Casus belli

Religious War Is Already Here (Again)

In order to understand the events we are experiencing in the Middle East in general and in Israel in particular, we must take a moment and look at the history of war as a definition and analyze its characteristics and the changes that have taken place regarding its character. Both Judaism and Christianity has seen its share of religious wars, but over the years, people were divided into nation-states and abandoned religious wars to a point where a motive for wars is mostly based on political and national interests. Only in the nations of Islam did this change faile to take place and religion remained a central element in wars to this very day.

Muslims did not, even for a moment, stop from executing religious wars throughout a history of over a thousand and four hundred years. Since there was no Islamic religious reform movement, religious wars in Islam never stopped. On the contrary – it is safe to say that throughout the past fifteen decades, except for a few rare occasions, all Muslim wars have been religious ones.