CHAPTER 5

Warfare

1. INTRODUCTION

Religious heritages differ widely in the stances they take toward warfare. We can easily illustrate the point with two contrasting Indian religions, Buddhism and Sikhism. On the Buddhist side one canonical text warns us that “a man or woman who kills living beings, who is murderous, who has blood on his or her hands, who is given to blows and violence, who is without pity for living beings” will earn a rebirth “in a state of misfortune, an unhappy place, a state of affliction, hell.”1 In case anyone should think that soldiers might be professionally exempt from this fate, another canonical text describes how various members of this occupational category came to the Buddha, telling him they had heard it said that a soldier killed in battle would be reborn among the gods; the Buddha condemned this belief and told them that they would in fact be reborn in hell.² On the Sikh side things could hardly be more different. According to one Sikh rule book, “The Sikh who ventures out unarmed shall be doomed to continued transmigration,” whereas a Sikh who fights “will win salvation.”³ Another such text states: “The command of the Gurus is ‘Fight the barbarians, destroy them all!’ ”—the barbarians, as the context makes clear, being the Muslims.⁴ The same text quotes the wish of the tenth Guru to die in battle,⁵ avers that the Sikh who bears arms will always worship his weapon, and informs us that the Guru “approves of warfare.”⁶ Buddhist pacifism and Sikh militancy could thus be seen as marking the opposite ends of the doctrinal spectrum.

On a more mundane level things are inevitably more blurred. No religion that enjoys the loyalty of a significant number of people over an extended period can consistently place itself at either end of this spectrum. Both war and peace are inescapable realities of human life, and a doctrine that categorically rejects one or the other is in the long run unsustainable. In the Buddhist case, at least in the Theravada tradition, the moment of truth came in Ceylon when the Buddhist king Duṭṭhagāmaṇī triumphed over the non-Buddhist Tamil invaders in the second century BC, or whenever it was that the story took shape between then and the redaction of our source toward 500. When this king became distraught at the carnage, we read, eight Buddhist saints arrived by air to reassure him that he would still get to heaven since almost all of those slain were “unbelievers and men of evil life” who were “not more to be esteemed than beasts”7—as if Tamils and beasts were not among the “living beings” of the canonical text. Unsurprisingly we encounter this story in the preaching of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka during the recent civil war with the Tamil Tigers.⁸ Other ideas developed to justify the violence of, for example, Buddhist monks in medieval Japan.⁹ In the Sikh case the moment of truth came much earlier in relative terms. In one of the sources quoted above, we read that members of the community “who are employed by a Muslim administration” should be forgiven their inability to observe the rules in return for a money offering; other Sikhs are not to place obstacles in their way.10 What we see here is not just a failure to destroy the barbarians, it is active collaboration with them. In sum, neither Buddhists nor Sikhs can be relied on to speak—let alone act—as their highest principles require.

One could accordingly ask whether the contrast between Buddhist and Sikh principles makes any difference in the real world.¹¹ Other things being equal, do Sikhs have a greater propensity to engage in warfare than Buddhists?¹² And when they do engage in warfare, is it more likely to acquire a strong religious coloring among Sikhs than among Buddhists? The second seems more likely to me than the first, particularly in insurrectionary contexts where military force must be generated by mass mobilization. But this last point aside, I shall make little attempt to engage with these questions. Instead I shall set out from a more modest assumption: that those who want to be militant are more likely to invoke their religious heritages if they can find in them strong support for their militancy.

How then do the Islamic, Hindu, and Catholic heritages regard warfare—and in particular, warfare directed against members of other religious communities?¹³

2. ISLAM

Muḥammad ruled in Medina for ten years, starting with his arrival from Mecca in 622 and ending with his death in 632. During this decade, according to one of the major sources for his life, he mounted sixty-five military expeditions against unbelievers (another source makes the total seventy-four).14 Some were offensive, as with the battle of Badr, the conquest of Mecca, and the battle of Ḥunayn; others were defensive, as with the battles of Uḥud and the Khandaq. But the net effect of these expeditions was to establish Muḥammad’s power on a reasonably firm basis in the Ḥijāz and to extend it more loosely over much, if not all, of Arabia. Warfare, then, was a prominent aspect of the Prophet’s career in Medina.

Just as significant for our purposes is the character of this warfare. In terms of scale, the range was considerable. Many of Muḥammad’s expeditions are described as involving rather small numbers of men; for example, the figures given for four of the earliest expeditions are sixty (or eighty), thirty, eight, and eight.¹⁵ Some were just groups of commandos dispatched to assassinate one or another of Muḥammad’s opponents.¹⁶ Other expeditions, however, were larger, and these show the increasing scale of his military activity. Thus the same source tells us that he commanded 314 men at the battle of Badr in 624, 700 at the battle of Uḥud in 625, 3000 at the battle of the Khandaq in 627, 700 or 1400 on the way to Ḥudaybiya in 628, 10,000 at the conquest of Mecca in 630, and 12,000 at the battle of Ḥunayn in the same year.¹⁷ Yet even these larger figures, assuming they are reliable, need to be put in perspective. First, as might be expected, they are rather small by the standards of imperial warfare outside Arabia.¹⁸ Second, they do not reflect the emergence of a standing army. Despite the fact that Muḥammad was sending out an average of six or seven expeditions a year, he assembled each one separately; there was no body of regular troops, no permanent command, no continuing military structure of any kind.

Another noteworthy feature of Muḥammad’s warfare was his own close involvement in it. He did not delegate military activity to a handful of generals. According to our source, he personally commanded twenty-seven of the sixty-five expeditions, including most of the larger ones;19 for the other expeditions he appointed commanders, who typically never served more than once or twice in the role.²⁰ On nine occasions he was engaged in the actual fighting;²¹ he was in the thick of it at Uḥud, where he was badly injured.²² Nor was it only the fighting in which he participated: in the digging of the trench (khandaq) that gave the battle of the Khandaq its name, he joined in the work alongside his followers.²³ He made military judgment calls, and in this he was receptive to intelligent suggestions from his followers. Shortly before the battle of Badr, one of them came up to him and told him that he had chosen the wrong place to station his troops; Muḥammad heeded this advice²⁴ and won the battle. He might even be too receptive: in the discussion before the defeat at Uḥud, when the Meccans and their allies were attacking Medina, it was his more impetuous followers who persuaded him against his better judgment to go out and give battle, instead of waiting to fight the enemy when they entered the oasis.²⁵ He had also to decide when not to fight at all, but rather to settle for a truce—as he did in 628, when he agreed to a ten-year truce (hudna) with the pagan Meccans.²⁶ Altogether, he appears as a military leader of a very practical kind.

The background to all this is the Arabian environment that set the scene for the creation of Muḥammad’s state. He was engaged in building military power from scratch in an arid land populated by a fiercely independent tribal society. Among the tribesmen there were no professional soldiers, just as there were no civilians; every self-respecting tribesman bore arms and knew how to use them. This was well known to outsiders: the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus says of the Saracens that “all alike are warriors (bellatores) of equal rank.”27 At the same time the warlike values of the Arabian tribesmen are richly attested in their pre-Islamic poetry.²⁸ It was an environment in which making war came naturally to the bulk of the adult male population.

As we might expect from this, the theme of warfare against unbelievers—“jihad in the way of God”—is prominent in the foundational texts of Islam, the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet.²⁹ Thus a much-quoted verse tells the believers that when the time comes they should slay the idolaters wherever they find them unless they repent and convert (Q9:5). In another verse the believers are instructed to do their best to gather forces to “terrify thereby the enemy of God and your enemy” (Q8:60).³⁰ They will be amply rewarded for their efforts: “God has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of God; they kill and are killed” (Q9:111). In short, the faithful should fight the unbelievers until “the religion is God’s entirely” (Q8:39). Likewise, a famous tradition has the Prophet state: “I have been commanded to fight people till they testify that there is no god but God and Muḥammad is the messenger of God, and perform the prayer and pay the alms tax.”³¹ In another he says: “I have been sent with the sword so that God may be worshipped without any companion, warfare has been made my livelihood,³² and humiliation and abasement are the lot of whoever opposes my cause.”³³ Yet another tradition affirms that the most excellent man is a believer who strives in the way of God with his life and his property.³⁴ Further traditions identify those who are killed as martyrs (shahīds);³⁵ of the inhabitants of Paradise only the martyr wishes to return to earth, to be killed again ten times over.36 The Prophet himself expresses a wish to be killed “in the way of God” and then resurrected to be killed again repeatedly.³⁷ The historical salience of warfare against unbelievers in the career of the founder was thus written into the foundational texts.

This heritage did not fall into oblivion with the passing of the centuries. The scholastic tradition treated war against unbelievers as a standard topic of Islamic law; every comprehensive Sunnī law book included a “book of jihad.” This guaranteed that, unlike the theory of the caliphate, the subject would be treated repeatedly in the vast legal literature that the scholars produced generation after generation. Much of the detail would have been unknown to most Muslims, but there was nothing arcane about the concept of jihad itself. The story of Muḥammad’s conflicts with unbelievers was not a monopoly of the scholars; it caught the imagination of the laity, though not always in forms of which the scholars approved.³⁸

At the same time, armed conflict with unbelievers was a real-life experience that recurred often enough in Islamic history to give the heritage a continuing relevance that the scholars could easily invoke. Such conflict might be a consequence of Muslim aggression, as in the case of the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Thus, one early Ottoman chronicler saw the role of the struggle as “to clear the earth of the filth of polytheism,”³⁹ while another described the Ottoman sultans as “the pre-eminent ghazis … after the Apostle of God and the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs”⁴⁰—a ghāzī being someone engaged in jihad.⁴¹ Or the aggressors might be the unbelievers, as in the case of the Reconquista in Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and the subsequent Christian attacks on North Africa. In this latter context a seventeenth-century Moroccan scholar, urging jihad on his fellow countrymen, started from the obvious point that Muslims have the duty of resisting infidel conquest of a Muslim territory (waṭan), and dismissed as absurd the idea that this duty could lapse once the unbelievers were in firm possession of the territory in question; he went on to demonstrate that jihad remains obligatory even in the absence of a Muslim ruler, an argument requiring fancier footwork.42 Meanwhile an Indian scholar writing in the late seventeenth century poured scorn on the notion put about by the Mughal emperor Akbar (ruled 1556–1605) that one should have irenic relations with everyone (ṣulḥ al-kull),⁴³ remarking that if leaving people alone were pleasing to God, He would not have imposed on them the duty of religious war, which means suffering and death for Muslims and unbelievers alike.⁴⁴

