A vast repertoire of sources allows an understanding of the historical transformation of a defensive war into a warlike undertaking with imperialistic aims. A reading that challenges the extremist literature of militant Islamist groups and anti-Islamic groups.
Last update: 2024-12-16 15:59:01
This essay will deal with a number of popular and erroneous perceptions of jihad that are quite prevalent among many Westerners and even some Muslims. These misperceptions are often predicated on the following assumptions: 1) Jihad is relentless, bloody warfare to be waged by Muslims (en masse) against non-Muslims (en masse) until Islam occupies the whole world or until the end of time – whichever occurs first; 2) Muslims can issue the call to such a jihad anytime and anyhow and their only excuse is that stubborn unbelievers will not submit, willingly or unwillingly, at their hands; 3) when Muslims argue that a true military jihad is only defensive and conditional while an internal, non-violent jihad is continuous and unconditional, they are deliberately dissembling about the real nature of jihad and are to be regarded as apologists for their faith.
It is not only anti-Islamic websites that list such perceptions of jihad; the popular media and mainstream publications frequently convey versions close to the above and contribute to the formation of such views. Militant Islamist websites and printed literature reinforce such ideas. More sophisticated and/or more sympathetic sources will often refer to the greater and lesser jihad as indicating the distinction between the spiritual versus the physical jihad, and the greater importance of the former. However, the assertion that Muslims as a collectivity must continue to wage a military jihad against non-Muslims in order to expand Muslim realms while observing humanitarian codes of conduct against civilians is more or less accepted as a given, even by many specialists of Islam. The proof-texts invoked in support of such a position are medieval Islamic legal texts which frequently did list such a requirement as part of the duties of the Muslim ruler.
And this is where we must start to trace the rise of certain truisms about the nature and purview of the military jihad. Privileging the legal literature above other kinds of literature – particularly the exegetical literature on the Qur’an and ethical treatises – in discussions of jihad almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that it is primarily a collective military obligation incumbent upon able-bodied Muslim men in the service of the State and religion. And because what we call Islamic law is assumed to be derived directly from the Qur’an and the hadith – the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – such an obligation is assumed to be mandated by Islam itself.
Patient Forbearance
But if we put on our historical glasses and plumb the earliest exegetical texts, hadith collections and edifying literary works which stressed ethical and moral concerns above all, a considerably different picture emerges. The earliest connotations of jihad had to do with patient forbearance (in Arabic the term is sabr). Such patient forbearance was to be exercised in the face of harm and represented stoic, non-violent resistance to wrong-doing. After the famous emigration to
Permission is given to those who are fought against/against whom fighting has been initiated (yuqâtalûna) because they have been wronged/oppressed, and God is able to help them. These are they who have been wrongfully expelled from their homes merely for saying “God is our Lord”. If God had not restrained some people by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which God’s name is mentioned frequently would have been destroyed. Indeed God comes to the aid of those who come to His aid; verily He is powerful and mighty’.
It should be noted that the Arabic uses the passive verb (yuqâtalûna) instead of the active (yuqâtilûna) in Qur’an 22:39. The verse, therefore, clearly refers to fighting back once one has been attacked. Recourse to defensive fighting was established in these verses for Muslims not for the sake of propagating religion but for the protection of their lives and property, as well as potentially those of non-Muslims who faced similar persecution since non-Muslim houses of worship are clearly mentioned in Qur’an 22:39-40 as being worthy of protection.[1]
Another critical verse, Qur’an 2:190, unambiguously forbids Muslims from attacking the enemy first. The verse states: ‘Fight in the way of God those who fight you and do not commit aggression’. Accordingly, early exegetes in particular insisted that Muslims could only fight back after they had been attacked – no ifs or buts – and that the counter-attack had to be proportional to the original attack. This is the documented position of the early exegetes Mujâhid b. Jabr[2] and Muqâtil b. Sulaymân[3] who wrote their Qur’an commentaries during the Umayyad period (656-750). These early positions continued to be maintained by later exegetes, such as al-Râzî.[4]
Some scholars were also of the opinion that the Qur’anic command to fight was only applicable to the first generation of Muslims who were contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Companions, since the historical referent in the verses that deal with fighting are the hostile pagan Arabs of Mecca. One verse (Qur’an 2:216) that is often cited in many sources as establishing the obligatory nature of fighting states:
Fighting has been prescribed for you even though you find it displeasing. Perhaps you dislike something in which there is good for you and perhaps you find pleasing that which causes you harm. But God knows and you do not.
