Clarissa Ward's Interview with Anjem Choudary on CBS 60 Minutes

A wonderful, gutsy interview last Sunday (Nov. 2, 2014)!  In the face of Clarissa Ward's questions, Mr. Choudary had to retreat into his drought-ridden intellectual exercises.  What strikes one about Mr. Anjem Choudary is:  (1) his completely isolated, cold narcissistic intellectualism.  Hiding behind intellectualism, he escapes reality — the reality of having to suffer for the cause he professes and actively promotes.  And (2), the impression he makes of a type of collective mindset that has turned (for lack of a better word) ‘demonic’, claiming that It knows All there Is to be Known, and therefore his particular belief is correct in an absolute sort of way.  But no one knows what they don’t know, so underneath the absolutist mindset is an enormous amount of unconsciousness.  The absolutist mindset has the totally unwarranted pretension to “All-Knowing” status.  When an absolutist mindset aligns itself to the power drive in an intellectual, such as Mr. Choudray, the person is cut off, uninformed — and unmoved — by other realities, other factors (such as eros).  The one-sidedness of the conscious attitude warps and twists consciousness into the ‘demonic’ form we saw chillingly on display in the public persona of Mr. Choudary.

I speak only of Mr. Choudary’s public persona, of course.  I cannot know or presume to know what he is in himself, inside his own soul.  I am certainly not calling him ‘demonic’ (which would attribute way too much importance to him personally).  Only the warped, clouded lens of that collective mindset through which he sees the world is ‘demonic’ because it cuts off half of reality — the feminine half.  The wound to his soul must have been grievous to cause him to abandon her to the ignominy of anonymity where she pines, unheard, unseen underneath the habib of his intellect, making everyone else faceless to himself, as if they had no soul either.  Has he abandoned her, his soul, because one of the soul’s functions is to drag us into the infinitely complex difficulties of human relationship and human feeling?  Ah, I suspect it might be very difficult for him to treat others (particularly female others) as human beings rather than as means to his ends.

What is particularly sad/chilling is that the persona of Mr. Choudary seems empty of any underlying substance.  I speak only of the exterior façade I see on the television, not of the inner person which I cannot possibly know.  Life for Mr. Choudray, it would seem, has deteriorated into an intellectual experience inside the tyranny of a religious complex, and all arguments are just intellectual exercises for him.  Without the relationship to the feminine, there can be no Eros, no human relatedness, and no differentiated feeling function.   Having escaped into complete intellectualism, his aloof response to Ms. Ward's question about the barbarity perpetrated by the soldiers of ISIS was, “I neither condemn nor condone” (the barbarity).  This ‘answer’ was a poorly disguised forced retreat, a cowardly flight/escape into an intellectual exercise when her calmness and steady, probing questions requiring a feeling evaluation/response ‘had him on the ropes’.  In fact, he babbled inchoately, simply spewing words like some out-of-control machine at one point during the interview which indicated, of course, that Ms. Ward had just touched on a weakness, a sore point.

His exterior masque shows a complete lack of differentiation of the feeling function, without any relationship to the feminine principle:  all women must look and act the same, i.e., covered by the burka or the habib; all people and all societies must look and function the same, i.e., like a Medieval Islamic caliphate; and all other religions or religious experience must be identical to his, the most tyrannical form of “religion” known to man, Sharia Law – not love of God or man, not compassion but intellect separated from the well-spring of the heart – enforcement of all thought into one thought, into one frame of reference.  Religion, when separated from the well-spring of love, is turned demonic by the intellectual power drive.  If Ms. Ward had asked, “I’m wondering Mr. Choudary, is your mother still alive?” that question, delivered with a slightly sentimental, quavering inflection, might have rattled his feeling function enough to have completely thrown him off his intellectual aerie and disarm his power drive.  But then, my guess is he might well have stormed off the set.

A pertinent quote about religious tolerance from a very wise woman, Marie Louise von Franz:

“So we are in a terribly contradictory situation:  to have a religious experience, one needs some kind of absolute obligation, yet this is irreconcilable with the reasonable fact that there are many religions and many religious experiences and that intolerance is really outdated and barbaric.  The possible solution would be for each individual to keep to his own experience and take it as absolute, accepting the fact that others have different experiences, thus relating the necessary absoluteness only to oneself—to me, this is absolute (there is no relativity and no other possibility), but I must not extend the borders into the other person’s field.  And this is what we try to do.  We try to let people keep a religious experience without collectivizing it and taking the wrong step of insisting that it must also be valid for others.  It must be absolutely valid for me, but it is an error for me to think that the experience which I have to follow absolutely has to be applied to others.”  

(Von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus, Sigo Press, 1970.  P.239-240)

Thank you, Clarissa, for having the courage and the smarts to tackle such a difficult interview!