The Islam in Islamic Terrorism The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by Ibn Warraq
The Islam in Islamic Terrorism The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by Ibn Warraq
The Islam in Islamic Terrorism The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by Ibn Warraq
IN
ISLAMIC TERRORISM
The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas,
and Ideology
IBN WARRAQ
Copyright © Ibn Warraq, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic
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There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern
Europe relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth
about their history, their culture, and their predicament. Today it is those
who told the truth, not those who concealed or denied it, who are respected
and welcomed in these countries. …
Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not
to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under
a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these
matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of
course, competently. Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to
use that freedom for those who do not possess it. We live in a time when
great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record
of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments,
religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind
are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would
like their followers to believe that it was. All this is very dangerous indeed,
to ourselves and to others, however we may define otherness-dangerous to
our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling
to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to
face the future.
—Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West
To
Peter
A Civilizing Influence.
Preface and Acknowledgements
THE PRESENT WORK was originally 165,000 words. I have cut it down by
a third, as I was advised by many friends that a shorter book is always
better than a longer one. It seems the general, educated public no longer
reads long books, and publishers are reluctant to take on weighty, daunting
tomes. I should have liked to have included a much longer section on India.
I shall perhaps post the long version on my website in a year or two.
All my Koranic citations are given in the following manner; for example,
the citation “Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 256” refers to Sura 2, called al-
Baqara in Arabic, which means the Cow, and the final figure “256” is
number of the verse. However, when I have to a give a long list of suras
from the Koran, my system becomes rather clumsy. For example, I give the
following Koranic references in footnote 167 below: Q2:216; Q2:221;
Q3:28; Q3:85; Q4:101; Q4:144; Q8:39; Q9:14, 17, 23, 28, 29, 36, 39, 41,
73, 111, 123; Q25:52. Imagine how lengthy and cumbersome that would be
if here I were to insist on keeping the following schema: “Q2. al-Baqara,
The Cow, 216”; and so on.
Originally, I had planned to thank everyone who has shown me any
kindness over the last few years. But it all became rather complicated. First,
the list became absurdly long, and while awaiting permission to publish
their names, I kept remembering ever more people I had forgotten to
mention. There is always the possibility I have missed someone. Second, I
am not at all sure that I am doing the people I mention any favors, since,
alas, Ibn Warraq remains “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I should not
like to embroil anyone not directly involved in the book’s production in any
controversy that may ensue on publication of a work critical of Islam.
Therefore, I shall only name those who have helped me directly with the
book, and whose permission I have received to do so.
It gives me great pleasure to single out my anonymous editor, who, with
her professionalism and patience, did a remarkable job on the original,
unwieldy manuscript, and made it presentable. I am beholden to Rebecca
Bynum, who took on the onerous task of publishing my work though she
was already busy with all her political commitments. Rebecca further
meticulously edited the work, and got it ready to send to the printer in
record time.
Finally, I should like to thank Nancy and Tom Klingenstein for their
friendship, kindness, and support which made all my research possible.
It is no empty formality to insist that I alone am responsible for the
opinions voiced in the present work.
INTRODUCTION
Consider the following claims:
1. Marc Sageman, a “government counterterrorism consultant,”
asserts that terrorism is not “the result of the beliefs and perceptions
held by the terrorists.”1
2. “The idea of the sacred Koran has existed for 1400 years, give or
take, [but] we have seen Islamic terrorism only over the past 40 or so.
Clearly, the Koran is not the issue.”2
I BELIEVE THAT both of these views are wrong.
To understand the behavior of Islamic terrorists, to make sense of their
motives, we must take their beliefs seriously. The acts of ISIS or the Taliban
or any other jihādist group are not random acts of violence by a mob of
psychopathic, sexually frustrated, impoverished vandals, but carefully and
strategically planned operations that are part of a long campaign by
educated, affluent Muslims who wish to bring about the establishment of an
Islamic state based on the Shari‘a—the Islamic Holy Law, derived from the
Koran, that is the very word of God, and from the Sunna of the Prophet and
the Traditions (ahādīth, pl. of hadīth), which are the sayings and doings of
Muhammad and his companions.
Nor has Islamic terrorism emerged, ex nihilo, in the “past 40 or so”
years. From its foundation in the seventh century, violent movements have
arisen seeking to revive true Islam, which its members felt had been
neglected in Muslim societies, who were not living up to the ideals of the
earliest Muslims. Groups such as the seventh-century Azraqites sought to
revive forgotten beliefs and rituals and to cleanse the body of Islam of the
corrupt practices that had tarnished the pristine Muslim religion. Today,
Deobandi extremists, for example, can only be understood against
developments within Islam during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
in particular the philosophy of Shah Wali Allah, who died in 1762.
What of the religious violence in ninth- and early tenth-century Baghdad
associated with such ideologues as Sahl ibn Salāma, and Barbahārī, and
their rejection of innovations (bid‘a); followed by more religious violence
in Baghdad between 991 CE and 1092 CE? The violent Qādīzādeli
Movement in seventeenth-century Istanbul may well have influenced the
movement launched by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb in Arabia in the eighteenth
century, which in turn has influenced almost every modern terrorist
movement. Wahhābi extremism spread as far as India and we are still
feeling its effects, far beyond Arabia, to this day.
As Barbara Metcalf, professor emerita of history at the University of
California, Davis, has noted, when faced with the decline of their culture,
Muslims “drew on their own traditions for interpretations and patterns of
action.”3 Extremists like the Deobandi in India are drawing upon their own
tradition and their own history of Islamic activism that reaches back to the
foundation of Islam. Similarly, all the other modern Islamist ideologues
from Hasan al-Banna to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini examined in this
book, draw their inspiration from Islamic traditions, the canonical texts,
Islamic history, and seminal Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyya (also
studied in the present work) to justify their political actions and activism,
which often end in violence.
Madeline C. Zilfi, who specializes in the Middle Eastern and Islamic
history of the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire, writes of the Qādīzādeli
Movement (see chapter 11), “The issues that shaped religious discourse in
seventeenth-century Istanbul indeed echoed those that had arisen in earlier
centuries.”4 But she also points out:
It is my contention that the fate of the ilmiye [the Ottoman religious
institution] between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, while
reflecting concerns similar to those of its secular counterparts, was
uniquely shaped by ideological conflict within the body of Ottoman
religious. In this regard, it is appropriate to focus on the “high” versus
“folk religion” features of such conflict. This, like ‘ulama’-state
tensions, is endemic to Islamic history.5
Again, one cannot escape one’s past; these concerns recur in surprisingly
similar forms.
In her important 1988 work, The Politics of Piety, Zilfi writes of the
fundamentalist preacher Kadizade: “His views, which he had made plain
countless times before, trumpeted the fundamentalist ethic, the drive to rid
Islam of beliefs and practices that had accumulated since the era of the
Prophet and the original Islamic community at Medina.”6 Zilfi continues:
The newly aroused tensions between innovation and fundamentalism
in large part determined the character of religious politics in the
seventeenth century. Constraints and austerity on the one hand and
innovation and license on the other are a recurring point counterpoint
in Islam. The appeal of the fundamentalist ethic bears on the
relationship of the Islamic community to its own past, to the austerity
and righteousness of the epoch of the Prophet Muhammad and the
patriarchs.7
Thus the fundamentalists’ acts must be referred back to Islam’s past.
One can argue that the dialectic between innovation and fundamental,
“orthodox” Islam is centuries old. As Zilfi contends:
The reason Islamic fundamentalists receive such enthusiastic
endorsement in the Islamic community lies in that community’s
attitude to its own romanticized past, perceived as a period of
righteousness. Ever since the epoch of the Prophet and his noble
companions, there has been a gradual distancing, it was felt, from its
ideals. Since all human activity is seen as a sacred matter, any change
in behavior, manners or dress, is seen as an unacceptable innovation
that represents a falling away from the norms established by the
Prophet and his companions. As a tradition (hadith) reminds us, every
innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to
hell.8
As the reader will learn in the pages of this book, there is a seamless path
from the acts of the Khārijites in the seventh century, passing, en route, the
violent religious riots in ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century Baghdad,
fifteenth- and seventeenth-century Istanbul, eighteenth-century Najd
(Arabia), and the nineteenth-century Wahhābis of India known as the
Hindustanee Fanatics, to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the modern jihādists.
Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton
University, writing in 1993 with his customary elegance, also refers to
Islam’s past to underline its relevance today:
No one, least of all the Islamic fundamentalists themselves, will
dispute that their creed and political program are not compatible with
liberal democracy. But Islamic fundamentalism is just one stream
among many. In the fourteen centuries that have passed since the
mission of the Prophet, there have been several such movements—
fanatical, intolerant, aggressive, and violent. Led by charismatic
religious figures from outside the establishment, they have usually
begun by denouncing the perversion of the faith and the corruption of
society by the false and evil Muslim rulers and leaders of their time.
Sometimes these movements have been halted and suppressed by the
ruling establishment. At other times they have gained power and used
it to wage holy war, first at home, against those whom they saw as
backsliders and apostates, and then abroad against the other enemies
of the true faith. In time these regimes have been either ousted or, if
they have survived, transformed—usually in a fairly short period—
into something not noticeably better, and in some ways rather worse,
than the old establishments that they had overthrown. Something of
this kind is already visibly happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran.9
Thus, fundamentalist movements have been endemic in Islamic history, and
modern jihādists are constantly drawing upon their Islamic tradition to
legitimate, morally and culturally, their acts and programs.
One such movement was that of the Isma’ilis, who emerged from among
the extremist Shi‘a in the first half of the eighth century. The first of many
assassinations for which the Isma’ilis were later renowned occurred on
October 16, 1092. A powerful vizier in the Seljuq empire, Nizam al-Mulk,
was the target. Our source, Rashid al-Din (ca.1247–1318), a Persian
historian in Ilkhanate-ruled Iran (during the Mongolian period), writes that
when Hasan-i Sabbah asked who would rid this state of the evil of Nizam
al-Mulk, “a man called Bu Tahir Arrani laid the hand of acceptance on his
breast, and, following the path of error by which he hoped to attain the bliss
of the world-to-come…struck [Nizam al-Mulk] with a knife, and by that
blow he suffered martyrdom.”10
As Lewis writes in The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967), “It
was the first of a long series of such attacks which, in a calculated war of
terror brought sudden death to sovereigns, princes, generals, governors, and
even divines who had condemned Ismaili doctrines and authorized the
suppression of those who professed them” (emphasis added).11 For the
Isma’ilis, the assassins were heroic warriors fighting the enemies of the
imam (Muslim ruler), ready to give their lives killing oppressors, thereby
manifesting their loyalty, faith, and selflessness. The assassins “earned
immediate and eternal bliss.”12
In sending out their assassins to kill the unrighteous, the Isma’ilis were
able to draw upon an old, and perhaps minor, Islamic tradition which
nonetheless found favor within dissident and extremist sects.
“The ancient ideal of tyrannicide,” Lewis explains, “the religious
obligation to rid the world of an unrighteous ruler,”
certainly contributed to the practice of assassination, as adopted and
applied by the Ismailis. But there was more to it than that. The killing
by the Assassin of his victim was not only an act of piety; it also had
a ritual, almost a sacramental quality. It is significant that in all their
murders, in both Persia and Syria, the Assassins always used a
dagger; never poison, never missiles, though there must have been
occasions when these would have been easier and safer. The Assassin
is almost always caught, and usually indeed makes no attempt to
escape; there is even a suggestion that to survive a mission was
shameful.”13
Lewis, it must be remembered, calls the Assassins “the first terrorists.”14
He quotes an Isma’ili poet: “Brothers, when the time of triumph comes,
with good fortune from both worlds as our companion, then one single
warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he owns more
than a hundred thousand horsemen.”15
And for a campaign of terror to be sustained, two things were required:
organization and ideology. “There had to be an organization capable both of
launching the attack and surviving the inevitable counter-blow; there had to
be a system of belief—which in that time and place could only be a religion
—to inspire and sustain the attackers to the point of death,” writes Lewis.16
The Isma’ili religion, “with its memories of passion and martyrdom, its
promise of divine and human fulfilment, was a cause that gave dignity and
courage to those that embraced it, and inspired a devotion unsurpassed in
human history.”17
Hasan-i Sabbah has inspired many contemporary Islamic
fundamentalists: he and his Assassins are regarded as “heroes of Islam,”
attracting more disciples than ever.18
***
The desire not to offend Muslims, the wish not to be considered
“Islamophobic,” and the long American tradition of not wanting to question
the religion of fellow citizens have made any criticism of Islam difficult.
This strategy of turning a blind eye to the obvious Islamic component in
Islamic terrorism has been taken to absurd and dangerous lengths.
The centrality of religion in the Islamic world is something that Western
liberals fail to understand or take seriously. Since most liberal are, in this
postmodern world, agnostic, atheists, or simply indifferent to religion, they
have trouble understanding that Muslims really do take the Koran literally
as the word of God, and really do believe that Muhammad, their Prophet,
received God’s message through angels or occasionally directly. As I write
in chapter 4, in the section entitled “Koran”:
The Koran is considered a revelation from God, ipsissima verba, the
very words of God. The Koran is understood, not in an allegorical,
analogical, metaphorical, or Pickwickian sense, but in a literal sense
to be the word of God, and to be obeyed literally. It is a practical
manual. Muslims use the Koran as guide to conduct, both private and
public. The Koran gives details of the moral and legal duties of
believers; it is the basis of their religious dogma, beliefs, ritual, and
one of the sources of their law.
To understand how the doctrines of Islam motivate and direct Islamic
terrorism, one must take the history of Islamic terrorism back to the Muslim
conquests during the first years of Islam. In their rationale, the conquests in
the Sind (India), Iraq, and Iran in the early eighth century bear a close
resemblance to the wars and agenda of modern jihādists; they all depend
upon the religious duty of carrying out a jihād in the name of and for the
cause of God, and to establish Islam. The other central doctrine of Islam
with profound implications for Islamic activism—the doctrine or principle
of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong—has seldom been discussed.
Jihād can be seen as a special case of this principle in action.
1 Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihād: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 22.
2 Anonymous, letter to author, July 2014.
3 Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 3.
4 Madeline C. Zilfi, “The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45, no. 4 (1986): 251–52.
5 Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800)
(Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988), 14.
6 Ibid., 134.
7 Ibid.
8 Zilfi, “Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism,” 253.
9 Bernard Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” Atlantic (February 1993),
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/02/islam-and-liberal-democracy/308509/.
10 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Hasan-i Sabbāh.”
11 Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd,
1967; New York: Basic Books, 2003), 47.
12 Ibid., 48.
13 Ibid.,127.
14 Ibid.,129-30.
15 Ibid.,130.
16 Ibid.,131.
17 Ibid.,131.
18 Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (London: Sphere Books, 1987),
34–35.
1- Root Cause Fallacy
IN THE WAKE of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, many
analysts, journalists, and pundits decided, without much thought, that the
United States was targeted because of its foreign policy. Others opined, just
as dogmatically, that we had to dig out the root causes, which were
essentially socioeconomic, with poverty as the favorite explanation. Others
followed with their own preferred explanations, which ranged from the
Arab-Israeli conflict; lack of education of the jihādists, who, it is claimed,
had absolutely no knowledge of Islam; sexual deprivation and frustration, to
the Crusades and Britney Spears, that is Western decadence; and, rather
fatuously, global warming (strange how global warming seems to goad only
Muslims to acts of terrorism).
I argue below that neither poverty, nor the lack education of the
terrorists, nor the Israel-Arab conflict, nor the foreign policy of the United
States, nor Western imperialism, nor the Crusades provide an adequate
explanation for Islamic terrorism.
Islamic Terrorism: Not Caused by Poverty or Lack of Knowledge
of Islam
The most common explanation for Islamic terrorism is the lack of
economic opportunities for the members of the various terrorists groups, in
other words, poverty. The second most frequent claim is that all the
terrorists are totally ignorant of the tenets of Islam and have no knowledge
of, no education in, the contents of the Koran. The thought behind the latter
claim is that the terrorists are not justified in invoking Islamic scripture—if
they had any real knowledge of Islam they would not commit these acts of
terror in its name.
We begin with a study conducted between 1977 and 1979 under the
leadership of an Egyptian sociologist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, of two militant
Egyptian Islamic groups: Al-Takfir wa-l-Hijra (incorrectly translated as
“Repentance and Holy Flight,” or RHF) and Al-Fanniya al-‘Askariya
(“Technical Military Academy,” or MA). I start with this study because
Ibrahim is a serious Egyptian scholar keenly aware of the cultural nuances
of an Islamic country not available to outsiders, which gives his conclusions
more authenticity and weight, and because his study is the first of its kind,
appearing long before Western scholars came on the scene in the wake of
the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Furthermore, Ibrahim addresses both the question
of poverty and the level of education of various members of the terrorist
organizations in general, and the depth of their knowledge of Islam in
particular.
In 1977, “demanding the release of RHF members being detained by the
government,” RHF kidnapped a former cabinet minister “and then carried
out their threat to kill [him] when the release did not materialize.
Crackdowns and shootouts resulted in scores of dead and wounded around
the country.”1 Three years earlier MA had “attempted to stage a coup
d’état.” That plot “was foiled while in process but only after dozens had
been killed and wounded.”2 Although the two leaders of both groups had
been executed, many of their second-echelon leaders were still in prison. At
first distrustful, the jailed militants ultimately decided that Ibrahim’s team
of researchers “seemed honest and credible enough [to allow the team] to
spend approximately four hundred hours interviewing them over a two-year
period,” amounting to “more than ten hours per person for the thirty-three
militants” interviewed.3
MA, RHF, and Education
I shall begin with a word about the similarities between the leaders of the
militant Egyptian Islamic groups under discussion. MA began under the
leadership of Salih Siriya, who turns out to be “a modern, educated man
with a Ph.D. in science education”:
A Palestinian by birth and in his mid-thirties, he had been a member
of the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Jordan (known as the Islamic
Liberation Party, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami). After the defeat of 1967 he
intermittently joined various Palestinian organizations, tried to
cooperate with various Arab regimes that claimed to be revolutionary
(Libya and Iraq, for example), spent brief periods in jail, and finally
settled in Egypt in 1971 and joined one of the specialized agencies of
the Arab League in Cairo. It was from that vantage point that he
began to attract the attention of some religious students. Underground
cells, called usar (families) by the group, began to form in Cairo and
Alexandria.”4
Also in his thirties and educated in Cairo, with a B.S. in agricultural
science, RHF founder Shukri Mustafa “had been arrested in 1965, tried, and
jailed for a few years on charges of being a member of the Brotherhood.”5
Both Siriya and Mustafa were seen by rank and file members of their
groups as “extremely eloquent, knowledgeable about religion, well-versed
in the Quran and Hadith, and highly understanding of national, regional,
and international affairs. Both were perceived as virtuous, courageous,
fearless of death, and even eager for martyrdom (istishhad).”6 Mustafa in
particular was considered by RHF members to be “an authority on matters
of doctrinal theology, Islamic jurisprudence, worship, and Islamic social
transaction.”7
Ordinary Muslims
Now we come to the ordinary members themselves. As Ibrahim notes,
“the class affiliation of most members of these militant Islamist groups is
middle and lower-middle class,”8 whose
educational and occupational attainments…was decidedly higher than
that of their parents. All but five…were university graduates or
university students…enrolled in college at the time of their arrest. The
rest were secondary school educated. Occupationally, only…47
percent…were classifiable, the rest being students. Most of these
were professionals…employed by the government: five teachers,
three engineers, two doctors, and two agronomists. Three were self-
employed (a pharmacist, a doctor, and an accountant), and one
worked as a conductor for a bus company. Among those who were
students at the time of their arrest…six majored in engineering, four
medicine, three in agricultural science, two in pharamacy, two in
technical military science, and one in literature….[F]our of [these]
majors require very high grades in Egypt’s statewide examination of
thanawiya ‘amma:9 medicine, engineering, technical military science,
and pharmacy. These four majors accounted for fourteen out of the
eighteen students.…In other words, student members of the two
militant Islamic groups were decidedly high in both motivation and
achievement.10
Incidentally, 80 percent of the members had perfectly ordinary family
backgrounds.
Fifteen years later, Ibrahim’s findings were still considered valid, and
enthusiastically endorsed by Egyptian economist Galal A. Amin, who
called Ibrahim’s work a “pioneer study.”11 Amin wrote, “It is striking how
rare it is to find examples of religious fanatcism among either the higher or
the very lowest social strata of the Egyptian population,”12 and quoted
Albert Hourani, a much respected Arab historian and intellectual who
“reached similar conclusions in connection with the growth of the Muslim
Brothers’ movement in the late 1930s, pointing out that it was ‘spreading in
the urban population-among those in an intermediate position: craftsmen,
small tradesmen, teachers and professional men who stood outside the
charmed circle of the dominant elite.’”13
That same year the Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh observed in a
Jerusalem Post article that the claim that “Islamic terrorism in Israel, as
elsewhere, is the product of poverty, backwardness and ignorance” is
“simply nonsense. Islamic fundamentalism (a more accurate term is Islamic
revival) is not a product or by-product of poverty. Several studies have
shown that a substantial majority of Islamists and their supporters come
from the middle and upper socio-economic strata.”14
Amayreh elaborated:
In the Jordanian parliamentary elections of 1994, to cite just one
example, the Muslim Brothers won by landslide margins in such
middle-class Amman districts as Jabal Amman and Shmesani, as they
did in the poorer neighborhoods. Likewise, in the West Bank and the
rest of the occupied territories, the Islamist movement has attained
much more popularity and acceptance in towns like Hebron, Nablus,
and Ramallah than it has in rural areas and refugee camps, which
have a lower standard of living.
Moreover, successive student council elections in West Bank colleges
and universities have consistently shown that city dwellers are more
likely to vote for “Islamic blocs” than are villagers. The fact that city
dwellers, who are generally more educated and better off
economically, have consistently lent more support to Islamists refutes
the widely held assumption that Islamist popularity thrives on
economic misery.15
Poverty and the Plight of Women
Geraldine Brooks, a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal,
wrote about her experiences researching the plight of women in the Middle
East in the late 1980s.16 While in Egypt Brooks was assisted by Sahar, a
well-educated, well-connected (her father worked for an American car
company) Egyptian woman of twenty-five who wore thick make up, stiletto
heels, elaborate hairdos, and elegant dresses. “Then one morning,” Brooks
remembers, “I opened the door and faced a stranger. The elaborate curls
were gone. Wrapped away in a severe blue scarf. The make-up was
scrubbed off and her shapely dress had been replaced by a dowdy sack.
Sahar had adopted the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist….I’d had
assumed that the turn to Islam was the desperate choice of poor people
searching for heavenly solace. But Sahar…belonged somewhere near the
stratosphere of Egypt’s meticulously tiered society.”17
Asked about her decision, “Sahar mouthed the slogan of Islamic Jihād
and the Muslim Brotherhood: ‘Islam is the Answer.’” Imported ideologies
of capitalism and socialism had failed, it was time to “follow the system set
down so long ago in the Koran. If God had taken the trouble to reveal a
complete code of laws, ethics and social organization, Sahar argued, why
not follow that code?”18
As Brooks explains, “Islamic movements were on the ascendant in
almost every university in the Middle East. And the faculties in which they
were most heavily represented were the bastions of the most gifted….The
students who were hearing the Islamic call included students with the most
options…the elites of the next decade: the people who would shape their
nations’ futures.”19
Variations of the Socioeconomic Argument
Brooks’s conclusion puts into question a slightly more refined variation
of the socioeconomic argument the idea that it is a lack of economic
opportunities and means of bettering one’s position in society that is
responsible for young people turning to Islamic terrorism. Martin Kramer,
director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
at Tel Aviv University, for example, surmises that the Islamic world
contains potential members of the elite who get excluded from political
power for one reason or another. “So while they are educated and wealthy,
they have a grievance,” Kramer observes in a letter to Daniel Pipes,
historian and the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its
Middle East Quarterly, “their ambition is blocked, they cannot translate
their socio-economic assets into politcal clout. Islamism is particularly
useful to these people, in part because of its careful manipulation, it is
possible to recruit a following among the poor, who make valuable foot-
soldiers.”20 Kramer goes on to cite the “Anatolian Tigers, businessmen who
have a critical role in backing Turkey’s militant Islamic party, as an
example of this counter-elite in its purest form.”21
Does Brooks’s conclusion that even students who have the world at their
feet, who have not been rejected and yet choose to follow the radical
Islamic path, serve as a counterargument to Kramer’s conjecture that it is
those who have been rejected who comprise the majority of Islamists?
Surely Kramer’s argument cannot account for all educated recruits to the
Islamists’ cause.
In 2008, Marc Sageman, a government counterterrorism expert who had
worked with Islamic fundamentalists during the Soviet-Afghan War, and
had studied their development, wrote in Leaderless Jihād: Terror Networks
in the Twenty-First Century: “In terms of socioeconomic background of the
family of origin, the vast majority of the terrorists [in his sample of more
than 500] came from the middle class.”22 The first wave of the old guards
came from a higher socio-economic status, almost equally divided
between upper class and middle class. An example of the upper class
is of course Osama bin Laden himself, the very wealthy scion of a
construction empire who grew up with royal princes of Saudi Arabia.
A second is his deputy. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who comes from one of
the most prominent families in Egypt, with a grandfather who held
prestigious diplomatic and academic and uncle who was the founding
Secretary General of the Arab League.23
The second wave was young people mainly from the middle class.
As Pipes pointed out in 2001,
wealth does not inoculate against miltant Islam. Kuwaitis enjoy a
Western-style income, and owe their very existence to the West, yet
Islamists generally win the largest bloc of seats in parliament.…The
West Bank is more prosperous than Gaza, yet militant Islamic groups
usually enjoy more popularity in the former than the latter. Militant
Islam flourishes in Western Europe and North America, where
Muslims have an economic level higher than the national averages.
And… [i]n the United States, the difference between Islamists and
common Muslims is largely one between haves and have-nots.
Muslims have the numbers; Islamists have the dollars.24
Pipes also makes clear that “a flourishing economy does not inoculate
against radical Islam. Today’s militant Islamic movements took off in the
1970s, precisely as oil-exporting states enjoyed extraordinary growth
rates.”25
Land and Wealth: Mistaken Identifiers
In general, observes David Wurmser of the American Enterprise
Institute, Westerners attribute too many of the Arab world’s problems “to
specific material issues” such as land and wealth. This usually means a
tendency “to belittle belief and strict adherence to principle as genuine and
dismiss it as a cynical exploitation of the masses by politicians. As such,
Western observers see material issues and leaders, not the spiritual state of
the Arab world, as the heart of the problem.”26
Islamists themselves seldom invoke poverty as their principal grievance.
Here is an illuminating reply to this kind of explanation from the Ayatollah
Khomeini in an August 24, 1979, speech given in Qom: “Economics is a
matter for the donkey (khar). Our people made the revolution for Islam, not
for the Persian melon (kharboza).”27 Even more conclusive is Khomeini’s
lengthy riposte, uttered in late 1979, in which he spells out the raison d’être
of the Iranian Revolution:
This movement which from start to finish took about fifteen, sixteen
years…in which much blood was given and young people were
lost….[I]t is our belief that this was all for Islam.
I cannot, and no intelligent person can, imgine that it could be said
that we gave our blood so that melons would be less expensive, that
we gave up our young men so that houses would be less expensive….
…It is for Islam that a person can give up his life. Our saints also
gave up their lives for Islam, not for economics….[T]hat a person
would want an economic system and would sacrifice his life so that
the economic situation would be improved! This is not sensible!”28
In the preface to his translation of a work by celebrated Iranian exegete
and historian al-Tabarī’ (839–923 CE), Israeli scholar of Islamic studies
Yohanan Freidmann, echoing Khomeini, summarizes the goals of the early
Muslims as explained directly to their Persian adversaries: “Unlike the pre-
Islamic Arabs, the Muslims do not fight for worldy possessions or in order
to improve their standard of living. Their only objective is to spread the
new faith of Islam.”29
Bringing the argument to February 2015, here is how ISIS recruit Aqsa
Mahmood describes her background and motivations to journalist Beenish
Ahmed in an interview: “The media at first used to [portray] the ones
running away to join the Jihād as being unsuccessful, [and say that they]
didn’t have a future and [came] from broke [sic] down families etc. But that
is far from the truth.” Mahmood elaborates:
Most sisters I have come across have been in university studying
courses with many promising paths, with big, happy families and
friends and everything in the Dunyah [“world”] to persuade one to
stay behind and enjoy the luxury. If we had stayed behind, we could
have been blessed with it all…a relaxing and comfortable life and lots
of money….
…[W]e sacrificed all of that for the best in al-ākhira [the
“Hereafter”]. [We] were not stupid young brainwashed females[;]
we[’]ve come here to [S]yria for ALLAH alone.”30
It is true that some Islamists refer to economic circumstances, including
the poverty of their fellow Muslims, when justifying their acts of terrorism,
but they are thinking only of Islamic justice. Their priority is the
establishment of an Islamic state where God-made laws replace man-made
laws. If they were truly thinking first and foremost of ameliorating the
economic situation of all Muslims, the Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian
militant extremist Islamist group linked to al-Qaeda, for example, would
not have bombed the tourist districts of Kuta in Bali in October 2002,
killing 202 people. The Islamic terrorists not only killed thirty-eight
Indonesians, but also slowed the tourist trade on which so many locals
depended; tourism accounts for five percent of Indonesia’s Gross Domestic
Product. In other words, Islamic terrorism was the cause, not the result, of
poverty.
A similar conclusion can be drawn regarding the Luxor Massacre of
fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptian nationals on November 17, 1997. This
massacre, probably instigated by the Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian
Sunni Islamist group designated as a terrorist organization by the United
States, was also directly responsible for empty hotel rooms and unemployed
tourist guides. A great many Egyptians depend upon the tourist industry for
their livelihoods; 700,000 people work in travel agencies and hotels, and
many times that number rely indirectly on tourism (as many as 1.5 million
in 2014).31 “We are facing the biggest crisis in the history of tourism in
Egypt,” Tourism Minister Mamdou el-Beltagi reported to the government
daily Al-Ahram. “It would be naive to say that this grisly crime will not
have a major negative impact.”32 There is some evidence to suggest that the
Islamic terrorists responsible for the murders were deliberately targeting the
Egyptian economy, hoping to provoke the government to take repressive
measures, which in turn would have strengthened support for
antigovernment forces.33 Islamic terrorist attacks have had a similarly
devastating effect on the economies of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Aden, and
Yemen.34
Nor by Israeli-Arab Conflict
The existence of Israel is not the cause of Islamic terrorism.
In Terrorism: How the West Can Win (an underrated book he edited and
contributed to), Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes clear
that Islamic terrorism is “not a sporadic phenomenon born of social misery
and frustration.”35 We must avoid simplistic analyses of Islamic terrorism
as “a result of certain ‘root causes,’ such as poverty, political oppression,
denial of national aspirations, etc.,” Netanyahu warns, for “terrorism is not
an automatic result of anything. It is…an evil choice.” He continues: “No
resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe conducted or condoned
terrorist attacks against German civilians, attacking military and
government targets instead. But today’s terrorists need the flimsiest pretexts
to perpetrate their crimes, targeting the innocent with particular relish.”36
Thus,
the root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances, but in a disposition
toward unbridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which
asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed
demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions. In this context, the
observation that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists is more than a
tautology.37
And so we come to Israel and the Arabs. Writing in 1986, Netanyahu
sets the record straight:
It is argued that the absence of progress toward a peaceful settlement
between Arabs and Israelis induces terrorism. The truth is exactly the
reverse. Arab terrorism is the not the result of breakdowns of peace
negotiations; it is, more than any other factor, the cause of such
breakdowns. (Arab leaders showing the slightest inclination toward
peaceful coexistence risk immediate assassination by the terrorists.)38
What about American support for Israel? According to Netanyahu,
The antagonism of Islamic and Arab radicalism to the West…is
sometimes explained as deriving from American support for Israel.
But the hostility to the West preceded the creation of Israel by
centuries, and much of the terrorists’ animus is directed against
targets and issues that have nothing to do with Israel…. Middle
Eastern radicals…hated Israel from its inception because it is an
organic part of the West. That is, because Israel represents for them
precisely the incarnation of those very traditions and values, formeost
of which is democracy, which they hate and fear.”39 (emphasis in
original)
As early as 1995, Netanyahu had warned: “It is impossible to understand
just how inimical—and how deadly—to the United States and to Europe
this rising tide of militant Islam is without taking a look at the roots of
Arab-Islamic hatred of the West. The enmity toward the West goes back
many centuries.…And this would be the case even if Israel had never been
born.”40 Or as Wagdi Ghuniem, a militant Islamic cleric from Egypt, put it:
“[S]uppose the Jews said ‘Palestine—you [Muslims] can take it.’ Would it
then be ok?…No! The problem is belief, it is not a problem of land.”41
In September 2001 Christopher Hitchens, journalist and political analyst,
wrote in The Nation: “Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from
Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a
moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihād
make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on
principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism.”42
In 2012, Yoram Ettinger, Israel’s consul general in Houston, Texas from
1985 to 1988 and minister for congressional affairs—with the rank of
ambassador —at Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C. from 1989 to 1992,
wrote:
The most-frequently mentioned (supposed) cause of anti-U.S. Islamic
terrorism is U.S. support of Israel and U.S. policy toward the
Palestinians. Nevertheless, 9/11 was planned while former U.S.
President Bill Clinton and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered
the Palestinians the entire store. The Oct. 12, 2000 murder of 17
sailors on the USS Cole happened when Israel and the U.S. offered
unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians at Camp David. The
Aug. 27, 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
(257 murdered and more than 4,000 injured) took place while Clinton
was brutally pressuring then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The murders of 19 U.S. soldiers in Riyadh and the Khobar Towers, in
1995 and 1996, were carried out while then-interim Prime Minister
Shimon Peres implemented unprecedented concessions for the
Palestinians. The February 1993 World Trade Center bombing (six
murdered and more than 1,000 injured) transpired while Israel
conducted the pre-Oslo talks with the PLO. The Dec. 21, 1988 Pan
Am-103 terrorist attack (270 murdered) took place a few months
following the groundbreaking recognition of the PLO by the U.S. The
1983 murder of 300 Marines and 58 French soldiers in car bombings
at the U.S. Embassy and Marines base, and at the French military
headquarters in Beirut, all occurred while the U.S. military confronted
Israeli tanks in Lebanon and the U.S. administration blasted Israel for
its war against the PLO.43
The passing of time and further reflection has not altered this conclusion:
Islamic terrorism far predates the existence of Israel.
Rival Ideologies
Islamic terrorists see the United States as preaching and practising a rival
ideology: “Islamic rogue regimes view the U.S. as their key moral and
strategic adversary. U.S.-style freedom of religion, expression, markets and
association constitute a lethal threat to all Islamic regimes.”44 Osama bin
Laden confirmed this insight in an interview about the September 11, 2001,
World Trade Center atrocity: “The immense materialistic towers, which
preach Freedom, and Human Rights, and Equality, were destroyed.”45 He
did not call the towers a symbol of capitalism, but of “freedom, human
rights and equality”—and it’s these three fundamental Western principles
that are the targets of the Islamic terrorists.
Barry Rubin, the late director of the Global Research in International
Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, Israel, also makes
some valid observations regarding U.S. support for Israel and Islamic anti-
Americanism in his masterly 2001 essay, “The Truth about U.S. Middle
East Policy”:
It is strange that the height of anti-Americanism in the Middle East
came at the height of U.S. proposals to support an independent
Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem….The attempt to
reduce all of U.S. Middle East policy to the phrase “support for
Israel”—and then misrepresent what that stance acutally entailed—
was really an attempt to exploit xenophobia as a tool justifying radical
groups and dictatorial regimes. The real complaint was that the
United States helped Israel survive, then sought a diplomatic solution
that would undermine both the case for Islamist revolution and the
justification for the regimes’ dictatorial rule.46
Neither Ettinger nor Rubin, however, mention two other fundamental
elements of Islamic terrorist ideology that, in themselves, are enough to
explain this hostility to Israel and all those who come to her succour. First,
virulent antisemitism is central to all Islamic doctrine. As Andrew Bostom
points out in his definitive analysis and anthology, The Legacy of Islamic
Antisemitism (2008), “The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines
and history is required to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim
Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam.”47
Antisemitism
Islamic antisemitism is not a modern creed derived from Nazism but is
simply confirmed by it. Modern Islamic terrorists justify this hatred by
copious references to the Koran, the biography of Muhammad, the sunna
and hadīth —in other words all the scriptures and revered texts of Islam.