The question who was the aggressor in these conflicts was not in fact a matter of doctrinal indifference to the scholars: they made a distinction between offensive and defensive jihad. Either way the Muslims were in the right, but of the two duties one was by far the more exigent. Offensive jihad—attacking unbelievers beyond the frontiers who were not engaged in hostilities against Muslims—was a collective duty: provided some Muslims were engaged in it, others were dispensed from it.⁴⁵ Thus a typical juristic view was that the ruler of the Muslim community had to send an expedition out into the lands of the infidel once or twice a year.⁴⁶ Defensive jihad, by contrast, was an individual duty: when unbelievers invaded Muslim territory, each and every Muslim in the region affected was obligated to participate in jihad against them; it was even held that slaves should join the struggle without the permission of their masters and women without the consent of their husbands⁴⁷—a remarkable instance of the overriding of basic features of the structure of Muslim society. The relative downgrading of offensive jihad by the jurists is in a way the Muslim moment of truth: however glorious it might be, it is impractical to try to pursue expansive warfare in all directions all the time. This opened the door to peaceful relations with non-Muslim states; non-Muslims might reside in Muslim territory, and Muslims in non-Muslim territory, with their security guaranteed by the relevant political authorities.48 But this did not necessarily mean that the glory had departed. The role played by volunteers in jihad on the frontiers in later centuries is evidence of the continuing allure of aggressive jihad and of its appeal to people who today would be described as non-state actors.⁴⁹

What, then, was the net effect of these attitudes in the pre-modern Muslim world? In principle a full commitment to Islamic ideals would have generated a single Muslim state at peace within itself and at war with the infidel states on its frontiers. In practice, of course, the Muslim world has not looked at all like that for most of its history. Instead there was a plurality of Muslim states making war both on infidel states and on each other. How far, if at all, geopolitical calculations were skewed by religious affiliations would be an interesting question to pursue.⁵⁰ What we can say for sure is that some sense of the gap between principle and practice remained. One testimony to this is the fact that the Islamic law of war simply failed to address directly the reality that Muslim states made war on each other.⁵¹ Whereas wars against infidel states needed no specific justification, wars against Muslim states required special pleading.⁵² Worse yet, as we have seen, was for a Muslim ruler to ally with an infidel state against a Muslim rival;⁵³ if nothing else, such behavior carried costs at the level of public relations.

We have, then, a heritage that remained vivid and retained its authority into modern times. It went on to play a significant part in the Muslim resistance to the imposition of Western imperial rule, with jihads led by such leaders as ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1883) against the French in Algeria, Sayyid Aḥmad al-Sharīf (d. 1933) against the Italians in Libya, the Khalīfa ʿAbdallāh (d. 1899) against the British in the Sudan, the “Mad Mullah” Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh Ḥassān (d. 1920) against the British in Somaliland, ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām (d. 1935) against the Jews and the British in Palestine, Shāmil (d. 1871) against the Russians in the Caucasus, and Sayyid Aḥmad Barēlwī (d. 1831) against the Sikhs and the British in northwestern India.54 A significant feature of such cases was the fact that these movements were largely dependent not on preexisting regular armies but rather on recruitment from wider populations.⁵⁵ Here again, the appeal of jihad reached deep into Muslim societies. And yet at the same time the law did not preclude peaceful relations with non-Muslim states and made some provision for the existence of a Muslim diaspora in infidel lands. A century later what did this long-lived heritage mean for Islamists?

The concept of jihad has provoked two sharply conflicting reactions in the modern world. One sees it as a piece of medieval fanaticism incompatible with the standards of the civilized world and the principles of international law. This view is naturally widespread among non-Muslims, particularly those who for one reason or another find themselves on the receiving end of jihad. Their perception, and the evidence that supports it, has caused considerable embarrassment to modern-educated Muslims attuned to current global—historically Western—values. The reaction of many Muslims has accordingly been to reinterpret jihad in such a way as to tone down or remove altogether its more objectionable features. One way to do this is to emphasize the etymology of the term—that the root sense of jihad is “striving”—and to latch onto a strain in the pre-modern Muslim tradition that declares the highest form of jihad to be a spiritual rather than a martial mode of strife.⁵⁶ Another way out is to ignore or deny the existence of offensive jihad and to affirm only the defensive form.⁵⁷ In essence this reduces jihad to self-defense, which almost all humans recognize as a right.⁵⁸ Muslim writers may go further to include in what has to be defended the freedom of Muslims to proselytize in non-Muslim countries, with the implication that in principle it would be justifiable to make war against a state that sought to obstruct Muslim missionary activities within its borders;59 but when this is accompanied by the denial that such wars are needed under current conditions, the net effect is the same.⁶⁰ In other words, jihad as it has been understood in their pre-modern heritage is something modern Muslims of an irenic bent could do without.

Our concern, however, is with Islamists, who should presumably be made of sterner stuff. What is remarkable is that even they can be forced into an apologetic mode by the negative reaction to jihad.⁶¹ Thus the impulse behind Mawdūdī’s discussion of jihad has more to do with apologetics than with activism. It is significant here that his early interest in the subject was a reaction to Hindu accusations that Islam was spread by the sword.⁶² In a similar vein he begins a pamphlet on jihad by remarking that Europeans translate the term as “Holy War” and that among them it has become synonymous with viciousness, barbarity, and bloodshed.⁶³ Instead, he sets out to associate it with a far more prestigious term in the Western political lexicon of his day: revolution. The truth, he explains, is that Islam is a revolutionary idea (fikra inqilābiyya), that the Muslims are a worldwide revolutionary party (al-ḥizb al-inqilābī al-ʿālamī), and that jihad is the revolutionary struggle (al-kifāḥ al-inqilābī) of this movement.⁶⁴ This is not, of course, an irenic version of jihad: the object of the activity is to demolish un-Islamic systems and establish in their place a government based on the principles of Islam.⁶⁵ Nor is Mawdūdī seeking to present jihad as purely defensive: the distinction between defensive and offensive warfare, he observes, has no application to Islamic jihad.⁶⁶ But the whole thrust of his presentation in this pamphlet is to emphasize the elevated moral purpose of the activity. He pretty much ignores the more pedestrian legal issues it raises, shows no obvious interest in fanning its flames, and makes no appeal to Muslim youth to enlist. In the same way, a sustained discussion of jihad in another of his works is notable for the paucity of its references to military activity directed at infidel enemies.67

Quṭb’s approach to jihad is, I think, broadly similar to Mawdūdī’s. His apologetic impulse shows in his anxiety to rescue the authentic concept of jihad from its twin enemies: the Orientalists who deliberately misrepresent it as aimed at forced conversion and the defeatist Muslim apologists who respond by reducing it to purely defensive warfare.⁶⁸ Like Mawdūdī, he presents jihad as a selfless mission to destroy all the corrupt structures of power in the world; he adds the point that it is these structures that prevent people from freely choosing their religion.⁶⁹ His concern to demonstrate the righteousness of offensive jihad thus looks more like a middle-aged effort to shore up the moral self-image of Islam than a youthful call to arms. It is rare for Quṭb to match the lyrical jihadism of ʿAbdallāh ʿAzzām (d. 1989): “Love of jihad has taken over my life, my soul, my sensation, my heart and my emotions.”⁷⁰ In the course of a long discussion of the causes of European hostility to Islam, Quṭb remarks that Islam, unlike Christianity, urges resistance and combat (al-muqāwama waʾl-kifāḥ), and he quotes some appropriate Koranic verses to demonstrate this; but the point is only to explain why European imperialism necessarily regards Islam as an enemy.⁷¹ He did approve of violent operations in some contemporary contexts, and occasional flashes of a more emotional jihadism appear.72 But in general his attitude to jihad is not marked by enthusiasm. Despite his assertion that the tide has turned in favor of Islam,⁷³ he is well aware of Muslim weakness in a world dominated by non-Muslim powers, remarking that “this Western world with which our interests are interwoven is stronger than we are at present,” and that we “have no control over it and no strength equal to its strength, as we did in the early days of Islam.”⁷⁴ There is, however, a more fundamental and even more dispiriting reason why the Muslims do not engage in jihad today: in Quṭb’s view, they no longer exist.⁷⁵ In respect of jihad at least, Quṭb is not an activist.⁷⁶

Against the negative view of jihad to which Mawdūdī and Quṭb were reacting, there is a positive one with its origins inside the Muslim community. We live in a world in which mass mobilization and armed resistance are recurrent features of confrontations between native populations and rulers seen as foreigners or in league with foreigners. Where the native population is Muslim and the rulers, or those they are felt to be in league with, are not, jihad fits the situation like a glove; whatever costs it may carry in terms of relations with the world at large, it has strong domestic resonance. So for anyone prepared to write off the costs, the benefits can be considerable. This is where the jihadis have their role to play, and their uninhibited glorification of their violent way of life is an essential part of their image.⁷⁷ These are people who refer to themselves as lions,⁷⁸ relish their role in rubbing America’s nose in the dirt,79 and quote defiant verses of the pre-Islamic poet ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm to the American Secretary of Defense.⁸⁰ And on a more prosaic level one of their leaders is careful to give them detailed instructions for the avoidance of obesity.⁸¹

A striking change between Mawdūdī and Quṭb on the one hand and Ẓawāhirī and Bin Laden on the other is accordingly the disappearance of apologetics.⁸² A key text in this connection is a refutation, attributable to Bin Laden and dating from 2002, of the Saudi contribution to an exchange of views between some American and Saudi intellectuals.⁸³ Bin Laden foists on the Saudi intellectuals the classic apologetic belief that jihad is purely defensive. He then has a field day putting them right on this. The problem, he points out, is that offensive jihad is “an established and basic tenet of this religion.”⁸⁴ He quotes the saying of the Prophet: “I have been commanded to fight people till they testify that there is no god but God and Muḥammad is the messenger of God, and perform the prayer and pay the alms tax.”⁸⁵ He presses on ruthlessly: “Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?” The answer, of course, is that it does. Defeated unbelievers have three choices: conversion, payment of the poll tax, or the sword.⁸⁶ The West may indeed see fighting, enmity, and hatred for the sake of religion as evil, but so what? Whose notions of justice and righteousness are correct, ours or theirs?⁸⁷ Islam is spread with the sword, just as the Prophet was sent forth with the sword.88 This is God’s religion; why should anyone want to apologize for it?

