The Taung Child (or Taung Baby) is the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, South Africa. Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal Nature in 1925.
In the early 20th century, the workers at limestone quarries in Southern Africa routinely uncovered fossils from the tufa
formations that they mined. The tufa did not form consistently, and
over time cavities were left open and they became beneficial areas for
animals to take shelter in. As a result, many bones began to build up in
these areas. These areas were mostly sandstone, and they stood in the
way of successful mining. So, miners would use explosives to clear these
areas, and discard all the debris. However, many fossils began to show up, and these were saved by many of the miners. Many were of extinct fauna, which included baboons and other primates, and the more complete or somehow more interesting fossils were kept as curiosities by the Europeans who managed operations.
Discovery
In 1924, workers at the Buxton Limeworks, near Taung, showed a fossilized primate skull to E. G. Izod,
the visiting director of the Northern Lime Company, the managing
company of the quarry. The director gave it to his son, Pat Izod, who
displayed it on the mantle over the fireplace. When Josephine Salmons, a
friend of the Izod family, paid a visit to Pat's home, she noticed the
primate skull, identified it as from an extinct monkey and realised its
possible significance to her mentor, Raymond Dart.
Salmons was the first female student of Dart, an anatomist at the University of Witwatersrand.
Salmons was permitted to take the fossilized skull and presented it to
Dart, who also recognized it as a significant find. Dart asked the
company to send any more interesting fossilized skulls that were
unearthed. When a consulting geologist, Robert Young, paid a visit to
the quarry office, the director, A. E. Speirs, presented him with a
collection of fossilised primate skulls that had been gathered by a
miner, Mr. De Bruyn. A. E. Speirs was using a particular fossil as a
paperweight, and Young asked him for this as well. Young sent some of
the skulls back to Dart. When Dart examined the contents of the crate, he found a fossilized endocast
of a skull showing the impression of a complex brain. He quickly
searched through the rest of the fossils in the crates, and matched it
to a fossilized skull of a juvenile primate, which had a shallow face
and fairly small teeth.
Only forty days after he first saw the fossil, Dart completed a paper that named the species of Australopithecus africanus, the "southern ape from Africa", and described it as "an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man". The paper appeared in the 7 February 1925 issue of the journal Nature. The fossil was soon nicknamed the Taung Child.
Scientists were initially reluctant to accept that the Taung Child and the new genusAustralopithecus were ancestral to modern humans. In the issue of Nature immediately following the one in which Dart's paper was published, several authorities in British paleoanthropology criticized Dart's conclusion. Three of the four scholars were members of the Piltdown Man committee: Sir Arthur Keith, Grafton Elliot Smith, and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward.
They were much more skeptical about this fossil's place in evolutionary
history, and believed it deserved to be categorized as a chimp or
gorilla rather than a human ancestor. However, Dart still had the
hesitant support of W.L.H. Duckworth, but he still asked for more
information on the brain to support this claim.
Dart's former mentor, Arthur Keith, one of the most prominent anatomists of his time, claimed that there was insufficient evidence to accept Dart's claim that Australopithecus was transitional between apes and humans. Grafton Elliot Smith
stated that he needed more evidence and a larger picture of the skull
before he could judge the significance of the new fossil. Arthur Smith Woodward
dismissed the Taung Child as having "little bearing" on the issue of
"whether the direct ancestors of man are to be sought in Asia or
Africa".
The critiques became more fervent a few months later. Elliot
Smith concluded that the Taung fossil was "essentially identical" to the
skull of "the infant gorilla and chimpanzee". Infant apes appear more human like because of the "shape of their forehead and the lack of fully developed brow ridges". Addressing the claim that the fossil was "the missing link between ape and human", Arthur Keith stated in a letter to Nature that
"an examination of the casts... will satisfy geologists that
this claim is preposterous. The skull is that of a young anthropoid
ape... and showing so many points of affinity with the two living
African anthropoids, the gorilla and chimpanzee, that there cannot be a
moment's hesitation in placing the fossil form in this living group".
In 1926, a year after the publication of Dart's article, Aleš Hrdlička reviewed and approved German and Portuguese articles for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Both articles asserted that the Taung Child should not be placed within
the human phylum due to a lack of justification for the classification.
The next year, Hrdlička personally commented on another of Dart's
articles, this time in Natural History, saying that the author
"very ingeniously, but, it seems obvious, more or less artificially,
endeavors to humanize the 'Australopithecus'. It is not known that this
effort thus far has found favor with any other student who gave truly
earnest and critical attention to the otherwise very interesting and
important Taung relic."
"Far from the bones being objective facts to be judged as evidence,
there was an established pattern of belief. There was a climate of
opinion that favored discoveries made in Asia but not the 'silly notion'
of small-brained bipeds from Africa".
There were several reasons that it took decades for the field to accept Dart's claim that Australopithecus africanus
was in the human line of descent. First and foremost was the fact that
the British scientific establishment had been fooled by the hoax of the Piltdown Man, which had a large brain and ape-like teeth.
Expecting human ancestors to have evolved a large brain very early,
they found that the Taung Child's small brain and human-like teeth made
it an unlikely ancestor to modern humans.
Secondly, until the 1940s, most anthropologists believed that humans had evolved in Asia, not in Africa.
A third reason is that, despite accepting that modern humans had
emerged by evolution, many anthropologists believed that the genus Homo
had split from the great apes as long as 30 million years ago and so
felt uneasy about accepting that humans had a small-brained, ape-like
ancestor, like Australopithecus africanus, only two million years ago.
Lastly, many people disputed the role of this fossil because of
their religious affiliation. When Taung was first announced in February
1925, many anti-evolutionists began to rise up in protest of this
fossil. Dart began receiving many threats from members of various
religious communities that proclaimed his ideas blasphemous. Some were
able to reconcile the science with the religious theology through the
lens of "creation science", but there was still significant opposition.
However, by this time many other fossils such as Java Man, Neanderthal Man, and Rhodesian Man were being discovered, and the theory of evolution was becoming more difficult to refute.
Solly Zuckerman, who had studied anatomy under Dart in South Africa, concluded as early as 1928 that Australopithecus was little more than an ape.
He and a four-member team carried out further studies of the
Australopithecine family in the 1940s and 1950s. Using a "metrical and
statistical approach" that he thought was superior to purely descriptive
methods, he decided that the creatures had not walked on two legs and so were not an intermediate form between humans and apes. For the rest of his life, Zuckerman continued to deny that Australopithecus was part of the human family tree, even when that was the conclusion that had become "universally accepted" by scientists.
Acceptance
Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor who became a professional paleontologist in 1933 at 67, was a longtime supporter of Dart. Broom discovered fossils of Australopithecus that contributed to the acceptance of Dart's interpretation of the Taung child, as a transitional form between apes and anatomically modern humans.
Dart's claim that Australopithecus africanus, the species name that he had given to the Taung Child, was a transitional form between apes and humans was almost universally rejected. Robert Broom, a Scottish doctor who worked in South Africa, was one of the few scientists to believe Dart. Two weeks after Dart announced the discovery of the Taung Child in Nature, Broom visited Dart in Johannesburg to see the fossil. After he became a paleontologist in 1933, Broom found adult fossils of Australopithecus africanus and discovered more robust fossils, which were eventually renamed Australopithecus robustus (AKA Paranthropus robustus).