Jews cannot be trusted, they are the permanent enemies of Muslims, and
must be subjugated, made to pay a tax, or killed, and fought until the Day of
Judgment. In the hadīth, according to Sahīh al-Bukhārī, “The Day of
Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the
Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees
will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill
him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees
of the Jews.”48 (We shall return to this theme when examining the doctrines
of the Islamic terrorists.)
The second Islamic principle concerning Jews and Israel is well-
described by Jan Willem van der Hoeven, director of the International
Christian Zionist Center in Jerusalem: “Once the forces of Islam conquer a
land or territory, it is to remain under Islamic dominion forever, and it is a
mortal affront to the supremacy of Islam when such territories would ever
be lost to the dominion of Islam and revert to previous—infidel—
ownership as was the case in Palestine. It was a Muslim controlled territory
(under the Muslim Turks and later the Muslim Arabs) and reverted by the
decree of the U.N. resolution back to its previous owners: the Jews.”49
Article 11 of the August 18, 1988, Covenant of the Islamic Resistance
Movement (the Hamas Covenant) makes clear the doctrinal issue by using
waqf, a term, according to The Dictionary of Islam, that “in the language of
the law signifies the appropriation or dedication of property to charitable
uses and the service of God. An endowment. The object of such an
endowment or appropriation must be of perpetual nature, and such property
or land cannot be sold or transferred.”50 Here is an essential excerpt from
Article 11 of the Hamas Covenant:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine
is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until
Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or
any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country
nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings
and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they
Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an
Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment
Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent
Muslim generations till Judgment Day?
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia
(law) and the same goes for any land the Muslims have conquered by
force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Muslims
consecrated these lands to Muslim generations till the Day of
Judgment.51
Many Islamists claim that large parts of Europe that were once conquered
by Muslims still belong to them. Hasan al-Banna, founder of Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood, argued that “Andalusia [the Muslim name for Spain],
Sicily, the Balkans, south Italy, and the Roman sea islands were all Islamic
lands that have to be restored to the homeland of Islam.…[I]t is our right to
restore the Islamic Empire its glory.”52 Of course, in a culture imbued with
the ethics of shame and honor, the very existence of Israel and the loss of
the land of Palestine is a doubly shameful reminder of Islamic humiliation.
More recently Bernard Lewis is reported to have said that “the only real
solution to defeating radical Islam is to bring freedom to the Middle East.
Either ‘we free them or they destroy us,’” but as Daniel Pipes pointed out,
“There are plenty of born-free Muslims in the West who are Islamists. Take,
for example, the four 7/7 bombers in London. Freedom did nothing for
them.”53
Nor by U.S. Foreign Policy
United States foreign policy is another popular explanation for the
virulent anti-Americanism of the Islamic terrorists that is offerred as a
general cause of all terrorist acts. However, as Barry Rubin very
convincingly argues in his above-cited essay,54 U.S. foreign policy
regarding the Islamic world has been conciliatory and accommodating
rather than confrontational and antagonistic. Rubin writes:
During the 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. leaders wanted to play an
anti-imperialist role in the Middle East. They tended to oppose
continued British and French rule in the region and to voice support
for reform movements. When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in
Egypt in 1952, American policymakers welcomed his coup....In 1956,
in an unusual break in its close relationship to England and France,
the United States opposed their plot to overthrow Nasser during the
Suez crisis because it thought this action would antagonize the Arab
world and increase Soviet influence.55
Rubin goes on to argue that much of the instability of the region was caused
by the Arab states themselves:
America was dragged into crises when Muslim Iraq attacked Muslim
Iran, when Arab Muslim Iraq seized Arab Muslim Kuwait, and when
Arab Muslim but secularist Egypt threatened Arab Muslim Jordan
and Saudi Arabia. Usama bin Ladin’s anger was most provoked by
the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia starting in 1990. Yet this
action not only protected Saudi Arabia and freed Kuwait from an
Iraqi threat but was sanctioned by the Arab League. The grievance
most closely associated with bin Ladin’s turn to an anti-American
strategy and the September 11 attacks was clearly based on a U.S.
action that was pro-Arab and pro-Muslim.56
With the help of Rubin’s “The Truth about U.S. Middle East Policy,” let
us consider the many ways the United States has assisted both Muslims and
Arabs.
Palestine. When chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) Yasir Arafat was besieged in Beirut by the Israeli army in 1982, the
United States arranged for him safe passage out of Lebanon and adopted a
conciliatory approach to the PLO, turning a blind eye to terrorism by some
PLO member groups. This policy became unacceptable when the PLO
refused to denounce and renounce violence in 1990. Between 1993 and
2000, the U.S. was in effect Palestine’s patron, even forgiving Arafat’s past
acts of terrorism that killed American citizens, including U.S. diplomats.
Arafat was subsequently invited to the White House on numerous
occasions. The U.S. raised money for the Palestinian Authority (the interim
self-government body established in 1994 following the Gaza-Jericho
Agreement to govern the Gaza Strip and Areas A and B of the West Bank),
which it refrained from criticizing in public.
Several U.S. presidents made symbolic gestures of solidarity with the
Palestinian people and its leaders, as, for example, when President Bill
Clinton spoke in Gaza to the Palestinian leaders in 1998. The U.S. oversaw
negotiations that led to a peace agreement producing an independent
Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem in 2000. And when
Arafat rejected U.S. peace efforts, refusing to implement agreed upon
cease-fires, American leaders still did not criticize him or give up hope.
Despite all efforts, patience, and diplomacy on the part of the U.S., Arabs
and Muslims were jubilant when bin Ladin attacked the U.S. on September
11, claiming that Palestinians themselves had suffered because of American
policies.
Iran. The Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations all made serious
détente efforts with Iran. While it is true that America maintained some
sanctions against Iran in order to discourage Iran’s sponsoring of terrorism,
development of weapons of mass destruction, and ongoing opposition to
Arab-Israel peace efforts, American leaders constantly sought ways to end
sanctions through diplomatic compromise, never interfering in Iran’s
internal affairs.
Afghanistan and Others. Covert aid from the United States saved
Afghanistan from the Soviets in the 1980s, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from
Iraq (the First Gulf War: August 2, 1990–February 28, 1991), the Muslim
peoples of Bosnia from Bosnian Serbs (1992–1995), and Kosovo from the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of the Republics of Montenegro
and Serbia (1998–1999). While the U.S. risked American lives to help
Muslims for humanitarian reasons, bin Ladin and his apologists blamed the
United States for Muslim suffering in Bosnia and Kosovo, as elsewhere.
What mattered to bin Ladin was that Americans—infidels, in other words—
deployed troops on Saudi-Muslim soil and attacked a Muslim nation, Iraq.
Successive U.S. presidential administrations took pains to cushion
Muslim sensibilities, exonerating Islam from any responsibility for terrorist
attacks by using euphemisms and stock phrases such as “A great world
religion has been hijacked by a minority of criminals” and “Islam is a
religion of peace” when addressing these attacks in public statements.
Pakistan and Turkey. Ignoring Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism
against India, the U.S. government backed the Pakistani government. It also
backed Turkey against Greece over the Cyprus conflict, a crisis resulting
from the invasion of the island by Turkey and the eventual illegal
declaration of independence by the Turkish Cypriot assembly in 1983.
Somalia. Similarly, the U.S. intervened in Somalia to protect the Muslim
people for humanitarian reasons, sending U.S. forces to protect Muslims
suffering from anarchy, civil war, and brutal warlords, but because there
were no American interests in play, humanitarian actions were portrayed by
bin Ladin, journalists, Muslim intellectuals in the Middle East, and many
others as American imperialism and aggression against Muslims.
Iraq. When President Saddam Hussein of Iraq began to seek Arab
leadership in 1989 and repeatedly denounced the United States, U.S. policy
makers responded cautiously, in order to avoid offending Arabs, and
continued to provide Iraq with credits and other trade benefits, despite hard
evidence that the money Iraq obtained was being used illegally to buy arms.
Nonetheless the U.S. supported continued sanctions against Iraq because
Hussein refused to cooperate with United Nations inspectors. Since
Baghdad’s government reneged on its commitments to allow UN inspectors
free access to military sites these sanctions were kept in place. Iraq’s
government deliberately allowed its own people to suffer, and using that
suffering as propaganda maintained its aggressive stance toward its Arab
and Muslim neighbors. Bin Ladin and his apologists portrayed American
policy as a deliberate attempt to injure and kill Iraqi people.
The Persian Gulf. The U.S. kept its military forces out of the Persian
Gulf to avoid offending the sensibilities of the Arab and Muslim peoples
there. It entered only when requested,
first to reflag Arab oil tankers and later to intervene against Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait. Its forces never went where they were not invited
and left whenever they were asked to do so by the local states.
American forces also stayed away from Mecca and Medina to avoid
offense to Islam. Once Kuwait was liberated, the United States…
advocated the concept of the Damascus agreement, in which Egypt
and Syria would have played a primary role in protecting the Gulf. It
was the Gulf Arab states that rejected implementation of this idea.
Nevertheless, bin Ladin, other Arabs, and Iran’s government
portrayed the U.S. presence as an imperialist plot to dominate the area
and subjugate its people.
The United States rescued Egypt at the end of the 1973 war by
pressing Israel to stop advancing and by insisting on a cease-fire. The
United States became Egypt’s patron in 1980s, after the Camp David
peace agreement, providing large-scale arms supplies and other
military and financial assistance while asking little in return….[N]one
of this help gave the United States any leverage over Egyptian
policies, or even goodwill in the state-controlled Egyptian media and
in the statements of that country’s leaders. Bin Ladin and his allies,
however, portrayed Egypt as a puppet of the United States.57
Setting the Record Straight
It is important to record at least some of the ways that the United States
has not reacted to events in the Middle East, despite deliberate provocation
on the part of Middle Eastern regimes:58
• The United States has not attacked Iran despite the overwhelming
evidence that Iran has sponsored terrorist attacks on Americans—attacks
that have cost hundreds of American lives in Lebanon and Iraq. Following
the Iranian revolution of 1979, the U.S. demanded economic sanctions to
change specific policies. They were expanded in 1995 to include firms
dealing with the Iranian government. In 1979 Iran was in violation of all
international laws when it took American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran—strictly speaking an act of war—but President Carter sought
diplomatic means to resolve the situation.
• Similarly, when Syria was shown to have participated in anti-American
terrorism, the United States did not coerce or seek to subvert it. The U.S.
tried to win over Syria during the First Gulf War, which was a consequence
of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and in the subsequent peace
process. Even when Syria walked out, the U.S. did not apply pressure, but
sought diplomatic ways to gain Syria’s cooperation.
• Nor did the United States seek to destroy Arafat and the PLO even
when they were known to have been responsible for anti-American
terrorism and to have aligned with the USSR. The U.S. refrained from
criticizing the PLO when they broke agreements and cease-fires promised
in 2000 and 2001.
• The U.S. did not threaten or punish when Egypt purchased missiles
from North Korea in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and refused to
cooperate with the War on Terror in 2001.
• Nor did the United States retaliate when Jordan supported Iraq during
the First Gulf War. Jordan continues to receive American aid—amounting
to $1,211,821,880 in 2013 and in $772,939,966 in 2014.59
• “When the U.S. companies’ holdings were nationalized and oil prices
were raised steeply, the United States did not try to overthrow regimes or
force or threaten them to lower prices.”60
• The U.S. “did not take advantage of the USSR’s disappearance as a
superpower to impose anything on anybody and certainly not to establish
American domination in the region. Despite having won the Cold War, the
United States did not seek to take revenge on regimes that had supported
the losing side.”61
U.S. Aid
It is important as well to point out that the U.S has spent billions of
dollars in aid to the Middle East.
In 2013, Face the Facts USA, a project of George Washington
University, reported that “[o]ver the last six decades, the U.S. has invested
$299 billion in military and economic aid for Middle East and Central
Asian countries currently in turmoil. Egypt tops a list of 10 nations,
receiving $114 billion since the end of World War II. Iraq comes in second,
getting nearly $60 billion from the U.S. (over and above war costs).”62
As Rubin points out, the United States bent over backwards to maintain
good relations with Muslims and Arabs even after several thousand
Americans were murdered in the terrorist attacks of 9/11: “U.S. leaders
spent much of their time urging that there be no retaliation against Muslims
or Arabs in the United States. American policy makers repeated at every
opportunity that they did not see Islam as the enemy and tried everything
possible to gain Arab and Muslim support or sympathy for the U.S.
effort.”63
Both the Bush and Obama administrations reiterated on every relevant
occasion that “Islam is a religion of peace, and terrorism has nothing to do
with the tenets of Islam.” Consider these quotes from President George W.
Bush on Islam and terrorism. “I believe that Islam is a great religion that
preaches peace,” Bush stated in 2007 on an Arabic speaking television
station,64 recalling language he used during remarks made to reassure
Muslims and Americans not long after 9/11 at the Islamic Center of
Washington, D.C.:
These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental
tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow
Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as
eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran,
itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who
do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to
ridicule.
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam
is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace.
They represent evil and war.65
Although the United States has handled relations with the Middle East
with political restraint and humanitarian generosity, the Middle East has
neither recognized America’s protection, nor acknowledged its
responsibility for acts of terrorism against Americans—and for squandering
billions in American aid. As Rubin sums it up: “[I]f the root cause of this…
anti-Americanism” is “internal, it is dependent on those needs and forces
rather than anything the United States actually does.... Those who have
declared war on America are playing the dangerous game of exaggerating
outside menaces to justify their incompetence at home and aggressiveness
abroad. They deliberately misunderstand American policy and society,
successfully soiling them also in the eyes of others.”66
All the states of the Middle East, including Turkey and Iran, see
themselves in modern history as passive victims of Western imperialist
manipulation. This attitude and the attendant conspiracy theories with
which the Middle East is awash are a means to avoid taking responsibility
for its present lamentable state. Its anti-Western, anti-American rhetoric is a
convenient way to cover up its own failures.
The True Victims
Historically, the image of the West slowly picking the Ottoman Empire
to pieces during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and driving into
World War I to hasten its demise in order to seize its lands is nonsense. As
Efraim Karsh, professor and head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme,
King’s College, University of London, wrote,
[T]he Ottoman Empire was not a hapless victim of European
imperialism but an active participant in the great-power game; the
destruction of this empire was predominantly self-inflicted; there was
no Arab yearning for regional unity; the European powers did not
break the Middle East’s political unity but rather over-unified the
region; Britain neither misled its Arab allies nor made simultaneous
contradictory promises regarding post-war settlement in the Middle
East; and the creation of the post-Ottoman regional order was no less
of the making of the local actors than of the great powers.67
What, for example, has U.S. foreign policy to got to do with the armed
conflict between Islamist groups (such as the Islamic Armed Movement and
the more hard-line Armed Islamic Group) and security forces between 1991
and 2002 that left over 150,000 Algerians victims and more than 6,000
missing?68 As I wrote ten years ago, many of the victims of Islamic
fundamentalism are Muslim—Muslim men, women, and children, Muslim
writers, intellectuals, and journalists.69 The Algerian armed groups have
everything essential in common with all other Islamic terrorist groups, a
fact obscured by the reality that in this case the victims have been largely,
though not entirely, fellow Muslims.
Nor by Western Imperialism
It is still claimed by many analysts and experts in the West, and even by
Muslim intellectuals and Muslim states, that one of the reasons the United
States was attacked is its imperialist past. But of course, the United States
has never been an imperialist power in the Middle East. Indeed it played an
anti-imperialist role, as for example, when President Eisenhower intervened
during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Eisenhower dissuaded the European powers
from launching a military operation against Egypt, when the latter seized
and nationalized the Suez Canal in which Great Britain had heavy economic
investments.
Fifteen of the nineteen Islamic terrorists involved in the September 11,
2001, attacks on America were Saudi nationals. But Saudi Arabia has never
been colonized by any Western power. The coastal strip known as the Hijaz,
which contains the holy sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina, was, in fact, a
part of the Ottoman Empire. These holy sites were attacked and captured by
the fundamentalist and violent Islamic group, the Wahhābis in 1803 and
1804, who destroyed various shrines such as the one built over the tomb of
Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter.
The Wahhābis also massacred thousands of Shias. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,
the founder of Wahhābism, was not motivated by anticolonial animus—he
was not even aware of any Western presence in the Islamic world. He was
mainly concerned with saving Muslim souls and purifying Islam of its
impious accretions.
The British left Egypt in 1956, but Islamic acts of terrorism began in
1970s and were directed at various Egyptian governments and leaders. The
French departed Algeria in 1962, but since that date Islamic terrorists have
targeted fellow Algerians, leaving, as noted above, more than 150,000
Algerians dead. More than fifty years later, the terrorism continues, with
attacks perpetrated by such groups as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-
Murabitun, and Jund al-Khalifa on Algerian government interests in 2013,
2014, and 2015.
Putative neocolonialism through multinationals controlling the
production of oil is also inadequate as an explanation. The Arab oil-
producing countries were totally incapable of extracting the oil on their
own, and had to rely on the scientific and technological know-how and
experience of American, British, or Dutch companies. But since the
nationalization of many of these hitherto foreign companies, Arab countries
have regulated the prices themselves and have become enormously rich.70
As Tawfik Hamid, a former Egyptian Islamist, wrote, “No, colonialism
did not spark jihād. On the contrary, when Islamic nations were colonized
[by the West], Sharia- and Islamist-based crimes tended to drop
significantly. In fact, Islamic nations in many respects were more civilized
under occupation than they are now; we virtually never heard of suicide
bombings or attacks against, or kidnapping of, tourists during that
period.”71
On the other hand, Islamic imperialism destroyed thousands of churches,
synagogues, and temples in lands they captured in a most brutal fashion;
whole civilizations such as the Pre-Islamic cultures of Iran (Zoroastrians)72
and the Assyrians were exterminated.
Nor by the Crusades
Ian Richard Netton, Sharjah Professor of Islamic Studies at the
University of Exeter, summarizes the Crusades rather narrowly as “[a]
series of conflicts which took place in mediaeval times, often in Middle
Eastern soil, between Europe and the Muslim East.”73 The European
Christians were essentially trying to defend their persecuted fellow Oriental
Christians and the Christian holy places such as Jerusalem from Muslims,
who had been waging ceaseless jihād for several hundred years. The first
crusade resulted in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. But the Crusades were
also wars against all European heretics, even unorthodox Christians such as
the Cathars.
On the Crusades as an explanation for Islamic terrorism I have already
described in Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies (2013) how a
new generation of Western scholars of the Middle Ages has been trying to
put to right misconceptions that have arisen about the Crusades.74 As the
late Jonathan Riley-Smith, a historian of the Crusades and Dixie Professor
of Ecclesiastical History and Fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge,
has argued, “[M]odern Western public opinion, Arab nationalism, and Pan-
Islamism all share perceptions of crusading that have more to do with
nineteenth-century European imperialism than with actuality.”75
Muslims in particular have developed “mythistories” concerning the
putative injuries received at the hands of the Crusaders. The first point that
needs emphasizing is that the Crusades “were proclaimed not only against
Muslims, but also against pagan Wends, Balts and Lithuanians, shamanist
Mongols, Orthodox Russians and Greeks, Cathar and Hussite heretics, and
those Catholics whom the Church deemed to be its enemies.”76
Second, the Crusades were not “thoughtless explosions of barbarism.”77
Their underlying rationale was relatively sophisticated and elaborated
theologically by Christian nations threatened by Muslim invaders who had
managed to reach into the heart of Europe, central France in the eighth
century and Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
Crusades were a response to the desecration of the Christian shrines in the
Holy Land, the destruction of churches, and the general persecution of
Christians in the Near East.
A crusade, to be considered legitimate, had to fulfill strict criteria. “First,
it must not be entered into lightly or for aggrandizement, but only for a
legally sound reason, which has to be a reactive one.” It was, in other
words, waged to repel violence or injury and to impose justice on
wrongdoers. Never a war of conversion, a crusade was a rightful attempt to
recover Christian territory injuriously seized in the past. “Second, it must be
formally declared by an authority recognized as having the power to make
such a declaration. Third, it must be waged justly.”78
Crusaders were not colonialists, and the Crusades were not undertaken
for economic reasons, as many Western liberals and liberal economists have
assumed; most crusaders would have laughed at the prospect of material
gain. In fact, crusading became a financial burden as the expenses
associated with warfare increased. Crusaders were far more concerned with
saving Christendom from Islam, as well as their own souls. The role of
penance (an act of mortification or devotion to express repentance for sin,
performed voluntarily or imposed by a church official) has often been
overlooked when examining crusading thought and practice; many
crusaders believed that by enlisting in a crusade they were able to repay the
debt their sinfulness had incurred.
Nineteenth- and even early twentieth-century Europeans unashamedly
used crusader rhetoric and a tendentious reading of crusader history to
justify imperial dreams of conquest. For example, after World War I the
“French Mandate in Syria generated a wave of French historical literature,
one theme of which was that the achievements of the crusaders provided the
first chapter in a history that had culminated in modern imperialism.”79 As
we shall see, the newly emerging Arab nationalists took nineteenth-century
rhetoric seriously.
A second strand in erroneous modern interpretations of crusader history
was furnished by European romanticism, manifested, for example, in the
novels of Sir Walter Scott. As Riley-Smith summarized:
The novels [of Scott] painted a picture of crusaders who were brave
and glamorous, but also vainglorious, avaricious, childish and
boorish. Few of them were genuinely moved by religion or the
crusade ideal; most had taken the cross out of pride, greed, or
ambition. The worst of them were the brothers of the military orders,
who may have been courageous and disciplined but were also
arrogant, privileged, corrupt, voluptuous and unprincipled. An
additional theme, the cultural superiority of the Muslims, which was
only hinted at in the other novels, pervaded the The Talisman
[1825].80
Many believe that modern Muslims have inherited from their medieval
ancestors memories of crusader violence and destruction. But as Riley-
Smith writes, nothing could be further from the truth.81 In the Islamic
world, by the fourteenth century the Crusades had almost passed out of
mind. Muslims “looked back on the Crusades with indifference and
complacency. In their eyes they had been the outright winners. They had
driven the crusaders from the lands they had settled in the Levant and had
been triumphant in the Balkans, occupying far more territory in Europe than
the Western settlers had ever held in Syria and Palestine.”82
The Muslim world began to take a renewed interest in the Crusades in
the 1890s, but only through the prism of Western imperialist rhetoric and
European romantic fantasies concocted by Sir Walter Scott, who
encouraged the myth of the culturally inferior crusaders faced with
civilized, liberal, modern-looking Muslims. And from Scott the Muslims
derived the equally false idea of a continuing Western assault. Many Arab
nationalists believed “their struggle for independence to be a predominantly
Arab riposte to a crusade that was being waged against them. Since the
1970s, however, they have been challenged by a renewed and militant Pan-
Islamism, the adherents of which have globalized the Nationalist
interpretation of crusade history.”83
As a consequence, modern Islamists such as Osama bin Laden often
invoke the Crusades: “For the first time the Crusaders have managed to
achieve their historic ambitions and dreams against our Islamic umma,
gaining control over the Islamic holy places and the Holy Sanctuaries, and
hegemony over the wealth and riches of our umma,”84 and, “Ever since
God made the Arabian Peninsula flat, created desert in it and surrounded it
with seas, it has never suffered such a calamity as these Crusader hordes,
that have spread in it like locusts, consuming its wealth and destroying its
fertility.”85 The battle, according to bin Laden, is between Muslims—
people of Islam—and “the Global Crusaders.”86
The idea that Christians—hence all Westerners—continue to wage a
Crusade against Islam and Islamic civilization has taken hold of the
imagination of all Muslims, not just the Islamic terrorists. This has less to
do with historical reality than with Islamist reinterpretation of Crusader
history. It rather ingeniously helps Muslims, moderate and extremist alike,
to place the exploitation they strongly feel they have suffered historically in
a real context, and at the same time to satisfy both their feelings of
humiliation (Muslims being defeated and ruled by infidels is the ultimate
degradation) and superiority (the Muslims did, after all, drive the Crusaders
out of Islamic lands).
1 Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups: Methodological Notes and
Preliminary Findings,” in Egypt, Islam and Democracy: Critical Essays (1996; Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, 2002), 2. First published under the same title in International Journal of
Middle East Studies 12, no. 4 (December 1980): 423–53.
2 Ibid., 3.
3 Ibid., 6.
4 Ibid., 14.
5 Ibid., 14-15.
6 Ibid., 15.
7 Ibid., 16.
8 Ibid., 18.
9 Thanawiya ‘amma means “General Secondary” in Modern Standard Arabic. It refers to a series of
standardized tests in Egypt that lead to the General Secondary Education Certificate for public
secondary schools and serves as the entrance examination for Egyptian public universities. In the
context of Egypt’s education system, it refers to the general (as opposed to technical or vocational)
secondary education track, the completion exams at the end of the track, and the diploma a student
earns by passing the exams.
10 Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups,” 18–19.
11 Galal A. Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament: A Study in the Interaction of External Pressure,
Political Folly and Social Tension in Egypt, 1960–1990 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 137.
12 Ibid., 136.
13 Ibid.,137, quoting Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber and Faber,
1991), 349.
14 Khaled Amayreh, “Reality Behind the Image,” Jerusalem Post, February 24, 1995.
15 Ibid.
16 Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (1994; New York:
Anchor Books, 1996).
17 Ibid., 7-8.
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 164.
20 Martin Kramer, letter to Daniel Pipes, August 2, 2001, cited in Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam
Reaches America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), 57.
21 Ibid.
22 Sageman, Leaderless Jihād, 48.
23 Ibid., 49.
24 Pipes, Miltant Islam, 58, quoting Khalid Duran, “How CAIR Put My Life in Peril,” Middle East
Quarterly 9, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 43.
25 Ibid., 58.
26 David Wurmser, “The Rise and Fall of the Arab World,” Strategic Review 21, no. 3 (Summer
1993): 33–46; quoted in Daniel Pipes, “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?”
National Interest, no. 66 (Winter 2001/2002): 14–21.
27 Quoted in Saïd Amir Arjomand, After Khomeini: Iran under His Successors (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56.
28 Quoted in Suzanne Maloney, Iran’s Political Economy since the Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 84. Mavaz’-e Imam Khomeini, ed. Mohammad Reza Akbari
(Isfahan, Iran: Payam-i ‘Itrat, 1999), 1:243–44.
29 The Battle of a-Qadisiyya and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine, trans. Yohanan Friedmann,
vol. 12 of The History of al- Tabarī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), xvi.
30 Beenish Ahmed, “How a Teenage Girl Goes from Listening to Coldplay and Reading Harry Potter
to Joining ISIS,” Think Progress, February 24, 2015,
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/24/3626720/women-isis/.
31 Kevin Rushby, “Can Middle East Tourism Ever Recover?” Travel, Guardian, November 24, 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/nov/24/can-middle-east-tourism-ever-recover-terrorist-
attacks-egypt-tunisia
32 Douglas Jehl, “Massacre Hobbles Tourism in Egypt,” International Business, New York Times,
December 25, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/25/business/international-business-massacre-
hobbles-tourism-in-egypt.html
33 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Vintage
2007), 256–57.
34 Rushby, “Can Middle East Tourism Recover?”
35 Benjamin Netanyahu, “Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: How the West Can Win, ed. Benjamin
Netanyahu (New York: Farrar, Starus, Giroux, 1986), 7.
36 Benjamin Netanyahu, “Terrorism: How the West Can Win,” in Netanyahu, Terrorism, 203.
37 Ibid., 204.
38 Ibid.
39 Benjamin Netanyahu, “Terrorism and the Islamic World,” in Netanyahu, Terrorism, 62–63.
40 Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and
International Terrorism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 82; quoted in Douglas Murray,
Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 118–19.
41 Wagdi Ghuniem, speech delivered at “Palestine: 50 Years of Occupation,” a program sponsored
by the Islamic Association for Palestine and held in the Walt Whitman Auditorium, Brooklyn
College, Brooklyn, NY, May 24, 1998; quoted in Steven Emerson, “Islamic Militants on the Lecture
Circuit in the United States,” Journal of Counterterrorism (Summer 1998), available at
http://www.steveemerson.com/4256/islamic-militants-on-the-lecture-circuit-in.
42 Christopher Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” Nation, September 20, 2001,
https://www.thenation.com/article/against-rationalization/.
43 Yoram Ettinger, “The Root Causes of Anti-US Islamic Terrorism,” Israel Hayom, January 11,
2012, http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1180.
44 Ibid.
45 Osama Bin Laden, interviewed by Tayser Allouni, Al Jazeera, October 21, 2001, in Messages to
the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence, trans. James Howarth (London:
Verso, 2005), 112.
46 Barry Rubin, “The Truth about U.S. Middle East Policy,” in Anti-American Terrorism and the
Middle East: A Documentary Reader—Understanding the Violence, ed. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp
Rubin (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94. Originally published under the
same title in Middle East Review of International Affairs 5, no. 4 (December 2001),
http://www.rubincenter.org/meria/2001/12/brubin.pdf. This important article deserves to be better
known, and should be reprinted as a pamphlet, and translated into as many languages as possible,
particularly Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.
47 Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History
(Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2008), 33.
48 Bukhārī, Sahīh, The Authentic Hadīth: Book of Jihād and Campaigns, trans. Muhammad Muhsin
Khan, Hadīth 2925 (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Darussalam, 1997), 4:113.
49 Jan Willem van der Hoeven, “The Main Reason for the Present Middle East Conflict: Islam and
Not “The Territories,” EretzYisroel.Org, 2000–2001,
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/mainreason.html.
50 Thomas Patrick Hughes, Dictionary of Islam: Being a Cyclopaedia of the Doctrines, Rites,
Ceremonies, and Customs, Together with the Technical and Theological Terms of the Muhammadan
Religion (London: W.H. Allen, 1885; Delhi: Rupa & Co, 1988), s.v. “waqf.”
51 “Hamas Covenant 1988: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” August 18, 1988,
text available at Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, The Avalon Project: Documents in
Law, History, and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
52 “Oh Youth,” The Complete Works of Imam Hasan al-Banna: 1906–1949, 12,
https://thequranblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/_9_-oh-youth.pdf, available at The Quran Blog—
Enlighten Yourself, June 7, 2008, https://thequranblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/the-complete-
works-of-imam-hasan-al-banna-10/.
53 Daniel Pipes, “We Free Them or They Destroy Us,” Lion’s Den: Daniel Pipes Blog, September
13, 2006, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/09/we-free-them-or-they-destroy-us.
54 Rubin, “Truth about Middle East Policy.”
55 Ibid., 81-82.
56 Ibid., 83.
57 Ibid., 85–87.
58 Rubin, “Truth about Middle East Policy,” 89–91.
59 Jordan 2014 figures, USAID, https://explorer.usaid.gov/country-detail.html#Jordan. USAID is the
leading U.S. Government agency that “works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient,
democratic societies to realize their potential,” Who We Are, https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are.
60 Rubin, “Truth about Middle East Policy,” 91.
61 Ibid.
62 “Billions in U.S. Aid Haven’t Bought Peace in the Middle East,” World Post, May 06, 2013,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/us-aid-middle-east_n_3223151.html.
63 Rubin, “Truth about Middle East Policy,” 88.
64 George W. Bush, quoted in Daniel Pipes, “Bush Returns to the ‘Religion of Peace’ Formulation,”
Lion’s Den: Daniel Pipes Blog, October 4, 2007, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2007/10/bush-
returns-to-the-religion-of-peace.
65 The White House: President George W. Bush, “‘Islam Is Peace’ Says President: Remarks by the
President at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C.,” news release, September 17, 2001,
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html.
66 Rubin, “Truth about Middle East Policy,” 106.
67 Efraim Karsh, The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 9.
68 Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck, “The Decline of Islamist Parties in Algeria,” Sada: Middle East Analysis,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 13, 2014,
http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/?fa=54510.
69 Ibn Warraq, “Reason, Not Revelation,” in Virgins? What Virgins? And Other Essays (Amherst,
MA: Prometheus Books, 2010), 384. “Reason, Not Revelation” was a paper originally given at The
Hague in 2006.
70 See Adam Bird and Malcolm Brown, “The History and Social Consequences of a Nationalized
Oil Industry,” June 2, 2005, available at
https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/VENEZUELA%20OIL%20&%20LAND%20REFORM.htm.
71 Tawfik Hamid, Inside Jihād: How Radical Islam Works; Why It Should Terrify Us; How to Defeat
It (Mountain Lake, MD: Mountain Lake Press, 2015), 66.
72 Persia, before the arrival of Islam, was host to another much more ancient religion,
Zoroastrianism, founded by Zoroaster, perhaps sometime between the seventh and sixth century
BCE.
73 Ian Richard Netton, A Popular Dictionary of Islam (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1992), s.v.
“Crusades.”
74 Ibn Warraq, Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies (Nashville, TN: New English
Review Press, 2013), 139–41.
75 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 79.
76 Ibid., 9.
77 Ibid., 79.
78 Ibid., 11-12
79 Ibid., 60.
80 Ibid., 65.
81 Ibid., 68.
82 Ibid., 71.
83 Ibid., 73.
84 Bin Laden, Messages to the World, 16; quoted in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 75.
85 Ibid., 59; quoted in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 75.
86 Ibid.
2 - Explanations of Islamic Terrorism
Human Agency, Free Will, and Responsibility
THERE ARE MANY contemporary political commentators and intellectuals
who do not accept what seems an obvious starting point in trying to explain
the behavior of Islamic terrorists, namely their beliefs, their ideology as laid
down in tract after tract, statement after statement, interview after interview,
and book after book—books that are the careful work of Muslim scholars of
Islam, lavishly sprinkled with quotes from the Koran, which is the very
word of Allah, the hadīth (the sayings and deeds of Muhammad and his
Companions), the sira (life of the Prophet), all used to justify their heinous
acts, even against civilians, including women, children, and the old.
Western liberals who no longer espouse religious beliefs interpret such
behavior as “delusional, perceiving the devout terrorists as suffering from a
serious mental illness, or victimized by a rare form of false consciousness
originating in their justified grievances and low socioeconomic status,” to
quote Paul Hollander, historian of many works on communism and its fall
and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.1 These analysts insist that Islamic religious beliefs do not provide
any justification or encouragement for barbaric acts of terrorism. We must
not, they contend, pay attention to the terrorists’ explanations of their
motives.
Suddenly these Western pundits seemed to have acquired a deeper
knowledge of Islam than such Islamists as Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the
founder of al-Qaeda, who spent years studying Islam, first at the University
of Damascus, where he graduated with a honors degree in Shari‘a in 1966,
then at the prestigious al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he earned a
master’s degree, followed by a doctorate in the principles of Islamic
jurisprudence.
Thus it was a sign of willful and dangerous ignorance when, speaking at
the 2015 World Economic Forum, U.S. Secretary John Kerry refused to
take the assertions of the radical Islamists seriously, claiming instead that
“it would be a mistake to link Islam to criminal conduct rooted in
alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking and other factors.”2
On January 7, 2015, two Islamists belonging to al-Qaeda’s branch in
Yemen had stormed into the offices of the French satirical weekly
newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people and injuring
eleven others. (Charlie Hebdo had abundantly availed itself of its rights of
freedom of expression to satirize Muhammad and Islam.) There were also
related attacks in the Île-de-France region, where another five were killed
and eleven wounded.
