Against the Myth of Eternal Religious War

As tensions escalate across the Middle East—particularly in the widening confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran—an increasingly familiar and deeply dangerous idea is being revived with renewed force: that Muslims, Christians, and Jews are locked in an inevitable, even divinely ordained, struggle. What was once the language of the fringes has moved steadily toward the mainstream. Political leaders, media commentators, and influential public figures now speak openly of “civilizational conflict”, and some go further still, invoking biblical prophecy or apocalyptic imagery to frame contemporary geopolitics. In this telling, what we are witnessing is not merely a contest over territory, power, or security, but the unfolding of something older and more permanent—a religious war that was always meant to be.

This framing is powerful precisely because it feels intuitive in moments of crisis. It simplifies complexity into something emotionally satisfying. It turns uncertainty into certainty—and fear into something that feels like moral clarity. But it is also profoundly misleading. It distorts both the present and the past, collapsing centuries of human experience into a single, flattened narrative of inevitable hostility. In doing so, it erases a far richer and more complicated history—one in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews did not simply clash, but repeatedly protected one another, often at moments of profound vulnerability.

The appeal of these civilizational narratives is not accidental. Fear has always been one of the most effective tools of political mobilization. When leaders persuade their populations that an entire religious or cultural group represents an existential threat, they consolidate authority, mobilize support, and deflect scrutiny from their own failures. The language of sacred conflict carries a particular potency because it elevates political disputes into moral absolutes. If a conflict is understood as divinely sanctioned or historically inevitable, then compromise becomes betrayal, and coexistence begins to look like weakness. The stakes are raised beyond negotiation. Entire communities are encouraged to see one another not as neighbours, but as adversaries in a struggle that is framed as permanent.

Pope Leo XIV and Rector of the Great Mosque of Algiers Mohammed Al-Mamoun Al-Qasimi Al-Hassani during a visit to the Great Mosque of Algiers in April 2026. © IMAGO / Vatican Media

Yet the historical record resists this simplicity at every turn. The relationships among Muslims, Christians, and Jews have always been complex, shaped by politics, power, and human frailty. There have been periods of violence and persecution that should not be minimized. But there have also been sustained traditions of coexistence, legal protection, and moral responsibility across religious lines—traditions that are no less real for being less frequently remembered. If anything, history suggests that religious conflict is rarely inevitable. It is far more often constructed—and then sold to the public as destiny.

One of the earliest and most consequential examples comes from the formative period of Islam itself. In the seventh century, when the first Muslim community faced persecution in Mecca, a group of followers sought refuge across the Red Sea in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. The ruler, known in Islamic tradition as al-Najashi, refused demands from Meccan elites to return them. Instead, he offered protection, reportedly moved by their appeal to shared ethical and theological principles. The survival of early Islam depended, in part, on the willingness of a Christian king to extend protection to a vulnerable religious minority.

This was not an isolated act of generosity, nor a historical curiosity. It reflected a broader pattern of interreligious engagement that would continue to develop in the years that followed. Around 628 CE, the Prophet Muhammad (may the peace and blessings of God be upon him) is said to have issued what is commonly known as the ‘Ashtiname’—a covenant of protection granted to the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. The document declared that Muslims were obligated to protect Christians, their churches, and their freedom of worship, and it was treated by many subsequent Muslim rulers as binding. The monastery itself, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian institutions in the world, still stands—a quiet reminder that these commitments were not merely theoretical.

Even in moments of conquest, where the logic of power might have dictated otherwise, the historical record offers examples that complicate the narrative of religious hostility. When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab entered Jerusalem in 637 CE, he is widely reported to have guaranteed the safety of Christian holy sites and declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, out of concern that future Muslims might use his actions as a precedent to claim the church. Centuries later, when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from Crusader forces in 1187, he allowed many Christian residents to ransom themselves and leave safely, avoiding the mass killings that had marked the Crusader conquest of the city decades earlier.

The history of Jewish–Muslim relations further undermines the notion of inevitable religious conflict. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 during the Inquisition, many found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where Muslim rulers welcomed them and enabled the rebuilding of Jewish communal life in cities such as Istanbul and Salonika. Jewish scholars have often noted that, despite existing inequalities, Ottoman lands frequently offered greater security than much of Christian Europe at the time. This was not a world free of hierarchy or discrimination; but it was a world in which reli-gious difference did not automatically translate into expulsion or annihilation.

