War and Peace

The linked subjects, because they are linked, make for very riveting epic novels. They keep university courses interesting and on topic. There are plenty of those twinned subjects-events to look at, past and present. From antiquity comes anecdotal accounts passed down through the scripts of ancient manuscripts and from sources like the ever-reliable Bible which abounds with them.

Any history of Islam is replete with accounts of religious wars of conquest just like those of Christendom and the Crusades. Nothing appears to engage human nature in a frantic will to slaughter like religion with its indelible message of peace. An intangible turned so readily to reality; survival of the fittest; survival of its omniscient, powerful talisman.

One of the most famous 19th-Century works of literature is Count Leo Tolstoy's tome of War and Peace. The most famous of all war-and-siege epics is Homer's Iliad. But there are stories of wild, slaughtering armies sweeping through the Globe from ancient times to the present; from the hordes of Genghis Khan  to the world conquest of Alexander the Great and the conquering armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. Humankind has not grown any kinder over the millennia in facing its perceived enemies.

The grim stories of mass atrocities are evenly matched with those happening to the present day; from the unrelenting, regulated and timely-orchestrated mass annihilation of the Holocaust, to the mass slaughters in Cambodia, Sudan and Rwanda, the world has never learned to bypass war and go directly to peace, and stay there, for it represents a far more comfortable place. Instead carnage on a scale scarcely imagined by the sane is carried out by those whom bloodlust has overtaken.

Spurred on by territorial imperative, the most ancient of all animal impulses growing out of the elemental inheritance of all living things whom nature has endowed with the will of survival; wars, conflict between tribes, clans, ethnic groups, religious sects, ideologies continue to thrive and to surprise us with the monumentality of their destructive inventiveness in the flawed minds of men who use their charisma and power to wage unrelenting misery.

The Assyrians of ancient Middle East provenance were thought to be one of the most war-loving of all such tribes. Sometimes referred to as the empire of the first military power the world had known. It cannot be known whether it is their genetic legacy sprinkled freely within the Middle East that led eventually to that already-militarized and war-riven geography to become enslaved to the kinds of hatred that lead inevitably to conflict.



When a new religion was introduced by the Prophet Mohammad, who took inspiration for it from the already established religions of the region; first Judaism, then Christianity, on the monotheistic model that pleased him greatly, he felt that all adherents of the previous two should rightfully abandon their trial models and join his far superior rendition of the representation of the One True God. To further his ambitions in that direction he led armies of brutal conquest sweeping their deadly conversion-persuasion throughout the geography and beyond.

Battle of Nicopolis, 1396. Painting from 1523

And now, in the 21st Century, long and far removed in time from its inception as a Bedouin religion taking precedence over all others in the minds of its faithful, militant Islam has once again arisen, with a vengeance.  Taking inspiration from the past conquering mighty armies of Islam wreaking havoc and gaining ascendancy in European Spain, in India and Asia, a new, purist Islam invoking the past in melancholy despair that it is the past, has become morbidly resentful that Western values and religion have eclipsed their own.

And they will have none of it, they declare. None of the corrupted, evil values espoused and lived by Western societies with their degraded appetites and customs insulting to Islam. Although special exception is made for Western technology that enables communication, of technologically advanced weapons aiding conflict.

Jihadists turn a jaundiced eye of condemnation upon their own, deeming Muslims insufficiently steeped in surrender to the fine-detail dictates of Islamic precepts and values to be heretics, whose value to life is no more than that of the detested Jews and infidels.

Yet it is far more convenient, much easier to strike close to home, at the vulnerable, humble Muslims puzzled that they are not considered sufficiently pious, alarmed that they have suddenly become living targets for imminent death. From North Africa to the Middle East, the Far East to Europe and North America, Muslims themselves are under dire duress as Sunnis identify Shia as worthy of death and Shia succumb to the survival need of pre-empting the Sunnis and killing them first.

And in the process war consumes the present with the armies of Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda in Iraq, in the Maghreb, in the Levant, and al-Shabab, and Al-Nusra and the Muslim Brotherhood with all the other hate-filled, death-loving, martyrdom-aspiring lovers of Islam and the blessed Prophet seting out to welcome the opportunity given them by the rise of militant Islamism to invoke the fog of war and death and cloud the future of life on Earth.