God, Nations, and Deterrence: The Impact of Religion on Deterrence

Abstract

This article discusses the influence of religion on deterrence. Faith may increase risk propensity and lower the legitimacy of being deterred. Anticipation of divine intervention, reward or punishment, adherence to an apocalyptic ideology, or (in the Shiite world) to believe in the imminent advent of the Hidden Imam reduces susceptibility to deterrent threats. Religious motivation can, however, be potentially exploited to enhance deterrence. Superstitions can induce courage and self sacrifice but may also induce fear and mass hysteria. Prophecies too are a two-edged sword; believers, who receive divine guarantees that a certain event will not happen, may lose faith in the face of the occurrence of that event.

Notes

1. Some emblematic examples of such influence in “secular” societies can be seen in the attempt by the Soviet state to harness religion to motivate the defense against Nazi Germany in World War II, in the slogan Gott mit uns inscribed by German soldiers on their helmets and belt buckles in World War I, and even in World War II, and in the use by the Iraqi leader, Sadam Hussein, of Islamic motivation and references, including the change of the Iraqi flag to include the slogan “Allah is Great.” In all these examples, the “secular” leadership takes into account the religiosity of the populace and attempts to harness it to his goals. However, by doing so, he accepts the constraints of religion.

2. AlQaeda is a case in point; alQaeda was willing to sacrifice Afghanistan for the wider entity of the Muslim Ummah, which was expected to gain from the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Similarly (though not in a religious context), Fidel Castro expressed his willingness to sacrifice Cuba for the victory of socialism.

3. The pope in the Middle Ages played a pivotal role in seemingly irrational decisions in the Crusades; the religious principle of unrelenting war against the infidel Sadam Hussein dictated decisions by Khomeini in the war with Iraq.

4. For example, the British in Sudan proposed to wrap suicide attackers in pigskins and to spread religious opinions (fatwas) that such contact prevents the soul from rising to Paradise. In ancient times, shrines were attacked to indicate that the Deity could not even protect itself.

5. The motto of the British royalty, Dieu et mon droit, implies two inseparable sources of legitimacy.

6. The Children of Israel are said to have declared at Mt. Sinai, “We will do and we will listen”—a commitment to act on the divine orders even before hearing them. Muhammad pointed out the inadequacy of human conscience in regards to matters of jihad and the danger of leaving the question of participation in the jihad to the discretion of the individual, abstract morality, or politics. See: “Fighting is ordered for you even though you dislike it and it may be that you dislike a thing that is good for you and like a thing that is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not know,” Qur’an 2:216.

7. This is particularly true in regards to Islam as a religion of a wider transnational Ummah and, conversely, does not apply to Judaism, which is a nonproselytizing religion in which there is a high correspondence between the adherents of the religion and a territorial and social collective.

8. Compare cases like the early martyrs of Christianity, whose level of confidence in the guarantee of paradise brought them to give up their lives, and the famous case of the Jewish Messianic pretender, Shabtai Zvi, whose claim to be the Messiah swept the Jewish world of the Middle Ages and ultimately accepted conversion to Islam when confronted with a threat of execution.

9. Catholic doctrine regarding divine guidance of the election notwithstanding—the fact is that God could provide such quidance from the beginning to a consensus had He desired to do so, thus preventing the days of negotiation and bargaining.

10. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's”.

11. The motto of the British royalty, Dieu et mon droit, epitomizes the two sources of legitimacy—God and my right (sword) hand.

12. The most famous example of such a belief is the story of Joshua in the Valley of Ayalon: “Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ayalon” (Joshua 10:12).

13. See, for example: “No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn … says the Lord” (Isaiah 54:17); “Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” (Luke 10:19).

14. This is exemplified in Islamic discussions of justification for retreat in battle in the face of a superior enemy force; the Qur’an initially prohibited any retreat, except for tactical retreat, and then later allowed retreat in the face of a tenfold superiority of the enemy, and finally two to one superiority. The traditional reasoning is that the act of jihad is, by definition, an act of faith in Allah; by fighting an weaker or equal enemy, the Muslim is relying on his own strength and not on Allah, whereas, by entering the fray against all odds, the mujahid is proving his utter faith in Allah and will be rewarded accordingly.

