Excerpts from Chapter I:THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF VIOLENCE IN CHRISTIANITY

Charlemagne

The Emperor Charlemagne wrote to Pope Leo III:

“According to the succour of divine mercy, it is incumbent upon us to take up arms and defend the holy Church of Christ from the incursion of the pagans and from the devastation of the unfaithful, everywhere without, and to fortify it with the recognition of Catholic faith within. In turn, it is incumbent upon you, most holy Father, to raise your hand, like Moses, unto God to aid our militia, and thus, by your intercession and by God’s guidance and concession, the Christian people may always and everywhere claim victory over the enemies of His holy name, and the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, may be proclaimed throughout the world” (89).

The alliance between the throne and the altar was by now established. The Carolingian era undoubtedly signaled a turning point in the history of the Catholic Church. The merger between religious and civil-military offices and, therefore, between the figure of the priest and that of the state official was one of its most significant aspects, which would receive even greater emphasis in the Ottonian era (10th century). In fact, Charlemagne (and his successors), wanting to Christianize his realm as much as possible, vested abbots and bishops with the administrative functions of the State. In so doing, he enriched civil and governmental structures spiritually, on the one hand, while he exposed the clergy to an ever-greater risk of secularization on the other. If we take into account the fact that high ecclesiastic offices were, for the most part, the privilege of the second sons of noble families, we can then easily understand how these prince-bishops and prince-abbots often seemed more like rich, powerful lords, devoted to the typical noble occupations of hunting and war, than like pastors of souls. In 806, for example, Charlemagne wrote a letter to the abbot Fulrad of Nieder-Alteich, exhorting him to head to Saxony with his troops, equipped with “shield and lance, sword and dagger, bow and quiver with arrows, [...] axes, spades, blades of iron and other necessary instruments against the enemy” (90): he turned to him as he would have turned to any military leader.

In reality, already in the first centuries of its history, the Church had made a peremptory pronouncement prohibiting the clergy from brandishing arms. This prohibition, however, for reasons that I have explained, was little observed in the High Middle Ages, even if the Church, while closing an eye to the actual reality, remained steady in its affirmation of the principle that the priest may only attend to soldiers, pray for war and give his blessing, but never actually fight.

Under Charlemagne, Christian war began to acquire new meanings: no longer merely an instrument of punishment and correction against the unjust, no longer a simple defense of the Church; war now also became missionary war, having as its goal the dilatatio Christianitatis. This concept had already been formulated, two centuries earlier, by Pope Gregory the Great, but it would be Charlemagne in particular who would give it full life. His endeavors, especially those against the Saxons, cannot be otherwise defined but as true and proper holy wars. Military conquest went hand in hand with spreading the faith. The choice between baptism and death that Charlemagne left to the pagans was not approved by some great intellectuals and theologians, such as Alcuin of York, who invoked the freedom of faith, but was consistent with a bloody, warrior spirit already melded with Christianity—a spirit, moreover, that was just as familiar to

the Saxons, surely more sensitive to the idea of a strong and fearsome “God of the armies” than to a God of peace and “weakness.” After the well-known battle of Verden, Charlemagne had more than four thousand five hundred Saxons massacred. It is highly probable, then, that these pagans, even in their disgrace, remained struck by the glory, majesty and power of this Christian God, truly worthy of being feared and honored. This same cruelty was, therefore, a demonstration of force, a sign of power and glory.

In their spirit and even in their cruelty, the wars of Charlemagne reflect the holy wars of the Old Testament: the slaughter of entire peoples for the triumph of the God of the armies. Many other “missionaries” (largely canonized by the Roman Church) employed methods similar to those of Charlemagne: from the Irish warrior-monk Saint Columba to the King of Norway, Saint Olaf, and the King of Hungary, Saint Stephan. For pagan peoples born in war, the language of arms and violence was the most effective, the most apt to cause the new Christian faith to be understood and accepted, which might “please” them all the more so as it presented itself as the religion of a strong, virile and fearsome God. In the end—as paradoxical as it may seem—it involved a genuine endeavor of evangelistic “inculturation”: inculturating Christianity in warrior populations.

One characteristic statement of this typically Nordic sensibility is provided in the literature of these people, who, once they became Christians, still maintained their “virile,” warrior vision of divinity. For example, Cynewulf, an Anglo-Saxon writer from the 7th century, a pious and devout man, presents, in his poem, Christ, the image of a Jesus who, although nailed to the cross, remains nonetheless a young hero, “God of the armies” and “Lord of triumphs.”

But to return to Charlemagne, let me quote a poetic description left to us in the Song of Roland on the missionary war of Charlemagne in Spain:

The sunny day had passed, the shades of nightHad fallen; bright the moonlight; all the starsIn heaven shone. Carle ruled in Sarraguce.Unto one thousand men he gave commandTo search throughout the city's synagoguesAnd mosques for all their idols and graved signsOf gods—these to be broken up and crushedBy axe and iron mallet he ordains.Nor sorcery nor falsehood left. King CarleBelieves in God and serves him faithfully.Then bishops bless the fountains, leading upThe Heathens to the blest baptismal Font.If one perchance resist the King, condemnedIs he to die, or hanged, or burnt, or slain.More than one hundred thousand are baptizedTrue Christians; but not so Queen Bramimunde:A captive shall she go unto sweet FranceAnd be converted by the King through love. (91).

Like the Song of Roland (12th century), countless other epic poems were composed during the Middle Ages to sing the praises of military-religious heroes and their holy wars: it suffices to think of the ancient Russian prose hagiography entitled Tales of the Life and Courage of the Great and Pious Prince Alexander (13th century), of the Castillian epopee Poem of the Cid (12th century) and, later, of the Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso, a true panegyric of the crusades.

The Papal Magisterium before the Crusades

The position of the Popes in the first centuries of the Middle Ages was seemingly ambiguous. On the one hand, they would (like Saint Gregory the Great) approve and bless missionary wars and would (like Stephan II) ask earthly sovereigns to defend the Church with arms; on the other, a Pope like Saint Nicholas I (9th century) would proclaim:

“As to those who refuse to accept the good that is Christianity [...], I can say no more than that you convince them of their error, not so much with force as with admonishments, exhortations and reason [...]; absolutely no violence should be done to them that they may believe.” (92)

And later Alexander II (11th century) would reiterate the concept:

“Our Lord, Jesus Christ, was never said to have compelled anyone to serve him with force, but with humble exhortation, allowing everyone to make his or her own free choice.” (93)

In reality, the contradiction is only apparent: we must consider the context of the passages quoted, of the contingent motive for which they were written, of the political and ecclesiastical situation of the moment. The doctrine, however, always remains the same: a Christian is always urged to feel love and forgiveness but, at the same time, if in a role of authority, it is his duty to guide and correct his brothers and to defend them from those who would harm them, resorting even to force if necessary, but always guarding in his heart charity and the right intention. Similarly, faith is a free choice of every man and cannot be forced upon him; but it is the task of the Christian to make this choice an easy one for others, doing everything possible to create exterior circumstances favorable to acceptance of the faith (for example, by eliminating the lure of pagan cults). Moreover, according to the principle already articulated by Saint Augustine, “we must not be either too idle in the name of patience nor too cruel under the pretext of zeal in charity” (94); so, as Gratianus will say in his Decretum: “Some evils must be chastised, some tolerated” (95).

