War can show us at our worst,
but also at our best
by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad
What is it like to be licensed to kill? The extraordinary experience of the
soldier is that a declaration of war allows you to step over a moral boundary,
and find that to shoot someone has now become a virtue, and not a criminal offence.
Life perhaps has nothing more disorientating to offer than this instant moral
inversion. I felt it myself, once, travelling into Bosnia as an aid worker during
the war there: a mixture of exhilaration and a sickening confusion at the knowledge
that whether the men at the next checkpoint proved courteous, or whether they
opened fire, there would be no-one to hold them to account. The normal laws
of human behaviour had been abolished entirely. In this profoundly strange place,
nothing could be predicted.
We have to think, now, of the young people, cast like dice by distant politicians
upon the sands, as they look through the windows of their vehicles for target
opportunities. Whichever side they are on, they carry immense burdens. They
will be afraid. They may suffer private agonies of doubt over the justice of
their cause. They may dread an attack by anthrax spores, or depleted uranium.
And yet their leaders have entrusted them with an almost godlike power of life
and death over half-glimpsed strangers. A teenager may be judge and executioner
in no more than five seconds. A small squeeze of a trigger, a faint tap on a
computer console,
and a whole life is gone.
The religions have insisted that the nobility of the soldier's calling hinges
on the way he carries this burden. True, we have a habit of dragging religion
into disputes which more usually have their origins in our own stupid failings.
It's sometimes said that if truth is the first casualty in war, God is the first
conscript. Yet God is really present in war, and He has a message for the young
man hunting other young men, which is that the face in the binoculars is His
greatest creation. "When you strike", said the Prophet, "avoid the face, for
God made Adam in His image". He urged that prisoners of war be fed and clothed
no less
adequately than one's own soldiers. Women and children were utterly sacrosanct.
War can show us at our worst, but also at our best. Over the past months, older
men on both sides have failed many tests. Our prayers now are that younger people
will do all they can to pass the stern test which they now face in combat. We
must pray that when, as the Koran says, "war lays down its burdens" - and the
soldiers return from the nightmarish, lawless world of battle - that they have
brought healing, instead of more rancour and division.
© 2003 BBC
