Some recent widely-seen footage from NBC's Kevin Sites shows a US marine apparently shooting a wounded prisoner in a mosque in Falluja. "He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead," the marine says immediately before shooting the Iraqi, and when told the man in question was one of a group who had been captured, given medical treatment and left in the mosque awaiting transportation the previous day, "I didn't know sir - I didn't know." As Sites comments, "The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread."
That moment should be poignant enough: one can feel for the young marine, who had apparently been shot in the face himself the day before. But there's more, and I would like to use this pair of DoubleQuotes as an opportunity to visit a variety of themes of interest: military and religious honor and morality, differences between the approaches of Islamic and Western law, and above all, the nature of the inner struggle which is itself the benchmark of morality.
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In his blog under the heading Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1, Sites describes the incident as he witnessed it, taking pains to do so in a manner that is intended to avoid its use "a tool of propaganda for the left or the right" and without "imposing" on the marine "guilt or innocence or anything in between" But this is just the beginning. He goes on to describe his own moral struggle once he realizes what an impact his footage might have on a tensely watching world, and considers holding the tape back from the "pool" or even destroying it. But that brings the same sinking feeling to his stomach as witnessing the shooting did – it "feels wrong", it would be a betrayal of truth. He describes the deliberations leading to his eventual decision to make the tape available using the words of St John of the Cross: as a dark night of the soul.
The marine faces his moral struggle, the reporter has one of his own. And then in the course of his blog entry he quotes some remarkable words from his an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, taped shortly before the battle began. As he comments, these words seem "prophetic" in retrospect. Colonel Buhl's words form the content of the first quote above, which I have titled, "The moral struggle".
I found these words describing the immense struggle that those who would fight within the limitations of a military and moral code of honor to be the most touching in Sites' entire account of the incident. Again, one can feel for the marine in his struggles, one can feel for his commanding officer in his own.
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There are various ways we could go from here. We could address the marine's situation and the harsh realities of war. We could discuss the killing of prisoners of war as viewed in the Geneva Conventions (it is prohibited to kill those who have surrendered) and in the Qur'an (only after the battle has been won should prisoners be taken, and then they should be treated with generosity and/or made available for ransom).
We could also seek a broader contrast between western and Islamic views of morality in war, noting that in the west (as under the Conventions) certain behaviors are within the pale while others ("war crimes") are absolutely prohibited, whereas Qur'anic law provides for certain prohibited actions to be permitted in cases where the enemy has already taken them.
This last seems to me to be a highly significant matter, so I'd like to restate it and explore it a little. The Qur'an teaches that war should be fought with restraint unless and until the enemy engages in reprehensible behavior, at which time the same exact behavior becomes permitted to Muslims as morally justified reciprocity.
The Qur'anic perspective is presented in terms of the "forbidden months", three months in which warfare was prohibited at the time the Qur'an was revealed. The revelation makes it clear that that prohibition should be observed unless and until breached by the enemy -- at which time the prohibition is lifted from Muslims too:
…for all things prohibited, there is the law of equality. If then any one transgresses the prohibition against you, Transgress ye likewise against him. But fear Allah, and know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.
Qur'an, Buqara, 2.194)
I am suggesting that this kind of thinking may hold roughly the same degree of obviousness within the thinking of many Muslims as the idea that what the Geneva convention outlaws is abhorrent and universally prohibited holds in many western minds. The statement is clear, the standard is a standard of restraint and justice -- but one's own morally permitted range of actions is calculated according to whatever level of morality obtains among one's enemies.
That sensibility, that moral calculus – and make no mistake, just because it is an unfamiliar moral calculus in no way implies that it is not a moral calculus, nor for that matter that it is an inferior one – is one which bin Laden appears to use. That very verse (Buqara 194) is in fact the one which opens al-Jazeera's presentation of bin Laden's pre-election video. I featured it my Forensic Theology DoubleQuotes recently under the title Forensic Theology. That verse appears to be foundational for OBL's own calculus, and thus for a clear understanding on our side of how his decision making is shaped.
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But I don't want to leave it there, either, I want to take this further, and that's where the second quote from this pair comes in. Because just as moral struggle is important to the young marine, his commanding officer, and a journalist, so it is in jihad. We in the west are by now so used to associating jihad with acts of brutality, hatred and terror – suicide bombings, kamikaze attacks, beheadings – that it is easy for us to forget that the word itself means "struggle" and has reference to the struggle to remain in submission to the divine will. This is the primary meaning of jihad, and even when the struggle takes place within a "holy war" context, that remains (or should remain) the prime purpose of the effort as a whole.
For those who don't know him, Rumi is a poet-saint in the Islamic tradition to be ranked with St John of the Cross – who gave us that phrase, "the dark night of the soul" -- within Catholicism, and the author of the Mathnawi, the compendium from which this tale comes. As it happens, he was also listed as the single best-selling poet, living or dead, in a recent survey of American bookshops, thanks to extensive translations by the American poets Robert Bly and Coleman Barks. And that's a curious distinction when you consider that Rumi was born eight centuries ago in Afghanistan (a country with which we were recently at war and still occupy) and then moved to Baghdad (likewise), and thence eventually to Qonya, Turkey. Besides his extraordinary status as a poet, Rumi is remembered as the founder of the "whirling dervish" school of Sufism.
Rumi's story of Ali exemplifies the intensity of the struggle against one's own baser instincts, even in the heat of battle. Ali's sword is lifted against a foe, in battle. The foe spits in Ali's face. And Ali, noting that an egotistic anger at the insult has now added itself to his motive, suspends his killing stroke and desists from killing his opponent. Because in jihad it is not battle victory nor pride not anger which brings one to the fight but the righteous cause of Allah, and the jihad is first and foremost against that in oneself which takes on from him.
Whether the story itself is hagiography, as many will maintain, or history, which others will assert, matters little for my purposes. What is extraordinary her is that such an attitude could be enshrined in the common memory of a great and at times militant assembly, and that such a level of self-awareness should be hoped for and prized in their warriors.
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Describing the human condition, Emerson once wrote: It seems as if heaven has sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum. And here they will break out into their native music, and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns, and they mope and wallow like dogs!
In the mad fit of war, it is urgent that we should be able to hear again those words "heard in heaven" – in this case, the voices of the struggle for restraint even in the fury of battle. They may at times seem tenuous, there will be times when they may seem frankly incredible: yet they are all around us.
Sources:Kevin Sites' blog
Jellaluddin Rumi, Masnavi
Originally prepared for posting 25 November 2004, delayed by moving house and subsequent flu
