In the past few decades, Christian and Muslim theologies have been misinterpreted and used tactically against Middle Eastern dictatorships with no success.
For instance, former US president George W Bush justified the “war on terror” as a fight against an “axis of evil” and called for a new Crusade to liberate the people of the Middle East.
This use of Christian theological concepts to justify the war in the Middle East requires a lot of spin.
The teachings of Jesus about nonviolence and pacifism such as “turning the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39), “loving one’s enemy” (Matthew 5:43), and warning that “all who live by the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52) was originally understood to mean that Christians were forbidden to use violence.
It was only after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 391 CE under Theodosius I that St Augustine proposed a “Just War” theory, saying war was allowed only if it was defensive, and intended to create peace, without self-interest.
Holy war, or a religiously sanctioned war for the purpose of imperial expansion, appears much later in Christian theology — in the 11th to 13th centuries. Pope Urban II’s speech of 1095 is the first known use of this idea, promising a guaranteed entrance into heaven to everyone who dies as a crusader.
The Crusades were notionally an attempt to win back the holy land for the “Christian” civilization. But they are better understood as an attempt to extend Papal powers, unify the ideology of feudal Europe and create international trading opportunities for the bourgeoning merchant class in Italy.
The idea of a Holy War has long since lost credibility in Christian theology. George W Bush’s now famous use of terms like “Crusade against terrorism” and “crusade to defend freedom” can only be understood as a regression in the development of Christian theology.
It has also led to many political commentators defining the “war on terror” as the tenth crusade. In Alexander Cockburn’s famous 2002 article “The Tenth Crusade” in Counterpunch, the situation is described vividly:
“Islamic fanatics flew those planes a year ago and here we are with a terrifying alliance of Judaeo-Christian fanatics, conjoined in their dreams of the recovery of the Holy Lands of the West Bank, Judaea and Samaria.
“War on Terror? It's back to the late thirteenth century, picking up where Prince Edward left off with his ninth crusade after St Louis had died in Tunis with the word Jerusalem on his lips.”
The second example of a misinterpreted theology failing to bring justice in the Middle East is the reinterpretation of “Jihad” as violent, terrorist activity by the al-Qaeda movement.
Jihad is an Arabic term from the Quran that means “struggle”, and has traditionally been interpreted in Islam as moral struggle: a personal struggle against sin, or the struggle against injustice in Islamic society.
The material basis of Jihadism has been outlined by Norm Dixon’s 2001 Green Left Weekly article “How the CIA created Osama bin Laden”.
The Jihadis were a group of fighters that were funded, armed and trained by the US who fought against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan.
What made al-Qaeda so original was its interpretation of Jihad as violence or military struggle against the US empire which was seen as the cause of injustice and oppression in the Arab world.
Mark Juergensmeyer claimed in a March article on the The Immanent Frame blog: “They also thought that only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare — based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses — provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle.”
Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle — including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations — was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.
In the struggle against dictatorship, the people’s revolutions in the Middle East are different to the reactionary tactics of the US and al-Qaeda, not just because they are successful, but also because they are carried out justly.
The revolutions work because of the material force behind them: the mass of united, oppressed people. Unlike the Crusader and Jihadi movements, they have only used violence to defend their revolutions.
They have not divided along the lines of race, gender or religion because they understand that the real war is against the oppressors — not against another culture, race or religion.
How embarrassing then for Crusaders and Mujaheddin alike, when working people acting in solidarity between different faiths and races can achieve so efficiently what all the might of the US empire, and all the terror of al-Qaeda, with their divisive religious rhetoric and military might, could not do.
[Pastor Karl Hand is an ordained minister in the Metropolitan Community Church, and currently pastors CRAVE MCC, http://cravemcc.com .]