Another aspect of the issue involving the attitude of the Church to war is that the latter was always better incorporated into the fabric of religion. The military world became—so to speak—a camp for evangelism: i.e., the Church, rather than leave soldiers outside Christ’s fold, with all their violence, crudity and humanity, undertook to Christianize and moralize that world as much as possible. In so doing, especially with the institution of the Christian chivalry, the Church, embracing the world of war, attempted to render it less cruel and to contain it within the limits of morality and justice. Since war existed anyway, it was preferable that it be put in the hands of the priests rather than be left to the mercy of an unchecked brutality.

The chivalric, warrior spirit, moreover, was for centuries “the virile soul” of religion. Given that the instinct and—I might say—the joy of war are something deeply and viscerally rooted in the masculine character, the Church, especially starting in the Middle Ages, welcomed and legitimized the military vocation. In fact, just as a religion, which would require that one fully renounce such base instincts as procreation, would prove impractical and unbearable for humanity (and indeed all religions embrace these instincts through marriage, sanctifying, moralizing and embellishing them), so the Church felt that, if it had closed the door on war entirely, it would have acted against nature: i.e., against that inherent virile attraction to the world of war – and that man would have ended up frustrated and pinioned deep within himself.

Excerpts from Chapter II:THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF VIOLENCE IN ISLAM

Jihad against the Jews and Hajj Amin al-Hussaini

Meanwhile three issues were significantly disrupting the lives of nations in those years: the two world wars and the founding of the State of Israel. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the resulting creation of local national entities—often manipulated and used for the purposes of European colonial powers—and the strengthening of the Zionist movement in Palestine presented the Islamic world with certain big new challenges. In particular, the ever more massive presence of Jews in Palestine (as a result of the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and as a result of the British decision to assign the land of Israel, as was logical, to the people of Israel) revived and unleashed all of the hatred that had accumulated for centuries in Arab Muslims against the Jews.

I do not intend to expand upon the attitude of the Koran and Mohammed towards the Jews. It is a complex issue, which I have already examined in my book, A Dialogue on Islam between Father and Son, and to which I refer the interested reader (46). Here we need only remember that, although it explicitly states that the Jewish people were chosen by God “above all beings” (K. 2:47/Arb. 2:40) and that the Jewish religion comes from God, the Koran also contains (like the Bible itself) many verses of harsh reproach directed at the wickedness and untrustworthiness of the Jews. And these verses, together with the example of Mohammed, who behaved on many occasions with hostility towards the Jews, have persuaded Muslims that the Jews are an enemy of Islam and, therefore, that they should be fought or kept at a distance. Indeed, as the centuries passed, the image of the Jews was more and more demonized until finally attaining the extreme levels of anti-Semitism that we see today.

One factor exacerbating the hatred was the conquest of Palestine—and of Jerusalem in particular—by caliph Omar in 637. In the years that followed, the caliphs had the enormous al-Aqsa mosque built on the Temple Mount, the spiritual center of Judaism from as early as 1000 A.D., which was then considered the third holiest site of Islam, after Mecca and Medina. In reality, Mohammed had never declared Jerusalem a holy city of Islam, and indeed had deliberately ordered Muslims to turn, during prayer, not towards Jerusalem (as they first did), but towards Mecca, precisely to emphasize that Jerusalem was to remain the sanctuary of the Jews and not of the Muslims. According to one hadith, he even said that “the conquest of Jerusalem” by the Muslims would be among the catastrophes that would mark the end times before the Last Judgement (47). Current Islamic doctrine, therefore, according to which Jerusalem, and especially the Al-Aqsa mosque, is supposed to be a holy site of Islam, is in no way based either on the Koran or on the original hadiths of Mohammed.

The Prophet, nevertheless, is attributed with sayings and actions of open hostility towards the Jews. According to one hadith, for example, he said to the Jews gathered in the synagogue in Medina: “Convert to Islam and you shall be safe. Know that this land belongs to God and to his Prophet, and I mean to drive you from it” (48). There is even a report of one specific, categorical order of his: “The Prophet said: ‘Kill any Jew that falls into your power.’ ” (49). And again: “The Day of Judgment shall not arrive if you do not first fight against the Jews, and any stone behind which a Jew shall hide, shall say: ‘O Muslim, here behind me is a Jew, kill him!’ ” (50).

The continued reading of these and other similar hadiths over the centuries, as well as verses from the Koran, created a store of extreme rancor towards the “children of Israel” in the hearts of Muslims, a rancor that periodically exploded into pogroms and massacres. An attitude similar to that encountered in the Medieval Christian world, in which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the insistence of Christian teachings on the Jews, murderers of Christ and “god killers,” wicked and

usurious, led not only to ghettoizing and humiliating the Jewish presence in Europe, but also to repeated massacres, especially frequent in the era of the Crusades. And in these very same centuries, the Jews, who often fled Christian countries for shelter in Islamic territory, found themselves subject to similar treatment by the Muslims. In Spain and Morocco, their numbers were considerable and the persecution, as consequence, more violent. One well-known episode, for example, was the massacre at Granada, when the Jewish Vizier, Joseph ben Naghrela, was crucified and another 4,000 Jews were killed with him on 30 December 1066. A few months earlier, the Islamic poet Abu Ishaq of Granada had sung these verses:

“Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators?How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!” (51)

There were also riots in Morocco, in the city of Fes and elsewhere, in 1033, resulting in 6,000 dead among the Jews. Similar scenes were repeated in 1276 and 1465. In 1790, Mulay Yazid, the new governor of Tetouan—again in Morocco—announced an actual hunting of the Jews (52): their homes were ransacked, the women raped and thrown naked into the streets, many rabbis were hung upside down until they died, others burned alive, others crucified on the doors of their dwellings, as a sign of revenge for having killed the prophets (as is repeated several times in the Koran) and for the refusal to convert to Islam.