After the massacre “White House press secretary Josh Earnest suggested
that ‘these are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and…later
tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and
their own deviant view of it.’”3 This sounds as if the Charlie Hebdo
terrorists set out to commit a random act of violence, and then, when they
realized they needed some justification afterwards, plucked “Islam” out of
the air by sheer chance.4
Others have refused to hold the terrorists responsible for their acts,
laying blame, yet again, firmly on the shoulders of the West. In the January
24, 2015, New York Times, Tom Koch, adjunct professor of medical
geography at the University of British Columbia, emphasized the socially
determined nature of their conduct:
The tragedy [of the recent murders in Paris] lies…in the decades of
military encroachment and colonial expansion that helped to
radicalize a religious sect. It lies too, in our culture’s failure to
integrate new members in an ethos that is inclusive and assures a
political space for legitimate complaint….Our tragedy is this
collective fatal flaw, which insists on demonizing those we disagree
with and turning them into mortal enemies. The question is whether
we will react…breeding more terror in our responses, or, instructed in
its causes, search for resolution.5
Thus Western colonialism, and the failure to integrate immigrants,
radicalizes those Muslims who eventually become terrorists. We refuse, it is
argued, to listen to their grievances. We demonize them simply because
they are different from us.
First, however, colonialism has nothing to do with radicalization; of the
nineteen men responsible for the 9/11 terrorists attacks fifteen were of
Saudi origin. Saudi Arabia was never colonized by the West; it was de jure
colony of the Ottoman Empire.
Second, it is Muslims themselves, and Muslims alone, who refuse to
integrate into Western society and its democracies. Muslims may not
integrate themselves into a non-Muslim society. It would constitute an act
of apostasy. According to many Islamic scholars, it is a Muslim’s duty to
emigrate from the land of the Infidels to the land of the Believers—the land
of Islam. A survey of six hundred U.S. Muslims conducted in June 2015 by
pollster Kellyanne Conway revealed that 51 percent agreed that Muslims in
America should have the choice of being governed according to Shari‘a.
Even more alarming, 25 percent of those polled agreed that violence against
Americans in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihād.6 In a
Senate Judiciary Committee testimony in July 2016, Philip Haney, a
founding member of the Department of Homeland Security, reported that
mainstream institutional Islam within the U.S. encourages this intolerant
Islamic mindset, institutions such as the highly influential Assembly of
Muslim Jurists of America.7 Lack of integration in Europe applies almost
exclusively to Muslims, and not, for example, to those from Vietnam and
Cambodia.
Third, there is the insidious influence of leftist Western intellectuals who
have taken over the institutions of higher education, drumming into the
malleable minds of young students since the 1960s that all the ills of the
world, particularly the Third World, are the sole responsibility of the West.
The West is evil, and is the source of all evils in the world, as Susan Sontag
once said.8 If this were true, why would the children of immigrants want to
board what James Baldwin once called a “sinking ship”?9 Such cultural
relativism has so sapped our civilizational self-confidence that we in the
West are no longer capable of defending Western values. (And as time
passes fewer and fewer of the young appear even to know what Western
values are, let alone how to defend them.)
Fundamental Differences
Yes, there are differences between the West and the Muslim world,
differences of a fundamental kind. Muslims cannot accept a democracy,
since that would be to accept that sovereignty lies with the people, and for
Muslims sovereignty lies with God alone. Furthermore, Muslims cannot
accept to live under man-made laws, only under the Shari‘a, which is God-
given. The treatment of women and non-Muslims, for example, is clearly
defined in the Shari‘a. Women have fewer rights (inheritance) than men;
they may not marry a non-Muslim; men have the right to beat them.
Another difference involves personal responsibility. Scholars such as
Koch in the piece cited above, argue that the perpetrators of terroristic acts
have “little choice in the matter.” As Hollander explains, Muslim terrorists
are
merely respond[ing] to stimuli they were exposed to, and their prior
victimization determined their course of action. Observers like Koch
have little discernible interest in the actual motivation of the terrorists,
in the roots of their determination to kill, and their apparently clear
conscience about what most people consider heinous crimes. It is also
overlooked that blasphemy is a religious notion, and if the cartoonists
were murdered for blasphemies, then the perpetrators were obviously
motivated by very strongly felt religious sentiments, as they
themselves made quite clear.10
So while the “victim” cannot help but act in the way he acts, it seems, the
“victimizer” is absolutely free. Hollander again:
Such explanations of terror entail a selective determinism, a
disposition I first noticed in the social criticism of the late 1960s. In
this scheme, only the powerful, the top-dogs and victimizers, are
capable of making choices and thus can be held responsible for their
actions; the underdogs, the victims, the victimized are not in a
position to make morally relevant choices as their behavior is
determined by brutal social forces. Needless to say, designations of
victim and victimizer can be quite subjective and variable, depending
on the worldview of those who propose the classification.11
Disputes about the motivations of Islamic terrorists are strongly
reminiscent of the arguments that took place throughout the existence of the
Soviet Union. “Real Marxism has nothing to do with the experiment in the
Soviet Union, real Marxism has not been applied” went the claim. This
desperate attempt to save Marxism as a viable system was fatally tainted
with the Soviet experiment. It was implausible to suggest that Marxism had
nothing to do with the Soviet systems. And it is similarly argued that
Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. The real Islam, it is claimed,
is a religion of peace that respects the rights of women, and so on. But it is
actually implausible to suggest that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic
terrorism. And I doubt that John Kerry would win the argument against
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam that Islam has nothing to do with the terrorists’
actions.
Learned Disbelief
There are many scholars who refuse to take any aspect of Islamic
terrorist belief seriously. Marc Sageman, the government counterterrorism
consultant cited in the introduction, asserts that terrorism is not “the result
of the beliefs and perceptions held by the terrorists.”12 It is no wonder that
the U.S. government has failed to learn the “threat doctrine” of the enemy.
Robert Reilly, author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2011),13
rebutted Sageman very effectively in a review of Leaderless Jihād.
Sageman succumbs to the root cause fallacy and tries to “find the ‘root
cause’ of global Islamist terrorism by conducting a ground up exploration
of his sample of terrorists.” “Ground up” means that Sageman “concentrates
on the foot soldiers, and tries to draw his conclusions from his observations
of them,” and readers learn that “‘terrorists rarely execute their operations
as a direct result of their doctrines.’…Why, then, do they do it?” Reilly
wonders, and “[s]peaking of terrorists in North America and Western
Europe,” Sageman tells readers they ‘were not intellectuals or ideologues,
much less religious scholars. It is not about how they think, but how they
feel.’ Anyone feel like some terrorism?”14
“Terrorism is not simply terror,” Reilly continues, “some people doing
terrible things on the spur of the moment. It is murder advanced to the level
of a moral principle, which is then institutionalized in an organization—a
cell, a party, or a state—as its animating principle. The very first thing one
must understand is the ideology incarnated in the terrorist organization; it is
the source of its moral legitimacy. Without it, terrorism cannot exist.”15
Sageman seems to be aware of some of the Salafi thinkers behind the
ideology of current terrorism (the Salafis were ultraconservative Sunni
Muslims who wished to restore the pristine Islam practised by their devout
ancestors). He mentions Sayyid Qutb twice, Hasan al-Banna once, but
never Abul A‘la Mawdūdī (more on these figures forthcoming), and
because he refuses to acknowledge ideology as a motivating force, the
absence of deep analysis of their work is not surprising. To establish the
origins and causes of a war, one must refer first to the respective ideologies
and principles of the warring factions before interviewing the soldiers in the
trenches.
When Reilly questioned him on this point at a lecture Sagemen was
giving, Sageman told Reilly that “Sayyid Qutb was not relevant because the
people in his case studies did not read him.” Sageman naively leaves his
analysis incomplete, and misses the point entirely. How many rank and file
Nazis were aware of the intellectual, putatively biological, and putatively
historical underpinnings of Nazi ideology? It is highly unlikely that the
ordinary Nazi foot soldier had ever heard of Alfred Rosenberg (1893–
1946), a primary creator of the Nazi ideology of racial purity, persecution of
the Jews, lebensraum, etc., and even less likely that he had read
Rosenberg’s work. The common Nazi was nonetheless trained to obey and
duty-bound to follow the orders of a regime motivated and animated by the
ideology created by such thinkers as Rosenberg, Alfred Baeumler (1887–
1968), a philosopher and interpreter of Friedrich Nietzsche; Ernst Krieck
(1882–1947), a German pedagogue; Herman Schmalenbach (1885–1950),
who refined the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Bund; and Carl Schmitt
(1888–1985), a jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.
The regime was able to mold the average Nazi soldier to its own image,
and train him docilely to carry out its policies. In fact, the Nazi Party
successfully persuaded many ordinary citizens of the truth of its Nazi
ideology, and was able to turn a hitherto highly civilized nation into
barbarians capable of accepting its horrific agenda, and helping to
perpetrate unimaginable atrocities. We see a similar pattern in the Islamic
world, where the Islamist ideology threatens to attract an ever-growing
circle of admirers and activists ready to sacrifice their life for Islam. It is
indeed a war of ideas—hence our duty to understand these ideas, ideas of
such Islamic ideologues as Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Mawdūdī,
and their roots in Islam, in Islamic theology and Islamic history.
Importance of Ideology as a Motivating Force
British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) often warned of the danger of neglecting ideas
and their influence on world events. The arguments in his classic essay,
“Two Concepts of Liberty,” based on a lecture given in 1958, remain valid
and are worth pondering at length:
[T]here has, perhaps, been no time in modern history when so large a
number of human beings, in both the East and the West, have had
their notions, and indeed their lives, so deeply altered, and in some
cases violently upset, by fanatically held social and political
doctrines. Dangerous, because when ideas are neglected by those who
ought to attend to them—that is to say, those who have been trained
to think critically about ideas—they sometimes acquire an unchecked
momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may
grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism….[I]f professors
can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other
professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or
Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?16
We are similarly engaged in a war of ideas and therefore must come up
with better ideas to combat fanatical Islamic terrorists.
Writing in 1966, Marxist Islamologist Maxime Rodinson argued with
regard to the Islamic world that “the course of history is, in the last
instance, determined by economic and social factors and that ideology plays
only a secondary role.”17 Berlin’s further observations in “Two Concepts of
Liberty” are an implicit reply to Rodinson: “It is only a very vulgar
historical materialism that denies the power of ideas, and says that ideals
are mere material interests in disguise. It may be that, without the pressure
of social forces, political ideas are stillborn: what is certain is that these
forces, unless they clothe themselves in ideas, remain blind and
undirected.”18
What were the causes of the horrors perpetrated by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler,
Mao, and Pol Pot? They were, in Berlin’s view, “not caused by the ordinary
negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal
hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their
wicked part,” but “by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx,
who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal
social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the
transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he
wanted and, by reaction, against it.”19
Berlin continues, “There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil
conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those
who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.” 20 This is an apt
and chilling description of the Islamic radicals who are so certain of the
rightness of their putatively God-given goals that they are ready to die—and
take as many infidels as possible with them.
Soviet Union and Communism
Many explanations of the Cold War, the actions of the Soviet Union, and
the collapse of that regime are also framed in such a way that the driving
ideology of Marxism-Leninism is sometimes neglected or even denied.
Nonetheless, a number of distinguished historians have emphasized the
ideological nature of the Soviet phenomenon.
In the introduction to his monumental work, The Soviet Tragedy: A
History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991, for example, Martin Malia, a
professor of history specializing in Russia at the University of California,
Berkeley, writes:
This eternal return of utopian hope, breaking through the façade of
social-science rigor, brings us back to the premise that the key to
understanding the Soviet phenomenon is ideology. It is only by taking
the Soviets at their ideological word, treating their socialist utopia
with literal-minded seriousness, that we can grasp the tragedy to
which it led. The concrete agenda of this book, therefore, is to reassert
the primacy of ideology and politics over social and economic forces
in understanding the Soviet phenomenon. It is to rehabilitate history
“from above” at the expense of history “from below” as the motive
force of Soviet development. Finally, it is to resurrect the totalitarian
perspective, but in a historical and dynamic, not a static, mode; for it
was the all-encompassing pretensions of the Soviet utopia that
furnished what can only be called the “genetic code” of the tragedy.21
Malia returns to the importance of ideas and their consequences: “To
produce the distinctive Soviet institutions of Plan, kolkhoz, and Gulag, the
illusions of maximalist socialism and the lawlessness of the Leninist Party
were indispensable.” He continues;
So once again we return to the primacy of ideology and politics in the
Soviet phenomenon. As Solzhenitsyn put the matter with respect to
the unique dimensions of the Soviet terror: “The imagination and
inner strength of Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at ten or so
cadavers, because they had no ideology….It is thanks to ideology that
it fell to the lot of the twentieth century to experience villainy on a
scale of millions.” And Solzhenitsyn’s proposition is also valid, and
was intended, of course, for Hitler’s Final Solution and his camps.
But in the Communist case the primacy of ideology holds not just for
camps but for the entire Soviet endeavor, from its socioeconomic base
to its cultural superstructure.22 (emphasis in original)
As Malia emphasizes, “[A]ll the basic institutions of the Soviet order…
were the creations of ideology; they were nothing less than the Party
program set in steel, concrete, and the omnipresent apparat.”23
Nearly twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
disintegration of the Communist world, many American intellectuals are in
denial, and continue to “applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest
ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they
hold distinguished positions in American higher and cultural life.”24 Eric
Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, was an
apologist of communism, and someone who refused to recognize the crimes
of Stalin, until Khruschev pointed them out. He is also “an unforgiving
historian of America.”25 Unsurprisingly Foner wrote soon after September
11, 2001: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed
New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White
House.”26
A number of apologists of communism, the so-called “revisionist
historians,” have blamed the United States for the 9/11 attacks, or played
the old moral equivalence card. For example, Alan Singer, professor of
teaching, literacy, and leadership and program director of graduate
programs in social studies education at Hofstra University, has argued that
the United States is guilty of far worse crimes than those perpetrated by
Islamic terrorists.27 As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr observe in their
In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, “[T]he deeply
ingrained anti-Americanism of their intellectual world could not help but
make these revisionists view the attack on this country as the secular
equivalent of divine retribution.”28
The Ideology of Nazism
A number of scholars have argued that the ideology of Nazis was the
prime motivation for the Holocaust. Yahuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust
studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of more than forty books on
the Holocaust and antisemitism, and a recipient of several awards and
honors. In his readily accessible work, Rethinking the Holocaust (2001),
Bauer argues that from the outset “ideology was the central determinant of
the Holocaust.”29 The Nazis considered the Jews a universal devilish
element. Pursuing them “was to have been a global, quasi-religious affair,
the translation into practice of a murderous ideology”; for the Nazis,
“persecution of the Jews was pure, abstract antisemitic ideology in the
context of biological racism, and it became a central factor in Hitler’s war
against the world.”30
Bauer grants the importance of the bureaucracy, and the impact of
economic, social, and political crises, “but without a guiding ideological
motivation and justification, mass murder generally, and the intent to
annihilate the Jewish people in particular, would have been unthinkable.
Ideology is central.”31 And Bauer endorses political scientist and author
Daniel Goldhagen’s central point in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (1996),32 which places anti-Semitic ideology at
the center of the Holocaust: “I agree with [Goldhagen] rather than those…
who emphasize the social stratification in a crisis situation, the political and
economic background, and the bureaucratic machinery.”33
Islam or the Ideology of the Islamic Terrorists
Ideology is also the defining feature of the twentieth century, or perhaps
it is more accurate to say that it was the clash of ideologies that
characterizes the twentieth century—a period of “ideological frenzy.”34
Communism, socialism, nationalism, fascism, Nazism, etc., mobilized
millions to action. Leslie Stevenson, a professor of logic and metaphsyics,
writes, “A system of beliefs about human nature that is held by some group
of people as giving rise to their way of life is standardly called an
‘ideology.’ Christianity and Marxism are certainly ideologies in this
sense.”35 And in this sense, we can just as naturally add Islam to this list.
Thus the ideology of the Islamic terrorists is no exception to this
discussion. And despite the theological nature of their beliefs, useful
comparisons can be made between Islamic terrorism and the other
ideologies of the twentieth century. I argued over ten years ago that one
could label the beliefs of the Islamic terrorists—or even Islam, tout court—
fascist, in a precise way.36 In that examination I took the fourteen features
the late Italian novelist, philosopher, and semiotician Umberto Eco
considered to be typical of “Eternal Fascism” (or “Ur-Fascism”), and
showed how Islam also satisfied all of those features.37
Islam has also been described as totalitarian. Here is an encapsulation of
what I wrote in 2008 on this subject: Charles Watson and Georges-Henri
Bousquet refer to Islam as a totalitarian system tout court, while Bertrand
Russell, Jules Monnerot, and Czeslaw Milosz compare Islam to various
aspects of communism, while Carl Jung, Karl Barth, Adolf Hitler, Saïd
Amir Arjomand, Maxime Rodinson, and Manfred Halpern, among others,
point out Islam’s similarities to fascism or Nazism (with the latter two terms
often used synonymously).38
To elaborate, in 1937 Charles Watson, a Christian missionary in Egypt,
described Islam as totalitarian by showing how, “by a million roots,
penetrating every phase of life, all of them with religious significance, it is
able to maintain its hold upon the life of Moslem peoples.”39 The late
Georges-Henri Bousquet (d. 1978), a professor of law at the University of
Algiers and later the University of Bordeaux and one of the foremost
authorities on Islamic law, distinguishes two aspects of Islam he considers
totalitarian: Islamic law and the Islamic notion of jihād, which has as its
ultimate aim the conquest of the world in order to submit it to one single
authority.40
To quote another great scholar of Islamic law and longtime professor of
Arabic at the University of Leiden, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje—Islamic
law has certainly aimed at “controlling the religious, social and political life
of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification,
and the life of those who follow tolerated religions to a degree that prevents
their activities from hampering Islam in any way.”41 The all-embracing
nature of Islamic law is apparent in that it does not distinguish between
ritual, law (in the European sense of the word), ethics, and good manners.
In principle, this legislation controls the entire life of the believer and the
Islamic community; it intrudes into every nook and cranny, from (in a
random sample) the pilgrim tax to agricultural contracts to the board and
lodging of slaves to issuing wedding invitations to the ritual fashion in
which to accomplish one’s natural needs to the proper treatment of animals.
Islamic law is a doctrine of duties—duties, as Hurgronje explains,
“susceptible to control by a human authority instituted by God. However,
these duties are, without exception, duties to God, and are founded on the
inscrutable will of God Himself. All duties that men can envisage being
carried out are dealt with; we find treated therein all the duties of man in
any circumstance whatsoever, and in their connections with anyone
whatsoever.”42 In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920), British
philosopher, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell wrote:
Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution
with those of the rise of Islam….
…Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come
about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early
successors of Mahommet….
…Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with
Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism.
Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with
mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and
Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the
empire of this world.43
In Sociologie du Communisme (1949) Jules Monnerot, a French essayist,
sociologist, and journalist, called communism the twentieth-century
“Islam.”44 Islam has also been compared more precisely to Nazism and
sometimes fascism, terms that are usually used synonymously. For
example, in the late 1930s the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was asked in an
interview if he had any views on what was likely to be the next step in
religious development. He replied, referring to the rise of Nazism in
Germany, “We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam.
He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany
is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god. That
can be the historic future.”45
Karl Barth,46 the Swiss Reformed theologian, also writing in the 1930s,
reflected on the threat of Hitler and his similarities to Muhammad:
Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed
life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to
those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now
it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with
resistance, it can only crush and kill—with the might and right which
belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way.
It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in
fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new
Allah’s Prophet. A prayer for the ruling National Socialism and for its
further expansion and increase simply cannot be uttered—unless one
wishes to strike his confession in the face and make nonsense of his
prayer. But there is one prayer with regard to the ruling National
Socialism which may be uttered and ought to be uttered. It may and
has to be prayed, in all earnestness, by Christians in Germany and
throughout the whole world. It is the prayer which was uttered right
into the nineteenth century, according to the old Basel Liturgy: “Cast
down the bulwarks of the false prophet Muhammad!”…
…And there we have it—we stand today, all Europe, and the whole
Christian Church in Europe, once again in danger of the Turks. And
this time they have already taken Vienna and Prague as well. “Thy
will be done!” “If I perish then I perish!” They really knew that at the
time of the old Turkish menace. They knew it better, knew it with
more resignation to the will of God and less querulousness than we
today do.47 (emphases in original)
While serving a twenty-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg
tribunal, Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production,
wrote a memoir of his World War II experiences. Speer’s narrative includes
this discussion, which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs and his
effusive praise for Islam:
Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned
from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans
attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the
eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at
the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be
Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in
spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that
faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.
Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial
inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with
the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not
have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not
Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this
Mohammedan Empire. Hitler usually concluded this historical
speculation by remarking, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have
the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese,
who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The
Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible
to us than Christianity.”48 (emphases added)
The comparison of Islamism with fascism was also put forward by
Maxime Rodinson, the eminent French scholar of Islam and by common
consent one of the three greatest scholars of Islam of the twentieth century,
who pioneered the application of sociological method to the Middle East.
As a French Jew born in 1915, Rodinson also learned about fascism from
direct experience; his parents perished in Auschwitz. Responding in a long
front-page article in Le Monde to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s
uncritical endorsement of the Iranian Revolution, Rodinson targeted those
who “come fresh to the problem in an idealistic frame of mind.” While
admitting that trends in Islamic movements such as the Muslim
Brotherhood were “hard to ascertain, Rodison stated that “the dominant
trend is a certain type of archaic fascism. By this I mean a wish to establish
an authoritarian and totalitarian state whose political police would brutally
enforce the moral and social order. It would at the same time impose
conformity to religious tradition as interpreted in the most conservative
light.”49
In 1984 Said Amir Arjomand, an Iranian American sociologist at
SUNY–Stony Brook, also pointed to “some striking sociological
similarities between the contemporary Islamic movements and the
European fascism and the American radical right….It is above all the
strength of the monistic impulse and the pronounced political moralism of
the Islamic traditionalist and fundamentalist movements which makes them
akin to fascism and the radical right alike.”50
One scholar I have not discussed before, Malise Ruthven, an Anglo-Irish
academic and journalist who focuses on religion, fundamentalism, and
especially Islamic affairs, is worth quoting at length.51 Ruthven points out
the debt owed to Marxism and fascism by such thinkers as Sayyid Qutb and
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (discussed later in these pages), though he is careful
to use the term “Islamism” and not “Islam” tout court. “Qutb’s ideas…were
‘invisible’ adaptations of the revolutionary or political vanguardism to be
found in both Bolshevism and fascism,” writes Ruthven, however,
the fascist parallels go deeper than Marxist ones. In his explicit
hostility to reason…it is not Marx, grandchild of the Enlightenment,
but Nietzsche, an anti-rationalist like the anti-Mu‘tazilite al-Ash‘ari,
whom ‘Azzam echoes. The attachment to the lost lands of Palestine,
Bukhara and Spain (unlike a rational and humane concern for
Palestinian rights) is, like Mussolini’s evocations of ancient Rome,
nostalgic in its irredentism, its “obliteration of history from
politics.”52 The invocation of religion is consistent with the way
fascism and Nazism used mythical thought to mobilize unconscious
or psychic forces in the pursuit of power—a task made easier in a
population sanctified by a millennium of Islamic religious
programming. Georges Sorel, sometimes seen as the intellectual
father of fascism, declared that “use must be made of a body of
images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses
are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of
sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the
war undertaken by Socialism.” Mussolini, to whom Sorel in his later
years lent his support, saw fascism as “a religious conception in
which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law
and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual
and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.”53 In
the same line of thinking Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue,
stressed the other-worldly, spiritual aspect of Hitler’s racial theories:
“The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed
philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to natural
law, but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of
soul, which cannot be explained rationally.”54
It would be much too reductive to redefine Islamism as ‘Islamo-
fascism,’ but the resemblances are compelling.55
Finally, no less a figure than Sayyid Abu ’l-‘Alā’ Mawdūdī, one of the
major thinkers behind modern Islamist ideology, said that in an Islamic
state as envisioned by him, “no one can regard any field of his affairs as
personal and private. Considered from this aspect, the Islamic state bears a
kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.”56
1 Paul Hollander, “Marx and the Koran: The Role of Beliefs and Ideologies in Motivating, Justifying,
and Legitimating Political Violence,” Weekly Standard, February 23, 2015,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/marx-and-the-koran/article/850146.
2 Ken Dilanian, “Kerry: Violent Extremism Is Not Islamic,” Associated Press, January 23, 2015,
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kerry-violent-extremism-not-islamic-170022857--politics.html?ref=gs.
3 Fred Lucas, “Josh Earnest Says the White House Doesn’t Call Terror Attacks ‘Radical Islam’
Because It’s Not ‘Accurate,’” Blaze, January 13, 2015,
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/01/13/josh-earnest-says-the-white-house-doesnt-call-terror-
attacks-radical-islam-because-its-not-accurate/; quoted in Hollander, “Marx and the Koran.”
4 Cf. Thomas L. Friedman, “Say It Like It Is,” Opinion, New York Times, January 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/opinion/thomas-friedman-say-it-like-it-is.html?_r=0
5 Tom Koch, “What’s Worse Than Sad,” Opinion, New York Times, January 24, 2015, Sunday
Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/opinion/sunday/whats-worse-than-sad.html.
6 As reported by Andrew Bostom, “Shocking Polls Show What U.S. Muslims Think of U.S. Laws,”
PJ Media, July 1, 2016, https://pjmedia.com/blog/shocking-polls-show-what-u-s-muslims-think-of-u-
s-laws/.
7 Ibid.
8 Referred to by George Zilbergeld, A Reader for the Politically Incorrect (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2003), 157.
9 Quoted in African American Political Thought, ed. and intro. Marcus D. Pohlmann, vol.6,
Integration vs. Separatism: 1945 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2003), 6:119.
10 Hollander, “Marx and the Koran.”
11 Ibid.
12 Sageman, Leaderless Jihād, 22.
13 Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern
Islamist Crisis (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011).
14 Robert R. Reilly, “Thinking like a Terrorist,” review of Leaderless Jihād: Terror Networks in the
Twenty-First Century, by Marc Sageman, and The Mind of Jihād, by Laurent Murawiec, Claremont
Review of Books 9, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 31–33, http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/thinking-like-a-
terrorist/.
15 Ibid.
16 Isaiah Berlin, Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 167.
17 Cited in Rudolph Peters, Islam and Colonialism (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), 6,
referring to Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (London: Allen Lane,
1974), 296ff. Originally published as Islam et le capitalisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966).
18 Berlin, Liberty, 167–68.
19 Isaiah Berlin, “A Message to the 21st Century,” acceptance address upon receiving honorary
Doctor of Laws, University of Toronto, November 25, 1994, reprinted in New York Review of Books,
October 23, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/23/message-21st-century/.
20 Ibid.
21 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: The
Free Press, 1994), 16.
22 Ibid., 512. Quoting Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, 3 vols. (New
York: Harper & Row, 1973–1978), 1:181.
23 Malia, Soviet Tragedy, 512.
24 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (New
York: Encounter Books, 2003), 1.
25 John Patrick Diggins, “Fate and Freedom in History: The Two Worlds of Eric Foner,” National
Interest, no. 69 (Fall 2002): 85, cited in Haynes and Klehr, In Denial, 40.
26 Haynes and Klehr, In Denial, 49.
27 Cited in ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Yahuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2002), 7, 42, 44.
30 Ibid., 27-28.
31 Ibid., 44.
32 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
33 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, 95.
34 I think this phrase originates with American journalist Max Lerner (1902–1992), Ideas Are
Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 9—but I am not certain.
35 Leslie Stevenson and David L. Haberman, Ten Theories of Human Nature, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. Not to be confused with a later edition titled Twelve Theories of
Human Nature: see Chapter 4, note 1.
36 Ibn Warraq, “Islam, Middle East, and Fascism,” in Virgins? What Virgins? 255–88. Versions of
this article have been floating around the Internet since the late 1990s. One version was published in
the American Atheist around 2002, and later reposted by New English Review,
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_Warraq/Islam,_Middle_East_and_Fascism/.
37 Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/.
38 Ibn Warraq, “Apologists of Totalitarianism: From Communism to Islam” in Politcal Violence:
Belief, Behavior and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 177–
91.
39 Charles Watson, Muslim World 28, no. 1 (January 1938): 6.
40 Georges-Henri Bousquet, L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam (1966; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1990),
10.
41 C. Snouck Hurgronje, Selected Works, ed. Georges-Henri Bousqet and Joseph Schacht (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1957), 264.
42 Ibid., 261.
43 Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1920), 5, 29, 114.
44 Jules Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Translated by Jane Degras
and Richard Rees as Sociology and Psychology of Communism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 18–22.
45 Carl Jung, The Collected Works, vol. 18, The Symbolic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1939), 281.
46 I owe the references to Carl Jung and Karl Barth to Andrew Bostom.
47 Karl Barth, The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 43,
64–65.
48 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 96.
49 Maxime Rodinson, “Islam Resurgent?” Le Monde, December 6–8, 1978; quoted in Janet Afary
and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of
Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 233.
50 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective,” World Politics 38,
no. 3 (April 1986): 383–414.
51 Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London: Granta Books, 2002),
esp. 206ff. However, in recent writings, particularly in the New York Review of Books, Ruthven
seems to deny such comparisons. Is this a genuine change of opinion, or simply the dead hand of
political correctness? Where an earlier generation was afraid of being labelled “Orientalist,” the
present one is terrified of being accused of “Islamophobia.”
52 Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997), 11.
53 Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932), in Adrian Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From
Pareto to Gentile (London, 1973), 59–67; cited in Neocleous, Fascism, 14. Quoted by Ruthven, Fury
for God, 206.
54 Neocleous, Fascism, p.15.
55 Ruthven, Fury for God, 206–7.
56 Syed Abul ’ Ala Maudoodi, Islamic Law and Constitution, trans. and ed. Khursid Ahmad
(Chicago: Kazi Publications, Inc., 1993), 262.
3 - Marx, Freud, and Darwin among the Jihādists
Reductionist Views of Islamic Terrorism
FAR TOO MANY writers on the motivation of the Islamic terror- ists are
reductionist. These writers try to reduce the stated purpose of terroristic
behavior to something more basic, more biological, but this leaves them at a
loss to account for particular human goals and aspirations. How can the
pursuit of ethical, political, religious, aesthetic, or even sporting ideals be
reduced to basic biological needs such as survival and reproduction that we
share with animals?
Those who argue that the reasons behind the actions of Islamic terrorists
lie elsewhere than in the religious texts—which I consider as their primary
source—have recourse to any number of theories about human nature. For
Marx, “the real nature of man is the totality of social relations” (cf. Maxime
Rodinson), and all humans are a product of the particular economic state of
human society in which they are born. Freud wished to reduce all human
striving to hunger and sexual desire. Darwinian evolution links us
inexorably to the animal world, to nature, to genetics, and seems to pose a
decisive challenge to our own sense of worth, and to our human values. B.F.
Skinner and his radical behaviorism denies free will, and considers all
human actions the result of conditioning. Zoologist, ethologist, and
ornithologist Konrad Lorenz argues that aggression in humans is innate.1
And so on.
Humans are indeed animals, members of the species homo sapiens, but
we are also persons, rational agents displaying intentionality. We can hold
humans, since we have a degree of choice, responsible for our acts, that is,
we can ascribe moral responsibility to humans in a way that cannot be
ascribed to animals.
Since we humans are rational agents, we can give reasons for our
actions, and these necessarily involve our beliefs and values, which can be
expressed in terms of concepts engendered in a particular culture. We are
undoubtedly products of evolution by natural selection, and have some
innate biological drives, but we grow up in a common culture that is as
much responsible for creating and molding human nature as our biology.
Furthermore, as rational agents we also have individual choices, for which
we can be held responsible.
Reductionists, meanwhile, favor a determinist philosophy of human
action that does not allow any room for individual choice, freely made.
Again, evolution by natural selection has profound implications for human
behavior, but so does religion, which imparts values and provides guidance
that result in a particular way of living. Religion motivates humans, whose
behavior can no longer be explained simply in biological terms. Religion
has historically served as a source of values and a guide to action, whether
or not we agree with those values and actions, values that are not available
otherwise. In other words, values are not a “natural kind,” and do not
otherwise exist in nature. Values are a human construct.
Importance of Religion in the Middle East
This brings us to religion, and the role of religion in the Middle East and
its apparent revival in the last forty years. We return to our previously cited
Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who asks “why, in Egypt and the
Arab world, people with roughly the same social profile have flocked into
militant Islamic movements more readily than they have to into leftist or
Marxist groups?” Ibrahim cites four factors that have “tilted the balance in
favor of Islamic groups.” The first is the ability of the ruling elites to
dismiss leftist and Marxist opposition as atheists bent on destroying Islam.
The second factor is the comparative failure of socialist or quasi-socialist
policies in the Arab world. “The third factor,” which is of particular interest
to this discussion (I shall return to the fourth later),
has to do with the deep-rootedness of Islam in the entire Middle East.
In Egypt particularly people are said to be quite religious. There is a
positive sociocultural sanction to being religious. Even the most
avowed liberal or leftist secularist regimes in the area find it
necessary and expedient to invoke Islam when they try to institute any
major new policy. The point is that for any militant Islamic
movement, half its task of recruiting members is already done by
socialization and cultural sanctions in childhood. The other half of
their task is merely to politicize consciousness and to discipline their
recruits organizationally.2
In 2005, on the first anniversary of the Madrid bombings that killed 191
people and injured 1800 more, the Club de Madrid, the “world’s largest
forum” of former heads of state and government and independent nonprofit
promoting democracy and international change, organized a conference to
discuss the causes of terrorism. Several members who took part in the
discussions “wanted to make clear that although economic, political and
other causes intertwine with religious ones, the religious element should not
simply be reduced to an expression of these other factors. It supplies a
significant component of its own.” One member urged scholars to
“‘abandon their reductionism’ and respect the fact that ‘religion is a body in
itself’ and a significant factor in violent incidents.” Another member argued
that “in the case of Al Qaeda and other Islamic groups involved in
terrorism, the ‘preeminence of the religious factor’ is ‘undeniable’”3
Many liberals and leftists are unwilling to accord religion any role in the
events unfolding in the Middle East. Such an attitude merely underlines
their lack of imagination, and is condescending at best. As Bernard Lewis
wrote in Islam and the West,
Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a
dominant and central place in religion in his own affairs, found
himself unable to conceive that any other people in any other place
could have done so and was therefore impelled to devise other
explanations of what seemed to him only superficially religious
phenomena. We find, for example, a great deal of attention given by
eighteenth-century European scholarship to the investigation of such
meaningless questions as “Was Muhammad sincere?”…We find
lengthy explanations by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
historians of the “real underlying significance” of the great religious
conflicts in Islam among different sects and schools in the past….To
the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight
and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have
to be other “genuine” reasons underneath the religious veil.…[T]o
admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary
loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as
offensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage
on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards. This is reflected in
the recurring inability of political, journalistic, and academic
commentators alike to recognize the importance of religion in the
current affairs of the Muslim world and in their consequent recourse
to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and
conservative, and the rest of the Western vocabulary of ideology and
politics.4
There may also be socioeconomic factors in Muslim political movements
that must be taken into account, Lewis goes onto remind us, but in the end,
we cannot ignore the centrality of Islam for all Muslims in the Muslim
world:
Whatever the cause—political, social, economic—the form of
expression to which Muslims have hitherto had recourse to voice both
their criticisms and their aspirations is Islamic. The slogans, the
programs, and to a very large extent the leadership are Islamic.
Through the centuries, Muslim opposition has expressed itself in
terms of theology as naturally and spontaneously as its Western
equivalent in terms of ideology.…
If, then, we are to understand anything at all about what is happening
in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the
past, there are two essential points that need to be grasped. One is the
universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples,
and the other is its centrality.5
Islam was, then, “not only universal but also central in the sense that it
constituted the ultimate basis and focus of identity and loyalty.”6 Religion
was a badge of membership uniting those belonging to the group and
distinguishing them from those on the outside. Islam provided a far more
powerful sense of belonging than language or country. For example,
Muslims of Pakistan, though biologically, historically, linguistically, and
even in some sense culturally related to Hindus in India, identify with and
refer to, with considerable pride, the history and actions of peoples
thousands of miles away in present-day Saudi Arabia. Though speaking an
Indo-European language, Pakistani Muslims share the same sacred past as
Arabs, speaking a Semitic language, Arabic. Transcending national
boundaries, Muslims of different countries celebrate one anothers’ triumphs
and lament one anothers’ failures; they exhibit a sense of shared destiny. As
one Ottoman minister remarked in 1917, “the Fatherland of a Muslim is
wherever the Holy Law of Islam prevails.” Islam is the binding and decisive
factor.
