Hello James!
I loved your latest piece, “Warrior Performance & Quality: Christian versus Muslim Musings Cormac MacArt, 10/12/24”!
You know that if you publish an article about Christians and Muslims in the Arуan Battlespace, I am going to throw in my two cents!
Long time readers may recall, I wrote and published my second book on this topic in 2015, “All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War”.
As such, here are some thoughts of mine on the topic…
Within Islam, we have the concept of 3 Jihads:
Jihad of the Heart…Belief in the power and righteousness of the cause
Jihad of the Tongue…Verbal persuasion to effect above belief
Jihad of the Sword…Battlefield actions to kill the enemy
We see a 1:1 parallel here with Indo-European Arуan practices, the 3 Agons, as laid out by Marcus Auraelius:
Agon of Idea
Agon of Utterance
Agon of Action
However, while the framework looks the same on the surface, the similarities end there.
They end with one word:
Deception.
One of the big things that we see in the Middle East is a heavy emphasis on Deception. Any GWOT vet will tell you this from experience.
We see this veneration of Deception from the Spiritual Caste at the Jihad of the Heart and Jihad of the Tongue levels. An example of this comes from Quran 3:54:
“And they deceived and Allah deceived, and Allah (is) the best (of) the deceivers.”
Another example from extra-Quranic texts comes from Khalid Muhammad Khalid, Translated by Muhammad Mahdi al-Sharif. “Book One: Abu Bakr Has Come”
“By Allah! I would not rest assured and feel safe from the deception of Allah, even if I had one foot in paradise.”
Compare this Arab focus on Deception to its Arуan opposite, the Agon of Idea and the Agon of Utterance.
This comparison can be found in a footnote on pg. 79 of Julius Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World” Translated by Stucco, Guido. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995.
“Concerning the cult of truth, the [Medieval] knights’ oath was ‘In the name of God, who does not lie!’ which corresponds to the Arуan cult of truth.
“According to this cult, Mithras was the god of all oaths and the Iranian mystical ‘glory’ was believed to have departed from King Yima the first time he lied.
“In The Laws of Manu (4.237), we read: ‘By telling a lie, a sacrifice slips away.’”
Christian readers may recall the words of Jesus in John 8:32, NLT:
“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
We likewise see this veneration of Deception from the Warrior Caste at the Jihad of the Sword level. Essentially, the Arabs fight in a Predatory mode of combat known as “Raizzas” and “Ghazus”.
These guerrilla-type of operations are from the shadows, sneaky, stab-in-the-back, shooting fish in a barrel type of affairs.
These are not mano-a-mano, up-front, straight-shooting Confrontational modes of combat as in the Arуan Ethos venerated in the Agon of Action.
The Jihad and Agon may look similar on the surface, but Deception is the key that separates the substance from the veneer.
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
01-08-2025
Written at 11:37 PM, somewhere in the USA…
