I’m struck by the interesting relationship between the Western concept of “the church militant” and the Islamic concept of “jihad.” Both have positive meanings if viewed from within the faith system in which they arose but may be viewed negatively from the other—provided that the individual or group doing the viewing is moved by ignorance and ill will. From the Islamic point of view that “militancy” is the violent crusading spirit which brought war and mayhem to the Islamic world intermittently during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. (This comes to mind because I just finished reading one of Ellis Peter’s Cadfael novels.) From the Western point of view, jihad is terrorism.
Concepts can be as dangerous as high explosives. There is no escaping our mixed state in this dimension. Religious structures that came into being to raise humanity to a higher level themselves function in a chaotic environment, are themselves subject to decay, and are often captured by the very forces of ignorance that they would enlighten. Furthermore, they’re never finished and need the continuous effort of every generation even to function badly. Indeed those two expressions incorporate the very meaning of this struggle and its great difficulty. The last thing those on either side who formulated these expressions had in mind was the slaughter of the other.
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