There is no doubt that according to this verse and other verses, when war is duly constituted for justified and legitimate reasons (among which are the violation of treaties by the enemy and their initiation of hostilities), fighting becomes a moral obligation which no adult male believer may shirk without extenuating reason. However, the exegetes differed as to who exactly were intended in the Arabic plural ‘you’ (kum) in the verse, which states in Arabic: kutiba ‘alaykum al-qitâl (‘fighting has been prescribed for you’). According to early sources, such as the late ninth century Qur’an commentary of al-Tabarî, the early pious Medinan scholar ‘Atâ b. Abî Rabâh was prominent among those who subscribed to the position that fighting was prescribed only during the time of the Prophet.[5] In the eleventh century, another Qur’an exegete al-Wâhidî (d. 1076) continues to endorse this early position that fighting was a religiously prescribed duty only during the lifetime of the Prophet;[6] as did al-Râzî in the late twelfth century.[7]
Another important verse, Qur’an 8:61, warns that should the adversary refrain from fighting and incline towards peace, Muslims had to reciprocate. Qur’an 8:61 is therefore the quintessential verse concerning peacemaking. It states in full: ‘And if they should incline to peace, then incline to it [yourself] and place your trust in God; for He is all-hearing and all-knowing’.
Al-Tabarî says that God in this verse addresses the Prophet and counsels him that should the enemy ‘incline to making peace with you and abandon warfare’, either through entry into Islam, or payment of the jizya (the so-called poll tax), or through the establishment of friendly relations (muwâda‘a), then you should do the same for the sake of peace and peacemaking.[8]
The Turning Point of Political Realism
As one might imagine, such Qur’anic verses which limited warfare to defensive fighting and commanded desisting from violence when the other side did, were an obstacle to the process of empire-building. By Umayyad times, the need was soon felt in official and certain legal circles to promote the military jihad as a religiously meritorious activity to allow for the expansion of the Islamic empire, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, during the late seventh and eighth centuries of the Common Era. Certain hawkish scholars, such as the Syrian scholar Makhûl al-Shâmî (d. c. 737), starting already in the late seventh century during the Umayyad period, framed Realpolitik concerns focused on security and territorial expansion in overtly religious idiom and sought to create theological imperatives for fighting on behalf of empire. The progressive watering-down in later exegetical and legal literature of the Qur’anic prohibition against initiating hostilities reveals the triumph of political realism over scriptural fidelity.
This trend became quite prominent by the late-ninth century during the Abbasid period with its imperial ambitions, as may be detected in the famous exegetical work of the late-ninth century scholar al-Tabarî, who had close connections with the ruling Abbasid elite. The well-known Abbasid jurist al-Shâfi‘î was also a member of this “school” of political realism. It is from this vantage-point that al-Shâfi‘î divided the world into the Abode of Islam (Dar al-Islam) versus the Abode of War (Dar al-Harb) with an intervening Abode of Truce (Dar al-‘Ahd/Sulh) into which non-Muslim nations could enter by signing treaties of co-existence with the Muslim polity.[9] None of the foundational texts of Islam – either the Qur’an or the hadith literature – refer to such a division of the world; but ever the pragmatist, this is how al-Shâfi‘î made sense of the conflict-ridden world of his time. He was also of the opinion that the Caliph should carry out offensive military campaigns against non-Muslim polities as part of his role as the defender of Islamic realms. Such offensive military activity was included by him under the rubric of jihad and justified as a necessary moral preemptive course of action against a hostile enemy, such as the Byzantines.[10] Ironically, thanks to his efforts, the military jihad thus became inextricably linked to the secular project of empire-building and expansion, although its secular nature was convincingly concealed within a carefully-crafted religious idiom.
A Way of Self-purification
A diachronic comparison of early and late texts that discuss jihad affirms, however, the variable trajectory of this term and indicates the moral and legal contestations of its multiple meanings by different groups of people in different historical periods. This becomes particularly evident when we further survey religious edifying and what today we might call “self-improvement literature” that emphasizes ethical imperatives more than legal and statist concerns. Thus the famous mystical theologian of the late-eleventh century Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî (d. 1111) in his celebrated work on ethics and morality entitled in English ‘The Revival of the Religious Sciences’ emphasizes the internal and spiritual dimensions of jihad that are of greater importance for the individual. The external battle between the forces of good and evil which will persist until the last times was completely internalized by al-Ghazâlî and transferred to the ‘battle-ground’ of the human heart.[11]
Lest one think that only Muslim mystics place such stress on the internal jihad, as is sometimes dismissively asserted, it is useful to refer to the views of a prominent Hanbali jurist from the fourteenth century, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), who was a student of another famous Hanbali jurist, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). In an ethical treatise, Ibn Qayyim mirrors the views of al-Ghazâlî to a considerable extent by praising those who constantly practice the internal self-purification required of a holistic jihad and who thereby ‘strive with regard to God in true striving’ (a reference to Qur’an 22:78).[12] Like al-Ghazâlî, he does not devalue the external combative jihad when and where there is a need for it, but regards engaging in the internal jihad as encapsulated by the term sabr (patient forbearance) as the best of all deeds under all circumstances.