Even after Dart chose to take a break from his work in anthropology,
Broom undertook more excavations, and slowly began to find more Australopithecus africanus
specimens that proved Dart was correct in his analysis of the Taung
Child; it did have human-like morphology. In 1946, Broom and his
colleague Gerrit Schepers published a volume consolidating all the information they had found about Australopithecus africanus in a volume titled The South African Fossil Men: The Australopithecinae.
In the late 1920s, American paleontologist William King Gregory also accepted that Australopithecus was part of the human family tree. Employed by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Gregory supported Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley's then-unpopular view that humans were closely related to African apes. The director of the museum, however, was Henry Fairfield Osborn; despite being "the chief public defender of evolution in the United States" at the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925, he disagreed with Darwin's views on the origins of humanity.
Gregory and Osborn repeatedly debated the issue in public forums, but
Osborn's view that humans had evolved from early ancestors who did not
look like apes prevailed among American anthropologists in the 1930s and
1940s. In 1938, Gregory visited South Africa and saw the Taung Child and the fossils that Broom had recently discovered. More convinced than ever that Dart and Broom were right, he called Australopithecus africanus "the missing link no longer missing".
The turning point in the acceptance of Dart's analysis of the
Taung Child came in 1947, when the prominent British anthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark
announced that he supported it. Le Gros Clark, who would also play an
important role in exposing the fraud of the Piltdown Man in 1953,
visited Johannesburg in late 1946 to study Dart's Taung skull and
Broom's adult fossils, with the intention of proving that they were only
apes.
After two weeks of studies and visiting the caves in which Broom had
found his fossils (the Taung cave had been destroyed by miners soon
after the discovery of the Taung skull), however, Clark became convinced
that these fossils were hominids rather than pongids.
In 1947, Sir Arthur Keith published in Nature, announcing
his support of Dart and Broom's research. He stated "the evidence
submitted by Dr. Robert Broom and Professor Dart was right and I was
wrong",
agreeing that with the new evidence along with the Taung Fossil
indicated that this fossil was human-like in posture, dental elements,
and its bipedal walk.
In early January 1947, at the First Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark
was the first anthropologist of such stature to call the Taung Child a
"hominid": an early human. An anonymous article, published in Nature
on 15 February 1947, announced Clark's conclusions to a wider public.
On that day, Keith, who had been one of Dart's most virulent critics,
composed a letter to the editor of Nature announcing that he supported Clark's analysis: "I was one of those who took the point of view that when the adult form [of Australopithecus]
was discovered it would prove to be near akin to the living African
anthropoids—the gorilla and the chimpanzee. I am now convinced... that
Prof. Dart was right and that I was wrong. The Australopithecinae are in
or near the line which culminated in the human form". As Roger Lewin put it in his book Bones of Contention, "a prompter and more thorough capitulation could hardly be imagined".
Identification
Recovering the missing parts of skull by Arc-Team, Antrocon NPO, Cicero Moraes, University of PaduaFacial forensic reconstruction by Arc-Team, Antrocon NPO, Cicero Moraes, University of Padua
Dart drew conclusions that were unavoidably controversial due to the
lack of more fossil evidence at the time. The idea that the skull
belonged to a new genus was identified by comparison with skulls of
chimpanzees. Its skull was larger than a fully-grown chimpanzee's. The
forehead of the chimpanzee receded to form a heavy browridge and a
jutting jaw; the Taung Child's forehead recedes but leaves no browridge.
Its foramen magnum,
a void in the cranium, where the spinal cord is continuous with the
brain, is beneath the cranium so the creature must have stood upright. This is an indication of bipedal locomotion.
Dean Falk, a specialist in neuroanatomy, noted that Dart had not fully considered certain apelike attributes for Taung.
"In his 1925 article, Dart had claimed that the brain of Taung
was humanlike. As it turned out, he was wrong about that.... Taung's
humanlike features were overemphasized".
This mainly pertains to the lunate sulcas,
which Dart had described as having human-like placement, Upon further
examination however, Falk determined that these patterns were much more
similar to that of an ape's similar sized brain. This however was of great debate as the sulcas was not incredibly visible on the endocast, as it often is not in apes. Ralph Holloway
stood in opposition of this idea as he had long been known as a
supporter of Dart's analysis of Taung. He believed that the sulcus would
be in the area of the lambdoid
structure. Falk however, believed the sulcas was placed higher on the
skull, in a more ape-like manner. However, studies surrounding this have
been controversial, as there is no concrete place on the brain where
they can place these features. Paleoneurologists have been tasked with
looking at various depressions in the brain and attempting to determine
what they are. These scientists are often met with skepticism, just as
Falk in her continued support of an ape-like placement of the lunate
sulcas. However, now many professionals believe that the sulcas is not
visible in Taung and many other Australopithecus africanus
specimens. However, a newer endocast specimen title Stw 505 has been
examined, and many believe that it supports Dart's hypothesis, but this
aspect of Taung is still highly debated, and many still believe it has
ape-like placement.
Subsequently, Falk unearthed an unpublished manuscript that Dart
completed in 1929 in the Archives of the University of Witwatersrand,
which provides a much more thorough description and analysis of the
Taung endocast than Dart's earlier announcement in Nature. This
was barred from being published to Dart's dismay in 1931. It remains
unpublished in these archives where very few are able to appreciate it.
In this writing Falk discovered that she and Dart had come to similar
conclusions surrounding the evolutionary process of the brain that Taung
indicates. Whereas Dart had identified only two potential sulci
on the Taung endocast in 1925, he identified and illustrated 14
additional sulci in this still-unpublished monograph. There, too, Dart
detailed how Taung's endocast was expanded globally in three different
regions, contrary to the suggestion that he believed hominin brains
evolved back-end-first, in a so-called mosaic fashion.
This goes against Holloway's interpretation as he has indicated that
the back area of the brain evolved before other regions of the brain,
but it stands in agreement with Falk's belief that the brain evolved
equally in a coordinated fashion instead.
Description
The fossil has most of the face and mandible with teeth and, uniquely, a natural endocast
of the braincase. It is estimated to be 2.3 million years old.
Originally thought to have belonged to a monkey or ape, the skull, as
Dart realized, must have been positioned directly above the spine,
indicating an upright posture. That is a trait seen in humans but
unknown in other primates.
The Taung Child was originally thought to have been about six years old at death because of the presence of deciduous teeth, but it is now believed to have been about three or four, based on studies of rates of enamel
deposition on the teeth. There was some debate over the age of this
creature initially because it was unclear if it grew at the speed of a
human, or of an ape. Compared to an ape, it would have been aged about 4
years, and compared to a human, it would have been aged around 5–7
years old. Comparison of the Taung Child fossil to the skull of a nine-year-old modern child suggest that A. africanus had a growth rate to adolescence more similar to that of modern apes, like chimpanzees (genus Pan), than to that of modern Homo sapiens.
The creature stood 105 centimetres (3 ft 5 in) tall and weighed between
9 and 11 kilograms (20 and 24 lb). It had a cranial capacity of
400–500 cc, which is comparable to that of a modern adult chimpanzee.