The same pattern appears in more recent history. During sectarian violence in Damascus in 1860, the Algerian Muslim scholar and resistance leader Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri sheltered thousands of Christians in his home and compound, risking his own safety to protect theirs. Around the same time, regional leaders such as Aqil Agha warned Muslim communities against harming Christians and threatened consequences for those who did. These acts were not simply political calculations. They were moral choices, grounded in an understanding of religious obligation that placed protection above division.

Minaret and church towers steeples on the hills of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. © IMAGO

That tradition has not disappeared. It continues, often quietly, in moments of crisis that rarely dominate headlines. During Egypt’s political upheaval in 2011, Muslims formed human chains around churches to protect Christian worshippers. After the 2019 terrorist attack on mosques in Christchurch, Christian communities in several countries stood guard outside mosques, while Muslims organized similar gestures of protection for churches. In the United States, following the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh—the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history—Muslim communities were among the first to mobilize support, raising significant funds for victims and publicly pledging to stand in solidarity with Jewish institutions. These were not symbolic gestures. They were expressions of a deeply rooted ethical instinct.

And yet, even as these traditions persist, they are increa-singly overshadowed by narratives of division. In early 2026, an attack on a synagogue in the Detroit area served as a stark reminder of how quickly rhetoric can translate into violence. Mosques, synagogues, and churches have all become targets in an environment where fear is amplified and difference is weaponized. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are rising at the same time, often feeding off one another in a cycle of mutual suspicion. The more societies internalize the idea of civilizational conflict, the more they begin to produce the very conditions that make such conflict appear inevitable.

Recent geopolitical tensions—particularly involving Iran—have been framed by some leaders in explicitly religious terms, invoking divine mandate or casting military action as part of a larger moral struggle. What is striking about the current moment is not only how often religion is being invoked to justify conflict, but how openly it is being contested by religious voices themselves. In recent days, Pope Leo XIV has issued an unusually direct rebuke of efforts to frame geopolitical violence in sacred terms, warning against those who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain”. He has rejected outright the idea that war can be cloaked in divine legitimacy, insisting instead that invoking faith to sanctify violence represents a profound moral distortion.

This emerging clash—between political leaders who increasingly frame war in theological language and religious authorities who resist that framing—reveals something essential about the present crisis. It is not, at its core, a conflict between religions, but a struggle over who gets to define what religion means in public life. When state actors claim divine sanction for military action, they are not interpreting faith so much as selecting from it—elevating what serves power and ignoring what restrains it. And when figures like the Pope push back, they are drawing on a much older tradition—shared across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that insists faith must serve as a restraint on power, not a justification for its excesses.

What makes this moment particularly striking is the extent to which these narratives diverge from the ethical teachings of the religious traditions they claim to defend. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly commands care for the stranger and the vulnerable. The Gospels call for love not only of one’s neighbour, but of one’s enemy. The Qur’an refers to Jews and Christians as “People of the Book” and emphasizes justice, compassion, and moral accountability across religious lines. These traditions, at their core, do not demand civilizational war. They demand something far more difficult: moral responsibility in the face of power.

This emerging clash—between political leaders who increasingly frame war in theological language and religious authorities who resist that framing—reveals something essential about the present crisis. It is not, at its core, a conflict between religions, but a struggle over who gets to define what religion means in public life

The problem, then, is not religion itself, but its instrumentalization. Political actors who invoke faith to divide are rarely interpreting religion. They are selecting from it—elevating what serves power and ignoring what restrains it. In this sense, religion becomes less a source of ethical gui-dance than a tool of political mobilization. But believers—and citizens more broadly—are not bound to accept that narrowing.

Remembering the long history of interfaith protection does not require denying the existence of conflict. It requires resisting the temptation to reduce that history to conflict alone. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have fought one another. But they have also sheltered one another, defended one another’s places of worship, and stood together against violence. When those stories are forgotten, conflict begins to feel inevitable. And when conflict is seen as inevitable, it becomes easier to justify—and harder to resolve.

At a moment when powerful voices are reframing geo-political struggles as sacred wars, these historical memories carry an urgent significance. They remind us that the past does not support the idea of permanent civilizational conflict. It offers, instead, a more demanding and more hopeful lesson: coexistence is neither automatic nor impossible, but something that must be continually chosen—and defended.

The question, ultimately, is not whether history contains violence. It does. The question is whether we allow that violence to define the entirety of our understanding, or whether we also make space for the equally real history of solidarity, restraint, and protection. Religious faith has never belonged only to those who wield it as a weapon. It has also belonged to those who refuse to let hatred speak in its name.

And at a time when fear is once again being mobilized as a political force, remembering that distinction is not just an intellectual exercise. It may determine whether religion remains a source of conscience—or becomes, once again, a justification for catastrophe, invoked in God’s name and paid for in human lives.