15. “And so Urban, Pope of the Roman see, with his archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priests, set out as quickly as possible beyond the mountains and began to deliver sermons and to preach eloquently, saying: “Whoever wishes to save his soul should not hesitate humbly to take up the way of the Lord, and if he lacks sufficient money, divine mercy will give him enough.” Then the apostolic lord continued, “Brethren, we ought to endure much suffering for the name of Christ—misery, poverty, nakedness, persecution, want, illness, hunger, thirst, and other (ills) of this kind, just as the Lord saith to His disciples: ‘Ye must suffer much in My name,’ and ‘Be not ashamed to confess Me before the faces of men; verily I will give you mouth and wisdom,’ and finally, ‘Great is your reward in Heaven.”’ And when this speech had already begun to be noised abroad, little by little, through all the regions and countries of Gaul, the Franks, upon hearing such reports, forthwith caused crosses to be sewed on their right shoulders, saying that they followed with one accord the footsteps of Christ, by which they had been redeemed from the hand of hell.” From Pope Urban's Call to Crusade (quoted by an anonymous writer connected with Bohemund of Antioch).

16. This was encapsulated in the saying of Maimonides, “One may not rely on a miracle,” and Thomas Aquinas’ definition of miracles as occurrences that may seem natural but are the result of divine intervention to do something “which nature can do, but not in that order” or “without the operation of the principles of nature.” (Aquinas Compendium theologiae 1.136).

17. See the incident of the campaign of Sancherib, King of Assyria against King Hezkiya of Judaea (Kings II, 19:1–30).

18. Talmud, Baba Batra B-12, Mishne Torah, Commentary on the Tractate of Sabbath.

19. See David Cook, Contemporary Islamic Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005).

20. This was demonstrated in the Jewish leadership during the revolt against Rome (67–73 ad), which was pluralistic enough for respected rabbis to chose compromise and thus to save their followers. Even then, the level of internal religious coercion (the Zealots, who assassinated those who seemed to them to be faint hearted) made it difficult for moderate and risk-averse leaders to be heard.

21. “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this in a book as a memorial, and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven”; “The Lord has sworn; the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:1–16); “blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:17). Consequently, King Saul was ordered by the Prophet Samuel to kill all of the people of Amalek—including men women and children—and lost his kingdom, according to the Biblical narrative, for not fulfilling such an extreme order. It stands to reason that one of Saul's considerations was the need to defuse future conflicts and the fear of a cycle of retaliation (second strike in modern deterrence parlance). However, the divine commandment to destroy all of Amalek overruled this rational strategic consideration.

22. My thanks to Prof. Thomas Schelling for the discussion on the nuclear taboo.

23. David Martin and Peter Mullen (eds.), Unholy Warfare: The Church and the Bomb (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), 181–182, 173–177, 214.

24. 1 Samuel 17: 1–52.

25. Numbers 24:17: “There shall come a star out of Jacob.”

26. Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, Sermon to the Knights (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos), trans. Dorothy Whitelock, Methuen and Company Limited, London.

27. The name apparently comes from the name Hasan (the leader of the sect).

28. Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Abi Baker Naji Idarat al-tawahush, “The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass,” trans. William McCants, The John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, 23 May 2006. http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/olin/images/Management%20of%20Savagery%20-%2005-23-2006.pdf.

29. The adjuration of a Muslim who is about to perform an act of jihad in which he may be killed is: “tawakalt nafsi billah,” I submit my soul to Allah.

30. Surat al-Anfal, verse 65: “O Prophet! Rouse the believers, to the fight. If there are twenty amongst you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred; if a hundred, they will vanquish a thousand of the unbelievers: for these are a people without understanding.”

31. The symbol consists of four crescents and a sword. The four crescents are meant to stand for the word Allah. The five parts of the emblem symbolize the five principles of Islam. Above the sword (central part) is a tashdid (which looks a bit like a W). In Arabic writing this is used to double a letter, here it doubles the strength of the sword and resembles the name of Allah. Taken together it looks like a tulip, the symbol of martyrdom.

32. Gen. S. K. Malik, “The Qur’anic Concept of War,” in Jim Lacey, ed., The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists’ Strategy for Defeating America (Annapolis: US Naval Institute Press, 2008), 112–116.

33. Qur’an 4:59.

34. The term derives from the Arabic root by', which denotes both buying and selling. A bay'a, therefore, is originally a transaction. From the very beginning of Islam, bay'a was a token of the relationship and mutual obligations between leaders and those led by them, between rulers and ruled. The bay’a is mentioned in the Qur’an in verse 9:111: “Allah has bought from the believers their lives and property; if they fight, kill and are killed in the path of Allah, in jihad, they earn Paradise, “so rejoice in the bargain you have concluded.”

35. Qur’an 48:10.

36. An interesting anecdote that emphasizes this ideal is that of Mossadeq, who, defeated and dying, heard a colleague say “how terrible it all turned out,” and answered him, “Yes, but at the same time, how marvellous it all turned out.” It is said that Mossadeq saw himself playing out the roles of the Iranian paradigms of javanmardi: the battling hero Rostam, the son of Zaal, the noble general Ali, the Lion of Allah and, at the same time, the Imam Hussein, Prince of Martyrs. Roy Mottahadeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 133.

