He said “peace is holy“.
Pope Leo XIV declared:“there is no such thing as a holy war” and that “only peace is holy” during a video message marking the 40th anniversary of the interfaith peace meeting in Assisi.
The Pope thereby denounced jihad.
He denounced the Jewish, Christian and Muslim idea of a holy war.
He denounced the idea that God supports one side in war.
This is a big deal. All of the books about war for religious purposes is holy will have to be re-written to reflect the truth that Pope Leo just articulated.
Anyone can decide to go to war for any reason they conjure up. They can say God decided we should go to war but no one can actually speak for God. God can speak for himself and there is no record of him actually speaking about war so the idea that God justifies war cannot be correct. Not only is is not correct, it is impossible to know what God actually thinks because no one can know what someone else is thinking because thoughts cannot be accessed by others.
In his message, the American pope denounced the “troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics” and its religious justifications by leaders.
Pope Leo continued: “Precisely in these times marked by a culture of power, there is a need to cultivate the spirit of Assisi,” he said. “War can never be waged in the name of God,” he said. “We must rebuild peace everywhere, not prepare for more wars.”
Russia’s Orthodox Church has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war” against a Western world it considers has fallen into evil.
Leaders on all sides of the Iran war have used religion to justify their actions. U.S. officials, especially Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have invoked their Christian faith to cast the war as a Christian nation trying to vanquish its foes with military might.
Leo has consistently rejected such justifications as a perversion of religion itself, most stridently in his first encyclical “Magnificent Humanity” in which he said fighting in the name of religion “means attacking religion itself.”
In the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldūn conceptualises war as something natural to the human being (amr ṭabī‘iyy fī-l-bashar), from which no nation or generation has been able to escape. In his opinion, it occurs most of the time due to jealousy and rivalry (ghayra wa munāfasa). The cause of this, in general terms and depending on the case, is either hostility, zeal in the defense of God and His religion (ghaḍiban li-Llah wa li-dīni-hi), or the eagerness to obtain power and the desire to establish it.12
Based on these statements, the North African thinker establishes four types of war. The first type is the one that occurs between neighboring tribes or rival clans. The second one generally takes place between savage peoples that inhabit desert and desolate areas (al-qafr) and obtain their sustenance with their arms. The third one is the call to jihād by divine law (Sharī‘a), the war for religion or the religious spread through arms. This is an interesting idea, since it illustrates well how the Islamic World considered the notion of jihād over centuries: rather than being only a religious justification of violence, it is understood as a legal problem and made more precise in law compendia where certain points were treated in depth. Examples included who had to participate in the jihād, what had to be done with the booty obtained, and how prisoners had to be treated. In this sense, it is worth remembering that some of the earliest definitions of jihād as war, of martial jihād, come from jurists.13 In his Kitāb al-jihād, al-Sulamī (d. 1106) quoted the following definition by al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820):
That is to say that jihād is a type of departure for battle by which it is sought to exalt the word of God, be He praised, to demonstrate His religion, to suppress by it His enemies, the polytheists, and to achieve the reward that God and His Prophet promised to whomever fought the jihād in His cause.14
Therefore, the definition emphasized a fight for the defense and spread of the faith that leads to spiritual rewards. Finally, the fourth type of war in Ibn Khaldūn’s classification is the one undertaken by dynasties against those who try to emancipate from them and do not pledge obedience. Within this classification, Ibn Khaldūn describes the first two types as unjust wars and as revolt (baghī wa fitna), while the latter two as just wars (‘adl) and in defense of religion.15 In these lines, Ibn Khaldūn, according to the globalizing conception of history and ethnography of both the Muqaddima and the Kitāb al-‘Ibar, intends to consider all religions. It is clear, however, that he uses a discourse and a vocabulary (sharī‘a, jihād or fitna, for instance) which will soon be identified with Islam. In the following pages, I attempt to specify the reason why he uses such a vocabulary, and assess whether it is a purely ideological matter or one of language use and economy.
This kind of war typology, in which the concepts of justice and injustice are of great importance, is deeply rooted in Greek philosophy, and it was introduced into Islamic thought probably due to authors such as al-Fārābī (d. 950).16 Although the latter never refers to war as jihād, but always as ḥarb, he also explains the differences in terms of just or unjust confrontation. According to al-Fārābī, a just war is one carried out for the sake of the nation, to demand compensation for damage, to punish a nation for its acts, or to civilise other nations and help them to accept a better life, the latter being the category in which war for the spread of Islam would be included. Al-Fārābī explains it as follows: “to lead and force people to what is better and more excellent for themselves, when they are spontaneously unaware of it or are not willing to be led by anybody who knows it and invites them thereto by word of mouth.”17 This last statement, the resort to preaching, reminds us of one of the conditions of jihād: the legal necessity to invite infidels into Islam before initiating armed hostilities against them. A paradigmatic example of this condition in Islamic sources is the conversation between Rab‘ī b. ‘Āmir al-Tamīmī and Rostam, the Persian general, prior to the battle of al-Qādisiyya. Then the Muslim said
God has sent us and brought us here so that we may free those who wish to from slavery (‘ibāda) of the earthly rulers and turn them into His servants, change their poverty for wealth and rescue them from the tyranny of religions and bring them to the justice of Islam.18
Undoubtedly, this discourse is expressed in the same terms as al-Fārābī’s category of just war, as he
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