Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 5, 1991 TAG: 9102050427
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHARLES A. KENNEDY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Families watch anxiously for glimpses of their loved ones caught up in Operation Desert Storm. Experts, self-styled and otherwise, analyze bits and pieces of raw information to explain what the allies or Iraq may be doing at any given moment.
The result, for most of us, is information overload. We have too many facts and no way to organize them. We lack any kind of mental filing system.
Traditionally, this is something religions have provided. A religion includes a world view, a way of organizing all the information we receive about the world around us.
Is this world a good or bad place to be?
For some Christians, it is a "vale of tears" to be left behind for a heavenly land. Others see this world as the best and only one there is, so it is important to preserve it from the pollution of sin or the pollution of toxic wastes.
Judaism and Islam also see this world as the creation of a gracious God who has placed human beings in it to manage, but not destroy, these precious resources. Yet the homeland of three faiths, the Middle East, is again in flames. Is there a connection between religious beliefs and the war?
The first answer is that the three religions do not play a major role in the war. Leaders on all sides invoke God for their political purposes. But unlike the late Aytollah Khomeini of Iran, none of the heads of the warring states are known for applying their religious beliefs to the conduct of foreign policy.
Yet Saddam Hussein calls for a holy war against the infidel, and George Bush asks for a crusade against the dictator. Both expect their audiences to complete the references from their own histories, political and religious. Both leaders know the political value of sound bites, especially when they have religious overtones.
The second answer is that the relations between the Western powers and Islamic world have been colored by religious ways of thinking since the West lost the Crusades to the armies of Islam.
Christian Europe was threatened by the rise of Middle Eastern empires. In the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks invaded the Danube valley as far into Europe as the gates of Vienna, where they finally were repulsed by a coalition of Christian armies. A short time later, the last Moors were expelled from Spain.
By the 19th century, the tide was changing. Christian missionaries, followed by imperial armies from Europe, were moving into Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. While the missionaries tried to convert the Moslems, the colonial powers imposed a secular form of government operating by European civil-law codes.
The peoples of the Middle East rightly saw the Westerners as undermining Moslem beliefs and the Moslem way of life.
These historical memories remain on both sides of the present crisis, and declarations of war recall them to mind.
During the Iran-Iraq War, newspaper reports in Baghdad routinely made references to battles fought between the two countries in the seventh and eighth centuries. In a much shorter time frame, Americans are being reminded that the Persian Gulf war is not another Vietnam, but another World War II, a Crusade in the Gulf instead of in Europe. The comparison of Iraq to Nazi Germany is grossly inaccurate; nonetheless, American memories have been stirred for political, not religious, reasons.
A final answer must deal with the broader issue of religion and war. Neither Christianity nor Islam is a pacifist religion, although some individuals in both religions do hold such a belief. Both religions allow for defensive, not offensive, wars.
The Koran (22:40) tells of monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques rescued from destruction by Moslem defenders. Our Arab allies have agreed that Israel has the right to retaliate against Iraq in self-defense after the Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv. The difficulty today is defining a defensive war, what Christians call "a just war."
Modern weapons and tactics have made the distinction almost meaningless. The stumbling block to disarmament treaties is classifying weapons as defensive or offensive. Not even the experts agree.
World War II, so often appealed to by the politicians, became a defensive war for the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kuwait is no Pearl Harbor.
Islam proclaims peace through the surrender to God's will. Christianity, echoing Israel's prophet Isaiah, hails a Prince of Peace. Paradoxically, sadly, Moslems, Christians and Jews continue to fight and kill for peace in the name of religion.
by CNB