The importance of religion is further borne out by the number of
religious books published in Arab countries. As reported by the Rand
Institute, quoting United Nations data, “Religious books constitute 17
percent of all books in Arab countries, in comparison with a world average
of approximately 5 percent (United Nations Development Programme,
2003, pp.77–78). The increased sales of religious books may benefit from
sponsorship and subsidy of mosques, Islamic foundations, or religious
governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia.”7 Subsidies make these religious
books cheap, and thus available to poorer people.
1 Cf. Leslie Stevenson, “Conclusion: A Synthesis of the Theories,” in Leslie Stevenson, David L.
Haberman, and Peter Matthews Wright, Twelve Theories of Human Nature, 6th ed. (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 288–89. Stevenson’s observations were immensely helpful in
writing this section.
2 Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups,” 26–27.
3 Peter R. Neumann, ed., Addressing the Causes of Terrorism, Club de Madrid Series on Democracy
and Terrorism, vol. 1 (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005), 28,
http://www.clubmadrid.org/img/secciones/Club_de_Madrid_Volume_I_The_Causes_of_Terrorism.p
df.
4 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 134–
35.
5 Ibid., 135.
6 Quoted in ibid., 136.
7 Lowell H. Schwartz, Todd C. Helmus, Dalia Dassa Kaye, and Nadia Oweidat, Barriers to the
Broad Dissemination of Creative Works in the Arab World (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation,
2009), 8–9, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG879.pdf.
4 - Islamic Doctrines as Motivating
Factors
Like Marxism and Christianity, Islam has
• a background metaphysical understanding of the universe and
humanity’s place in it
• a basic theory of human nature in the narrower sense of some
distinctive general claims about human beings, human society, and
the human condition
• a diagnosis of some typical defect in human beings, of what tends to
go wrong in human life and society
• a prescription or ideal for how human life should best be lived,
typically offering guidance to individuals and human societies1
ISLAM, however, is much more all-encompassing and more totalitarian
than Marxism or Christianity.
Both religious faith and political ideology, Islam oversees every aspect
of a Muslim’s life—from what a non-Muslim might consider minor details
(such as how to use a toothpick) to larger issues such as prayer, pilgrimage,
and marriage. Islam also provides a powerful sense of personal and group
identity. Central for all Muslims is the Koran, which is the uncreated word
of God and is His inspired Word and Revelation as delivered to His
Prophet, Muhammad, by the angel Gabriel, or the “Faithful Spirit” (Rūhu
‘l-Amīn), and sometimes angels in general.
The Koran was revealed over a period of years. The very minimum
required to be a Muslim is contained in the profession of faith (Shahāda):
“There is but one God, Muhammad is the Apostle of God” (lā ilāha
illa’llāh muhammadun rasūlu’llāh).
Sura 4, Q4. an-Nisā’, the Women, 136, addresses all Muslims: “O ye
who believe, believe in God and His Apostle and the Book which He hath
sent down to His Apostle and the Scripture which He hath sent down
formerly. Whosoever denieth God and His Angels and His books and His
Apostles and the Last Day hath strayed far from the Truth.”
The essential element of true belief for all Muslims is an
uncompromising monotheism expressed by the Arabic word, tawhīd, “the
unity or oneness of God.” Tawhīd is a central concept, and despite its
apparent simplicity leads to complex corollaries, some of which have been
further elaborated, as we shall have occasion to see later, by radical thinkers
such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb. First, true belief necessitates ikhls, which is
the sincere devotion, loyalty, and total allegiance owed to God. Its opposite
is shirk, sometimes translated as “polytheism” or “idolatry,” and is the
unforgivable sin of ascribing partners to God. It is the worship of any other
being than God; as the Koran tells us, Q4. an-Nisā’, the Women, 48: “Verily
God forgives not that partners should be set up with Him; but He forgives
anything else, to whom He pleases; to set up partners with God is to devise
a sin most heinous indeed.”
The Koran
The Koran is considered a revelation from God, ipsissima verba, the
very words of God. The Koran is understood not in an allegorical,
analogical, metaphorical, or Pickwickian sense but in a literal sense to be
the word of God, and to be obeyed literally. It is a practical manual.
Muslims use the Koran as guide to conduct, both private and public. The
Koran gives details of the moral and legal duties of believers; it is the basis
of their religious dogma, beliefs, ritual, and one of the sources of their law.
The Koran clearly has an exhortatory element; it is not a quiet, meditative
tract enjoining private experience of God, but often a robust call to arms—
to fight and kill, if necessary, in the name of God, until Islam dominates the
world. It is constantly and extensively quoted by the jihādists, for all their
tenets and ideology are located within its pages.
While there are two or three short verses that enjoin tolerance of non-
Muslims (e.g., Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 256; Q109. al-Kāfirūn, the
Disbelievers, 1–6), these have been abrogated or canceled by the so-called
Sword Verses that enjoin fierce battles against the unbelievers (Q9. at-
Tawba, the Repentance, 5; see also Q4:76; Q8:12, 15–16, 39–42). Other
verses that incite violence against non-Muslims and other religions are
abundant.2
Jews and Christians are also regarded with much contempt, and Muslims
are told not to take them as friends (e.g., Q5. al-Mā’ida, the Table, 51). The
final verses of the opening chapter of the Koran, the Fātiha, which has a
central role in Islamic prayer and is repeated at least seventeen times a day,
are: “The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favours. Not those
upon whom wrath is brought down, nor those who go astray” (Q1. al-
Fātiha, the Opening: 6–7). Evidently in verse 6, it is those who are on the
right path who have been blessed, while verse 7 is interpreted to refer to
Jews and Christians, respectively.
Here is the commentary on verse 7 of al-Qurtubī (1214–1273), famous
for his commentary on the Koran:
The majority say that those with anger on them are the Jews and the
misguided are the Christians. That was explained by the Prophet
[pbuh, “peace be upon him”], in the hadith of ‘Adī ibn Hātin and the
story of how he became Muslim, transmitted by Abū Dāwūd in his
Musnad and at-Tirmidh in his collection. That explanation is also
attested to by the Almighty who says about the Jews, “They brought
down anger from Allah upon themselves” (Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow,
61; Q3. ’āl ‘Imrān, the Family of Imran, 112) and He says, “Allah is
angry with them” (Q48. al-Fath, the Victory, 6). He says about
Christians that they, “were misguided previously and have misguided
many others, and are far from the right way” (Q5. al-Mā’ida, the
Table, 77).3
Thus in a sense, Jews and Christians are singled out for admonition
several times a day, every day, by all Muslims. Antisemitic sentiments are
plentiful in the Koran.4
Other elements of belief found in the Koran include a belief in angels
(Q2:177), in all the prophets (Q2:177) and their scriptures, and in the Last
Judgment (Q2:17). The term al-ākhira, meaning “the Hereafter,” is
mentioned more than a hundred times.
The Hereafter is to be preferred to this life on earth: Q40. Ghāfir, the
Forgiver, 39: “O my people, surely this present life is but a passing
enjoyment, and the Hereafter, is the abode of stability”; Q16. an-Nahl, the
Bee, 30–31, “the abode of the Hereafter is better”; Q29. al-‘Ankabūt, the
Spider, 64, “And the life of this world is but a sport and a play. And the
home of the Hereafter, that surely is the Life, did they but know.”
Shari‘a Supremacism
While I have largely concentrated on jihād in the military sense, as the
immediate goals of Islamic terrorists, their ultimate goal is to subjugate the
globe to Islam, so that the world is governed by the Shari‘a and not, for
instance, by the various secular constitutions in the Western world. Muslims
cannot accept any other religion or any other constitution.
According to the Koran, Muslims alone possess the absolute truth, and
they constitute the best of all nations, as in Q3. ’āl ‘Imrān, the Family of
Imran, 109: “And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will not be
accepted from him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers.”
Because Islam is the religion of truth, those not following Islam must be
subjugated and made to pay a tax: Q9. at-Tawba, the Repentance, 29:
“Fight those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that
which Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor follow the Religion of
Truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in
acknowledgement of superiority, and they are in a state of subjection.” Any
accommodation with any other creed on a basis of equality is unthinkable,
for Islam is destined to prevail: Q9. at-Tawba, the Repentance, 33: “He it is
Who sent His Messenger with guidance and the Religion of Truth, and that
He may cause it to prevail over all religions, though the polytheists are
averse.” Precisely the same message is given at Q48. al-Fath, The Victory,
28, and Q61. al-Saff, The Ranks, 9.
Muhammad the Prophet also made it clear that Islam cannot coexist with
any other religion, and He dutifully informed his successors that Arabia
must be cleansed of Jews and Christians: “There shall be no two faiths in
Arabia” (Imam Malik, Muwatta’, hadīth 1588).5 The theory and practice of
dhimmitude, whereby non-Muslims such as Jews and Christians are termed
dhimmis and endure various social and legal disabilities, is based on the
premise that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims. Most of the canonical
hadīth collections contain this hadīth: “Muhammad the Prophet said: A
Muslim should not be killed in retaliation for the murder of a disbeliever.”6
As the Ayatollah Khomeini once put it, “Eleven things are unclean: urine,
excrement, sperm, blood, a dog, a pig, bones, a non-Muslim man and
woman, wine, beer, perspiration of the camel that eats filth.”7
To strive to bring the entire world under Shari‘a must have seemed an
idle dream to Muslims even fifty years ago. Today, there are more than
eighty Shari‘a courts operating in Great Britain, and a poll in conducted in
2012 found that 40 percent of Muslims in America believe that they should
not be judged by U.S. law and the Constitution, but by Shari‘a.8 Various
Islamic organizations such as the influential and litigious Council on
American-Islamic Relations are working night and day to bring about the
compliance of American law. Slowly, Muslims are eroding the Western
rights of free speech, as journalists and writers in the West are beginning to
practice self-censorship in order not to offend Muslims.
The Sunna and Muhammad
The Sunna
The Sunna plays an important part in Islam, and is a further guide for all
Muslims to follow. Sunna can be seen as model pattern of behavior. It is
also “custom” or “customary behavior.” Finally, it is the way Muhammad
acted, which is then emulated by Muslims. The hadīth, on the other hand, is
a tradition or written report, and can be the source material for the sunna.
The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd edition), which is regarded as the most
authoritative work of reference on Islam, defines the sunna thus:
Some time after the preaching of Islam had begun, the term sunna
came to stand for the generally approved standard or practice
introduced by the Prophet as well as the pious Muslims of olden days,
and at the instigation of al-Shāfi‘ī, the sunna of the Prophet was
awarded the position of the second root (asl) of Islamic law, the
sharī‘a, after the Qur’ān...9
The opposite of sunna is bida‘, usually translated as “innovation.” The
Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, another definitive source, gives the
following definition:
bida‘ is the exact opposite of sunna, and means some view, thing, or
mode of action the like of which has not formerly existed or been
practised, an innovation or novelty. The word became important
theologically in the revolt against the precise following of the sunna
of the Prophet, came thus to indicate all the unrest of new ideas and
usages which grew up naturally in the Muslim church, covering
dogmatic innovations not in accordance with traditional sources
(usūl) of the Faith, and ways of life different from those of the
Prophet. The word, therefore, came to suggest individual dissent and
independence, going to the point of heresy although not of actual
unbelief (kufr). In this development two broad parties showed
themselves. One conservative, in the past mostly of Hanbalī and now
practically Wahhābī only, taught that the duty of the believer was
“following” (ittibā‘)—the sunna understood—and not “innovating”
(ibtidā‘). The other accepted the facts of change of environment and
condition, and taught, in varying degrees and ways, that there were
good and even necessary innovations.10
Muhammad
From our twenty-first century perspective, Muhammad the Prophet was
hardly a model of tolerance, kindness, or compassion. Islamic sources
contain numerous accounts of his cruelty, hatred of Jews, and intolerance of
other religions. Nonetheless, Islamic purists who insist on the sunna of
Muhammad as a guide to their own behavior are, in terms of doctrine, fully
justified.
Here is an instance of Muhammad’s cruelty: When some people from the
tribe of Ukl, who had reverted from Islam, and while trying to steal some
camels had killed a shepherd of camels, were captured. Muhammad ordered
their hands and legs to be cut off, their eyes to be branded with heated
pieces of iron, and that their wounds not be cauterized till they die.11 In
another instance, Muhammad ordered the torture of a prisoner in order to
discover the whereabouts of some hidden treasure, and is recorded as
saying, “Torture him until you extract it from him.”12 Muhammad also
revived the cruel practice of stoning adulterers to death.13
Here are some examples and expressions of Muhammad’s hatred of
Jews, all taken from the Life of Muhammad by Ibn Ishāq (c. 704–c. 767
CE), our earliest and most important source for the life of Muhammad:
• “Kill any Jews that falls into your power,” said the Prophet. (p. 369)
• the killing of Ibn Sunayna, and its admiration leading someone to
convert to Islam (p. 369)
• the killing of Sallam ibn Abu’l-Huqayq (pp. 482–83)
• the assassination of Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, who wrote verses against
Muhammad (pp. 364–69)
• the raid against the Jewish tribe of the Banu ‘l-Nadir and their
banishment (437–45)
• the extermination of the Banu Qurayza, between six hundred and
eight hundred men (pp. 461–69)
• the killing of al-Yusayr (pp. 665–66)14
Muhammad also ordered the assassinations of his opponents. For
example, the killing of poetess ‘Asma’ b. Marwan, who had written satirical
poems that “vilified Islam and incited people against the Prophet,”15 is
mentioned in Ibn Ishāq’s biography,16 and described in gruesome detail in
Kitāb al-Tabaqāt by Ibn Sa‘d (c. 784–845 CE),17 a traditionist and
biographer of Muhammad, and Kitāb al-Maghāzī by al-Wāqidī (747–823
CE),18 an important early Muslim historian and judge who was patronized
by Harun al-Rashid. Al-Wāqidī’s major work, The Book of Campaigns
(Kitāb al-Maghāzī) is an important source on early Islam and the life of
Muhammad.
The assassins responsible for the massacre of the cartoonists of the
French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, on January 7, 2015 (discussed
earlier), had Muhammad’s example as a guide, and thus Islamic doctrine on
their side.
Muhammad’s intolerance of other religions is also well-attested in the
Islamic sources:
I was told that the last injunction the apostle [Muhammad] gave
[before his death] was in his words “Let not two religions be left in
the Arabian peninsula.”19
A hadīth informs us that “The Apostle of Allah said, ‘I will certainly
expel the Jews and the Christians from Arabia.’”20
Hadīth
The hadīth often simply elaborate on and further emphasize certain
aspects of Islamic doctrine adumbrated in the Koran, and hinted at in the
Sira, the life of Muhammad. The Dictionary of Islam gives the following
definition for “hadīth”:
All Muslims believe that in addition to the revelation contained in the
Qur’ān, the Prophet received the Wahy ghair Matlū (literally, “an
unread revelation”), whereby he was enabled to give authoritative
declarations on religious questions, either moral, ceremonial, or
doctrinal. Muhammad traditions are therefore supposed to be the
uninspired record of inspired sayings....They are records of what
Muhammad did, what Muhammad enjoined, and that which was done
in the presence of Muhammad and which he did not forbid. They also
include the authoritative sayings and doings of the Companions of the
Prophet.21
As I shall be examining the hadīth on jihād further along in this discussion I
shall not dwell on it here.
Shari‘a
Joseph Schacht (1902–1969), who was, by common consent, a leading
Western scholar of Islamic Law, characterized Shari‘a in this manner:
Islamic Law is the totality of God’s commands that regulate the life of
every Muslim in all its aspects; it comprises on an equal footing
ordinances regarding worship and ritual, as well as political and (in
the narrow sense) legal rules, details of toilet, formulas of greeting,
table-manners, and sick-room conversation. Islamic law is the most
typical manifestation of the Islamic way of life, the core and kernel of
Islam itself....[E]ven at the present time the Law...remains an
important, if not the most important element in the struggle which is
being fought in Islam between traditionalism and modernism under
the impact of Western ideas.22
Islamic Law is based on four principles or “roots” (usūl, pl. of asl): the
Koran, the sunna of the Prophet, which is incorporated in the recognized
traditions, the consensus (ijmā‘) of the scholars of the orthodox community,
and the method of reasoning by analogy (qiyās).23
Position of Women and Non-Muslims
The position of women under Islamic Law regarding blood-money,
evidence, and inheritance is inferior; she is counted as half a man. With
regard to marriage and divorce a woman’s position is less advantageous
than that of a man, and a man has the right to beat his wife. A Muslim
woman is not free to marry a non-Muslim. Slavery is recognized as an
institution, and the slave is considered both a thing and as a person.
The position of non-Muslims living under Islamic Law is summarized by
Schacht: “The basis of the Islamic attitude towards unbelievers (i.e., non-
Muslims) is the law of war; they must be either converted or subjugated or
killed (excepting women, children, and slaves); the third alternative, in
general, occurs only if the first two are refused. As an exception, the Arab
pagans are given the choice only between conversion to Islam or death.”24
Non-Muslims must pay the poll tax (jizya) and the land tax (kharāj);
“they must wear distinctive clothing and must mark their houses, which
must not be be built higher that those of Muslims, by distinctive signs; they
must not ride horses or bear arms, and they must yield the way to Muslims;
they must not scandalize the Muslims by openly performing their worship
or their distinctive customs, such as drinking wine; they must not build new
churches, synagogues, and hermitages; they must pay the poll-tax under
humiliating conditions.”25
Apostasy is punishable by death. The male apostate from Islam is given
three days to return to Islam. If he still refuses, he is killed. The woman
who commits apostasy is imprisoned and beaten every three days until she
returns to Islam.26
In Islamic Law, certain acts are forbidden or sanctioned by punishment
in the Koran and have therby become crimes against religion:
unlawful intercourse (zinā); its counterpart, false accusation of
unlawful intercourse (qadhf); drinking wine (shurb al-khamr); theft
(sariqa); and highway robbery (qat‘ al-tarīq). The punishment laid
down for them are called hadd (plural hudud), Allah’s “restrictive
ordinances” par excellence; they are: the death penalty, either by
stoning (the more severe punishment for unlawful intercourse) or by
crucifixion or with the sword (for highway robbery with homicide);
cutting off hand and/or foot (for highway robbery without homicide
and for theft); and in other cases, flogging with various numbers of
lashes.27
Beliefs: God and Tawhīd
The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) defines tawhīd “in the true sense
of the term,” as “the act of believing and affirming that God is one and
unique (wāhid), in a word, monotheism.” For the Muslim, this means
“believing and affirming what is stated by the first article of the Muslim
profession of faith: ‘there is no other god but God’ (lā ilāha illā llāh).”28
However, as also explained in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, over time this
term has acquired a much wider significance. Since Islam is
uncompromisingly monotheistic, Muslims are sometimes referred to as ahl
al-tawhīd, the people of tawhīd. Throughout history some Islamic groups
have claimed that they alone respect the principle of monotheist orthodoxy
and thus they alone can be called truly Islamic. Examples include the
Mu‘tazilīs, who called themselves ahl al–tawhīd wa ’l-‘adl,29 and
Muwahhidūn, the Almohads, disciples of the mahdī (literally, “The One
who is Rightly Guided,” a figure of great eschatological significance in
Islam; his just rule will herald the approach of the end of time) lbn Tūmart
(d. 1130),
a fundamentalist who wished to re-establish what he conceived to be
the original purity of the faith by reference to the Koran and the
Sunna and so rejected the taqlīd which in his day dominated theology
in the West. He placed especial stress on the doctrine of tawhīd,
which to him meant a complete abstraction or spiritualization of the
concept of God, as opposed to tajsīm, the literal acceptance of the
anthropomorphic phrases of the Koran of which he so often accused
the Almoravids.30
For certain theologians, tawhīd has come to encompass all discussions of
God, His existence, and His various attributes. Even broader meanings are
understood under tawhīd, such as all the “principles of religion” (usul al-
dīn), and finally, theology in general.31
The opposite of tawhīd is shirk, which can be defined as “the act of
‘associating’ with God, in other words, accepting the presence at His side of
other divinities; it may be translated either literally, by associationism or, in
more explicit fashion, by polytheism.”32 Certain practices (e.g., sorcery,
ornithomancy) are denounced as shirk in the hadīth. Some purist reformers
throughout Islamic history have branded as shirk such practices as the
veneration of saints and worshipping at their tombs:33
Shirk is the worst form of disbelief. The treatment to be applied in
this world to the “associator” is that prescribed in IX, 5 (the “verse of
the sword”, āyat al-sayf): death, at least if they do not become
Muslims (whereas the “People of the Book” are, for their part,
allowed to maintain their religion, so long as they pay the jizya, IX,
29). In the next world, they will be assuredly consigned to damnation;
the Koran states in fact, twice, that God can pardon all sins save one,
that of associationism (Q4. an-Nisā’, the Women 48, 116).34
Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong
There is one central, distinctive feature of Islamic ethics that is often left
out of general surveys of Islam, but is of the utmost importance to
understanding the thinking behind various influential modern Islamic
ideologues whose writings have not only influenced the Islamic terrorists
but also have provided the foundation of their worldview, and have
furnished their rationale for action.This principle is as important as the
theory and practice of jihād, which, on the other hand, has been discussed at
great length. In fact, we can regard jihād as a special case of the principle of
Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong.
Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), one of Islam’s greatest theologians, a major sufi,
and a scholar of Islamic philosophy, defines this specifically Islamic duty
thus: “Every Muslim has the duty of first setting himself to rights, and then,
successively, his household, his neighbours, his quarter, his town, the
surrounding countryside, the wilderness with its Beduin, Kurds, or
whatever, and so on to the uttermost ends of earth.”35 As Michael Cook, the
greatest modern scholar on the subject, put it, “Of these demanding
activities, all bar the first fall under the rubric of ‘commanding right and
forbidding wrong’ (al-amr bi’l-ma‘rūf wa’l-nahy ‘an al-munkar), roughly
speaking the duty of one Muslim to intervene when another is acting
wrongly.”36
Like jihād, this duty is derived from the Koran, and has been commented
and elaborated upon by Islamic thinkers for centuries, right up to today:
Q3. al-‘Imrān 104: Let there be one community (umma) of you,
calling to good, and commanding right and forbidding wrong; these
are the prosperers.
Q3. al-‘Imrān 110: You were the best community ever brought forth
to men, commanding right and forbidding wrong.
Women also have this moral obligation:
Q9. at-Tawba 71: And the believers, the men and the women, are
friends one of the other; they command right, and forbid wrong.
There are also numerous traditions of the Prophet that refer to the duty of
Forbidding Wrong. However, the Sunni law schools do not cover
Forbidding Wrong in their law books, though sectarian scholars among the
Zaydīs, Imāmīs, and Ibādīs do. Al-Ghazālī was perhaps the first major
Muslim thinker to devote substantial amount of space to this duty in The
Revival of the Religious Sciences [Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn], which we shall be
examining later in this section.
Forbidding Wrong
For Muslim scholars, Forbidding Wrong was a duty imposed by God—
as revealed in the Koran and the traditions. In the Koranic passage cited
above (Q3. al-‘Imrān 104), God is addressing Muslims in general. As Cook
explains, the language of here—“let there be”—is clearly prescriptive, “So
the obvious reading of the verse is indeed that God is imposing a duty on
the Muslims, and this is how it was universally understood.”37 In a hadīth
Muhammad says: “Whoever sees a wrong, and is able to put it right with
his hand, let him do so; if he cannot, then with his tongue, if he can’t, then
in his heart, and that is the bare minimum of faith.”38
Since the purpose of the duty is to come to the aid of Islam, it is a duty
of believers, not of unbelievers. This was considered by most scholars to be
a collective obligation (fard ‘alā ’l-kifāya). In performing this duty, one
must address legally competent persons (thus children and lunatics are
excluded).
According to most scholars, Muslims have a duty to command right and
forbid wrong, and by “right” they mean all that God and His Prophet have
commanded, and by “wrong” all they have forbidden. Al-Ghazālī has
formulated the most comprehensive and influential classification of how
wrong is to be forbidden.
By Tongue
He begins forbidding wrong with the tongue, that is the oral mode, of
which there are three levels. First, one must inform someone who is acting
wrongly out of ignorance, but one must be careful not to humiliate a fellow
Muslim. At the second level, one must use exhortation when confronted
with someone who knows he is doing wrong. Such exhortation can include
quotations from traditions, stories about pious Muslims, and so on. At the
third level, one may be forced to use harsh language with someone who
knows he is doing wrong but remains obstinate.
Or Hand
In the case of forbidding wrong with the hand, Al-Ghazālī again has
recourse to three levels. The first is physical action that does not involve
physical attacks against people. One can, for example, destroy the offending
objects (e.g., break a musical instrument,). One can also remove someone
from a place where he ought not to be. The second level does involve actual
physical violence against the offender. At this level, one may well have to
kick and punch the offender, and even use a stick. Arms must only be used
as a last resort, and must not lead to public disorder. Finally, at the third
level, one may have to collect a band of armed men for assistance, which,
of course, could lead to the offender forming his own band of armed men,
ending in pitched battles.
As Cook spells out, “[A]ttacks on offending objects are a ubiquitous
theme....There are, for example, chess-boards to overturn, supposedly
sacred trees to cut down and decorative images to destroy or deface....But
the targets that are mentioned again and again are liquor and musical
instruments.”39 When the magnificent Buddhas of Bamyan in central
Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001, one Taliban
envoy from Afghanistan gave the implausible reason that “the Islamic
government made its decision in a rage after a foreign delegation offered
money to preserve the ancient works while a million Afghans faced
starvation,” while more plausibly, “other reports…have said the religious
leaders were debating the move for months, and ultimately decided that the
statues were idolatrous and should be obliterated.”40 In other words, it was
a clear case of Islamic iconoclasm, sanctioned by the very principle under
discussion.
The paramount duty for all Muslims is to uphold God’s unity, tawhīd,
which is the fundamental concept in Islam, while its antithesis, shirk—
associating others with God—is considered tāġūt, or idolatry. Any behavior
is considered idolatrous that may include the creation of any type of image
of the deity, or even other figures of religious significance such as prophets
and saints. The creation of images of living things—persons or animals—
falls under this definition of idolatrous activity. Thus statues of Buddha
constitute idolatry par excellence.
Muslim scholars have much debated whether the use of violence in
Forbidding Wrong was reserved for the state, or at least needed the
permission of the imam, essentially a prayer leader in a mosque, but also
someone whose leadership or example is to be followed by the Muslim
community. As Cook summarizes, “There were nevertheless a good many
scholars who left individuals free to take up arms, and did so without
evincing any such concern for the role of the state. This is well-attested
among the Mu‘tazilites, Zaydīs and Ibādīs. It is also by no means rare
among the Sunnīs; thus Abū Hanīfa is said to have held that forbidding
wrong is obligatory by word and sword, and Ibn Hazm gives strong support
to recourse to arms where necessary.”41
Or Heart
Finally, there is the recourse to the heart, which is a purely mental act.
Al-Ghazālī on Emigration
If one lives in a land where wrongdoing prevails, and one does not have
the realistic possibility of righting those wrongs, then one’s duty is to
emigrate.42 Al-Ghazālī does not endorse this reading, arguing instead that
as long as one does not participate in the wrongdoing, one is not obliged to
emigrate, which seems a rather unrealistic demand of ordinary Muslims.
Nonetheless, al-Ghazālī is relentless in urging Muslims to pursue this
Islamic duty, especially if one knows that there is “an evil in the market-
place, and are capable of putting a stop to it, then it is your duty not to sit at
home, but rather to sally forth to confront evil.”43
The Zaydī Mu‘tazilite Mānkdīm argues that “forbidding wrong has
conditions (sharā’it), being obligatory only when they are satisfied.”44
These conditions are: (1) knowledge of law, (2) knowledge of fact, (3)
absence of worse side-effects, (4) efficacy, and (5) absence of danger to
onself.45
As for the condition of danger, “the question for us now is whether in the
absence of obligation it is still good to proceed. The standard answer is that
it is; if you are willing to take risks in God’s cause, you will be rewarded. In
the limit, this means endorsing the view that someone who is killed
forbidding wrong dies the death of a martyr (shahīd), and many scholars
have no problem with this.”46
Privacy versus Hidden Sin
Muslim scholars do not have “any single concept equivalent to our
notion of privacy; what they have is rather a cluster of related concerns.”47
Cook explains that Muslim scholars do not seem to have
the notion that certain kinds of behavior are inherently private, and as
such immune to public scrutiny. What is protected is not “private life”
but rather “hidden sin,” behavior that happens not to be public
knowledge. It is no business of ours to pry into what is unknown to
us, nor to divulge what we innocently stumble upon; but once we
know, we are likely to incur some kind of obligation to forbid
wrong....The difference between Muslim thinking and that of the
modern West is thus not simply that there is no single Muslim
concept corresponding to the Western notion of privacy; it is also that
the Muslim concepts seem to be of a significantly different kind.48
Similarly, this principle also overrides concerns about minding one’s own
business, as there is “no doctrinal rejection of forbidding wrong based on
the principle of minding one’s own business.”49
The Muslim state should be responsible for carrying out this duty. But
where the state itself is a wrongdoer, Muslims should speak out publicly to
rebuke unjust rulers, many scholars argue, despite the danger to oneself. Al-
Ghazālī encourages such rebuke, giving the example of early Muslims who
took such risks to fulfill their Muslim duty, “knowing that to be killed in
such a case was martyrdom.” Al-Ghazālī then quotes seventeen anecdotes
“to illustrate their courage and plain speaking. This, he laments, is how
things used to be; but today the scholars are silent, or if they do speak out,
they are ineffectual, all because of their love of things of this world.”50
The Hanafī Mu‘tazilite Jassās denounces Sunni traditionists who had a
tendency to downplay the duty,
for holding that injustice and murder may be committed by a ruler
with impunity, while other offenders may be proceeded against by
word or deed—but not with arms. The point is not, in his view, an
academic one. It is these attitudes that have led to the present sorry
state of Islam—to the domination of the reprobate, of Zoroastrians, of
enemies of Islam; to the collapse of the frontiers of Islam against the
infidel; to the spread of injustice, the ruin of countries and the rise of
all manner of false religions.51
This duty is not found in all the classical traditions, but “outright denials
of the obligatoriness of forbidding wrong are almost unheard of.”52 Its
importance is underlined in a comprehensive manner by the Indian Hanafi
‘Ismat Allāh of Sharānpur, who was clearly irritated by those who
downplay the duty, and the doctrine of some, though not all, Sūfīs, of
leaving people in peace:
For were it pleasing to God to leave people alone, He would not have
sent the prophets, nor established their laws, nor called to Islam, nor
voided other religions, but would rather have left people to their own
devices, untroubled by divine visitations; nor would He have imposed
on them the duty of holy war, which involves suffering and death for
both Muslims and infidels. He further emphasises that Sūfīs—
pantheists included—have made it abundantly clear that they neither
practise nor preach an indiscriminate toleration. What is more,
distinguished Sūfīs have written on forbidding wrong. Even apart
from this, the fact that the prophets were sent to command right and
forbid wrong is enough to establish that it is both good and obligatory.
In short, if leaving people alone were praiseworthy, then forbidding
wrong would not be a religious duty.53
Categories of Wrongdoing
As for the kinds of wrongs that Muslims commonly committed, al-
Ghazālī’s examples are sorted into three categories by Michael Cook:
violation of religious norms (e.g., praying faultily), “offense against
puritanical norms” (e.g., imbibing liquor, making music, and indulging in
improper sexual relations), and “secular” wrongs (e.g., blocking a street).
It is odd that Cook characterizes taking liquor as an offense against
“puritanical norms,” when imbibing alcohol is quite clearly against the
Shari‘a, which is incumbent on all Muslims, hence simply an Islamic norm.
Cook does refer to drinking alcohol as a common practice in medieval
Islamic societies, suggesting that not all Muslims took the Koranic
injunction against alcohol seriously. Finally, Cook ends on a very important
point: “[T]here is no sign within the secular category of a concern for what
we might call social justice.”54 The primary concern for all who insist on
the duty to Command Right and Forbid Wrong is to see that Islam is not
endangered in any way by laxness among Muslims, from rulers to common
people.
Cook shows that “it was common in the early centuries of Islam for
rebels to adopt forbidding wrong as their slogan,”55 examples being “found
among the Khārijites, including the Ibādīs, among the Shī‘ites, including
Zaydīs, and among the Sunnīs, especially the Mālikīs. Some instances of
such rebels in the early centuries of Islam are Jahm ibn Safwān (d. 746), in
late Umayyad Transoxiana, Yūsuf al-Barm in Khurāsān in 776f., Mubarqa‘
in Palestine 841f., Ibn al-Qitt in Spain in 901 and an ‘Abbāsid who rebelled
in Armenia in 960.”56
Cook’s conclusion is that the act of Forbidding Wrong is largely driven
by puritanical attitudes, and that “those who participated were members of
the religious elite, and above all the scholars....[T]he link between
forbidding wrong and rebellion is unproblematically historical.”57
Forbidding Wrong and Rebellion
There is an inexorable link between Forbidding Wrong and rebellion,
and therefore a link that has great importance in light of militant Islam’s
resurgence in the second half of the twentieth century. Islamic
fundamentalists fervently believe in drawing on the Islamic tradition, which
remains profoundly relevant for all Muslims living in the modern world.
Thus medieval doctrines of Forbidding Wrong continue to play a vital role
in directing the actions of contemporary Islamists.
Educated Sunni Muslims agree that Islam as it has been practised in the
last hundred years needs drastic reform, but there is no agreement about
what kind of reforms should be enacted. Islamic modernists propose
restoring Islam in a way that allows practitioners to continue to live at ease
with themselves in the modern world. However, many Muslims see this as a
compromise and, in effect, a project to Westernize Islam. Islamic
fundamentalists obviously prefer an uncompromising restoration of Islam
that shuns omnipresent Western culture. Cook has provided the essential
historical link, from groups seeking to apply the Islamic duty of
Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in order to purify Islam to the
modern, violent reform movements.
As I emphasize throughout this book, reform movements, often violent,
seeking to restore a pristine Islam have existed since the foundation of the
original Muslim community—from movements such as the Khārijities in
the eighth century, to movements in Baghdad in the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries, to the Qādīzādeli movement in Istanbul in the
seventeenth century, which influenced Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb
(1703–1792), who founded Wahhābism, the movement named after him in
eighteenth-century Najd, in the interior of Arabia, which gave rise to the
Saudi state.
Ibn al-Wahhāb, whose ideas are explored in depth in chapter 14, was
motivated by purely Islamic concerns such as the elimination of harmful
innovations, and he was not afraid to use violence to impose his version of
pristine Islam. He would provide inspiration for Islamic fundamentalists
worldwide, from India to Indonesia in the East, and Egypt and Iran in the
Middle East, as they battled, in their view, the pernicious and ubiquitous
influence of Western civilization.
Since Forbidding Wrong is an Islamic practice that tells people what to
believe, it reminds us of the profound difference between Islam and
Western liberalism. As I have written, under Islam, life is a closed book.58
Everything has been decided for human beings: the dictates of Shari‘a and
the whims of Allah set strict limits on the possible agenda of our lives. In
the West, we are free as individuals to choose our goals and determine our
path, and to decide what meaning to give to our lives. As Roger Scruton has
remarked, “the glory of the West is that life is an open book.”59
Both Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), an Egyptian Islamist and the leading
member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s (see
chapter 19), and ‘Ali ibn Hajj (Ali Benhadj or Belhadj, b. 1956), an
Algerian Islamist activist, preacher, and cofounder of the Islamic Salvation
Front political party, vehemently argue that what the West continues to
consider as personal matters are no such thing. It is the duty of observant
Muslims to interfere where Islamic laws and custom are being broken. As
early as 1961 French Islamologue Louis Gardet (1904–1986) presciently
remarked that “forbidding wrong as moral reform (réforme des moeurs),
though currently held in check by the modern state, was alive in the
sentiments of the Muslim people, and could well emerge in favourable
circumstances.”60 Strangely enough, Qutb insisted that one had to establish
a true Muslim society before one could apply the principle. This, however,
was not the position adopted by all Islamic fundamentalists.
