“When you go out to
war against your enemies, and the Lord
your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among
the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and
you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she
was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her
mother a full month. After that you may
go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no
longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not
sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have
humiliated her. (Deuteronomy 21: 10-14)
During the last two weeks an
investigative journalist named Rukmini Callimachi has published extensive reports of an organized, large-scale system of sexual violence and slavery that
the Islamic State has established in territory it controls and calls a
caliphate. The details are so
circumstantial and horrific as to shock even readers jaded by a daily surfeit
of reported mayhem. “In the moments before
he raped the 12-year-old girl,” Ms. Callimachi begins, “the Islamic State
fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin.
Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not
only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he
insisted.”
Generally speaking wars are fought by young men under
conditions that undermine civilized social norms and enable transgression. “Rape and pillage” go together like “fire and
the sword” in the pages of our history textbooks. Long before the Rape of the Sabine Women,
foreign females might be viewed as a convenient source of breeding stock. The cultural exchange was not always
violent. Following the Second War there came
to this country large numbers of “war brides” from Britain, Germany, Japan,
South Korea, the Philippines—places where large numbers of young Americans had
passed through as allies, invaders, or occupiers.
Giambologna's "Rape of a Sabine Woman"
As Johnson points out in a Rambler essay, “Precept has generally been posterior to performance.” The religious sanction for rape, perhaps the most shocking element in Ms. Callimachi’s story, justified “facts on the ground,” as we now call them. The Times reassures us that ISIS’s practice is based on a “narrow interpretation” of the Koranic text, one that most Muslims would disavow. That gives some comfort, though probably not so much to the Yazidi girls in the sacral brothels of Iraq or the little Nigerian girls carted off by Boko Haram.
What would a “broad interpretation”
mean? Consider some earlier Semitic texts held to be sacred. Many of the early Christians were
so disturbed by certain parts of the Hebrew Scriptures that there was a lively
debate as to whether the writings could actually represent Revelation. The history of the conquest of Canaan is essentially
a catalogue of war crimes. What do you
do (see Judges, chapter 19) with a Levite who with a butcher knife cuts up his gang-raped
concubine into twelve parts?
More immediately to the point, how
do you deal with the epigraph from Deuteronomy at the top of this essay, which
is another primitive justification for sexual booty in the ancient Near
East? Fortunately for lovers of western
classical literature, Saint Jerome and other early exegetes found a way of
saving the Scriptures from themselves. Jerome thought that this Deuteronomic
legislation could have no literal application in the Age of the
Incarnation. Its force was instead
allegorical or spiritual.
The passage was an allegory not of
sexual conquest but of cultural appropriation.
The beautiful female captive should be understood to mean the beautiful literature
of ancient Greece and Rome. The poems of
Homer and Virgil were full of polytheistic mythology, sexual violence, and martial
barbarity. But they were likewise
replete with ancient wisdom expressed in language of unsurpassed beauty. To obliterate or suppress them would be to
throw out more baby than bathwater. So
the classics were, as we say, “preserved,” by being sent off to the allegorical
nail salon. Were it not for the work of
pious, devoted medieval monks with their monkish commentaries, there would be
no “classics” to study in our schools and colleges.
Saint Augustine found in another
scriptural text the identical lesson.
Shortly before they exited Egypt the Hebrew slaves robbed Pharaoh blind,
gathering up all the expensive and ornamental cookware they could find, vessels
of silver and vessels of gold. The
Hebrew euphemism for this was “borrowing”, but they had not the slightest
intention of returning the goods. “And
they spoiled the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:36).
As grand theft might appear to be an unseemly habit for the Chosen
People, Augustine found in the episode an allegory of the humanistic
impulse. Christians did not have a
monopoly on the truth, which wherever it found expression belonged to the Lord;
but they should take it and use it wherever they found it. The gold was the wisdom of the ancients, the
silver the beautiful rhetoric in which it was clothed.
In the great medieval
Christian epic (the Divine Comedy)
the character Dante chose as his guide and mentor not Saint Peter or Saint
Paul but the pagan poet Virgil. Virgil,
though he could lead others to belief, was himself an unbeliever. He is therefore, sadly, damned for all
eternity. As Hell goes, he’s definitely
in one of the better neighborhoods—but still…Among the first words he utters in
the poem are these: “I lived in the time of the false and lying gods.” This detail is to be sure “judgmental” on
Dante’s part, but it is very different from blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas. You don't have to read the Æneid if you don't want to, but you don't get to incinerate the last copy.
Ancient Buddha of Bamiyan, before and after Islamic intervention
