The ethnicity of Muslim rule changed when Seljuk Turks, then Mongols and later Ottoman Turks invaded the territories of the early Arab caliphate. But the invaders adopted their subjects’ religion and the character of Islam did not greatly change.
Islamic countries have had difficulty in separating church and state. One reason, perhaps, is the nature of Islam. Unlike the case with Judaism or Christianity, its founding prophet was presented as a temporal ruler who commanded armies and set social policy. The religion specified only an Islamic state, not a separate church within it. “The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought,” writes Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islam.277
For over a millennium Islamic countries used the shari’a, regarded as divinely inspired, as their only source of law. It was only after the expansion of Islam had been firmly checked and reversed that reformers started to urge separating the state from religion, but they confronted deep resistance. “The general failure of liberal democracy to take hold in Muslim societies is a continuing and repeated phenomenon for an entire century beginning in the late 1800s. This failure has its source at least in part in the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to Western liberal concepts,” writes the political scientist Samuel Huntington.278
Mustafa Kemal succeeded in secularizing Turkey, after the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918. More recently secular leaders have emerged in countries like Egypt and Syria, but they are far from being fully secure. Radical fundamentalist movements agitated for a restoration of Islamic rule. Such movements have come to power in Iran and, for a time, in Afghanistan, and pose a serious threat to the stability of governments in Pakistan and Egypt.
Still, it’s far from clear that Islam is the cause of Islamic countries’ discontents. Although shari’a was presented as divine law, it was nonetheless administered and interpreted by Islamic scholars, known as the ulema, who for centuries served as a check on the absolute authority of the caliph. The ulema did not have formal rights of judicial review, as in western countries, but they gave the ruler legitimacy and he required their support.
Ottoman reformers replaced the ulema with a Western-style legislature, but Caliph Abdulhamid II abolished the legislature in 1878 and the caliphate itself was abolished in 1924. Islamic countries for most of the last century have been ruled by absolutist modern rulers, unchecked by either the ulema or a functioning legislature.
Calls to bring back the shari‘a, with its medieval penal code of stonings and amputations, alarm Western observers but reflect the deep-seated desire of many Islamic populations for the rule of law and an institution for restraining the arbitrary power of unjust rulers. “The distinctive distortions of many Muslim states in this era were products of unchecked executive authority,” writes the legal scholar Noah Feldman. “The call for the restoration of the shari’a in contemporary Islamist politics may be seen in substantial part as a response to this constitutional defect.” 279
In two important exceptions, the voice of the scholars in political affairs has remained strong, but in neither case with entirely happy results. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has a historic alliance with that of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a fundamentalist religious leader. In principle the scholars, on whom the Saudi rulers depend for their legitimacy, should hold them answerable to the people. In practice, the gushers of oil money have freed the rulers of many ordinary political constraints, and the Wahhabite ulema is under no compulsion to operate for the public benefit, Feldman argues.
In Iran the scholars are in control but too much so. When the shah was ousted, the Ayatollah Khomeini could have restored the ulema to its former role of advising and curbing a secular ruler. Instead, he instituted the unprecedented office of a scholar-jurist who was to be the supreme ruler. “The idea that the scholars as a class would rule directly was without precedent in Islamic history,” writes Feldman.280 Since the Iranian parliament is subject to review by the scholars’ Council of Guardians, the system is close to being a dictatorship of the ulema, which is no better than any other kind.
A striking feature of all Islamic countries is the prominent place that Islam plays or is expected to play in national politics. Even in Turkey, the most secular of Islamic countries, a party with Islamist sympathies has gained power through its parliamentary majority. The point could not be clearer: in countries that have not had time to develop robust secular institutions, religion is often the only organizing principle, other than autocracy, to which people can turn.
All state religions are capable of supporting warfare, but Islamic countries, whether or not because of their apparently deep-seated unease with secularization, seem to some observers to have become embroiled in warfare with more than usual frequency. Along the fault lines between Islamic countries and the rest of the world, strife has been common. “Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders,” Huntington observed in 1993.281
Though almost all Muslims are of course peaceful citizens, the recent terrorist activities by members of Muslim communities against their host European countries of Germany, England, Spain and Holland have added to the perception of Islam as a religion of violence. Religious behavior in itself prompts only social cohesion and purpose, but these can be shaped by leaders toward aggressive ends, as was the case with the Aztec religion. There are many Islams, just as there are many Christianities. Those who shape a sect’s beliefs are probably responsible in some degree for what its followers do in the sect’s name. Violence, in other words, is behavior more appropriately attributed to societies, not to the religion they may use to justify or incite it.
Shaping Religion for Warfare
Looking back at the relationship between religion and warfare, each of the three monotheisms has followed a different course. Judaism started as an expansionary creed and transformed itself into a pacific one after defeat. Christianity began as nonviolent, became an aggressive religion of empire, and was then somewhat neutralized after the rise of secular states. Islam was created as a religion of empire but has generally not yet found an easy role in a secular state.