Because mature brain size is attained within the first few years of
life, the relatively small size is unlikely to be attributed to the
specimen being a juvenile. The skull also possesses features more
commonly found in humans than apes, including a rising forehead and
round eye sockets. Although the lower portion of the nose resembled a
chimpanzee, the overall shorter shape was human-like. Likewise the lower
portion of the face was protruded albeit to a lesser degree than in
modern apes. A bony shelf found within the inner jaw of apes could not
be found. Dart opted to describe the remains as a "man-ape" rather than
as an "ape-man" to highlight the more human features present compared to
the remains found of the more recent Pithecanthropus erectus.
In 2006, Lee Berger announced the Taung Child probably was killed by an eagle
or other large predatory bird, citing the similarity of the damage to
the skull and eye sockets of the Taung Child to that seen in modern
primates that are known to have been killed by eagles. There are talon marks in the eyes as well as a depression along the skull that is common in creatures that have been preyed upon by eagles.
The definition of religion is a controversial and complicated subject in religious studies with scholars failing to agree on any one definition. Oxford Dictionaries defines religion as the belief in and/or worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.Others, such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, have tried to correct a perceived Western bias in the definition and study of religion. Thinkers such as Daniel Dubuisson have doubted that the term religion has any meaning outside of western cultures, while others, such as Ernst Feil doubt that it has any specific, universal meaning even there.
Competing definitions
Scholars
have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are however two
general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the
phenomenological/philosophical.
Emile Durkheim
defined religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative
to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden -
beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called
a church, all those who adhere to them."
Max Lynn Stackhouse,
defined religion as "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral
vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself
basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either
fully confirmed or refuted".
Some jurisdictions refuse to classify specific religions as religions, arguing that they are instead heresies, even if they are widely viewed as a religion in the academic world.
Modern western
Religion is a modernWestern concept. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages. Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition. Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.
An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion.
They observe that the way we use the concept today is a particularly
modern construct that would not have been understood through much of
history and in many cultures outside the West (or even in the West until
after the Peace of Westphalia). The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions states:
The very attempt to define
religion, to find some distinctive or possibly unique essence or set of
qualities that distinguish the religious from the remainder of human
life, is primarily a Western concern. The attempt is a natural
consequence of the Western speculative, intellectualistic, and
scientific disposition. It is also the product of the dominant Western
religious mode, what is called the Judeo-Christian climate or, more
accurately, the theistic inheritance from Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. The theistic form of belief in this tradition, even when
downgraded culturally, is formative of the dichotomous Western view of
religion. That is, the basic structure of theism is essentially a
distinction between a transcendent deity and all else, between the
creator and his creation, between God and man.
[…] system of symbols which acts to
establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations
in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the
moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
Alluding perhaps to Tylor's "deeper motive", Geertz remarked that
[…] we have very little idea of
how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished. We
just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people
almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to
demonstrate it.
The theologian Antoine Vergote
took the term supernatural simply to mean whatever transcends the
powers of nature or human agency. He also emphasized the cultural
reality of religion, which he defined as
[…] the entirety of the linguistic
expressions, emotions and, actions and signs that refer to a
supernatural being or supernatural beings.
Peter Mandaville and Paul James
intended to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous
understandings of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and
sacredness/secularity. They define religion as
[…] a relatively-bounded system of
beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence,
and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing.
According to the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions, there is an
experiential aspect to religion which can be found in almost every
culture:
[…] almost every known culture
[has] a depth dimension in cultural experiences […] toward some sort of
ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the
rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behavior are built
around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes
religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the
organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience—varied in
form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing
culture.
Classical
Budazhap Shiretorov (Будажап Цыреторов), the head shaman of the religious community Altan Serge (Алтан Сэргэ) in Buryatia.
Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as "the feeling of absolute dependence".
His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."
Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as "the belief in spiritual beings". He argued that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry
and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious,
and thus "has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular
developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them". He also
argued that the belief in spiritual beings exists in all known
societies.
In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James
defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual
men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine". By the term divine James meant "any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.
The sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things".
By sacred things he meant things "set apart and forbidden—beliefs and
practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church,
all those who adhere to them". Sacred things are not, however, limited
to gods or spirits.
On the contrary, a sacred thing can be "a rock, a tree, a spring, a
pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred".
Religious beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are the representations
that express the nature of these sacred things, and the virtues and
powers which are attributed to them.
Echoes of James' and Durkheim's definitions are to be found in the writings of, for example, Frederick Ferré who defined religion as "one's way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively". Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is "the state of being ultimately concerned", which "is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life."
When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive
valuing, or ultimate concern, then it is possible to understand why
scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g., those made by Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents.
Religion as modern western construct
Fresco of St. Augustine of Hippo, Maria Steinbach. Saint Augustine was a Christian theologian and the bishop of Hippo Regius in north Africa and is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity for his writings. Among his most important works are The City of God, On Christian Doctrine and Confessions.
A number of scholars have pointed out that the terminology used in the study of religion in the west derives from Judeo-Christian tradition, and that the basic assumptions of religion as an analytical category are all Western in origin. This idea was first raised by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion. Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Talal Asad, and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm. These social constructionists
argue that religion is a modern concept that developed from
Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to non-Western
cultures.
While few would dispute that the concept of religion does have a
historical genealogy, there is some disagreement about what the Western
origin of the term has meant historically. Some such as Tomoko Masuzawa
have felt that the equation of religion with Christianity had the
effect of diminishing other traditions, especially in the study of
comparative religions as it developed during the high point of Western
imperialism. Others have felt that this sort of criticism overestimates the influence that Western academic thought had on the rest of the world.
Daniel Dubuisson, a French anthropologist, argues that the idea
of religion has changed a lot over time and that one cannot fully
understand its development by relying on consistent use of the term,
which "tends to minimize or cancel out the role of history".
"What the West and the history of religions in its wake have
objectified under the name 'religion' is ... something quite unique,
which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history." He notes that St. Augustine's definition of religio differed from the way we used the modern word religion.
Dubuisson prefers the term "cosmographic formation" to religion.
Dubuisson says that, with the emergence of religion as a category
separate from culture and society, there arose religious studies.
The initial purpose of religious studies was to demonstrate the
superiority of the living or universal European world view to the dead
or ethnic religions scattered throughout the rest of the world,
expanding the teleological project of Schleiermacher and Tiele to a worldwide ideal religiousness.
Due to shifting theological currents, this was eventually supplanted by
a liberal-ecumenical interest in searching for Western-style universal
truths in every cultural tradition.
According to Timothy Fitzgerald, religion is not a universal
feature of all cultures, but rather a particular idea that first
developed in Europe under the influence of Christianity.
Fitzgerald argues that from about the 4th century CE Western Europe and
the rest of the world diverged. As Christianity became commonplace, the
charismatic authority
identified by Augustine, a quality we might today call religiousness,
exerted a commanding influence at the local level. As the Catholic
Church lost its dominance during the Protestant Reformation and Christianity became closely tied to political structures, religion was recast as the basis of national sovereignty,
and religious identity gradually became a less universal sense of
spirituality and more divisive, locally defined, and tied to
nationality. It was at this point that religion was dissociated from universal beliefs and moved closer to dogma in both meaning and practice. However, there was not yet the idea of dogma as a personal choice, only of established churches.
