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Jihad

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Jihad (جهاد) is an Arabic word which comes from the Arabic root word "jahada"; which means "exerting utmost effort" or "to strive." The word connotes a wide range of meanings, from an inward spiritual struggle to attain perfect faith to an outward material struggle. During the period of Qur'anic revelation while Muhammad was in Mecca, jihad meant essentially a nonviolent struggle. Following his move from Mecca to Medina in 622, and the establishment of an Islamic state, fighting in self-defense was sanctioned by the Qur'an (22:39). The Qur'an began referring increasingly to the word qital (fighting or warfare), instead of jihad. Two of the last verses on this topic (9:5, 29) suggest a war of conquest against unbeliever enemies. In medieval legal sources, jihad generally referred to a divinely sanctioned struggle to establish Muslim hegemony over non-Muslims as a prelude to the propagation of the Islamic faith.

Jihad as a General Struggle

Muslims often refer to two meanings of jihad by citing a hadith recorded by Imam Baihaqi and al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (even though its isnad is categorized as "weak"):

  • "lesser (outer) jihad" — a military struggle, i.e. a holy war
  • "greater (inner) jihad" — the struggle of personal self-improvement against the self's base desires

Other examples of actions that could be considered jihad (on the basis of hadiths with better isnad) include:

The more literal meaning of the word Jihad is simply "a struggle," and so it is sometimes dubbed the "inner Jihad." This "inner Jihad" essentially refers to all the struggles that a Muslim could go through, in adhering to the religion. For example, a scholarly study of Islam is an intellectual struggle that some may refer to as "jihad," though it is not common for a scholar of Islam to refer to his studies as "engaging in Jihad."

Jihad as Islamic "Holy War"

The Islamic legal tradition identifies two types of armed religious warfare, namely the defensive jihad and the offensive jihad. Most Muslims consider armed struggle against foreign occupation or oppression by domestic government to be worthy of defensive jihad. In colonial times, Muslim populations often rose up against the colonial authorities under the banner of jihad (examples include Daghestan Chechnya against Russia, the Indian Mutiny against Britain, and the Algerian War of Independence against France). In this sense, defensive jihad is no different from the right of armed resistance against occupation that is sanctioned under the UN and International Law, though armed resistance against one's own domestic government is not sanctioned by international humanitarian law.

Offensive jihad is the waging of wars of aggression and conquest against non-Muslims in order to bring them and their territories under Islamic rule. Liberal Muslims, today, dispute its necessity. Some say that it was practiced only to preserve Islam from destruction, and that the concept is now obsolete because freedom of religious practice is present in most of the world. Others argue that it is questionable whether Muslims established the second-largest empire in the history of the world, through war and conquest, only to preserve Islam from destruction. Orthodox Muslims do not see this as logically sound, and believe that it is Islam's goal to establish a global theocratic empire. Such Muslims wish to return to the days when a single Islamic Empire was ruled by a single Caliph. Some Islamists see this as a pious and important ambition, and they find justification for their imperialist beliefs in the mainstream Islamic legal tradition of the four Madhabs, which was codified in the early centuries of the budding Islamic empire. Mainstream Muslim scholarship continues to see its historical imperialism, such as when Islamic armies conquered Spain, marched half way into France, laid siege to Vienna, and invaded large portions of Eastern Europe, as blessed and legitimate occurrences of jihad.

Historians dispute whether forced conversion was or was not carried out during the era of Islamic imperialism which lasted approximately 1,400 years. Whether or not "conversion by the sword" was systematically carried out, it is argued by some that the jizyah (a tax laid exclusively on non-Muslims whose proceeds go to the government) created a kind of economic apartheid where non-Muslims were economically punished by the state for not converting to Islam. Others dispute this, citing the fact that non-Muslims were not required to pay the zakat (mandatory charity), though the zakat is a 2.5% tax, while the jizyah is approximately a 10% taxation. As explained in the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on jizyah, "many converted to Islam in order to escape the tax." [1] Non-Muslims were also usually denied entry to high-ranking military and civil service positions, although there were historical exceptions such as the Mughal Empire where non-Muslims did reach high-ranking positions. The Sira (biography of Muhammad) also mentions the wars against of entire Arab tribes who were followers of Islam while Muhammad lived, but tried either to defect from the religion when its prophet died or refused to pay Jizya. In the same spirit, today in several Islamic countries, Muslims who are known to have left the religion are accused of apostasy and are given an ultimatum to either convert back to Islam or face execution; though in modern times, such executions have been rare to nonexistent in some Muslim countries.

