Many people from very diverse
quarters say that all religions have a concept of “holy war”. In this, at
least, they are all equal. Thus, the recent cases of self-defence against
Muslim attacks by Buddhists in Thailand and Myanmar are taken to prove that
even the ostensibly non-violent Buddhists have their notion of “holy war”, now
on display. Similarly Hinduism has its own dharma
yuddha, literally (they say) “religious war”.
Some add that the one exception to
this rule, hence the most peaceful religion of all, is Islam. We have all heard
about jihad, thinking this is the
“holy war” par excellence, but now we are told that we have been mistaken all
along. Even Osama bin Laden didn’t know true Islam, he was wholly wrong about
the meaning of jihad. They assure us
that jihad is merely an inner
struggle against the evil in ourselves, not a war against unbelievers. At the
very most, it can be a struggle in self-defence when the unbelievers attack us.
Let us see what the truth of this can be.
Dharma Yuddha
The proverbial war in the Hindu
worldview is the great war of the Bharata clan, on which the mega-epic
Mahabharata elaborates. This epic philosophizes profusely on the principles of dharma yuddha even as it describes the
successive episodes of a real-life war. Yuddha
means “struggle, war”. Dharma, “sustenance,
that which sustains”, effectively means “maintaining the correct relation
between the part and the whole”, “playing your specific role in the whole that
you are part of”. It approximately means both “religion” in the sense of
“relating to the cosmos” and “ethics” in the sense of “correctly relating to
the beings around you”. Dharma yuddha
means “struggle in accordance with ethics/Dharma”, “chivalrous war”. But does
the epic describe a dharma yuddha at
all?
First off, there is no religious
conflict on the horizon. The Bharata war pits two branches of the same family
against each other. They practise the same religious tradition, just as they
have the same teachers, live in the same area, speak the same language and
share the same ethnicity. Clearly, dharma
yuddha does not mean “war against the unbelievers”. No command is given
anywhere to take up hostilities with a religious out-group, nor with any
linguistic or ethnic or any other group either. Coincidence has it that two
groups of cousins are in a position to compete for the same throne, and
attempts at finding a peaceful compromise fail.
But secondly, the actual war is only
partly a dharma yuddha. The rules for
a dharma yuddha are articulated, but
fall into disuse the longer the battle rages. The reader is treated to a
complete contemplation of the principles of dharma
yuddha, but the epic’s characters are shown as practising them less and
less. During the build-up to the war, the Pandava brothers with their friend
and adviser Krishna make several attempts to solve the conflict peacefully, and
are rebuked by their Kaurava cousins even when they express willingness to make
great concessions. They only resolve to make war once they have no other
option. And even when the war starts, Arjuna finds all kinds of reasons to
forfeit his claim and withdraw from the battle, until Krishna convinces him
that it has become necessary.
During the war, however, they let
the rules of “justice in war” relax gradually, commensurate with the other
party’s breaches of the code of chivalry. Thus, when the enemies’ leader
Duryodhana has fallen from his chariot, the rule that someone in an
incapacitated state should not be attacked, would normally apply. Yet, Krishna
orders to strike him while he is down. Duryodhana had been a party to the
forced disrobing of princess Draupadi, an un-ethical act, so Krishna is not
impressed when he now invokes the well-known rules of ethical warfare: “Where
was your Dharma then?” So, the other side’s breaches of Dharma are increasingly
used as a justification for breaking Dharma too.
The battle rages for eighteen days.
The change it has wrought, is best realized by Krishna’s brother Balarama, who
has missed the battle. He has gone on pilgrimage along the Saraswati river and
returns just at the end of the hostilities. He is amazed and indignant at the
size of the destruction and the decline into non-Dharmic behaviour. But that is
how war goes: at the start, as in 1914, you march off with a flower in your
gun, singing songs of victory, you even play football with the enemy soldiers
during breaks; but as soon as you have seen some of your comrades die, you get
angry and eager for revenge by any means, so war becomes more cruel the longer
it lasts.
The epic is by no means a children’s
story in black and white, or a hagiography for a saintly Krishna. The bad guys
always have a decent motive or a legitimate excuse for their conduct (for
instance, Duryodhana has welcomed the illegitimate son Karna after the latter
was spurned by the Pandavas), and the good guys have their own past to blame
for the misfortunes that befall them. They are all far from perfect, and the dharma yuddha is an ideal which they try
to uphold as long as the going is good, but which they betray more and more as
the battle gets grimmer.