Such affirmation of the principle of offensive jihad, and the textual evidence accompanying it, was well calculated to embarrass the Saudi intellectuals and at the same time to highlight the proud intransigence of the jihadis.⁸⁹ But we should be clear that offensive jihad does not represent the day-to-day agenda of the jihadis, either now or in the foreseeable future. Their immediate concern is with the altogether more pressing demands of defensive jihad. Unsurprisingly, they insist on the well-established doctrine that this form of jihad is an individual duty of Muslims.⁹⁰ As we have seen, this makes it a far more exigent duty than the offensive jihad with which Bin Laden tormented the Saudi intellectuals.⁹¹ It also allows the movement to argue in propaganda directed at the West that its attacks are solely in response to prior attacks on Muslims: “We only killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq,” and so forth.⁹² Why else had they omitted to attack Sweden?⁹³ In short, the vindication of offensive jihad was not an attempt to justify the current activities of al-Qāʿida; the point was rather to dramatize the refusal of the jihadis to pander to Western values.⁹⁴

The same refusal is in evidence in the attitude of the jihadis to being called terrorists. Bin Laden does not categorically reject the use of the term terrorism to describe what the jihadis do. Instead, he distinguishes between good and bad terrorism; that of the jihadis is, of course, the good kind.⁹⁵ We owe a more systematic discussion of the distinction between good and bad terrorism to the prolific jihadi strategist Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī.96 His main proof-text is the Koranic instruction to “terrify … the enemy of God and your enemy” (Q8:60);⁹⁷ with regard to assassination, he naturally refers to the small groups that Muḥammad would send out to kill individual enemies.⁹⁸ This does not mean a lack of moral scruple on the part of the jihadis. Thus Bin Laden can be put on the spot by a question about killing women and children. He admits that the Prophet forbade it but invokes various scholars as saying that if the enemy does it to us, then we can do it back to deter them.⁹⁹ He counsels Muslim youth not to take matters into their own hands in applying the law with regard to human shields; better leave such questions to the judgment of honest scholars.¹⁰⁰ Likewise, Ẓawāhirī strains to legitimize martyrdom operations by eliding the difference between killing onself and getting oneself killed,¹⁰¹ and he states that those who unintentionally kill Muslims in the course of operations must pay blood money to their relatives.¹⁰² But these scruples are internal to the Muslim community; they make no concession to Western values, and the apologetic mood has evaporated entirely.

As the reference to assassination suggests, the military side of Muḥammad’s life plays a conspicuous part in the jihadi outlook. He is quoted as longing to be killed in jihad only to be resurrected and killed yet again¹⁰³—part of a widespread cult of martyrdom in the contemporary Muslim world.¹⁰⁴ One jihadi author laments the ignorance of the military life of the Prophet that prevails in our time and the tendency to play it down; a Muslim grows up hearing nothing about his Prophet except how nice he was to Jews and Christians.105 This jihadi evokes Muḥammad’s personal courage in battle¹⁰⁶ and is proud to describe how he would kill one man, order the assassination of a second, behead a third, and declare licit the blood of a fourth; he would raid this tribe or that, destroy their castles, burn their date palms, kill their men, and take captive their women and children.¹⁰⁷ Such was the life of the Prophet and his Companions: fighting, jihad, conquest, boldness, killing, capturing, slaughtering, terrorizing the enemies of God.¹⁰⁸ The moral is that the Muslim community can attain glory (ʿizza) only through jihad.¹⁰⁹ Another jihadi author remarks that the Prophetic model makes every individual a private soldier at the level of obedience and a commander at the level of responsibility.¹¹⁰ Yet another rejoices in the number of expeditions the Prophet led in person,¹¹¹ his presence in the thick of the fighting,¹¹² and once more his wish to be resurrected only to be killed again.¹¹³ He emphasizes the shameful disparity between the militancy of Muḥammad and the passivity of his community today: how could a community whose Prophet lived like that conduct itself like this?¹¹⁴ Of course, the example of the Prophet also gives jihadis the pragmatic option of making a truce with the enemy for a limited time when it is opportune to do so; Bin Laden offered such an arrangement to “our neighbors north of the Mediterranean” in a letter of 2004.¹¹⁵ All told, it is no mystery that the figure 314—the number of men who fought for Muḥammad at his first battle—should have a way of resurfacing in contemporary jihadi contexts.¹¹⁶

Alongside this shift from apologetic defense of jihad to enthusiastic participation there has been a second reorientation that separates the jihadis from the patriarchs of Islamism. To the extent that they thought about the need for Muslims to have military power, earlier Islamists seem to have had regular armies in mind, as when Ḥawwā looked forward to a time when the Muslim community would be the greatest political, economic, and military power on earth.117 By contrast, the pattern of warfare that has emerged among the jihadis is a highly irregular one: they engage in insurrection, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism. There is, moreover, a significant geographical aspect to this pattern. With the exception of some dramatic terrorist excursions, they have had no success in the parts of the world endowed with the resources needed for political, economic, and military power. Instead they show a marked affinity for what Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī described as “areas of chaos without governmental control,” “semi-autonomous tribal areas and remote areas lying far away from weak governments”; as examples of such environments he offered “the tribes in Yemen, Somalia, and the Horn of Africa, the tribes in the border areas of Pakistan, and the long arch of the Great Sahara countries in Africa, which stretches from Sudan to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.”¹¹⁸ In sum, the jihadi way of life is the practice of irregular warfare, preferably in areas of chaos.

This is not to say that the jihadis are committed to maintaining this practice indefinitely. Abū Muṣʿab himself was pessimistic about its prospects since he expected the Americans to bring these areas under control and close them to jihadis—something that despite increased American activity seems unlikely to happen. He accordingly developed a new and even more anarchic model for Islamic resistance suitable for current conditions: “individual terrorism jihad” together with the “secret operational activity of small units totally separated from each other.”119

Another jihadi who sees current jihadi practice in a broader—but rather different—framework is Ẓawāhirī. As he remarks with unvarnished realism in his book of 2001: “Armies achieve victory only when the infantry takes hold of land.”¹²⁰ Of course, in the present epoch the situation of the Muslims precludes pitting regular armies against infidel enemies; such conventional military strength as the Muslim world possesses is currently in the hands of collaborationist regimes. The only military option open to the Muslims is accordingly the kind of irregular warfare associated with guerrillas and terrorists. But Ẓawāhirī makes it clear that in his view such irregular warfare has no value in itself. It amounts to nothing more than a series of peripheral disturbances unless it furthers the eventual goal of establishing an Islamic state—a restored caliphate—in the core of the Muslim world;¹²¹ thus the reason he gives for forming his connection with Afghanistan is that he saw the country as a possible base for jihad in the Arab heartlands.¹²² It was the new—or rather restored—Islamic state, “with all its weight in the heart of the Islamic world,” that would then go on to lead the Muslim world in a jihad against the West¹²³—a jihad that would at last be a real war. But without such a state in the heart of the Arab region, there would be no prospect of defeating the world alliance, and jihad would go nowhere.¹²⁴ The problem, of course, is how to get from the periphery to the core: as he says, the establishment of the projected state is neither easy nor close.¹²⁵

In these larger perspectives, irregular warfare is a choice dictated by circumstances, but it is nevertheless a choice that resonates strongly with the military career of Muḥammad. He too went to work in the periphery, in an area of tribal chaos outside the control of any government. He too fought in a style that was often closer to irregular warfare than to the clashing of big battalions.126 He too appealed to religious loyalty and the martial values of a warlike society to recruit his forces. And in the fullness of time did not his followers go on to defeat the empires of the day with something more like regular armies? This fits with the lively jihadi interest in the military aspect of Muḥammad’s career that we noted above. A specific example is provided by Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī: he finds a useful precedent for “individual jihad and small cells” in a certain Abū Baṣīr, who “formed the first guerrilla group in Islam”;¹²⁷ this man became the leader of a group of nearly seventy Muslims who harried the pagans of Mecca despite the truce that was in operation at the time.¹²⁸ Bin Laden reaches even further back in his defiant address to the Secretary of Defense: “These youths love death as you love life. They inherit dignity, pride, courage, generosity, truthfulness and sacrifice from father to father. They are most delivering and steadfast at war. They inherit these values from their ancestors (even from the time of the Jāhiliyya, before Islam). These values were approved and completed by the arriving Islam as stated by the Messenger of God (God’s Blessings and Salutations be upon him): ‘I have been sent to perfect the good values.’”¹²⁹ This seems a passable illustration of much of the argument of this section.

3. HINDUISM

Hinduism, like Buddhism, has a norm of nonviolence (ahiṃsā), in other words not harming or giving pain to any living being.¹³⁰ Within Hinduism it goes back to the Upaniṣads and is a prime virtue and a moral duty. “Manu has said that non-violence, truth, not stealing, purification, and the suppression of the sensory powers is the duty of the four classes, in a nutshell.”¹³¹

But Hinduism differed from Buddhism in two relevant respects. First, its canonical texts were full of martial violence: many hymns of the Ṛg Veda refer to battles,132 and a leading figure in its pantheon is the war god Indra.¹³³ Second, the Hindu legal tradition laid out the law of war without blinking—what else were Kṣatriyas for? Thus, an early source informs us that, despite a long list of exceptions, a king in principle “commits no sin if he kills someone in battle.”¹³⁴ Manu states without hesitation that conquest is a king’s duty.¹³⁵ “By means of his army he should seek what he has not got,” just as he should “guard what he has got.”¹³⁶ And when he has retired from his kingship, he should go to his death in battle.¹³⁷ There are indeed serious moral standards to be upheld on the battlefield, but the legitimacy of war as such is not in question.¹³⁸ In fact, legal texts make liberal reference to the heavenly rewards awaiting those who die in battle.¹³⁹ One source dating from the early centuries of our era promises that the valiant soldier who fights on though surrounded by enemies will find divine damsels running after him in heaven to choose him as their lord.¹⁴⁰ Dayānand would have done well to consider this passage before asking of the Muslim paradise: “Is this a paradise or a grove of prostitutes?”¹⁴¹ In short, war has an accredited place in the Hindu tradition.

But who are the Hindus fighting against in these statements of the law of war? The answer, by and large, would seem to be each other. Often the provisions in the law books take it for granted that the enemy is Hindu; thus we read that the sins of soldiers killed in battle are wiped out whichever side they are on, that the customs of a conquered country should be respected, and that care should be taken not to kill Brahmins.¹⁴² No doubt the same assumption of a shared religious culture is behind the emphasis on decent behavior in warfare. It is rare indeed to find the jurists discussing war against non-Hindus, and when it happens the spirit is very different: one commentator on Manu, writing around the ninth century, allows for a conquest of the barbarians (mlecchas) in which they are reduced to a status like that of the Cāṇḍālas, the most despised stratum of Hindu society.143 But even in eschatology the concern with the barbarians seems very leisurely: if we are willing to wait some 427,000 years for the end of the present degenerate Kali age, we can expect the advent of Kalkin, an incarnation of Viṣṇu who will destroy all the barbarians or in some accounts conquer them to become a universal emperor (cakravartin).¹⁴⁴ For the most part non-Hindus are simply ignored.

