Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY) :- Former Press Secretary to the President, Former Press Minister to the Embassy of Pakistan to France, Former MD, SRBC Mr. Qamar Bashir analysis : A striking observation by a renowned Jewish religious scholar widely circulated in social and traditional media that Muslims cannot be defeated through conventional military means alone raises a question far larger than the conflict in which his remarks are being circulated.
He attributes Muslim resilience to spiritual strength rooted in faith, prayer, sacrifice and an understanding of life and death extending beyond material existence. His observation points toward a broader proposition: military superiority may destroy physical capabilities, but it does not necessarily vanquish a people whose spiritual foundations remain intact.
History repeatedly demonstrates the distinction between defeating an army and defeating a nation. Armies may be destroyed, governments removed, economies crippled and territories occupied, yet a people can recover if their faith, identity and collective conviction survive.
This phenomenon is not peculiar to Islam. Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and other great religious traditions have endured persecution, displacement and political upheaval because something deeper than material strength continued to sustain their communities.
In Islam, this spiritual foundation begins with iman: belief in Allah, His angels, His revealed books, His prophets and messengers, and the Hereafter. These convictions find practical manifestation through the declaration of faith, five daily prayers, fasting, zakat and pilgrimage to Makkah.
Together they cultivate discipline, sacrifice, accountability and attachment to purposes transcending material life. The stronger this relationship between belief and practice becomes, the more profoundly it shapes the believer’s response to fear, hardship, suffering and death.
This is where conventional deterrence encounters a different equation. Military power normally seeks to raise the cost of resistance until surrender appears preferable to continued suffering. But a person who regards earthly existence as temporary, sacrifice as meaningful and death as a transition rather than absolute extinction may calculate those costs differently.
Physical destruction remains painful, but its capacity to compel submission diminishes when the convictions sustaining resistance are stronger than fear.
The Jewish scholar’s observation becomes particularly significant in this context. The strength confronting an army is not merely the weapon carried by a fighter but the conviction residing within the person carrying it. A missile can be destroyed, an installation demolished and an army weakened, yet if the belief system producing courage and endurance survives, resistance can regenerate. The deeper contest therefore extends beyond weapons to the spiritual foundations sustaining collective purpose.
This introduces another dimension of confrontation. If spiritual conviction strengthens a population, weakening that conviction becomes another means of weakening resistance. Doubt may be directed toward fundamental beliefs; attachment to worship may be eroded; materialism may displace spiritual purpose; internal divisions may be encouraged; and succeeding generations may gradually become detached from the traditions through which religious identity is renewed. The battlefield then extends beyond territory into the mind, heart and spiritual consciousness of society.
Religious communities, however, are not without spiritual guardianship. Islam has its scholars, shaykhs, Sufi traditions and awliya, just as other religions possess their own spiritually accomplished personalities and inherited traditions of guidance. Within Islamic spiritual understanding, accomplished figures have historically strengthened belief, preserved sacred knowledge and exercised responsibility for communities entrusted to their care. Their role has often been to reinforce faith precisely when political, cultural or external pressures threatened to weaken it.
The history of Islam offers powerful examples. Across the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Malaysia and other parts of Asia, Islam frequently established deep social roots not primarily through military conquest but through merchants, scholars, Sufi shaykhs and spiritual personalities. Their influence came through character, teaching, service, devotion and spiritual attraction. Khanqahs, zawiyas and religious circles became centers of learning, charity and community cohesion, allowing spiritual influence to reach where political authority or military force never could.
This history illuminates the concept of spiritual jurisdiction. Within the religious framework, highly attained personalities carry responsibility not only for individual disciples but for wider communities or territories. They strengthen faith, respond to spiritual disturbances, preserve unity and protect the religious consciousness of those within their sphere. If a community’s spiritual foundations are challenged, such guardians seek to fortify belief and practice and, within this understanding, counter hostile spiritual influence through their own spiritual resources.
The same broad principle appears in different forms across other religions. Judaism has its rabbis, sages and mystical traditions; Christianity its saints, clergy, monastic orders and contemplative lineages; Hinduism its gurus, yogis and spiritual masters; Buddhism its monks, teachers and accomplished practitioners. Their doctrines are different, yet each tradition recognizes personalities whose spiritual attainment gives them responsibilities extending beyond ordinary religious instruction.
This creates, within the spiritual realm, something comparable to deterrence in the physical realm. Spiritual aggression cannot necessarily be assumed to remain unanswered. A community whose beliefs are challenged may respond by strengthening its own religious foundations, reviving worship, restoring unity and reinforcing the institutions through which sacred knowledge is transmitted. Spiritual attack can therefore generate spiritual defence, and spiritual defence can create counterbalancing pressure. In this sense, religious civilizations possess a form of spiritual strategic depth.
Afghanistan provides a powerful modern illustration of why physical superiority alone cannot guarantee complete victory. The United States and its allies possessed overwhelming advantages in aircraft, satellites, drones, precision weapons, intelligence and financial resources. The Taliban possessed nothing remotely comparable. Yet after two decades, foreign forces departed and the Taliban returned to Kabul. Political and strategic failures played major roles, but one undeniable factor was that the conviction sustaining resistance was never extinguished.
Iran offers another contemporary illustration. Whatever one’s political judgment of Tehran, the ability of Iranian society to withstand immense military, economic and psychological pressure cannot be understood exclusively through inventories of missiles or military hardware. Religion, nationalism, historical memory, collective sacrifice and a deeply cultivated narrative of resistance have all contributed to national cohesion. Destruction of infrastructure or military assets does not automatically produce collapse when the population continues to perceive endurance as meaningful.
This is precisely why the spiritual dimension matters in strategic calculations. A military installation can be rebuilt. Weapons can be replaced. Economic damage, however severe, can eventually be repaired. But the decisive question is whether a people still possess the conviction to absorb hardship and rebuild. If the answer remains yes, physical defeat may be temporary. When conviction itself collapses, however, even a materially powerful society may become vulnerable from within.
The lesson is not that one religion must spiritually conquer another. On the contrary, durable spiritual strength comes primarily from strengthening one’s own foundations. Muslims strengthen Islam through faith, prayer, knowledge, character, service and unity. Jews preserve Judaism through their sacred traditions and communal institutions. Christians, Hindus and Buddhists likewise safeguard their civilizations by transmitting their own spiritual inheritance with confidence, discipline and continuity.
That is the deeper importance of the Jewish scholar’s observation. A country may possess the world’s most sophisticated weapons and still fail to achieve complete victory over a people whose spiritual will survives every physical blow. Conversely, a materially weaker nation may endure overwhelming pressure if its people remain united by deeply rooted belief, disciplined practice and spiritual leadership.
A military can conquer territory; it cannot automatically conquer conviction. Governments may fall, armies may retreat and economies may suffer devastating losses, yet civilizations can rise again so long as the spiritual foundations that give their people identity, courage and purpose remain alive. A nation is therefore not completely defeated when its weapons are destroyed, but when the spiritual power sustaining its will to survive has been broken.

