Abraham's Children

From the beginnings of history, when many of his favorite gods were gods of war, man has invoked the deity in battle. Medieval Crusaders cut their way toward Jerusalem--sometimes through fellow Christians--shouting "Deus vult!" (God wills it!). Yankee soldiers in the Civil War marched into battle singing about God's "terrible swift sword." In World War II, both sides felt that God was behind them: Wehrmacht soldiers fought with GOTT MIT UNS emblazoned on their belt buckles; Americans were urged to "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition."

The war between Israel and the Arab nations around it has stronger religious overtones than have most modern conflicts. There are, of course, the more expectable rites: Egyptian tanks rolled into the desert equipped with metal-jacketed copies of the Koran, Islam's book of divine revelation; in Jerusalem, soldiers carrying machine guns prayed before the Wailing Wall. But political and spiritual leaders have emphasized deeper spiritual dynamics.

Outraged that the Egyptian attack was launched on Yom Kippur, the solemn Jewish Day of Atonement, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban called it "blasphemous." The Grand Sheik Abdel Halim Mahmoud, Egypt's highest religious authority, proclaimed the war a jihad, a holy war. "We are fighting as the early Moslems fought against the infidels," he declared in Cairo's Al Azhar mosque. "All the dead in battle are sure of paradise." In Saudi Arabia, the Interior Ministry urged its citizens to "destroy the enemies of religion."

Arab political leaders generally avoided calling the battle a holy war. In fact, the conflict with Israel is much more complicated. Both sides possess intense national and ethnic pride. Thus some Arab Christians as well as Moslems are committed to the Arab cause; many Jews who are not at all religious have died for Israel. Yet the majority of the combatants belong to two of the world's major religions, and they are on opposite sides.

Both religions have traditionally exerted a powerful, homogenizing influence on their followers. Jews may be blonds from Sweden or dark-skinned Yemenites, but they share an ethnic and often spiritual identity. Arabs may be tent-pitching Bedouins or Cairo businessmen, but many of them turn in prayer toward Mecca five times a day. Even in those countries that observe separation of church and state, religion plays a significant role in the life and attitudes of their societies.

Both peoples, their scriptures tell them, are the children of that primeval patriarch Abraham: the Arabs the offspring of his son Ishmael, the Jews of his son Isaac. Both hammered out their visions of a single God in the forge of the desert, and both fought to win a stronghold for those visions against the tribes of idolaters then around them.

Almost 2,000 years before Islam's rise, the ancient Jews took possession of their promised land under the rubric of divine command. As recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy, the idolaters occupying the area were to be annihilated completely: men, women, children, "as the Lord your God commanded you." Such enemies were herem--proscribed abominations whose pagan practices threatened contagion. History is unclear how often this "commandment" was carried out, but Joshua seems to have applied it with vigor against Canaan.

The concept of herem had died out by the time King David established his monarchy at the beginning of the tenth century B.C., but expansionist wars were still permitted when approved by the priestly court, the Sanhedrin. Since the Sanhedrin no longer exists, the only permissible war for Jews is one of self-defense. After the disastrous Jewish war against the Romans in the first century and Bar Kokhba's last desperate rebellion in the second century, the Jews were forcibly scattered so widely that making war became virtually impossible.

That undoubtedly accounts for the paucity of rabbinic law on war during the 18 centuries that followed. Having no warmaking capabilities as a nation, Jews did not need to develop--as Christians did--an elaborate theology of war. The morality of war did not become an important issue even after the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Conditioned by more than 1,800 years of exile and the horror of the Nazi holocaust, most Jews felt thoroughly justified in supporting Israel's survival by whatever means necessary.

While the Jews seem to have retreated from the idea of sacred conquest to an ethic of self-defense, early Islam moved the other way. When his group was still small in the early years at Medina, Mohammed preached a doctrine of self-defense. "Fight against those who fight against you," Allah warns in the Koran's second sura. "But begin not hostilities. Allah loves not aggressors."

Holy War. The very word jihad is ambiguous. In some parts of the Koran, it means any "struggle" or "striving" in the cause of Allah--such as leading a righteous life. But in other sections of the holy book, revealed to the Prophet after he and his followers had begun the successful conquest of their Arab neighbors, jihad takes on a military tone. Small wonder: Mohammed is said to have led 26 or 27 battles.

The stunning conquests of Mohammed's Arab successors, which swept across the Middle East and North Africa into Spain and even France, first gave Islam its formidable reputation for waging holy war. Now, with Moslems scattered among many, often rivalrous nation-states and among a number of sects, such monolithic holy war is impossible. Some Moslem scholars insist that the obligation to wage it, once one of Islam's most sacred tasks, has also passed, and that "striving" for Allah these days should be through persuasion alone.

Still, the Islamic view of the world in a sense pitches it into an endless struggle against the rest of mankind. Islam sees itself as a universal religion, with a formula for order and justice that Allah intends the entire world eventually to accept. That obviously clashes with the ancient vision of the Arabs' cousins in Israel, who have a different covenant with God. Such spiritual implications may not have started the latest Middle East war, but they certainly nourish the hostilities, making them more difficult to stop--and easier to start again.

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