A more recent chapter in the history of warfare in India allows us to take the point a little further. Bīrūnī, the eleventh-century Muslim scholar who was by far the most serious foreign student of India before modern times, mentions that the Hindus rarely quarreled among themselves over religious disagreements with anything more than words.¹⁴⁵ However, in the last centuries before the establishment of the pax Britannica, we find that the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava ascetics of India each had their troops of naked warriors. There are references to them fighting Muslims, but they seem above all to have gloried in slaughtering each other.¹⁴⁶ Thus, we are told of a major battle they fought at Hardvār in 1760 over their relative positions in the procession of pilgrims at the Kumbh Melā; it is reported that the carnage left 18,000 dead (or was it only 1800?), and that it resulted in the exclusion of the defeated Vaiṣṇavas from the ritual until the British imposed their sense of fair play several decades later.¹⁴⁷ On a more individual level we hear of two champions, a Śaiva and a Vaiṣṇava, neither of whom would eat his daily meals unless he had killed at least one ascetic of the other kind.¹⁴⁸ Here, then, is religious warfare in a Hindu context, and it is war between Hindus.

To sum up our discussion of Hinduism before modern times, this is a tradition that is comfortable with warfare—and in that respect on the same footing as the Islamic heritage. But the Hindu heritage differs from that of Islam in two significant ways. First, it shows no embarrassment when Hindus fight Hindus. Second, it shows little interest when Hindus fight non-Hindus. The very different distribution of the attention of the Hindu and Muslim jurists underlines this contrast. On the Hindu side the law of war is about conflict between Hindus, with almost no consideration given to conflict with non-Hindus. On the Muslim side the law of war is centered on conflict with non-Muslims, and the realities of conflict between Muslims are ignored or swept under the carpet.

So far in this section we have been concerned with the mainstream of the Hindu tradition. But there are also many sidestreams, and one in particular is worth a closer look than we have given it so far in this chapter: Sikhism. When this movement began in the early sixteenth century, the Sikhs did not stand out from the general run of Hindu sects.149 But in 1699 Gobind Singh (d. 1708), the tenth and last Guru of the sect, wrought a remarkable transformation.¹⁵⁰ He established the Khālsā, a religious order that gradually marginalized other elements in the Sikh community. The new dispensation was characterized by new norms very different from those of earlier times. Strict rules, particularly one forbidding the cutting of the hair,¹⁵¹ set Sikhs apart from the surrounding society and made their distinctiveness immediately visible.¹⁵² There was strong emphasis on solidarity within the community: there should be “unity and friendship” among Sikhs,¹⁵³ and they should have business dealings only with each other.¹⁵⁴ “He who becomes a Sikh of the Guru should never strike another Sikh; and he who actually kills a Sikh will go to hell.”¹⁵⁵ At the same time there was an intense militancy directed against outsiders, with the ultimate goal of achieving political power: “The Khalsa shall rule (rāj karegā), no enemy shall remain.”¹⁵⁶ This militant Sikhism that took shape as Mughal power was declining did much to shape the subsequent history of the community. What made such a transformation possible?

First, the Sikhs were a relatively small population concentrated in a single region, the Punjab, and subject to the religious authority of a single leader, the Guru.157 It would have been much harder to bring about a comparable change among the members of a large, sprawling, and decentralized religious community. Moreover, the fact that the tenth Guru was also the last tended to lock in the transformation; his death in 1708 did not freeze Sikhism, but he had no successors who could easily have reversed what he had done.

Second, the Sikhs had a clear enemy to mobilize against: the Muslims.¹⁵⁸ Sikh texts of the period are strongly, sometimes virulently, hostile to them: “The true Khalsa is one who carries arms and slays Muslims.”¹⁵⁹ A Sikh should not befriend a Muslim, trust his word or oath, drink water from his hands, sleep in his company, be influenced by his opinions, or eat his food at a gathering.¹⁶⁰ Moreover, we can reasonably suspect that this hostility was tinged with emulation: the stress on communal solidarity, communal militancy, and the aspiration to rule look very much like a Hindu appropriation of Islam, an attempt—by no means unsuccessful—to beat the Muslims at their own game.

Third, the Sikhs, and in particular the Khālsā, had their demographic base in a particular part of the Punjabi population, the Jāṭs. This warlike peasant caste had a reputation for violence going back to the first Muslim invasions of India.¹⁶¹ The association of Sikhism with the Jāṭs seems to have intensified over time; the Gurus themselves were not Jāṭs but Khatrīs, members of a mercantile caste.¹⁶² The establishment of the Khālsā thus seems to have represented a powerful fusion of Sikh religiosity with the martial values of the Jāṭs.¹⁶³ In this respect it provides a striking parallel to Muḥammad’s fusion of monotheist religiosity with the martial values of the pre-Islamic Arab tribesmen.

The Sikhism of the Khālsā thus represented a reversal of the pattern we saw in mainstream Hinduism: like Muslims, but on a manageably smaller scale, the Sikhs were now committed to being at peace with each other and fighting zealously against outsiders. Like Muslims, they have not always observed these norms. Sikhs have been known to fight Sikhs, and there have been long periods in which they have not engaged in religious warfare against non-Sikhs—under the British Raj, for example, when the martial energies of the Jāṭs were diverted into the Indian Army or in the period since the suppression of the Sikh separatism of the 1980s. But the Sikh transformation is a notable example of militarily significant religious change and worth bearing in mind as we come to the Hindu nationalists.

For Hindus in modern times, being heirs to a heritage that does not glorify warfare against non-Hindus is in one respect advantageous: it puts them in a strong position to make jihad a focus of polemic against Islam. They are not vulnerable to counterarguments in the way that Christians are, thanks to their medieval record as crusaders. Islam, Dayānand charged repeatedly, sanctifies war, plunder, and the slaughter of nonbelievers.164 “Who is not a Moslem, kill him wherever you get him, but do not kill a Muslim!”¹⁶⁵ Lekh Rām (d. 1897), a member of the Ārya Samāj and its leading critic of Islam, published his “Tract on jihad, or the foundation of the Muḥammadan religion” in 1892. Islam, he argued, was born of violence and would always remain tied to religious warfare; he may have felt some grudging satisfaction when an outraged Muslim obliged by assassinating him five years later.¹⁶⁶

Yet by the same token modern Hindus miss out on the mobilizing potential of jihad, and in this context it makes sense to look for signs of emulation.¹⁶⁷ The Hindi lexicon includes the term dharmayuddh, with the translations “a religious war” or “crusade”¹⁶⁸ (here dharma is “religion” and yuddh is “war”). This is a perfectly good Sanskrit compound but not to be found in such a sense in the Sanskrit lexicon;¹⁶⁹ it presumably represents a modern rendering of “crusade” or “jihad.”170 As such it has achieved a certain currency. In the context of state elections in Maharashtra in 1990, a pamphlet issued by the BJP declared that the current election was a dharmayuddh and named some Hindu gods to whose assistance the party would owe its prospective victory.¹⁷¹ In Gujarat at the time of the destruction of the Bābrī Masjid in 1992, the organizations linked to the party called for a dharmayuddh; so did slogans painted on walls.¹⁷² As might be expected, the term is also used by the Shiv Sena; thus, an editorial in the organization’s daily paper spoke of dharmayuddh in the context of the massive communal riots that broke out in Bombay in the winter of 1992–1993.¹⁷³ It is no accident that the contexts in which the word is used typically pit Hindus against Muslims. One accordingly suspects that those who use it are thinking more of the Muslim idea of jihad than of the Christian notion of the crusade. But even so, the term does not seem to be a central one for the Hindu nationalists. The bottom line is perhaps that the leading historian of Hindu nationalism, in a monograph of some 550 pages, never has occasion to mention it.¹⁷⁴

There is also an overt borrowing that is suggestive of emulation—the term for “martyr.” Lekh Rām after his assassination was eulogized as one; the term used, shahīd, was ironically an Islamic one.¹⁷⁵ In itself this might reflect only the currency of Urdu as the literary language of the Punjab at the time. But the situation was no different for Hindi speakers a century later. Even before 1990 a common slogan of the VHP summoned Hindus not to forget the śahīds that had fallen in the seventy-seven battles fought against Muslims at Ayodhyā, the birthplace of Rām. In that year, in the course of the agitation there, the police added some real martyrs to these legendary ones, and the slogan became “Long life to the śahīds of Ayodhyā!”176 That a movement so noisily concerned about Indian cultural authenticity should have used so transparently Islamic a term at such an emotional moment is telling.¹⁷⁷

This is not to say that the Hindu nationalists have no indigenous resources to appeal to. As noted above, the Rāmāyaṇa, one of the two great Indian epics, has the advantage of demonizing the enemy—whereas the setting of the other, the Mahābhārata, is more like an agonizing civil war within the religious community.¹⁷⁸ Hence the verse in which Rām vows “to rid the earth of demons” is a favorite of the VHP.¹⁷⁹ But the Hindu nationalists get scant satisfaction from the old Hindu law of war.

In conclusion, we can say that the Hindu nationalists, like the eighteenth-century Sikhs, have chosen the Muslims as their enemy. But their situation is unlike that of the Sikhs in two respects. First, Hinduism is a religion with a large following spread over a vast territory and devoid of institutions for centralized decision making. For all the pressures of modernity, and the efforts of the VHP to introduce some degree of coordination, Hinduism does not lend itself to the kind of radical religious innovation effected by the tenth Guru. Second, the Hindu population at large is not made up of Jāṭs; unemployed urban youth can make a lot of trouble, but they are not a substitute for the peasant warriors of the Punjab.

