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 Gods 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 Christianitya 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 endas paradoxical as it may seemit
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 night
Had fallen; bright the moonlight; all the stars
In heaven shone. Carle ruled in Sarraguce.
Unto one thousand men he gave command
To search throughout the city's synagogues
And mosques for all their idols and graved signs
Of godsthese to be broken up and crushed
By axe and iron mallet he ordains.
Nor sorcery nor falsehood left. King Carle
Believes in God and serves him faithfully.
Then bishops bless the fountains, leading up
The Heathens to the blest baptismal Font.
If one perchance resist the King, condemned
Is he to die, or hanged, or burnt, or slain.
More than one hundred thousand are baptized
True Christians; but not so Queen Bramimunde:
A captive shall she go unto sweet France
And 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 becameso to speak
a camp for evangelism: i.e., the Church, rather than leave soldiers outside Christs 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 andI might saythe 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 entitiesoften manipulated and used for the purposes of
European colonial powersand 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 antiSemitism that we see today.
One factor exacerbating the hatred was the conquest of Palestineand of Jerusalem in
particularby 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 Tetouanagain in Moroccoannounced 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 Gods vengeance against the Jewish infidels. AlQassam (to which todays 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 wifes 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
Dantes 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 Fhrer 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 Muslimsthe
Muftis 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 movements 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 nonbelievers, 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
childrens 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, alShatat, whose protagonists are Jewsalways greedy, wicked, cruelwho cut the throats of
children and feed on their blood. Hitlers 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 III

THE 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 ones sword, bathed in the blood of the Turk, on
ones arm. There is a pleasure in rushing into the desert on horseback with the wind in ones 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 couldnt 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. Oneabout which I have already spokeninvolves 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 spring

that makes the plants and meadows to flower,
[...] I like it when I see stands in the meadows
and standards raised,
and joy washes over my heart,
when I see knights and armed horses
arrayed 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 havent as much taste
For eating or drinking or sleeping,
as for hearing shouted, from all directions,
onward, courage, and horses neighing
under 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 sections
of 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. Masud 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, mans
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 living
And living is dying.
.............................
Kill me, burn me
Inside these superfluous bones.

My spoils you will meet

in sepulchers already crumbling.
The secret of the Beloved
You 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 mothi.e. the souland 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 deaths 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, Jnger 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 welike
Robinson Crusoe among so many otherssought to give some meaning to. Moneythat
source of worrybecomes 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 todays
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 worlds 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 Islams 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 almuslim by Jazairi, 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
Allahs 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 alHamid 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 Christs intentrepresents, 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 mans personal liberation as its goal since the
beginninghis 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 torments
and life is dear to us all.
Therefore, seeing ourselves in others,
we should not injure or kill anyone.
He will not find peace after death
who, for his own satisfaction, does harm to others
who also seek happiness.
[...] He who has renounced the use of violence
against 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 malevolence
Fall 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 ones enemies, butsays the
Buddhahe 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.
Henceforthas he wrote in his Edicts on stone, still visible in India todayit 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 joyto 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 evidentmore 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 (paa), i.e., from the correct view of things as they are. But mahayana Buddhism
has always stood another pillar along side paa: 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 wisdomconstituted 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 isnt
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 accusationthat many make against U Wirathuof being the Bin Laden
of Burma, hundreds of people protested in the capital of Yangon, on 30 June 2013, chanting the
slogan: He isnt 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 closewith its blessings, its rituals and its mythsto 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 Europeanespecially
Germanic and NordicMiddle 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 Shaolinwhose tradition included the first formulation
of the martial arts and, in particular, kungfuwas 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 thatleaving 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 ones 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 death
guide 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 deathdeath 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, lifes
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 rememberboth day and night, from the morning
when he picks up his chopsticks to eat his New Years breakfast until the evening at the end
of the year when he pays his yearly accountsthe 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 ones adversary, completely forgetting the hand. Ones 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 enemys 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 exitsperhaps 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)
-----------------------------------

Abstract of the Book and Index:

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http://dagtessore-english.blogspot.com/p/reviews-to-mysticism-of-war.html
See the other books of Dag Tessore:
http://dagtessore-english.blogspot.com/2014/09/all-books-of-dag-tessore.html