10.8 Holy war
Was it accidental that a civilization centered on Islam played this role in the history of Eurasia? Or did the religion itself possess features—over and above the traditional intransigence of monotheism—that helped the civilization to achieve its remarkable expansion and maintain its cultural unity over unprecedented distances?
One relevant feature was the salience of holy war (jihad) in the Islamic heritage. The Koran, though not by any means a pacifist manifesto, is somewhat ambiguous in its treatment of armed struggle against the infidel. Some passages seem to enjoin only defensive warfare: "fight in the way of God with those who fight you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors" (Koran 2:190). Other passages, however, suggest aggressive warfare: "slay the idolators wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush" (Koran 9:5). Likewise Muhammad is quoted as declaring, "I have been commanded to fight people till they testify that there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God, and perform the prayer and pay the alms-tax." Yet, at one point in the course of his struggle with the pagan Meccans, he made a truce with them, and he is also said to have told his followers, "Leave the Turks alone as long as they leave you alone."
On the basis of such materials, the medieval Muslim scholars worked out an elaborate legal doctrine of holy war. They endorsed the fundamental idea of aggressive warfare aimed at extending the dominion of Islam, but at the same time hedged it about with a variety of ifs and buts. Normally the infidels were to be called to accept Islam before they were attacked, women and children were to be spared, enemies were not to be tortured nor their bodies mutilated, truces could be made, Jews and Christians who submitted to Islamic rule were to be tolerated, and so forth. On the other hand, there were many matters on which the scholars disagreed: whether other categories of noncombatants could be killed, whether the enemy could be slain with fire, whether mangonels could be used, whether the livestock and fruit trees of the infidel could be destroyed, whether non-Arab pagans who submitted to Islamic rule could be tolerated, and the like.
The fact that Islam espoused a doctrine of holy war against the infidel was obviously no guarantee that Muslims would actually engage in it. Granted it had worked like a charm to mobilize the anarchic tribesmen of seventh-century Arabia. But humans regularly fail to live up—or down—to their principles. Nor is lacking such a doctrine any guarantee that people will abstain from conquest. The Mongols, for example, conquered more territory than the Muslims, and slaughtered many more people, without being inspired by anything that could pass for a doctrine. Yet the central place of the value of holy war in the Islamic heritage certainly made available to Muslims a moral charter for the continuing conquest of infidel lands, and one they invoked often enough. In that sense there clearly was something about Islam that lent itself to the creation of a global culture.