No consistent relationship emerges between religion and warfare, other than that religion is a potent instrument that can be wielded by rulers in many ways. This is as would be expected from the evolutionary perspective that religion emerged from the unremitting strife between early human societies. Religious behavior helped energize a society for war, induced people to endure privation and prepared men to sacrifice their lives in battle. But warfare is only one aspect of religion’s cohesive powers. If a group needs to live peacefully with its neighbors, or within a more powerful host community, its religious behavior can be adapted to its needs.
Religious behavior is shaped in part by genetics and in part by culture. Both components may vary over time but the cultural component of religion can be changed more quickly. Through cultural shifts in the interpretation of a religion’s requirements, a society can tailor its behavior, or a country its foreign policy, to whatever strategy fits the circumstances. Religions thus possess a considerable degree of flexibility, more than might be expected from their claims to reflect the unchanging commands of divine revelation. The malleability of religious doctrine is not so surprising, given that inflexible religions would soon have led their societies to destruction.
Still, religions have a certain inertia that may persist for generations. Doctrine derived from a divine founder cannot be changed too obviously or too fast. And in some societies leaders may not see the need for change or may fear to implement it. Reasons of this kind could explain the comparative stability of Islam over the centuries, in contrast to the continual turnover of Christian sects.
When states go to war, it is usually for a variety of generally secular causes. Religion
may be quickly invoked, but only because it is such a potent instrument for energizing a society and motivating troops. It is usually no more a cause of war than are weapons; both are primarily means of war. Even when the formal cause of war is expressed in terms of religion, the underlying motives are usually secular.
The Bishops’ Wars between England and Scotland, for instance, began when Charles I decided in 1637 to impose a version of the Anglican prayer book on the Scottish church. The Scottish nobles and Presbyterians found common cause in rejecting the bishops appointed by the king. In the course of these events Scotland declared itself a Presbyterian nation, sealing its difference with Anglican England, and declared that the appointment of bishops by the king was contrary to divine law. This blunt challenge to royal prerogatives and the divine right of kings to rule as absolute monarchs led to the second Bishops’ War, to the English parliament’s Grand Remonstrance against royal abuses of power, to the outbreak of civil war in England between the king and parliament and, in 1649, to the momentous event of the king’s execution.
But these events can also be considered as a struggle between England and Scotland, followed by a civil war in England, in both of which the combatants used religion to energize their followers. The driving force of both Bishops’ Wars was the desire, first of Scotland and then of the English Parliament, to reduce the power of the king; both found it useful to invoke religion against him.
An Insatiable War Machine
A case in which religion seems much closer to being a prime cause of war is that of the sanguinary campaigns fought by the Aztec empire against its neighbors. The Aztec empire rose to power in the fourteenth century A.D. by shaping a horrific new religion for itself. Building on an ancient Mesoamerican tradition of human sacrifice, the Mexica, the principal members of the Aztec alliance, asserted the belief that their patron deity, the sun god Huitzilopochtli, required spilled human blood to replenish his life force.
“The imperial cosmology held that the Mexica must relentlessly take captives in warfare and sacrifice them,” write the anthropologists Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest. “The spiritual strength of the sacrificed enemy warriors would strengthen the sun and stave off its inevitable destruction by the forces of darkness. Thus, it was specifically the Mexicas’ sacred duty to preserve the universe from the daily threat of annihilation.”282
Instead of the occasional human sacrifice at major festivals, the Aztecs now required routine slaughter of massive numbers of people. The whole society was given over to the mad objective of capturing as many victims as possible from neighboring states, while imposing demands for tribute.
With extraordinary cruelty, the Aztec priests would cut the heart out of living people, whose remains would then be eaten in a cannibal feast. According to a Spanish monk who accompanied Hernan Cortes’s invading force in 1519, “The natives of this land had very large temples ... with a house of worship at the top, and close to the entrance a low stone, about knee-high, where the men or women who were to be sacrificed to their gods were thrown on their backs and of their own accord remained perfectly still. A priest then came out with a stone knife like a lance-head but which barely cut anything, and with this knife he opened the part where the heart is and took out the heart, without the person who was being sacrificed uttering a word.
“Then the man or woman, having been killed in this fashion, was thrown down the steps, where the body was taken and most cruelly torn to pieces, then roasted in clay ovens and eaten as a very tender delicacy; and this is the way they made sacrifices to their gods.”283
Aztec practice was for the warrior who had taken the captive to sponsor a feast at which a carefully prepared human stew was served.284
The scale of this macabre operation was enormous, given the resources of an archaic state. The Aztecs themselves claim to have sacrificed 80,400 prisoners during a 4-day festival in 1487, during the reign of the emperor Ahuitzotl. Historians consider the number exaggerated because the Aztecs could not have managed the logistics. Still, estimates are that at least 15,000 people a year were sacrificed in Central America, with hundreds or thousands of people being massacred in a single ceremony.
