"The cry goes up 'How Long?' "

Most of us are aware of the barbarous slaughter by Daesh this week of  young Jordanian Muslim pilot Moaz al-Kassasbeh. No words express the horror of this situation: that is precisely, if I can second guess Daesh, what these perpetrators of horror are attempting to orchestrate. We are meant to be horrified. Horror is a synonym of terror, and this is still a phase of the terrorism war into which we fell on September 11, 2001.

The picture is more complicated than that. As far back as the Fall of the Shah of Iran in February 1979, Arab and Muslim worlds were beginning to set about restructuring the arbitrary lines that had been drawn across the world by colonial powers. Long before that, in 1975, we had seen in the Oil Shock the power of the Arab world and its ability to bring what we now call the Global North to its knees. Whatever else we are seeing we are seeing the death throes of Colonial supremacy and nonchalance.

Nothing though, nothing excuses the deliberate manipulative horror of the execution of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and, previous executions, including Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. Al-Jazeera however note that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh is designed to take the horror of Daesh executions a step beyond the series of beheadings we have or heard of in recent months.

Daesh are not so dull that they did not realize that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh, young father, young husband, someone’s son, someone’s brother, would up the antagonism of Jordanian authorities. They wanted just that, we assume. Jordan has initially responded by executing would-be terrorist and suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi. There will be more blood-letting.

And more. And more. Blood begets blood and sin pricks on sin. Daesh knows but does not care how far these escalations will rise. They have seized the momentum and have the ball firmly in their court. They know the valleys and caves of the Levant well. It would be a brave person to say it in the field (I am unbrave, sheltering far away in a cosy office) but this cycle will break only when some Christlike breaker of hatred hammers swords into ploughshares, crying out “no more blood, no more blood.” That person will almost certainly die for her or his troubles, but only that and similar deaths will break the cycles.

We can pray. I think our prayers are likely to be stuttered, but they will be prayers nevertheless. There are injustices even in our prayers; I doubt many of us prayed fervently when US and UK troops were torturing captives in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and for that may God forgive us. But we can pray now despite our past failings: that the family of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and the families of other victims may find comfort. That the cycles of hatred may be broken. That justice (for there has been much injustice) for the Arab peoples may be established.

What we must not do is be drawn into cycles of vengeful hatred. However hard it may seem we must not paint Daesh in monochromes of black, nor ourselves in monochromes of white. If Hinduism can teach us one thing—and it can do more that—it is the notion that we are they and they are us. If Paul can teach us one thing it is that we all have the propensity for evil, to cauterize the human conscience, to anaesthetize human decency. Let us pray, however we understand it, the maranatha: may God’s reign come, and may we in our tiny corner be vehicles of that reign of justice and peace.