If this was the climate throughout much of the Muslim world, you can well imagine how much more tense was the atmosphere in Palestine. Here the Jewish presence was felt as even more threatening since they claimed the land as their own. And all the more so when the Zionist movement assumed a concrete form. This was the fuse that ignited the anti-Semitic hatred already largely present in Islam. ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (1882-1935) figured significantly in this matter. A graduate of the prestigious theological university of Al-Azhar, he then became imam at a mosque in Haifa, Palestine. Known for the violence of his sermons and for his bitterness against the Jews, he gave a strong Muslim religious connotation to the Palestinian resistance. It was no longer a matter of merely defending the country from the invader, whether British or Zionist, but of defending the holy sites of Islam (Al-Aqsa) and of carrying out God’s vengeance against the Jewish infidels. Al-Qassam (to which today’s Al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, harkens back) tirelessly dedicated itself to preaching its anti-Semitic doctrine among the Palestinian people and to giving birth to terrorist and guerilla groups against the English and especially against the Jews. Thanks to Al-Qassam, the Palestinian cause has ceased to be a locally confined issue since the 1920s, taking on an international dimension and changing from a national resistance movement to a religious war, for which the entire Islamic community has been mustered in defense of al-Aqsa.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Hajj Amin al-Hussaini very near the positions of al-Qassam became the grand Mufti of Jerusalem. As a result of his position as the highest spiritual and political authority, the preachings of al-Hussaini were heard and received with enthusiasm by the Palestinian people. He tried in every way possible to incite the Arabs against the Jews and thereby gave rise to various pogroms, the best known of which was that of 1929. On 23 August, the Muslims, only just exited from Friday prayer at the mosque, and burning with zeal inspired by the words of the Mufti, attacked many Jews in Jerusalem and killed a number of them. The wave of violence lasted for several days and reached a peak on 24 August, when numerous Palestinians poured out in Hebron (where a Jewish community of a certain significance had still been living since ancient times) and cried, “Allahu akbar” and “Death to the Jews!” They attacked them in their homes and in the street, armed with axes and knives; some were stoned in the streets, clubbed to death or disemboweled with knives; many women were raped and then killed. The many testimonials that remain (53)

speak of an unparalleled frenzy: children were decapitated; the eyes of the pharmacist, Ben Zion Gershon, pulled out, after which he was cudgeled to death; his wife’s hands were cut off; a Mr. Goldshmidt was killed by holding his head over a kerosene flame; the rabbi Meir Kastel and five of his students were castrated with knives and then killed. All of this lasted two hours and, in the end, the dead numbered 67. One of the survivors later said that he had “seen horrors worse than those in Dante’s Inferno.”

Al-Hussaini was the true spirit behind these undertakings and provided the combatants with the religious perspective in which to carry out the massacres. The depth of anti-Semitic hatred which dwelled in the soul of al-Hussaini and the Palestinian people and which manifested itself in all its rawness during the pogroms of these years, liken the Mufti to his contemporary Adolf Hitler. In fact, a solid relationship was established between the two. On 21 November 1941, al-Husaini met officially with the Führer in Berlin. He left feeling enthusiastic. In a diary entry from November of 1943, he wrote:

“It is the duty of Muslims in general and Arabs in particular to … drive all Jews from Arab and Muslim countries….Germany is also struggling against the common foe who oppressed Arabs and Muslims in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a final solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world.”

Al-Husaini did everything he could to assist Hitler in exterminating the Jews. In particular, he went to Bosnia to urge as many Muslims as possible to fight for the Nazi cause. Thus was born the thirteenth SS unit, called the Handschar Division, composed of 20,000 Bosnian Muslims—the Mufti’s men. Al-Hussaini composed a pamphlet, Islam i Zidovsto (“Islam and Judaism”) for them, in which he described Islamic doctrine regarding the duty to exterminate the Jews throughout the world.

Hamas

With the official creation of the State of Israel, the tension between the Muslims and Jews continued to increase. Things then grew still worse after the Six Day War, in 1967, when the Israelis retook those parts of ancient Israel that had not been provided for in the partitioning by the UN, especially Jerusalem, the holy Jewish city par excellence, which Islam had also adopted as a holy city in the meanwhile. As a result, numerous ideological and military movements were born to combat the “Zionist enemy.” Hezbollah (literally, “Party of God”) was created around 1982, led by Hasan Nasrullah and under the de facto jurisdiction of Iran.

Later, in 1987-1988, Ahmed Yasin founded the Hamas movement. Yasin, like many modern militants and fundamentalists, was a man of culture, who graduated from the theological University of Al-Azhar and was provided with a solid foundation in Islamic doctrine. In 2006, Hamas won the elections in Palestine. In 2007, after armed skirmishes with other Palestinian factions, it took power in the Gaza Strip where it still governs today. Hamas’ Statutes provide a good description of the movement’s goal: “The Islamic Resistance Movement [in Arabic, Harakat al-muqawamat al-islamiyyah, abbreviated as HAMAS] believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf (possession) consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up” (Art. 11). It then explains a key concept: “It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine contains Islamic holy sites. In it there is al- Aqsa Mosque which is bound to the

great Mosque in Mecca in an inseparable bond” (Art. 15). As Abu Mazen, leader of the Palestinian National Authority, recently repeated: “We must all keep armed vigil in the al-Aqsa mosque. We must use all means possible to prevent the Jews from entering the Sanctuary. It is our Sanctuary, our al-Aqsa mosque, our Church. They have no right to enter it. They have no right to defile it. We must prevent them from doing so. Let us confront them, our chests bared, to defend our holy sites!” (54). This is what the great leader of al-Qaeda and successor of Bin Laden, Zawahiri, stressed with extreme clarity, a few years ago:

“The Jihadist movement must get the ummah (the Islamic community) to take part in its holy war, but it can do so only if the slogans of the mujahedeen can be understood by the masses. The slogan that the ummah has well understood and to which it has subscribed, since fifty years, is the call to jihad against Israel (...). It is an undeniable truth that the Palestinian cause has been the only one to inflame the ummah for fifty years, from Morocco to Indonesia, but it is also the cause that unites Arabs, believers and non-believers, good and bad.” “The masses need (...) a well-defined enemy against whom to direct their blows.” (55)

So, then, let us to return to Hamas’ Statutes: “Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion” (Art. 13), and “liberation of Palestine is then an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be” (Art. 14).

