Royalty, Religion, Rulers
Far apart, Iran and Britain were two sides of the same coin this week
Yesterday morning I started out the day as usual with e-mails and slack channeling while also having the Queen’s funeral going on a separate screen. Multi-tasking is never good and I may have missed a few things of the ceremony, but I was drawn in at the pivotal moment when the royal regalia were taken off her coffin at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor. It was the symbolic and definitive end to the divine mandate she was given. It was also why she never retired, it was up to heaven as she had always insisted, to call her back. It is hard in this day and age to try and grasp what the medieval tradition of receiving such a mandate actually means. Humans all over the world have always tried to find a way to unite us around a larger and spiritual journey and to give that a place on earth in a physical form. On the one hand it was to validate power (royalty pointing out that they had actually received their ordinance from higher powers) or the people asking for an earthly symbol to represent and guide a nation.
One of the first things King Charles III did was to make it clear that he sees his role as one that will continue on this principle, but also that it will encompass all religions of the world. Not only Anglicans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Hindus, even those that worship Mother Nature (yes, the green movement has very religious characteristics), any deity really that we can identify with is somehow represented on earth. If you are in the United Kingdom or Commonwealth there is a sovereign who seeks to balance our earthly powers with the divine. The condition to make this work is that it needs to come with incredible restraint, a sense of neutrality and above all tolerance. Only this way can believers and non-believers live together and unite behind a royal who claims to represent us all.
Where am I going with this? Well, yesterday also saw an extreme explosion of protests and violence following the murder of Mahsa Amini by Iranian police. Her crime: not properly wearing the hijab. She was arrested, beaten into a coma for her trespass and she died over the weekend. Iran as we all know is governed as a religious state by a group of conservative ayatollahs who have - as opposed to the Queen and now King - taken the divine mandate for themselves without anchoring it in a constitutional framework of succession and democracy. The concepts of restraint and tolerance are utterly alien to them. It’s raw power they exert. They actually have destroyed all institutions that could serve as a check on their power by assuming they, and only they, have the heavenly mandate (if you want to read how this was accomplished read Kim Ghattas’ excellent ‘Black Wave’). The hijab is a cornerstone of the social order implemented by the governing ayatollahs, taking it off is therefore a direct threat to their power. If you manage to subvert one of the key rules, you probably have the power to get rid of the rulers altogether. That is why the reaction from the state in Iran is so extremely violent. Taking off a piece of cloth is not just that, it is chipping away directly at the power of the rulers and invalidating the religious state.
We live in a time where the regime in Iran is a potent force, but also one where in the United States some leaders invoke religion to obtain power. People have always craved the stability and structures where their worldly and spiritual needs can be balanced, lived and met. It is not clear how many watched the Queen’s funeral yesterday. I heard the number was estimated to be around four billion, way more than her actual subjects. There is a reason for that. She embodied the very thing that humans have looked for to balance for ages: a divinely inspired monarch who displayed restraint and subjected herself to the core tenets of an open and functioning liberal democracy where excessive power is always checked. She thus became an envy for many in the world: if we can’t have it here, we want to see it, admire it and learn from it.
In saying farewell to the Queen, we are also expressing our fears over extremism and an uncertain future. Iran is a great example of the threat of co-opting heaven to brutally subject an entire nation. I don’t know if Mahsa Amini was religious or not. It does not matter. She died trying to create the room so many in this world strive for and that we in the West take for granted. As separate as the Queen and Mahsa were, they both played a role in defining how power and religion can and should co-exist. Their lives briefly touched this week.