With the Enlightenment religion lost its attachment to nationality,
says Fitzgerald, but rather than becoming a universal social attitude,
it now became a personal feeling or emotion.
Talal Asad
later refined this notion by showing that many assumptions about
religion derive specifically from post-Enlightenment Christianity.
Asad argues that before the word religion came into common usage, Christianity was a disciplina, a rule just like that of the Roman Empire. This idea can be found in the writings of St. Augustine
(354–430). Christianity was then a power structure opposing and
superseding human institutions, a literal Kingdom of Heaven. It was the
discipline taught by one's family, school, church, and city authorities,
rather than something calling one to self-discipline through symbols.
These ideas are developed by S. N. Balagangadhara. In the Age of Enlightenment,
Balagangadhara argues that the idea of Christianity as the purest
expression of spirituality was supplanted by the concept of religion as a
worldwide practice. This caused such ideas as religious freedom, a reexamination of classical philosophy as an alternative to Christian thought, and more radically Deism among intellectuals such as Voltaire.
Much like Christianity, the idea of religious freedom was exported
around the world as a civilizing technique, even to regions such as India that had never treated spirituality as a matter of political identity.
In The Invention of Religion in Japan, Josephson Storm
argued that while the concept of religion was Christian in its early
formulation, non-Europeans (such as the Japanese) did not just acquiesce
and passively accept the term's meaning. Instead they worked to
interpret religion (and its boundaries) strategically to meet their own
agendas and staged these new meanings for a global audience. In nineteenth century Japan, Buddhism was radically transformed from a pre-modern philosophy of natural law
into a religion, as Japanese leaders worked to address domestic and
international political concerns. The European encounter with other
cultures therefore led to a partial de-Christianization of the category
religion. Hence religion has come to refer to a confused collection of
traditions with no possible coherent definition.
In more recent work, Storm has sought both to generalize and to
move beyond the critique of the category of religion using what he terms
a metamodern perspective. Storm argues that the problems with the category of religion reflect broader ways different concepts in the human sciences may be deconstructed; in particular, Storm analogizes the debate about the definition of religion to classificatory disputes about art. In turn, developing a theory of social kinds influenced by philosophy of biology,
Storm argues that both the concept of religion and individual religions
should be analyzed as "property clusters" that temporarily gain
stability according to an "anchoring process."
For this reason, Storm proposes studying both the concept of religion
and individual religions by identifying causal processes that worked in
multiple directions, rejecting both essentialism and oversimplified
critiques of the definition of religion as a Western imposition.
George Lindbeck, a Lutheran and a postliberal theologian (but not a social constructionist), says that religion does not refer to belief in God
or a transcendent Absolute, but rather to "a kind of cultural and/or
linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and
thought ... it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the
description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the
experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments."
A religious war or a war of religion, sometimes also known as a holy war (Latin: sanctum bellum), is a war which is primarily caused or justified by differences in religion and beliefs. In the modern period, there are frequent debates over the extent to which religious, economic, ethnic
or other aspects of a conflict are predominant in a given war. The
degree to which a war may be considered religious depends on many
underlying questions, such as the definition of religion,
the definition of 'religious war' (taking religious traditions on
violence such as 'holy war' into account), and the applicability of
religion to war as opposed to other possible factors. Answers to these
questions heavily influence conclusions on how prevalent religious wars
have been as opposed to other types of wars.
According to scholars such as Jeffrey Burton Russell,
conflicts may not be rooted strictly in religion and instead may be a
cover for the underlying secular power, ethnic, social, political, and
economic reasons for conflict.
Other scholars have argued that what is termed "religious wars" is a
largely "Western dichotomy" and a modern invention from the past few
centuries, arguing that all wars that are classed as "religious" have
secular (economic or political) ramifications. In several conflicts including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Syrian civil war, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, religious elements are overtly present, but variously described as fundamentalism or religious extremism—depending
upon the observer's sympathies. However, studies on these cases often
conclude that ethnic animosities drive much of the conflicts.
According to the Encyclopedia of Wars, out of all 1,763 known/recorded historical conflicts, 121, or 6.87%, had religion as their primary cause. Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives religion as the primary cause of 11 of the world's 100 deadliest atrocities.
Konrad Repgen
(1987) pointed out that belligerents may have multiple intentions to
wage a war, may have had ulterior motives that historians can no longer
discover, and therefore, calling something a 'religious war' (or 'war of succession') based merely on a motive that a belligerent may have had, doesn't necessarily make it one.
Although ulterior motives may never be known, war proclamations do
provide evidence for a belligerent's legitimisation of the war to the
public. Repgen therefore concluded:
...wars should only be termed
[religious wars], in so far as at least one of the belligerents lays
claim to 'religion', a religious law, in order to justify his warfare
and to substantiate publicly why his use of military force against a
political authority should be a bellum iustum.
Philip Benedict
(2006) argued that Repgen's definition of 'religious war' was too
narrow, because sometimes both legitimisation and motivation can be
established. David Onnekink (2013) added that a 'religious war' is not necessarily the same as a 'holy war' (bellum sacrum):
'After all, it is perfectly acceptable to suggest that a worldly
prince, say, a Lutheran prince in Reformation Germany, engages in
religious warfare using mercenary armies.'
While a holy war needs to be authorised by a religious leader and
fought by pious soldiers, a religious war does not, he reasoned. His definition of 'war of religion' thus became:
a war legitimised by religion and/or for religious ends (but possibly fought by secular leaders and soldiers).
Some commentators have questioned the applicability of religion to
war, in part because the word "religion" itself is difficult to define,
particularly posing challenges when one tries to apply it to non-Western
cultures. Secondly, it has been argued that religion is difficult to
isolate as a factor, and is often just one of many factors driving a
war. For example, many armed conflicts may be simultaneously wars of succession as well as wars of religion when two rival claimants to a throne also represent opposing religions. Examples include the War of the Three Henrys and the Succession of Henry IV of France during the French Wars of Religion, the Hessian War and the War of the Jülich Succession during the Reformation in Germany, and the Jacobite risings (including the Williamite–Jacobite wars) during the Reformation in Great Britain and Ireland.
John Morreall and Tamara Sonn (2013) have argued that since there
is no consensus on definitions of "religion" among scholars and no way
to isolate "religion" from the rest of the more likely motivational
dimensions (social, political, and economic); it is incorrect to label
any violent event as "religious".
Theologian William T. Cavanaugh in his Myth of Religious Violence
(2009) argues that the very concept of "religion" is a modern Western
concept that was invented recently in history. As such, he argues that
the concept of "religious violence" or "religious wars" are incorrectly
used to anachronistically label people and conflicts as participants in
religious ideologies that never existed in the first place.[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.