Hamas’ goal, therefore, is to expel the Jews from the land of Palestine, or to kill them: “We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity,” as one of the leaders of Hamas recently affirmed (56). And one member of the movement clarified the concept: “If the enemy sets foot on a single square inch of Islamic land, Jihad becomes an individual duty, incumbent on every Muslim, male or female. A woman may set out [on Jihad] without her husband's permission, and a servant without his master's permission. Why? In order to annihilate those Jews.... O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. O Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one!” (57)

It is important to emphasize that the animosity is directed not simply against the Israelis and, more specifically, the “Zionists,” but against the Jews as such and their religion. This explains the nature of terrorist attacks like the attack on the Kehilat Yaakov synagogue on 18 November 2014 in Jerusalem. Two Palestinians entered, crying “Allahu akbar,” and then shot and axed to death four Rabbis who were at prayer. Hamas described it as a “heroic act” and urged Muslims to carry out other similar actions.

All of this is understandable if we take into consideration the anti-Semitic hatred, which is being instilled in Muslims since elementary school and which is regularly anchored in the message of the Koran and Mohammed and, therefore, in the very foundations of Islam. Many of the children’s songs, which are sung in kindergartens and elementary schools in Palestine and in other Islamic countries, encourage them to seek death as martyrs in terrorist attacks against the Jews. In a Jordanian-Palestinian schoolbook from 1998, we read: “This religion will destroy the other religions thanks to the soldiers of Islamic jihad.” And in 2001, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, on Palestinian TV, said: “We must teach our children to love jihad in the path of God.” And, again on Palestinian TV, on 13 October 2000, this was heard:

“The Jews are the Jews. ...They are terrorists. Therefore it is necessary to slaughter them and murder them, according to the words of Allah... it is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them any place that you find yourself. Any place that you encounter them kill them. Kill the Jews and those among the Americans that are like them... Have no mercy on the Jews, murder them everywhere!”

Similar words, passionately proclaimed by the ulema and the imam, are continuously broadcast on television and radio in Islamic countries and you hear them everywhere. Just a few days ago, for example, I heard these same words coming from a tiny, old radio hanging on the wall of a shoe repair shop, while I waited my turn, in a rural hamlet in Morocco.

Anti-Semitic education, therefore, is fed through schools and televisions first and foremost. Since 2003, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iran have been broadcasting for several years the serial, al-Shatat, whose protagonists are Jews—always greedy, wicked, cruel—who cut the throats of children and feed on their blood. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic, is widely available and read in Islamic countries. The Muslim intellectual, Abd al-Bari Atwan, recently affirmed: “Arabs who do not believe that Israel is the enemy are neither Arabs nor Muslims.... This is the one thing that unites us.” (58)

Excerpts from Chapter IIITHE MYSTIQUE OF THE CRUSADES AND THE MYSTIQUE OF JIHAD

The Appeal of Killing

From the preceding pages, the reader will have gathered that the words of Shanfara, like those of Bin Laden, impart a kind of appeal, pride and pleasure. There is a deep pride in crossing oneself atop the summit of the Liacura and drying one’s sword, bathed in the blood of the Turk, on one’s arm. There is a pleasure in rushing into the desert on horseback with the wind in one’s hair. There is a pleasure in fighting, in killing. William Broyles, a Vietnam veteran, wrote: “I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too” (98). “I couldn’t help it,” exclaimed another soldier, “I could not help it, sir, the feeling came over me; I tried not to do it, but I had to; I killed him!” (99) These testimonies could go on for entire pages: an artilleryman in the First World War, Henry de Man, noted in his diary: “I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life [...], I could had wept with joy!” (100) .

The pleasure of violence and killing is a basic psychological trait of human or, if you prefer, male nature. And this throws light on the extraordinary attraction that Isis exercises over many Western youth: by the thousands, they leave everything behind and go to Iraq or Syria to fight, to have the pleasure, at last, of being able to actually kill someone. In reality, the factors driving them to join the Caliphate are many. One—about which I have already spoken—involves the consistency that Isis exhibits in putting the Koran and the Sunna into rigorous practice, without dilutions and hypocrisies. Then, there is the sense of security provided by having precise, indisputable rules, especially today when young people often meander in the absence of values and the boredom of too much freedom. Another aspect for males, no doubt, is the extremely atavistic attraction of the idea of being able to have sexual relations with female prisoners of war and of being able to freely acquire sexual slaves. The ability to benefit from the spoils that fall to soldiers of jihad in every expedition, too, is not an insignificant incentive. Then, on a deeper level, the psychic store of frustration and rancor that most people accumulate throughout life has considerable weight: Isis offers an escape valve for this repressed hatred. In particular, the tenacious hatred that pulses in centuries-old anti-Semitism finds in Isis a banner under which to openly fight the Jews. But, in the last analysis, the main factor is the appeal of violence, the same appeal that makes us love war films, makes us crave strong, extreme emotions and made Beltrand de Born, in the 13th century, sing:

“I like the season of springthat makes the plants and meadows to flower, [...] I like it when I see stands in the meadowsand standards raised,and joy washes over my heart,when I see knights and armed horsesarrayed in battle.[…] In the initial rush of battle,we see shields pierced and cracked,maces and brands in a bewildering din[...] when some brave noble mixes into the throng,cuts off heads, pierces ribs:it is better to see men dead than living ones defeated!For me, I say, I haven’t as much tasteFor eating or drinking or sleeping,as for hearing shouted, from all directions, “onward, courage,” and horses neighingunder the shaded greenery,when the cry “help, help” is repeated,nobles and peasants stream out of the trenches;while one man is wounded by the catapult,and others are pierced with the sectionsof splintered shafts in their sides….”

This feeling for the beauty of war and for the visceral appeal of killing is undoubtedly present in the Islamic tradition. In the ancient biography of Mohammed, he is reported to have said, one day, «“Kill any Jew that falls into your power”. Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas’ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him». Seeing this, Huwayyisa, brother of Muhayyisa, reproached him for the murder. But Muhayyisa replied: «”Had the one (the Prophet) who ordered me to kill him ordered be to kill you I would have cut your head off”». Then filled with admiration, Huwayyisa exclaimed: «”By God, a religion which can bring you to this is marvellous!”, and he became a Muslim». (101). Many of the young people who are joining Isis today are probably doing so for the same reason as Huwayyisa.

The Appeal of Dying

The taste for killing is counterbalanced by the appeal of death, the desire to die. The poetry of Islamic mystics, like the poetry of Christian mystics, is rich in yearnings for death, man’s ultimate goal. Listen to these verses from the great mystic al-Hallaj:

“Kill me, my friends;if you kill me, I live.For me, dying is livingAnd living is dying..............................Kill me, burn meInside these superfluous bones.

