Nonviolence (5 page)

III

[We call for peace] in the name of God, since without peace no one will see God.

—Peace meeting at Le Puy, 994

T
he ideology of warfare that has been repeatedly invoked for the past thousand years of Western history grew out of Augustine's thesis of just war in the fifth century and continued to be developed to its complete expression in Pope Urban II's propaganda campaign launching the first Crusade at the end of the eleventh century.

Simply stated in the terms of the American western, one of the great cultural institutions for fostering violence, the world is made up of good guys and bad guys, and the good guys have to shoot the bad guys for everyone's well-being. Once this was established, the state had only to declare its proposed victim a bad guy to justify a war.

If Christianity was initially polluted by the state, in the second phase the state was polluted by Christianity. Once the religion began working with the state and became involved in the state's business, it was involved in warfare. Augustine provided the theology to explain this unexplainable contradiction. But in the process, the role of the Christian Church was changing. From a moral guide on the periphery of events, it moved to the epicenter of power politics.

The state jealously guards the right to make war because this prerogative is a source of power. Once Christianity became interested in power, the Church became competitive with states. If kings derived their power from the right to declare war, the clergy would challenge that power with the right to declare peace. And so began a power struggle in which a peace movement known as
pax dei,
the Peace of God, led the world into the ruthless and violent wars known as the Crusades.

The Church engaged in this power struggle for some time before the late tenth century, when the Peace of God came into being as a recognized movement. Officially it seems to have begun at a 975 meeting in an open field outside the city walls of Le Puy, which is today in France. From the beginning the movement was not really
about peace. The meeting was called by the Church to discuss the raiding and looting of Church holdings by noblemen leading peasant armies. The noblemen were forced to take an oath that they would no longer commit such acts of aggression against Church property. If they broke their oath the penalty was excommunication. But the threat was also backed up by considerable military might.

The meeting in Le Puy was considered a great success, and others followed on the same model. To attack Church property— buildings, clergy, livestock, crops, olive trees, peasants while harvesting—was a crime against the
pax dei.
Sometimes widows, orphans, and others considered to be defenseless were also included in the protection of the Peace of God. Some fifty years later, either coming out of the Peace of God movement or running alongside it—historians disagree on this point—a movement arose called
truega dei,
the Truce of God.

A truce is not a peace. The Truce of God movement did little to end war but did a great deal to establish the power of the Church. The Church declared a moratorium on warfare during holy days just as it had ordered abstinence from sex and red meat on those days. Since holy days made up more than half the days of the year, including every Sunday, the Truce of God meant that by Church orders, under threat of excommunication, a king who was engaged in a war had to constantly lay down his sword for a day or two in mid-campaign. This alone made the Church far more powerful than it had ever been.

This strengthened Church enforced its authority to stop violence not only by the threat of excommunication but by mobilizing powerful armies, which it used to wage war to chastise “peacebreakers” who had violated Church truce days. Among the combatants in these Church armies were clergymen killing for peace, a just war. These armies, sometimes called peace militias, unleashed terror on populations, razing whole castles and slaughtering peasants who had fled to the protection of the castle ramparts. In one incident the peace militia massacred fourteen hundred men and women. Sometimes peace-breaking lords would retaliate and slaughter hundreds
of clergy. They were two opposing dominions, the religious and the secular, rallying military might to fight for power.

How far Christianity had come from the time when a Christian, by definition, took no part in warfare. Until the eighth century, clerics had been barred from combat, even in a “just war.” After that they were allowed to accompany troops to celebrate mass, hear confessions, and perform other priestly functions. Even in the eleventh century clerics were forbidden to bear arms. But as the Church asserted its power, it took on more military functions, provisioning armies, conscripting soldiers, and finally leading campaigns. Some priests went into battle with clubs, because they believed it was unchristian to wield a sword. After all, Augustine had argued that Jesus was not really talking about loving one's enemies but simply loving the reflection of God that was within them. A priest could love the reflection of God within someone and still club that person to death, which was more moral than stabbing or chopping him to death.

By the early eleventh century, Christians were venturing the opinion that not only was violence acceptable but that killing pleased God when done in the cause of the Church. The killing of “false Christians” pleased God and was not to be considered homicide. Then in 1063 Pope Alexander II wrote Wilfred, Archbishop of Narbonne, that there were two exceptional circumstances under which killing people was permissible: in punishing crimes and in stopping aggression. He offered an example of stopping aggression: stopping the Saracens, a somewhat pejorative Western term for Muslims. In fact, by the eleventh century a term was invented for killing non-Christians, since this was not to be considered homicide. It was
malicide,
Latin for the killing of a bad person.

