as bad in its own way as fanaticism. Assad and ISIS instrumentalise fear, but more sophisticated operators employ confusion (it’s too complicated to know what to do), or the sense of impotence (there’s nothing we can do) to arrive at the same destination. In their study of apathy, Ben Gook and Seán Cubitt write ‘this term for being “without feeling” … marks a reduction in feeling and activity, typically describing forms of indolence, diminished initiative, slowness, inertia, and generalised passivity … It is then not only that there are causal factors pushing many sectors of the population towards exhaustion, disaffection, alienation, and apathy, but that the one thing that might motivate them, the mere possibility of a condition other than the one we all occupy, has been erased.’ The evil of apathy, therefore, accompanies a lack of faith in any better alternative.

One defiant response to apathy is offered in these pages by the Canadian artist Marc Nelson. His paintings of the Caesar photographs – pictures of activists murdered by the Syrian regime smuggled out of the country by a defecting military photographer – and of Mazen Hammada – a revolutionary activist who escaped Syria after torture but who was tricked into returning, and then disappeared back into the Assadist gulag – act against the immediate forgetfulness of social media, and therefore against apathy. ‘Photos and videos of the civilians murdered by the Syrian regime are being shared in real-time, for everyone to see,’ he writes. ‘I feel that there is an inherent ephemerality to media shared on Twitter and Instagram, and I attempt to reflect on these quickly scrolled-by images through the time-consuming act of drawing and painting.’

It takes time and effort to counter evil or even to give due consideration to its victims. Evil, on the other hand, destroys its targets quickly and easily. It often feels as if evil dominates and is only beaten back by exceptional circumstances. Zaina Erhaim’s essay ‘Grinding Mills of Evil’ describes her youth in Syria and ‘the two big evils in our lives – fear and hate’. As a schoolgirl, Zaina herself participated in generating evil, albeit unwittingly. When she joined the Ba’ath Vanguards Organisation and repeated its propaganda slogans at home, her mother’s face turned yellow: ‘I felt her fear of me, and I felt powerful without understanding why.’

Fear and hate were produced not only by the totalitarian Syrian regime but also by ‘the maze of social evil’ limiting personal freedoms by keeping people under a social surveillance which mirrored the ‘security’ surveillance of dictatorship. Women, of course, suffered this evil more than men. The antidote to such judgmental suspicion is love, and according to Erhaim it was love which defeated fear and hate – temporarily – when the revolution erupted in 2011: ‘The men I had always feared as potential harassers had finally become trustworthy. They loved me without knowing who I was, just for demonstrating beside them, and I loved them back.’

Evil was dissolved by the opening horizons and new social bonds of revolutionary cooperation, and if the regime had fallen quickly this positive energy might have continued melting evil obstructions to reform a wounded society. But the regime found powerful foreign allies, and revolution became war, the cities were burnt, and the people were traumatized. Soon forms of hyper-authoritarian Islamism thrived amid the horror: ‘In the final demonstration I attended, someone chanted, “Our leader for ever is our Prophet Muhammad.” The chant was new, but it sounded very familiar, copying even in its Arabic rhythm the slogan we had grown up repeating – “Forever, forever, oh Hafez al-Assad”. It was a cue for all the evils to reveal themselves again, but this time wearing different masks.’

Some of the authoritarian Islamists joined with more democratic groups in a genuine attempt to bring down Assad, but ISIS – to return to that grim organisation – was more interested in fighting the revolution in order to set up its own dictatorship. It merged al-Qaida-style Salafi-Jihadism with a Baathist approach to statecraft. The Islamic State of the twenty-first century bore very little resemblance to the pre-modern state established in Madina by the Prophet, but it did closely resemble the totalitarian surveillance states, with their prison networks, armies of informers, and rule-by-torture, established in the late twentieth Century in both Syria and Iraq.

When religious justifications are mixed with political organisation, then – in Julian Baggini’s terms – ‘righteous evil’ meets ‘utilitarian evil’. Baggini’s essay ‘Ordinary Folks’ argues that evil is indeed ordinary, and that it originates in humans, but that it often seems superhuman: ‘When the means is seen to justify the end but the means are so vile, it seems akin to possession: in this case by an ideology.’