My spoils you will meetin sepulchers already crumbling.The secret of the BelovedYou will find among these remains.” (102)

Among his many hadiths encouraging jihad, Mohammed said: “Without a doubt, there is nothing better than to be killed in the path of the Lord” (103), since “our death is our marriage to the Eternal.” (104)

“Fighting for God [jihad], has no other goal than God himself,” said Sayyid Qutb (105). War becomes a mystic flame which attracts the moth—i.e. the soul—and which ultimately burns and consumes it, since God is a “consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24). God, the beginning and end of everything, the “alpha and omega” (Rev. 1:8), the goal of every man and creature, is He towards whom the spiritual soul is inexorably drawn and in whom it longs to be consumed, extinguished and “dissolved” (Philip. 1:23). “For me,” Saint Paul said, “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philip. 1:21). For that very reason, Urban II urged the Crusaders to go fight in Jerusalem: “May it please you to die for Christ in that city where Christ died for you!” (106) Setting off for holy war meant, not so much going off to kill for God, as going off to die for God. But these two things go hand in hand: Only “once you've accepted your own death, you can become really proficient at killing, because it is no longer important if you die.” (107). When Saint Francis decided to leave for the Crusade in Egypt, his biographer wrote: “As an intrepid soldier of Christ, thus hoping to succeed in attaining his goal [to die a martyr] as soon as possible, he set out, in no way alarmed by the fear of death, but actually moved by the desire to meet with it.” (108)

The Persian mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) wrote:

“Die, die, for this love die,if you die of love, you will all be Spirit!Die, Die, fear not this death,fly from this earth overhead and seize the heavens in your fist!..................................................................................Die, die, before the Sovereign most fine:you will be dead before Him, you will be Sultans and ministers!Die, die, leave this cloud,You who leave will be the shining Moon!Quiet, quiet, the silence is death’s whisper;All of life lies therein: be a silent flute.” (109)

“But how can death,” asks Hasan Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, “become joy? How can death become happiness? When Hussain asked his nephew Qasim, who was still a child, “Do you like the taste of death?” He answered that it was sweeter than honey. How can the horrible taste of death become sweeter than honey? Only through conviction, ideology, faith, devotion [...]. We are not interested in our personal safety. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights desiring, more than anything else, to be killed in the path of God.” (110)

And Bin Laden: “Dying in the path of God is an honor wished for by the soldiers of my community. We love death in the path of God as much as you love life, we fear nothing, indeed we hope to die just so.” (111)

It is clear that this spirit creates a special, deep attraction to religious suicide, and this explains the appeal that thousands of young Muslims feel before the prospect of carrying out suicide terrorist attacks. On the one hand, this extreme, frightening, total gesture is presented by the jihadists as a religious duty incurred in the war against the unfaithful, but, in reality, it takes on a value much more profound and complex than a religious or moral value. It transcends the

boundaries of a religious act to become a “psychological paradigm,” in a mystical and visceral afflatus, the same one that everybody experiences when he encounters death:

“Those days and nights before the battle,” Jünger writes in his book, Combat as Internal Experience, “have a strange appeal. Everything that weighs gloomily in its insubstantiality is rendered, at that instant, a sweet possession. The future, worries and all burdens whose weary hours weighed us down, are tossed behind us like a spent cigarette. Within a few hours, perhaps, there will be a permanent end to this messy island, which we—like Robinson Crusoe among so many others—sought to give some meaning to. Money—that source of worry—becomes superfluous, useless, is frittered away, if for no other reason than to free us from it. Parents will weep, but time will carry it all away […]. Friends, wine, books, a rich table of sweet and bitter delights, everything will be extinguished in the last cracklings of consciousness, like the last candle on the Christmas tree […]. It is the great night, being diluted, forgotten, swallowed up, returning from time to eternity, from individuality to that Whole that embraces everything.

Yes, the soldier, in relation to death, in sacrificing himself for an idea, knows almost nothing of the philosophers and their values. And yet, in him, in his actions, life finds a stronger, deeper expression than that which could be found in any book. And so, from out of the utter absurdity of an utterly mad event outside himself, there always springs one bright truth: that death on behalf of a conviction is a supreme achievement. It is a statement, an act, an accomplishment, faith, love, hope and purpose; it is, in this imperfect world, something perfect, perfection itself. The cause is unimportant; conviction is everything. One can actually die in an obvious error: and yet, this is as magnificent a thing as could be […]. He who dies for an error nevertheless remains a hero.” (112)

This profound sense of death, which undoubtedly strikes the most hidden and inviolable cords of human spirituality, has however come to trivialize itself in the turbid death cult of today’s Islamic fundamentalism. There exists, especially among the Palestinians, a persistent, almost pathological desire for, and pleasure in, death: “By grace of God we have succeeded,” according to a recent statement by a Hamas commander, “in raising an ideological generation, which loves death in the same way our enemies love life” (113). Words that are quite true and horrifying, echoed by those of Zarqawi, who said: “The tree of triumph and power sprouts and grows only with blood and fury; the world’s Muslim community shall live only on the scent of martyrdom and the perfume of blood spilt for God” (114).

This culture of death has also created a cult of arms, actually already present in the extremely war-oriented society of Islam’s origins. Indeed, it is written in the Koran: “Make ready for them whatever force and strings of horses you can, to terrify thereby the enemy of God and your enemy” (K. 8:60). And one hadith says that God opens the gates of Paradise to him who makes weapons, to him who distributes them and to him who wields them (115). The love of weapons is a constant in manuals of Islamic doctrine. We read, for example, in the “best seller,” Minhaj al-muslim by Jaza’iri, which I have already quoted from:

“It is incumbent upon the Muslims ... that they make ready and prepare combative arms and ammunitions. It is also obligatory that they train some men in the disciplines of war and fighting as much as possible. This should not be merely for defending against the attacks of the enemy only. Rather, it should also be for performing battle expeditions in Allah’s way [...]. It is also compulsory upon the Muslims to build military factories to produce all the weaponry that is available in the world. They should do this even if it leads to leaving off the nonessential things like types of food, drink, clothes and homes.” (116)

And it was in reference to this “culture of death” that the great Islamic intellectual, Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, speaking on UAE TV in 2005, spoke these important words: “We have not succeeded in making our children love life. We have taught them to die in the path of God, but we have not taught them how to live in the path of God.”