The belligerent juridical perspective that gained ground from the time of al-Shâfi‘î onward relied for its validity on the invocation of the hermeneutic principle of abrogation that emerged over time – a principle, according to a considerable number of scholars, which allowed a number of early Qur’anic verses which are markedly irenic and conciliatory in tone to be superseded by later ones which deal with fighting those who had attacked and persecuted Muslims for their faith alone. It is this theory of abrogation which allowed an expansionist conception of the military jihad to emerge in deference to Realpolitik. Thus the first part of the Qur’anic verse 9:5 which states ‘When the sacred months have lapsed, then slay the polytheists wherever you may find them’ is invoked by a number of influential exegetes as having abrogated Qur’an 2:190, with its no-aggression clause. It is also assumed by some to have abrogated our quintessential peacemaking verse Qur’an 8:61.
However, the exegeses of some of the most influential Qur’an commentators of the pre-modern period establish, despite popular opinion to the contrary, that this verse was assumed by them to be valid for all time. Thus, al-Tabarî says that the position of those who maintain that the peacemaking verse Qur’an 8:61 had been abrogated by Qur’an 9:5 cannot be supported on the basis of the Qur’an, the sunna, or reason.[13] Al-Tabarî’s was not a minority position. After him, al-Zamakhsharî, al-Râzî and Ibn Kathîr (d. 1373) continued to assert that Qur’an 8:61 remained an unabrogated verse and its mandate for establishing peace was normative for all time.[14]
Modern anti-abrogation scholars in particular emphasize that the Qur’an should be read holistically and that the critical verses contained within it which forbid the initiation of war by Muslims and which uphold the principle of non-coercion in religion (Qur’an 2:256) unambiguously and permanently militate against the conception of an offensive jihad that may be waged against non-Muslims solely because they are non-Muslims. Chief among these modern scholars are Muhammad ‘Abduh, al-Bûtî and ‘Alî Jum‘a (Gom‘a) whose views are described in detail in my recent book Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought.[15] Needless to say, militants in the modern period favor the pro-abrogation position because it allows them to wield the so-called ‘sword verse’ (Qur’an 9:5) ahistorically and arbitrarily to justify their campaign of violent vengeance. Thus, in the tract titled al-Farîda al-ghâ’iba, its author ‘Abd al-Salâm Farâj, a member of the extremist Egyptian group al-Jihâd wa-l-Takfîr, appeals to the abrogating function of Qur’ân 9:5 vis-à-vis all other conciliatory verses in the Qur’an, and invokes the situation in extremis argument, which grants him and his fellow militants considerable license in the means they adopt in carrying out their violent mission.[16]
From their perspective, such a position also justifies so-called martyrdom operations. One contemporary militant, ‘Abd al-Qâdir b. ‘Abd al-‘Azîz, has described the love for martyrdom operations as ‘a part of the politics of deterrence’ and contrasts ‘the enthusiasm of the believer for death and the (sic) martyrdom’ to ‘the fear of the disbeliever of death and his enthusiasm for this life’.[17]
Mainstream scholars like Nâsir al-Din al-Albânî of
Multiple Meanings, Impossible Reductions
These conclusions regarding the historical trajectory of jihad have profound implications for the contemporary period. First, they document the multiple meanings of jihad that are prevalent in the literature particularly outside the legal sphere and challenges a monolithic, reductive understanding of the term. Second, they establish the defensive and limited nature of fighting in the Qur’an as stressed particularly by exegetes, ethicists and moral theologians. The military jihad is most categorically not holy war in the Qur’an, since it is not fought for religious reasons but for defense against violent persecution by others for professing monotheism, and therefore can be fought to protect not only persecuted Muslims but also persecuted Jews, Christians and other believers, as clearly stated in Qur’an 22:39 . Third, they contextualize the legal positions that legitimized offensive military activity as contingent responses to specific historical circumstances, which cannot therefore be deemed to be normatively binding for Muslims for all times and for all places.
Through a close reading of scripture and the historical contextualization of later literary productions which chart the storied history of jihad, fundamental Islamic perspectives on peace and war are thus discovered to be closely aligned with modern international norms of waging war and making peace. Consultation of a broad repertoire of diverse sources allows one to better comprehend the circumstances which allowed for the historical transformation of the Qur’anic defensive jihad into offensive imperial warfare. Above all, it allows all to credibly and cogently challenge the views touted in extremist literature produced by both militant Islamist groups and virulent Islamophobes today that military activity masquerading as cosmic holy war is the primary and most authentic meaning of the complex and multivalent Arabic term jihad.