In his essay ‘Atrocity, Evil and Forgiveness’ – focusing on the 2019 massacre of Muslims by a white supremacist at the al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and on the 2017 massacre, by a Salafi-Jihadi extremist, of young girls attending a concert at the Manchester Arena, England – Luke Russell asks if evil and forgiveness are essentially religious concepts. He may well ask – ‘evil’, after all, is only a letter away from ‘devil’.

Michael Wilby’s essay continues the supernatural theme, but his devil is AI – ‘an intelligent but alien being with the means and motivation to turn the whole world to dust; an artificial Satan or Mephistopheles … Can a mere tool,’ he asks, ‘– even a highly advanced tool – be held morally responsible?’

Bearing moral responsibility is not the same as being evil, and accusing others, even machines, of evil may not lead to greater understanding, and certainly not to self-knowledge. Julian Baggini writes that ‘most psychologists and many philosophers would prefer that we never used the term “evil”. The problem is that it suggests some people or acts are in a different category to others, that evil inhabits its own wicked sphere, separate from ordinary badness. Evil “otherises” the extremely bad, allowing us to feel that we could never have anything to do with it. Yet most, if not all, of what we call evil is the work of ordinary human beings.’ How then to reduce ‘evil’ in our perceptions to the work of ordinary human beings? Here Zaina Erhaim quotes the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek to great effect: ‘No matter how much the evil they produce is aimed at me, I still view it in its context.’

So how does Bashar al-Assad – responsible for the destruction of Syria, the expulsion of half its population, and the murder of up to a million people – look in his context? If I were him, would I have done it any differently? I mean, if I were really, exactly him. If I had his genetics, his childhood and social context. If as I was growing up my father had carried the blood of tens of thousands on his hands, and I only ever saw people showing him love and respect. If the authority figures around me as I formed my ideas of right and wrong had emphasised the necessity of shedding blood. Would I have done anything differently?

The man is too small a figure to bear so much Satanic weight, and indeed the evil wrought is far bigger than him. He doesn’t do the torturing, raping, shooting, bombing, gassing etcetera by himself. He exploits the weaknesses and failures of his opposition, and of Syrian society. He requires a sadistic social structure to do the bloody work. He needs foreign helpers, and the apathy and racism of the ‘international community’ of states. He’s the chief representative of a particular sort of evil, but the evil itself spreads far beyond him.

In his essay ‘Encountering the Shadow’, Jeremy Henzell-Thomas warns against the solipsism which identifies absolute good, often locating it in ‘us’ or ‘our society’, and absolute evil, often located in ‘them’, whoever they may be. He suggests that identifying others as evil may itself be an evil pattern of thought. John Liechty connects this ‘us and them’ to ‘the War on Terror, the cosmic duality of Pure Good versus Pure Evil’ and then to an ancient religious model: ‘neither the September 11 terrorists nor the counter-terrorists seemed overly devoted to their respective faiths. The one faith their thinking and actions did bear a striking resemblance to was Manichaeism, long since declared heretical. Pure Good, Pure Evil, Cosmic Duality, God, Satan … a Masters of the Universe comic-book worldview made up of sharply drawn opposites, stirring a marked capacity for self-righteousness and delusion.’ Jonah’s self-sacrifice, on the other hand, his readiness in the face of the storm to be thrown overboard, ‘indicates a moment of repentance, of submission to God, of admission of the need for renewal. In letting the Self go, in losing it, Jonah takes a step toward gaining something far better.’

Letting the self go is to recognise that evil resides there. What if we saw evil, rather than as a sharply drawn opposite, as our shadow? Following Jung, and using dream analysis, Henzell-Thomas seeks to examine his own shadow and thus to go beyond Manichaeism. And Zaina Erhaim concurs that the distinction between good and evil is a lot more shadowy than a simple sharp line: ‘War taught me that fighting evil once is no guarantee that you won’t fight on its behalf at a later time.’

Everything is connected, everything is ultimately one. Satan is able to corrupt and pervert only because God allows him to. Satan is a shadow that lives within us. By knowing the evil in ourselves and others, and by understanding its context, we might be able to untangle it somewhat, and thus to defuse its power. To describe this strategy, Erhaim refers to Samar Yazbek’s metaphor of ‘combing Medusa’s hair’.

If we could try this more often, we might avoid doing evil in the name of fighting evil. We might avoid falling into the pitfall encapsulated in a joke remembered by John Liechty: ‘A political cartoon from the early War on Terror days shows a smiling Satan telephoning the White House as the President lifts the receiver to his ear. “Hello, George?” the caller says. “It’s God again”.’


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