Hot Post: I Have A Bone To Pick With Beck
Here it comes:
The Arabs of the conquest years were not caught on that crux. Their new religion, Islam, was a creed of conflict, that taught the necessity of submission to its revealed teachings and the right of believers to take arms against those who opposed them. It was Islam that inspired the Arab conquests, the ideas of Islam that made the Arabs a military people and the example of its founder, Mohammad, that taught them to become warriors.
And finally:
Mohammad was not only a warrior himself, who had been wounded at the battle at Medina against the men of Mecca in 625. He preached as well as practiced war. In his last visit to Mecca in 632 he laid down that, though all Muslims were bretheren and should not fight each other, they should fight all other men until they said “There is no God but God”.
There’s more, all good, I highly recommend it. But why, you may ask, have I taken us off into these sketchy historical considerations? (And by all means, please look into it yourself.)
My intention is this. I also read into Beck’s 5000 year comment a sense, and I believe it is a very prevalent sense, that religious war is a permanent and universal aspect of the human condition. That all nations and cultures are somehow equally implicated and always have been. And that because it is so universal, so permanent and so seemingly irrational, it is in a sense trivial and the details are undeserving of inspection.
I think such dismissive neglect is dangerous, and inappropriate to the realities.
It may be possible that the idea of religious war, of holy war in the sense that we understand it today, may have been introduced to Europe’s conceptual vocabulary by the encounter with the Arabs. That holy war, war specifically for the faith, war for the purpose of spreading an ideology, or its dominance — an idea the 20th century became all too familiar with — may be a uniquely Mohammedan, and Arab, invention, as of 632 AD.
It may also be that the idea of “holy war” never spread far into east Asia precisely because the Arab armies never did. Although things seem to be warming up again down around Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Arab trading ships did go.
Ominously, through the renewed popularity of the war verses of the Koran, the Sira and the Hadiths, the original authors of the noxious concept of holy war may be striding across the globe again today.
And it might be best if we understood what is going on.
PS: I’m still a Beck fan.
