Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church by Philip Yancey

Author:Philip Yancey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religious
ISBN: 9780340786017
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2002-11-14T22:00:00+00:00

Recent times have demonstrated the moral power of a single individual. Nelson Mandela calmly stepped into the leadership of a nation that nearly every observer expected to erupt into a civil war, and the tone of conciliation he set ultimately proved the prophets wrong. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lech Walesa, Cory Aquino, and Vaclav Havel all stood up courageously and with their moral authority helped to change history. In other nations—Sudan, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Congo—where no one had the moral leadership to restrain violence, slaughter ensued.

In 1947, as the momentum for independence swept across India, centuries-old animosities began to boil to the surface. Hindus and Muslims turned against each other with ferocity. Muslims burned the huts of their Hindu neighbors, forced them to eat sacred cows, raped the Hindu women and butchered their husbands. Hindus fought back in kind, and thousands of Muslims also died in the months leading up to independence. Increasingly it appeared the whole country would burst into flames.

While politicians sat in elegant palace rooms in New Delhi and bartered for power and land, Gandhi went on an “ointment” crusade. Let them argue, he said; he was going to the people, to the angry hordes who were assailing each other so viciously. At the age of seventy-seven he headed to the region where the most violence had occurred. He led his ragtag group of Hindu disciples into charred Muslim villages to face taunts and rocks and bottles. If turned away, he would look for a tree to sleep under. If accepted, he would read from the Bhagavad Gita and Koran and New Testament, teach basic principles of health and hygiene, then trudge on to the next village. In all he visited forty-seven villages, walking 116 miles barefoot.

In each village Gandhi tried to persuade one Hindu and one Muslim leader to move into the same house together and serve as guarantors of peace. He asked them to pledge themselves to fast unto death if one from their own religion attacked an enemy. Incredibly, the method worked. While debates continued in the Delhi palaces, Gandhi’s personal ointment began to salve the wounds across the region. For a while the killing stopped.

When the politicians decided to carve the separate nation of Pakistan out of India, however, the country needed more than ointment; it needed huge swaths of bandages to stanch the flow of blood that quite literally turned rivers scarlet and filled the skies with vultures. As Gandhi had predicted in his appeals against it, partition provoked a reaction with no historical precedent. When boundary lines were finally announced, Hindus found themselves caught within the borders of a newly created and hostile Pakistan, and Muslims found themselves in Hindu India. Thus began the greatest mass migration ever as ten million people left their homes and attempted a frantic march across mountains and desert plains to a new home.

Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy who oversaw independence, knew that two areas were potential conflagrations. On the west where India bordered West Pakistan, hostilities would undoubtedly break out.

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