It was in the 17th century that the concept of "religion" received its
modern shape despite the fact that the Bible, the Quran, and other
ancient sacred texts did not have a concept of religion in the original
languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these
sacred texts were written. The modern word religion comes from the Latin word religio
which, in the ancient and medieval world, was understood as an
individual virtue of worship, never as doctrine, practice, or actual
source of knowledge. Cavanaugh argued that all wars that are classed as "religious" have secular (economic or political) ramifications. Similar opinions were expressed as early as the 1760s, during the Seven Years' War,
widely recognized to be "religious" in motivation, noting that the
warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as
much as along secular interests.
There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as "religion" in modern translations, but up to the mid-17th century, translators expressed din as "law".
It was in the 19th century that the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" first emerged.
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of "religion" since
there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its
meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in
1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding,
among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with
this Western idea. According to the philologistMax Müller, what is called ancient religion today, would have only been understood as "law" by the people in the ancient world. In Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as "religion", also means law. Throughout the classical Indian subcontinent, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions.
Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between "imperial law" and
universal or "Buddha law", but these later became independent sources of
power.
According to McGarry & O'Leary (1995), it is evident that religion as one aspect of a people's cultural heritage
may serve as a cultural marker or ideological rationalization for a
conflict that has deeper ethnic and cultural differences. They argued
this specifically in the case of The Troubles
in Northern Ireland, often portrayed as a religious conflict of a
Catholic vs. a Protestant faction, while the more fundamental cause of
the conflict was supposedly ethnic or nationalistic rather than
religious in nature.
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.
In their 2015 review of violence and peacemaking in world
religions, Irfan Omar and Michael Duffey stated: "This book does not
ignore violence committed in the name of religion. Analyses of case
studies of seeming religious violence often conclude that ethnic
animosities strongly drive violence."
The definition of 'religious war' and the applicability of religion
to war have a strong influence on how many wars may be properly labelled
'religious wars', and thus how prevalent religious wars have been as
opposed to other wars.
According to Kalevi Holsti
(1991, p. 308, Table 12.2), who catalogued and categorised wars from
1648 to 1989 into 24 categories of 'issues that generated wars',
'protect[ion of] religious confrères'
(co-religionists) was (one of) the primary cause(s) of 14% of all wars
during 1648–1714, 11% during 1715–1814, 10% during 1815–1914, and 0%
during 1918–1941 and 1945–1989. Additionally, he found 'ethnic/religious unification/irredenta'
to be (one of) the primary cause(s) of 0% of all wars during 1648–1714
and 1715–1814, 6% during 1815–1914, 17% during 1918–1941, and 12% during
1945–1989.
In their 1997 Encyclopedia of Wars, authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documented 1763 notable wars in world history, out of which 121 wars were in the "religious wars" category in the index.
They note that before the 17th century, much of the "reasons" for
conflicts were explained through the lens of religion and that after
that time wars were explained through the lens of wars as a way to
further sovereign interests.
Some commentators have concluded that only 123 wars (7%) out of these
1763 wars were fundamentally originated by religious motivations. Andrew Holt (2018) traced the origin of the 'only 123 religious wars' claim back to the 2008 book The Irrational Atheist of far-right activist Vox Day, which he notes is slightly adjusted compared to the 121 that is indeed found in the Encyclopedia of Wars itself.
The Encyclopedia of War, edited by Gordon Martel, using
the criteria that the armed conflict must involve some overt religious
action, concludes that 6% of the wars listed in their encyclopedia can
be labelled religious wars.
Holy war concepts in religious traditions
While early empires could be described as henotheistic, i.e. dominated by a single god of the ruling elite (as Marduk in the Babylonian empire, Assur in the Assyrian empire, etc.), or more directly by deifying the ruler in an imperial cult, the concept of "holy war" enters a new phase with the development of monotheism.
During classical antiquity, the Greco-Roman world had a pantheon with particular attributes and interest areas. Ares personified war. While he received occasional sacrifice from armies going to war, there was only a very limited "cult of Ares". In Sparta, however, each company of youths sacrificed to Enyalios before engaging in ritual fighting at the Phoebaeum.
Hans M. Barstad (2008) claimed that this ancient Greek attitude to war and religion differed from that of ancient Israel and Judah: 'Quite unlike what we find with the Greeks, holy war permeated ancient Israelite society.'
Moreover, ever since the pioneering study of Manfred Weippert,
"»Heiliger Krieg« in Israel und Assyrien" (1972), scholars have been
comparing the holy war concept in the (monotheistic) Hebrew Bible with other (polytheistic) ancient Near Eastern war traditions, and found 'many [striking] similarities in phraseology and ideology'.
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.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, multiple invasions occurred which
led some regions to make their own armies to defend themselves and this
slowly lead to the emergence of the Crusades, the concept of "holy
war", and terminology such as "enemies of God" in the 11th century. In early Christianity, St. Augustine's concept of just war (bellum iustum) was widely accepted, but warfare was not regarded as a virtuous activity
and expressions of concern for the salvation of those who killed
enemies in battle, regardless of the cause for which they fought, was
common.
During the era of the Crusades, some of the Crusaders who fought in the name of God were recognized as the Milites Christi, the soldiers or the knights of Christ.
The Crusades were a series of military campaigns against the Muslim Conquests
that were waged from the end of the 11th century through the 13th
century. Originally, the goal of the Crusaders was the recapture of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims, and the provision of support to the besieged Christian Byzantine Empire which was waging a war against MuslimSeljuq expansion into Asia Minor and Europe proper. Later, Crusades were launched against other targets, either for religious reasons, such as the Albigensian Crusade, the Northern Crusades, or because of political conflicts, such as the Aragonese Crusade. In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II raised the level of the war from a bellum iustum (a "just war"), to a bellum sacrum (a "holy war").
In the Hindu texts, dharma-yuddha refers to a war that is fought while following several rules that make the war fair.[36] In other words, just conduct within a war (jus in bello) is important in Vedic and epic literature such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. However, according to Torkel Berkke, the Mahabharata does not provide a clear discussion on who has the authority to initiate a war (jus ad bellum), nor on what makes a war just (bellum justum).
The Muslim conquests were a military expansion on an unprecedented scale, beginning in the lifetime of Muhammad and spanning the centuries, down to the Ottoman wars in Europe. Until the 13th century, the Muslim conquests were those of a more or less coherent empire, the Caliphate, but after the Mongol invasions, expansion continued on all fronts (other than Iberia which was lost in the Reconquista) for another half millennium until the final collapse of the Mughal Empire in the east and the Ottoman Empire in the west with the onset of the modern period.
There were also a number of periods of infighting among Muslims; these are known by the term Fitna
and mostly concern the early period of Islam, from the 7th to 11th
centuries, i.e. before the collapse of the Caliphate and the emergence
of the various later Islamic empires.
While technically, the millennium of Muslim conquests could be
classified as "religious war", the applicability of the term has been
questioned.
The reason is that the very notion of a "religious war" as opposed to a
"secular war" is the result of the Western concept of the separation of Church and State.
No such division has ever existed in the Islamic world, and
consequently, there cannot be a real division between wars that are
"religious" from such that are "non-religious". Islam does not have any
normative tradition of pacifism,
and warfare has been integral part of Islamic history both for the
defense and the spread of the faith since the time of Muhammad. This was
formalised in the juristic definition of war in Islam,
which continues to hold normative power in contemporary Islam,
inextricably linking political and religious justification of war. This normative concept is known as Jihad,
an Arabic word with the meaning "to strive; to struggle" (viz. "in the
way of God"), which includes the aspect of struggle "by the sword".