The new religion gave the Aztecs a pretext for continual campaigns against their neighbors for the purpose of taking captives and levying tribute. Both nobles and civilians were indoctrinated in the imperial cult and the gods’ ceaseless thirst for blood. Their empire expanded rapidly. In the course of a century the Mexica and their allies came to dominate almost all of Central America.
Aztec soldiers fought fanatically because they gained wealth and prestige if they brought captives home, and were promised immortality if they died in battle. Priests accompanied the soldiers to the battlefield, bearing statues of the gods and murdering the first captive in a ritual sacrifice.
The speedy rise of the Aztec empire demonstrated the frightening power of a religious ideology to organize a society around a single goal, however irrational, and drive it to excel in warfare. The religion operated at every level of society, from guiding the state’s military campaigns to motivating individual warriors. But the religious ideology the Aztecs created had a fatal flaw, which its designers and their successors failed to fix.
The empire’s two goals were sacrificial blood for the gods and tribute for the state. But so much of the workforce of vassal states became depleted by the Aztecs’ voracious demands for human blood that there were soon too few people to work the fields. Tribute revenues dropped, a serious threat for the Aztec polity where the noble and warrior classes had expanded in relation to the productive labor force.
In other societies religion has operated to manage natural resources or maintain an ecological balance. But religions are only as good as the thought put into their design and operation. The Aztec state was ultimately unsustainable because the two goals of its religious ideology—victims and tribute—were in effect contradictory.
Aztec armies had to campaign farther afield in search of victims, straining their logistics and leading to many defeats. The Aztec emperors seem to have believed in their sanguinary cult and feared the gods’ wrath when the supply of captives started to dry up. Without assurance of the gods’ support “the zeal and confidence of the imperial armies was greatly diminished,” Conrad and Demarest observe.285
Cortes and his conquistadors arrived on the scene in 1519, at a time when the empire’s war machine was failing and the Aztecs were hated by all the surrounding states on which they had preyed for so long. Under the assault of a few hundred Spanish troops, and tens of thousands of eager Indian allies, the Aztec empire disintegrated into Cortes’s hands.
Though the Aztec wars were formally driven by their sun god’s inordinate thirst for sacrificial blood, the question is why the Aztec society and its leaders embraced such a cruel and wasteful creed. Presumably Aztec rulers believed their religion’s requirements to be in the state’s interests, and indeed without the constant requirement for new victims it’s possible that the Aztecs themselves could have ended up on a rival’s altars.
“The Mexicas’ sacrificial cosmology gave them the competitive edge needed for such victories: fanaticism,” write Conrad and Demarest. “The unending hunger of the gods for mass sacrifices also generated the tireless dynamism of the Mexica armies, a persistence which allowed them to wear down some of the most obstinate of their opponents.”
The Aztecs’ error, from the perspective of their state’s long-term survival, was less in adopting such a bloodthirsty creed as in failing to moderate it when circumstances required. Religion is a potent instrument for survival but it embodies only the collective wisdom of a society, and when that is insufficient religion is no salvation.
If religion plays a somewhat less prominent role in wars between modern states, the reason is in part the separation of church and state. The power to declare war rests with secular leaders, not a priest-king. But there is another reason for the detachment of religion from warfare: modern states are no longer dep
endent on religion for military training, because they have learned how to borrow and secularize religious techniques.
Training for War
One of the most surprising achievements of the secular state, though it is generally taken for granted, is the ability to induce men to sacrifice their lives in battle without any explicit religious incentive.
In primitive societies and archaic states, religious indoctrination was a principal way of getting soldiers to fight. Boys were expected to endure painful initiation rites without showing pain, so as to toughen them as warriors. Their emotional endurance too was tested through long and frightening ordeals. They would often be trained with others of their age group to encourage solidarity. Among the Nilotic peoples of East Africa like the Nuer, the age-sets of initiated young men served as military companies who were always ready to go to war, and this organization enabled the Nuer to prevail over neighbors who were less well prepared.
In a cross-cultural survey of male initiation, the sociologist Richard Sosis and colleagues tallied the presence or absence of 19 ritual practices such as genital mutilation, teeth pulling, tattooing, scarification and piercing. They found that societies that went to war most often had the most painful initiation rites. Presumably the more militaristic the society, the more searing it made the initiation of its future warriors.
The pain and fear associated with these rituals stands in interesting contrast to the positive effects of religious rites involving dance and music, which leave participants emotionally uplifted. Sosis and colleagues suggest that “through frightening and painful rites, religious symbols can acquire deep emotional significance that subsequently unites individuals who share the experience.” Even though boys may not go to war until many years after their initiation, the emotional effect of initiation is enduring. Painful rituals “generate solidarity between men and serve as reliable indicators of group commitment, thus reducing the likelihood that men will defect when there is war,” the researchers conclude.286
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