Bitterness and weaponised words can’t soften scars

Finding peace for Daniel Anjorin, Salman Rushdie and Bishop Mar Mari.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man sits being interviewed and holds a hand to the side of his face, one lens of his glasses is tinted black.

Salman Rushdie discusses his attack.

BBC.

Knife crime around the world is unacceptably high, and with around 50,000 offences expected this year in the UK, it is sadly no surprise when we hear tragic news stories involving knives and sharp instruments. Recently, it was the terrible circumstances of the death of Daniel Anjorin that made the headlines. The gentle, much-loved, 14-year-old boy was on his way to school in East London when he, along with several others, was randomly attacked by a man with a sword. He died from his wounds shortly after being taken to hospital.

I happened to be in the middle of listening to Knife, a memoir by Salman Rushdie, when the news broke of that tragedy. It is another heart-rending story. Rushdie describes how, in 2022, during a speech he was giving about the need to protect writers, a man ran onto the stage and frantically stabbed him 15 times. Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital and survived the attack but lost an eye. Then began his difficult physical and emotional journey towards recovery, documented in the book he never wanted to write.

It was not the first time Rushdie had been the victim of aggression. In 1988, following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, the Iranian government called for Rushdie’s death by issuing a fatwa against him. His book was perceived to be blasphemous to the Islamic faith, and despite ten years of round-the-clock police protection in London, he faced several serious assassination attempts.

The fatwa was lifted in 1998, but twenty-four years later, Rushdie was clearly still not safe. He recounts the moment when he saw the man running at him in the darkness as he gave his lecture.

“My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So it is you. Here you are…. It struck me as anachronistic. This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveller, a murderous ghost from the past.”

I can’t imagine how I would cope in his shoes. I have not had to experience the daily fear of assassination for decades as Rushdie has. In all my years of delivering speeches and sermons on stages around the world, I have never had cause to even contemplate the possibility of an attempt on my life. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear in Rushdie’s voice, the words he chose to say to his attacker:

“If I think of you at all in the future it will be with a dismissive shrug. I don't forgive you. I don't not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me, and from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I'm glad I have my life and not yours and my life will go on.”

Rushdie admits that his words are his weapons – and he certainly uses them to good effect. They are sharp. They are designed to eviscerate. They are calculated to cause pain. They express derision towards his attacker. Part of me cheers him on: a defenceless man in his seventies who walked into a lecture hall expecting to give a speech to rapturous applause but left barely alive as the victim of a brutal frenzied attack. Like the plot of every action movie I have ever seen, the story seems to have a happy ending – the hero is saved, the bad guy is locked up and justice is seen to be done.

But there is another part of me that knows these Hollywood endings can’t be trusted. Those 27 seconds of violence have clearly left Rushdie reduced to spitting insults at a young man in prison. He claims his life now is “filled with love”, but sadly there is little evidence of it in the way he addresses the radicalised 24-year-old. Bitterness and weaponised words, however eloquent, can’t soften the scars, nor do they make the world a safer place.

Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back.

I can’t help but compare Rushdie’s reaction with that of Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel. The day before Knife was published, the Iraqi-born bishop was preaching at his church in Sydney, Australia, when he too was attacked by a young man with a knife, and, like Rushdie, ended up losing an eye. The attack was an overt terrorist act against Bishop Mar Mari, a controversial figure who has spoken dismissively about the Islamic, Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities.

Despite the striking similarities between the two men’s terrible ordeals, the contrast in their response couldn’t be starker. Speaking just two weeks later at a Palm Sunday service, Bishop Emanuel affirmed that he had forgiven his teenage assailant:

‘I say to you, my dear, you are my son, and you will always be my son. I will always pray for you. I’ll always wish you nothing but the best. I pray that my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to enlighten your heart and enlighten your soul your entire being to realise, my dear, there is only one God who art in heaven…. the Lord knows it is coming from the bottom of my heart. I’ll always pray for you and for whoever was in this act. In the name of my Jesus, I forgive you. I love you, and I will always pray for you.”

Woven into the fabric of every form of Christianity is a commitment to love and forgiveness, clearly exemplified for us here by Bishop Mar Mari. His words resonated around the world this week as he returned to the pulpit where he was stabbed, bandage over one of his eyes, to speak out with kindness and compassion.

I am deeply challenged by the bishop’s response. I have never experienced the physical pain and emotional trauma of a knife attack. Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back. I know how hard it is, to be gracious to those who deliberately cause pain to me or to my family members through their actions. Like Rushdie, I sometimes I would like nothing more than to see them locked up, living a loveless, meaningless, irrelevant life. But this is not the Christian way. I follow Jesus who forgave the soldiers driving nails through his hands and feet, so I must strive to be compassionate to those who do us much lesser harm, as well as seek, in his name, to tackle the underlying causes for the greater dis-ease in society.

The issues that lead to knife crime are many and complex. They include poverty, fear of victimisation, gang culture, radicalisation, distrust of authorities, lack of education, experience of violence in childhood, and much more. Whatever we can do to tackle these problems, we do for the sake of love and peace in our world. Perhaps as we seek to overcome these things together, we can work towards a day when what happened to Daniel Anjorin on 30th April can never happen again.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Justice

15 October 2024

5 min read

Will clinicians and carers objecting to assisted death be treated as nuisances?