When they controled most of Afghanistan, the Taliban established a
department, and later a ministry, for Forbidding Wrong. More notorious are
the religious police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, who carry out this duty. For
other fundamentalists such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, this duty even
overrides the danger condition, and if death occurs to the Muslim trying to
forbid wrong, he will have died an honorable death of a martyr.
The Hereafter: Blood and Death, not Life, in Islam
On January 9, 2015, Amedy Coulibaly, hostage-taker and gunman in the
Kosher supermarket at La Porte de Vincennes in Paris presented himself to
victims in this manner: “I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian, Muslim. I belong
to IS [État islamique]. The difference between Muslims and you, the Jews,
is that you treat life as sacred. For you, life is too important. As for us, it is
death that is sacred.”61 A little later, the young Malian reaffirmed his
commitment to Islam in a message sent to his commanders to look after his
wife, who, he insisted, must learn Arabic, the Koran, and theology. His
hatred of the West resulted, Coulibaly claimed, from its relentless attack on
Islamic institutions and values: the caliphate and the Shari‘a. To “elevate
the words of Allah” and to protect Islam, Coulibaly shot and killed four
hostages before he was killed by the police.62 As former senior international
policy analyst with the RAND Coroporation Laurent Murawiec has written,
“inseparable…from contemporary Islamic terrorism are the idolization of
blood, the veneration of savagery, the cult of killing, the worship of
death.”63
Contempt for Life
That Islamic terrorists embrace death with joy in anticipation of their
rewards seems, to non-Muslims, morbid and immoral, for it treats the
human life as worthless, expendable. But this disdain for life has been
acquired from Islamic history and Islamic texts. The Koran refers to the
“Last Day”—al-yawm al-ākhir—in some formulation at least forty times,64
but alludes to the “Hereafter” or the “World to Come”—al-Ākhirah—more
than a hundred times,65 often to say that the “Life to Come” is far better
than life on Earth, and to heap scorn on those who enjoy living. For
example:
• Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 86: Such are those who have purchased the
present life at the price of the world to come.
• Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 94: Say: If the abode of the Hereafter in
the providence of Allah is indeed for you alone and not for others of
mankind, then long for death (for you must long for death) if you are
truthful.
• Q9. at-Tawba, the Repentance / al-Barā’at, the Immunity, 38: The
enjoyment of the present life, compared with the Hereafter, is a little
thing.
• Q16. an-Nahl, the Bee, 106–7: Theirs will be an awful doom. That
is because they have chosen the life of the world rather than the
Hereafter.
• Q87. al-’A‘lā, the Most High, 16–17: But you prefer the life of
world, although the Hereafter is better and more lasting.
Similar attitudes are expressed in the hadīth:
• Sahīh al-Bukhārī: hadīth 6413: “Narrated Anas: The Prophet said,
‘O Allah! There is no life worth living except the life of the
Hereafter.’”66
• Sahīh al-Bukhārī hadīth 6415: “I heard the Prophet saying, ‘A
(small) place equal to an area occupied by a whip in Paradise is better
than the (whole) world and whatever is in it; and an undertaking
(journey) in the forenoon or in the afternoon for Allah’s Cause, is
better than the whole world and whatever is in it.’”67
• Ibn Majah, Sunan, book 6, hadīth 1571: “It was narrated from Ibn
Mas’ud that the Messenger of Allah said, ‘I used to forbid you to visit
the graves, but now visit them, for they will draw your attention away
from this world and remind you of the Hereafter.’”68
The Islamic concept of martyrdom is examined in the forthcoming chapter
on jihād, which includes examples of contempt for this life on Earth, and
phrases remarkably similar to those used by modern jihādists such as “more
eager for death than you are for life,” in the history of al-Tabarī in the
section on the early Muslim conquests. As for the modern period, there are
countless examples to choose from; I share here two, posted in July 2014 on
Palestinian Media Watch:
A recorded statement by Hamas Chief of Staff Muhammad Deif,
prepared during the current Gaza war, announced: “Today you
[Israelis] are fighting divine soldiers, who love death for Allah like
you love life, and who compete among themselves for Martyrdom
like you flee from death.”
Yesterday, Hamas TV also chose to broadcast a statement former
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh made in the past: “We love
death like our enemies love life! We love Martyrdom, the way in
which [Hamas] leaders died.”69
These examples of praise for death, collected on Jihād Watch, were posted
in 2014:
A Muslim child preacher taunted those he has been taught to hate
most: “Oh Zionists, we love death for the sake of Allah, just as much
as you love life for the sake of Satan.” Jihād mass murderer
Mohamed Merah said that he “loved death more than they loved life.”
Nigerian jihādist Abubakar Shekau said: “I’m even longing for death,
you vagabond.” Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife advised Muslim women:
“I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihād and martyrdom
and to instil in them a love for religion and death.” And as one
jihādist put it, “We love death. You love your life!” And another:
“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.” That was from
Afghan jihādist Maulana Inyadullah.70
Some may remember the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, spoken in 1977:
“This world is but a passage; it is not a world in which we ought to
live….What is called Life in this world is not Life but Death. True Life is
that offered only in the Hereafter.”71 And “It is only the Mullahs who can
bring the people into the streets and make them die for Islam—begging to
have their blood shed for Islam.”72
Political analyst and lecturer Amir Taheri, a former editor-in-chief of
Kayhan, Iran’s largest-selling daily newspaper, shares the following
startling example of the significance of blood in Islam in his 1987 book,
Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism:
Pilgrims to the ‘waiting room of Paradise’ start their guided tour of
the Islamic Republic with a visit to the Behesht Zahra (Paradise of
Flowers) graveyard south of Tehran. There they are invited to stand
for a minute’s silence in front of the Fountain of Blood, a 4.5 metre-
high fountain out of which surges a blood-red liquid, symbolizing, in
the words of the guide, the essence of Islam’s message.73
Finally, consider this quote from Osama bin Ladin, uttered in 1996:
Since the sons of the land of the two holy places [Saudi Arabia] feel
and strongly believe that fighting [jihād] against the kufr [unbeliever]
in every part of the world is absolutely essential, then they would be
even more enthusiastic, more powerful, and larger in number upon
fighting on their own land… defending the greatest of their [holy
places], the noble Kaba….They know that the Muslims of the world
will assist and help them to victory. To liberate their [holy places] is
the greatest of issues concerning all Muslims; it is the duty of every
Muslim in this world. I say to you [U.S. Defense Secretary William
Cohen]: These youths love death as you love life.74
1 Ibid., 30.
2 Ibid., 30-31.
3 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 9.
4 Ibid., 10.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Ibid.
8 Canadian scholar Andrew Rippin defines jihād as, “‘striving for the faith’, or ‘holy war’,
sometimes seen as a ‘sixth pillar’” in the glossary to Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices,
2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), 324.
9 Ibid., 13.
10 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Ibn al-Mubarak.”
11 Ibid.
12 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 14.
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Ibid., 14. Cook’s reference, 214n9: “Ibn al-Mubarak, Kitāb al-Jihād (Beirut: Dār al-Nūr, 1971),
30–31, no. 7.”
15 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 15.
16 Ibid. Cook is quoting Ibn Al-Mubārak, Kitāb al-Jihād, 30, no. 6. Cf. Riley-Smith, The Crusades.
17 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 15, quoting Ibn al-Mubarak, Kitāb al-Jihād, 112, no.137.
18 Ibid., quoing Ibn al-Mubarak, Kitāb al-Jihād, 104–5, no. 125.
19 The date of his death, according to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 6, “Mahk-Mid,” ed. C.E.
Bosworth, E. Van Donzel, and Ch. Pellat, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1991), s.v. “Mālik b. Anas.”
20 Mālik b. Anas, Muwatta’, Kitāb al-Jihād, trans. Muhammad Rahimuddin (New Delhi: Kitab
Bhavan, 2003), 198.
21 Ibid., 206.
22 Ibid., 208.
23 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 16.
24 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, “A–B,” ed. H.A.R. Gibb et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), s.v.,
“al- Bukhārī,” 1297a: “In time, although criticisms have been made on matters of detail, it [Bukhārī
’s Sahīh] was accepted by most Sunnis as the most important book after the Kur’ān.”
25 Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb al-Īmān, The Authentic Hadīth: Book of Belief (Faith), trans. Muhammad
Muhsin Khan, hadīth 36 (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Darussalam, 1997), 1:72–74.
26 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2006), 186.
27 Bukhārī, Authentic Hadīth: Book of Belief, hadīth 36, 1:72.
28 Muhammad Muhsin Khan’s translation of Bukhārī that is available online
(http://www.theonlyquran.com/hadīth/Sahih-Bukhari/?chapter=52&pagesize=0) omits the quote from
9:111. The nine-volume book version, however, includes the quote: “Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb al-jihād
wa –l siyar, Khan, trans., Authentic Hadīth: Book of Jihād and Campaigns, 4:44, hadīth 2787.”
29 Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb al-jihād wa –l siyar, Khan, trans., Authentic Hadīth: Book of Jihād and
Campaigns, 4:59, hadīth 2810
30 Ibid., 4:126, hadīth 2946
31 Ibid., 4:63, hadīth 2817
32 Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, Kitāb al-Jihād, ahādīth 2496 and 2497, 2:693.
33 Ibid., hādīth 2635, 2:729.
34 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 17.
35 Cook’s footnote: “E.g. al-Nasa’i, Sunan (Beirut, n.d.), VI, pp.3–4; and the examples cited in my
‘Muslim Apocalyptic and Jihād,’ Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 20 (1996), pp. 99–100, n.
120.”
36 Cook’s footnote: “Al-Bukhari, Sahih, IV, pp. 15–16 (nos. 2977–78).”
37 Cook’s footnote: “Note how much poetry is cited concerning jihād in Muslim, Sahih, V, pp. 168,
186–89, 191–92, and 194–95.”
38 Cook’s footnote: “Khalil ‘Athamina, ‘The Black Banners and the Socio-Political Significance of
Flags and Banners,’ Arabica 36, no. 3 (November 1989): 307–26.”
39 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 17–18.
40 Cook’s footnote: “Muslim, Sahih, Beirut: Dar Jil, n.d., V, p. 158 [no. 4361]; Abu Da’ud, Sunan,
Beirut, 1998, III, pp. 31–32 [no. 2673].”
41 Muslim ibn al-Hajjāj, Sahīh, Kitāb al-Jihād wa’l-Siyar, trans. ‘Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, hadīth 4361
(New Delhi: Kitāb Bhavan, 2000), 3:1160; also in Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, Kitāb al-Jihād, hadīth 2673,
2:741.
42 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 19–20.
43 Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, s.v. “Daru ’I-Islam.”
44 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, “C–G,” ed. B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat, and J. Schacht, 2nd ed. (Leiden:
Brill, 1965), s.v. “Dar al-Harb.”
45 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 20.
46 Khadduri, War and Peace in Islam, 53.
47 Ibid., 53-54.
48 Born in Alexandria and educated in Cairo, Ibn al-Humam lived for some time in Aleppo (Syria).
Considered an expert on Sufism, he was appointed head shaykh of the Sufi Brotherhood or tariqa of
Khanaqah Shaykhuniyyah in Cairo in 1443.
7 - The Goals of Jihād: Apocalypse and
Conversion
THE ARABS, coming out of the Arabian peninsula, conquered vast
stretches of territory in the Near East and Egypt within thirty years of the
death of Muhammad 632 CE, and by the middle of the eighth century they
controlled much of North Africa, Spain, Sicily, and lands bordering on
India and China. What was the driving force behind the astonishing rapidity
of these conquests?
Were they “sustained by a strong belief in the imminent end of the
world?”1 Though the knowledge of the future is God’s alone, the Koran is
written in an apocalyptic vein, and many verses speak of the Hour being
near (Q42. ash-Shūrā, Counsel, 17; Q54. al-Qamar, the Moon, 1). There is
little doubt that it will appear (Q22. al-Hajj, the Pilgrimage, 7; Q40. Ghāfir,
the Forgiver, 54; Q45. al-Jātiya, the Kneeling, 32), and when it does it will
appear suddenly (Q12. Yūsuf, Joseph, 107; Q22. al-Hajj, the Pilgrimage,
55; Q43. az-Zukhruf, Gold, 66; Q47. Muhammad, Muhammad, 18).
The hadīth literature, on the other hand, makes a much stronger
“connection between the fighting process and the imminent end of the
world: ‘Behold! God sent me [Muhammad] with a sword, just before the
Hour [of Judgment], and placed my daily sustenance beneath the shadow of
my spear, and humiliation and contempt on those who oppose me.’”2 Cook
elaborates:
The Prophet Muhammad is portrayed...as a doomsday prophet, sent
just before the end of the world to warn those who would heed a
warning and to punish those who would not. Here, the process of
jihād...is one in which the hold of worldly things over the believer is
diluted. Because of the impermanence of the soldier’s life, and the
difficulties of establishing a stable family or gathering substantial
possessions, many of the ties that bind people to the world are
weakened or even dissolved entirely. When this is taken into
consideration, the spiritual significance of jihād becomes even more
pronounced.3
Muslim fighters went into battle fervently embracing the notion of the
end of the world, bolstering the courage needed to persist in jihād, which
numerous hadīth and the apocalyptic literature reminded them remained a
duty until the Day of Resurrection (Al-Nasā‘ī, Sunan, vol. 4, book 28,
hadīth 3591; Abū Dāwūd, Sunan).4 Jihād, in general, plays an important
role in Muslim apocalyptic literature. “The early Muslims’ existence was
largely dominated by fighting and conquest, it is hardly surprising to find
that their vision of the future just before the end of the world, as well as
their vision of the messianic future, was characterized by a state of
continuous war.”5
The Mahdi
Muslim messianic thought is dominated by the figure of “the mahdi, who
will complete those conquests left undone by the early Muslims.”6 As
discussed, another goal of jihād is spreading Islam via conquest, and jihād
“created the pre-conditions for conversions, and conversion or proclamation
was one of the goals of jihād.”7 Jihād will continue until conversion occurs
—only the scriptuaries, the people of the book, the Jews, Christians, and
Sabeans, being exempted, as long as the latter pay a tax and accept a lower
social status. Idolaters, polytheists, Hindus, and Buddhists are given a stark
choice: convert or die.
While baser motives for jihād—such as booty and women— are
recognized, many hadīth extol the spiritual goals of jihād. Already having
cited Bukhārī on this subject, two hadīth from Abū Dāwūd’s Sunan suffice:
2509: Narrated Mu‘adh ibn Jabal: “The Prophet (pbuh) said:
‘Fighting is of two kinds: The one who seeks Allāh’s favour, obeys
the leader, gives the property he values, treats his associates gently
and avoids doing mischief, will have the reward for all the time
whether he is asleep or awake; but the one who fights in a boasting
spirit, for the sake of display and to gain a reputation, who disobeys
the leader and does mischief in the earth will not return credit or
without blame.’”
2510: Narrated Abu Hurayrah: “A man said: Apostle of Allāh, [what
of] a man [who] wishes to take part in jihād in Allāh’s path desiring
some worldly advantage? The Prophet (pbuh) said: ‘He will not have
a reward.’”8
The Martyr
A Muslim who blows himself up fighting in the cause of Allāh is not
regarded as a suicide bomber, but a šahīd (pl., šuhadā’), or martyr. In his
Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1974) Hans Wehr gives this
definition: “witness; martyr, one killed in battle with the infidels; one killed
in action.”9 Edward William Lane in his monumental Arabic-English
Lexicon (1872), which draws on more than seventy-five Arab
lexicographers,10 gives these definitions:
A martyr who is slain in the cause of God’s religion; [S, K;] [i.e,.] one
who is slain by unbelievers on a field of battle; [Msb] one who is slain
fighting in the cause of God’s religion [Iath]: so called because the
angels of mercy are present with him; [K] because the angels are
present at the washing of his corpse, or at the removal of his soul to
Paradise [Msb].11
The Muslim conception of martyrdom differs from the Christian or the
Jewish one. Christian or Jewish martyrs are unwilling to compromise or
abjure their faith, but are willing to undergo torture or even death in order to
prove their faith. As Cook explains, “Martyrdom in Islam has a much more
active sense: the prospective martyr is called to to seek out situations in
which martyrdom might be achieved. For example, in ‘Abd Allāh b. Al-
Mubārak’s Kitāb al jihād, we find Nawf al-Bikali praying: ‘O, God! Make
my wife a widow, make my child an orphan, and ennoble Nawf with
martyrdom!’12 Most often in early Islam, martyrdom meant dying in
battle.13
Other categories of martyrdom that do not involve war or violence—
cases we would categorize as accidents or even illnesses—were added over
the centuries, but the jurists of Islam brought the meaning back to the
respect accorded to martyrs who died in battle.
The Rewards of Martyrdom
In the Koran
The celebrated delights of Paradise described in the early verses of the
Koran are promised to all believers, all Muslims. In later verses, these
heavenly pleasures are more “closely associated with being a martyr or
dying in battle,”14 See, for example, Q3. al-‘Imrān 13–15:
Already there has been for you a sign in the two armies which met—
one fighting in the cause of Allāh [fī sabīli llāhi] and another of
disbelievers....Fair in the eyes of men is the love of things they covet:
Women and sons; Heaped-up hoards of gold and silver; horses
branded (for blood and excellence); and (wealth of) cattle and well-
tilled land....Say: Shall I give you glad tidings of things far better than
those? For the righteous are Gardens in nearness to their Lord, with
rivers flowing beneath; therein is their eternal home; with companions
pure (and holy); and the good pleasure of Allāh.
The virtues of the martyrs are extolled; those dying for the cause are always
promised just a little more, as at Q3. al-‘Imrān 169–70: “Think not of those
who are slain in Allāh’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their
sustenance in the presence of their Lord; they rejoice in the bounty provided
by Allāh. And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined
them (in their bliss), the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear,
nor have they (cause to) grieve.”
It is with these promises in mind that the Muslim martyr goes into battle
and to his death with equanimity. See Q9. at-Tawba 111: “Allāh hath
purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in
return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are
slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and
the Qur´an: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allāh? Then
rejoice in the bargain which ye have concluded: that is the achievement
supreme.” Martyrs are promised Paradise at Q. 22 al-Hajj 55: “Those who
leave their homes in the cause of Allāh, and are then slain or die,—On them
will Allāh bestow verily a goodly Provision: Truly Allāh is He Who
bestows the best provision.”
In the Hadīth
In the hadīth, it is faith, sincerity, and intention that count in gaining
one’s heavenly rewards:
It has been narrated on the authority of Anas b. Malik that the
Messenger of Allāh (may peace be upon him) said: Who seeks
martyrdom with sincerity shall get its reward, though he may not
achieve it. —Sahīh Muslim, Muslim ibn al-Hajjāj, hadīth 4694
Who sought martyrdom with sincerity will be ranked by Allāh among
the martyrs even if he died on his bed. —Sahīh Muslim, Muslim ibn
al-Hajjāj, hadīth 4695
And while the sensual aspects of Paradise are often mentioned (for the
seventy-two huris, or dark-eyed damsels, see al-Tirmidhī and Ibn Majā),15
what matters is pleasing God and the degree of honor attained for oneself
and one’s earthly family. See, for example, Bukhārī, hadīth 2817: “The
Prophet said, ‘Nobody who enters Paradise likes to go back to the world
even if he got everything on the Earth, except a Mujahid who wishes to
return to the world so that he may be martyred ten times because of the
dignity he receives (from Allāh).’” “It is said that there are one hundred
ranks in Paradise [see al-Tirmidhī16],” Cook explains, “and that the martyr
will achieve the highest among them (ranking only below prophets and
other righteous men of God in the hierarchy of Paradise). One of the most
important reflections of this spiritual rank is the ability of the martyr to
intercede on behalf of Muslims at the Day of Judgment.”17
This aspect of the martyr’s role in spreading Islam was also noted by
Edward William Lane in his Arabic-English Lexicon, partially cited above:
“God and His angels are witnesses for him of his title to a place in Paradise:
(Iamb, Mgh, K), or because he is one of those who shall be required to bear
witness on the day of resurrection, (K, TA), with the Prophet, (TA).”18 Al-
Tirmidhī also spells out the special privileges the martyr enjoys:
The Mesenger of Allāh [pbuh] said: ‘There are six things with Allāh
for the martyr: He is forgiven with the first flow of blood (he suffers),
he is shown his place in Paradise, he is protected from punishment in
the grave, secured from the greatest terror, the crown of dignity is
placed upon his head—and its gems are better than the world and
what is in it—he is married to seventy-two wives among the Huri-
eyed of Paradise, and he may intercede for seventy of his close
relatives.19
The Law Schools on Jihād
A great number of law schools existed in the second and third centuries
of the Islamic era (the eighth and ninth of the Christian era),20 but “at this
stage no sharp distinction was yet recognized between them. These schools
varied from relatively liberal Hanafites and Mu‘tazilite jurists—permitting
large measures of independent reasoning (ijtihād)—to the conservative
Zahirite and Hanbalite jurists, who not only restricted ijtihad, but also
insisted on a literal interpretation of the Qur’ān and hadīth.”21
By the fourth century of the Islamic era, only four schools of law
(madhahib, sing. madhab)—Hanafī, Mālikī, Shāf‘ī, and Hanbalī—were
recognized (considered orthodox), with the Hanbalīs emerging as the most
rigid and intolerant, rejecting ijtihad and seeking answers to problems in
hadīth. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) was a Hanbalī jurist whose teachings, as
will be discussed at length, were adopted by ‘Abd al-Wahhāb in the
eighteenth century.
As Khadduri explains, the law books of the four schools “became the
standard text-books and any attempt to depart from them was denounced as
innovation (bid ‘a). As a result ijtihād was gradually abandoned in favor of
taqlīd (literally, ‘imitation’) or submission to the canons of the four schools,
and the door of ijtihād was shut.”22
Al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820), founder of the Shāf‘ī school of law, and considered a
founder of the Science of Islamic Jurisprudence or the science of usūl al-
fiqh (roots or sources of the law), encourages the waging of jihād, and then
“addresses the payment of the jizya by non-Muslims (Jews, Christians,
Sabeans, and others) and the manner in which this tax should be levied and
collected....Sections on truces, cease-fires, dealing with rebels, safe-
conducts, and disposition of spoils all follow, together with sections
describing relations with captured women. All of these discussions
presuppose a victorious polity and reflect the confidence of the early
Muslims that God would give them victory.”23
Like Bukhārī, Al-Shāfi‘ī in his Kitāb al-Risāla fī Usūl al-Fiqh, insists
that God has imposed the duty of jihād on all Muslims, and then quotes
extensively from the Koran, particularly sura 9.24 Al-Shāfi‘ī also cites a
hadīth from Abū Dāwūd’s Sunan in which Muhammad says, “I shall
continue to fight the unbelievers until they say: ‘There is no god but God,’
if they make this pronouncement they shall be secured their blood and
property, unless taken for its price, and their reward shall be given by
God.’”25 Al-Shāfi‘ī then summarizes that
These communications mean that the jihād, and the rising up in arms
in particular, is obligatory for all-bodied [believers], exempting no
one, just as prayer, pilgrimage and [payment] of alms are performed,
and no person is permitted to perform the duty for another, since
performance by one will not fulfill the duty for another. They may
also mean that the duty of [jihād] is a collective (kifāya) duty
different from that of prayer: Those who perform it in the war against
polytheists will fulfil the duty and receive the supererogatory merit,
thereby preventing those who stayed behind from falling into error.26
Hanafī jurist al-Sarakhsī, who lived and worked in Transoxiana in the
eleventh century, wrote a thirty-volume legal compendium known as Kitāb
al-Mabsūt, a highly influential work in the genre of furū‘, defined by Hans
Wehr as “applied fiqh, applied ethics, consisting in the systematic
elaboration of canonical law in Islam.”27 As Norman Calder (1950–1998),
former senior lecturer in Arabic at the University of Manchester, writes,
“[Al-Sarakhsī’s] organisation, comprehensive coverage, exploration of
ikhtilāf [points of dispute], and manipulation of hermeneutical argument, all
conduce to make this work a remarkable achievement of juristic literature.
It remained a point of reference for the developing Hanafī furu‘ tradition till
the 19th century.”28
Calder discusses “the significance of jihād, the reasons behind it,” in
great detail, before considering the relative legal validity of tactics,
including the procedure for surrender, how to carry out a siege, and
handling captives—who may be killed, who enslaved. He describes many
of Muhammad’s battles, extracting basic legal principles from each one. In
sum, al-Sarakhsi completes what al-Shāfi‘ī began and covers the spectrum
of waging jihād in law. “From this point forward, although individual points
continued to be debated, the Muslim method of warfare was set.”29
A number of legal works works by jurists such as al-Hakim al-Tirmidhī
(d. 930) and al-Haythami (d. 1565) also discussed the various sins
associated with fighting, further emphasizing jihād’s “crucial importance
for Muslims.”30
The Spiritual Nature of Jihād
The spiritual nature of jihād is also underlined by the Koran and in
several hadīths that emphasize that jihād carried out for booty or worldly
honors is neither acceptable nor valid.
First, that the phrase “fī sabīl allāh,” typically translated as “in God’s
way” (or, perhaps better, as “God’s Cause” or “for the sake of God”),
appears frequently in the Koran—2:154, 2:190, 2:244, 2:246, 2:261, 3:13,
3:157, 3:167, 4:74, 4:76, etc.)—is significant. As the Koran tells us at Q.61.
As-Saff, The Row, 4, “Verily, Allāh loves those who fight in His Cause in
rows as if they were a solid structure.”
Another Koranic verse explains that because the Muslims were fighting
in God’s Cause against the unbelievers, God helped them win the battle of
Badr (Q3. ’āl ‘Imrān, the Family of Imran, 13):
Already there has been for you a sign in the two armies which met—
one fighting in the cause of Allah and another of disbelievers. They
saw them [to be] twice their [own] number by [their] eyesight. But
Allah supports with His victory whom He wills. Indeed, in that is a
lesson for those of vision.
Bukhārī’s hadīth 2810 gives an unequivocal reason for jihād: “Narrated
Abū Mūsa: A man came to the Prophet [pbuh] and asked, ‘A man fights for
war booty; another fights for fame and a third fights for showing off; which
of them is in Allah’s Cause?’ The Prophet [pbuh] said, ‘He who fights that
Allah’s word [i.e., Allah’s religion of Islamic Monotheism] be superior, is
in Allah’s Cause.”31 Even more decisive is Bukhārī’s hadīth 2946:
“Narrated Abū Hurayrah, Allah’s Messenger [pbuh] said, ‘I have been
ordered (by Allah) to fight [’uqātila] against the people till they say lā ilāha
illallāh (none has the right to be worshipped but Allah), and whoever said
lā ilāha illallāh, he saved his life and property except for Islamic law, and
his accounts will be with Allah.’”32
Modern scholars also point out the spiritual nature of jihād in opposition
to those historians who narrow the causes of jihād and the early conquests
to socioeconomic conditions. Khadduri, for instance, writes
The Jihād was not a casual phenomenon of violence; it was rather a
product of complex factors while Islam worked out its jural-doctrinal
character. Some writers have emphasized the economic changes
within Arabia which produced dissatisfaction and unrest and
inevitably led Arabs to seek more fertile lands outside Arabia. Yet this
theory—plausible as it is in explaining the outburst of the Arabs from
wihin their peninsula—is not enough to interpret the character of a
war permanently declared against the unbelievers even after the
Muslims had established themselves outside Arabia. There were other
factors which created in the minds of the Muslims a politico-religious
mission and conditioned their attitude as a conquering nation.33
Cook also observes that “[t]he Prophet Muhammad is portrayed…as a
doomsday prophet, sent just before the end of the world to warn those who
would heed a warning and to punish those who would not. Here, the process
of jihād...is one in which the hold of wordly things over the believer is
diluted. Because of the impermanence of the soldier’s life, and the
difficulties of establishing a stable family or gathering substantial
possessions, many of the ties that bind people to this world are weakened or
even dissolved entirely. When this taken into consideration, the spiritual
significance of jihād becomes even more pronounced.”34
We shall return to this discussion of the spiritual nature of the early
Muslim conquests.
Greater Jihād and Lesser Jihād
Non-Canonical Distinction
Modern apologists of Islam tend to emphasize what is actually a
nonclassical definition of jihād, known as the “greater inner jihād” (jihād
al-akbar), which is seen as a purely spiritual enterprise, the struggle to
overcome one’s baser self. Here the original meaning of jihād as “struggle”
or “striving” is constantly evoked. Jihād in the military sense is the “lesser
outer jihād” (al-jihād al-asghar).
There is some justification for this interpretation in the Koran at Q.22 al-
Hajj 78:
And strive [wa-jāhidū] for Allāh with the striving due to Him [haqqa
jihādihī]. He has chosen you and has not placed upon you in the
religion any difficulty. [It is] the religion of your father, Abraham.
Allāh named you “Muslims” before [in former scriptures] and in this
[revelation] that the Messenger may be a witness over you and you
may be witnesses over the people. So establish prayer and give zakah
give alms and hold fast to Allāh. He is your protector; and excellent is
the protector, and excellent is the helper.
But as Cook points out, “however much weight is put on this verse, the
Qur’an cannot support a reading that would make fighters and
noncombatants spiritual equals.”35 Sura 4 al-Nisā’ verse 95 makes clear
there is no equivalence:
Not equal are those believers remaining [at home]—other than the
disabled—and those who fight [mujāhidūna] in the cause of Allāh [fī
sabīli llāhi] with their wealth and their lives. Allāh has preferred
those who fight [mujāhidīna] through their wealth and their lives over
those who remain [behind], by degrees. And to both Allāh has
promised the best [reward]. But Allāh has preferred those who fight
[mujāhidīna] over those who remain [behind] with a great reward.
Nonetheless, some early scholars such as Ibn al-Mubārak do talk of jihād as
a struggle against one’s lower soul. But the “greater jihād” and “lesser
jihād” distinction seems to date from the ninth century.
The earliest source that David Cook found for this distinction was in a
work by al-Bayhaqi, an Ash‘arite scholar, and Shafi‘ite in fiqh, who died in
1066. His Kitāb al-zuhd al-kabīr contains the following tradition: “A
number of fighters came to the Messenger of Allāh, and he said: ‘You have
done well in coming from the “lesser jihād” to the “greater jihād.”’ They
said, ‘What is the “greater jihād”?’ He said: ‘For the servant [of God] to
fight his passions.’”36
Cook’s conclusion is “that it first appears in Bayhaqi (d. 1066), so most
likely it is being circulated about a generation or so previously, probably by
Sufis who were moving away from the proto-Sufi paradigm of jihād (cf.
Abd Allāh b. al-Mubārak, who is such a proto-sufi, but does not mention
the ‘greater jihād’ in his Kitāb al-jihād, circa 790s), and were seeking an
alternative line of thinking, and then was popularized by al-Ghazali a
generation after al-Bayhaqi.”37 The greater and lesser jihād distinction does
not appear in any of the canonical hadīth collections, however, and while
al-Tirmidhī does cite “the fighter is one who fights his passions,” as Cook
comments in a footnote, “even so, he cites this tradition in the context of the
reward of the murabit (one who guards the frontier), so it is not entirely
without military implications.”38 Clearly the great hadīth collectors ruled
that the spiritual jihād was not a legitimate reading of the meaning of jihād.
Here are the conclusions of some modern scholars on the distinction
between the greater and lesser jihād, and the tradition quoted from al-
Bayhaqi:
Reuven Firestone, University of Southern California: “Its source is
usually not given, and it is in fact nowhere to be found in the
canonical collections.”39
Rudolph Peters, University of Amsterdam: “Although this Tradition is
quite famous and frequently quoted, it is not included in one of the
authoritative compilations.”40
David Cook, Rice University: “In reading Muslim literature—both
contemporary and classical—one can see that the evidence for the
primacy of spiritual jihād is negligible. Today it is certain that no
Muslim, writing in a non-Western language (such as Arabic, Persian,
Urdu), would ever make claims that jihād is primarily nonviolent or
has been superseded by the spiritual jihād. Such claims are made
solely by Western scholars, primarily those who study Sufism and/or
work in interfaith dialogue, and by Muslim apologists who are trying
to present Islam in the most innocuous manner possible.”41
Fazlur Rahman, University of Chicago: “The most unacceptable on
historical grounds, however, is the stand of these modern Muslim
apologists who have tried to explain the jihād of the early Community
in purely defensive terms.”42
Mustansir Mir, University of Michigan: “According to al-Rāghib al-
Isfahānī [d. early eleventh century], one engages in jihād against an
outside enemy (mujāhadat al-‘aduww az-zāhir), against Satan
(mujāhadat ash-shaytān) or against one’s own baser self
(mujāhadatan-nafs). In all three types it can be seen, the goal is to
defeat a hostile force or subdue an opponent. In its special sense jihād
is equivalent to the first of the three types of confrontation and may
be translated ‘armed action,’ another term for which is qitāl. This, the
most familiar meaning of jihād, is the one we are mainly concerned
with here. When the Qur’ān and the hadīth promise great reward for
jihād, they are referring primarily to jihād in the sense of qitāl.”43
Renowned classical Islamic philosopher Ibn Taymiyya (mentioned
earlier, discussed at length in chapter 12) was also skeptical of the
authenticity of this hadīth, and quotes suras Q4 and Q9:
As for the hadīth which is narrated by some in which the Prophet is
alleged to have said upon the return of the Muslims from the battle of
Tabuk: “We have come back from the minor jihād to the major
jihād.” This is a false hadīth, having no origin, and none of those
knowledgeable of the words and actions of the Prophet (sallAllāhu
alayhi wa sallam) have transmitted it. Fighting against the
disbelievers is one of the greatest of works. In fact, it is the best thing
which a person can volunteer.
Allāh said: Qur’an 4:95–96: “The believers who sit back without any
valid excuse are not the same as those who fight in the path of Allāh
with their property and their lives. Allāh has preferred those who
struggle with their property and their lives over those who sit back by
a degree, and to both Allāh has promised good. And Allāh has
preferred those who struggle over those who sit back by a great
(difference in) reward.”
Q9:19–22: “Do you equate providing waters for the pilgrims and
maintaining the sacred masjid with those who believe in Allāh and in
the last day and struggle in the path of Allāh? They are not equal in
the eyes of Allāh, and Allāh does not guide the oppressors. Those
who believe and migrate and fight in the path of Allāh with their
property and their lives are greater in rank with Allāh, and they are
the successful ones. Allāh gives them glad tidings of mercy from Him
and acceptance and gardens wherein for them is a permanent bliss.
They will stay in it forever, verily with Allāh there is a very great
reward.”44
Hundreds of years later, Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim
Brotherhood, also dismissed the distinction between the greater and lesser
jihād:
The belief is widespread that fighting the enemy is jihād asghar (a
lesser jihād) and that there is a greater jihād (jihād akbar), the jihād
of the spirit. Many of them invoke as proof of this the following
narration [athar]: “We have returned from the lesser jihād to embark
on the greater jihād.” They said: “What is the greater jihād?” He said:
“The jihād of the heart, or the jihād of the spirit.”