4. LATIN AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

In the respect that concerns us here, the Jesus of the Gospels was closer to the Buddha than to Muḥammad. In the Sermon on the Mount, he says “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:39, cf. Luke 6:29) and admonishes: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matt. 5:44, cf. Luke 6:27–28, 35). He warns his disciples: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matt. 10:16). And yet Jesus does not quite speak with a single voice, for he also tells his disciples: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34). The role of the sword in his career is nonetheless marginal: at one point he instructs his followers to buy swords, but he then pronounces two to be enough; and later he intervenes when a sword is used to defend him (Luke 22:36, 38, 49–51). There is not much foundation for Christian violence here. As Erasmus (d. 1536) was to put it, “To fight the Turks we get no instructions from Christ and no encouragement from the apostles.”180

But there is more to Christian scripture than the Gospels. Behind them lay the Old Testament, never repudiated by mainstream Christianity and hardly a text that appeals to pacifist sensibilities. God’s instructions to the Israelites regarding the conquest of the territory he is giving them are the ultimate in ethnic cleansing: “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” (Deut. 20:16).¹⁸¹ And through the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah he declares, “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah 48:10).¹⁸² There is also the violent New Testament eschatology laid out in Revelation. Here the heavens open and Christ appears on a white horse to judge and make war, followed by the heavenly hosts; he has a sharp sword coming out of his mouth with which to “smite the nations,” and with it he slaughters the kings of the earth and their armies (Rev. 19:11, 14–15, 19, 21). It is thus far clearer than in the case of the Buddhist canon that pacifism is not the only doctrinal option.

Early Christianity nevertheless left a gap that needed to be filled if this religion was to meet the needs of the martial races that lived in and around the Mediterranean world. A thirteenth-century French expert on the liturgy explains that knights (milites) show respect for St. Paul by standing during the reading of his epistles since he was himself a knight (miles).¹⁸³ This seems to reflect a very generous interpretation of scriptural metaphor;184 without resorting to metaphor Muslim knights of the same period would have had a choice of any number of Muḥammad’s Companions as role models. As this suggests, Christianity did gradually contrive to fill the gap, but the process was slow and somewhat awkward. It was not until the fifth century that a Christian doctrine of just war emerged, not until the ninth that the notion appeared that just wars could in some sense be holy, and not until the eleventh that this tradition was fused with that of pilgrimage to form the idea of the crusade.¹⁸⁵

Once the idea was there, it proved fairly robust, despite the embarrassment that reference to the pacifism of the Gospels could give rise to.¹⁸⁶ Criticism of the very idea of the crusade does not seem to have been widespread in medieval Europe.¹⁸⁷ It did nevertheless exist, the two main arguments against the crusade being that for reasons of his own God might not wish to end Muslim rule in the Holy Land¹⁸⁸ and that the impact of crusading on unbelievers was such as to diminish rather than increase the chances of their conversion.¹⁸⁹ Moreover those preaching crusades would seem to have confronted considerable scepticism from their audiences, and it is significant that a thirteenth-century manual for such preachers stresses the importance of presenting the crusade as a form of just war and accordingly as defensive rather than aggressive.¹⁹⁰ At the same time canon lawyers and theologians responded without enthusiasm to the appearance of the idea of the crusade;¹⁹¹ their reticence regarding warfare against infidels invites comparison with that of the Muslim jurists regarding warfare against fellow believers. If we ask whether the mere fact of belief in Islam is an offense against God sufficient to justify attacking otherwise inoffensive Muslim societies, the answer we are given by the jurists and theologians is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and often simply unclear,192 with the negative answer tending to prevail over time.¹⁹³ Assuming that to merit attack the Muslims did have to commit an offense against Christians over and above their adherence to a false religion, what did that offense have to be? Saracen attacks on Christian lands obviously had to be met with force. Almost as straightforward was Saracen occupation of the Holy Land since it was the rightful property of Christians.¹⁹⁴ But if we ask whether this irredentism should be limited to the Holy Land or extend to all territory once possessed by Christians, the answer again tends to be unclear.¹⁹⁵ In other words, there was no well-established, more or less homogeneous doctrine equivalent to that of offensive jihad in Islam. Altogether, the crusade was a secondary development, without direct endorsement in the foundational texts of Christianity, and this rendered it less compelling than jihad and in the long run easier to disown.

In real life the single thing that did most to undermine the plausibility of the crusade was military failure on the Muslim front. This failure is easy to explain: Spain and the Mediterranean islands apart, the target region was as difficult of access for Christian armies from Western Europe as it was easy of access for Muslim armies based in the Islamic lands. But medieval Christians responded to failure in less secular terms. Their main reaction—or at least the respectable reaction—was to blame themselves, or the crusaders in question, for their sinfulness.¹⁹⁶ But there was another, more revealing reaction that is sometimes recorded among the laity: blaming God for dereliction of duty.¹⁹⁷ One of our sources describes how, in the course of the First Crusade, the crusaders hear a false report of a military disaster at Antioch; in an impassioned response they tell God that if the account is true, then “we and the other Christians will abandon you and remember you no more.”198 A thirteenth-century troubadour reacted even more outrageously to Christian defeat: “It is with good reason that we cease to believe in God and worship Muhammad … because God and the blessed Mary desire that we be conquered against all justice.”¹⁹⁹ What this lay reaction shows is that, despite the pacifism of the Gospels, ordinary Christians did not care to think of themselves as sheep in the midst of wolves; instead they now thought of their deity as, among other things, a war god whose task it was to deliver victory to his followers. But their religious heritage overall was ambivalent in its attitude to warfare.

This background suggests that Latin American Catholics in modern times would have more than one option with regard to warfare, and history bears this out.

The Cristero rebels of western Mexico in the later 1920s represent the militant strain of Christianity. In practice they were no match for the professional armies of the regime, but they were a significant threat to its authority in the countryside, especially at times when its military attention was focused elsewhere. They sang, “Let us go, valiant crusaders; let us go, let us go to fight; let us go with Christ the King, to conquer his kingdom.”²⁰⁰ A particularly striking feature of their rebellion was their vivid and emotive cult of martyrdom.²⁰¹ “We must win Heaven now that it is cheap” was a typical Cristero remark. “How easy Heaven is now, mother!,” a young man about to be executed told her by way of consolation. A youth who was spared while twenty-seven of his companions were shot lamented that “God did not want me as a martyr.” Women too savored martyrdom: one who stepped out of a doorway to see the rifles of the enemy pointing at her recalls how “I remembered that this moment was for me, I imagined the crown and I almost touched the palm.” Another woman felt abandoned by God because her family had been spared; when her only son fell fighting, her reaction was joy amidst her tears. With more of a rhetorical flourish, the Cristeros of Jalisco prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe that “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” should be their last cry on earth and their first song in heaven.202 But the Cristiada was a minor and untypical event in the modern history of Mexico, let alone of Latin America as a whole.

The Liberationists were closer to the irenic strand of the Christian heritage and accordingly displayed a rather inhibited attitude to violence. Thus, in El Salvador Archbishop Romero gave only conditional legitimacy to revolutionary violence in 1979,²⁰³ while the Basque Jesuit Ellacuría (d. 1989) endorsed “violence performed on behalf of the oppressed” as “good violence,” albeit to be ended as soon as possible; even he was ambivalent about Camilo Torres, the Colombian priest who had turned guerrilla and been killed in 1966.²⁰⁴ The Brazilian Leonardo Boff was considerably more circumspect. He tells us that Jesus “was not prepared to seize political power” and kept his distance from the Zealots;²⁰⁵ he “preferred death to the imposition of the Reign of God by violence.”²⁰⁶ On the other hand, following Jesus is never just a matter of “slavish imitation,”²⁰⁷ and we have to filter his example though the sieve of the relativity of historical circumstances.²⁰⁸

The difference in attitudes between the Cristeros and the Liberationists is not surprising. The Cristeros were unreconstructed conservatives in a remote area of Mexico for whom the militant strand of medieval Catholicism was still a living force. The Liberationists, by contrast, were progressives in close touch with European modernity who found their religious inspiration in the unfiltered message of the Gospels; to the extent that they espoused violence, its source was more Marxist than Christian.²⁰⁹

5. CONCLUSION

Of the three founders of the world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—Muḥammad was the only one to use warfare to advance his cause. In this respect he resembles Moses more than the Buddha or Jesus. Our narrative record of his military activities is a vivid one, with many of his sixty-five expeditions involving small numbers of men engaged in a style of irregular warfare appropriate to the Arabian environment. At the same time the canonical sources fully reflect the values behind Muḥammad’s role as a military man: warfare against unbelievers was enshrined as a central theme in the foundational texts of the new religion. The later history of Islam rendered this theme less salient because of the embarrassing frequency of war between rival Muslim states, but it was by no means forgotten. By contrast, neither Hinduism nor Christianity is like this. The Hindu tradition, despite sharing the Buddhist concept of nonviolence, was in general quite comfortable with the fact that Hindus went to war; what makes the Hindu case so different from the Islamic case is the fact that Hindus are almost always thought of as making war on each other. The Christian tradition is more seriously conflicted. There is a clear message of pacifism in the Gospels, but it is offset by a strong vein of bellicosity elsewhere in Christian scripture—and one that lent itself to the later development of the idea of the crusade. But in neither Hinduism nor Christianity do we find an unambiguous endorsement of warfare against outsiders built into the foundations of the tradition.

One illustration of this contrast is the divergent conceptions of martyrdom in war. The slain warriors of ancient India—the ones who went to heaven to be chased by divine damsels—were fighting fellow Hindus. The Christians did develop the idea that those who fell in battle in a holy war against false believers were martyrs. As we have seen, this was a prominent theme in the Cristero understanding of their struggle against the impious Mexican regime; it had already made a striking appearance in the context of papal warfare in the mid-eleventh century210—though in Western Europe, perhaps significantly, the idea seems not to antedate the rise of Islam. But such thinking is not just older in Islam than it appears to be in Western Christianity, it also bulks larger.²¹¹

Under modern conditions all this has tended to put the Islamic heritage in the limelight. On the one hand Muslims who find jihad in one way or another embarrassing have generated a large amount of apologetic—and this includes such pioneers of Islamism as Mawdūdī and Quṭb. And on the other hand Muslims disposed to engage in military violence against others have found in it a perfect charter for jihadism, a justification of their struggle and an inspiration for their practice of irregular warfare in areas of chaos. The Hindu heritage, by contrast, does little for modern Hindus beyond providing a basis for polemic against Islam. The Hindu nationalists’ concept of religious war looks like a modern calque, and their idea of the martyr who falls in combat against non-Hindus is transparently a borrowing from Islam. Meanwhile, the Christian heritage, as might be expected, has been used in antithetical ways insofar as it has been used at all: on the one hand we have the Cristeros with their cult of martyrdom, and on the other hand the reluctance of the Liberationists to do more than flirt with Marxist violence. In sum, no heritage is a reliable predictor of the behavior of those who inherit it, but just as surely heritages are not interchangeable.