The risk and mental cost of forcing someone to act against their conscience.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A tired-looking doctor sits at a desk dealing with paperwork.

Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.

After a formal introduction to the House of Commons next Wednesday, MP’s will debate a draft Bill to change UK legislation on Assisted Dying. Previously, a draft Bill was introduced in the Scottish Parliament in March 2024, and is currently at committee stage. Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, a Private Member’s Bill was introduced by Lord Falconer in July and currently awaits its second reading. These draft Bills, though likely to be dropped and superseded by the Commons Bill in the fullness of time, give an early indication of what provision might be made on behalf of clinicians and other healthcare workers who wish to recuse themselves from carrying out a patient’s end of life wishes on grounds of Conscientious Objection.

There are various reasons why someone might want to conscientiously object. The most commonly cited are faith or religious commitments. This is not to say that all people of faith are against a change in the law – there are some high-profile religious advocates for the legalisation of Assisted Dying, including both Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Even so, there will be many adherents to various faith traditions who find themselves unable to take part in hastening the end of someone’s life because they feel it conflicts with their views on God and what it means to be human.

However, there are also Conscientious Objectors who are not religious, or not formally so. Some people, perhaps many, simply feel unsure of the rights and wrongs of the matter. The coming debates will no doubt feature discussion of how changing the law for those who are terminally ill in the Netherlands and Canada has to lead to subsequent changes in the law to include those who are not terminally, but instead chronically ill. The widening of the eligibility criteria has reached a point where, in the Netherlands, one in every 20 people now ends their life by euthanasia. This troubling statistic includes many who are neurodivergent, who suffer from depression or are disabled. It is reasonable that, even if a Conscientious Objector does not adhere to a particular religion, they can be allowed to object if they feel uneasy about the social message that Assisted Dying seems to send to vulnerable people.

“You will often find that legislation that provides a right to conscientious objection is interpreted by judges these days in a way that seems to treat conscientious objectors as nuisances”

Mehmet Ciftci

Conscientious Objection clauses can themselves send a social message. A response to the Scottish Bill produced by the Law Society of Scotland notes concern over the wording of the Conscientious Objection clause, as it appears to be more prescriptive in the draft Bill than in previous Acts such as the Abortion Act of 1967. In the case of any legal proceedings that arise from a clinician’s refusal to cooperate, the current wording places the burden of proof onto the Conscientious Objector, stating (at 18.2):

In any legal proceedings the burden of proof of conscientious objection is to rest on the person claiming to rely on it.

The Bill provides no indication of what is admissible as ‘proof’. Evidence of membership of a Church, Synagogue, Mosque or similar might be the obvious starting point. But where does that leave those described above, who object on grounds of personal conscience alone? How does one meaningfully evidence an inner sense of unease?

The wording of the Private Member’s Bill, currently awaiting its second reading in the House of Lords, provides even less clarity, stating only (at 5.0):

A person is not under any duty (whether by contract or arising from any statutory or other legal requirement) to participate in anything authorised by this Act to which that person has a conscientious objection.

Whilst this indicates that there is no duty to participate in assisting someone to end their life, there remains a wider duty of care that healthcare professionals cannot ignore. Thus, a general feature in the interpretation of such conscience clauses in medicine is that that the conscientious objector is under an obligation to refer the case to a professional who does not share the same objection. This can be seen in practice looking at abortion law, where ideas around conscientious objection are more developed and have been tried in the courts. In the case of an abortion, a clinician can refuse to take part in the procedure, but they must still find an alternative clinician who is willing to perform their role, and they must still carry out ancillary care and related administrative tasks.

Placing such obligations onto clinicians could be seen as diminishing rather than respecting their objection. Dr Mehmet Ciftci, a Researcher at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford comments:

You will often find that legislation that provides a right to conscientious objection is interpreted by judges these days in a way that seems to treat conscientious objectors as nuisances who are just preventing the efficient delivery of services. They are forced to refer patients on to those who will perform whatever procedure they are objecting to, which involves a certain cooperation or facilitation with the act.

This touches everyone, even those who (if the Bill becomes law) will still choose to conscientiously object. Therefore, it is important to consider that the human conscience is a very real phenomenon, which means that facilitating an act that feels morally wrong can give rise to feelings of guilt or shame, even if one has not been a direct participant.

Psychologists observe that when feelings of guilt are not addressed, if they are treated dismissively or internalised, this can significantly erode self-confidence and increase the likelihood of depressive symptoms. But even before modern psychology could speak to the effects of guilt, biblical writers already had much to say on the painful consequences of living with a troubled conscience. In the Psalms, more than one ancient poet pours out their heart to God, saying that living with guilt has caused their bones to feel weak, or their heart to feel heavy, or their world to feel desolate and lonely.

If the Conscientious Objection clauses of the new Bill being proposed on Wednesday are not significantly more robust than those in the draft Bills proposed thus far, then perhaps that is something to which we should all conscientiously object? There is much to discuss about the potential rights and wrongs of legalising Assisted Dying, but there is much to discuss about the rights and wrongs of forcing people to act against their consciences too.