Religion and War and its Roots
We have a sacred month with Ramadan, Passover and Easter coming up for Muslims, Christians and Jews. All derive their religious beliefs from the same source – the Abrahamic tradition as recounted in the Old Testament.
I grew up with extensive Catholic and Christian religious education and religious history. The parts that have stuck with me were that Christ was a man of peace who condemned killing and war and died on the cross for our sins. He particularly reached out to the dispossessed and marginalized with extraordinary gifts of human kindness and compassion. Even during his suffering and death, he forgave those who betrayed him and persecuted him. He was Jewish, and he challenged the rabbis of his time to be better men of faith. His followers called themselves Christians and his teachings spread all over the world. Under the Ten Commandments as Moses brought them down from the mountainside, were the words thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal, thou shall not lie, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s goods or wife. That part of Christianity seems somehow missing in Putin’s Russia of today (or Trumpism for that matter).
I can remember the Berrigans, the Quakers, the William Sloan Coffins, Reverend King and Reverend Abernathy who stood up speaking for Christ when we were all so young, during the 60’s. Where are their successors today?
Persecution by the Romans and martyrdom for their beliefs were the norm for Christ’s followers for several centuries. At a certain point in the 4th Century under the Emperor Constantine, the church became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and it spread rapidly throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East; it became a state religion for much of Europe, then the Americas and large swaths of Africa. As a state religion, it endorsed, justified and exalted the decisions of the secular or temporal rulers. It then shattered into its many constituent, warring parts during the Reformation. This set off centuries of bloody warfare as to whose interpretation of Jesus was the true faith and to our founding father’s guarantees of religious tolerance, of freedom of religion and a prohibition against governments establishing a single religion.
Christianity’s early dominance was challenged then surpassed by the rise of Islam throughout the Middle East and North Africa, starting in the 7th Century. Among its prime tenets are alms for the poor, fasting for the month of Ramadan, and prayer five times a day. For the next 600 or so years, Arab civilization, learning, and culture were dominant as Christian Europe wallowed in and then emerged from its Dark Ages. Islam and the state became inextricably entwined during this period, and just as for Christianity, the rulers’ wars were justified by the religious leaders to the faithful.
This flowering of Arab civilization preserved and built upon the learning of the Greeks and Romans; they built magnificent architecture, introduced Arabic numerals and algebra, developed scientific thinking, promoted philosophy, astronomy and literature in ways that underpin our civilizations today. Arab caliphates spread across the Mediterranean basin from Spain to Sicily to Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus. They extended from India to Indonesia to parts of China.
Warfare between the Arabs, then the Turks and the Europeans was a constant until the 20th Century. While it had religious elements and overtones, such as the Crusades, at its bottom they fought for territory, for control of the lucrative trade routes to the East, for the commercial opportunities of the Mediterranean basin, and for control of the profits from the importation of luxury goods and spices from the Far East.
The Arab Empires based in North Africa invaded and took control of Spain and Portugal and fought to take over France as well during the 7th and 8th Centuries. They took over portions of Southern Italy and Sicily too, until the Normans displaced them.
Muslim leadership in Granada, the last vestige of the Moorish empire, was expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed to America, thinking he had arrived at the Spice Islands of the East Indies. This was during the height of the Spanish Inquisition when Spanish Jews and Moors were expelled, tortured, or forcibly converted to Catholicism – a process that did not end until the early 1600s. At the same time, the Portuguese were battling the Ottoman and Arab traders across the Indian Ocean for maritime control of trade from the Spice Islands to Europe.
These are millennia old battlegrounds in the Mediterranean. Remember the context; Rome and Carthage invaded each other and fought over these same territories in the Punic Wars during the rise of the Roman Republic and the ultimate destruction of Carthage. France, Spain and Italy invaded North Africa and turned what are now the nations of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya into their colonies during the 19th and 20th Centuries. And the Germans under Edwin Rommel fought bloody battles against the British, free French and American forces during World War II over the very same landscape.
The Ottoman Turks succeeded the Arabs as the dominant Islamic power. They rose to military power and imperial dominance as both the Arab and the Byzantine Empires fell apart, leaving a vacuum which they ably filled. The Ottoman Empire at its height covered the entirety of North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. They captured Constantinople in 1453 and ended the thousand-year-old Orthodox Christian, Byzantine Empire in the process. The Ottoman Empire at its zenith included Hungary, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, parts of Ukraine and portions of modern Russia. They fought to the gates of Vienna in 1683 where they were defeated by the Poles, Lithuanians, and Hapsburgs.
