by Daniel Pipes
Commentary
November 2002
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/498
LAST SPRING, the faculty of Harvard
College selected a graduating senior named Zayed Yasin to
deliver a speech at the university's commencement exercises in
June. When the title of the speech—"My American Jihad"—was
announced, it quite naturally aroused questions. Why, it was
asked, should Harvard wish to promote the concept of jihad—or
"holy war"—just months after thousands of Americans had lost
their lives to a jihad carried out by nineteen suicide hijackers
acting in the name of Islam? Yasin, a past president of the
Harvard Islamic Society, had a ready answer. To connect jihad to
warfare, he said, was to misunderstand it. Rather, "in the
Muslim tradition, jihad represents a struggle to do the right
thing." His own purpose, Yasin added, was to "reclaim the word
for its true meaning, which is inner struggle."
In the speech itself, Yasin would elaborate on this point:
Jihad, in its truest and purest form, the form to which all
Muslims aspire, is the determination to do right, to do justice
even against your own interests. It is an individual struggle
for personal moral behavior. Especially today, it is a struggle
that exists on many levels: self-purification and awareness,
public service and social justice. On a global scale, it is a
struggle involving people of all ages, colors, and creeds, for
control of the Big Decisions: not only who controls what piece
of land, but more importantly who gets medicine, who can eat.
Could this be right? To be sure, Yasin was not a scholar of
Islam, and neither was the Harvard dean, Michael Shinagel, who
enthusiastically endorsed his "thoughtful oration" and declared
in his own name that jihad is a personal struggle "to promote
justice and understanding in ourselves and in our society." But
they both did accurately reflect the consensus of Islamic
specialists at their institution. Thus, David Little, a Harvard
professor of religion and international affairs, had stated
after the attacks of September 11, 2001 that jihad "is not a
license to kill," while to David Mitten, a professor of
classical art and archaeology as well as faculty adviser to the
Harvard Islamic Society, true jihad is "the constant struggle of
Muslims to conquer their inner base instincts, to follow the
path to God, and to do good in society." In a similar vein,
history professor Roy Mottahedeh asserted that "a majority of
learned Muslim thinkers, drawing on impeccable scholarship,
insist that jihad must be understood as a struggle without
arms."
Nor are Harvard's scholars exceptional in this regard. The truth
is that anyone seeking guidance on the all-important Islamic
concept of jihad would get almost identical instruction from
members of the professoriate across the United States. As I
discovered through an examination of media statements by such
university-based specialists, they tend to portray the
phenomenon of jihad in a remarkably similar fashion—only, the
portrait happens to be false.
SEVERAL INTERLOCKING themes emerge from the more than two dozen
experts I surveyed.* Only four of them admit that jihad has any
military component whatsoever, and even they, with but a single
exception, insist that this component is purely defensive in
nature. Valerie Hoffman of the University of Illinois is unique
in saying (as paraphrased by a journalist) that "no Muslim she
knew would have endorsed such terrorism [as the attacks of
September 11], as it goes against Islamic rules of engagement."
No other scholar would go so far as even this implicit hint that
jihad includes an offensive component.
Thus, John Esposito of Georgetown, perhaps the most visible
academic scholar of Islam, holds that "in the struggle to be a
good Muslim, there may be times where one will be called upon to
defend one's faith and community. Then [jihad] can take on the
meaning of armed struggle." Another specialist holding this view
is Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im of Emory, who explains that "War is
forbidden by the shari'a [Islamic law] except in two
cases: self-defense, and the propagation of the Islamic faith."
According to Blake Burleson of Baylor, what this means is that,
in Islam, an act of aggression like September 11 "would not be
considered a holy war."
To another half-dozen scholars in my survey, jihad may likewise
include militarily defensive engagements, but this meaning is
itself secondary to lofty notions of moral self-improvement.
Charles Kimball, chairman of the department of religion at Wake
Forest, puts it succinctly: jihad "means struggling or striving
on behalf of God. The great jihad for most is a struggle against
oneself. The lesser jihad is the outward, defensive jihad."
Pronouncing similarly are such authorities as Mohammad Siddiqi
of Western Illinois, John Iskander of Georgia State, Mark
Woodard of Arizona State, Taha Jabir Al-Alwani of the graduate
school of Islamic and social sciences in Leesburg, Virginia, and
Barbara Stowasser of Georgetown.
But an even larger contingent—nine of those surveyed—deny that
jihad has any military meaning whatsoever. For Joe Elder, a
professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, the idea
that jihad means holy war is "a gross misinterpretation."
Rather, he says, jihad is a "religious struggle, which more
closely reflects the inner, personal struggles of the religion."
For Dell DeChant, a professor of world religions at the
University of South Florida, the word as "usually understood"
means "a struggle to be true to the will of God and not holy
war."
Concurring views have been voiced by, among others, John Kelsay
of John Carroll University, Zahid Bukhari of Georgetown, and
James Johnson of Rutgers. Roxanne Euben of Wellesley College,
the author of The Road to Kandahar: A Genealogy of Jihad in
Modern Islamist Political Thought, asserts that "For many
Muslims, jihad means to resist temptation and become a better
person." John Parcels, a professor of philosophy and religious
studies at Georgia Southern University, defines jihad as a
struggle "over the appetites and your own will." For Ned
Rinalducci, a professor of sociology at Armstrong Atlantic State
University, the goals of jihad are: "Internally, to be a good
Muslim. Externally, to create a just society." And Farid Eseck,
professor of Islamic studies at Auburn Seminary in New York
City, memorably describes jihad as "resisting apartheid or
working for women's rights."
