THE TROUBLE with this accumulated
wisdom of the scholars is simple to state. It suggests that Osama bin
Laden had no idea what he was saying when he declared jihad on the United
States several years ago and then repeatedly murdered Americans in
Somalia, at the U.S. embassies in East Africa, in the port of Aden, and
then on September 11, 2001. It implies that organizations with the word
"jihad" in their titles, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and
bin Laden's own "International Islamic Front for the Jihad Against
Jews and Crusade[rs]," are grossly misnamed. And what about all the
Muslims waging violent and aggressive jihads, under that very name and at
this very moment, in Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao,
Ambon, and other places around the world? Have they not heard that jihad
is a matter of controlling one's anger?
But of course it is bin Laden,
Islamic Jihad, and the jihadists worldwide who define the term, not a
covey of academic apologists. More importantly, the way the jihadists
understand the term is in keeping with its usage through fourteen
centuries of Islamic history.
In premodern times, jihad meant
mainly one thing among Sunni Muslims, then as now the Islamic majority. It
meant the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories
ruled by Muslims (known in Arabic as dar al-Islam) at the expense of
territories ruled by non-Muslims (dar al-harb). In this prevailing
conception, the purpose of jihad is political, not religious. It aims not
so much to spread the Islamic faith as to extend sovereign Muslim power
(though the former has often followed the latter). The goal is boldly
offensive, and its ultimate intent is nothing less than to achieve Muslim
dominion over the entire world.
By winning territory and
diminishing the size of areas ruled by non-Muslims, jihad accomplishes two
goals: it manifests Islam's claim to replace other faiths, and it brings
about the benefit of a just world order. In the words of Majid Khadduri of
Johns
Hopkins
University
, writing in 1955 (before political correctness conquered the
universities), jihad is "an instrument for both the universalization
of [Islamic] religion and the establishment of an imperial world
state."
As for the conditions under which
jihad might be undertaken—when, by whom, against whom, with what sort of
declaration of war, ending how, with what division of spoils, and so
on—these are matters that religious scholars worked out in excruciating
detail over the centuries. But about the basic meaning of jihad—warfare
against unbelievers to extend Muslim domains—there was perfect
consensus. For example, the most important collection of hadith (reports
about the sayings and actions of Muhammad), called Sahih al-Bukhari,
contains 199 references to jihad, and every one of them refers to it in
the sense of armed warfare against non-Muslims. To quote the 1885 Dictionary
of Islam, jihad is "an incumbent religious duty, established
in the Qur'an and in the traditions [hadith] as a divine institution, and
enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling
evil from Muslims."
JIHAD WAS no abstract obligation
through the centuries, but a key aspect of Muslim life. According to one
calculation, Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles, of which just one
(the
Battle
of the Ditch) was defensive. Within a century after the prophet's death in
632, Muslim armies had reached as far as
India
in the east and
Spain
in the west. Though such a dramatic single expansion was never again to be
repeated, important victories in subsequent centuries included the
seventeen Indian campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazna (r. 998-1030), the battle
of Manzikert opening Anatolia (1071), the conquest of Constantinople
(1453), and the triumphs of Uthman dan Fodio in West Africa (1804-17). In
brief, jihad was part of the warp and woof not only of premodern Muslim
doctrine but of premodern Muslim life.
That said, jihad also had two
variant meanings over the ages, one of them more radical than the standard
meaning and one quite pacific. The first, mainly associated with the
thinker Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328), holds that born Muslims who fail to live
up to the requirements of their faith are themselves to be considered
unbelievers, and so legitimate targets of jihad. This tended to come in
handy when (as was often the case) one Muslim ruler made war against
another; only by portraying the enemy as not properly Muslim could the war
be dignified as a jihad.
The second variant, usually
associated with Sufis, or Muslim mystics, was the doctrine customarily
translated as "greater jihad" but perhaps more usefully termed
"higher jihad." This Sufi variant invokes allegorical modes of
interpretation to turn jihad's literal meaning of armed conflict
upside-down, calling instead for a withdrawal from the world to struggle
against one's baser instincts in pursuit of numinous awareness and
spiritual depth. But as Rudolph Peters notes in his authoritative Jihad
in Classical and Modern Islam (1995), this interpretation was
"hardly touched upon" in premodern legal writings on jihad.
IN THE vast majority of premodern
cases, then, jihad signified one thing only: armed action versus
non-Muslims. In modern times, things have of course become somewhat more
complicated, as Islam has undergone contradictory changes resulting from
its contact with Western influences. Muslims having to cope with the West
have tended to adopt one of three broad approaches: Islamist, reformist,
or secularist. For the purposes of this discussion, we may put aside the
secularists (such as Kemal Ataturk), for they reject jihad in its
entirety, and instead focus on the Islamists and reformists. Both have
fastened on the variant meanings of jihad to develop their own
interpretations.