Some of them try, by recourse to this, to divert people from the
importance of fighting, preparing for combat, and resolving to
undertake it and embark on God’s way. This narration is not really a
sahih (sound) tradition: The Prince of Believers in matters of
Tradition, Al-Hāfiz ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalānī [d. 1449],45 said in the
Tasdīd al-Qaws: “It is well known and often repeated, and was a
saying of Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abla.’”46
…Nevertheless, even if it were a sound tradition, it would never
warrant abandoning jihād, or preparing for it in order to rescue the
territories of the Muslims and repel the attacks of the unbelievers. Its
meaning is simply that it is necessary to struggle with the spirit so that
it may be sincerely devoted to God in every one of its acts. So let it be
known.47
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–1989),48 a Palestinian who obtained a
doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar in 1973, was fully
qualified to write about this hadīth, “[It] is in fact a false, fabricated hadīth
which has no basis. It is only a saying of Ibrahim Ibn Abi Abalah, one of
the Successors, and it contradicts textual evidence and reality….The word
‘jihād’, when mentioned on its own, only means combat with weapons, as
was mentioned by Ibn Rushd, and upon this the four Imams have
agreed....The implication of ‘fī sabīli llāhi (in the Path of Allāh) is jihād, as
Ibn Hajar has said.”49
Military Mysticism: Sufis Soldiers and Jihād
Sufis, the mystics of Islam, are an idealized, mythified group, and thus
much misunderstood in the West, where everything peaceful and
ecumenical is attributed to them. In fact, the first Sufi order in Islam
(founded in the tenth century CE) had a surprising character. Born 1930,
former professor of Arabic at Oxford University Wilferd Madelung offers a
history:
The first Sufi order in Iran, and indeed in Islam, was the Murshidiyya
or Kāzarūniyya founded by Abū Ishāq al-Kāzarūnī, known as
Shaykh-i Murshid (963–1035). Al-Kāzarūnī came from a poor local
family in Kāzarūn, west of Shiraz; his grandfather had still been a
Zoroastrian. Like Ibn Karrām, he represented an activist asceticism,
was a powerful preacher and converted numerous Zoroastrians to
Islam. His strictures and aggressive conduct toward the non-Muslims
brought him and his followers into sometimes violent conflict with
the strong Zoroastrian community backed by the local Būyid
authorities. He preached the jihād against the infidels, and groups of
his followers carried out campaigns against the Christians in
Anatolia.50
In a brilliant section on “Sufi Warriors” in Understanding Jihād, Cook
points out that many Sufi groups, while promoting the greater jihād, “also
proclaimed the need for actual fighting and demonstrated the connection
between the two....Wherever Sufi groups went, they took both aspects of
jihād with them.”51
In his classic work on Shi‘ism—an important branch of Islam practiced
in modern-day Iraq and Iran that differs from Sunni Islam on a variety of
matters such as questions of succession, authority and law—Heinz Halm,
professor of Islamic studies at the University of Tübingen, gives many
examples of Sufi groups that combined the two, such as
the development of isolated tarīqas [Sufi brotherhoods, dervish
orders] into militant Shi‘ite fighting federations which gained
political significance in the 14th century....The earliest example is the
tarīqa of the Shaykhiyya-Jūriyya which goes back to the ‘Pole of the
gnostics’ (Qutb al-Arifīn) Shaykh-i-Khalīfa (d. 1335) and his
successor Shaykh Hasan-i Jūrī (d. 1342). The wandering dervish
Shaykh-i-Khalīfa from Māzandarān on the Caspian Sea set himself up
as a mystical teacher in the mosque of Bayhaq/Sabzavār (east of
Tehran) where he preached the imminent appearance (zuhūr) of the
Mahdī and urged the Shi‘ites to prepare themselves for Holy War.52
(In a Sufi context, a Shaykh is a qualified Sufi, a Sufi master, who is
authorized to teach, initiate, and guide aspiring dervishes or novices
[murid].)
The historically important Safavid dynasty had its origin in the
Safaviyya Sufi order founded by Safi ad-din Ardabili (1252–1334). After
Safī al-Dīn, the leadership of the Safaviyya passed onto his son Sadr al-Din
Musa (1305–1392). The order now became a vigorous proselytizing
religious movement preaching throughout Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor,
while maintaining its Sunni Shafi’ite outlook. The leadership of the order
next passed to Sadr ud-Dīn Mūsā’s son Khwādja Ali (d. 1429) and in turn to
his son Ibrāhīm (d.1429–47). Shaykh Junayd, the son of Ibrāhim, assumed
leadership in 1447, and suddenly the history of the Safavid movement
changed dramatically. As R.M. Savory, an Iranologist and specialist on the
Safavids, wrote, “No longer content with spiritual authority alone, Junayd
introduced a miltant note by inciting his disciples to carry on holy war
against the infidel.”53
Halm takes up the story:
Junayd began to recruit supporters among the nomadic Turcoman
tribes whom he commanded as border fighters (ghāzī) in the Holy
War against the Christian Georgians and the Circassians of the
Caucasus. After he fell in battle (1460) his son Shaykh Haydar
succeeded him....Haydar too sent his ‘representatives’ (khalīfa) to
Turcoman tribes which had linked up with the Safaviyya order and
urged them to Holy War against the unbelievers. It is hardly
surprising that the character of the order changed substantially under
these conditions. Haydar was no longer the traditional Sufi Shaykh
who operated in a circle of a dozen adepts; rather he was the leader of
a large and powerful force of religious fighters. The word Sūfī
increasingly acquired the meaning of “active Muslim.”54
Or, as the Safavid historian Iskandar Beg Munshī (Eskandar Beg Torkamān
Monšī, d. ca.1633) put it in Tārīkh-i ‘Alam-ārā-yi ‘Abbāsī (“Haydar
Wielded both Spiritual and Temporal Authority”), his history of the reign of
Shah Abbas I: “[I]nwardly, following the example of [Sufi] shaykhs and
men of God, he walked the path of spiritual guidance and defence of the
faith; outwardly, he was a leader sitting on a throne in the manner of
princes.”55
It is a similar history in India, where the Sufi order of the
Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya was
closely associated with Muslim revivalism and conquest. Simon
Digby’s translation of the Malfuzat-i Naqshbandiyya, aptly titled Sufis
and Soldiers in Awrangzeb’s Deccan, illustrates this trend. The major
figure of the work, Baba Palangposh, is a local holy man who joins
the army of the Mogul rule Awrangzeb (1657–1701) and participates
in the campaign to subdue the region of southern India. He witnesses
a vision of the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Hamza (slain at the Battle
of Uhud in 627, and usually called “the prince of Martyrs”) in which
Hamza gives Baba Palangposh a sword and says: “Take this
sword...and go to the army of Mir Shihab al-Din in the land of the
Deccan [southern India].”56
Conclusion
While there are hundreds of sources for militant, or lesser, jihād in
classical Islam—hadīth collections, commentaries on the Koran, law books
from all the schools of law, and so on—there do not seem to have been any
works devoted exclusively to spiritual, or greater, jihād. This is clearly a
derivative form, since it is not mentioned in any of the canonical collections
of hadīth. Even the later literature on jihād fails to mention “greater jihād.”
1 Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 241.
2 For this section on Baghdad under al-Ma’mūn, I rely entirely on Ira M. Lapidus, “The Separation
of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 6, no. 4 (October 1975): 363–85.
3 Ibid., 370.
4 Ibid., 372.
5 Josef van Ess, “Une lecture a rebours de I’histoire du mu‘tazilisme,” Revue des études islamiques
47, no. 1 (1979): 68.
6 Lapidus, “Separation of State and Religion,” 372.
7 Ibid., 373.
8 Ibid., 376.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 377.
11 Ibid., 378.
12 Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, 116, citing Ignaz Goldziher, “Review of Walter
M. Patton, Ahmed Ibn Hanbal and the Mihna,” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen
Gesellschaft, Bd. 52 (1898), 158.
13 The entire section on Barbahārī is dependent on Henri Laoust’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of
Islam, vol.1, “A–B,” ed. H.A.R. Gibb et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), s.v. “al-Barbahārī.”
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Ibn Batta,” by Henri Laoust.
11 - Religious Violence in Baghdad between 991 CE
and 1092 CE
AFTER BARBAHĀRĪ, Hanbalite activism continued during the Buyid
period, a major Shī‘ite dynasty in mediaeval Islamic history that flourished
in Persia and Iraq between 945 and 1055. Buyid Baghdad witnessed many
clashes between the Sunni and Shī‘ite populations. But as Michael Cook
emphasizes, “Confrontation between Sunnis and Shī‘ites did not, of course,
end with the passing of the Buyids; it is enough to note that it remained a
feature of the politics of Baghdad to the fall of the ‘Abbasid caliphate [with
the sack of Baghdad in 1258].”1
Baghdad was shaken by numerous violent incidents of a religious
character between 991 and 1092.2 The accession of al-Qādir (991–1031),
brought a new resolution to defend the Sunna and to reestablish the
authority of the caliph. At the foundation of House of Science (Dār al-‘ilm),
sometimes considered the first madrasa established to serve the defence of
Shī‘ism, the caliph replied by inaugurating a new khutba (sermon) mosque
in the Harbīya quarter.
Serious disturbances broke out in 998, when the Shī‘ites of Baghdad
were celebrating with particular fervor the solemn ceremonies of
al-‘āshūrā’ on the 10 muharram and Ghadīr Khumm on 18 dhū’l-hijja.3
The Sunnis reacted by replying to these Shī ‘ite ceremonies with two
ceremonies of their own: visiting the grave of Mus‘ab b.Zubayr on 18
muharram, which commemorated the victory of Mus‘ab over the rebellion
of al-Mukhtār; and celebrating the festival of the Day of the Cave (yawn al-
ghār), an episode in the life of Muhammad when he and Abu Bakr escaped
from their enemies by hiding in a cave.4
The public disturbances provoked by celebrating these ceremonies
finally ended in 1002, in an armed confrontation in the streets of the capital
between the so-called ‘ayyārūn5 of the two parties: the party of ‘Alī and the
party of al’Abbās. The public celebration of all these festivals had to be
forbidden the following year.
Sunni and Shī‘ite clashed again in 1007, this time over the status of the
version of Koran according to Ibn Mas‘ūd versus the version according to
‘Uthman. It seems to have started with the looting of the Shī‘ite mosque of
Barāthā, in response to attacks on two of the most prominent Shafi‘ites, the
qadi Abū Mahammad al-Akfānī and Shaykh Abū Hāmid al-Isfarā’inī. A
commission set up by the caliph concluded that Ibn Mas‘ūd’s recension of
the Koran constituted an inacceptable alteration of the Koranic text.6
During the night of April 24-25, 1008, a Shī‘ite in Karbala publically
cursed “the man who had burnt the Mushaf [of Ibn Mas ‘ūd],” which was
obviously aimed at the Caliph ‘Uthmān, whom Shī‘ites reproached for
having dispossesed Imām ‘Alī, having persecuted ‘Abd Allāh b. Mas‘ūd,
and having had burned all the recensions of the Koran that differed from his
own. The caliph had the blasphemer arrested and executed. In the ensuing
riots, and during which the Fātimid al-Hākim was cheered, Shaykh Abū
Hāmid al-Isfarā’inī had to flee from his home, and Shaykh al Mufīd, the
spokesman of the Twelver Shī‘ias, was sent into exile.
The intervention of the caliph and the Buyid Emir, at the request of the
leading citizens of Baghdad, brought some balm to the situation; and the
popular preachers of the two parties, who had been forbidden to hold their
meetings in public places, were able to resume their activities—as long as
they abstained from inciting riots by their sermons.7 After a brief lull, the
violence resumed between 1015 and 1017.
Once again, Sunni and Shī‘ite were at the center of the discord. The vizir
Fakhr al-Mulk brought a measure of calm by allowing the Shī‘ites to
celebrate al-‘āshūrā’. In 1016, the violence incidents became even more
frequent. Fires whose origin remains mysterious broke out in Karbala, in
the mausoleum of Imām al-Husayn, in diverse sanctuaries of Baghdad, and
in the Great Mosque of Sāmarrā. The three great mosques of Mecca,
Medina, and Jerusalem were also plundered.
Al-Qādir’s main worry was his struggle against pernicious doctrines,
especially those that threatened the caliphate. In 1017,
[he] demanded that the Hanafi juriconsults who had shown some
sympathy with Mu‘tazilism make an act of penitence; at the same
time he forbade the teaching of Mu‘tazili and Shi‘i doctrines. Then, in
1018, he had a reading given in the palace of the text called the al-
risāla al-qādiriyya, a profession of faith defining the the official
doctrine which also conformed to the ideas of the Men of Old [Salaf].
Inspired by Hanbalite ideas, this text condemned not only Shi‘ism in
all its forms but also Mu‘tazilism and even Ash‘arism, which was
denounced for taking a stance that was a dangerous compromise with
Mu‘tazilism, and put forward the veneration of the Companions as a
genuine obligation.8
During the last years of his caliphate, al-Qādir consolidated his gains in the
cause of Sunnism. He had read out aloud from his palace three letters: the
first denounced Mu‘tazilism, the second attacked the doctrine of the
“created Koran,” and the third proclaimed the superiority of the early
caliphs, and affirmed the obligation of Commanding Right and Forbidding
Wrong.9 To ease tension, al-Qādir had the preacher at the mosque of
Barāthā dismissed because of his extreme pro-Shī ‘ite sermons.
The disturbances did not cease during the reign of al-Qādir’s successor,
al-Qa’im. If anything, they became more frequent. As the chief of the
‘ayyārūn, Al-Burjumi inspired, in Laoust’s words, “a veritable terror,” and
his crimes added to the Turkish militia’s lack of discipline. Such was the
chaos and agitation that the pilgrimage caravan was not able to depart.
There were riots in 1045 and 1047, when Jews and Christians were also
targeted. In 1048, no pilgrimage caravan was able to set off because of the
violence.
In 1049 the Sunnis and Shī‘ites were at it again; the two communities
barricaded themselves in their quarters of the city. Occasional apparent
reconciliations were brief, and violence broke out between the two once
again in Baghdad in 1051. Tombs were violated, and some Shī‘ites even
thought of violating the tomb of Ibn Hanbal, but were persuaded not to do
so. The year 1053 witnessed more Sunni-Shī‘ite violence. That same year,
Tughril Beg officially condemned Ash‘arism.
The policies of Nizām al-Mulk (d. 1090), the minister of the Seljuk
Sultans Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, were favourable to Ash‘arism,
Shafi‘ism, and Sufism, which contributed to a renewal of the disturbances.
However the inauguration of Nizām al-Mulks’s college, known as the
Nizāmīya, was vigorously opposed by both the Hanifites and Hanbalites.
Popular agitation of a serious kind erupted, evidence of the tension that
existed within the Sunnite schools and the unpopularity of Nizāmian and
Seljukite policies.
Religious agitation continued in Baghdad during the reign of Malik-Shah
(1072–1092). Two great facts dominate the history of Baghdad during this
time: first, the often violent confrontations between the Hanbalites and
Ash‘arites, and later, a renewal of the conflict between the Sunnis and
Shī‘ites.
Michael Cook gives an account of Hanbalite activism in the Seljuq
period in Baghdad. There is the example of Ibn Sukkara, a prominent
Sharīf, who raided two groups near the caliphal palace, smashing musical
instruments and pouring out liquor. In 1072, a younger Hanbalite scholar,
Abu Sa‘d al-Baqqāl (d. 1112), came across a singing-girl who had been
performing for a Turk. He grabbed her lute and cut its strings. She
complained to the Turk, who retaliated by raiding Abū Sa‘d’s home. Sharīf
Abū Ja‘far (d. 1077), a typical Hanbalite activist with a considerable
following, defended the mosque of the Hanbalites during the 1077
Hanbalite-Ash‘arite riots, “routing the attackers with barrage of mud
bricks.”10 When the caliph tried to make peace, Abū Ja‘far replied that
conflicts of doctrine could not be patched up like conflicts of interests.
In 1078, the conflict between the two groups renewed. As Cook writes,
“These hostilities between Hanbalism and Ash‘arism continued into the
following century and beyond.”11 The older Hanbalite conflict with the
Mu‘tazilism also continued unabated. While the Hanbalites were no longer
in awe of the state, they nonetheless sought its cooperation in the duty of
Forbidding Wrong, asking the caliph to take measures against brothels,
prostitutes, and liquor-sellers. The caliph did his best to comply.12
The Hanbalites were emboldened by the fact that there were, by the
eleventh century, far more Hanbalites than Shī‘ites in Baghdad. The state
was perceived as being weaker than in the past, but there was also an
understanding that “a certain bond was established between the Hanbalites
and the caliphate: they needed each other in the face of local Shī‘ites and
alien military rulers.”13
There was also a changed attitude among the Hanbalites to state
employment, something that had been shunned by Ibn Hanbal. Personal
debt forced his son to take a position as a judge, and Hanbalite scholars now
had more extensive dealings with the court. Abu Muhammad al-Tamīmī (d.
1095), for example “enjoyed a career as a courtier and diplomat,”14 and
then there is the example of Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201), the preacher who was a
“favourite of caliph and populace alike.”15 He was given executive powers
in 1176 “to mount a crackdown on manifestations of extreme Shi‘ism
(rafd); the operation was to include the permanent imprisonment of
offenders, and the demolition of their homes.”16
The intellectual curiosity of the Hanbalite theologian Ibn ‘Aqīl (d. 1119)
would lead him into much trouble. “Before the death of his teacher Abu
Ya‘la in 1066, he had already frequented the study circles of Mu‘tazili
masters, had delved into the study of kalām, vigorously condemned by
Hanbalism, and had become interested in the writings of the great mystic of
wahdat al-shuhūd, al-Hallāj.”17 Ibn ‘Aqīl was first attacked in 1069 for
such transgressions, and had to go into hiding between 1068 and 1072. In
1072, under pressure from Abū Ja‘far, Ibn ‘Aqīl read his public retraction,
repudiating his own earlier writings on al-Hallāj, and the Mu‘tazilites.
Abū Ja‘far, the persecutor of Ibn ‘Aqil, Henri Laoust tells us, was “a
successor in spirit of Barbahari and Ibn Batta” who “distinguished
himself…by the energetic drive he brought to bear in support of the Hanbali
credo and the restoration of the authority of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate. We see
him then at Baghdad taking command of a series of popular uprisings
against Mu‘tazilism and Sufism; in 1068 against the teaching of at the
Nizamiyya;…in 1071 against various forms of corruption;…finally in 1076
against Ibn al-Qushayri who, in his teaching at the Nizamiyya, had taken up
again against Hanbalism the old charge of anthropomorphism (tashbih).”18
Violent confrontations erupted between the supporters of Ibn al-Qushayri
and those of Abu Ja‘far. In 1077, new disturbances broke out, and the
expulsion of the ringleaders brought about some calm. Unrest reignited in
1082, when a Hanbalite scholar attacked the Nizamiya and exhorted his
listeners to destroy it. He was caught, flogged, and imprisoned. Another
incident occurred in 1083, when the partisans of a certain al-Bakri, who had
been appointed to give sermons at the Nizamiya, plundered the house of
one of the sons of Abū Ya‘lā, making off with one of his works. When
given the work, al-Bakri publicly accused Abū Ya‘lā of unbelief. That same
year al-Bakri gave a sermon in which accused the Hanbalites of unbelief.
Stones were thrown, but the caliph managed to restore order.
In the following years incidents multiplied. There were bloody
skirmishes in 1085 between the Sunnis and Shī‘ites, leaving many dead.
The visit of Malik-Shah and Nizam to Baghdad calmed things down, but
the disturbances resumed in 1088, followed by even more serious riots in
1089, which left, according to Ibn al-Jawzi, more than two hundred dead.
The Shī‘ites were accused of hating Islam and its Law. Between 1091 and
1095 there were a series of violent deaths.19 The riots leaving hundreds
dead confirm that religiously inspired terrorism, far from being a twentieth-
century phenomenon, was present throughout the tenth eleventh, twelfth,
and right up to the thirteenth century in the Islamic world, especially in
large cities such as Baghdad.
1 Emmanuel Sivan, “Ibn Taymiyya: Father of the Islamic Revolution: Medieval Theology & Modern
Politics,” Encounter 69, no. 5 (May 1983): 41.
2 Yahya Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya,” in The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic Political Thought, ed.
Gerhard Bowering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 238.
3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Ibn Taymiyya,” by Henri Laoust. George Makdisi, “Ibn Taymiyah,” Islamic Philosophy Online,
May 13, 2003, updated September 6, 2007, http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/it/itya.htm.
4 Henri Laoust, “La Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya d’après Ibn Katīr,” Bulletin d’études orientales 9
(1942–1943): 117.
5 Henri Laoust, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Takī-d- Dīn Ahmad b. Taimīya
(Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1939), 73.
6 Ibid., 79.
7 Makdisi, “Ibn Taymiyah.” See also Wikipedia, s.v. “Ibn Taymiyyah,” last modified, January 14,
2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Taymiyyah.
8 Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 239.
9 Ibid.
10 Laoust, “Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya,” 123–24.
11 Ibid., 127.
12 Ibid., 133; Hasan Q. Murād, “Mihan of Ibn Taymiya: A Narrative Account Based on a
Comparative Analysis of Sources” (master’s thesis, McGill University, 1968), 80.
13 Laoust, “Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya,” 135–36, and Essai, 126–27; Murād, “Mihan of Ibn
Taymiya,” 80–82.
14 Laoust, “Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya,” 137; Murād, “Mihan of Ibn Taymiya,” 89.
15 Laoust, “Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya,” 139–41, 153, and Essai, 133–34, 144–45; Murād, “Mihan of
Ibn Taymiya,” 92, 94–95, 106–7.
16 Laoust, Essai, 141–42; Murād, “Mihan of Ibn Taymiya,” 101–2.
17 Muhammad b. Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-Hādī (d. 744/1343), Al-‘Uqūd al-durriyya min manāqib Shaykh
al-Islām Ahmad b. Taymiyya (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, n.d), 288.
18 Ibid., 269.
19 Donald P. Little. “Did Ibn Taymiyya Have a Screw Loose?” in Studia Islamica, No. 41 (1975;
Paris), 107-108.
20 Laoust, “Biographie d’Ibn Taimīya,” 120.
21 Ibid.
22 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ibn Taymiyya,” by Laoust.
23 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, “E–K,” ed. M. Th. Houtsman, A.J. Wensinck, and T.W. Arnold
(Leiden: Brill, 1927), s.v. “Ibn Taimīya,” by M. Ben Cheneb.
24 Ibn Battūta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354, trans. by H.A.R.Gibb (Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1999), 1:136. It is difficult to see how Ibn Battūta could have
witnessed what he said he witnessed in August 1326, when in fact Ibn Taymiyya was in prison in
July 1326 until his death in September 1328.
25 Sheikh Al-Islam Ahmad Ibn Taimiyah, Principles of Islamic Faith (Al-`Aqidah Al-Wasitiyah),
trans. Assad Nimer Busool (Skokie, IL: IQRA’ International Educational Foundation, 1992),
http://www.islamicweb.com/beliefs/creed/wasiti/taimiyah_1.htm.
26 ASHĀBULHADEETH, “Ruling on the Nusayri/Alawi Sect,” Shaykh-ul-Islaam Ibn Taymiyyah,
August 13, 2009, https://shaykhulislaam.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/ruling-on-the-nusayrialawi-
sect/.
27 Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 239.
28 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ibn Taymiyya,” by Laoust.
29 D.P. Little, “Religion under the Mamluks,” Muslim World 73, no. 3–4 (October 1983): 180.
30 Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, 150.
31 Ibid., 152–53.
32 Ibid., 154.
33 Ibid., 155.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 156.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 157.
38 Ibid.
39 Denise Aigle, “The Mongol Invasions of Bilād al-Shām [Syria] by Ghāzān Khān and Ibn
Taymīyah’s Three ‘Anti-Mongol’ Fatwas” Mamluk Studies Review 11, no. 2 (2007): 97,
http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/MSR_XI-2_2007-Aigle.pdf.
40 Ibn Taymiyya, Majmū‘at Fatāwā (Cairo: n.d.) 28:240–41; cited by Cook, Understanding Jihād,
64.
41 Ibn Taymiyya, Majmū‘at Fatāwā, 28:410–67, esp. 413–16, and 28:501–8, 589–90; cited by Cook,
Understanding Jihād, 65.
42 Cook, Understanding Jihād, 65.
43 Ibid., 65-66.
44 Aigle, “Mongol Invasions of Bilād al-Shām,” 98.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 102.
47 Ibid., 111-12.
48 Ibid., 112, quoting Ibn Taymiyya, Majmū‘ Fatāwa, 28:525.
49 Ibid., 113–14, quoting Ibn Taymiyya, Majmū‘ Fatāwa, 28:521–22.
50 Ibn Taymiyya, Majmū‘ Fatāwa, 28:523.
51 Aigle, “Mongol Invasions of Bilād al-Shām,” 116.
52 Alfred Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya: Dernier grand théoricien du Ğihād médiéval,” Bulletin d’études
orientales, Mélanges offerts a Henri Laoust, tome 2, 30 (1978): 90.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 91.
55 Ibid.
56 I have leaned heavily on Alfred Morabia’s classic paper, “Ibn Taymiyya: Dernier grand théoricien
du Ğihād médiéval,” for this section, which is largely a free paraphrase of pages 91 and following.
57 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ibn Taymiyya,” by Laoust.
58 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 92.
59 Laoust, Essai, 223.
60 Ibn Taymiyya, Iqtidā’ al-sirāt al-mustaqīm li-mukhālafat ashāb al-jahīm (Cairo, 1950); also ed.
‘Isām Fāris al-Harastāni & Muhammad Ibrāhīm al-Zaghlī (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1993).
61 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“‘ilm al-kalām”:
the discipline which brings to the service of religious beliefs (‘aqā’id) discursive arguments; which
thus provides a place for reflexion and meditation, and hence for reason, in the elucidation and
defence of the content of the faith. It takes its stand firstly against “doubters and deniers,” and its
function as defensive “apologia” cannot be over-stressed. A fairly common synonymous term is
‘ilm al-tawhid, the “science of the Unity (of God),” understood as concerned not merely with the
divine unity but with all the bases of the Muslim faith, especially prophecy.
62 Ibn Taymiyya, Iqtidā’ al-sirāt, 146–47.
63 A.N. Poliak, “Les révoltes populaires en Égypte à l’époque des Mamelouks et leur causes
economiques,” Revue des Études Islamiques 8 (1934): 255.
64 “Tenth day of Moharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar; for Sunnis it is a day on which
fasting is recommended, and for Shi’ites a day of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn.”
Encyclopaedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/, s.v. “Āšūrā’.”
65 Ibn Taymiyya concedeed that this rock was an object of veneration for Jews and Christians, but
insisted that Muslims should not imitate them. Furthermore, it was dishonest to claim that a footprint
of the Prophet or his turban was inside the mosque.
66 Taymiyya, Criterion between Allies.
67 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 92.
68 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, s.v. “Ibn Taimīya,” by Cheneb.
69 “Ibn al-Jawzī attacked all sorts of heresies in his robust polemic Talbīs Iblīs, “in which he attacks
not only the various sects more or less outside Sunnism (khawārij, rawāfid, mu‘tazila, falāsifa,
bātiniyya, etc.), but also, within Sunnism, all those whom he considered responsible for having
introduced into the dogma or the law of Islam innovations which were to be condemned (bid‘a):
fuqahā’, traditionists, statesmen and, above all, sūfiyya, among whom men such as Abū Tālib al-
Makkī, al-Qushayrī and al-Ghazālī, with many others, are vigorously attacked.” Encyclopaedia of
Islam, vol. 3, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ibn Taymiyya,” by Laoust.
70 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al-Sahīh li-man baddala dīn al-Masīh (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Nīl, 1905),
4:113–14; quoted by Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 93n42.
71 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, 2nd ed., s.v. “Ibn Taymiyya,” by Laoust.
72 Ibn Taymiyya wrote a treatise, Ibtāl wahdat al-wujūd (The Bankruptcy of Oneness of Existence);
monism seems to be equated with pantheism, which for him would be an unacceptable innovation.
73 Ibid.
74 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, s.v. “Ibn Taimīya,” by Cheneb.
75 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 93n43.
76 Sahīh Muslim, Kitab Al-Imara (The Book on Government), trans. Abdul Hamid Siddiqui, no.
4568 (Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2000), 3:1243–44. “Narrated Abu Sa’id al-Khudri: The Messenger of
Allah (peace_be_upon_him) said: When oath of allegiance has been taken for two caliphs, kill the
one for whom the oath was taken later.”
77 See Yaron Friedman, The Nusayrī-’Alawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History and Identity
of the Leading Minority in Syria (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2010).
78 Ibn Taymiyya, Iqtidā’, 451.
79 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Fatāwā al-kubrā, (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Hadītha, 1966), 3:513–14; quoted by
Friedman, The Nusayrī-’Alawīs, 194.
80 “This term initially referred to the Jews and Christians whose scriptures like the Torah and the
Gospel were completed in Muslim belief by Islamic revelation of the Qur’an. The term was later
broadened to cover adherents of other religions like Zoroastrianism.” Netton, Popular Dictionary of
Islam, s.v. “People of the Book.”
81 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al-Sahīh, 3:261; referred to by Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 93.
82 Ibid., passim.
83 Ibn Taymiyya, Iqtidā’, 118–19.
84 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, s.v. “Ibn Taimīya,” by Cheneb. See also, Ibn Taymiyya, Mas’alat
al-Kanā’is, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, no. 2962, ii.
85 Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, ed. David Thomas, vol.4, 1200–1350, ed.
David Thomas and Alex Mallet (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2009), 857.
86 Ibn Taymiyya, Iqtidā’, 192.
87 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 95.
88 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-shar‘iyya fī iAlāh al-rā‘ī wa-al-ra‘iyya, (Le Traité de droit public
d’Ibn Taimīya), trans. Henri Laoust (Beruit: Institut français de Damas, 1948), 17.
89 Ibid., 74ff., 90, 122, 130–33.
90 Ibid., 72.
91 Ibid., 125.
92 Ibid., 178.
93 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al-Sahīh, 3:299–300.
94 Ibn Taymiyya, Criterion between Allies, 52–53.
95 Laoust, Le Traité, 73.
96 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 96.
97 Laoust, Le Traité, 19.
98 Ibid., 125.
99 Ibid., 127.
100 Ibid., 128.
101 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al-Sahīh, 2:257.
102 Ibid., 4:266–67; Laoust, Le Traité, 127–28.
103 Laoust, Le Traité, 47.
104 Ibid., 49.
105 Ibid., 35-36.
106 Ibid., 12.
107 Morabia, “Ibn Taymiyya,” 98.
13 - The Qādīzādeli Movement in Seventeenth-
Century Istanbul
THERE WERE A number of violent fundamentalist movements in the
Islamic world, particularly in Baghdad, in the preceding centuries that bore
a close resemblance to the one examined in this chapter. In Islamic history,
not all pietists and pirs were for leaving people in peace. For example, the
duty of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong was enthusiastically
endorsed by the sixteenth-century Ottoman pietist Birgili (also al-Birgiwī,
Birgewī, Birgivi, Birkawī, Birgiwī, al-Birgawī, d. 1573), who also extolled
martyrdom, arguing that the duty was even more binding than jihād.1
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Birgili, “Like Ibn Taymiyya, set
himself firmly against all innovation in order to protect the sacred law, and
no considerations of rank would cause him to connive at any non-
observance of the faith. Towards the end of his life he even made the
journey from Birgi to Istanbul to advise the grand vizier Mehmed Pasha
about the rectification of some irregularities which he had observed.
Birgewī, an utter fanatic in religious matters, would not abide the slightest
deviation from the shari‘a.”2
Birgili inspired the violent puritan Istanbul-based Qādīzādeli movement
(1620–1680), during which simple smoking infractions, for example, often
resulted in execution by “dismemberment, impaling, or hanging.”3 Birgili
was popular throughout the Muslim world; his works were commented
upon and much discussed.4 Scholars such as Rudolph Peters5 and Barbara
Flemming6 suggest that the activities of the Qādīzādelis may well have
influenced the Wahhābī movement in the Arabian peninsula in the
eighteenth century.7 Works attributed to Birgili are extremely popular
among Salafī and Wahhābī groups to this day.8
Birgili devoted most of his time to teaching and writing in the remote
town of Birgi, near Izmir. Though living a fairly simple, pious life, Birgili
was always mindful of his Islamic duty to revive and protect the sunna of
the Prophet by Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, and
furthermore, he insisted that others do the same.9
His followers relied on his two important works: Risale-i Birgili
Mehmed (also known as Vasiy(y)etname or Ilmihal of Birgili), written in
Turkish between 1562 and 1563, and al-Tarīqa al-Muhammadiyya, or
Tarikat, written in Arabic and completed in 1572.
The Risale was “a catechism of fundamentals in simple Turkish
prose,”10 which perhaps explains its wide dissemination and popularity. In
this work, Madeline Zilfi, a scholar cited earlier in these pages, explains,
[Birgili] adduced proofs from the Koran, from the traditions of the
Prophet, and from the writings of the patriarchal authorities to
designate “the straight path.” He addressed such subjects as the
scriptures, the prophets, miracles and saints, those whose lot is heaven
or hell; the portents of Judgment Day; those things that are by holy
law enjoined, permissible, neutral, abominable, or forbidden; love of
grandeur, lying, stubbornness, and other hallmarks of the unethical
life; patience, generosity, piety, and other ethics; the proper rearing of
children; conditions under which women may venture outside their
homes; kinds and occasions of prayer; and the nature and substance of
innovation.
Zilfi goes on to compare Birgili’s Risale to his Tarikat, which was
intended for more learned audiences. Its treatment of the issues taken
up in the “Risale” was more elaborate, with more space given to the
canonical authorities underlying Birgili’s positions. In common with
fundamentalists before and since, Birgili “attached no importance to
custom and usage.”11 That is, the fact that the community had
embraced a particular practice could not compensate for the lack of a
Koranic or hadith-based authority.12
The Qādīzādeli movement itself is named after Qādīzāde Mehmed b.
Mustafa (d. 1635), a fiery Friday mosque preacher who railed against the
introduction of bida‘ (innovation) into Islam, particularly by Sufis. The
message of his sermons and those of fellow like-minded preachers “more
than once between 1630 and 1680...erupted into bloody confrontations not
only on the streets, but within the sacred precincts of the mosque.”13
In seventeenth-century Istanbul, the conflict was between “holy law-
defined ‘orthodoxy’ and the methods and claims of Sufism, Islamic
mysticism.”14 This conflict recalled those that have arisen throughout
Islamic centuries. Though the Sufis bore the brunt of the attacks, both
rhetorical and physical, the dispute essentially existed between Qādīzādeli
puritanism and the pragmatism of the ulama decision makers, who allowed
for the necessity of some innovations. Qādīzādelis were against popular
Islam and Sufis in particular.
Qādīzāde Mehmed
Born in 1582 in the western Anatolian town of Balikesir, Qādīzāde
Mehmed studied under Birgili, then made his way to Istanbul, where he
became a professional mosque preacher (“the path of sermon and
admonition”). Though at first attracted to Sufism, Qādīzāde rejected its
“emotionalism” and pursued the more austere path of preaching. He was
appointed preacher at the Sultan Selim I mosque because of his “gifts of
expression and grace of delivery.”15
In 1631, Qādīzāde was promoted to Aya Sofya, the imperial mosque,
where he began to preach a kind of fundamentalist ethic, “a set of doctrinal
positions intended to rid Islam of beliefs and practices that had accumulated
since the era of the Prophet Muhammad’s Medina. Qādīzāde’s sermons, and
the infecting style of his delivery, infused new life into centuries-old
dialectic between innovation and fundamental, ‘orthodox’, Islam.”16
Zilfi underlines the fact that the fundamentalism of Birgili and Qādīzāde
should be seen against the backdrop of the Islamic community’s ongoing
problematic relationship with its own history, which is liable to resurface at
any given moment in the Islamic community:
The lasting appeal of the fundamentalist ethic has its origins in the
relationship of the Islamic community to its own past, to the austerity
and righteousness of the epoch of the Prophet and the patriarchs of
the faith. While the original Islamic community at Medina has
provided Sunni Islam with perhaps its most compelling memory, the
memory has been a painful one. Every age since that of the One True
God’s revelation to His last Prophet necessarily means a dreaded
distancing from the ideal practice of the faith. With time come
changes and deviations. Whether large or small, matters of ritual or
dress or social ceremony, differences are inherently consequential for
a faith that holds all human activity to be a sacred concern.
Innovation, for Qādīzāde and his followers, as well as for their
spiritual guides from the Islamic past, represented a falling away that
threatened the salvation of the community. According to a Prophetic
tradition (Turkish, hadis; Arabic, hadith) repeated by the orthodox
down through the centuries, “every innovation is heresy, every heresy
is error, and every error leads to hell.”17 In a salvationary sense, far
from healing all wounds, time is itself wounding.18
One main contention was that the Islamic injunction to Command Right
and Forbid Wrong was obligatory for all Muslims. The Qādīzādelis were
activists who campaigned in mosques, urging Muslims to intervene and
fulfill this religious obligation. They condemned those who insisted that the
Prophet Muhammad’s parents and all who had died before the divine
revelations had died as believers, or believed in the immortality of the
Prophet al-Khadir, or referred to Islam as “the religion of Abraham.” They
also condemned the writings of the mystic Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240), especially
the Sufi notion of “Unity of Being” (wahdat al-wujūd), which smacked of
pantheism. As much as the pilgrim visiting a tomb to pray for divine
intercession, reading Ibn al-Arabi was an innovation and sinful, and the
guilty must be stopped since this behavior endangered the faith and the
community.
