Whose side is God on?
By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff, 2/12/1991
addam Hussein calls it a jihad, an Islamic holy war. If the jihad uses mustard gas, Israel or the United States might use nuclear weapons to turn Iraq into Armageddon.
It was Hindu scripture, however, that was quoted when the first atom bomb was exploded, not the Koran, the Torah or the New Testament's Book of Revelation. "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds," said physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita a few weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If truth is the first casualty of war and shattered worlds, then God is often the first draftee. And when war visits the Middle East, a place where three religions were born and where Armageddon is a dateline, not just a concept of nuclear retaliation, divine symbolism can be as pervasive as CNN news coverage -- and about as meaningful. "You can find religion in almost any war," says Jonathan Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University. President Bush and Saddam Hussein quickly found religion in this one. Marshaling quotes from the Bible, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Aquinas, Bush told a group of religious broadcasters Jan. 28 that the US-led coalition is "on the side of God." "Political rulers use religion to legitimize their aims," says Sohrab Sobhani, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Georgetown University. "Saddam Hussein is falling back on Islamic themes to legitimize his quest to annex Kuwait and to become the leader of the Arab world." Agrees Sarna: "Part of what religion does is reinforce social and national goals. That is especially true in the Middle East, which has been the vortex of history and culture for millennia." When Roman legions sacked Jerusalem, Titus invoked Mars, the god of war. In the name of Allah, Saracens conquered the city 11 centuries later in 1187. During the Middle Ages, Crusaders were dispatched to the Holy Land to evict the infidel. They were urged on by papal directives called propaganda, a word that later came to mean the shaping of wartime opinions and attitudes. The early Israelites envisioned Zion as a place without war, a promised land of milk and honey, but by the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther saw the Middle East as Mohammed's "kingdom of revenge, wrath and desolation." Edmund Allenby had better luck than most crusaders. Take Jerusalem by Christmas, his British superiors told the World War I field marshal. The Turks had declared a jihad. But with the help of Lawrence of Arabia, Allenby succeeded where Richard the Lion-Hearted had failed. Nine months later, in 1918, Allenby again defeated the Turks, this time at Megiddo, a hilly, fortified place where soldiers have warred since the fourth millennium before Christ. In the Hebrew Bible, an embattled Israel is often threatened and plundered by enemies from the north and south, Sarna notes. It was through the Megiddo pass that the Philistine hordes came from the north. Some made their home in what is now Iraq. After whipping Darius the Persian at Issus, Alexander the Great marched south, possibly through Megiddo, on his way to Egypt, where he agreed to worship local gods in return for the pharaoh's crown. A year later, in 331 BC, he trekked his army north, skirting Megiddo. Again he met and crushed Darius. The battle was fought on the banks of the Tigris River not far from Baghdad. Megiddo means "mountain" in Hebrew, and har mediggo, "the mountain," elided to become Armageddon. According to geography books, Megiddo lies south of Nazareth, where Jesus lived as a child. According to the New Testament, Armageddon is where Jesus will triumph over evil after an apocalyptic battle on Judgment Day. Hoping to avoid a nuclear Armageddon and expedite peace negotiations, Peter H. Lowenberg is organizing a symposium of language experts to study Iraq's wartime communiques. Those communiques are written in language that seems flamboyant by Western standards, says Lowenberg, a linguist at Georgetown. They are full of slogans and religious imagery. Barbara Johnstone, a Texas A & M University linguist, has parsed most of the public utterances of the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. "The rhetorical strategies of the West and Middle East are very different," she says. "Khomeini spoke in analogies and parables, much like our Bible. There's a different sense of how to convince people. Instead of using logic, an idea is presented repetitively in artistic, beautiful language, and there is a lot of religious imagery. But that may be more of a cultural decision than a linguistic one. One of the few areas where the West and Middle East overlap is in the language of religious discourse." In the United States, the traditional separation between church and state has made some Americans reluctant to call on God when issuing belligerent statements. On Pearl Harbor day, when the Japanese invoked their Shinto warrior code and dedicated themselves to an emperor called "the son of heaven," President Franklin Roosevelt chose to put his trust in "the stamina of the American people" rather than in the Almighty. After composing his "day of infamy" speech, FDR skipped a prayer session to have a few beers with journalist Edward R. Murrow instead, historian William Manchester writes. Roosevelt, however, was always exceptional. At the Alamo, William Barret Travis declared, "The Lord is on our side," a sentiment later expressed by the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis in an inaugural address. During a Fourth of July celebration in 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged the citizens of Concord to "put creed into deed," which is as good an explanation as any for the Civil War. Strolling through the Boston Common, William Vaughn Moody spotted the statue of Robert Gould Shaw and was inspired to write a poem, much as moviemakers would later be inspired to film "Glory," which recounted the deaths of Shaw and the black troops he led into battle at Fort Wagner, S.C. "The wars we rage are noble . . .," Moody wrote. "The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat and scramble in the market place of war." It was Roosevelt's Rough Rider cousin, Theodore, who may have been the first American orator to use Armageddon imagery, writes William Safire in his "Political Dictionary." In 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt decided to challenge his successor, President William Howard Taft, and Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt told the Bull Moose convention, "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!" A common theme in the Hebrew Bible is that God uses war to punish His erring people, says Harvard University professor Theodore Hiebert. Lincoln made a similar point in his second inaugural address, a speech famous for the phrase "With malice toward none." "The Almighty has his own purposes. . . . He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense of slavery and disunion came," he said. Asked to renounce Protestantism as a condition of being crowned king of Catholic France, the 16th century's Henri of Navarre replied, "Paris vaut bien une messe." If Paris was worth a Mass, then the Union was worth a religious poem. At Lincoln's request, Julia Ward Howe of South Boston wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which featured a wrathful Yahweh menacing rebel enemies with a terrible swift sword. After loosing the fateful lightning of the US Air Force and Navy on Iraq, Bush has gone to some lengths to assert that the hostilities meet the definition of a "just war." Among those persuaded by his casus belli is Cardinal Bernard Law, a sometime admirer of Bush Realpolitik. The concept of a just war evolved during the Middle Ages, says Anthony Saldarini, a theology professor at Boston College. "In the Bible, war is taken for granted as a lamentable fact of life," he says, adding that the biblical passages on which causes might justify war are "vague and ambiguous." The Koran is also vague on war and jihad, says Wadad Kadi, a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. "The jihad is a struggle on the path of God," she says. It is often a personal, spiritual striving through fasting, prayer and good works rather than defensive military action. Holy wars are rare, Kadi says. But any Muslim may call one. "If a Muslim believes that Saddam Hussein has religious authority, then he might follow his jihad," she says. "But not all Muslims do." Many scholars seem to agree with an observation made 250 years ago by the dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Said Jonathan Swift: "The Bible is an open town in time of war. It serves indifferently the occasions of both parties."
