tailieunhanh - GOD AND WAR: AN AUDIT & AN EXPLORATION

All faithful Muslims are thus involved in a continuous ‘greater jihad’, which is largely nonviolent. The ‘lesser jihad’, or war, is commanded by Allah but must be carried out according to strict rules. There is a sense in which the lesser jihad is both a ‘Holy War’ and ‘Just War’. But the purpose pf the lesser jihad (or war) is not to make others Muslim, although some (Muslims and non-Muslim). | 1 GOD AND WAR AN AUDIT AN EXPLORATION Compiled1 by Greg Austin Todd Kranock and Thom Oommen2 INTRODUCTION As the USA and the UK were preparing to invade Iraq in 2003 people around the world engaged in renewed debate about religion and war. Holy war God s war just war and clash of civilizations were just a few of the terms. Was there some new war between Christianity and Islam Are Al Qaida s acts of terrorism a war between Islam and the secular West What is the relationship between religion and war Has there been a rise in religiously motivated violence There is a view that the number of groups involved in conflicts with significant religious dimensions has increased dramatically in the more than half-century since the end of World War II from 26 between 1945 and 1949 to 70 in the 1990s with the greatest increase in the 1960s and 1970s .3 The author of that view postulated that by the 1980s militant religious sects accounted for one-quarter of all armed rebellions . He cited Martin van Creveld There appears every prospect that religious attitudes beliefs and fanaticism will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict than it has in the West at any rate for the last 300 years .4 This article concludes that at a philosophical level the main religious traditions have little truck with war or violence. All advocate peace as the norm and see genuine spirituality as involving a disavowal of violence. It is mainly when organised religious institutions become involved with state institutions or when a political opposition is trying to take power that people begin advocating religious justifications for war. One organising feature of this article is what it calls the Religious War Audit . BBC asked us to see how many wars had been caused by religion. After reviewing historical analyses by a diverse array of specialists we concluded that there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel Arab wars from 1948 to now often painted in the .