Islam—the root of the word is
salam,
peace—was founded by the seventh-century
A.D.
prophet Mohammed and takes much from Judaism, including a few of the many dietary laws and numerous historical characters, such as Abraham, Moses, and David. Islam also recognizes the Christian founder, Jesus, but does not accept his divinity. The prophet Mohammed was troubled by the growing materialism
of his people. Like Jesus, he had no intention of founding a new religion but wanted to bring the spiritual values of monotheism to Arabs. Mohammed, who was not literate, claimed periodically to have revelations, each one about a paragraph in length, and after twenty-one years these revelations were put together in a book, considered a masterpiece of Arab writing, called the Quran. Central to the Quran is the building of communities with a just distribution of wealth. Mohammed's approach shunned abstract debate and encouraged pragmatic solutions. He always emphasized negotiating solutions, and by tradition there is tremendous emphasis on negotiation in Muslim history. Mohammed's attempt at a perfect society in Mecca enforced a complete ban on violence, which made Mecca prosper as a center of trade. During the
hajj,
the required pilgrimage to Mecca, the faithful Muslim was not allowed to carry weapons, even for hunting, nor to commit any violence, including words spoken in anger.

Islam, an unusually open faith whose early adherents came from many backgrounds, including Judaism, began to change after 622, when Mohammed and his followers moved from Mecca to Yathrib, a town 250 miles to the north, which was renamed
al-Medinah
—the city. One of the most bitter disappointments of Mohammed's life was that the Jews of Medina, apparently more tradition-bound than those he had known before, refused to accept him as a prophet. At this point Jewish prophecy was already several thousand years old and they viewed a man who claimed to get messages from God with the same suspicion that most people today would. Mohammed physically turned the prayer meeting around so that worshipers now faced Mecca rather than Jerusalem.

But the establishment of Medina had an effect on Islam not unlike that of Constantine and Rome on Christianity. It was not that Mohammed was interested in conquest and empire like Constantine, but Medina had become, in effect, a state—territory that had to be defended when it was attacked by men from Mecca who vowed to destroy it, and in 625 they almost succeeded. The defense of Medina, in several major battles, began Islamic military history and included the first Muslim-Jewish conflict, in which Mohammed
massacred an armed Jewish group that rose against him. By the seventh century it was already an old pattern: the religious doctrine of peace meets the power politics of state, the rules are bent for the “just war,” and once the first few doses are administered the state becomes an addict that will tell any lie to get its narcotic. War is simply the means. The real narcotic is power. As Hungarian writer György Konrád said of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, “Men can invent few libidinous fantasies more enjoyable than those of world domination.” The African-American poet Langston Hughes called the leading nations “the nymphomaniacs of power.”

Mohammed, so the rationale goes, had to defend Medina. The Quran says, “Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those who have been attacked because they have been wronged.” There is no provision, however, for preemptive strikes. Wars of aggression are immoral and forbidden. Wars to spread the teachings of Islam are also not permitted. But seventh-century Islamic warfare was never justified on the grounds of building an empire or even spreading Islam. Mohammed did not want to convert Jews and Christians, since they were already believers in the one God. Islam teaches respect for the revelations of other prophets in other groups.

But there is always a way to argue that a war is a case of self-defense. The Jewish rebels had to be slaughtered to teach a lesson and stop the uprisings. Alliances needed to be formed for defense, and then obligations had to be met. Along the way it was noticed that warfare gave a common purpose and united Arab peoples, though sometimes an individual warlord simply coveted a strip of land.

Mohammed himself fought nineteen campaigns, but he taught that war was only a last resort and that God blessed those who took a nonviolent rather than a violent path—“God grants to gentleness what he does not grant to violence.”

After the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632, Islam's character changed even more rapidly than that of Christianity following Jesus' death. Mohammed's Muslims took Palestine in 636 and conquered Jerusalem in 638, and then went on to Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. None of which erases one of the most important passages
of the Quran: “Whoever kills a human being should be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind.”

War between Muslims, like war between Christians, was both commonplace and morally unacceptable, except, again, in cases of defense. The Quran states: “Do not yield to the unbelievers. Fight them strenuously.” For centuries this quote has been used to imply that Muslims had an obligation to go to war with non-Muslims. But many Islamic scholars have stated that the Quran seems to have meant by the word “fight” the use of intellectual persuasion, since the suggested tool is the Quran and it can be assumed that a good Muslim is not being told to whack the unbeliever over the head with a large copy of the sacred book.

In Islam, too, there is the concept of striving toward perfection. The Quran says that a good Muslim must “strive for the cause of Allah.” In Arabic this striving or struggle is called
jihad. Jihad
originally meant striving with great intensity. But this striving was meant to be an internal struggle to become the perfect Muslim that God—Allah—wanted each Muslim to be. Some scholars have even argued that when the Quran speaks of conquering unbelievers with
jihad,
it is saying to persuade them with the force of argument, and thus
jihad
means nonviolent activism. This is why numerous notable Islamic clerics have said that the prophet Jesus also instructed his followers to wage
jihad.

Islamic scholars have always debated the meaning of the thirty-five references to
jihad
in the Quran. But as medieval Muslims became engaged in a series of difficult wars, the word
jihad
began to be used to denote the struggle to prevail militarily in place of the original word for such a physical battle
, qital.
All successful leaders understand the importance of words, and it seemed a good Muslim would fight harder if the struggle were called
jihad
rather than
qital.
After the death of Mohammed, Muslims began speaking of two kinds of
jihad
—
al jihad al akbar,
greater
jihad,
and
al jihad al asghar,
lesser
jihad.
Greater
jihad
was the struggle to be a pure and good person, while lesser
jihad
referred to armed struggle.