Jihad is sometimes referred to as "The sixth pillar of Islam" in honor of its religious status and in reference to the Five Pillars of Islam, although no verse of the Qur'an or hadith describes jihad as a sixth pillar.

Political military authority

Muslims hold that an "Offensive Jihad" can only be declared by a lawful and legal Muslim authority, traditionally the Caliph. However, no authority is needed for the "Defensive Jihad" to become effective in Islamic traditional law, which holds that when Muslims are attacked then it becomes obligatory for all Muslim men of military conscription age, within a certain radius of the attack, to take up arms against the attackers. If the attacker is not defeated, then the "radius of obligation," so to speak, continues to expand, until it may encompass the whole world and every Muslim male of military conscription age.

The question of which Muslim authority, if any, may carry out duties such as declaring Jihad has been problematic since March 3, 1924, when Kemal Atatürk abolished the Caliphate, which the Ottoman sultans had held since 1517. There is no longer a single Muslim authority, which is considered a violation of the shariah (see Caliph). Sunni Islam (the largest denomination) has no religious hierarchy comparable to that of many Christian churches (although Shi'a Islam, which was historically persecuted by the Islamic state, does); its religion and government have been at times tightly woven into a political system known as the Caliphate, or khalifah. (Many of those termed Islamists in contemporary political rhetoric wish to return to this system of government.) Due to this lack of clerical organization amongst the vast majority of Muslims, any adherent may proclaim himself an "ulama" (Islamic scholar) and proclaim a defensive jihad by way of fatwa. Recognition is at the discretion of the listener.

In the absence of a Caliph, the only remaining "de facto" Islamic leaders would be the heads of the Islamic nation-states. However, due to the rampant corruption plaguing governments in the Muslim world and the view amongst some Muslims that the democratic or monarchic nation-state is an un-Islamic institution, there is widespread distrust of these heads of state. As a result Islamist movements (such as Al Qaida or Hamas) have declared jihad themselves, thus attempting to bypass (and even overthrow) the de facto authority of the nation-state.

Islamist terrorism

To non-Muslims, militant attacks under the rubric of jihad may be perceived as acts of terrorism. Two Islamist groups call themselves "Islamic Jihad": Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Supporters of these groups perceive a strong religious justification for a militant interpretation of the term jihad as an appropriate response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

To many Muslims, a person who dies as a part of struggle against oppression is a shahid (martyr) and is assured a place in Janna (Paradise) where they will have 72 virgins, rivers of wine and fresh fruit. If the death of the person is certain, some consider the act martyrdom rather than suicide, which is a hell-worthy sin under Islamic religious law. If non-combatant Muslims perish in such attacks, they are also considered shahid and thus have also secured a place in paradise. Hence, the only true victims are the kaffir, or unbelievers. Those Muslims who disagree with the militant interpretation believe instead that suicide and killing civilians remain sins, since neither suicide nor attacks against civilians are considered legitimate outcomes of jihad.

The basis of shahid can be traced back to the words of Muhammad prior to the battle of Badr where he stated:

"I swear by the One in whose hand Muhammad's soul is, any man who fights them today and is killed while he is patient in the ordeal and seeks the pleasure of Allah, going forward and not backing off, Allah will enter him into Paradise."

There are Muslim clerics who authorize suicide bombing as a valid form of jihad, especially against Israel, her allies, and her supporters, believing that such attacks are legitimate responses to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza [2]. One of these so named is the United States. However, there is also a significant number of Muslims residing in the United States and the United States gives more foreign aid to all Muslim countries together than it does to Israel, the largest single recipient of such aid.

Many Islamic legal rulings view any killing of civilians (whether through combat or any other such militant activity) as against the ethics of Islam. Moreover, since terrorist organizations do not constitute any autonomous state or de facto authority, and because targets of jihad can only be recognized military targets, most Muslims do not consider terrorism to be an extension of jihad. Islamist proponents of terrorism argue, on the other hand, that economic targets can be see as military targets, and often cite Muhammad's numerous caravan raids (see Battle of Badr for a description of one such caravan raid and the war that it led to). The Qur'an specifically forbids attacking women, children, elderly people, and civilian buildings during a military campaign. However, there can be exceptions. Just as Western philosophies of war permitted harm to civilians and categorized it as "collateral damage," so too did Muhammad and his followers devise similar justifications. When Muhammad and his army attacked the Jewish oasis of Khayber in 628 CE (see history of Muhammad), they discovered catapults for the first time, in the captured fortresses of the Jews. Muhammad deemed it permissible to use the catapults against the remaining fortresses, despite women and children being put at risk of being killed by the bombardment of boulders, as Muhammad deemed this to be a sort of permissible collateral damage. The hadiths also go into some details about the circumstances under which fellow Muslims may be killed during a military campaign. In such hadiths, the essential message is that it is permissible to take the lives of innocents, during war, if and only if it is demonstrably for the greater good.

