Making War In The Name Of God. Christopher Catherwood
of Islamic law and ethics.
—The late Sheikh Zaki Badawi, of the Muslim College in London, after 9/11
CONFUSED?
This book will look at the long history of religious warfare in all its aspects, part of what my editor at Citadel Press has rightly described as the “dark heart of man.” It is a phenomenon that one might legitimately call humanity’s dirty secret, especially since religion is also regarded, a few hard-line atheists apart, as primarily a tool for peace and harmony, rather than for war.
I will not be considering only war between Muslims and Christians, since religious warfare is far wider in scope than that. For example, we will see that, as well as going to war against each other, Muslims and Christians have fought within their respective faith, such as during the intra-Islamic warfare of the seventh century, and the 150 years or so of European history usually named the Wars of Religion, when Catholics fought Protestants. In some parts of the world today, Muslims and Christians are the victims, not the perpetrators of aggression, notably in India, where the same extremist Hindu organization that murdered Mahatma Gandhi is still encouraging the massacre of Indians not of the majority faith.
In other words, where you find people, you find war, and since most people alive today are religious in some form or another, religion is often the excuse made to slaughter others on a grand scale.
However, those faiths around today—what British expert Anthony Smith calls “salvation religions”—usually teach that violence is normally wrong, except in specially permitted circumstances. I cannot simply go up to someone I dislike and beat him over the head, however much I might want to do so, because by the standards of most faiths today that would be morally wrong. What applies to an individual is also true of a much larger group of people, such as a nation state or a religious community.
Yet, since the dawn of time, individuals have been killing one another and nations have warred against each other—in our own era, with devastating effects, since the tools modernity uses for slaughter are far more efficient than were the simple weapons of days gone by.
In more recent times, warfare has been for reasons other than religion: for national gain, for economic resources, for ideological conquest. Hitler did not wipe out 6 million Jews and over 20 million Russians for religious reasons, but for a warped belief in the racial superiority of the German people. Communism is profoundly antireligious, and it was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions more during the last century.
Yet the excuse made by so many over millennia to murder in the name of religion has not gone away, be it the slaughter of over 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica in 1995 to the better-known carnage in Washington, DC, and New York of September 11, 2001, when over 3,000 innocent victims of a multitude of religions were massacred in the space of just a few minutes. However modern or sophisticated we might think we have become as we embark on the twenty-first century, some of our worst primeval instincts are powerfully with us still.
In this chapter, we will look briefly at two things.
The first is a personal introduction to this theme. Mine is not an academic textbook, with footnotes and quotations from original source material, but an attempt to explain one of the most complex and vital issues to intelligent lay people today. In order for me to do this it is important for you, the reader, to know where I come from, especially as I am aiming to make my views clear and to achieve a proper balance, both at the same time.
Second, we ought to look at the original faith statements of the two major protagonists in this book—Christianity and Islam. What is the Christian concept of a “just war”? Is such a thing even possible? What is jihad—is it always violent or can it be, as many Muslims are now saying, something altogether peaceful and internal? We will, deliberately, consider conflicts other than just Muslim/Christian, but need also to know a bit more about what those two faiths are supposed to believe, before we examine how they have been at daggers drawn for nearly 1,400 years.
In as much as possible of what follows, I will aim to be as fair and objective as possible. My reason is not to have some kind of woolly neutrality, since I would argue that such a goal, while praiseworthy, is in fact impossible. All humans have prejudices, and to me, at least, the real difference is whether we admit them openly or, rather, pretend that I am objective, you are prejudiced, and they are ignorant fanatics. Scholars and other writers who claim to be so wonderfully objective almost always give themselves away in some form or another, and it is surely better to admit to common human frailty from the outset, and then do one’s best at least to be as fair as possible when considering those whose viewpoints differ so much from one’s own.
So like most inhabitants of the West, and certainly those who would claim to be civilized, I must state at the outset that I am naturally against extremism and violence in all its forms. To me, terrorism cannot be justified, however righteous the cause; for instance, while I am of Protestant Scottish-Irish stock, I have always opposed the use of force in Northern Ireland as being against all I believe in and stand for. Democracy, not the gun, is the way to settle tribal disputes.
In being actively religious (in my case, membership of that rare beast, an actually thriving Church of England congregation in Britain), I am very much in the minority so far as Western Europe is concerned, especially in being also university educated. As will probably be obvious, I come from that part of contemporary Protestantism that regards conversion growth or peaceful missionary endeavor as the way in which the Christian faith should spread, and not the sword, or colonial conquest. (My maternal ancestors are Welsh; the English first invaded Wales and then, from 1536 to 1999, abolished the right of Welsh people to rule themselves.) Inevitably, this makes a difference to my view of the Crusades.
My kind of Christianity also believes in what the old Puritans would describe as original sin, the idea that by nature none of us are good, or capable of perfection, but that left to ourselves we instinctively do what is wrong. Far from thinking that this is a pessimistic view of life, I tend to hold that it is simply realistic, from the tantrums of small children to the much bigger horrors we see daily in the newspapers or by observing the world around us.
I do not, therefore, feel the need to defend what those who profess the same faith as I do, have done down the centuries, since they are all sinners, too. This affects not just my view of the Crusades, but also of the wars of religion that occurred in Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Being paternally Northern Irish, and from a family that employed Catholics and Protestants alike on merit, whatever our own devout Protestant beliefs, I have been raised with a dislike of sectarian conflict, and an inability, despite my Calvinist theology, to wear the color orange. Christians have killed other Christians since the decision of the Emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity in the fourth century, something of which I strongly disapprove and which, whatever one’s faith, should certainly not be swept under the carpet when one thinks of the many misdeeds of other religions.
One benefit of being British is, I trust, that I will be neutral in the culture wars of the United States, something that I find so often warps what even the most learned of authors write when it comes to the religious issues at the heart of this book. Just before writing this introduction, I read two fascinating books on the perennially thorny issue of jihad, a term used variably for the struggle to be a good Muslim, or, in the case of others, to wage war against those of other faiths. Is Islam naturally and instinctively a religion of peace? Or is it, by contrast, a faith with violence at its core, one that has been such since its origins over 1,300 years ago? One book argued firmly for the former view, the second for the latter, and the two respective volumes provided the quotations with which this chapter started.
One of the problems that I have observed is that, all too often, analysis of the Muslim past is determined by what side an author is on in very contemporary twenty-first-century culture war debates: either all Muslims secretly do believe in violent religious warfare, and in killing infidels on a grand scale; or Islam is overwhelmingly a peaceful faith, and the misdeeds of some rather misguided Muslims in centuries past does not really matter and should be taken in the context of living in more benighted and primitive times.
Such views naturally contradict each other! Both of them also incorrectly color the past with what we think particular