Mauricio Hoyos still remembers the pressure that the jaws of a female Galapagos shark, over 3m (10ft) in length, exerted on his skull.

The animal had lunged at him with astonishing speed, giving him barely enough time to duck his head in a last ditch effort to protect his jugular vein.

“When it closed its jaw, I felt the pressure of the bite, and then, after what I think was a second, it opened it again and it let me go,” Hoyos told BBC Mundo from his home in Baja California, Mexico, a little over month after surviving the incident.

Hoyos, a marine biologist with over 30 years of experience studying sharks in their natural habitat, was on a research trip in Costa Rica when he was attacked by the shark in September.

Less than two months on, and still bearing the scars from the attack on his face, he describes his recovery as “incredible” – and says he even hopes to encounter his assailant again.

For Hoyos, what happened to him that day in the waters off Cocos Island is the result of normal animal behaviour when confronted with a perceived threat.

“In this case, this bite was like a dog’s,” he says.

“Have you ever seen how dogs, when another dog gets too close, throw a quick bite? It doesn’t hurt it, but it calms the other dog down.”

Hoyos – who along with his colleagues attaches acoustic tags to sharks to help pinpoint their mating and spawning grounds as part of his work – was alerted to the shark’s presence in the water by tourists.

It was at a depth of 40m, and Hoyos told the captain of the boat he was on that he would be there “for a maximum of five minutes”.

He then entered the water and began his slow descent.

Hoyos recalls encountering the shark: “This giant female, measuring between 3 and 3.5m (11.5ft), swam by and headed toward the bottom, and I positioned myself to tag her at the base of her dorsal fin.”

But Hoyos, who has tagged many kinds of sharks in his decades-long career, says this animal reacted differently to others.

“Obviously the tip – the metal tip attached to the cable hanging from the probe – goes in, and unlike the other sharks I’ve tagged that immediately flee, she turns around and stares at me,” he recalls.

“I saw her little eye looking at me, and I saw her very calmly turning around.”

In a modest-sized university lab in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, researchers are using a tiny drill to scrape away enamel from a 2,500-year-old tooth.

Researchers at Madurai Kamaraj University say the tooth belongs to one of two human skulls that they have used as models to digitally reconstruct faces to understand what the region’s early inhabitants might have looked like.

