Acknowledgments
THE IDEAS IN this book have been germinating for some time, perhaps from my first exploration of the global rise of religious violence more than thirty years ago. The idea of cosmic war is something I have discussed in several essays and books. But I was not satisfied with these brief discussions. What I have wanted to explore more fully is why war and religion seem so oddly compatible with one another.
It is this question that has dogged me over the years. I made an earlier attempt to answer it in a series of lectures given at Princeton University. But afterwards the project languished for some time, until I received another opportunity to lecture on this topic while a visiting scholar at Münster University in Germany. Following the lectures I was finally able to knit these ideas together.
I am enormously grateful to Detlef Pollack, the director of the Religion and Politics Cluster of Excellence at Münster University (formally known as the Westfälische Wilhem Universität Münster), and to members of the faculty who provided a lively discussion of many of the ideas in this book. I also appreciated the editorial staff of Herder Verlag, Frankfurt, publishers of the German version, and the translator, Ulrike Berger, for rendering it into readable German. The English-language version has been shepherded into publication by the able staff at the New York offices of Oxford University Press. I am grateful to my editor, Cynthia Read, for her enthusiastic support and wise counsel as we have worked together toward its publication.
Acknowledging all the assistance I have received over the years would be exhausting, but I do want to recognize those who have assisted most recently. In Iraq, I appreciated the facilitation of arrangements by Prof. Dilshad Hamad of Tishk University in Erbil and Mushid Irwani of the Public Policy Institute, Erbil. For translation assistance I am grateful for Jeen Maltai in Dohuk and Shahid Burhan Hadi in Suliamaniya. In the Mindanao region of the Philippines, I appreciated the hospitality of Notre Dame University in Cotabato City, especially Fr. Francis Zabala, president, and Sheila Algabre, vice president for administration; for translating Tagalog I’m deeply grateful to Collin Dvorak. In India’s Punjab state, I am thankful for the assistance of three old friends, Mohinder Singh, Harish Puri, and Jagrup Singh Sekhon. For help in monitoring jihadi social media, my thanks to two of my students, Saba Sadri and Mufid Taha. For research support I am indebted to the Resolving Jihadist Conflicts Project of Uppsala University and its director, Isak Svennson. A host of other colleagues have helped me think about this topic, including Jahan Ahmed, Barzin Pakandam, and Jamel Velji, and my partners in the study of religion and violence, Margo Kitts, Michael Jerryson, and Mona Kanwal Sheikh.
As in all of my writings I am grateful for Sucheng Chan. Her own writings provide a model of conceptual clarity and textual fluidity that I have tried to emulate in the fifty years that we have lived together. Perhaps someday I might achieve it.
“THIS IS WAR,” the Filipino man muttered sadly as we looked across the river at the ruins of the town of Marawi. Just weeks ago, in a five-month siege, Marawi had been flattened by a military action aimed at ridding the city of an ISIS-affiliated Muslim separatist movement. As we looked at it now, the city lay in ruins, marked with the scars of battle.
His comment startled me. I too was dismayed to see the extent of the destruction, but I knew that there was some controversy over who was responsible, who started it, and whether the military assault had been justified. Just as the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria were devastated in the effort to free them from the evil grip of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, this push to drive out ISIS rebels in the Philippine state of Mindanao had seen cities reduced to rubble. The liberating armies had to destroy the cities in order to save them.
I agreed that these were heavy-handed military operations. They might have been misguided. But were they war? My Filipino companion quietly repeated his observation, as if stating the obvious. What did he mean, and what did he see that I didn’t?
I didn’t live in Marawi, of course. He did. His family home was in the midst of the inner city, and he had lived through months of bombs and social dislocation. Now he was facing the specter of a ruined city across the river.
“There’s nothing left,” he told me, showing videos of what remained of his family home, taken several days earlier on his cell phone. He was right—there was only a pile of brick and stone rubble where once a multistory house had proudly stood.
“My mother built that home with her sweat and toil,” he said. She had worked for years as a domestic housekeeper in Saudi Arabia, carefully sending the earnings back to her family in the Philippines. Part of the money was for their college education. The rest was for the house in Marawi.
Though earlier he had been mildly sympathetic with the Muslim separatist movement in Mindanao, he told me, his attitude had hardened after the fighting. He knew now that they were in a state of war.
War—what a remarkable notion. It enabled him to see everything differently, through new eyes. He could no longer trust the government to do what was right; he increasingly saw it as an enemy that was beyond redemption. One could only fight and attempt to conquer it in a scenario of struggle that engulfed every aspect of the social world around him.
It is a strange way of thinking, this idea of war. It turns the world upside down. It creates demonic enemies out of competitors and brings normal civil activity to a halt. It animates ordinary people into a state of action, allowing them to kill and be killed, and cheer when the enemy—whose lives may not be all that different from theirs, men and women with families and duties and dreams—is destroyed, sometimes brutally so.
Yet history is full of war. Perhaps more perplexing, religion is full of it. Human creativity in general revels in it. It saturates popular culture—plays and movies, novels and television stories, comic books and computer games. It is the prevailing image in the minds of those who have undertaken acts of terrorism in recent years. And it is the idea that animates those who have launched their own wars on terrorism against it.