Excerpts from Chapter IV:THE WAR SPIRITUALITY IN OTHER CULTURES AND RELIGIONS

Buddhism

Today, we see that the two religions most committed to tolerance and peace in the world are Christianity and Buddhism. Both proclaim an ethic of non-violence and of respect among the various creeds on the planet. But the difference is that, while the current behavior of the Church—though perhaps very faithful to Christ’s intent—represents, at least in a certain sense, an exception, an innovation in the context of its history and doctrine throughout the centuries, Buddhism has almost always advocated a philosophy of non-violence. Therefore, the current pacifism of the Buddhists is truly consistent not only with the teachings of the Buddha but also with its subsequent spiritual tradition. Buddhism, indeed, has had man’s personal liberation as its goal since the beginning—his dissociation from entanglement with the world by means of careful work on his mind and inner being; there was never a goal, except in some secondary sense, of establishing an ideal society. Buddhism was born as a monastic religion, where the monk was urged to think about himself and his sanctification, not about the conversion or correction of others.

The Buddha was called the “peaceful one” (paradayutta). Among the five moral precepts that he prescribed, the first is: “Do not kill life”; and among the ten royal precepts, the eighth is avihimsa (“non-violence”) and the ninth khanti (“patience, tolerance, indulgence”). According to the Dhammapada (ca. 3rd century B.C.):

“We all fear tormentsand life is dear to us all.Therefore, seeing ourselves in others,we should not injure or kill anyone.He will not find peace after deathwho, for his own satisfaction, does harm to otherswho also seek happiness.[...] He who has renounced the use of violenceagainst both the weak and the strong,who does not kill or cause others to kill,this is a blessed man.[He who is] loving among hostile persons,peaceful among violent persons,reserved in the midst of greedy men,this is a blessed man.Passion and hatred, arrogance and malevolenceFall away from the blessed man,like a mustard seed from the tip of a needle.”(40).

Violence and war lead, in the best of cases, to victory over one’s enemies, but—says the Buddha—“he who conquers himself enjoys a brighter victory than he who defeats many thousands

of men in war” (41). This teaching was faithfully followed by one of the greatest sovereign Buddhists in history, the Emperor Ashoka (3rd century A.D.), who, after having been a bloodthirsty, war-loving conqueror, converted to dhamma, i.e., to the doctrine of Buddha, and sought to guide his people along the path of non-violence, starting with respect for the life of every living creature. Henceforth—as he wrote in his Edicts on stone, still visible in India today—it is necessary “to refrain from killing and doing harm to living beings” and he forbade the killing of animals even in royal kitchens (42). Ashoka, moreover, understood that one of the causes of violence and war was religious fanaticism and intolerance, and he wrote accordingly: “Whoever exalts his religion through an excess of devotion and thinks, ‘I must glorify my religion,’ only damages it in reality. Therefore, it is good for there to be contact between the various faiths. And it is good to listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others.” (43)

The Buddha emphasized the importance of the feelings of metta (which might be translated as “charity”), compassion (karuna) and sharing joy (mudita). His many speeches, which have survived in the Pali language, never cease to refer to the feelings of kindness, tolerance, generosity and peace.

However, he also spoke of equanimity (upekkha), one of the highest states of the mind, a kind of well-intended “indifference” for the things without, for suffering and for pleasure, knowing that all reality is ephemeral, that what is born dies and that nothing has an intrinsic, stable existence:

“The angel of death would never find us,were we to look upon the world as upon a bubble,as upon a mere mirage.” (44)

The Buddhist, then, is invited not to worry over the pains of the body and soul and not to become attached to pleasures and joy—to anything that, by its nature, is passing and insubstantial. Even victory or defeat in war is a mirage, is a bubble:

“He, who is in peace, lives serene and transcends victory and defeat.” (45)

As can be seen, it is a line of reasoning similar to that exposed by the Bhagavadgita, about

which I spoke in regard to Hinduism. And like the latter, Buddhism gave rise to a philosophy of the acceptance of pain, death and reality in its entirety and, therefore, to an acceptance of war as well.

This anchoring is especially evident—more so than in early Buddhism (hinayana or theravada)—in the Buddhism elaborated over subsequent centuries in Tibet, China and Japan: mahayana. Independently of the political movements, personal egotism and hatred that were no doubt decisive factors in acts of violence and war carried out by Buddhists, especially Tibetan and Japanese, over the course of history, here I will attempt to understand the doctrinal and spiritual motives that justified such appeals to force. One essential first element is one that I have already mentioned: upekkha, i.e., equanimity, refusing to allow oneself to be disturbed by the suffering or death of bodies that are impermanent and destined, in any case, to dissolve away. This mental attitude arises from wisdom (pañña), i.e., from the correct view of things as they are. But mahayana Buddhism has always stood another pillar along side pañña: namely, karuna or compassion. According to this conception, when a saint achieves enlightenment and thus becomes a Buddha, he is then called upon to “return” among men to help them: he becomes a Bodhisattva. Now, like Christian charity, Buddhist karuna can also call for apparently unjust or violent actions, aimed at the good and dictated by mercy. An ancient Sanskrit text, the Sutra of Appropriate Means, recounts that the Buddha, in one of his previous lives, killed a man: he did so in order to prevent him from killing five hundred other persons. The “doctrine of appropriate means” (upayakaushalya)—inspired by charity, together with the concept of equanimity, based on wisdom—constituted a serious justification of the use of violence. In reality, the actual recourse to arms was not very common: the

most significant cases are those of the Tibetan monks who fought among themselves in the Middle Ages and who, in the 20th century, attempted to resist the Chinese invasion militarily. In this latter instance, killing might have been a laudable act on behalf of the preservation of religion and monasteries.

Even today, there are Buddhist movements, which resort to violence in defense of religion. For example, in 2004, Sri Lanka saw the founding of a political party supported by Buddhists monks, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, which was determined to impose standards of public morality (against smoking, drugs, alcohol, etc.); to help the armed struggle of the Singhalese against the Tamil Hindu presence in Sri Lanka; and, more particularly, to stand in opposition to the presence and proselytism of the Islamic and Christian communities. Those communities do, in fact, represent a real threat to the traditional buddhist identity of the island. The ideals of this monastic party have given rise not infrequently to violent clashes, especially with Muslims, as was the case in August of 2013 when the Buddhists attacked a mosque in Colombo.

Even in Thailand, during the years of communist threat, various monks, such as the venerable Phra Kittiwuttho, maintained that it was a duty to fight and kill in order to repel the enemy (46). The most interesting case, however, is that of Burma. The Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, led by a monk, the venerable U Thuzana, was established as early as 1992. But it was “Movement 969,” in particular, that would play an important role in the development of a genuine spirit of jihad in Burmese Buddhism. The name refers to the three numbers symbolizing the three treasures of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The movement is led by monks and, through the use of cultural education as well as boycotts and even armed violence, means to repel the Islamic presence in Burma and neighboring countries.