37. Suyūt., al, Jalāl al-Dn, Al-Durr al-Manthūr f al-Tafsr bi-al-Ma’thūr (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1983), 2/738. Quoted by Ella Landau Tasseron, “The Religious Foundations of Political Allegiance–A Study of Bay'a in Pre-Modern Islam,” Hudson Institute, Washington D.C., May 2010.

38. The Twelfth Imam in the line of the founder of the Shiah, the Imam Ali, who is believed to have disappeared, remains in the world in “occultation” (ghayba) and will eventually reappear to mete out justice, to reward his believers (the Shiites), and to punish the oppressors.

39. Maslahah literally means utility or welfare. The jurists use it to denote public interest or general human good. The medieval jurist Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 505 ah/1111 ad) developed it by ruling that the ultimate purpose of the Shari’ah is to further the maslahah of the ummah. The masalih (plural of maslahah) are divided into the following three categories: daruriyah (essential), which protect din (religion), nafs (life), najl (offspring), ‘aql (reason), and mal (property); hajiyah (complementary); and tahsiniyah (desirable). The government's primary duty is to safeguard these at any cost. The complementary and desirable masalih tend to vary according to social and economic conditions. The government protects them only when it has fulfilled its primary duty of protecting the essential interests.

40. In January 1983, Khomeini ruled that the Majlis may pass laws that contradict the Shari’a based on the principle of darurat. Toward the end of his life (January 1988), he went a step further by ruling that “the State (government) is an absolute trusteeship which God conferred upon the Prophet (and from him to the Imams and the Jurists). It is the most important of God's ordinances and has precedence over all other of God's derived ordinances.” In other words, the ruler has absolute authority, which cannot be restricted by the existing laws of the Shari’a or agreements with the people (i.e., constitutions and democratic elections). The preservation of the regime has therefore such a priority that the state may even suspend in the favor of this goal primary religious duties (such as prayer, fasting during Ramadan, or the Haj to Mecca), or order the destruction of a mosque. See Schirazi, 230–231; Meir Litvak, “The Rule of the Jurist (Velayat-e Faqih) in Iran: Ideal and Implementation,” Ha-Mizrah He-Hadash, (Hebrew), vol. 42 (2001): 171.

41. Fatwā: Sheikh ‘alla al-Shanawi by The Al-Azhar Fatwā Committee headed by Sheikh ’ Ali Abu al-Hassan, faxed text in handwriting, http://www.islamonline.net/Arabic/news/2002-12/23/article06.shtml. The fatwā by Qaradawi, see Qaradawi to Qatari TV, 18 Oct. 2002.

42. Islamic law of war (jihad) does not recognize the Western concept of noncombatants who are inviolable in time of conflict and should not be targeted. Islamic law of war recognizes only the categories of those whose “blood Allah has forbidden” and those whom the leader (wali al-’amr, Amir) has discretion whether or not to kill. The legitimacy of indiscriminate killing of “dwellers of the house” when attacking an enemy of “that house” (tabiyt, in Islamic jurisprudence of jihad) may also influence the view of nuclear weapons. See Ella Landau Tasseron, Non-Combatants in Islamic Legal Thought (Hudson Institute, Research Monographs on the Muslim World, series no. 1, paper no. 3. December 2006).

43. This is based on Qur’an 16:126: “If you punish, then punish with the like of that by which you were afflicted (www.islamonline.net/iol-arabic/dowalia/alhadath-17-11/alhadath2.asp, 17 Nov. 1999).” Sheikh al-Azhar Muhammad Tantawi draws an analogy from the ruling of the Caliph Abu Bakr “to fight the enemy with a sword if he fights with a sword and … with a spear if he fights with a spear.” Therefore, if the enemy uses a nuclear bomb, it is the duty of the Muslims to use it. An unusually long (25 pages) fatwa by the Saudi Sheikh Nasser bin Hamid al Fahd in May 2003 reaches the conclusion that use of nuclear weapons against the United States is obligatory based on reciprocity (Sheikh Nasr bin Hamid al-Fahd, “Risalah fihukm istikhdam aslihat al-damar al-shamil did al-Kuffār,” [A treatise on legal status of using weapons of mass destruction against infidels], n.p.:1 May 2003). Even a moderate and Western-oriented Islamic scholar like Sheikh Taher Jaber Alwani rules the use of weapons of mass destruction “not permissible” (gheir ja’iz) but not haram, or forbidden (Fatwā: Taher Jaber al-‘Alwani, “Using WMD in War: Islamic View,” http://islamonline.net/fatwā/english/FatwāDisplay.asp?hFatwāID_52398_).

44. Ayatollah Saanei interviewed by Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 Oct. 2003, A-1; Mustafa al-Labbad, “Pressuring Tehran,” Al-Ahram Weekly, (2003): 656.