Religion doesn't fuel war but inhibits it - The Jewish Chronicle

One of the received ideas of the modern West is that religion is an essentially private pursuit that should never intrude on public life; it is also thought to be so prone to violence that it must be rigorously excluded from politics. But the secular ideal is a purely Western invention that dates only from the 18th century.

In the pre-modern world, spirituality pervaded all human activities - including politics and warfare - so thoroughly that trying to confine it to a separate sphere would have been like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail. The prophets had harsh words for those members of the ruling class who observed the temple rituals punctiliously but ignored the plight of the poor and, in the Talmud, the rabbis aimed to bring the whole of life within the ambit of the sacred.

Jesus may have told his followers to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" but, in first-century Palestine, where every Jewish uprising against Rome was inspired by the conviction that the Land of Israel and its produce belonged entirely to God, there was precious little to "give back" to Caesar. The bedrock message of the Quran is that it is good to create a society where the vulnerable are treated with equity and respect, because this was a matter of sacred import.

Before the modern period, therefore, every state ideology was imbued with religion, and because all states depend upon force, warfare acquired a sacral aura but was never divorced from more pragmatic considerations. The Crusades were certainly fuelled by religious passion, but the Pope's goal was also to extend the power of Christendom eastward. The Crusaders definitely believed that they were avenging Christ when they attacked the Jewish communities in Germany, but, as Norman Cohn has shown, the cities of the Rhineland were developing an innovative commercial economy in which Jews played a major role and were resented by both the aristocracy and the poorer townsfolk.

Much of the religiously articulated violence we see today also blends religious with secular concerns. In the ideology of Hamas, nationalism (which has no Islamic roots) melds seamlessly with religious fervour. It seems that disaffected Baathists and members of Saddam's disbanded army are fighting alongside the diehard jihadists of IS, and that the young who hasten to join them have been groomed in internet chat rooms rather than the mosque. MI5's behavioural science unit noted that many of them are not observant Muslims and that some lack basic religious literacy. Two wannabe jihadists ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon when they set out from Birmingham for Syria last May.

Secularism has liberated religion from collusion with the martial violence of the state... but it also has an aggression of its own

Bellicose passages common in all our scriptures are often claimed to incite violence and terrorism. Yet these are always tempered by other equally authoritative texts that advocate peace and reconciliation. The Quran has no coherent teaching on warfare and calls to offensive warfare regularly segue into demands for peace and clemency. The brutality of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament is countered by Jesus's command to turn the other cheek. In Deuteronomy, Moses calls for the extermination of all native Canaanites but, in Leviticus, God rules that: "If a stranger lives with you in your land do not molest him. You must treat him as one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt."

In the past, therefore, religion has inhibited violence. For instance, after the disastrous Bar Kochba revolt (132-35), rabbinic Midrash deliberately excised any adulation of belligerence from the biblical tradition, depicting David and Joshua as pious Torah scholars instead of intrepid warriors, and persuading Jews to refrain from political aggression for almost a millennium.

Secularism has been beneficial in many ways, not least because it has liberated religion from collusion with the structural and martial violence of the state. But it also has an aggression of its own. The ghastly public beheadings of the IS represent the darker side of modernity. During the French Revolution, which created the first secular state in Europe, 17,000 people were guillotined and, in 1794, when the revolutionary armies put down a rebellion against the regime's anti-Catholic policies in the Vendee, some 250,000 people were ruthlessly massacred.

In the modern Middle East, the forcible imposition of secularism has resulted in the development of newly extremist forms of Islam. Modernising rulers have tortured and assassinated Muslim clergy, confiscated their property, dismantled their sacred institutions, and shot down hundreds of demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress. In such a climate, secularism has acquired an aura of absolute evil.

In the 1950s, President Jamal Abdul Nasser interred thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, most of them without trial and for doing nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets. One was Sayed Qutb, who became a fundamentalist in the horror of Nasser's prison, where he wrote Milestones. This book - the work of a man who has been pushed too far - was eagerly read by the younger Brothers in jail, and after release they took it into mainstream society so that it became the bible of Sunni fundamentalism. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, convinced that the secular establishment wants to eradicate its members' faith and their way of life.

Secular nationalism has developed its own brand of violence. The industrialisation of society required an integrated population, standardised literacy and a shared language. Over the years, the nation-state has inspired quasi-religious emotions; indeed, if we define the sacred as that for which we are prepared to die, the nation has in some sense replaced God, since it is now admirable to die for your country but not to die for your faith. But Lord Acton (1834-1902) predicted with chilling accuracy that this sacralisation of ethnicity, language and culture would make ethnic minorities so vulnerable that, in certain circumstances, they would be "exterminated or reduced to servitude or put in a condition of dependence."

As the Jewish people would tragically discover, an inability to tolerate minorities has indeed been the Achilles' heel of the nation-state. A new antisemitism developed, which drew on centuries of religious prejudice but gave it a scientific rationale, claiming Jews did not fit the biological and genetic profile of the Volk and should be eliminated like medicine cuts out a cancer. The horror of the Shoah would permeate much modern Jewish extremism. Not surprisingly, Jews developed their own national ethos; Zionism, initially a rebellion against religious Judaism, had its own religiosity. The early pioneers in Eretz Israel were called chalutzim, a term with biblical connotations of salvation, their migration an aliyah, a spiritual ascent.

B ut Zionism did not become a religious force in Israel until after the Six-Day War. "The State of Israel is a divine entity," Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook maintained; every clod of its soil was holy and its secular institutions divine. The idolatry of the Land would make the presence of the Palestinian minority an abomination. For the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ideology was overshadowed by the Shoah, the "holiness" of the Jewish people meant they must be "set apart" and the Palestinians expelled.

The fusion of modern secular nationalism with religion had already surfaced perniciously in India. During the 1930s, M. S. Golwalkar, leader of the nationalist RSS party, declared foreigners and Muslims must either "lose their separate existence" or become entirely subordinated to the Hindu nation. In Israel and India, traditional sacred geography has been pervaded by an exclusive nationalism that has made the iconic monuments of past rulers so intolerable their destruction is deemed essential to the spiritual health of the nation - hence the plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (1977) and the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ajodhya, India, in 1992.

"Man hands on misery to man," wrote the late Philip Larkin; "it deepens like a coastal shelf." Secular atrocity has given birth to religious extremism born not of an inherent fanaticism but from suffering. Secularism has made our modernity possible and national mythology has created cohesion within the nation. But it has yet to develop what the Chinese sage Mozi (c.480-390 BCE) called jian ai, "concern for everybody" - an ideal that has become essential in our dangerously polarised world. The mythos of the nation-state has not encouraged citizens to love the stranger in their midst, to love and be loyal even to their enemies, and to reach out to "all tribes and nations" - an attitude that has been just as crucial to the religious quest as any crusade or jihad.