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. The
first revelation concerning the struggle against the Meccans was Quran 22:39-40:
Permission ˹to fight back˺ is
˹hereby˺ granted to those being fought, for they have been wronged. And
Allah is truly Most Capable of helping them ˹prevail˺. ˹They are˺ those
who have been expelled from their homes for no reason other than
proclaiming: “Our Lord is Allah.” Had Allah not repelled ˹the aggression
of˺ some people by means of others, destruction would have surely
claimed monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which Allah’s
Name is often mentioned. Allah will certainly help those who stand up
for Him. Allah is truly All-Powerful, Almighty.
Midianite
women, children and livestock taken captive by Israelite soldiers after
all Midianite men had been killed and their towns burnt. Watercolour by
James Tissot (c. 1900) illustrating the War against the Midianites as narrated in Numbers 31.
Reuven Firestone
(2012) stated 'that holy war is a common theme in the Hebrew Bible.
Divinely legitimized through the authority of biblical scripture and its
interpretation, holy war became a historical reality for the Jews of
antiquity. Among at least some of the Jewish groups of the late Second Temple period
until the middle of the second century, C.E., holy war was an operative
institution. That is, Jews engaged in what is defined here as holy
war.' He mentioned the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE), the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE) as three examples of a "holy war" or "Commanded War" (Hebrew: מלחמת מצווה Milkhemet Mitzvah) in the eyes of Rabbinic Judaism at the time. He asserted that this concept may have re-emerged in modern times within some factions of the Zionist movement, particularly Revisionist Zionism.
In 2016, however, Firestone made a distinction between what he
regarded as the Hebrew Bible's concept and the 'Western' concept of holy
war: ""Holy war" is a Western concept referring to war that is fought
for religion, against adherents of other religions, often in order to
promote religion through conversion, and with no specific geographic
limitation. This concept does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, whose wars
are not fought for religion or in order to promote it but, rather, in
order to preserve religion and a religiously unique people in relation
to a specific and limited geography."
Several scholars regard war narratives in the Hebrew Bible, such as the war against the Midianites in Numbers 31, to be a holy war, with Niditch (1995) asserting the presence of a 'priestly ideology of war in Numbers 31'.
Hamilton (2005) argued that the two major concerns of Number 31 are the
idea that war is a defiling activity, but Israelite soldiers need to be
ritually pure, so they may only fight wars for a holy cause, and are
required to cleanse themselves afterwards to restore their ritual
purity. The Israelite campaign against Midian was blessed by the Israelite god Yahweh, and could therefore be considered a holy war.
Olson (2012), who believed the war narrative to be a fictional story
with a theological purpose, noted that the Israelite soldiers' actions
in Numbers 31 closely followed the holy war regulations set out in
Deuteronomy 20:14, although Moses' commandment to also kill the captive male children and non-virgin women was a marked departure from these regulations.
He concluded: "Many aspects of this holy war text may be troublesome to
a contemporary reader. 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."
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".
In Sikhism, dharamyudh, dharam-yudh or dharam yudh (Gurmukhi: ਧਰਮਯੁਧ) is a term which is variously translated as 'religious war', 'war of righteousness', 'war in defence of righteousness', or 'war for justice'.
Though some core tenets in the Sikh religion are understood to
emphasise peace and nonviolence, especially before the 1606 execution of
Guru Arjan by Mughal emperor Jahangir, military force may be justified if all peaceful means to settle a conflict have been exhausted, thus resulting in a dharamyudh.
Antiquity
In Greek antiquity, four (or five) wars were fought in and around the Panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi (the Pythia (Oracle) residing in the Temple of Apollo) against persons or states who allegedly committed sacrilegious acts before the god Apollo. The following are distinguished:
"Never was there a war more prolonged nor more cruel than this, nor
one that required greater efforts on the part of the Frankish people.
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. On both sides of the
frontier murder, robbery, and arson were of constant occurrence, so the
Franks declared open war against them."
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. During his war with the Arian
Visigoths, Clovis reportedly said: "I take it very hard that these
Arians hold part of the Gauls. Let us go with God's help and conquer
them and bring the land under our control."
The Saxon Wars (772–804) of Frankish king Charlemagne against the Saxons under Widukind were described by Jim Bradbury (2004) as 'in essence a frontier struggle and a religious war against pagans – devil-worshippers according to Einhard.' He noted that Charlemagne ordered the destruction of the Irminsul, an object sacred to the Saxons.
Per Ullidtz (2014) stated that previous Frankish–Saxon conflicts
spanning almost a century 'had been mostly a border war', 'but under
Charles it changed character': because of 'Charles' idea of unity, of a
king over all German tribes, and of universal Christianity in all of his
kingdom, it changed into a mission from heaven.' Similarly, a successful Carolingian campaign against the Pannonian Avars in the 790s led to their forced conversion to Christianity. The earlier Merovingian conquests of Thuringia, Allemannia and Bavaria had also resulted in their Christianisation by 555, although the Frisians resisted with similar determinacy as the Saxons during the Frisian–Frankish wars (7th and 8th century), with both tribes killing several Christian missionaries in defence of their Germanic paganism, to the horror of Christian hagiographers.
The Crusades
are a prime example of wars whose religious elements have been
extensively debated for centuries, with some groups of people in some
periods emphasising, restoring or overstating the religious aspects, and
other groups of people in some periods denying, nuancing or downplaying
the religious aspects of the Crusades in favour of other factors. Winkler Prins/Encarta
(2002) concluded: "The traditional explanation for the Crusades (a
religious enthusiasm that found an outlet in a Holy War) has also
retained its value in modern historical scholarship, keeping in mind the
fact that it has been pointed out that a complex set of socio-economic
and political factors allowed this enthusiasm to manifest itself."
The Crusades against Muslim expansion in the 11th century were recognized as a "holy war" or a bellum sacrum by later writers in the 17th century. The early modern wars against the Ottoman Empire were seen as a seamless continuation of this conflict by contemporaries.
Jim Bradbury (2004) noted that the belligerents in the Reconquista
were not all equally motivated by religion, and that a distinction
should be made between 'secular rulers' on the one hand, and on the
other hand Christian military orders which came from elsewhere
(including the three main orders of Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights), or were established inside Iberia (such as those of Santiago, Alcántara and Calatrava).
'[The Knights] were more committed to religious war than some of their
secular counterparts, were opposed to treating with Muslims and carried
out raids and even atrocities, such as decapitating Muslim prisoners.'
The relative importance of the various factors that caused the Hussite Wars (1419–1434) is debated. Kokkonen & Sundell (2017) claimed that the death of king Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia on 19 August 1419 is the event that sparked the Hussite rebellion against his nominal heir Sigismund (then king of Germany, Hungary and Croatia), making it essentially a war of succession.
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).
