The Holy War

[Rehmat]

The roots of holy war are to be found in the Torah (which constitutes the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament) where the Israelites' experience after their Exodus from Egypt was presented in a bloody sacredness. Though the term holy war is not used in the Old Testament, other close terms were used such as "the battles of the Lord" (1 Samuel 25:28) and "the wars of the Lord" (Numbers 21:14).

Thousands of innocent people, including women and children, were indiscriminately slaughtered in order to prepare the ground for the Israelites' entry into the Holy Land. These Israelite wars of extermination were not in any sense justifiable self-defense, but an offensive war at the order of God — a God Who is presented in the Torah as a warrior: "The Lord is a warrior" (Exodus 15:3); and a soldier fighting on behalf of Israel: "The Lord will fight for you" (Exodus 14:14).

The idea of God supporting His people in the battlefield is not strange in any of the three Abrahamic faiths, nor is territorial expansion novel in the history of Christianity or Islam. What makes the Hebrew experience scripturally distinctive in this context is the legitimization of the indiscriminate extermination of a whole population through slaying every human soul in the defeated towns. The Jews believed they were given a divine order to kill every human being who became an obstacle in their way: "in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you" (Deuteronomy 20:16–17).

The warrior-God of the Torah warned the Israelites against showing any mercy or pity: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations … then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy" (Deuteronomy 7:1–2). This "divine" order was followed to the letter: "At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed them—men, women and children. We left no survivors" (Deuteronomy 2:34).

The idea of holy war was not conceivable in Christianity for almost a thousand years because Jesus was pacifist. But the destruction of the Roman Empire pushed Saint Augustine and other Christian theologians to look for scriptural justification for waging war. They developed a concept of just war strikingly similar to that of Islam.

Only a few verses in the New Testament would help a warmonger, such as these verses that make Jesus (peace be upon him) say "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34); "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:49); "Do not think I came to bring peace on earth; No, I tell you, but division" (Luke 12:51); "those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them - bring them here and kill them in front of me" (Luke 19:27). Such verses gave frenzy to Christian Crusaders against the Muslims and the Byzantine Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, and during their expansion throughout the New World and beyond. The guide to the Western wars since the 12th century is the extermination of Joshua and David, not the theology of Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas.

The initiators of the Crusades, such as Pope Urban II and Pope Innocent III, used the Old Testament more than the New Testament Gospels as a reference to justify their call for crusading - a call that led to two centuries of atrocities against Muslims of Palestine; brought suffering to Jews, Syrian Christians, and Byzantines; and devastated the Cathars of southern France who were seen as heretics.

Contrary to Judaism and Christianity - The theology of holy war has no place in Islam, and terms like holy war and war of God do not appear in any Qur'anic verses nor in any Prophetic hadith. But the concept of just war was a part of Islamic teaching since its inception. In Islam, God's grace is not to be separated from His justice, and the right of self-defense is a self-evident right. Therefore, war in Islam is a means to establish justice, but never a holy act.

According to British scholar Karen Armstrong (a former Nun) - "in a Jewish holy war, there was no question of coexistence, mutual respect, or peace treaties. … When the Jews had to establish themselves in the Promised Land, ordinary morality ceased to apply" Armstrong sees Islam as a middle way between the pacifism of Jesus and the annihilation of Joshua. Rejecting a common misconception in the West, Armstrong affirms that "Islam does not justify a total aggressive war of extermination, as the Torah does in the first five books of the Bible. A more realistic religion than Christianity, Islam recognizes that war is inevitable and sometimes a positive duty". (Source: Islamonline.net)