After the Spanish expelled the Moors and Jews, the Ottomans welcomed them as they settled from North Africa to Istanbul. Ottoman armies and navies were the strongest and most feared throughout Europe, until the Empire became stale, stagnant, ingrown, and inward looking during the 18th and 19th Centuries.
The Spanish provinces of Valencia and Aragon which had lost the most Moors and Jews in the expulsion went into economic decline, while the forced immigration greatly benefited the economy of the Ottoman Empire where there was far greater religious tolerance than in the Spain of the Inquisition era. The Spanish nobility had generally opposed the expulsions because of the prospective loss of productive workforces, while the Roman Catholic clergy pushed the efforts to purify the nation of its previously eclectic religious faiths.
The Ottomans initially looked to warfare as a profit center. Ottoman armies got to loot the areas they had conquered and keep the loot, provided the Sultan kept a fifth of the collected booty. Christians of Eastern Europe enrolled in the Ottoman army and became its mainstay both because of these profit-making opportunities and a requirement that a certain number of promising Christian youth from the Balkans enroll in the military and convert to Islam. The most feared part of the Ottoman military were these Janissaries, who were given extensive military training and became both the Sultan’s palace guards and the Empire’s infantry.
Christian and Jewish communities were allowed to live in peace under the protection of the Sultan, make and enforce their own rules and participate in running their own community affairs except at the highest levels of government, which were reserved for Turkish Muslims. As the Empire declined, corruption expanded, economic conditions worsened, taxes increased, central government controls over communities were extended, incipient nationalism broke out throughout the Empire, religious intolerance increased, and massacres of Christians, such as the Armenians and Greeks and Bulgarians, became more commonplace. Part of the underlying problem was that the Christians and Jews were getting more and better education in their community schools than the Muslim children were receiving in their public schools; as a result, they were becoming economically dominant and outcompeting their Muslim peers even though they had to pay higher taxes due to their non-Muslim status.
Imperial Russia came to be the protector and promoter of the best interests of Orthodox Christians, especially in the Balkans and around the Black Sea; France took on the role of protector/promotor of Catholics in the Levant; Great Britain became the protector/promotor of the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Needless to say, these nationalistic impulses then were transmuted into colonies of Britain and France and/or were incorporated into the steadily growing land grabs of the Russian Empire.
When the First World War broke out, the Ottoman Empire decided to ally with Germany and Austria Hungary in part because the others had been actively trying to break up and take over parts of the Ottoman Empire. Russia, England and France in turn entered into a secret agreement to divide up the Ottoman Empire when, if and after they prevailed. Russia would have Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and the Bosporus. France would have Syria and Lebanon and Southeastern Turkey. Britain would get Jordan, Palestine, and Southern Iraq.
At the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey kept Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and the Bosporus; France got protectorates in Syria and Lebanon; Britain got protectorates in Jordan, Palestine, and Southern Iraq, and Turkey became modern Turkey. Greece meanwhile recovered all the islands of the Aegean up to three miles off Turkey’s coastline. Russia was not a party as it had had a revolution, dropped out of the war, made a separate peace with Germany, and had become the USSR. The Arabs were furious as they had been promised a pan Arabic state by Britain and were now divided up among the protectorates/colonies of France and Britain.
If you think back at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, these were the historical battlegrounds of the Trojans and Greeks, the Persians and the Greeks, Alexander the Great and the Hellenic Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine and Arab Empires. This is where Byron swam the Hellespont and died fighting for Greek independence, where Achilles slew Hector and then died from an arrow to the heel, where the Charge of the Light Brigade was slaughtered and then immortalized in poetry. If you cast forward, you see the how the foundations were laid for the massacres of Srebrenica, the Armenian genocide, the division of Cyprus, the battles over Nagorno-Karabakh and Kosovo, the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the invasions of Kuwait, Iraq, Crimea, and Ukraine.
Ukraine must be able to defend itself and join the EU. We must all do what we can to help the Ukrainian people during this time of great suffering. Putin needs to be deposed by his fellow Russians, extradited and deported to face trial before the ICC for his war crimes. Freedom of the press needs to be restored and the political prisoners freed in Russia. Free and fair elections should be held in Russia with the prospect of joining the EU if they commit to transparency, an end to corruption, and a full stop to the invasions of their neighbors.
Religious figures across the globe and throughout our nation must preach, practice and teach peace and tolerance and love for all of our neighbors in all their glorious diversity. We all need to better practice our religions’ finest tenets and highest principles. We must put a stop those who seek to pervert the best of all of our religions for the very worst of human impulses.