Movement 969 has been at the root of such violent clashes as the one in Mandalay in 1997. When a statue of the Buddha in the pagoda of Maha Myatmuni was mysteriously broken and there was an attempted (though unproven) rape of a Burmese girl by a Muslim, the anti-Islamic rage exploded. Thousands of Buddhists, both monks and lay people, attacked mosques and Muslim stores, burned holy books and put up banners and billboards. One of them read: “The world isn’t just for Muslims.”

Much more serious was what happened in 2001. The destruction of the statues of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban further exacerbated the hostile feelings of the Burmese, frightened at the idea that this intolerant, expansionist and violent Islamic religion would set foot in Burma. While various pamphlets distributed by the monks among the population, like the one entitled The Fear of Losing Our Identity as a People, raised tensions, the dam of rage broke in Taungoo on May 15: eleven mosques were destroyed by the fury of the people, two hundred Muslims were killed and more than four hundred Muslim houses razed. Under the spiritual guidance of the monks, this “holy war” even had the military support of government forces, which slaughtered more than 20 Muslims at prayer in the mosque of Han Tha, in Taungoo. The monks later asked the government to demolish the mosque. On May 18, the soldiers sent in bulldozers and the request was fulfilled.

The spiritual leader of Movement 969 is the monk Ashin U Wirathu. In an interview from 2013, he explained that, from the perspective of Buddhist ethics, “you can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog”, i.e. the Muslims. “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim (47). Against the accusation—that many make against U Wirathu—of being the “Bin Laden of Burma,” hundreds of people protested in the capital of Yangon, on 30 June 2013, chanting the slogan: “He isn’t a terrorist, but the protector of our people, our language and our religion.”

Finally, Japan is worthy of a separate discussion in itself, where Buddhism, penetrated from China at the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, merged with the pre-existing indigenous religion called Shinto. Shintoism remains the national Japanese religion, alongside Buddhism with which it is mixed. And just as Shintoism, fully corresponding to the Japanese temperament, was always close—with its blessings, its rituals and its myths—to war and the

military world, so did Japanese Buddhism soon assume explicitly war-like traits. However, if Shintoism, like Greco-Roman paganism, limited itself for the most part to invoking the protection of the gods over its armies, paying tribute to the great God of war, Hachiman, Buddhism, with its deep and elaborate philosophy, took a further step and one of extreme significance: it provided the warrior class with its own “theology,” the spirituality of the Samurai. It was especially in the 12th and 13th centuries that this form of Buddhism, known as Zen, spread throughout Japan, thanks to the diligent work of Chinese monks and Chinese-trained Japanese monks, and was even imposed as the “State religion” and especially as the official religion of warriors.

In Japan, where the sense of war was so deeply rooted (as in the European—especially Germanic and Nordic—Middle Ages), a religion that would have condemned war, without qualification, would have had difficulty in taking root. Moreover, as we have seen, Buddhism did not fail to justify the use of arms in certain instances: such was the case in Tibet and in China as well. The celebrated Chinese monastery of Shaolin—whose tradition included the first formulation of the martial arts and, in particular, kungfu—was a real monastery, where, however, the use of violence was provided for in instances of outside aggression. Many Japanese monks followed its example: they were the sohei, warrior-monks, often residing in actual fortified castles, as in the case of the Honganji monastery near Osaka.

These sohei, belonging to various Buddhist sects, fought with one another more out of political interests and personal rivalry than as a matter of any “spiritual” motive. So we cannot speak of a true “theology” of war. We might speak of it, if at all, with respect to Confucian doctrine, which also came to Japan via China and which had a famous representative in Yamaga Soko (1622-1685). Soko, in his Shido (“The Way of the Warrior”), presented the duty of the samurai (or bushi) as a religious duty (the svadharma of Hinduism), an ethical and social duty; the bushi is that man whose job it is to fight in defense of the poor, religion and the nation. This social and ethical view, typical of Confucianism, was not, however, the cornerstone of Japanese warrior spirituality, which, instead, found its true identity and a more fitting religiosity in Zen.

Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word, chan, which derives, in turn, from the Sanskrit dhyana, “meditation.” Zen is a form of Buddhist meditation that—leaving aside techniques, visualizations, repeated mantras etc.—is inclined towards the essential: awareness of the present moment. According to one tradition, Zen was born when Buddha one day showed his followers a flower without saying a word. His follower Kashyapa smiled. He had understood. But what? That there was nothing to understand; one had only to observe that flower and smile. That was all. Kashyapa is considered the first of the great Zen masters. “In our world, we stand over the hell looking at the flowers,” said another Zen master (48). Sitting in meditation can mean simply listening, in silence, to one’s own breath as it enters and exits, or watching the clouds in the sky as they thicken into rain, or listening to the birds and the hiss of the wind:

“So much hated ravens:how beautiful atop the snow!” (49)

What does it mean? That this moment is reality, this moment is unique and will never return; as one contemporary vietnamese Zen master writes:

“Ordinarily, we think it a miracle to walk on water or in the air. I believe, rather, that the true miracle is not walking on water or in the air, but walking on the ground. Every day, we are participants in a miracle of which we are not even aware: the azure skies, the white clouds, the green foliage, the black, curious eyes of a child, our own eyes.” (50)

Awareness of the present moment is undoubtedly at the base of all Buddhist spirituality. And if there is awareness, death dissolves away, or better still, the fear of death dissolves away, that fear that makes death so terrible. Awareness, therefore, is called the “extinction of death” (amata) (51). Death itself thus appears in its true reality, in as much as it is intrinsically connatural with everything. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius also said, death is the nature of things, it is a structural part of the cosmos and so, observing it is like observing “a rose in spring or a piece of fruit in summer.” (52)

“Just as the shepherd, with his whip,guides the cattle to pasture,so do decadence and deathguide the life of beings.” (53)

But let us now turn to the Samurai. They were by no means monks, but their lives, aside from their spirituality, took inspiration from the monastic ideal: they often led poor, ascetic lives, like those of bandits or hermits. Daidoji (17th century) wrote:

“Horsemen born in a period of civil war were always in the field, sweltering in their armor under the scorching summer sky or whipped with frigid gusts of winter wind, drenched in rain or covered in snow; they slept in moors or on hills, with no pillow but their own arms covered in a sleeve of mail and with no food or drink unless there was coarse rice or salty soup.” (54)

