Eyre Lines

The most recent Global Christian Perspectives discussion included an item which frankly horrified me; the report that some individuals in ISIS had developed a “theology of rape”, making it a religious act to rape members of the Yazidi group.

One of my more scholarly Islamic friends has made haste to post a link to a piece which completely rebuts any suggestion that this is acceptable Islamic theology. I am sure that this is correct, and that if any Muslims actually do follow this “theology of rape”, they are not following any version of Islam recognised now or in the time of the Prophet. I say “if any Muslims actually do follow this” for two reasons. Firstly, it is distinctly arguable that if they do follow this, they cannot any more be regarded as Muslim. The second I expand on later.

The problem here is that the shock effect of the first article outweighs the reasoned, considered and extensive scholarship of the second, irrespective of the accuracy of the report and of whether the alleged perpetrators are actually Muslims. I suspect that the reasoned and considered discussion we engaged in on Friday will equally have much less impact.

Some of my less scholarly Islamic friends have just discounted the report as mere propaganda and without any likelihood of being accurate. In conscience, this was my first thought on seeing the article. It felt like propaganda. It felt like the kind of thing the British government put out during World War I (in which, apparently, Germans were bayoneting Belgian babies and raping Belgian nuns, an allegation which was virtually certainly false); it also brought to mind the Nayirah testimony which may have been pivotal in inducing the US to invade Iraq in the first Gulf War. The allegation there was that Iraqui soldiers had removed babies from incubators, stolen the incubators and left the babies to die; this testimony has since been shown to have been false, and an effort by Kuwait to present the Iraquis as barbaric.

It is well known that if we can present an enemy as barbaric, lacking in human values, not worthy of being called human, we can then excuse and promote any degree of violence against them – including violence which is itself barbaric. This is psychology of aggression 101. If the report is true, it’s what is being done in respect of the Yazidis, though to a somewhat lesser extent – the Yazidis are monotheists with links to the Zoroastrian tradition, seeing the deity as having delegated control of the world to the “Peacock Angel” (who is neither good not evil in Yazidism); unfortunately it is relatively easy to equate the Peacock Angel with Satan in the Islamic angelology – come to that, as the Peacock Angel is identified as having fallen, and as being the ruler of this world, it would not be difficult to do it in Christian angelology.

So the Yazidis are “obviously” Satan worshipers – and as such, they are probably alleged to eat aborted fetuses, or some such garbage. It would then be the argument that no usual rules of behaviour toward them would apply.

The argument “but Sir, he did it first” does not work in the playground, but it appears to work more often than it has any business to when talking of populations or governments; it should never work for Christians, who are enjoined to love their neighbours even if they are enemies (such as the Syrophonecian woman and the Samaritan, respectively members of groups for whom there was a scriptural injunction to eliminate them and of a group considered heretics, which is often thought of as worse).

Now, I don’t know whether there is truth in the story or not, but whichever is the case, recounting it feels to me like circulating propaganda aimed at removing our inhibitions about violent action against ISIS. I was, therefore, unhappy that the item was included at all.

What if there were some truth in it? Let’s face it, ISIS is quite prepared to issue video of them committing atrocities of other kinds. Well, my thoughts immediately turned to the injunction in Deuteronomy regarding how you should treat defeated enemies. There is, of course, a saving provision in Deut. 21:10-14 ordering that the Israelites marry any women with whom they want to have sex, which is sometimes put forward as an event on the trajectory towards, eventually, the more enlightened attitude to enemies in the Gospels, the justified assumption being that in the warfare of the time, women were probably going to be raped and abandoned – something which continued to be a feature of warfare even of Christian nations for a very long time, and has not entirely vanished, if some reports of activities in Ruanda relatively recently are to be believed.

All of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have moved well beyond this in their theology and ethics, but soldiers have not necessarily kept up with theology and ethics. In particular, I note, as highlighted by another item mentioned on Friday, that concepts of honour which have also been superseded by the theology of Islam do still persist; it may be that the culture of the area has also kept its old ideas about treatment of enemies despite the best efforts of religion, in this case Islam; this is seen particularly in “honour killings”. If religion is invoked at all in honour killings, it is twisted in order to attempt to justify actions which are not taken for reasons of religion, but those of a longstanding previous culture of the area.

So it may, just possibly, be with the ISIS report. If there is a second lesson we can learn here, it is that religion is often used as an excuse for appalling actions where in truth they do not flow from the religion itself. My own touchstone for this in Christianity is the celebrated statement of the Papal Legate Arnaud Amalric at the siege of Beziéres; “Kill all, God will know his own”.

Those who are prepared to massacre and rape are, it seems, also prepared to massacre and rape their theology.