Nolan described the wars' goals and character as follows: 'The main aim
of the Hussites was to prevent the hated Sigismund mounting the throne
of Bohemia, but fighting between Bohemian Hussites and Catholics spread
into Moravia. (...) 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'. Winkler Prins/Encarta
(2002) described the Hussites as a 'movement which developed from a
religious denomination to a nationalist faction, opposed to German and
Papal influence; in the bloody Hussite Wars (1419–1438), they managed to resist.' It didn't mention the succession of Wenceslaus by Sigismund, but noted elsewhere that it was Sigismund's policy of Catholic Church unity which prompted him to urgeAntipope John XXIII to convene the Council of Constance in 1414, which ultimately condemned Jan Hus.
Buddhism was formally introduced into Japan by missionaries from the kingdom of Baekje in 552. Adherents of the native Shinto religion resisted the spread of Buddhism, and several military conflicts broke out, starting with the Soga–Mononobe conflict (552–587) between the pro-Shinto Mononobe clan (and Nakatomi clan) and the pro-Buddhist Soga clan.
Although the political power each of the clans could wield over the
royal family was also an important factor, and was arguably a strategic
reason for the Soga to adopt and promote Buddhism as a means to increase
their authority, the religious beliefs from both doctrines, as well as
religious explanations from events that happened after the arrival of
Buddhism, were also causes of the conflict that escalated to war.
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. 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.
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.
However, the epidemic worsened, which Buddhists in turn interpreted as
the anger of Buddha to the sacrilege committed against his temple and
statue.
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.
The term "religious war" was used to describe, controversially at the time, what are now known as the European wars of religion, and especially the then-ongoing Seven Years' War, from at least the mid 18th century. The Encyclopædia Britannica maintains that "[the] wars of religion of this period [were] fought mainly for confessional security and political gain".
In 16th-century France, there was a series of wars between Roman Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots primarily), known as the French Wars of Religion. 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. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism
figured on the opposing sides of this conflict, though Catholic France
took the side of the Protestants, but it did so for purely political
reasons.
In the late 20th century, a number of revisionist historians such as William M. Lamont regarded the English Civil War (1642–1651) as a religious war, with John Morrill (1993) stating: 'The English Civil War was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion.' This view has been criticised by various pre-, post- and anti-revisionist historians. 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.
They even warned their Parliamentarian allies to not make overt use of
religious arguments in making their case for war against the king.
However, in some cases it may be argued that they hid their
pro-Anglican and anti-Catholic motives behind legal parlance, for
example by emphasising that the Church of England was the legally established religion:
'Seen in this light, the defenses of Parliament's war, with their
apparent legal-constitutional thrust, are not at all ways of saying that
the struggle was not religious. On the contrary, they are ways of
saying that it was.'
Burgess concluded: '[T]he Civil War left behind it just the sort of
evidence that we could reasonably expect a war of religion to leave.'
The Ethiopian–Adal War (1529–1543) was a military conflict between the Abyssinians and the Adal Sultanate. The ImamAhmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi came close to extinguishing the ancient realm of Abyssinia, and forcibly converting all of its surviving subjects to Islam. The intervention of the European Cristóvão da Gama
attempted to help to prevent this outcome, but he was killed by
al-Ghazi. 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. Many historians trace the origins of hostility between Somalia and Ethiopia to this war.
Modern period
Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence
(1821–1829) has sometimes been considered a religious war between
Christians and Muslims, especially in its early phase. The Greek
Declaration of Independence (issued on 15 January 1822) legitimised the
armed rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in a mix of religious and nationalist
terms: 'The war we are waging against the Turks, far from being founded
in demagoguery, seditiousness or the selfish interests of any one part
of the Greek nation, is a national and holy war (...). It is from these
principles of natural rights and desiring to assimilate ourselves with
our European Christian brethren, that we have embarked upon our war
against the Turks.' Scottish writer Felicia Skene
remarked in 1877: 'The Greek war of independence has never been called a
religious war, and yet it had a better claim to that appellation than
many a conflict which has been so named by the chroniclers of the past.
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.' Ian Morris (1994) stated that 'the uprising in 1821 was mainly a religious war', but that philhellene Western volunteers joined the war for quite different reasons, namely to 'regenerate' Greece and thereby Europe, motivated by Romantic ideas about European history and civilisation, and Orientalist views of Ottoman culture. The Filiki Eteria, the main organisation driving the rebellion, was split between two groups: one advocated the restoration of the Byzantine Empire
on religious grounds, and to encourage all Christians within Ottoman
territory to join the Greek revolutionaries; the other advocated the Megali Idea, a large Greek nation-state based on shared language rather than religion.
Both of these grand objectives failed, but a smaller version of the
latter goal was accepted by most members of the Eteria by 1823, and this
goal was generally compatible with the motives of philhellenes who
travelled to Greece to enter the war in 1821–23.
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
A fatally wounded Israeli school boy in a Hamas attack, 2011
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict can primarily be viewed as an ethnic conflict
between two parties where one party is most often portrayed as a
singular ethno-religious group which only consists of the Jewish
majority and ignores non-Jewish minority Israeli citizens who support
the existence of a State of Israel to varying degrees, especially the Druze and the Circassians who, for example, volunteer to serve in the IDF, participate in combat and are represented in the Israeli parliament in greater percentages than Israeli Jews are as well as Israeli Arabs, Samaritans, various other Christians, and Negev Bedouin;
the other party is sometimes presented as an ethnic group which is
multi-religious (although most numerously consisting of Muslims, then
Christians, then other religious groups up to and including Samaritans
and even Jews). Yet despite the multi-religious composition of both of
the parties in the conflict, elements on both sides often view it as a
religious war between Jews and Muslims. In 1929, religious tensions
between Muslim and Jewish Palestinians over Jews praying at the Wailing Wall led to the 1929 Palestine riots including the Hebron and Safed ethnic cleansings of Jews.
In 1947, the UN's decision to partition the Mandate of Palestine, led to the creation of the state of Israel and Jordan, which annexed the West Bank portion of the mandate, since then, the region has been plagued with conflict. The 1948 Palestinian exodus also known as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة), occurred when approximately 711,000 to 726,000Palestinian Arabsfled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Civil War that preceded it.
The exact number of refugees is a matter of dispute, though the number
of Palestine refugees and their unsettled descendants registered with
UNRWA is more than 4.3 million.
The causes remain the subject of fundamental disagreement between
Palestinians and Israelis. Both Jews and Palestinians make ethnic and
historical claims to the land, and Jews make religious claims as well.
Pakistan and India
The All India Muslim League (AIML) was formed in Dhaka in 1906 by Muslims who were suspicious of the Hindu-majority Indian National Congress.
They complained that Muslim members did not have the same rights as
Hindu members. A number of different scenarios were proposed at various
times. This was fuelled by the British policy of "Divide and Rule",
which they tried to bring upon every political situation. Among the
first to make the demand for a separate state was the writer/philosopher
Allama Iqbal,
who, in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim
League said that a separate nation for Muslims was essential in an
otherwise Hindu-dominated subcontinent.
Inter-ethnic conflict in Nigeria has generally had a religious
element. Riots against Igbo in 1953 and in the 1960s in the north were
said to have been sparked by religious conflict. The riots against Igbo
in the north in 1966 were said to have been inspired by radio reports of
mistreatment of Muslims in the south.
