There is much to be gained by looking at the war in Iraq as a conflict between two supremacist ideologies - Manifest Destiny and Islamicism. That’s the “clear” part. The fuzzy part is whether anything “sanctified” by recourse to religious texts is, in fact, religious".
The term “religious war” is an apparent conflict in terms - neither history, nor honesty, nor the Bible or Koran will permit us to say that. But both books instruct the faithful to hunt down and kill the enemies of God. The tendency is not to see this for what it is - bare tribal propaganda.
If we look at religious rhetoric we find that it is, in fact, supremacist rhetoric.
Speaker: Gordon Koppang, writer, thinker, columnist. Gordon Koppang graduated from the U of L in 1992, with a BA (English). He has spent the last ten years immersed in the poetry of Islamic and Hindu mysticism – especially the translations of Rumi done by Robert Bly and Coleman Barks. He admits to “studying, writing and teaching at the place where literature and religion meet”. He has been published in The Canadian Unitarian Quarterly, and is currently working on a catalogue of all Professor Bark’’s translations of Rumi.