Qādīzādeli violence “was directed against the Sufis. Individual Sufi
masters were denounced and beaten, and their lodges vandalized, often at
the instigation of Qādīzādeli preachers. In Qādīzāde Mehmed’s day, and in
part at his urging, Sultan Murad IV shut down taverns and coffeehouses and
outlawed tobacco and wine. In the 1630s Murad had a number of taverns
destroyed, and thousands of smokers were executed for defying his ban on
tobacco.”19
Sultan Murad did not have any particular quarrels with the Sufis,
however, and actually had strong personal ties to certain Sufi orders. He left
the Sufi lodges to themselves and the Qādīzādelis made more headway
under Murad’s successor, Ibrahim I (1640–1648) and in the first years of
Mehmed IV (1648–1687), when they obtained a fatwa condemning Sufi
excesses, particularly their music and dancing.
This second wave of Qādīzādeli activism ended in 1656, when many of
their ringleaders were arrested and banished to Cyprus. A third and final
wave of confrontations began with “Vani” Mehmed (d. 1685), a scholar and
preacher at the Lala Mustafa Pasha mosque in Erzurum, who was hostile to
the ecstatic wing of Sufism. He managed to have at least one dervish lodge
destroyed near Edirne, publicly denounced Sufis for disobedience to the
Shari‘a, and had the public performance of Sufi music forbidden. Later, the
the sale and consumption of wine was forbidden on pain of death wherever
a mosque existed. Vani’s influence ended with the Ottoman defeat at Vienna
in 1683.
Qādīzādeli Influence
Turning now to whether the Qādīzādelis had an influence on the
Wahhābīs, historian Simeon Evstatiev points out that both “movements
were the product of very different social, political, and cultural local
contexts but…shared a pattern of understanding what the demands of ‘true
belief’ were and what an authentically Islamic orthodox creed should mean
for Muslims.”20 Evstatiev argues for “continuity rather than rupture
between the ideas promoted by its adherents and other revivalist strands in
Islamic history,” for example, “their struggle for a sharī‘a-minded reform
brought about through reviving the beliefs and practices of the first Muslim
generations…seems not to have been entirely new; such trends appeared
not only in earlier Islamic experience in general but also in the earlier
Ottoman intellectual and religio-political experience.”21 In other words,
what these movements—one in a seventeenth-century urban setting, the
other in the heart of eighteenth-century Arabia—for the purification of
Islam share is their understanding of Islam.
“[T]he Qādīzādeli movement was one of the culminations of an already
existing trajectory in Islamic history,” Evstatiev emphasizes.22 The
Qādīzādelis admired Ibn Taymiyya; his “appeal for the eradication of
blasphemous practices and unbelief”23 resonated within the rank and file.
Islamic history is full of such movements, and this was a part of a wider call
for a return to the Koran and the Sunna, a rejection of heretical innovations,
and the aggresive reassertion of tawhīd—an uncompromising monotheism
that was in danger from shirk, polytheism, or more stricly attributing
partners to God, and thus by extension, practising idolatry.
Influence of Ibn Taymiyya
Contradictory opinions exist regarding the influence of Ibn Taymiyya on
Birgili, Qādīzāde, and the Qādīzādelis generally. Khaled El-Rouayheb,
James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual
History at Harvard, has argued that the “views of Birgiwi and Kadizadeli
followers may have been rooted, not in the thought of [Hanbalī] Ibn
Taymiyya, but an intolerant current within the Hanafī-Māturīdī school,
represented by such scholars as ‘Ala’ al-Dīn al-Bukhārī (d. 842/1438), who
famously declared both Ibn ‘Arabi and Ibn Taymiyya unbelievers.”24
However, in Tarikat Birgili contends that the visitation of graves is
forbidden, an opinion close to those of Ibn Taymiyya and his student Ibn al-
Qayyim.
Second, Saudi researcher Sultān Ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Arrābī has claimed
that Birgili, fearful of being rejected and suppressed by the Ottoman
religious establishment, borrowed directly from Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-
Qayyim, but without acknowledgment: “Accordingly, al-Birgiwi borrowed
from Ibn Taymiyya, including whole passages from his fatāwā, but in doing
so, he was ‘just very slightly modifying them’ (bi-taAsrruf yasīr jiddan).”25
There is another work that was once attributed to Birgili, Ziyārat al-
qubūr (On the Visitation of Graves), which is very popular among Salafī
and Wahhābī religious groups. Probably authored by an admirer of Birgili’s,
Ahmad al-Rūmī al-Aqhizārī (d. 1631 or 1634), this treatise begins with an
explicit mention of Ibn al-Qayyim, which surely indicates Ibn Taymiyya
and Ibn al-Qayyim’s importance to and influence on Birgili and his
admirers.
As for Qādīzāde Mehmed, he is said to have “expressed his political
views through an expanded translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-shar
‘iyya into Ottoman Turkish, entitled Tācü ’r-resā’il ve minhācü l-vesā’il,
which he presented to Sultan Murad IV.”26
1 Nehemia Levtzion and John O. Voll, eds., Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 6.
2 Ibid.
3 Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Islam (Niles, IL: Argus Communications, 1979), 13, cited by Levtzion and
Voll, Eighteenth-Century Renewal, 6.
4 Levtzion and Voll, Eighteenth-Century Renewal, 6.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 19.
7 Ibid.
8 Rudolph Peters, “The Battered Dervishes of Bab Zuwyala: A Religious Riot in Eighteenth-Century
Cairo,” in Levtzion and Voll, Eighteenth Century Renewal, 93–115.
9 Ibid., 93.
10 The Well-Preserved Tablet is a tablet in heaven on which is to be found the original text of the
Koran. It is mentioned in the Koran in Sura Q85, al-Buruj, The Mansions of the Stars, 22.
11 Ian Richard Netton, A Popular Dictionary of Islam, (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press 1992),
s.v. “Dhikr.”
12 Peters, “Battered Dervishes,” 94–95. Peters is relying on three sources: Ahmad Shalabi, “Awdah
al-isharat fi-man tawalla Misr min al-wuzara wa-l-bashat”; Yusuf al-Mallawani, “Tuhfat al-ahbab
bi-man malak Misr min al-muluk wa-l-nuwwab”; and Muhammad b.Yusuf al-Hallaq, “Tarih-I Misr.”
13 Ibid., 100.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 104.
16 The two highest-ranking qādīs of the Ottoman judiciary. As senior members of the royal court,
they supervised judicial affairs, heard legal cases, oversaw legal matters of the military-
administrative personnel, and handled campaign duties.
17 Peters, “Battered Dervishes,” 109–10.
18 Ibid., 110-11
19 Michael Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014), 7.
20 Ibid., 13.
21 ‘Abd Allāh Sālih al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb: The Man and His Works
(London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 20–21.
22 Ibid., 21.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 22.
25 Uthmān ibn Bishr, ‘Unwān al-Majd fī Ta’rīkh Najd (Token of Glory: On the History of Najd)
(Beirut, 1967), 16; cited in al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 23.
26 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 30.
27 Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (London: Saqi Books, 2000), 65.
28 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 33.
29 Ibid., 43.
30 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 28–29.
31 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Ibn Kudāma al-Makdisī,” by George Makdisi.
32 The House of Sa‘ud has thousands of members. It is composed of the descendants of Muhammad
bin Saud, founder of the Emirate of Diriyah, known as the First Saudi state (1818–91), and his
brothers, though the ruling faction of the family is primarily led by the descendants of Ibn Saud, the
modern founder of Saudi Arabia.
33 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 86.
34 Ibid., 86-87.
35 Halm, Shi‘ism, 39.
36 J.B.L.J. Rousseau, Description du Pachalik de Bagdad Suivie d’une Notice Historique sur les
Wahabis (Paris: Treutel & Würtz, 1809), 7:261f.; quoted in Vassiliev, History of Saudi Arabia, 97.
37 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 114, citing Husayn ibn Ghannām, Ta’rīkh Najd
al-Musmmā Rawdat al-Afhām li-Murtād Hāl al-Imām wa-Ta’dād Ghazawāt Dhawī ’l-Islām, 2 vols.
(Cairo, 1949), 1:107.
38 Ibid., 114.
39 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, “H–Iram,” ed. B. Lewis et al., 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), s.v.
“Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,” by Henri Laoust.
40 Al-‘Uthaymīn indicates sixty-nine chapters, whereas Crawford gives sixty-seven chapters.
41 However, ‘Abd Allāh Sālih al-‘Uthaymīn gives “ilāhiyya.”
42 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 29.
43 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 120.
44 Ghannām, Ta’rīkh Najd al-Musmmā Rawdat, 1:177; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 29.
45 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 29
46 Quoted in al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 79.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 80.
49 Ibid., 81.
50 Ibid., 82.
51 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 56.
52 Muhammad Rashid Rida, ed., Majmū‘at al-Tawhīd al-Najdiyya (Riyadh: Al-Amana al-‘Amma,
1999), 120–21; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 57.
53 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 57.
54 Bernard Haykel, “Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, Muhammad (1703–92),” Princeton Encyclopaedia of
Islamic Political Thought, 231.
55 Ibid.
56 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 58.
57 Rida, Majmū‘at al-Tawhīd al-Najdiyya, 140; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 59.
58 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 59.
59 Ibid., 61.
60 Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, Mu’allafāt al-shaykh al-imām Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,
including al-Rasā’il al-Shakhsiyya (RS), and al-‘Aqīda (2 parts),‘Aqīda, al-Fiqh (Fiqh), and
MukhtaAar Sīrat al-Rasūl (Sira), ed. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Zayd al-Rūmī et al. (Riyadh: Jāmi ‘at al-Imām
Muhammad b. Su ‘ūd al-Islāmiyya, 1978), ‘Aqīda, 1:284; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,
69.
61 Rida, Majmū‘at al-Tawhīd al-Najdiyya, 117; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 69.
62 Ghannām, Ta’rīkh Najd al-Musmmā Rawdat, 1:189; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 69.
63 For example, Bukhārī, Authentic Hadīth: Book of Jihād and Campaigns, hadīth 2810, 4:59.
64 Ghannām, Ta’rīkh Najd al-Musmmā Rawdat, 1:159, 178; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-
Wahhāb, 69
65 Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, al-Rasā’il al-Shakhsiyya, 293; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb,
69–70.
66 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 70.
67 Michael Crawford, “The Da ‘wa of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb before the Al Sa‘ūd,” Journal of Arabian
Studies 1, no. 2 (2011): 159–60.
68 Uthmān ibn Bishr, ‘Unwān al-Majd fī Ta’rīkh Najd, 1:45–46, 48; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd
al-Wahhāb, 70.
69 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 71.
70 Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (New York:
HarperOne, 2007), 47; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 77.
71 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 77.
72 Ibid., 78.
73 Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, Sira, 39; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 79.
74 Ghannām, Ta’rīkh Najd al-Musmmā Rawdat, 1:159,178; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-
Wahhāb, 79.
75 Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, Sira, 44; quoted in Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 80.
76 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 81–82.
77 Norman Calder, “Law, Islamic philosophy of” Islamic Philosophy Online, 1998,
http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H015.htm
78 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 139.
79 Netton, Popular Dictionary of Islam, s.v. “Ijmā‘.”
80 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 140.
81 Netton, Popular Dictionary of Islam, s.v. “Ijtihād.”
82 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 142.
83 Netton, Popular Dictionary of Islam, s.v. “Taqlīd.”
84 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 142.
85 Ibid., 144.
86 Ibid., 145.
87 Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, 169.
88 Ibid., 170.
89 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 93.
90 Ibid., 58.
91 Ibid., 94.
92 Ibid.
93 Al-‘Uthaymīn, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 146.
94 Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, 191.
95 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 50–51.
9696 Ibid.
97 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 13.
98 Ibid., 115.
99 Ibid., 104.
100 Ibid., 105.
101 Syed Ameer Ali, The Life and Teachings of Mohammed: Or, The Spirit of Islam (London: W.H.
Allen & Co., Ltd., 1891), 527.
102 David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 80.
103 Ibid., 81–82.
104 Ibid., 82.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 85.
107 Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, 125.
108 Ibid., 126.
109 H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam, (New York: Octagon Books, 1975), 27.
110 According to Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (The New Cambridge History of India, III.1), 1989), 19.
111 Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd Edn., Vol. 2, s.v. FARĀ’IDIYYA (A.Bausani), 783 b.
112 Ibid., 784 a.
113 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. (The New Cambridge History of India, III.1), 1989), 22.
114 Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 57.
115 Charles Allen, God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihād
(Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2006 ), 93.
116 A.C. Banerjee, Two Nations. The Philosophy of Muslim Nationalism (New Delhi: Concept
Publishing Company, 1981), 68.
15 - Sayyid Abu ’l-‘Alā’ Mawdūdī
MAWDUDI’S IDEAS did not emerge in a vacuum but were in line with the
thought of earlier Indian Muslim philosophers who greatly influenced him.
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century India Under Islamic Rulers
As early as the thirteenth century, thinkers like Nur-ud Din Mubarak
Ghaznavi, working at the court of Sultan Iltutmish [ruled 1211-1236] set the
aggressive tone of Islamic presence in India. Nur-ud Din elaborated the
doctrine of Din Panahi [protection of religion], by which Islam had to be
defended from the defiling Hindus who were idolaters who must be kept in
their place, and insulted, disgraced, dishonoured and defamed.1 Ziauddin
Barani [Diyā al-Dīn Baranī: 1285-1357] who was an Indian jurist, historian,
political thinker, writer, and a companion of Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq
[1309 –1388], wrote a Fürstenspiegel, a Mirror of Princes, akin to
Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Fatāwā-yi Djahāndārī, in order to educate
the de facto rulers of the day, the sultans, in their duty towards Islam in an
age of corruption. Barani advises sultans to enforce the sharī‘a, to curb
unorthodoxy ( especially speculative philosophy, falsafa), to degrade the
infidel, who must be treated harshly.2 The Sultans must fight like the
Prophet until all people affirm that “there is no God but Allah.” It is the
duty of Muslim rulers to overthrow infidelity, uproot it completely, and
apply the Holy Law, the Sharia on all.3 Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309 – 1388),
the Turkic Muslim who reigned over the Sultanate of Delhi (1351-1388)
carried on the intolerant tradition of the early invaders, and believed that by
extirpating Hinduism wherever possible he served God.4
Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī and the Sixteenth Century
When the Mughal emperor Akbar [reigned 1556-1605] manifested
general tolerance of all religions, the Muslim religious class, the ‘ulamā’,
were not at all amused. As a result, there were a number of Islamic
Revivalist Movements, some of which included a belief in the coming of a
Messiah, who would sweep away all the corruption and inaugurate an era of
piousness, a true, pristine Islam. One of the first to launch such a revival
movement was Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī5 [1564-1624], later known as
Mujaddidi Alf-i Thānī (the Renovator of Islam). For Sirhindi, the sunna and
Sharī‘a remain the most important components of Islamic culture. Despite
being a member of the Naqshbandi order of the Sufis, Sirhindi insists that
Sufi experience is inferior to the Sharī‘a, because Sharī‘a “is based on
incontrovertible proof, while Sufi experience is a result of fallible
speculation only….Any Sufi experience that is rejected by the Sharī‘a is
heresy.”6 Sirhindi denounces all innovations, even so-called good
innovations (bid‘a hasanah). He does not approve of certain customs
introduced by some Sufi orders, such as music (samā‘), dancing (raqS)
singing (naghmah), and ecstatic sessions (wajd, tawājud).7 Sirhindi also
attacked the Shi‘a in a most violent and bitter manner in his Epistle on the
Refutation of the Shi‘is, arguing that it was his duty to denounce heretical
ideas wherever they appear.8
Like many fundamentalists, Sirhindi has no tolerance for philosophers,
since he believed that “the human intellect is incapable of understanding
properly the nature of God without prophetic assistance.”9 But this rejection
of the philosophers also “leads him to an equally indignant rejection of their
[the philosophers] natural sciences. Their geometry, astronomy, logic, and
mathematics are useless as far as the hereafter is concerned and fall
therefore within the category of ‘inconsequential things’ [mā lā ya‘nī].”10
He even discourages the reading of popular literature.11
Sirhindi also launched a vicious attack on Hinduism, and believes all
Hindus, since they were guilty of shirk, must be humiliated whenever
possible. Sirhindi stood for a ruthless suppression of innovations, and
wrote, “It is therefore enjoined upon every Muslim to wage a regular
crusade against all innovations.”12 As Ayesha Jalal points out, he was “a
firm believer in the need to use state power to enforce Islam” and Sirhindi
coined the slogan, “Shariat [Sharī‘a] can be fostered through the sword.”13
Sirhindi argues one should adhere to the Prophet’s sunna and to the sharī‘a,
which was most comprehensive and “the essence of all heavenly books was
included in the Koran. Hence all those who pinned their faith on the Sharī‘a
were superior to all peoples and nations who did not. He condemned the
study of philosophy and the beliefs of the Mutazilas and their followers, in
most emphatic terms.”14
Shāh Walī Allāh and the Eighteenth Century
Shāh Walī Allāh [1703-1762] is best remembered for his efforts to
restore Muslim rule to India, ending with his appeal to the Afghan ruler
Ahmad Shah Abdali to invade India, destroy the Hindu Marathas.
Shāh Walī Allāh was in the Hijāz between April 1731 and the end of
June, 1732, a period of fourteen months. Shāh Walī Allāh (born 1703) and
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (born 1702) both studied in Medina over the same
period and with at least one teacher in common. We know that Muhammad
Hayāt al-Sindī [also written Hayyā al-Sindī] was Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s
teacher, and had an important influence on him. When Shāh Walī Allāh
came to Arabia, he studied hadith under Muhammad Hayat’s teacher, Abū
‘l-Tāhir Muhammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī.15
The central element in Shāh Walī Allāh’s vision of the restoration of the
true Islam was the emphasis on the textual sources of Islam, the Koran and
the hadith. In his Hujjat-Allah al-bāligha, Shāh Walī Allāh tells us that the
Sharī ‘a was the “fitrat”16 or natural disposition or original qualities of
mankind and, “as the last in the cycle of divine laws, was the guardian of
the best interests of mankind. The Islamic Sharī‘a was destined to dominate
the world and crush all undesirable elements. All misinterpretations which
entered it were removed by a renewer whom God raised up at the end of
each century.”17 Islam was superior to all other religions, and especially to
Hinduism. Jihād was central to Islam, which could not have been so
successful without it. Shāh Walī Allāh deplored the way jihād had been
interpreted as defensive. Rizvi paraphrases Shāh Walī Allāh’s doctrine as
spelled out in his Hujjat-Allah al-bāligha: “The modern interpretation of
jihād or Islamic holy war over-emphasized its defensive character. To the
‘ulamā’, jihād was the fard kifāya (collective duty) and it remained a duty
as long as Islam was not [the] universally dominant religion in any area.
According to Shāh Walī Allāh the mark of the perfect implementation of the
Sharī‘a was the performance of jihād… Force, said the Shah, was the much
better course-Islam should be forced down the throats like bitter medicine
to a child. This, however, was only possible if the leaders of the non-
Muslim communities who failed to accept Islam were killed; the strength of
the community reduced, their property confiscated and a situation was
created which led to their followers and descendants willingly accepting
Islam.”18
Shah Wali-Allah’s political ideas were influenced by Sunni theorists
such as al-Mawardi (d.1058), al-Ghazali (d.1111), and particularly Ibn
Taymiyya (d.1328), whose ideas on innovations were especially important
for him.
Shah Wali Allah ascribes at least three objectives to jihād19: First, to
extend the boundaries of right guidance;20 second, to fight criminality; and
finally to combat idolators. Like earlier Muslim thinkers of India cited
above, Shah Wali Allah showed implacable hatred for non-Muslims in
general, and Hindus, in particular, often encouraging, and exulting in, the
destruction of Hindu temples.
Apart from advocating jihād, Shah Wali Allah was fierce and consistent
in his attack on innovations, many of which had crept into Muslim practice
from Hindu and Shi ‘ite festivals and customs such as Muharram. Muslims
were also neglecting prayers, and the payment of zakat. As for praying at
the tomb of Khwaja Mu ‘in al-Din Chisti at Ajmer, and other similar tombs,
Shah Wali Allah considered such practices as no better than idol worship. In
fact, according to the Shah, anyone who prayed to the dead for their needs
was a sinner.
When he called for equity, justice and moderation, Shah Wali Allah only
saw these principles through Muslim eyes—in other words non-Muslims
and Shi‘ites were not considered worthy of similar treatment as if equal to
Muslims.
Sayyid Ahmad Brēlwī [1786-1831]
Sayyid Ahmad Brēlwī, [also Syed Ahmad Barelwi; Sayyid Ahmad
Shahid, or Shah Syed Ahmad or simply, the Sayyid] was born in 1786 in
Rai Bareilly, N. India. In 1804 in Delhi, he became the disciple of the
divine Shāh ‘Abd al-‘Azīz [died 1823], the eldest son of Shāh Walī Allāh.
He was initiated, in 1807, into the mystic (Sufi) tradition of Islam. In 1807,
he went back to Bareilly where he got married, and then in 1810 he left for
Tonk in Rajasthan where he served for seven years in the army of Nawāb
Amīr Khān. But when the Nawab of Tonk made an alliance with the British,
Sayyid Ahmad left, much disillusioned since he had dreamt of recreating an
Islamic state, thereby restoring Islamic supremacy, and re-establishing a
purified Islam.
Sayyid Ahmad Brelwi initiated several members of Shah Wali Allahs’
family into the sufi orders, and they became his disciples. Between 1818
and 1819, Sayyid Ahmad Brelwi made extensive missionary tours of
northern Indian cities, when along the way his disciples ‘Abd al-Hayy and
Shah Ismail gave fiery speeches denouncing degenerate Muslim practices
like the visitations of graves. A riot broke out when the Sayyid’s meetings
were banned by the authorities. They set off again on their missionary tours
in April 1819.
The Sayyid and his disciples often discussed both jihād and hajj in their
private assemblies.21 The Sayyid and his disciples went on missionary tours
to persuade Muslims to go on hajj, an Islamic obligation which had been
almost forgotten as there were many contradictory fatwas floating around
absolving Muslims from this duty. Finally in July 1821, the Sayyid set out
from Rai Bareilly with a party of 400. Along the way, “they preached
against bida‘ (innovations) and commended strict adherence to the
puritanical rules of the Sharī‘a. …In Banaras some of the Sayyid’s Sunni
disciples destroyed several hundred ta‘zīyas22 and used the wood and paper
as fuel to cook the party’s food.”23 The net result was to exacerbate
relations between the Sunnis and Shias generally, even in places where
hitherto they had lived together amicably. And yet, the Sayyid’s party
attracted a large number of converts to their cause.
The Sayyid and his party reached Mecca in May 1822. Even in the
Hijāz, the Indian Muslim pilgrims tried to eradicate non-Muslim practices.
In August 1822, the Sayyid obtained a pledge from his followers to fight
jihād.24 They left Mecca in July 1823, arriving back in April, 1824 in Rai
Bareilly, where he stayed for one year and ten months devoting his thoughts
to jihād and its preparation.
Here it would be appropriate to discuss just where and when the Sayyid
acquired his doctrines and views which resemble the ideas of Ibn ‘Abd al-
Wahhab. The Sayyid’s ideas are to be found in the Sirāta l-Mustaqīm which
was compiled at Delhi in 1817-1818, in other words before his pilgrimage
to Mecca, which he finally reached in May, 1822. But Najdi Wahhabi ideas
were already known by this time to Muslim intellectuals in India.25 Rizvi
also points out that though the Jihād Movement was planned by Sayyid
Ahmad, ‘Abd al-Hayy, and Isma‘il Shahid before their departure on hajj,
“the fame of the Wahhabi wars in Mecca and Medina strengthened the
determination of the Sayyid and his party to fight jihād with the help of the
North-West Frontier tribes.”26 The ‘ulama of the Hijāz had considerable
influence on their Indian counterparts. Finally, Dr Peter Hardy points out
that “Arabian Wahhabism no doubt helped turn Sayyid Ahmad’s thoughts
towards an active military jihād, though precedents were not wanting in
India itself for reforming brotherhoods to become military brotherhoods, as
in the militant Raushaniyya movement on the north-west frontier in the
sixteenth century, and indeed in Sikhism.”27
As Banerjee argues, “Wahabism [sic] in India was derived from two
sources, one internal, the other external: the philosophy of Shah Wali Allah
and the teachings of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab.”28 Islam was no longer in a
dominating position in India after the decline and fall of the Moghul
Empire; India was no longer Dar al-Islam but again a Dar al-Harb, and
Islam had been slowly but surely corrupted by non-Islamic traditions and
customs. “Total reform of the corrupt variety of Islam and jihād against
non-Muslim rule were the needs of the age. Shah Wali Allah’s works
provided sanction for the ambitious programme.”
“But,” continues Banerjee, “the basic lessons on lifting Islam from the
corrupting innovations or heresies (bida‘) were drawn from the doctrines of
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and-- from the long term point of view-- from the
Kharijites through the Azraqites. Wahabism [sic] actually represented a
special type of Pan-Islamism.”29
For the Sayyid, many innovations were dangerously close to denying
God’s Unity, innovations such as prostrating oneself before the tomb of a
saint. Making a circuit round tombs is also illicit since that is a ceremony
retained only for the Ka‘ba. Asking for the intercession of Saints is a way to
deny one’s fate which has been already decided upon by God.
The Sayyid also takes the Shias to task for corrupting the beliefs of the
ordinary Sunni believer, particularly in their estimations of the relative
merits of the first Caliphs. Other abuses result from the ceremonies
regarding the Muharram. There are also countless superstitions that have
grown over the years such as astrology—they must all be jettisoned.
The Sirat al-Mustaqim discusses, in considerable detail, jihād whose
benefits are considered universal, and beneficial not only to believers but
sinners and hypocrites. “The special benefits of jihād that accrue to the
martyrs of the true faith, the Muslim ghazis, mighty rulers and brave
warriors are indescribable. Jihād enables spiritualistic Sufis to rise to the
position of eminent saints (wilāyat) by simple spiritual exercises. Jihād
enables the ‘ulamā’ to disseminate the true faith and to promote an increase
in religious education….The association of infidels with pious Sunnis and
the promotion of Islamic customs and administrative laws may induce
infidels to become Muslims. Those who are killed fighting against the
Muslims also benefit because their death reduces the time they would have
remained adamant in their infidelity and therefore the burden of their
punishment grows lighter. Their families also benefit for they become the
slaves of the Muslims and their association with them may prompt them to
embrace Islam.”30
On his return to India in 1239/1824, he began to make active
preparations for a jihād or religious war. The ultimate object of his
reformist movement was to overthrow the rule of the British and the Sikhs
and restore Muslim dominion in India. First he had to dislodge the Sikhs
from the Punjab.31 Sayyid Ahmad set out from Rae Bareilly in January
1826 on a long circuitous journey of several thousand miles. The Sayyid’s
first act was to send an ultimatum to Ranjit Singh. The Sayyid gained an
early victory over the Sikhs in December 1826, and he was joined by
neighbouring Pathan chiefs, including sardars of Peshawar. In early 1827 he
was formally elected Imam or khalifa, and assumed the title of Amir al-
Mu‘minin (Commander of the Faithful). While many of the tribesmen were
clearly delighted with the booty acquired after the first two battles, the
Sayyid made it clear that his aim “was to obey God and to promote the
interests of Islam. Were the important rulers to accept Islam, he (the Sayyid)
would be their whole-hearted well-wisher. …He had no interest in booty or
in ruling the territory but had been asking Muslims to fight against the
infidels for Islam’s sake.”32
In May 1831, at Balakot on the Kaghan river, in an area where he was
trying to enlist the local chiefs against the Sikhs in Hazara and Kashmir,
Sayyid Ahmad, Shah Ismail and nearly six hundred of his followers were
killed.”33
The significance of Sayyid Ahmad Brelwi’s Jihād Movement must not
be misunderstood. It is certainly wrong to think that once he had driven out
the British from India, the Sayyid intended to hand over supreme power to
the Indian heads of states and non-Muslims. This is to misunderstand totally
the Sayyid’s life mission, and the spirit and purpose of his movement. “He
would never have allowed an Indian secular, or a united Hindu-Muslim,
rule which did not make Islam or Islamic law predominant and where the
control of the states or the sovereign authority was not in Islamic hands. His
letters themselves are clear evidence against this popular myth. In fact, the
Sayyid’s jihād was designed to destroy both the Sikhs and the British and to
make India a dar al-Islam. Those Hindu heads of state who helped him
were guaranteed their throne and a dhimmi (protected subjects [and
essentially inferior]) status; the future for the others in the Sayyid’s dar al-
Islam was bleak. By no stretch of the imagination [was] his jihād a war for
Indian independence.”34
Ayesha Jalal makes a similar assessment. It was in Balakot that Sayyid
Ahmad and Shah Ismail, “quintessential Islamic warriors in South Asian
Muslim consciousness, fell in battle against the Sikhs on 6 May 1831.
Considered to be the only real jihād ever fought in the subcontinent to
establish the supremacy of the Islamic faith…”.
Balakot has become even more important as a symbol of Islamic Jihād
in recent times. As Jalal explains: “Balakot’s association with the idea and
practice of jihād in South Asia was reinforced in the 1990s, when militant
groups set up training camps in its environs to prepare for their campaign
against Indian security forces stationed in predominantly Muslim Kashmir.
For these militants, Sayyid Ahmad and Shah Ismail are great heroes, whose
jihād their admirers wish to emulate, to redress what they perceive as
current injustices.”35 It is not just militants that extolled jihād: “[T]he most
gifted Muslim thinkers and poets of India were evidently influenced by the
movement and wrote feelingly about Sayyid Ahmad’s martyrdom, along
with that of Shah Ismail in Balakot on 6 May 1831.”36
As symbols, the Martyrs of Balakot have taken on an enormous
amplitude and significance that cannot be exaggerated. “The Shahnamah-i-
Balakot is an extended laudatory poem on the movement by a Pakistani
poet [Alim Nasiri]. Writing across the great divide of 1947, Maulana
Husain Ahmad Nadwi notes in his foreword that the hallowed blood shed
on that famous battlefield still runs in the veins of the Muslim community
(millat). This is because Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and Maulana Ismail
Shahid’s movement blended Ahmad Sirhindi’s ideas on Sunni reform and
the elimination of bid ‘a (innovation) with Shah Wali Allah’s jihād
movement. The party of six hundred or so selfless Muslim mujāhidīn who
fought in the rugged terrain of the northwest frontier along with tens of
thousands of Pathan tribesmen ushered in the spring of Islamic culture and
civilization. It is their deeds that have kept alive the spirit of jihād in
Muslim society to this day in the shape of various Muslim organizations
and movements.”37
Meanwhile the poet himself, Alim Nasiri, goes into raptures over the
peaks of the mountains surrounding Balakot coloured by the blood of the
martyrs of Balakot. Another modern writer, Khwaja Abdul Wahid, sings the
praise of the mujāhidīn who have kept the light of Islam burning despite
betrayals.38
Sayyid Abu ’l-‘Alā’ Mawdūdī
Sayyid Abu ’l-‘Alā’ Mawdūdī was born in Aurangabad, South India, in
1903 into a distinguished family from Delhi that traced its lineage to the
great Sufi saints of the Chishti order. His father Hasan was determined not
to give his son a Western education, and thus Mawdūdī was educated in
Urdu, Persian, Arabic, law, and hadīth through private tutors. He imbibed
Western science, however, and learned English and mathematics at an
Islamic academy influenced by Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s modernism. In 1919,
Mawdūdī left for Delhi where he acquired even greater knowledge of
Western science, history, and philosophy. Mawdūdī came into contact with
Jam‘iyyat-i ‘Ulamā’-i Hind (JUH, founded in 1919 at the hight of the
Khilafat movement by “clerics” from Deoband and the Lucknow
seminaries), of whose journal, al-Jam‘iyyat, he became editor. He left the
JUH because of their alliance with Congress (i.e. The Indian National
Congress Party, a secular political party founded in 1885), and left Delhi for
Hyderabad in 1928.
At first Mawdūdī was attracted to some aspects of Western culture, but
now came to the conclusion that the reason for the Muslims’ decline was
the corruption of Islam partly by Western culture, and to propagate “pure”
Islam he founded the Urdu journal, Tarjumanul Qur‘an, in 1932. By the
1930s, Mawdūdī had a clear vision of his plan:
I should first break the hold which Western culture and ideas had
come to acquire over the Muslim intelligentsia, and to instil in them
the fact that Islam has a code of life of its own, its own culture, its
own political and economic systems and a philosophy and an
educational system which are all superior to anything that Western
civilisation could offer. I wanted to rid them of the wrong notion that
they needed to borrow from others in the matter of culture and
civilisation.39
It was in Hyderabad that Mawdūdī fully developed his views on the
corruption of Islam “by centuries of incorporation of local customs and
mores that had obscured that faith’s veritable teachings,” writes University
of San Diego assistant professor of political science Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr.
“Salvation of Muslim culture and the preservation of its power lay in the
restitution of Islamic institutions and practices after they had been cleansed
of the cultural influences that had sapped Muslims of their power.”40
But “Mawdudi’s revivalist position was radical communalism as it
articulated Muslim interests and sought to protect their rights, and
demanded the severance of all cultural and hence social and political ties
with Hindus in the interests of purifying Islam.”41 Mawdūdī created an
Islamic ideology to counter especially the Western ideologies of socialism
and capitalism. He viewed “Islam as a holistic ideology similar to western
ideologies. His notion of Islamic ideology, one of the most prolific and
systematic articulations of its kind, has been most influential in giving
shape to Islamic revivalism as a distinct reading of Islam, its history, and its
purpose across the Muslim world.”42
Mawdūdī was critical of both the Congress and the All India Muslim
League, which he saw as being secular, calling it a “party of the pagans.”
As the Muslim League had no agenda for a Shari‘a state, Mawdūdī
despaired for the future Pakistan, dubbing it an “infidel state of Muslims.”43
It was against this background that in 1941 Mawdūdī founded his Jamā‘at-i
Islāmī (JI), Islamic party. After the Partition of India in 1947,44 the
Jamā‘at-i Islāmī split into an Indian party and a Pakistani party.