___________

1 Gethin, “Buddhist monks,” 62. See also Schmithausen, “Buddhist attitude towards war,” 45.

² Gethin, “Buddhist monks,” 62, and see also 72; also Schmithausen, “Buddhist attitude towards war,” 48.

³ McLeod, Textual sources, 77–78; and see McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 171 §190, 173 §250.

⁴ McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 150 §10, and see 213n32.

⁵ Ibid., 160 §121.

⁶ Ibid., 171 §196, §200. Such rule books are likely to date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

⁷ Gethin, “Buddhist monks,” 62–63; Schmithausen, “Buddhist attitude towards war,” 56–57 (for similar sentiments in Mahāyāna Buddist texts, see 57–58). Contrast the remorse felt by the north Indian emperor Aśoka a century earlier following his conquest of Kalinga, which led him to adopt a notion of peaceful victory (dhammavijaya, “victory by dharma”), in which nobody gets hurt (see the translation of the relevant rock edict in Thapar, Aśoka, 255–57; for the relevant passages in the original texts, see U. Schneider, Grossen Felsen-Edikte Aśokas, 76 P, 78 U, 80 X, and Schneider’s commentary, 174). Unfortunately this well-meaning idea does not seem to have had much of a future.

⁸ See Kent, “Onward Buddhist soldiers,” 166–67, and cf. 169.

⁹ For the strategies used to legitimate their use of armed force, see Taira, “La légitimation de la violence,” 100–103; and cf. also Adolphson, Teeth and claws, 55 (I owe my knowledge of both these studies to Kazuo Morimoto). Taira’s analysis shows that, as might be expected, these strategies do not call in question the basic principle of non-violence but rather seek to sideline or override it; thus a document of 1173 presents a refusal to soil one’s hands with violence for the sake of the well-being of all creatures as a Hinayana trait associated with an exclusive concern for individual salvation (Taira, “La légitimation de la violence,” 101–2). Perhaps the most notorious development of Buddhist militancy in Japan took place in the chaotic conditions of the sixteenth century. At least in the case of the leading Pure Land sect, the Honganji, the leadership seems not to have confronted the problem of finding a Buddhist justification for warfare (Tsang, War and faith, 228), though Pure Land priests of the Jishū sect had special battlefield rituals to help warriors attain rebirth in the Pure Land despite dying in a state of sin (288n88). There was a popular but unorthodox belief among Honganji members that fighting in defense of the sect would guarantee rebirth in the Pure Land, and the patriarch of the sect seems to have done nothing to discourage this idea (231). It fits with this that we hear of a banner borne into battle with the injunction: “Advance and be reborn in paradise. Retreat and fall immediately into hell” (229).

¹⁰ McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 156 §80, 183 §444–45, and see 219n106. There are three rules the violation of which cannot be forgiven, one of them being the shaving of the head or beard.

¹¹ For an interesting account of the difference it made in the context of the war against the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, see Frydenlund, “Canonical ambiguity.” Monks do not fight (108–9), and it is not appropriate for them to make outright demands for war (102), though they can call for the protection of the country (97, 102–3); when consoling soldiers they do not readily provide outright justification for the use of violence (109). Soldiers need to be consoled because they are concerned about the effects of their violence on their future rebirths (106, 109), and they may not pray to the Buddha for military success (104). For all this, see also Kent, “Onward Buddhist soldiers.” None of these problems would arise in an Islamic context. Monks nevertheless played a significant role in preventing the resolution of the conflict through political compromise, and some of the military violence was atrocious. The volumes containing the papers of Frydenlund and Kent offer several further studies of Buddhist accommodations of military violence.

¹² Other things are not, of course, equal: there have been many Buddhist states in history, some of them long lasting, but only one relatively short-lived Sikh state.

¹³ Note that this chapter does not attempt to cover the regulation of the conduct of warfare, nor does it discuss rebellion against rulers deemed to have apostatized.

¹⁴ Ibn Hisham, Sīra, 3–4: 608.13 = 659 (27 ghazawāt), 609.6 = 660 (38 buʿūth and sarāyā); Wāqidī, Maghāzī, 7.14 (27 maghāzī), 7.16 (47 sarāyā).

¹⁵ Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 1–2: 591.14 = 281, 595.13 = 283, 600.13 = 286, 601.15 = 286.

¹⁶ An example is the group of five men who used deceit to kill Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf (ibid., 3–4: 54.10 = 367–68).

¹⁷ Ibid., 1–2: 706.15 = 336 (Badr), 3–4: 65.19 = 373 (Uḥud), 220.2 = 452 (the Khandaq), 309.1 = 500 (Ḥudaybiya, and see 349.15, 350.4 = 521–22, supporting the larger figure), 400.4 = 545, 421.8 = 557 (the conquest of Mecca), and 440.17 = 567–68 (Ḥunayn).

¹⁸ A.H.M. Jones, Later Roman Empire, 684–85.

¹⁹ Ibn Hisham, Sīra, 3–4: 608.13 = 659.

²⁰ There is a convenient listing of expeditions in Wāqidī, Maghāzī, 2–7.

²¹ Ibn Hisham, Sīra, 3–4: 609.2 = 660.

²² Ibid., 3–4: 79.12 = 380.

²³ Ibid., 3–4: 216.3 = 450; see above, 185–86.

²⁴ Ibid., 1–2: 620.7 = 296–97.

²⁵ Ibid., 3–4: 63.5 = 371–72.

²⁶ Ibid., 3–4: 316.11, 317.17 = 504. In fact the truce lasted less than two years.

²⁷ Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, 26.16 = 27.

²⁸ See, for example, Nicholson, Literary history, 79–82.

²⁹ The term jihād literally means “effort” and can be used in this sense in nonmilitary contexts, but the default sense of the word in most Arabic texts is “religious war”—religious in the sense that it is waged for God against his enemies. As a seventeenth-century author puts it, the legal sense of the term is fighting the unbelievers, as by smiting them, plundering them, destroying their places of worship, and smashing their idols (Shaykhzāda, Majmaʿ al-anhur, 395.6, in a passage translated in Wendell, Five tracts, 147–48).

³⁰ The word rendered “terrify” is turhibūna.

³¹ Bukhārī, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 1: 14.10 (īmān 17).

³² Literally “my livelihood has been placed in the shadow of my lance.”

³³ Ibn Ḥanbal, Musnad, 2: 50.21, and similarly 92.18, drawn to my attention by Bernard Haykel. These versions add the statement, “He who imitates a people is one of them.”

³⁴ Bukhārī, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 2: 199.6 (jihād 2).

³⁵ Wensinck, Early Muhammadan tradition, 146–48; and see EI², art. “Shahīd” (E. Kohlberg), 204.

³⁶ Bukhārī, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 2: 206.11 (jihād 21).

³⁷ Ibid., 2: 201.13 (jihād 7).

³⁸ See Shoshan, Popular culture, chap. 2, and Paret, Die legendäre Maghāzi-Literatur, 1–58.

³⁹ Imber, “What does ghazi actually mean?,” 174.

⁴⁰ Imber, Ottoman Empire, 120.

⁴¹ A “holy warrior,” as Imber puts it (“What does ghazi actually mean?,”167).

⁴² Ḥajjī, Ḥaraka, 215.16. As usual, scholars complained that enthusiasm for jihad was not what it had been. One lambasted the feebleness of jihad in his day, attributing this backsliding to love of this world and reluctance to sacrifice one’s life in God’s cause, and contrasting the attitude of Muḥammad’s Companions and the success that God bestowed on them in reward; today, he complained, the Muslims are numerous, but the damage they inflict on the unbelievers is negligible (206.10).

⁴³ For this idea, see EI², art. “Ṣulḥ-i kull” (M. Athar Ali).

⁴⁴ M. Cook, Commanding right, 468.

⁴⁵ See, for example, Marghīnānī, Hidāya, 1–2: 426.4. For a useful set of extracts from legal works of the various Sunnī law schools setting out the distinction between offensive and defensive jihad, see Bannā, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 50–3 = Wendell, Five tracts, 147–50.

⁴⁶ Shaykhzāda, Majmaʿ al-anhur, 395.11, in a passage translated in Wendell, Five tracts, 147–48.

⁴⁷ Marghīnānī, Hidāya, 1–2: 426.17.

⁴⁸ For the legal position of Muslims residing in the territory of a non-Muslim state, see Abou El Fadl, “Islamic law,” 172–81.

⁴⁹ For a presentation of a rich body of evidence of this phenomenon, see Tor, Violent order, 68–77, 81.

⁵⁰ Cf. 26.

⁵¹ For the argument that such warfare was subsumed under the law of rebellion, see B. Lewis, Political language of Islam, 80–83.

⁵² For the way the Ottomans went about this, see Imber, Ottoman Empire, 121–22.

⁵³ To the example from Muslim India cited above (26n111) we can add one from Muslim Spain (Fierro, ʿAbd al-Rahman III, 63).

⁵⁴ For surveys of such movements see Peters, Islam and colonialism, chap. 3, and D. Cook, Understanding jihad, 78–90.

⁵⁵ See, for example, Peters, Islam and colonialism, 48, 49, 65, 85, 97–98. In the two cases discussed by Peters involving states with regular armies, the point of the invocation of jihad was to rally wider support, as in the Egyptian resistance to the British occupation of 1882 (79), and the Ottoman declaration of jihad in 1914 that sought to foment Muslim unrest against the British and French (90–91).

⁵⁶ For this strain, see D. Cook, Understanding jihad, 35–39, 46–48, and for its modern apologetic use, cf. 165–66.

⁵⁷ For the pull of this view, see Peters, Islam and colonialism, 124–27; Schleifer, “Jihad,” 27–37; D. Cook, Understanding jihad, 95–96, 122, and cf. 125.

⁵⁸ As Roman law has it, “vim enim vi defendere omnes leges omniaque iura permittunt” (Justinian, Digest, 1: 291.2, quoted in Russell, Just war, 41).

⁵⁹ See Peters, Islam and colonialism, 122–23, 124, 127; March, Islam and liberal citizenship, 201–4.

⁶⁰ This is the case with Qaraḍāwī’s discussion of the question (see Qaraḍāwī, Fiqh al-jihād, 1194.22, and for his identification of his position as defensive (difāʿī), 256.12; cf. also 240.22, 241.2, 256.1, 433.8, 1193.12). I owe my knowledge of Qaraḍāwī’s discussion of this point to Andrew March.

⁶¹ Compare the case of the distinguished Pakistani scholar Muḥammad Taqī ʿUthmānī (Zaman, Modern Islamic thought, 284–87).

