Examines how the military experience of three religious founders shaped their spiritual legacy.
It is one of the more startling facts of military history that the founders of three of the four "great religions"-Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam-were also accomplished field generals with extensive experience in commanding men in battle. One of these, Muhammad, fought eight battles and was wounded twice, once almost fatally. Another, Siddhartha Gautama (later to become the Buddha), witnessed so much battlefield carnage that he suffered a psychological collapse. Moses had become so much a "god-intoxicated" personality that it is a reasonable suspicion that he, like the Buddha, was murdered.
Indeed, had the experiences of these men in war not been so successful, it is quite possible that their achievements as religious leaders would never have occurred. For all three, war and religion were so closely intertwined in their personalities that it is difficult to discern where the influence of one ended and the other began.
This book attempts to explore the military lives of Moses, the Buddha, and Muhammad, and the role their war experiences played in their religious lives.
"Richard Gabriel drives his narrative with the desperate speed of a war-chariot, sometimes careening on one wheel so exciting is his story-telling, but masterfully never up-setting. This dean of military history does not preach, but the reader of God's Generals will learn as much about our own world as about the deeds and times of the holy soldiers of whom Gabriel's writes."
J.E. Lendon, author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
"Religions may be peaceful, but their founders usually couldn't be. Moses, leading some 25,000 migrants away from and then through hostile territory, was obliged to guard both rear and front constantly and to fight dissidents within, predators without, and dwellers resisting newcomers. Given his vision of the ummah, or worldwide Islamic community, Muhammad had to forge a military force to extend a