It is a powerful notion, war, and a puzzling one. For decades I have been studying the rise of religious violence around the world, including from groups like ISIS and Christian white supremacy movements that have been involved in acts of terrorism. Invariably war is central to their thinking. All of the activists with whom I have spoken eventually got around to the subject.
“Mr. Mark, there’s a war going on,” I was told by a jihadi militant who was imprisoned for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. “We knew it was war,” a former fighter for ISIS told me when I talked with him in a prison in Iraq, “as soon as Saddam fell and the country was plunged into chaos and the Shi’a began oppressing us Sunnis.” “We’re at war,” a Buddhist monk in Myanmar told me in justifying Buddhist attacks on the Muslim minority in his country. “We’re in a culture war,” a Christian activist in the United States explained, adding, “It’s not a metaphor, but a real war.”
War is the central image in the worldview of virtually every religious extremist I have interviewed who was engaged in violent acts. Behind the moral justification of using violence in savage attacks are images of great confrontations, of war on a transcendent scale. My fascination with these notions of war has deepened into a profound curiosity about what war is and why it seems to emerge so spontaneously in response to situations of extreme shock, humiliation, and stress. I want to understand war, to understand how this template of the human imagination can transform our view of the world around us, and what religion has to do with it.
This book is about war—the idea of war, why it is so appealing, and why it is often associated with religion. I want to know why war needs religion and why religion needs war. What fascinates me is the idea of war—war in the mind. I am less interested in the actual use of lethal weapons than the worldview that makes that usage possible. I know that much has been written about the strategic decisions that go into warfare, about the cold calculations weighing economic benefits or political leverage against the cost of soldiers’ lives, and about the political and moral justifications that allow for armed force in response to perceived threats. As important as these considerations are, though, they are not what I want to focus on in this book. What interests me is the quiet yearning for war that makes such calculations possible, the public acceptance of the notion that in some situations of social tension, war makes sense. It is this idea of war—this totalizing construct of the human imagination that absolutizes one’s view of the world—that I want to explore.
It is this mentality that I am thinking of when I talk about war. It is not so much the act of warfare as the idea of it, the passion for war, the war worldview. The passion for war is not a rational thing. The conduct of military operations certainly involves a great deal of skill and rational calculation, but it seems to me that war—the idea of absolute conflict that precedes many but not all military acts—is almost an instinctual thing. It has much more to do with emotions—or a kind of inarticulate mental reflex—than with reasoned arguments. It is what I mean by “the war mentality,” the way of seeing things in war-like terms.
In fact, the idea of war and the actions of military forces do not necessarily go together. There are police actions and humanitarian interventions, even on an international scale, that involve deadly force but are not regarded as war. A military raid undertaken to locate wrongdoers and bring them to justice is usually not thought of as war, but as a kind of police action. Representatives of the Philippine government told me that their military assault on the city of Marawi was not meant to be warfare but was simply an effort to capture members of a violent gang. When the FBI surrounded the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, on a fateful April day in 1993, their intention was not to kill the leader or burn alive the inhabitants of the compound. The FBI agents were not at war. But the members of the movement, trapped in what seemed to be a desperate situation and informed by biblical prophecies about the war at the end times, clearly saw things differently, just as the Muslim separatists in the Philippines saw the assault on Marawi differently. To them it was a salvo in a war in which they were a target. Militant actions are seen differently from different social perspectives. For those who accept that the motives of the US and Philippine governments were lawful in these cases, these are examples of police actions. For those who question the motives of those in authority and perceive a bellicose relationship between resistance groups and the government, Waco and Marawi were skirmishes in enduring wars. The application of military force and the idea of war are not necessarily identical.
Moreover the idea of war does not require constant military action. The Cold War involved various regional military encounters—in Cuba, Korea and Vietnam, for instance—but the overarching concept was greater than any of these specific military skirmishes.
For most of us who grew up in Europe or the United States in the era of the Cold War, in an odd way that global tension offered a reassuring view of the world. We knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, and we knew what to do about them. The decade after 1990 was one of uncertainty on a global scale. The “war on terror” announced by President George W. Bush in 2001 presented a new image of global war. Though not necessarily comforting, it imposed a template of meaning on international events. Again Americans knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, because everyone was either “for us or against us,” as the president sternly insisted.
In public pronouncements and popular sentiment in the years that followed 9/11, the war on terror was seen to have been in some ineffable way blessed by God. In the United States, as elsewhere in the world when the sound of war drums is heard, the language of warfare is accompanied by religious rhetoric. Just as the Islamic terrorists proclaimed a holy war against America, the US response was also accompanied by a religious refrain, “God bless America.” God, it seems, is always where the military action is.
This has been true throughout history. Whether it is the warfare of the Hebrew Bible or the great armies of the Hindu epics, God has marched alongside conquering armies. In our attempt to understand the idea of war, it is inevitable that we will also be trying to understand what God has to do with it. Why is religion so full of warfare, and why do wars always seem to employ God as a mercenary on both sides?
This book, then, is a meditation on war and religion. It is a reflection on the dark side of the human imagination, its capacity to deal with deep discomforts and profound anomalies in what strikes me as a horribly irrational way: by constructing a template of meaning that totalizes the differences between positions, Satanizes enemies, and gives moral sanction to the most hideous acts of destruction. What is this terrible thing called war? Why do we humans want it so? And why is God so often in command?