c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ As Indians and Pakistanis celebrate their capacity for destruction in the name of Hinduism and Islam, Western observers may find such sentiments odd if not blasphemous. But nuclear weapons have been equated with divine justice since the first nuclear tests more than a half-century ago.

Sometimes religious references are overt, such as the words “Islamic bomb” printed on Pakistani missiles. Often religious beliefs are part of the subtext shaping nuclear policy, said historian Kai Bird, editor of “Hiroshima’s Shadow”(The Pamphleteers Press).

And no consensus exists in any tradition on how religious teachings translate into practice or policy. One Muslim’s holy war is another’s crime against God, for example. Moreover, believers often interpret religious texts to bolster their contrasting or contradictory political stands.

While Pakistani Muslims talk of bombs to protect the Islamic world, the Muslim community “has diverse views on this,” said Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based Islamic advocacy group.

Many Muslims, he said “support testing as a defensive measure to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. In general, Islam encourages any community to maintain its defenses as a deterrent to attack.”

But Rabia Harris, coordinator of the Muslim Peace Fellowship in Nyack, N.Y., argued that “a significant number of Muslims object to testing.”

Islam, she said, “is a religion of peace. Even in those circumstances where warfare is religiously permitted for the sake of self-defense … any involvement of civilians in warfare is religiously impermissible.”It’s a spiritual atrocity to consider massacring millions of people,” Harris added.

Even Muslims who want weapons parity with the Western world might be troubled by the Pakistani-Indian conflict, said Patrice Brodeur, an Islamicist at Harvard University.

“What does it say about the solidarity of Muslim brothers if they’re willing to aim a bomb at India, where we find the largest Muslim minority in the world?” Brodeur said.

Sulayman Nyang, Howard University professor of African Studies, said both sides on the issue interpret religious texts to support political views.

And people who cite scripture to back nuclear weapons, he believes, are motivated by fear not faith.

“It’s poppycock. It’s rationalization,” Nyang said.“People are not going to be propelled to press the nuclear button in the name of religion because the text says so.”

Hindus danced in the street after India’s nuclear tests. On one hand, noted Prithvy Raj Singh, president of the Federation of Hindu Associations in Diamond Bar, Calif., many Hindus believe nuclear weapons deter aggression and are in keeping with the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.

“As a representative of God,” he said, “you have a right to defend yourself.”

But opponents of testing have accused Hindu nationalists of inventing threats to justify their explosions, and Singh noted some Hindus may also object to the weapons on religious grounds.

“The basic principle of Hinduism is that you want to feel (the) presence of God in human beings.” For many Hindus, he said, that means“you cannot do violence to anybody.”

The late Hindu leader, Mahatma Gandhi, was among the most forceful opponents of nuclear weapons.

“The atom bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for ages,” Gandhi said. “There used to be so-called laws of war that made it tolerable. Now we understand the naked truth.”

Countries are often less explicit in using religious beliefs and history to justify building a nuclear arsenal. Still, undercurrents may exist. The United States, historian Bird argued, has been steeped in religious thought surrounding nuclear arms.

“People are missing in the commentary on recent events a look at our own culture. There is a religious overtone to our own justification … partly wrapped up with the puritan Calvinistic attitudes of righteousness and the whole idea of American manifest destiny,” he said.

Yet, the 1940s saw strong religious opposition to the nuclear bomb.

“The wrong committed at Hiroshima … remains a matter of the gravest concern, because it sanctions the denial … of the transcendence of the moral order and the intrusion of national pragmatism in its place,” wrote the Jesuit priest Edgar R. Smothers in 1946.

Ironically, it was a Hindu deity whom physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer invoked after the first atomic bomb test.

“I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita,” Oppenheimer said. “… `Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’

“I suppose,” said Oppenheimer, “we all thought that _ one way or another.”

DEA END LIEBLICH