⁶² EI², art. “Mawdūdī” (F.C.R. Robinson), 872b.

⁶³ Mawdūdī, Jihād, 3.3; for this work, first published in 1962, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 37 no. 68.

⁶⁴ Mawdūdī, Jihād, 10.11.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 35.9.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 41.7. For the phrase al-jihād al-Islāmī, see also 18.13.

⁶⁷ Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, 243–63.

⁶⁸ Quṭb, Maʿālim, 81.7 = 75–76; see also 58.1 = 56, 59.10 = 57, 64.15 = 61–62, and Carré, Mysticism and politics, 299–305. By way of comparison, we may note that Saʿīd Ḥawwā has a similarly apologetic tone (see Ḥawwā, Rasūl, 2: 225.13), whereas Ḥasan al-Bannā’s discussion of jihad is far less apologetic (Bannā, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 54.8 = Wendell, Five tracts, 151; and see Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers, 207–8).

⁶⁹ Quṭb, Maʿālim, 63.21 = 61, 74.25 = 70; see also Quṭb, Hādhā ʾl-dīn, 87.17 = 88–89; Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 163.10 = 213; and Carré, Mysticism and politics, 299–305. Compare the observation of Aquinas that “Christ’s faithful often wage war on infidels, not indeed for the purpose of forcing them to believe, because even were they to conquer them and take them captive, they should still leave them free to believe or not, but for the purpose of stopping them obstructing the faith of Christ” (Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 32: 62.5 = 63 (2a2ae. 10, 8)).

⁷⁰ For this celebrated affirmation of ʿAzzām’s, see Musallam, From secularism to jihad, 191.

⁷¹ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 227.1 = 286. Likewise a discussion of the nature of Islamic conquest (ṭabīʿat al-fatḥ al-Islāmī) is directed to establishing the righteousness of the activity, not to encouraging it (Quṭb, Dirāsāt Islāmiyya, 28–39, and see especially 36.12). On his treatment of jihad in his Koran commentary, see Carré, Mysticism and politics, chap. 10.

⁷² See Shepard, Sayyid Qutb, lxi n1 (translating the suppressed dedication of the first edition of Quṭb’s ʿAdāla with its reference to future Muslim youth killing and being killed, cf. Q9:111), and Musallam, From secularism to jihad, 133–34 (on the jihad of the Muslim Brothers against the British in the Canal Zone in 1951); for a list of such contexts, see Carré, Mysticism and politics, 250.

⁷³ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 228.20 = 288.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 229.23 = 290.

⁷⁵ Carré, Mysticism and politics, 306.

⁷⁶ One could, of course, interpret Quṭb not just as defending the moral standing of jihad but also as itching to engage in it as soon as conditions made it possible to do so. But the way he writes does not strike me this way.

⁷⁷ For a graphic description of the jihadi film Badr al-Riyāḍ, celebrating a terrorist attack mounted in Riyadh in May 2003, see Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi state, 158–63.

⁷⁸ See, for example, Lawrence, Messages, 74, 158, 192. Bin Laden’s training camp in Afghanistan was a maʾsada, a “place that abounds in lions” (32). Compare the Sikh use of the title singh, “lion.”

⁷⁹ Ibid., 194, and cf. 192. One needs to remember that the target population for recruitment purposes is identified by Bin Laden as the cohort aged fifteen to twenty-five (see ibid., 91).

⁸⁰ See the passage by Bin Laden quoted in Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine,” 537.

⁸¹ Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi state, 156–57.

⁸² As might be expected, Mawdūdī and Quṭb have a prominent place in the religious genealogy of the leaders of al-Qāʿida. Ẓawāhirī describes Sayyid Quṭb as “the most prominent theoretician” of radical Islamism (Mansfield, His own words, 137) and says that his call for the acknowledgment of God’s unity and sovereignty was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad (48, and see 49–50); he quotes both Mawdūdī and Quṭb (for Mawdūdī, see Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 123, 130; for Quṭb, see 128, 131–33). Bin Laden in his student days read books by Sayyid Quṭb and heard lectures by his brother Muḥammad Quṭb (L. Wright, Looming tower, 79, on the authority of a fellow student and close friend of Bin Laden).

⁸³ For the authorship, see Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 285n2, and for the date, see 27.

⁸⁴ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 32. For the similar view of Faraj, see Jansen, Neglected duty, 193 §71.

⁸⁵ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 41; see above, 220.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 42.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 43.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 46–47; similarly Faraj in Jansen, Neglected duty, 193 §71.

⁸⁹ Compare the championing of offensive jihad in a jihadi text translated in D. Cook, Understanding jihad, 184–85, 188.

⁹⁰ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 102; Lawrence, Messages, 60; and cf. Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 114, and Lawrence, Messages, 61, 202.

⁹¹ See 222.

⁹² Lawrence, Messages, 236.

⁹³ Ibid., 238.

⁹⁴ Another likely example is the emphasis on the place of booty in jihad, which may reach the point of being purely symbolic. Thus a document instructing the hijackers of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center in 2001—men with little prospective use for booty—counsels as follows: “Do not forget to take some of the spoils, even if only a cup of water, to drink from it and offer it to your brothers to drink, if possible” (Euben and Zaman, Readings in Islamist thought, 471).

⁹⁵ Lawrence, Messages, 120. This is not just an extremist view—Qaraḍāwī too makes such a distinction (Zaman, Modern Islamic thought, 274n33).

⁹⁶ See the text translated in Lia, Architect of global jihad, 382–90.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 385, and see 42; and see Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 148, for the view of the radical cleric Ḥamūd al-Shuʿaybī in November 2001, and Lahoud, “Jihadi recantations,” 148, for the view of Sayyid Imām that to deny the legality of terrorism in Islam is unbelief. The verb translated “terrify” is turhibūna, of which irhāb, the modern Arabic term for terrorism, is the verbal noun. However, the verse would seem to refer to regular, rather than irregular warfare.

⁹⁸ Lia, Architect of global jihad, 389–90.

⁹⁹ Lawrence, Messages, 118–19.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 231. For the key role of authoritative scholars in granting or withholding legitimation for jihadi activities in the Saudi context, see Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 83–84, 125, 148, 153, 202, 222.

¹⁰¹ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 156–57; and cf. Ibrahim’s comment (138). By contrast, Ẓawāhirī’s tactical justification is straightforward: such operations are the most effective in inflicting damage on the opponent and the least costly in terms of casualties among the jihadis (Mansfield, His own words, 200, 223; the translator uses the phrase “suicide operations” in the first passage and “martyrdom operations” in the second). On the casuistry of martyrdom operations see D. Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, 149–53.

¹⁰² Mansfield, His own words, 104.

¹⁰³ Lawrence, Messages, 56. Cf. L.Wright, Looming tower, 108, and above, 221.

¹⁰⁴ D. Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, especially 144–45, 147–48, 154–61.

¹⁰⁵ Ḥusayn ibn Maḥmūd, Muḥammad, 4.10, 4.17; I owe my copy to Nelly Lahoud.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 5.5, 6.2, 6.11.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 6.13.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 7.2. The word I render as “terrorizing” is irhāb.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 7.9.

¹¹⁰ Shinqīṭī, Numūdhaj, 13.8.

¹¹¹ Abū Baṣīr, Hākadhā, 6.14 (yaqūdu … bi-nafsihi; the phrase is repeated many times in the next five pages). I owe my copy of this electronic pamphlet to Nelly Lahoud.

¹¹² Ibid., 7.1, 10.18.

¹¹³ Ibid., 11.6, 12.7.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 11.19, and see 11.8, 11.16. Compare the view of Faraj: “Neglecting jihād is the cause of the lowness, humiliation, division and fragmentation in which the Muslims live today” (Jansen, Neglected duty, 205 §100, and cf. 160f §3).

¹¹⁵ Lawrence, Messages, 235. Having the option of making such a truce with the Israelis has been politically helpful for Ḥamās (see Mishal and Sela, Palestinian Hamas, 3, 71, 86, 108).

¹¹⁶ L. Wright, Looming tower, 132–33, quoting from notes on a meeting in Peshawar in 1988. Cf. also Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi state, 159 (on the film Badr al-Riyāḍ); Rougier, Everyday jihad, 209–10; Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, 42, 204 (with the figure as 313, as in Wāqidī, Maghāzī, 152.15). See above, 218.

¹¹⁷ See 49. Setting out the need to plan the development of Muslim military power in a book written in 1987, he starts with the point that modern warfare requires regular armies (juyūsh niẓāmiyya) with the requisite manpower and equipment (Ḥawwā, Jund Allāh takhṭīṭan, 117.6, and see 119.12; the armies in question seem to be those of the existing Muslim states). Later in the passage he also allows for guerrilla warfare (ḥarb al-ʿiṣābāt) and even finds references to it in the Koran (117.21, citing Q9:41 and Q4:71; in the latter verse he glosses thubāt as ʿiṣābāt); but he seems to see it as in the first instance something to be undertaken by states (118.1), though later he adds an endorsement of people’s war (al-jihād al-shaʿbī, 118.26). Despite the date, the charm of the jihadi lifestyle is not yet in evidence here (for the date of writing, see 144.22).

¹¹⁸ See the passage from Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī’s treatise “The global Islamic resistance call” translated in Lia, Architect of global jihad, 461.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 371 item 1.

¹²⁰ Mansfield, His own words, 214, and likewise 201; for the similar view of Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī see Lia, Architect of global jihad, 371. Compare Mearsheimer, Great power politics, 86: “Armies are of paramount importance in warfare because they are the main military instrument for conquering and controlling land.”

¹²¹ Mansfield, His own words, 201-2, 213–15, 225; and cf. V. Brown, Cracks, 9. Compare Ẓawāhirī’s remark in his letter to Zarqāwī of 2005 that the battles fought in the far-flung regions of the Islamic world—such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia—are just a foundation for the major battles that have begun to be fought in the heart of the Islamic world (Mansfield, His own words, 252–53).

¹²² Mansfield, His own words, 28.

¹²³ Ibid., 113.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 201; similarly 214, speaking of the heart of the Islamic world.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 201.

¹²⁶ See the discussion of “types of warfare” in Landau-Tasseron, “Pre-conquest Muslim army,” 303–16, especially the summing-up (316).

¹²⁷ Lia, Architect of global jihad, 363.

¹²⁸ Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 3—4: 324.4 = 508.

¹²⁹ As quoted in Shepard, “Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine,” 537 (the awkward translation is not his). For the Prophetic tradition, see, for example, Bayhaqī, Sunan, 10:192.2 (innamā buʿithtu li-utammima makārim al-akhlāq).

