Tower and Town, December 2014

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Another Look At Holy War

Christians and Muslims have spent most of the last fourteen centuries confronting each other with fear and hostility. The sudden expansion of IS in the Middle East and the threat that some of their followers seem to pose nearer to home may have reinforced this impression of Islam, that it encourages aggression and condones violence. On the ‘other’ side, the American and British use of armed force in Iraq and Afghanistan is perceived as a latter-day ‘crusade’, hostile to Islam.

Yet both of these two great religions preach peace and tolerance as fundamental principles.

Islam has been represented as a religion that promotes its influence and justifies war under the label 'Jihad', a word mistranslated as ‘Holy War’. 'Jihad', means 'struggle' or 'effort', and Mohammed himself made it clear that there are two forms of this: to defend one’s religion is the Lesser Jihad; the Greater Jihad is the inner struggle against the worse parts of one’s own nature, eg selfishness. Mainstream Muslim thinking has it that resorting to arms is justified only when the community of the faithful is under attack and when all other avenues, eg negotiation, have failed. War can be declared only by a proper religious authority and should never involve non-combatants or the destruction of property. The Christian notion of a 'Just War' is based on very similar principles.

But Islam is not endemically a ‘religion of the sword’. Wars of looting and conquest have been described as 'wars of religion', when the powers-that-be used 'God' as justification for the 'sword'. The Koran insists that 'there is no compulsion in religion', and like the Bible, stresses the sanctity of life. Only God, who gives life, may take it away, and so unprovoked killing is wrong and suicide bombings particularly abhorrent.

Ed Hussain’s The Islamist describes how misguided adolescent idealism led him to join an extremist Islamist organization that actively promotes the establishment of an Islamic State by revolutionary and violent means; and how a murder on a London street made him realize how far he had strayed from the core principles of Islam.

My wish for the New Year and beyond is for Christians and Muslims to reject simplistic views of each other, recognize the compassion that is common to both faiths and back away from extreme positions. As a noted academic has put it: it would help if Islam were to heal its divisions and we were to keep out of the Middle East.

John Osborne