This familiarity with nature, with woodlands, with mountain solitude is also observed in the name of those men who were called yamabushi: i.e., “mountain warriors,” more accustomed to the silence of the moon among the trees than to the human voice. King of the Mountains (Sanno) is the name of the Shinto-Buddhist God who was already blessing the military retaliations of the monks in the centuries of the Middle Ages. Perhaps detachment from worldly turmoil was encouraged by the high mountain peaks and the inner quiet as well as by the thought of the impermanence of all things and of death—death for which the warrior had to be ready every day. According to one ancient text:

“Meditation on the certainty of death must be practiced every day. Every morning, in intense mental and bodily concentration, you must envision yourself being cut to pieces by arrows, bullets, spears and swords, or being engulfed by waves, or finding yourself in the midst of a vast fire, or being struck by lightening.” (55)

Nabeshima Naoshige (1538-1618) said: “The way of the samurai means being possessed by the thought of death [...]. You must think of death to the point of madness [...], you must consider only death!” (56)

It is difficult to say whether these words were dictated by genuine spirituality or by a “calculated convenience” instead: thinking constantly of death might have helped the warrior to face armed conflict with greater courage and therefore greater effectiveness. This same meditation might have served to quiet the mind of the soldier, removing hesitation, fear, instinctive reactions that, in battle, would have worked to the detriment of success. It is well known that, even today, some Japanese companies pay their employees for periodic meditation sessions: the purpose is clearly one of making people more efficient and productive. This utilitarian objective in the use of spiritual practices and doctrines was certainly present in many great masters of the Japanese warrior tradition. Notwithstanding, it is just as certain that an authentic spiritual yearning was pulsing in

him who saw the path to inner enlightenment in his own sword. Even in the martial arts, it is difficult to say whether philosophical discourses and meditation were used as an improvement in battle tactics, or whether, vice versa, the movements of the body, the sword, the fight were the instruments of an inner path and a genuine search for spirituality.

Perhaps it was both these factors that moved the great samurai and “philosophers of war” like Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645) and Daidoji Yuzan Shigesuki (17th century). The latter wrote a work entitled, Code of the Samurai, one of the first treatises on what will later be called bushido, or the “Way of the Warrior,” where “way” (do, the Chinese “Tao”) has the meaning of inner path, life’s choice, and even ethical principles, a concept dear to Japanese culture even today. It is significant that the ethics of bushido and the sacred mission of the warrior were vigorously reintroduced to the Japanese soldiers during the Second World War: many army officials, moreover, were ex-samurai, whose spiritual training called upon them to give unconditional service to the Emperor (considered to be of divine descent), to the point of sacrificing their own lives for this essentially religious idea; and it is no accident that the very term, kamikaze, literally means “wind of the gods”: it is the yearning after death experienced in a mystical dimension.

Daidoji repeatedly takes up the subject of the meditatio mortis:

“First of all, the samurai must constantly remember—both day and night, from the morning when he picks up his chopsticks to eat his New Year’s breakfast until the evening at the end of the year when he pays his yearly accounts—the fact that he must die. This is his principal duty.” (57)

As to Miyamoto Musashi, he is the author, among other things, of the celebrated Book of Five Rings, a treatise on the art of war, which he wrote in the last days of his life, cloistered in a cave. Musashi was an expert fencer; for him, as for every samurai, the sword was a sacred object, the most precious treasure in the world. Moreover, the sword-makers enjoyed a special veneration in Japan. Making a sword was a religious ceremony, a meditation. When the smithy prepared for his sacred work, he donned Shintoist ceremonial dress. As in alchemy, working iron meant much more than producing an item of everyday use: the sword symbolized the soul, enlightenment, the Emptiness that is, in a certain sense, the Buddhist nirvana. Musashi also emphasized the specific character of the sword as a weapon of “proximity”, of the intimacy of the gazes between two men, one of whom was destined to see death in the eyes of the other and almost seeing himself reflected in those eyes. The gazes then became more penetrating than the blade of the sword. Musashi insisted on “staring at his adversary, maintaining his gaze,” “focusing his gaze,” “reading the mind of the other man with his eyes.” (58)

Takuan, a Zen monk (1573-1645), also highlighted the “spirituality” of the sword in his work:

“The mind must not be occupied with the hand that draws the sword. It must, instead, strike and pierce one’s adversary, completely forgetting the hand. One’s adversary must be like the Emptiness. We are the Emptiness. The hand that wields the sword, the sword itself, is the Emptiness.” (59)

A poet once wrote:

“Some think that striking is to strike:but striking is not to strike, nor is killing to kill.He who strikes and he who is struck -they are both no more than a dream that has no reality.” (60)

And again Takuan:

“The perfect swordsman takes no cognizance of the enemy’s personality, no more than of his own. For he is an indifferent onlooker of the fatal drama of life and death in which he himself is the most active participant. In spite of all the concern he has or ought to have, he is above himself, he transcends the dualistic comprehension of the situation, yet he is not a contemplative mystic, he is in the thickest of the deadly combat.” (61).

This kind of spirituality applied to war and, in particular, to the art of killing with a sword is still appreciated today by many Japanese Zen masters. Everyone knows the name of D.T. Suzuki, quite well known even in the West. He states that “swordsmanship is, after all, not the art of killing; it consists in disciplining oneself as a moral and spiritual and philosophical being” (62). Elsewhere he explains that the swordsman

“He has no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy. This is the kind of sword that Christ is said to have brought among us. It is not meant just for bringing the peace mawkishly cherished by sentimentalists.” (63)

As the crusaders attended a holy mass before an armed skirmish, so did the samurai gather together to drink tea before entering into battle. Today, in Japan, the tea ceremony is still an evocative and almost sacred ritual, more like a meditation session than a gathering of friends. While the other samurai, with their swords on their hips, sat on the floor of the pagoda, in a solemn, austere posture, as if in meditation, the tea master carried out the ceremony in silence: he lit the small charcoal fire and started boiling the water in the kettle. As he did so, there might also be talk; but, before the battle, you might here only the crackling of the fire, the faint hiss of the boiling water, the light rustle of clothing accompanying the movements of the tea master: “This is the essence of the way of the warrior: thinking about death, morning and evening, in silence and being ready to die at any moment” (64). Tasting the hot tea that slides down your throat, holding the cup with both hands and hearing your own breath as it enters and exits—perhaps the last hours of life for each of them. “For him, at that moment, drinking tea means everything, the whole world” (65). One great general of the 16th century wrote:

“Those who cling to life die, and those who defy death live. The essential thing is the mind. Look into this mind and firmly take hold of it, and you will understand that there is something in you which is above birth-and-death and which is neither drowned in water nor burned by fire.” (66)

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