A military coup d'état led by lower and middle-ranking officers, some
of them Igbo, overthrew the NPC-NCNC dominated government. Prime
Minister Balewa along with other northern and western government
officials were assassinated during the coup. The coup was considered an
Igbo plot to overthrow the northern dominated government. A counter-coup
was launched by mostly northern troops. Between June and July there was
a mass exodus of Ibo from the north and west. Over 1.3 million Ibo fled
the neighboring regions in order to escape persecution as anti-Ibo
riots increased. The aftermath of the anti-Ibo riots led many to believe
that security could only be gained by separating from the North.
In the 1980s, serious outbreaks between Christians and Muslims occurred in Kafanchan in southern Kaduna State in a border area between the two religions.
The 2010 Jos riots saw clashes between Muslim herders against Christian farmers near the volatile city of Jos, resulting in hundreds of casualties. Officials estimated that 500 people were massacred in night-time raids by rampaging Muslim gangs.
Buddhist uprising
During the rule of the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam,
the discrimination against the majority Buddhist population generated
the growth of Buddhist institutions as they sought to participate in
national politics and gain better treatment. The Buddhist Uprising of 1966 was a period of civil and military unrest in South Vietnam, largely focused in the I Corps area in the north of the country in central Vietnam.
In a country where the Buddhist majority was estimated to be between 70 and 90 percent,Diem ruled with a strong religious bias. As a member of the Catholic Vietnamese minority, he pursued pro-Catholic policies that antagonized many Buddhists.
Chinese conflict
The Dungan revolt (1862–1877) and Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873) by the Hui
were also set off by racial antagonism and class warfare, rather than
the mistaken assumption that it was all due to Islam that the rebellions
broke out. During the Dungan revolt fighting broke out between Uyghurs and Hui.
Tensions with Uyghurs and Hui arose because Qing and Republican
Chinese authorities used Hui troops and officials to dominate the
Uyghurs and crush Uyghur revolts.
Xinjiang's Hui population increased by over 520 percent between 1940
and 1982, an average annual growth rate of 4.4 percent, while the Uyghur
population only grew by 1.7 percent. This dramatic increase in the Hui
population led inevitably to significant tensions between the Hui and
Uyghur Muslim populations. Some old Uyghurs in Kashgar remember that the Hui army at the Battle of Kashgar (1934) massacred 2,000 to 8,000 Uyghurs, which caused tension as more Hui moved into Kashgar from other parts of China. Some Hui criticize Uyghur separatism, and generally do not want to get involved in conflicts in other countries over Islam for fear of being perceived as radical. Hui and Uyghur live apart from each other, praying separately and attending different mosques.
There is no consensus among scholars on what triggered the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). 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. However, the conflict played out along three religious lines: Sunni Muslim, Christian Lebanese and Shiite Muslim, Druze are considered among Shiite Muslims.
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. The Cold War had a powerful disintegrative effect on Lebanon, which was closely linked to the polarization that preceded the 1958 political crisis. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, an exodus of Palestinian refugees, who fled the fighting or were expelled from their homes,
arrived in Lebanon. 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.
Lebanon was promised independence, which was achieved on 22 November 1943. Free French troops, who had invaded Lebanon in 1941 to rid Beirut of the Vichy French
forces, left the country in 1946. The Christians assumed power over the
country and its economy. A confessional Parliament was created in which
Muslims and Christians were given quotas of seats. As well, the
president was to be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and
the speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim.
In March 1991, Parliament passed an amnesty law
that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment. The amnesty
was not extended to crimes perpetrated against foreign diplomats or
certain crimes referred by the cabinet to the Higher Judicial Council.
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.
Some violence still occurred. In late December 1991 a car bomb
(estimated to carry 220 pounds of TNT) exploded in the Muslim
neighborhood of Basta. At least 30 people were killed, and 120 wounded, including former Prime Minister Shafik Wazzan, who was riding in a bulletproof car.
Iran–Iraq War
In the case of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the new revolutionary government of the Islamic Republic of Iran generally described the conflict as a religious war, and used the narrative of jihad to recruit, mobilise and motivate its troops. On the other hand, justifications from the Saddam Hussein-led Ba'athist Iraq were mostly framed in terms of a supposed Persian–Arab historical enmity, and Iraq-centred Arab nationalism (including support for Arab separatism in Khuzestan). 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), obtaining access to the oil reserves in Khuzestan, and exploiting the instability of post-Revolution Iran, including the failed 1979 Khuzestan insurgency.
Peyman Asadzade (2019) stated: 'Although the evidence suggests that
religious motivations by no means contributed to Saddam's decision to launch the war,
an overview of the Iranian leaders' speeches and martyrs' statements
reveals that religion significantly motivated people to take part in the
war. (...) The Iranian leadership painted the war as a battle between
believers and unbelievers, Muslims and infidels, and the true and the
false.'
Iran cited religious reasons to justify continuing combat operations,
for example in the face of Saddam's offer of peace in mid-1982, rejected
by Ayatollah Khomeini's declaration that the war would not end until Iran had defeated the Ba'athist regime and replaced it with an Islamic republic.
While Ba'athist Iraq has sometimes been described as a 'secular
dictatorship' before the war, and therefore in ideological conflict with
the Shia Islamic 'theocracy' which seized control of Iran in 1979, Iraq also launched the so-called Tawakalna ala Allah ("Trust in God") Operations (April–July 1988) in the final stages of the war. 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. "Al Anfal" literally means the spoils (of war) and was used to describe the military campaign of extermination and looting commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid (also known as "Chemical Ali"). His orders informed jash (Kurdish collaborators with the Baathists, literally "donkey's foal" in Kurdish) units that taking cattle, sheep, goats, money, weapons and even women as spoils of war was halal (religiously permitted or legal).
Randal (1998, 2019) argued that 'Al Anfal' was 'a curious nod to Islam'
by the Ba'athist government, because it had originally been known as a
'militantly secular regime'.
Some commentators have concluded that the code name was meant to serve
as 'a religious justification' for the campaign against the Kurds.
The Croatian War (1991–95) and the Bosnian War (1992–95) have been viewed as religious wars between the Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim populations of former Yugoslavia: respectively called "Serbs", "Croats" and "Bosniaks" (or "Bosnian Muslims"). Traditional religious symbols were used during the wars. Notably, foreign Muslim volunteers came to Bosnia to wage jihad and were thus known as "Bosnian mujahideen". Although some news media and some scholars at the time and in the aftermath often described the conflicts as nationalist or ethnic in nature, others such as the literary critic Christopher Hitchens (2007) have argued that they were religious wars (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.
Some scholars have stated that they "were not religious wars", but
acknowledged that "religion played an important role in the wars" and
"did often serve as the motivating and integrating factor for justifying
military attacks".
Sudanese Civil War
The Second Sudanese Civil War from 1983 to 2005 has been described as an ethnoreligious
conflict where the Muslim central government's pursuits to impose
sharia law on non-Muslim southerners led to violence, and eventually to
the civil war. The war resulted in the independence of South Sudan six years after the war ended. Sudan is majority-Muslim and South Sudan is majority-Christian.