The concept of Dharma Yuddha is akin to the
later European concept of Just War. The Just War theory is linked with names
like Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius. It lays down that
war should only be started in self-defence, after attempts at a peaceful
solution, and with a real chance of victory. During the war, the means used
should be commensurate with the aim, non-combatants should be spared, and peace
overtures from the other side should be answered. The same principles are
already articulated briefly in the Dhanurveda and the Mahabharata.
Jihad
In Islam, the first blood that flows
is that of an unbeliever who laughs at the Muslims praying with their bottoms
up in the air: he is hit by the Muslims with an animal’s bone. There is no
trace of self-defence: an unbeliever exercises his freedom of expression and
the Muslims decide to become violent. Later, Mohammed would have a handful of
critics assassinated and another handful formally executed. This is the model
and justification for the murders or attempted murders of writers, cartoonists,
film-makers and other critics of Islam during the modern age.
When Mohammed and his followers
migrate to Medina, they are welcomed but soon realize that unlike the natives,
they have no source of income. So, they start attacking caravans. Mohammed is
credited with organising 82 raids (ghazwa,
hence also razzia) and with leading
26 of them in person. The passengers were held in captivity until their
families paid the ransom. Mohammed gave permission to his men to rape their
hostages. At first he instructed them to practise coitus interruptus (often cited in pro-Islamic arguments as proof of
how progressive Mohammed was, even condoning birth control!), later he decided
that it didn’t matter.
These raids set the pattern for
“holy war” against the unbelievers. They were called jihad fi sabil Allah, “exertion on the path of Allah”. Mohammed
used the money gained to buy weapons and horses to equip his growing army.
Nothing “internal” there, no character struggle against the evil tendencies
within oneself, only an external military endeavour. Given the repeated Muslim
initiative to strike first, it is also not required that the other side commits
aggression; self-defence is no requirement. All Mohammed’s subsequent struggles
against various categories of unbelievers are called jihad. So we have it on Mohammed’s own testimony that jihad means a military struggle against
the unbelievers.
When Islamic or pro-Islamic
apologists (such as David Cameron in May 2013, after a British soldier was
murdered by two Muslims in Woolwich) say that an act of violence against
unbelievers is a “betrayal of Islam”, they imply that an Islamic court would
punish the murderers. But in fact, before an Islamic judge, the culprits could
easily invoke the precedent behaviour of Mohammed himself. The words and acts
of the Prophet are the basis of Islamic law. All fatwa-s (juridical advice) ultimately answer the question in this
form: what has Mohammed done in a similar situation? The only reason for doubt
in some judges’ mind could be that in a particular case, an act of violence
would yield such negative publicity as to do Islam more harm than good. But the
mere fact that the Islamic cause was furthered by violence against the
unbelievers would be a sound emulation of the Prophet’s precedent. Whether it
was strategically wise to kill soldier Lee Rigby (and thus mobilize British
public opinion against Islam) is questionable, which is why the British Muslim Council
tried to limit the damage by falsely swearing that the act was un-Islamic; but
it was at any rate fully in accordance with Mohammed’s precedent and hence with
Islamic law (shari’a).
There are hundreds of farewell
letters, farewell video and suicide notes in which Islamic fighters and
terrorists explicitly say that they are going to pay the ultimate price for the
sake of Islam. For instance, Mohammed Atta of 9/11 fame and Mohammed Bouyeri,
who killed Theo van Gogh, said that Islam made them do it. Not “Islamism” or
“fundamentalism” but Islam. I take them seriously and believe them at their
word. By contrast, the “experts” overrule these men’s first-hand testimony and
assure us that it may have been any reason but not Islam.
Wherefrom then the claim that this jihad is merely the “little jihad”, while the real jihad or “great jihad” is an internal struggle? Firstly, note that all the above is
not really being denied by this claim. Jihad
is relabelled as “little jihad”, but is acknowledged nonetheless.
Preachers who have to motivate their flock to overcome the evil tendencies in
themselves like to picture this as a heroic enterprise, so they compare it to a
war. But of course, the metaphor of a figurative holy war is only possible
because the physical holy war exists.