The skulls, both belonging to men, were excavated from Kondagai, an ancient burial site about 4km (2.5 miles) from Keeladi – an archaeological site that has become a political flashpoint in India.

Tamil Nadu state department archaeologists say an urban civilisation dating back to 580BC existed in Keeladi, a claim that adds a new dimension to the story of the Indian subcontinent.

The Indus Valley Civilisation, that emerged over 5,000 years ago in the northern and central parts of present-day India, is the country’s first major civilisation – and narratives around urbanisation have so far been confined to the north.

But state archaeologists say the findings at Keeladi indicate for the first time that an ancient independent civilisation existed in southern India as well.

They say the people of Keeladi were literate, highly-skilled and engaged in trade across the subcontinent and abroad. They lived in brick houses and buried their dead along with daily necessities like food grains and pots in massive burial urns in Kondagai.

Archaeologists have excavated about 50 such urns from the site so far.

Researchers at Madurai Kamaraj University are now extracting DNA from human bones and other goods found in these urns to better understand who the inhabitants of Keeladi were and what their lifestyle was like.

But a more profound quest seems to be under way.

“We want to understand our ancestry and the migration routes of our ancestors,” says professor G Kumaresan, who heads the genetics department at the university. “It’s a journey towards answering the larger question of ‘who are we and how did we come to exist here’,” he adds.

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The exercise of reconstructing faces of the 2,500-year-old skulls has revealed clues that can answer at least one part of this question.

“The faces mainly have features of Ancient Ancestral South Indians – a population group believed to be the first inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent,” says Prof Kumaresan.

The features also reveal traces of Middle-East Eurasian and Austro-Asiactic ancestries, hinting at global migration and the mixing of ancient population groups. But Prof Kumaresan says that more research is needed to properly establish the ancestries of Keeladi’s residents.

The facial reconstruction of the skulls began with researchers at Madurai Kamaraj University creating 3D scans of the skulls.

These digital scans were then sent to Face Lab at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. Face Lab specialises in creating digital craniofacial reconstructions using forensic, artistic and scientific principles and technologies.

Experts at the lab used computer softwares to add muscles, flesh and skin to the scans of skulls, bringing out their facial features. These additions were made according to standard human anatomical proportions and measurements.

Then came the big challenge: adding colour to the images.

This brought up questions like which shade of brown should the men be, what colour should their eyes have and how should their hair look?

Prof Kumaresan says the standard practice of using colours that matched physical traits of people currently living in Tamil Nadu was followed, but the digital portraits still evoked lively discussions on social media.

They underscored longstanding divisions in Indian society – around race, culture and heritage.

Historical narratives championing Aryans (a term commonly used to describe people who settled in the northern part of India) as the “original citizens” of the country clashed with those that ascribed this title to Dravidians (a term used to describe people living primarily in India’s southern states).

India has always been plagued by a north-south divide that stems partly from the popular belief that Indian civilisation – and everything associated with it, like language, culture and even religion – took root in the north and shaped the rest of the country.

But Prof Kumaresan says the facial portraits of the Keeladi skulls reveal a message that’s more complex and inclusive.

“The message we can all take home is that we are more diverse than we realise, and the proof of this lies in our DNA,” he says.

This isn’t the first time that researchers in India have attempted to recreate faces from ancient skulls.

In 2019, scientists reconstructed faces of two skulls found at a cemetery in Rakhigarhi – an important Indus Valley Civilisation site in India. But the sketches lack colour and other physical traits.

“As humans, we have a fascination with faces – our ability to recognise and interpret faces is part of our success as a social species,” says Caroline Wilkinson, who headed the Face Lab team that worked on the Keeladi men.

“These facial depictions also encourage the audience to understand ancient remains as people rather than artefacts, and to establish a connection through personal narrative rather than a wider population history,” she adds.

At the Madurai Kamaraj University, efforts are under way to study Keeladi as thoroughly as the Indus Valley Civilisation.

“So far, we have learnt that the people of Keeladi were involved in agriculture, trade and cattle-rearing. They kept deer, goats and wild pigs and ate lots of rice and millets,” says Prof Kumaresan.

“Interestingly, we have found evidence that they also consumed dates, even though the date palm isn’t ubiquitous in Tamil Nadu at present,” he adds.

But the most challenging task for his team remains extracting sufficient DNA from human skeletons found at Kondagai to create a gene library. Because the skeletons are badly degraded, the DNA extracted from them is low and of poor quality. But Prof Kumaresan is hopeful that some good will come out of these endeavours.

“Ancient DNA libraries are like portals to the past; they can reveal fascinating insights about life as it was and life as we know it to be,” he says.

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