Religious war
[2] The concept of "religion" as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recently invented concept in the English language since such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and more prevalent colonization or globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures with non-European languages.
[20] Since the native Irish were mostly Catholic and the later British-sponsored immigrants were mainly Protestant, the terms become shorthand for the two cultures, but McGarry & O'Leary argued that it would be inaccurate to describe the conflict as a religious one.
[31] According to historian Edward Peters, before the 11th century, Christians had not developed a concept of holy war (bellum sacrum), whereby fighting itself might be considered a penitential and spiritually meritorious act.
[32][33] In early Christianity, St. Augustine's concept of just war (bellum iustum) was widely accepted, but warfare was not regarded as a virtuous activity[32][34] and expressions of concern for the salvation of those who killed enemies in battle, regardless of the cause for which they fought, was common.
The first forms of military jihad occurred after the migration (hijra) of Muhammad and his small group of followers to Medina from Mecca and the conversion of several inhabitants of the city to Islam.
But understood within the symbolic world of the ancient writers of Numbers, the story of the war against the Midianites is a kind of dress rehearsal that builds confidence and hope in anticipation of the actual conquest of Canaan that lay ahead.
"[45] Dawn (2016, translating Rad 1958) stated: "From the earliest days of Israel's existence as a people, holy war was a sacred institution, undertaken as a cultic act of a religious community".
For the Saxons (...) are by nature fierce, devoted to the worship of demons and hostile to our religion, and they think it no dishonour to confound and transgress the laws of God and man.
According to Gregory of Tours' writings, King Clovis I of the Franks waged wars against other European nations who followed Arian Christianity, which was seen by Catholics as heretical.
[63] Nolan (2006) named religion as one of several significant causes, summarising the Hussites' motives as "doctrinal as well as 'nationalistic' and constitutional", and providing a series of issues that led to war: the trial and execution of Jan Hus (1415) "provoked the conflict", the Defenestration of Prague (30 July 1419) "began the conflict", while "fighting began after King Wenceslaus died, shortly after the defenestration" (that is, after 19 August 1419).
(...) cross-class support gave the Hussite Wars a tripartite and even 'national' character unusual for the age, and a religious and social unity of purpose, faith, and hate".
[69] Whereas the Soga argued that Buddhism was a better religion because it had come from China and Korea, whose civilisations were widely regarded as superior and to be emulated in Yamato (the central kingdom of Japan), the Mononobe and Nakatomi maintained that there should be continuity of tradition and that worshipping the native gods (kami) was in the best interest of the Japanese.
[69] Unable to reach a decision, Emperor Kinmei (r. 539–571) maintained Shinto as the royal religion, but allowed the Soga to erect a temple for the statue of Buddha.
[69] Afterwards, an epidemic broke out, which Shintoists attributed to the anger of the native gods to the intrusion of Buddhism; in reaction, some burnt down the Buddhist temple and threw the Buddha statue into a canal.
[69] Both during the 585 and 587 wars of succession, the opposing camps were drawn along the Shinto–Buddhist divide, and the Soga clan's victory resulted in the imposition of Buddhism as the Yamato court religion under the regency of Prince Shotoku.
[69] There have been several religious wars in the Toltec Empire of Mesoamerica (c. 980–1110) between devotees of Tezcatlipoca and followers of Quetzalcoatl; the latter lost and were driven to flee to the Yucatán Peninsula.
[71][non-primary source needed] The Encyclopædia Britannica maintains that "[the] wars of religion of this period [were] fought mainly for confessional security and political gain".
In the first half of the 17th century, the German states, Scandinavia (Sweden, primarily) and Poland were beset by religious warfare during the Thirty Years War.
[73] Glen Burgess (1998) examined political propaganda written by the Parliamentarian politicians and clerics at the time, noting that many were or may have been motivated by their Puritan religious beliefs to support the war against the 'Catholic' king Charles I of England, but tried to express and legitimise their opposition and rebellion in terms of a legal revolt against a monarch who had violated crucial constitutional principles and thus had to be overthrown.
The Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi came close to extinguishing the ancient realm of Abyssinia, and forcibly converting all of its surviving subjects to Islam.
However, both polities exhausted their resources and manpower in this conflict, allowing the northward migration of the Oromo into their present homelands to the north and west of Addis Ababa.
It is a significant fact that the standard of revolt was raised by no mere patriot, but by Germanus, the aged Archbishop of Patras, who came forward, strong in his spiritual dignity (...) to be the first champion in the cause of Hellenic liberty.
In 1929, religious tensions between Muslim and Jewish Palestinians over the latter praying at the Wailing Wall led to the 1929 Palestine riots, including the Hebron and Safed massacres.
However, the militarization of the Palestinian refugee population, along with the arrival of the PLO guerrilla forces, sparked an arms race for the different Lebanese political factions.
It has been argued that the antecedents of the war can be traced back to the conflicts and political compromises reached after the end of Lebanon's administration by the Ottoman Empire.
Palestinians came to play a very important role in future Lebanese civil conflicts, and the establishment of Israel radically changed the local environment in which Lebanon found itself.
In May 1991, the militias (with the important exception of Hezbollah) were dissolved, and the Lebanese Armed Forces began slowly to rebuild themselves as Lebanon's only major non-sectarian institution.
[115] Some of the underlying motives of Saddam appear to have been controlling the Shatt al-Arab waterway and region (previously settled by the 1975 Algiers Agreement, which had ended Imperial Iranian support for the 1974–75 Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi government[116]: 3:27 ), obtaining access to the oil reserves in Khuzestan, and exploiting the instability of post-Revolution Iran, including the failed 1979 Khuzestan insurgency.
[116]: 16:05 Moreover, the Anfal campaign (1986–1989; in strict sense February–September 1988) was code-named after Al-Anfal, the eighth sura of the Qur'an which narrates the triumph of 313 followers of the new Muslim faith over almost 900 pagans at the Battle of Badr in the year 624.
[citation needed] Although some news media and some scholars at the time and in the aftermath often described the conflicts as nationalist or ethnic in nature,[note 1] others such as the literary critic Christopher Hitchens (2007) have argued that they were religious wars[note 1] (Catholic versus Orthodox versus Islamic), and that terms such as "Serb" and "Croat" were employed as mere euphemisms to conceal the religious core of the armed conflicts, even though the term "Muslims" was frequently used.
