Page:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din - Ethics of War.djvu/5



To ensure peace we have often to disturb peace, and then the martial spirit that has been implanted in us by God for our safety comes into play. The protection of life and property is a common instinct, but it has often served as a pretext for oppression and tyranny, We are not free from inordinacy, and if we need something to put us on the right path, war is indispensable in order to restrain those who would otherwise be beyond our control. In other words, we need ethics of war, as war is one of the essentials of our civilization, and a Warrior-Prophet was needed to act as an exemplar in this respect. We fail to find any healthy principle of war in the Bible. The Israelite fighting aimed at the extinction of enemies, and sowed vengeance and rancour in human hearts. Since the Prince of Peace did not come for peace but for fire and sword, as he said himself, he asked his disciples to sell even their clothes in order to purchase weapons of war. His mind seems to have been agog with various other high-flown but contradictory ideas, but he could neither digest them nor reconcile them to each other. He left his followers, as it were, in a maze as regards military matters, and they began to walk