Islamists, besides adhering to
the primary conception of jihad as armed warfare against infidels, have
also adopted as their own Ibn Taymiya's call to target impious Muslims.
This approach acquired increased salience through the 20th century as
Islamist thinkers like Hasan al-Banna (1906-49), Sayyid Qutb (1906-66),
Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi (1903-79), and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1903-89)
promoted jihad against putatively Muslim rulers who failed to live up to
or apply the laws of Islam. The revolutionaries who overthrew the shah of
Iran
in 1979 and the assassins who gunned down President Anwar Sadat of
Egypt
two years later overtly held to this doctrine. So does Osama bin Laden.
Reformists, by contrast,
reinterpret Islam to make it compatible with Western ways. It is
they—principally through the writings of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a
19th-century reformist leader in India—who have worked to transform the
idea of jihad into a purely defensive undertaking compatible with the
premises of international law. This approach, characterized in 1965 by the
definitive Encyclopedia of Islam as
"wholly apologetic," owes far more to Western than to Islamic
thinking. In our own day, it has devolved further into what Martin Kramer
has dubbed "a kind of Oriental Quakerism," and it, together with
a revival of the Sufi notion of "greater jihad," is what has
emboldened some to deny that jihad has any martial component whatsoever,
instead redefining the idea into a purely spiritual or social activity.
For
most Muslims in the world today, these moves away from the old sense of
jihad are rather remote. They neither see their own rulers as targets
deserving of jihad nor are they ready to become Quakers. Instead, the
classic notion of jihad continues to resonate with vast numbers of them,
as Alfred Morabia, a foremost French scholar of the topic, noted in 1993:
Offensive,
bellicose jihad, the one codified by the specialists and theologians, has
not ceased to awaken an echo in the Muslim consciousness, both individual
and collective. . . . To be sure, contemporary apologists present a
picture of this religious obligation that conforms well to the
contemporary norms of human rights, . . . but the people are not convinced
by this. . . . The overwhelming majority of Muslims remain under the
spiritual sway of a law . . . whose key requirement is the demand, not to
speak of the hope, to make the Word of God triumph everywhere in the
world.
In
brief, jihad in the raw remains a powerful force in the Muslim world, and
this goes far to explain the immense appeal of a figure like Osama bin
Laden in the immediate aftermath of
September 11, 2001
.
Contrary to the graduating
Harvard senior who assured his audience that "Jihad is not something
that should make someone feel uncomfortable," this concept has caused
and continues to cause not merely discomfort but untold human suffering:
in the words of the Swiss specialist Bat Ye'or, "war, dispossession,
dhimmitude [subordination], slavery, and death." As Bat Ye'or points
out, Muslims "have the right as Muslims to say that jihad is just and
spiritual" if they so wish; but by the same token, any truly honest
accounting would have to give voice to the countless "infidels who
were and are the victims of jihad" and who, no less than the victims
of Nazism or Communism, have "their own opinion of the jihad that
targets them."
….For usage of the term in its
plain meaning, we have to turn to Islamists not so engaged. Such Islamists
speak openly of jihad in its proper, martial sense. Here is Osama bin
Laden: Allah "orders us to carry out the holy struggle, jihad, to
raise the word of Allah above the words of the unbelievers." And here
is Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former head of the Taliban regime, exhorting
Muslim youth: "Head for jihad and have your guns ready."
IT IS an intellectual scandal
that, since
September 11, 2001
, scholars at American universities have repeatedly and all but
unanimously issued public statements that avoid or whitewash the primary
meaning of jihad in Islamic law and Muslim history. It is quite as if
historians of medieval Europe were to deny that the word
"crusade" ever had martial overtones, instead pointing to such
terms as "crusade on hunger" or "crusade against
drugs" to demonstrate that the term signifies an effort to improve
society….”
Conclusion:
Here we clearly find jihad as offensive war carried
out against the non-Muslims when they reject Islam and follow the religion
or philosophy of their wish. Jihad is performed to convert these infidels
to Islam by force or accept humiliation by paying poll tax, jizya.
No justification what so ever can be given to what
Muhammad & his companions did in the name of jihad. Muhammad’s Islam
knows no tolerance. All it knows and wants is complete dominance.
Though jihad around us is going on unabated, there is
a serious and dangerous conspiracy going around us to give to a normal
person “a renovated and civilized” view of Islam and jihad. These
apologetic views which are being spread are more dangerous than Jihad
which we are talking about. These apologists prevent people from
understanding the real threat, and when they will understand that on their
own, it will be too late.
Jihad is knocking at the door steps of the civilized
world disguised as renaissance with the help of those whom Respected Ali
Sina rightly quotes as “useful idiots” and it trying to enter our
homes spelling doom to Mankind. But Dr. Sina, may be wrong they aren’t
“useful Idiots” but “Useless Idiots” they don’t do justice to
their job or neither to mankind.
It is high time we realize the threat of Islamic
Jihad and stand up strong against it for our own survival.
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