The Qur'an vehemently denounces the killing of any innocent person:

"Whosoever killed a person - unless it be for killing a person or for creating disorder in the land - it shall be as if he killed all mankind; and whoso saved a life, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind." (?:32)

According to the Qur'an, therefore, the killing of just one innocent person is equivalent to the massacre of the entire human race, which is an inconceivably barbaric crime, and a monumental sin. However, it is not clear who is and who is not an innocent person. The Qur'an explicitly outlaws many "crimes" which modern secualr society sees as fundamental rights, and furthermore the Qur'an explicitly designates every non-Muslim a guilty of one sin or another. The point being that the concept of who is an "innocent person" and who is a "guilty person" can vary widely between different cultures, nations, religions, and eras in history. Modern Jihad theorists, such as Sayyid Qutb (an Egyptian who is concidered one of the founders to contemporary militant ideological strain in Islam) who wrote a series of books, while in prison, in which he declared that all people who participated in any form of government that was not an Islamic theocracy (either by participating in the councils of such a form of government, or campaigning for a political party in democratic system, or even encouraging people to vote in a democratic form of government) could be concidered guilty persons who could justifiably be killed. "The implication [of Qutb's was that these leaders could justifiably be killed, because they had become so corrupted, they were no longer Muslims, even though they said they were." [3]. One of Sayyid Qutb's followers was to become Osama bin Laden's personal mentor; he was an Egyptian named Ayman al-Zawahiri, who wrote (like Qutb, while in prison) an even more radical framework for the Global Jihad Ideology than Qutb's framework. "The mystery, for Zawahiri, was why the Egyptian people had failed to see the truth and rise up [against their un-Islamic secular leaders]. It must be because the infection of selfish individualism had gone so deep into people’s minds that they were now as corrupted as their leaders. Zawahiri now seized on a terrible ambiguity in Qutb’s argument. It wasn’t just leaders like Sadat who were no longer real Muslims, it was the people themselves. And Zawahiri believed that this meant that they too could legitimately be killed. But such killing, Zawahiri believed, would have a noble purpose, because of the fear and the terror that it would create in the minds of ordinary Muslims. It would shock them into seeing reality in a different way. They would then see the truth." [4]

Excerpts from the Qur'an on warfare

The Qur'an uses the term jihad only four times, none of which refer to armed struggle. As such, the use of the word jihad, in reference to holy Islamic war, was a latter day invention of Muslims. However, the concept of holy Islamic war was not itself a latter day invention, and the Qur'an does contain passages laying out the theory and practice of armed struggle (qi'tal) for Muslims. A few examples are as follows:

“Strike terror (into the hearts of) the enemies of Allah and your enemies.; But if the enemy incline towards peace, do thou (also) incline towards peace, and trust in Allah: for He is One that heareth and knoweth (all things).” (8:60-61)
“What! will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and aimed at the expulsion of the Messenger, and they attacked you first; do you fear them? But Allah is most deserving that you should fear Him, if you are believers. Fight (kill) them (non-Muslims), and Allah will punish (torment) them by your hands, cover them with shame.” (9:13-14)
“Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. This because they contended against Allah and His Messenger: If any contend against Allah and His Messenger, Allah is strict in punishment.” (8:12-13)
“But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war) but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. And if one of the idolaters seek protection from you, grant him protection till he hears the word of Allah, then make him attain his place of safety; this is because they are a people who do not know.” (9:5-6)
“Fight (kill) those who believe not in Allah, nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (9:29)
"Permission (to fight) is given to those upon whom war is made because they are oppressed ... those who have been expelled from their homes without a just cause except that they say: Our Lord is Allah. "(22:39-40)

References

[1] Encylopedia Britannica (Concise Online Edition), entry on "jizya"

[2] MEMRI Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project, "Al-Qaradhawi Speaks In Favor of Suicide Operations at an Islamic Conference in Sweden"

[3] Transcript of BBC Documentary Series "The Power of Nightmares," Episode 2

[4] Transcript of BBC Documentary Series "The Power of Nightmares," Episode 1

See Also

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