Religious Fighting and the Print-Media Soldier
The current New Yorker features a cover of entrenched soldiers, one reading by flashlight, and inside 12 pages of soldiers’ letters anchor their "Life During Wartime" issue. A selection from "Dispatches from Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories" can be heard on The New Yorker’s website; if audio tracks of war letters are of interest, more can be heard at the Gilder Lehrman Institute—letters from the American Revolution to the current war.
From this New Yorker: in 2003, Captain Donna Kahout wrote to members of her Colorado church about fighting on religious land:
One clear day, I looked down at the rich greens of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates and pondered over the fact that these were the Tigris and Euphrates that I’d learned about in chruch and school my whole life. Genesis describes the Garden of Eden standing at the headwater of four rivers, two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. That places the Garden just north of Basa, within sight of where I flew almost daily.
Abraham, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, the whole displaced Israelite nation, and perhaps even Adam and Eve all trod the ground I was looking down on daily. And I was living in the same desert where the Israelities wandered. We complain about being there for three months—it’s so barren, flat, windy, hot, sandy, and dry—it’s no wonder the Israelites complained during the forty years that they followed God around the Sinai Peninsula between their exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land, near Jerusalem.
While current soldiers remark at a combat zone with Biblical connection, some of the Indian soldiers in Iraq in the 1910s, trodding the same ground, refused to fight against the local population for their own religious reasons. A 1916 letter from a Punjabi Muslim named Fateh Ullah to his friend, Fateh Ahmed, who was stationed in France, relates a friend’s refusal to fight in Mesopotamia:
We have learnt from Nasir Khan’s letter that his brother Raja Khan has been sentenced by court martial to fourteen years’ imprisonment. This has caused us much grief. The details which he gives are that when the 15th Lancers reach Basra they were ordered to fight against the Turks. They, however, declined to take up arms against their brother Muslims and asked to be sent to some other theatre of war. A court martial was convened and 400 men were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.
- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War (London, 1999), p. 199.
BTW, Sikhs are not Muslims - mostly they have been bitter enemy.
Comment by not important — November 18, 2006 @ 10:31 pm
this letter is from an Indian Muslim, not a Sikh, however, and as Omissi’s book explains, the mutiny of the 15th Lancers was led by Indians opposed to fighting near the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, which suggests that they were not Sikhs.
Comment by Freddy — December 23, 2006 @ 11:26 am