¹³⁰ See Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 5: 944–7; also Bodewitz, “Hindu ahiṁsā,” 19–20.

¹³¹ Manu, Laws, 243 (10.63); and cf. 124 (6.75), 273 (11.223), 286 (12.83).

¹³² Basham, Wonder that was India, 32.

¹³³ Ibid., 233–34.

¹³⁴ So the Dharmasūtra of Gautama in Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 94 (10.17).

¹³⁵ Manu, Laws, 249 (10.119).

¹³⁶ Ibid., 138 (7.101, and similarly 7.99); cf. also 139 (7.107, 109).

¹³⁷ Ibid., 232 (9.323).

¹³⁸ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 209–212. Outside the legal tradition there was indeed a view that all this was evil (see Zaehner, Hinduism, 155, quoting the Mahābhārata), but the law takes no account of this moral agonizing.

¹³⁹ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 57–58, 211–12.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 3: 211, and cf. 58 (quoting Parāśara, for whose date see 1: 464).

¹⁴¹ K. W. Jones, Arya Dharm, 146; cf. also K. W. Jones, “Two sanātan dharma leaders,” 239 (quoting Vivekānanda).

¹⁴² Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 57–58, 71, 209–10.

¹⁴³ Ibid., 2: 16, quoting Medhātithi (for whose date see 1: 583); and see Jha, Manusmṛti, 3: 238–39 (to Manu 2:23). Medhātithi here entertains the possibility of a Hindu conquest of land outside Āryāvarta.

¹⁴⁴ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 923, citing various Purāṇas with the comment that this is “very small consolation.” In typically Hindu style this eschatological catharsis will also eliminate Śūdra kings. A late seventeenth-century source is less patient, offering the suggestion that Śivājī (ruled 1674–1680) might be “the first harbinger of that Kalkin” whose role is to “destroy the hordes of Yavanas” (926), in other words the Muslims.

¹⁴⁵ Bīrūnī, Taḥqīq, 10.5 = trans. Sachau, 1: 19.

¹⁴⁶ Ghurye, Indian Sadhus, 110–27, 201–11. More recent discussions can be found in Lorenzen, “Warrior ascetics,” and Pinch, “Soldier monks,” especially 148–56. If the phenomenon had a doctrinal basis, these studies do not mention it.

¹⁴⁷ Ghurye, Indian Sadhus, 124–26.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 201.

¹⁴⁹ See McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 7–8, on the place of Nānak (d. 1539), the first Sikh Guru, in the Sant tradition of northern India.

¹⁵⁰ McLeod, Sikh community, 14–15.

¹⁵¹ See McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 32; McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 170 §183.

¹⁵² McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 168 §166.

¹⁵³ Ibid., 157 §94.

¹⁵⁴ Ibid., 151 §17.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., 156 §79.

¹⁵⁶ McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 50; McLeod, Textual sources, 78; and see McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 171 §200, 175 §279.

¹⁵⁷ According to the British census of 1881, the Sikhs then numbered 1.7 million (McLeod, Sikh community, 93).

¹⁵⁸ McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 49–50.

¹⁵⁹ McLeod, Textual sources, 79; and see McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 171 §201, 194 §595, 195 §606.

¹⁶⁰ McLeod, Chaupa Singh Rahit-nama, 150 §10.

¹⁶¹ For a convenient survey of their history over several centuries, see EI², art. “Djāt́” (A. S. Bazmi Ansari). Some of them moved—or were moved—to Iraq and other core regions of the Islamic world and were already making trouble there in early Islamic times; for this, see the survey in EI², art. “Zuṭṭ” (C. E. Bosworth).

¹⁶² McLeod, Sikh community, 87–88. For the forms Jāṭ and Jaṭ, see McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 111; for simplicity I use the first throughout.

¹⁶³ McLeod, Sikh community, 9–14, 51–52, 92–93.

¹⁶⁴ Jordens, Dayānanda Sarasvatī, 268–69.

¹⁶⁵ K. W. Jones, Arya Dharm, 145.

¹⁶⁶ Ibid., 149–50, 193–94, 334.

¹⁶⁷ The incidents of Hindu nationalist terrorism against Muslims in recent years are a practical example of this phenomenon.

¹⁶⁸ McGregor, Oxford Hindi-English dictionary, 525b.

¹⁶⁹ Macdonell, Practical Sanskrit dictionary, 130c, gives the term only in the sense of “fair contest,” i.e., a contest conducted in accordance with dharma. The other dictionaries I consulted do not have the word.

¹⁷⁰ The earliest such use of the term that I have come upon dates from 1919 (Jordens, Swāmī Shraddhānanda, 110, in a context of nationalist agitation against the British). Hansen states that the term is taken from the writings of V. D. Sāvarkar (d. 1966) (Hansen, Saffron wave, 164). See also R. Guha, India after Gandhi, 238, 299.

¹⁷¹ Hansen, “BJP,” 132.

¹⁷² Shah, “BJP’s riddle,” 248-49; cf. also Shakir, “Analytical view,” 93 (Ahmedabad in 1969).

¹⁷³ Katzenstein et al., “Rebirth of Shiv Sena,” 385, citing an editorial of January 14, 1993; and cf. 374, 386, 387.

¹⁷⁴ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement.

¹⁷⁵ K. W. Jones, Arya Dharm, 195. I do not know when this term first appears in Hindu sources.

¹⁷⁶ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 421–23 (Ayodhyā ke śahīdoṁ ko zindābād; the form śahīd transliterates the Hindi orthography). For the seventy-seven battles, see also 402 and above, 92.

¹⁷⁷ The idea of martyrdom is not entirely absent from traditional Hindu sources: heaven is the reward of those who die in a number of ways, including death in the course of protecting a cow or a Brahmin or in an attempt to prevent miscegenation between the four classes (Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3:58; cf. Manu, Laws, 109–10 (5.95), 243 (10.62)).

¹⁷⁸ See 66.

¹⁷⁹ Lutgendorf, “Interpreting Rāmrāj,” 285n30.

¹⁸⁰ Housley, “Necessary evil?,” 271.

¹⁸¹ For the historically problematic background to this doctrine, see Walzer, In God’s shadow, chap. 3.

¹⁸² This was to be a favorite Biblical quotation of Pope Gregory VII (in office 1073–1085), see Bartlett, Making of Europe, 260.

¹⁸³ Bloch, Feudal society, 316.

¹⁸⁴ Paul tells Timothy to endure hardship “as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (bonus miles Christi Iesu, 2 Tim. 2:3) and twice describes a coworker as a “fellowsoldier” (commilito, Philippians 2:25 and Philemon 2). I am indebted to John Gager for putting me on the right track here.

¹⁸⁵ Brundage, Medieval canon law, 19–20, 22–23, 27.

¹⁸⁶ For examples see Kedar, Crusade and mission, 97–98, 193.

¹⁸⁷ As the author of a monograph on the subject puts it, “Fundamental criticism of the concept itself was rare” (Siberry, Criticism of crusading, 220).

¹⁸⁸ Ibid., 12, 84.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid., 207–8.

¹⁹⁰ Brundage, “Humbert of Romans,” 306, 309–10.

¹⁹¹ Russell, Just war, 294–96; Mastnak, Crusading peace, 74–78. Aquinas holds the legitimacy of all wars to depend on the same three conditions, namely the authority of the sovereign (auctoritas principis), just cause (causa justa), and right intention (intentio … recta), without making any fundamental distinction between wars against believers and those against unbelievers (Summa theologiae, 35: 80.27 = 81–83 (2a2ae. 40, 1)).

¹⁹² For more or less positive answers, see Russell, Just war, 198, 201; for more or less negative answers, see 122–23, 197, 198, 199, 255, 294; for cases where the answer is unclear, see 112, 114–15, 252, 257. For an early fifteenth-century controversy on the question whether peaceful infidels (not in this case Muslims) may be attacked, as the Teutonic Knights maintained they could be, see Belch, Paulus Vladimiri, 418–19, 459, 709–10 (especially the second principle), 713; I owe my knowledge of this controversy to Patricia Crone.

¹⁹³ See Russell, Just war, 294.

¹⁹⁴ Ibid., 122, 199, 201, 253.

¹⁹⁵ Occasionally the answer limits irredentism to the Holy Land (ibid., 122, 201); but for cases where the answer is left unclear, see 198-99, 255, 257.

¹⁹⁶ For some early examples, see Siberry, Criticism of crusading, 75–77, and in general her summary, 217–18.

¹⁹⁷ As Siberry puts it, “At a popular level there was a tendency to accuse God of deserting his people” (ibid., 69).

¹⁹⁸ Hagenmeyer, Anonymi Gesta Francorum, 359 (XXVII, 4).

¹⁹⁹ Siberry, Criticism of crusading, 194. For other examples see 193–94.

²⁰⁰ “Vamos, valientes cruzados / Vamos, vamos a luchar / Vámonos con Cristo Rey / Su Reinado a conquistar” (J. A. Meyer, Cristiada, 3: 280n22); cf. also Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, 33.

²⁰¹ J. A. Meyer, Cristero rebellion, 190–93. The cult was continued by the Sinarquists (Serrano Álvarez, Batalla del espíritu, 1:291–5); they had sixty-four martyrs by the end of 1940 (293).

²⁰² J. A. Meyer, Cristiada, 3: 280.

²⁰³ Sigmund, Liberation theology, 113.

²⁰⁴ Ibid., 110–11; for Torres, see 25.

²⁰⁵ Boff, Faith on the edge, 137; he clearly sees the Zealots as the Marxist guerrillas of the day.

²⁰⁶ Ibid., 139.

²⁰⁷ Ibid., 142.

²⁰⁸ Ibid., 143.

²⁰⁹ A quite different Christian milieu is that of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. Given the strong tradition of gun ownership and the abundant supply of weapons in the country, the relative marginality of armed violence among its religious fundamentalists is striking.

²¹⁰ See Erdmann, Idea of crusade, 122–23, describing it as a novelty. Two Byzantine emperors had already favored the idea, the first being Heraclius (ruled 610–641) in the context of war against the Persian empire (see Howard-Johnson, “Heraclius’ Persian campaigns,” 85), and the second Nicephorus Phocas (ruled 963–969), whose attempt to introduce it was frustrated by the church (see Canard, “La guerre sainte,” 617–18; Viscuso, “Christian participation,” 37–38). I owe these references to Patricia Crone.

²¹¹ D. Cook, Martyrdom in Islam, 30, 166.