Finally, there are those academics who focus on the concept of
jihad in the sense of "self-purification" and then proceed to
universalize it, applying it to non-Muslims as well as Muslims.
Thus, to Bruce Lawrence, a prominent professor of Islamic
studies at Duke, not only is jihad itself a highly elastic term
("being a better student, a better colleague, a better business
partner. Above all, to control one's anger"), but non-Muslims
should also "cultivate . . . a civil virtue known as jihad":
Jihad? Yes, jihad . . . a jihad
that would be a genuine struggle against our own myopia and
neglect as much as it is against outside others who condemn or
hate us for what we do, not for what we are. . . . For us
Americans, the greater jihad would mean that we must review
U.S. domestic and foreign policies in a world that currently
exhibits little signs of promoting justice for all.
Here we find ourselves returned to
the sentiments expressed by the Harvard commencement speaker,
who sought to convince his audience that jihad is something all
Americans should admire.
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
Atat?rk), 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."
ISLAMISTS SEEKING to advance their agenda within Western,
non-Muslim environments—for example, as lobbyists in Washington,
D.C.—cannot frankly divulge their views and still remain players
in the political game. So as not to arouse fears and so as not
to isolate themselves, these individuals and organizations
usually cloak their true outlook in moderate language, at least
when addressing the non-Muslim public. When referring to jihad,
they adopt the terminology of reformists, presenting warfare as
decidedly secondary to the goal of inner struggle and social
betterment. Thus, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),
the most aggressive and prominent Islamist group in the United
States, insists that jihad "does not mean ‘holy war'" but rather
is a "broad Islamic concept that includes struggle against evil
inclinations within oneself, struggle to improve the quality of
life in society, struggle in the battlefield for self-defense
(e.g., having a standing army for national defense), or fighting
against tyranny or oppression."
This sort of talk is pure disinformation, reminiscent of the
language of Soviet front groups in decades past. A dramatic
example of it was on offer at the trial of John Walker Lindh,
the Marin County teenager who went off to wage jihad on behalf
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. At his sentencing in early
October, Lindh told the court that, in common with "mainstream
Muslims around the world," he himself understood jihad as a
variety of activities ranging "from striving to overcome one's
own personal faults, to speaking out for the truth in adverse
circumstances, to military action in defense of justice."
That a jihadist caught in the act of offensive armed warfare
should unashamedly proffer so mealy-mouthed a definition of his
actions may seem extraordinary. But it is perfectly in tune with
the explaining-away of jihad promoted by academic specialists,
as well as by Islamist organizations engaging in public
relations. 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.
Among today's academic specialists who have undertaken to
sanitize this key Islamic concept, many are no doubt acting out
of the impulses of political correctness and the
multiculturalist urge to protect a non-Western civilization from
criticism by making it appear just like our own. As for
Islamists among those academics, at least some have a different
purpose: like CAIR and other, similar organizations, they are
endeavoring to camouflage a threatening concept by rendering it
in terms acceptable within university discourse. Non-Muslim
colleagues who play along with this deception may be seen as
having effectively assumed the role of dhimmi, the
Islamic term for a Christian or Jew living under Muslim rule who
is tolerated so long as he bends the knee and accepts Islam's
superiority.
As I can attest, one who dares to dissent and utter the truth on
the matter of jihad falls under enormous censure—and not just in
universities. In June of this year, in a debate with an Islamist
on ABC's Nightline, I stated: "The fact is, historically
speaking—I speak as a historian—jihad has meant expanding the
realm of Islam through armed warfare." More recently, on a PBS
Lehrer NewsHour program about alleged discrimination
against Muslims in the United States, a clip was shown of a
role-playing seminar, conducted by the Muslim Public Affairs
Council, in which Muslim "activists" were practicing how to deal
with "hostile" critics. As part of this exercise, my image was
shown to the seminar as I spoke my sentence from the
Nightline debate. The comment on this scene by the show's
PBS narrator ran as follows: "Muslim activists have been
troubled by critics who have publicly condemned Islam as a
violent and evil religion." We have thus reached a point where
merely to state a well-known fact about Islam earns one the
status of a hostile bigot on a prestigious and publicly funded
television show.
AMERICANS STRUGGLING to make sense of the war declared on them
in the name of jihad, whether they are policymakers,
journalists, or citizens, have every reason to be deeply
confused as to who their enemy is and what his goals are. Even
people who think they know that jihad means holy war are
susceptible to the combined efforts of scholars and Islamists
brandishing notions like "resisting apartheid or working for
women's rights." The result is to becloud reality, obstructing
the possibility of achieving a clear, honest understanding of
what and whom we are fighting, and why.
It is for this reason that the nearly universal falsification of
jihad on the part of American academic scholars is an issue of
far-reaching consequence. It should be a matter of urgent
concern not only to anyone connected with or directly affected
by university life—other faculty members, administrators,
alumni, state and federal representatives, parents of students,
students themselves—but to us all.
* To see what the public is told, I looked at op-ed pieces,
quotations in newspaper articles, and interviews on television
rather than at articles in learned journals.
* The following analysis relies on Douglas Streusand, "What Does
Jihad Mean?," Middle East Quarterly, September 1997.
Daniel
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