DOCTRINE..

Moslem doctrine accounts for much of the intractability of the Middle Eastern situation. The Koran specifically sanctions religious war: "When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter of them." The Grand Sheik of Al Azhar in Cairo, a leading center of Islamic learning in the Middle East, has flatly said, "The struggle against Israel is jihad, and if all Moslems did their duty and took a weapon, there would be no problem." Moslem theology distinguishes between dar-al-Islam (the region already conquered for Allah) and dar-al-Harb (the region of Holy War, still to be conquered). Israel lies in dar-al-Islam and as such is seen as an alien presence in land already belonging to Moslems.
But the struggles involving Moslems are more complicated than that intransigent doctrine. Arab leaders like Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad are not encouraging the rhetoric of holy war. Arabs are not theologically blinded to the larger secular issues of international power. In Lebanon, for example, a tangled social history has preceded what might seem at first glance an essentially religious struggle. The roots lay in the creation by the French in 1920 of a greater Lebanon from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Lebanon combined a predominantly Maronite Christian area, which had had a semiautonomous status in the past, with Moslem regions. The country's Moslems have tended to identify with the Arab Orient, while the Maronite Christians looked to the West. The Christians' special relation with the French and the rest of the West gave them enormous advantages. Lebanon was slow in developing a state system of education, but the Maronites became the best-educated community in the Arab world because of the large number of French Catholic mission schools in their area. Through such advantages, many of them created a thriving entrepreneurial class and gained control over the economic life of Lebanon, the commercial and financial center of the Middle East. The country became a pattern of haves and have-nots—with the line drawn between the religious communities. But again, as in Ireland, the religious identifications have served as a deeply embittering factor. Observes Ralph Potter, professor of ethics at Harvard Divinity School: "We pick out that factor which puts most things into immediate order for us. Where religion satisfactorily encompasses the whole logic, it becomes the prime identifier. At the same time, that shorthand also traps people into a primarily religious identity."
Other conflicts involve longstanding secular grievances. They are perhaps primarily not religious so much as they are exertions for recognition and even survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere of "a disintegration of the national fabric and a religious revival taking its place."