The comparison happens to be
particularly popular in Sufism, a movement originating in the grey zone around
Islam. Mostly, Sufism drew from East-Persian Buddhism and from Turkic
Shamanism. The ecstatic trance pursued by the “whirling dervishes” is nothing
but the shamanic trance witnessed in e.g. Genghis Khan. The fana’ (annihilation) described by the
Sufi poets is an adaptation of the Buddhist nirvana.
This preservation of non-Islamic influences was aptly recognized by wary
Islamic theologians. Mansur al-Hallaj was beheaded for saying: Ana’l Haqq (“I am the True One”/Allah),
an adaptation of the Upanishadic saying Aham
Brahmasmi, “I am Brahma”. Only after Sufism was sufficiently assimilated
did orthodox Muslims judge it useful for propaganda purposes among the masses.
With success, for Sufi music, though
only superficially Islamic, is very popular in Pakistan and Bollywood. Sufi
phrases have hoodwinked many would-be “experts” into exclaiming that here is
the “real, peaceful Islam”. In reality, Sufis mostly became sweet-talking
Muslims who were just as hard-headed when it came to fighting the infidels. The
Sufi master Muinuddin Chishti, venerated even by silly Hindus, acted as a motivator
and spy in the conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori. At any rate, if you
think that “peace” and “inner struggle” are the real Islam, take the test and
try to convince a shari’a court that war
against the unbelievers is un-Islamic.
Khalistani dharma yuddh
The Sikhs are a Hindu sect
particularly devoted to Vishnu in his incarnations as Rama and Krishna. Most of
the Sikh Gurus are named after them, e.g. Guru Govind Singh was named after
Krishna, the “cowherd” (govind). He
founded a military order, the Khalsa, in order to defend “Hindu dharma”. But in
the 19th century, the Sikhs, with their history of resistance
against the Moghul empire, saved many British colonizers during the Mutiny,
perceived as an attempt to restore the Moghul empire. Out of gratitude, the
British decided to upgrade Sikhism, not just by reserving many army jobs for
Sikhs, but by turning Sikhism into a separate religion.
This Sikh separatism caught on, and
by the 1920s Sikhism was led by a faction pushing for a distinct religious
identity. Since they could not start altering their holy Granth, a collection of hymns with Hindu themes, and standing proof
of Sikhism’s Hindu character, they altered or reinterpreted everything else.
Thus, for their holiest shrine, the Sanskrit name Hari Mandir (“Vishnu temple”) was replaced with the Urdu name Darbar Sahib (“revered court-session”).
Hindu icons such as the Vishnu statue in the Hari Mandir were removed, along with the Brahmins serving them. To
take distance from Hinduism, Islamic concepts were borrowed or Hindu terms were
reinterpreted in an Islamic sense. Thus, an Islamic fatwa became the Sikh hukumnama
(“command-letter”).
In this climate, it was inevitable
that among separatist Sikhs, dharma
yuddha (in its Panjabi pronunciation: dharam
yuddh) would be emptied of its Hindu content and take on the meaning of jihad: war against the unbelievers. In
India this means in effect: war against the Hindus. In the 1980s, this term was used for the wave
of terrorism against the Indian state and for the creation of a Sikh state
called Khalistan (“land of the pure”). This struggle was supported by the
global hub of terrorism, Pakistan (also “land of the pure”), eventhough there
is a historical hostility between the Sikh community and Pakistan, the
successor state of the Moghul empire. It also had the sympathy of many Sikhs in
the West as well as from poorly informed Westerners. Though the Khalistani
struggle in India died out in the early 1990s, there still are some centres of
Khalistani ideology in the West.
The Khalistanis’ sense of religion
is proverbially crude. This recrudescence resonates well with the cluelessness
about the fine points of religion among the “secularist” class, which holds the
reins of power in India. Every hazy prejudice by a Western tourist can also be
heard from the mouth of Indian journalists and cabinet ministers. Government-sanctioned
schoolbooks teach that all religions are basically the same. They are all
assumed to preach government-sanctioned ethics and, except for casteist Hinduism,
they are all presented as egalitarian. Since the existence of jihad cannot be entirely denied to any
Indian who follows the news, the next line of defence is to shield Islam from
criticism by alleging that all religions are the same. One way to do this is to
spread the false notion of “Hindu terrorism”, another is to blur the
terminology and equate Hindu “chivalrous war” with Islamic “holy war”. The use
of dharma yuddha as a synonym of jihad, “war against the unbelievers”, is
unhistorical and incorrect.