Mawdūdī along with 385 members opted for Pakistan, but his ambitious
goal was “Allah’s Government” (hukūmat-i ilāhiyya) or a true “Islamic
State.” Shari‘a and the belief in monotheism was central to all Muslims:
In Qur’an ki Char Bunyadi Istelahen (Four Fundamental Concepts of
the Qur’an), he reinterpreted words such as ilāh (God), rabb (Lord),
‘ibādat (worship), and dīn (religion) to argue that the Qur’an obliged
Muslims to establish a state based on divine sovereignty and
simultaneously reject, or rather dethrone, jāhiliyyat, the embodiment
of human sovereignty. This approach also informs Mawdudi’s multi-
volume commentary on the Qur’an, Tafhīm al-Qur’ān (begun in 1942
and completed in 1972), which finds a coveted space on the
bookshelves of many Muslims who are not Islamists.45
Despite his hatred of the secular West, Mawdūdī often used Hegelian
and Marxists analyses in his own philosophy to show that history since the
seventh century has been a battle between Islam and jāhiliyyat, with secular
democracy as the ultimate expression of jāhiliyyat. He advised his followers
not to vote in elections for a secular, democratic state.46 But an Islamic state
could not function properly until society was already thoroughly
Islamicized. For example, hudud (pl. of hadd, “boundary,” “limit,”
“stipulation,” or “restriction” laid down by God) punishments as prescribed
in the Koran could only be implemented when the people were “fully aware
of the teachings of Islam and would have no excuse for not following the
Sharī‘a.” Thus an Islamic State “should not be the enforcer of the Sharī‘a
but the implementor of the will of the people. Ideally, popular will should
demand implementation of the Sharī‘a, unburdening the state and
legitimizing its rule.”47
But Mawdūdī’s primary concern was to establish an Islamic State where
sovereignty lies with God, not the people. Therefore, as Reza Nasr points
out,
He dwelt less on socio-economic problems such as population
growth, economic inequalities, and social injustice. He believed that
these problems were not real issues of concern, for they were
symptoms of the absence of an Islamic order and reflections of the
failure of western ideologies. They would disappear once the state
and society were Islamized [sic], so Muslims were best advised not to
dwell on these issues but to focus on establishing and managing the
Islamic state.48
As for minorities in an Islamic State, Islamic law already had clearcut rules
governing dhimmis or non-Muslims, second-class citizens subject to a
special tax and other social disabilities. The role of women was also spelled
out in the Shari‘a. How could claims that an Islamic State would be
democratic be sustained alongside such views? Mawdūdī “remained
unapologetic”:
He argued that the Islamic state was an ideological one, and the
preservation of its ideological purity was therefore the condition sine
qua non for its survival and development. Extended rights for
minorities would undermine the Islamic state as they would diffuse its
ideological vigilance. Therefore limiting their rights to those of
zimmis in Islamic law was a matter of national security and self-
preservation.49
In 1953, Mawdūdī campaigned against Zafar’ullah Khan, Pakistan’s
Ahmadi Foreign Minister, and demanded that the Ahmadiyya, a religious
movement, be classified as a non-Muslim minority.50
Mawdūdī also clearly did not accord women a sociopolitical role equal
to men. Fearing that greater interaction of the sexes would lead to
immorality and undo the Islamic State, he “comes close to characterizing
women as an insidious force whose activities ought to be regulated and
restricted before they could wreak havoc.”51 Mawdūdī wrote: “God has
prohibited the unrestricted intermingling of the sexes and has prescribed
purdah [a word of Persian origin meaning the religious and social practice
of female seclusion]” recognizing “man’s guardianship of woman,” for
Muslims must guard against “that satanic flood of female liberty and
licence which threatens to destroy human civilization in the West.”52
By 1992 the Jamā‘at-i Islāmī of Pakistan had grown 7,861 members,
and 357,229 sympathizers. Their great emphasis has been on education. JI
sees itself as an umma, a virtuous Muslim community that demands each
member to reforms all aspects of his life to conform to Islamic standards as
defined by the party. JI wishes to change society in accordance with
Mawdūdī’s vision. “In political terms,” Reza Nasr writes, “the Jamā‘at-i
Islāmī’s organizational model has performed the function of a vanguard
party in the struggle for Islamic revolution.”53 But the overall aim has
always been to train a vanguard of Islamic elite to oversee the revival of
Islam on a national level, to encourage the existing, inherent religious
activism in Islam to push Pakistan toward complete Islamisization.
In newly-created Pakistan, Mawdūdī was in constant trouble with the
authorities. He served time in prison and was even sentenced to death (later
annulled) for participating in anti-Ahmadi agitation. Mawdūdī was also
uwelcome under the military regime of General Ayub Khan (1958–1969),
who tried modernize Pakistan without Islam. Mawdūdī’s candidates did not
win many seats in various elections. He vehemently opposed the
government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (d. 1979), who espoused a form of
socialist populism, and Mawdūdī formed a movement for the installation of
nizām-i muStafā (Prophetic Order).54
During the 1950s, Mawdūdī travelled widely outside Pakistan, often
visiting Saudi Arabia, where he helped establish and run Medina’s Islamic
university and the World Muslim League, but he never neglected Islamic
matters in Pakistan such as the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961 or
the Ahmadiyya question. JI anti-Bhutto protests played a part in the July
1977 military coup that brought General Muhammad Zia al-Haq (d.1988) to
power. Zia al-Haq was quick to grant some kind of legitimacy to the
Prophetic Order movement, and even accorded Mawdūdī the “status of
senior statesman, one whose advice was sought by the new leadership of the
country and whose words adorned the front pages of the printed media.”55
However, Mawdūdī died in 1979 in Buffalo, New York, seeking medical
attention from the very people he despised, the infidels. Over a million
people were said to have attended his funeral in Lahore.
Zia al-Haq earnestly undertook the Islamization of Pakistan, and the JI
enjoyed unprecedented success and political influence, its leaders holding
important government offices, including cabinet portfolios. “The party’s
views were reflected in government programmes. The party played a direct
role in the Islamization of the country, as well as in articulating state policy,
especially concerning the Afghan war and the government’s reaction to
provincialist and ethnic tendencies.”56 Nonetheless, in the 1985 election,
the JI won only ten seats to the National Assembly and thirteen seats to the
various provincial assemblies.
Despite electoral failures, the JI “had become a powerful political force
with significant social and cultural influence”57 and remains so, thanks to
its organizational abilities. Mawdūdī was “amongst the most influential” of
Muslims of the twentieth century who felt “that the answer to western
domination need not be formulated in terms of nationalism and secularism
but in terms of Islam. Himself inspired by Ibn Khaldun, Shah Walī Allah,
Muhammad Iqbal and Hasan al-Bannā’ he has influenced…leaders of
Islamic movements in Egypt, Syria and Iran to many ordinary Muslims
throughout the Islamic world.”58
Mawdūdī’s Beliefs
For Mawdūdī, God alone is sovereign. Man goes astray when he accepts
sovereigns other than God and Shari‘a is an all-embracing guide for
mankind because it is God-given, being derived from the Koran, the Sunna,
and the hadīth. Islam does not recognize national boundaries, and thus the
state ruled by God’s laws would be universal. The ruler can be chosen by
the people, who are imbued with the principles of Islam, but the ruler must
govern by God-given laws. The legislature, too, can be chosen by the
people, but legislation is “by interpretation, by analogy, by inference, and,
in that area of human affairs about which the Shari‘a is silent, by
independent judgement.” All people must submit to the Law, being God-
given, and the sole function of the state is to implement this law. “Islamic
norms exist not merely to be followed by Muslims on their personal
initiative and in their individual lives but to be put into effect through the
coercive power of the state.”59
Mawdūdī was convinced that only the Islamic State could guarantee an
effective means of living according to Islamic norms. The people, being
extraordinarily ignorant of true Islam, had to be educated in what this
meant. Given his family background and admiration for Shah Walli Allah
(1703–1762) and Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), Islamic scholars of India
who were sympathetic to Sufis and Sufism), Mawdūdī was surprisingly
hostile to the Sufis, who “appeared to him to be especially egregious in
violating ‘true’ Islam” and “went so far as to range Sufi asceticism
alongside atheism and polytheism.”60
Mawdūdī’s major contribution was
to have transformed Islam into an ideology, an integrated and all-
embracing system. He aimed to set out the ideal order of the time of
the Rightly-Guided Caliphs. The outcome is the most comprehensive
statement of the nature of the Islamic state in modern times, and one
which, while conjuring an ideal from the past, has been shaped by
contemporary concerns and modes of thought. His exposition, as
might be expected from a man who was primarily a theologian, is
strong on general principles but weak on detail.61
Clearly aware of the Islamic revival tradition in India, Mawdūdī was
heavily influenced by the example of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi and Sayyid
Ahmad Shahid, and considered that “his authority emanated from the
tradition of Ibn Taymiyyah and Shah Wali Allah.”62 Mawdūdī appealed to
the tradition of the mujaddid as a model of religious leadership. As Reza
Nasr notes, “Since Sirhindi’s time, generations of Muslim figures of
authority have drawn on his tradition of renewal and reform of Islam to
revive the faith. Much like them, Mawdudi based his claim to leadership on
his promise to deliver Muslims from their political impotence.”63
Sirhindi’s tradition “has provided a powerful paradigm for activism,”
and Mawdūdī saw “himself as a part of this tradition, and was viewed as a
part of it by his followers, as their documentation of all of his statements
and his every decision attests.”64 He himself identified a number of other
mujaddids responsible for calling Muslims back to the Shari‘a, shunning
innovations, and returning to pure Islam of the salaf.
Mawdūdī on Jihād
Introductory books on Mawdūdī rarely refer to his views on jihād. These
views are uncompromising, unapologetic, and very disturbing in their
implications. Mawdūdī begins his short treatise, Jihād in Islam, with a
definition of religion and a definition of nation:
But the truth is that Islam is not the name of a “Religion”, nor is
“Muslim” the title of a “Nation.” In reality Islam is a revolutionary
ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the
whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and
ideals. “Muslim” is the title of that International Revolutionary Party
organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme.
And “Jihād” refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion
which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective.65
Muslims shun the ordinary word for war, harb, for wars have
traditionally been fought between nations, but Islam does not wage war for
the sake of a nation. Mawdūdī declares:
Islam has no vested interest in promoting the cause of this or that
Nation. The hegemony of this or that State on the face of this earth is
irrelevant to Islam. The sole interest of Islam is the welfare of
mankind. Islam has its own particular ideological standpoint and
practical programme to carry out reforms for the welfare of mankind.
Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the
face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of
Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it. The
purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology
and programme, regardless of which nation assumes the role of the
standard-bearer of Islam or the rule of which nation is undermined in
the process of the establishment of an ideological Islamic State. Islam
requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet—not
because the sovereignty over the earth should be wrested from one
nation or several nations and vested in one particular nation, but
because the entire mankind should benefit from the ideology and
welfare programme or what would be truer to say from “Islam” which
is the programme of well-being for all humanity. Towards this end,
Islam wishes to press into service all forces which can bring about a
revolution and a composite term for the use of all these forces is
“Jihād.”66
The message could not be clearer: Islam must conquer the globe, and the
purpose of jihād is totalitarian—it demands the engagement of all Muslims
until Earth is ruled according to the precepts of Islam. All other ideologies,
as systems where man-made laws rule, are enemies. Mawdūdī wishes to
replace them with God-made laws: the Shari‘a.
Mawdūdī and Shari‘a
The Shari‘a, for Mawdūdī, governs everything on earth, as it is but the
will of God. One must submit to it, or be led astray into jahiliyya. The
highest court of appeal is the Koran and the Sunna of the Prophet. To
impugn them would be an unpardonable sin and result in the transgression
of shirk, embodied in the principle of tawhīd:
Tawhīd means that only God is the Creator, Sustainer and Master of
the universe and of all that exists in it—organic and inorganic….He
alone has the right to command or forbid. Worship and obedience are
due to Him alone… It is not for us to decide the aim and purpose of
our existence or to set the limits of our authority; nor is anyone else
entitled to make these decisions for us. This right rests only with
God….This principle of the unity of God totally negates the concept
of the legal and political independence of human beings….No
individual, family, class or race can set themselves above God. God
alone is the Ruler and His commandments are the Law.67
The source of “all evil and mischief,” wrote Mawdūdī, “is the
domination of man over man, be it direct or indirect….If you do not believe
in God, some artificial god will take His place in your thinking and
behavior. It is even possible that instead of one real God, a number of false
gods, ‘ilahs’ and ‘rabbs’ may impose themselves upon you.”68
More than a guide to one’s personal behavior, the Shari‘a is also meant
for the collective life, and prescribes all-encompassing directives, which for
Mawdūdī include “family relationships, social and economic affairs,
administration, rights and duties of citizens, judicial system, laws of war
and peace and international relations….The Shari‘a is a complete scheme of
life and an all-embracing social order where nothing is superfluous and
nothing lacking.”69
Without the establishment of the entire Islamic system, the provisions of
Islamic law cannot be properly implemented. The Shari‘a does not
recognize any division between religion and other aspects of life, and
between religion and state. Secularism, which
Mawdūdī equated with the separation of religion and state or with
religionlessness, he considered to be the very contrary of Islam since
it opened the way…to the exclusion of all morality, ethics, or human
decency from the controlling mechanisms of society. This…was
precisely what happened in the Western world whose governments
and social bases he never tired of condemning as unutterably and
irredeemably corrupt. In his mind, morality of any kind was simply
inconceivable without religion and the sanction of eternal punishment
to support it.70
And to implement the Shari‘a, political power embodied in an Islamic State
is necessary: “the reforms which Islam wants to bring about cannot be
carried out merely by sermons. Political power is essential for their
achievement.”71
The “materials for the constitution of an Islamic state are to be found in
four principle sources, the Koran, the Sunna of the Prophet, the conventions
and practices of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, and in the rulings of the
great jurists of the Islamic tradition.”72
As discussed earlier in these pages, the first basic principle of the Islamic
State is the recognition of the sovereignty of God.
The second basic principle is the authority of the Prophet: “Whoso obeys
the Messenger obeys God” (Q4. an-Nisā’, the Women, 80). The Prophet is
the perfect model to be emulated.
The third basic principle of the Islamic State is its status as the
viceregent of God, for the Islamic state does not make its own laws but
enforces God-made laws for His sake. The Koran vests viceregency in the
entire Muslim citizenry of the Islamic state (Q24. an-Nūr, the Light, 55). As
Mawdūdī wrote: “The power to rule over the earth has been promised to the
whole community of believers; it has not been stated that any particular
person or class among them will be raised to that position. From this it
follows that all believers are repositories of the Caliphate.”73
The fourth principle is that the Islamic State must conduct its affairs by
mutual consultation (shura) among all the Muslims. Mawdūdī calls this
system of government a “theo-democracy,” although he is aware of the
totalitarian aspect of the Islamic State—and is totally unapologetic. The
Islamic State “cannot…restrict the scope of its activities….It seeks to
mould every aspect of life and activity in consonance with its moral norms
and programme of social reform. In such a state no one can regard any field
of his affairs as personal and private. Considered from this aspect the
Islamic state bears a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist
states.”74 In this Mawdūdī makes it clear that Islam is “the very antithesis of
secular Western democracy. The philosophical foundation of Western
democracy is the sovereignty of the people.”75 He calls the Islamic State an
ideological society: “All…who… surrender themselves to the will of God
are welded into a community and that is how the ‘Muslim society’ comes
into being. Thus, this is an ideological society—a society radically different
from those spring from accidents of races, colour, or country.”76
Revivalist movements and the ideas of Muslim reformers in India bear a
remarkable resemblance to each other, and to revivalist movements in other
parts of the Islamic world, such as Wahhabism in eighteenth century
Arabia. These reformers believed that Islam was in danger, and was being
slowly corrupted by non-Muslim civilizations, whether Hindu, Buddhist or
Western. Unacceptable innovations (bida‘ ) had been introduced, and they
had to be removed and a pristine Islam of the ancestors restored. Tawhīd
(oneness of God) must be respected, and shirk (polytheism, idolatry,
association of partners to God) extirpated. Despite the fact they had been
initiated into various Sufi brotherhoods, and despite their qualified
admiration for some of the Sufi thinkers, these reformers considered that
the Koran, the Sunna and Sharī ‘a overrode all Sufi experiences, and
principles. And above all, being a Sufi did not absolve one from waging
jihād in the military sense. Sayyid Ahmad Brēlwī reminds us that jihād was
not waged for the sake of booty, but to extend the frontiers of Islam, until it
covered the entire world. There was no question of Islam accommodating
itself to Hinduism or the Christianity of the British in India; on the contrary,
Islam had to dominate. Finally, Mawdūdī admitted that Islam was a
totalitarian ideology akin to Fascism and Communism, where the individual
owes total allegiance to Islam, and Islam only, and where he loses his
individuality and finds relief in submerging himself in the Islamic
community (umma).
1 A.C. Banerjee, Two Nations: The Philosophy of Muslim Nationalism, (New Delhi: Concept
Publishing Company, 1981), 11.
2 Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd. Edn., Vol. I .1036a. s.v. Baranī, Diyā al-Dīn.
3 Mohammad Habib, The Political Theory of the Delhi Sultanate, (Allahbad: Kitab Mahal, 1961),
46-47.
4 Vincent A. Smith, The Oxford History of India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981 [Ist edn.
1919]), 258-259.
5 Also spelt: Sirhandi (Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihād in South Asia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008),), and Sarhindi (Q. Ahmad, Wahabi Movement in India (Calcutta,
1966).
6 Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image
in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 41.
7 Ibid., 68.
8 Ibid., 51.
9 Ibid., 53.
10 Ibid., 54.
1111 Ibid.
12 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 1965), 256
13 Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah. Jihād in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008), 31-32.
14 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements, 255.
15 John Voll, “Muhammad Hayyā al-Sindī and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab: An Analysis of an
Intellectual Group in Eighteenth-Century Madīna” in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies (University of London), Vol.38, No. 1 (1975), 39.
16 Cf., Koran: Q30 al-Rūm, The Romans, 30: So direct your face toward the religion, inclining to
truth. [Adhere to] the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created [all] people. No change should there
be in the creation of Allah. That is the correct religion, but most of the people do not know.
17 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004), 281.
18 Shah Wali-Allah, Hujjat-Allah al-baligha, Urdu translation by Abū Muhammad ‘Abd al-Haq
Haqqānī (Karachi: Asahhal-Mutābi’, n.d.) II.480. Summarized in Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah
Wali-Allah and His Times (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004), 285-286.
19 J.M.S. Baljon, Religion and Thought of Shāh Walī Allāh Dihlawī 1703-1762 (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1986),186.
20 Shah Wali Allah, al-Khayr al-Kathīr (Arabic) (Maktaba al-Qāhira, 1974), Khizāna 6.
21 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 480.
22 In South Asia this term refers specifically to the Miniature Mausoleums (imitations of the
mausoleums of Karbala, generally made of coloured paper, wood, and bamboo) used in ritual Shi‘te
processions held in the month of Muharram.
23 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 481.
24 Ibid., 484.
25 Ibid., 498.
26 Ibid., 523.
27 Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 53.
28 A.C. Banerjee, Two Nations: The Philosophy of Muslim Nationalism, 57.
29 Ibid., 58.
30 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 506-507.
31 Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd Edn. Vol.1, 282a-282b, s.v. “Sayyid Ahmad Brēlwī.”
32 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 488-489.
33 Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1972), 52.
34 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 535.
35 Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihād in South Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2008), 2.
36 Ibid., 61.
37 Ibid., 62-63.
38 Quoted by Ayesha Jalal, 62-63.
39 Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, “Twenty-Nine Years of the Jamaat-e-Islami,” Criterion 5, no. 6
(November–December 1970): 45; quoted in Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 4, “Iran–Kha,” ed. by E.
van Donzel, B. Lewis, and Ch. Pellat, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1978), s.v. “Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abu ‘l-
a’la,” by F.C.R. Robinson.
40 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jam‘at-i Islami: The Origins, Theory and Practice of
Islamic Revivalism” in Pioneers of Islamic Revival, ed. Ali Rahnema, Studies in Islamic Society
(London: Zed Books Ltd., 1994), 2.
41 Ibid., 103.
42 Ibid., 105.
43 Irfan Ahmad, “Mawdudi, Abu al-A ‘la (1903–1979),” Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic
Political Thought, 334.
44 In 1947, India was partitioned into two political entities to provide a homeland for Muslims. The
state of Pakistan was created for Muslims.
45 Irfan Ahmad, “Mawdudi, Abu al-A ‘la (1903–1979),” Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic
Political Thought, 334.
46 Ibid.
47 Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jam‘at-i Islami, 107.
48 Ibid., 108.
49 Ibid., 109.
50 The Ahmadiyya was founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908). The Ahmadiyya
are often persecuted by other Muslims because Ghulam Ahmad made a number of claims, including
being a recipient of revelation. Orthodox Muslims reject this notion as blasphemy; for them
Muhammad is the last of the Prophets to have received a revelation.
51 Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jam‘at-i Islami,” 110.
52 Syed Abul A’la Maududi, Political Theory of Islam (1960; Lahore: Islamic Publications Ltd.,
1980), 27.
53 Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jam‘at-i Islami,” 113.
54 Ahmad, “Mawdudi,” 334.
55 Reza Nasr, “Mawdudi and the Jam‘at-i Islami,” 118.
56 Ibid., 119.
57 Ibid.
58 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 4, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abu ‘l-a’la.”
59 Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts
and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 81.
60 Ibid.
61 Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 4, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abu ‘l-a’la.”
62 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 115.
63 Ibid., 126.
64 Ibid., 136.
65 Syed Abul A’la Maududi, Jihād in Islam (Beirut: The Holy Koran Publishing House, 1980), 5.
66 Ibid., 6–7.
67 Syed Abul A’la Maududi, The Islamic Way of Life, ed. Khurshid Ahmad and Khurram Murad
(Leicester, UK: The Islamic Foundation, 1992), 29–30. First Urdu edition, 1948; first English edition,
1967.
68 Maududi, Political Theory of Islam, 13.
69 Syed Abul A’la Maududi, Islamic Law and Constitution (Lahore, IL: Islamic Publications, 1967),
53.
70 Charles Adams, “Mawdudi and the Islamic State,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L.
Esposito (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 113.
71 Maududi, Islamic Law and Constitution, 177.
72 Adams, “Mawdudi and the Islamic State,” 114.
73 Maududi, Political Theory of Islam, 35.
74 Ibid., 30.
75 Ibid., 21.
76 Maududi, Islamic Law and Constitution, 50.
16 - Brigadier S.K. Malik and The Qur’anic Concept
of War
PRESIDENT ZIA AL-HAQ [1924 – 1988], who was President of Pakistan
from 1978 to 1988 vowed to run the country on Islamic principles, and said,
“Pakistan which was created in the name of Islam will continue to survive
only if it sticks to Islam. That is why I consider the introduction of [an]
Islamic system as an essential prerequisite for the country.”1 Thus while he
began the Islamization of Pakistan in earnest, Zia al-Haq took time to write
what, at first sight, might seem an extraordinary endorsement of The
Qur’anic Concept of War (1979), by Brigadier S.K. Malik, which has
become, according to Sebastian Gorka, who holds the Major General
Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine
Corps University, “the most influential treatise on why Jihād is necessary
and how it must be fought.”2 It is constantly quoted and referred to by
modern jihādists. However, given the President’s Islamization programme
for Pakistan and the fact that jihād is the quintessential Islamic duty, Zai al-
Haq’s stamp of approval of Brigadier Malik’s treatise makes perfect sense.
Little information is available on Brigadier Malik, and yet, as Patrick
Poole and Mark Hanna point out in their publisher’s preface:
The continued relevance of The Qur’anic Concept of War is indicated
by the discovery by US military officials of summaries of this book
published in various languages on captured and killed jihādist
insurgents in Afghanistan. This is hardly a surprising development as
Malik finds within the Quran a doctrine of aggressive, escalating and
constant jihād against non-Muslims and the religious justification of
terrorism as a means to achieving the dominance of Islam around the
world—dogmas that square with the Islamist ideology driving
terrorism worldwide.3
The endorsements of Zia al-Haq and Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, the late
advocate-general of Pakistan and former Pakistani ambassador to India,
“established Malik’s views on Jihād as national policy and gave his
interpretation official state sanction.”4 For Zia al-Haq, the book is essential
for soldier and civilian:
This book brings out with simplicity, clarity and precision the Quranic
philosophy on the application of military force within the context of
the totality that is Jihād. The professional soldier in a Muslim army,
pursuing the goals of a Muslim state, cannot become “professional” if
in all his activities he does not take the “colour of Allah.” The
nonmilitary citizen of a Muslin state must, likewise, be aware of the
kind of soldier that his country must produce and the only pattern of
war that his country’s armed forces may wage.5
In his enthusiasm, Zia al-Haq would change the motto of the Pakistani army
to “Islam, Piety, and Jihād.”6
The Qur’anic Concept of War is replete with quotes from the Holy Book
exhorting men to wage war in the name and for the cause of God. The most
quoted suras include Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow; Q3. ’āl ‘Imrān, the Family of
Imran; Q8. al-’anfāl, the Spoils of War / Voluntary Gifts; Q9. at-Tawba, the
Repentance / al-Barā’at, the Immunity; Q48. al-Fath, the Victory; Q4. an-
Nisā’, the Women. Eleven other suras are cited to a lesser degree. Malik
offers a close analysis of all of Muhammad’s battles, and his bibliography
refers to the works of Mawdūdī, namely Tafhīm al-Qurān and al-Jihād fi ’l-
Islām, which, as discussed, have had an enormous influence in Pakistan in
general, and on Zia al-Haq in particular.
One of Malik’s distinctive doctrines is the importance of using terror as
its own end:
[W]hen God wishes to impose His will upon the His enemies, He
chooses to do so by casting terror into their hearts….“Let not the
Unbelievers think,” God commands us directly and pointedly, “that
they can get better (of the Godly): they will never frustrate them.
Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power,
including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the
enemies of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may
not know, but whom Allah doth know.’ (Q8. al-’anfāl, the Spoils of
War / Voluntary Gifts, verses 59–60).7
Malik explains this approach:
The Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for
war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the hearts of the
enemies, known or hidden, while guarding ourselves from being
terror stricken by the enemy….[G]uarding ourselves against terror is
the “Base”; preparation for war to the utmost is the “Cause”; while
the striking terror into the hearts of the enemies is the “Effect.”…. In
war, our main objective is the opponent’s heart or soul, our main
weapon of offence against this objective is the strength of our own
souls, and to launch such an attack, we have to keep terror away from
our own hearts.
And for Malik psychological preparation for war is all important:
So spirited, zealous, complete and thorough should be our preparation
for war that we should enter upon the “war of muscles” having
already won the “war of will.” Only a strategy that aims at striking
terror into the hearts of the enemies from the preparation stage can
produce direct results.8
“Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the
end itself,” Malik states, “It is the point where the means and the end meet
and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision on the enemy; it is
the decision we wish to impose on him.”9
And what is the ultimate purpose of terror and terrorist action? To
destroy the enemy’s faith:
Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is
permanent. Psychological dislocation can be produced by a physical
act but this does not hold good of spiritual dislocation. To instill terror
into the hearts of the enemy, it is essential, in the ultimate analysis, to
dislocate his Faith. An invincible Faith is immune to terror. A weak
Faith offers inroads to terror. The Faith conferred upon us by the Holy
Quran has the inherent strength to ward off terror from us and to
enable us to strike terror into the enemy.10
Malik constantly quotes Western experts on the causes of war such as
Geoffrey Blainey, Bernard Brodie, and Liddel Hart only to dismiss their
sociopolitical arguments as irrelevant to Islam: “[T]he central theme behind
the causes of wars, as spelt out by the Holy Quran, was the cause of Allah.
This cause manifested itself in different shapes and forms at different stages
in the history of Islam. In pursuit of this cause, the Muslims were first
granted permission to fight but were later commanded to fight in the Way of
God as a matter of religious obligation and duty” (emphasis in original).11
Malik clearly sees the Koranic concept of war as humanitarian, noble,
and righteous, freeing humanity from tyranny and injustice, but a careful
reading reveals that by justice and peace he means the imposition of Islam
on the whole of humanity, until everyone submits. For Muslims the Koran
is the word of God, and it must be borne in mind constantly that Malik is
addressing committed Muslims:
[T]he fountain-head of the Quranic dimension of war lies in the fact
that war is waged for the cause of Allah, and with the object of
imposing conditions of justice and peace. To those who fight for this
noblest heavenly cause, the Book promises handsome heavenly
assistance. The index of fighting for Allah’s Cause is Man’s total
submission to His will. Those who fail to submit themselves fully and
completely to the Will of God run the risk of incurring heavenly
wrath. Nature has no particular or specific liking for any community
of people as such; it helps only those who qualify themselves for it,
and punishes the rest. Fighting involves risk to life and property that
must be accepted willingly and cheerfully. Death in this world is
inevitable; life in the Hereafter is certain; and the reward of those who
fight for the cause of Allah is safe, splendid and sure. Our reward is in
direct proportion to our performance. Those who die fighting for the
cause of Allah never actually die.”12
A little later, he adds, “A victory in Islam is a victory for the cause of
Islam.”13
Malik explains that the Koran
gives us a distinctive concept of total war. It wants both, the nation
and the individual, to be at war “in toto,” that is, with all their
spiritual moral and physicalresources.…Practised in their totality, the
Quranic dimensions of war provide complete protection to the Muslim
armies against any psychological breakdown….It is on the strength of
our Faith, and the weakness of that of our adversary, that we can
initiate plans and actions calculated to strike terror into the hearts of
our adversaries.14 (Emphasis added.)
In his preface to Malik’s book Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, a former diplomat
and advocate general of Pakistan, is even more explicit in his defense of
Islam and its arguments for jihād. After thanking Malik for his “valuable
contribution to Islamic jurisprudence” and “‘analytic Re-statement’ of the
Quranic wisdom on the subject of war and peace,” Brohi introduces and
then unfurls an ingenious new definition of “defensive”:
When a believer sees that someone is trying to obstruct another
believer from travelling on the road that leads to God, spirit of Jihād
requires that such a man…be prevented from doing so and the
obstacles…be removed, so that mankind may freely be able to
negotiate its own path that leads to Heaven. To omit to do this is a
culpable omission, if only because we…become passive spectators of
the…forces imposing a blockade in the way of those who mean to
keep their faith with God. Then ordinary wars which mankind has
been fighting for…revenge or securing satisfaction of their desire of
getting more land or more booty are not allowed in Islam. This is so
because here the rule is, all striving must be for the sake of
God….The wars in the theory of Islamic law are in the nature of an
undertaking to advance God’s purpose on earth, and invariably they
are defensive in character.
Now comes Brohi’s definition of “defensive”:
It is a duty of a believer to carry forward the Message of God and to
bring it to the notice of his fellow-men in handsome ways. But if
someone attempts to obstruct him from doing so he is entitled, as a
measure of defense, to “retaliate.” In other words, a Muslim has the
right to fight anyone who stops him for spreading Islam and its
message, and that is defined as a defensive measure.15
Thus it is a duty for all Muslims to spread the Message of the Quran, of
Islam, and anyone who stands in the way must be fought in the military
sense, if words do not suffice:
In Islam war is waged to establish supremacy of the Lord only when
every other argument has failed to convince those who reject His Will
and work against the very purpose of the creation of mankind. Indeed,
the person who goes to holy war virtually is offering testimony
regarding the paramountcy and supreme authority of God’s law by
giving up the most precious thing he has, namely, his life….Indeed
the very word “Shahīd” which is roughly taken to mean as a martyr,
literally signifies the idea that he has borne testimony as a witness
that God’s law is supreme and anyone who attempts to obstruct the
progress of those who are taking their path to God will be dealt with
sternly—for that is the only way in which to restore and rehabilitate
the authority of God on Earth.16
In other words, do not get in the way of the so-called “suicide bomber,” for
he is a martyr in the cause of Islam clearing the path for those who want to
get to God.
Brohi dismisses those Western critics who believe that Islam is in
perpetual struggle with the non-Islamic world by arguing that because man
is a slave to God, and defying God is treason under Islamic law, it is a
Muslim’s duty to remove those who defy God:
Many Western Scholars have pointed their accusing fingers at some
of the…verses in the Qur’an….As to them it is sufficient answer to
make…that the defiance of God’s authority by one who is His slave
exposes that slave to the risk of being held guilty of treason and such
a one, in the perspective of Islamic law, is indeed to be treated as a
sort of…cancerous growth on that organism of humanity….It thus
becomes necessary to remove the cancerous malformation even if it
be by surgical means (if it would not respond to other treatment), in
order to save the rest of Humanity.17
Brigadier Malik makes it clear that jihād is essential for the spread of
Islam, and it is a duty incumbent on all Muslims until Islam covers the
whole surface of the earth. Brohi also underlines another totalitarian aspect
of Islam: Islam demands the total surrender of oneself to the cause of Islam,
the individual sacrifices himself, and is sacrificed, for the sake of the
Islamic community (umma).
1 Ian Talbot, Pakistan, a Modern History (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1998), 251.
2 Sebastian Gorka, “Grandmasters of Jihad,” The Counter Jihad Report, May 16, 2015,
https://counterjihadreport.com/tag/s-k-malik/.
3 Patrick Poole and Mark Hanna, “Publishers Preface” to Brigadier S. K. Malik, The Qur’anic
Concept of War (1992; Delhi: Adam Publishers & Distributors, 2008),
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Quranic%20Concept%20of%20War.pdf.
4 Ibid.
5 General M. Zia-ul-Haq, “Foreword,” in Malik, Qur’anic Concept of War.
6 Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), 275.
7 Malik, Qur’anic Concept of War, 57–58.
8 Ibid., 58.
9 Ibid., 59.
10 Ibid., 60.
11 Ibid., 20.
12 Ibid., 44.
13 Ibid., 50.
14 Ibid., 144.
15 Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, “Preface,” in Malik, Qur’anic Concept of War, iii.
16 Ibid., v.
17 Ibid., vii.
17 - Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood
HASAN AL-BANNA was born in 1906 in Mahmudiyya, a village north of
Cairo. His father, a watch repairer, devoted his spare time to religious
studies and fulfilled the duties of an imam for the local mosque. Egypt was
at the time effectively under British control—a constant source of
humiliation for al-Banna and his fellow countrymen. Al-Banna took part in
demonstrations against the British when he was thirteen years old.
According to his memoirs, al-Banna took seriously the Islamic principle
of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong at an early age. For instance,
he denounced some workmen who had sculpted a nude wooden figure for
the prow of a boat to the local police. Later, he, his brother, and some
friends founded the Society for the Prevention of the Forbidden, believing it
their religious duty to write to those they felt were not following Islamic
teachings in their behavior.
By age thirteen al-Banna was also deeply influenced by the Hasafiyya
Brotherhood, a Sufi order and offshoot of the larger Shadhiliyya order
whose founder, Shaykh Hasanayn al-Hasafi (1848/9–1910), was an Azhar
scholar of the Shafi‘i school who took Commanding Right and Forbidding
Wrong seriously. Al-Banna made many friends in this tarīqa (Sufi order)
for example, Ahmad al-Sukkari, who later became a leading figure in the
Society of the Muslim Brotherhood.
At seventeen, al-Banna decided to enter Dar al-‘Ulum, a teacher-training
college in Cairo. For him, teaching was a religious calling; he believed
education was the transmission of the truths of Islam, which was all-
embracing. Al-Banna saw himself as a murshid (religious guide and
teacher) and would later demand total loyalty and obedience from his
followers. After graduating in 1927, he began teaching in Ismā‘īlīyya, in the
Suez Canal Zone, where al-Banna encountered what he felt was Western
dominance and Muslims who had shamelessly adopted Western
civilization’s worst aspects: its secularism and decadence.
He detested the cultural influences of the West over Muslims who were
being tempted into abandoning Muslim ethics and the Islamic way of life.
Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Jam‘iyyat al-Ikhwān al-
Muslimīn) in 1928, when a group of laborers pleaded with him to do
something about their constant humiliation from foreigners in their own
land.
Al-Banna labored tirelessly to build a tight organization with a broad
base of members who were enjoined to work for the good of the ordinary
Egyptian at all levels, providing schools and medical aid, and ameliorating
social conditions in the villages—in effect establishing a social welfare
program. The political situation was unstable; though nominally
independent since 1922, the real power in Egypt was divided among the
Egyptian monarchy, the nationalist Wafd Party, and the British, with
conflicts of interest that led to constantly shifting alliances. Corruption was
rife. With the advent of World War II and the rise in nationalist agitation,
the British tried desperately to maintain control and ensure that Egypt join
the Allied cause.
It was at this moment that al-Banna began participating in Egyptian
politics at the national level. He wanted to run for public office in 1941, but
he was persuaded by the Wafd Party to step aside, in return for the lifting of
restrictions on the Muslim Brotherhood. All along al-Banna’s main goal had
been more than independence from Britain: the installation of a truly
Islamic government inspired by the Koran, the Sunna, and the Shari‘a. He
obtained a promise from the Wafd Party to ban alcohol and prostitution as a
step in the right direction.
Al-Banna was also unsuccessful in the election of 1945, and henceforth
concentrated on agitating for the introduction of Islam into the private and
public domain. In doing so he did not hesitate to use increasingly violent
means to achieve his goals.
Brotherhood Ideology
At its fifth conference in 1939 the Muslim Brotherhood announced its
basic ideology:
1. Islam as a total system, complete unto itself, and the final arbiter of
life in all its categories;
2. An Islam formulated from and based on its two primary sources,
the Koran as God’s revelation, and His ipsissima verba, and the
perfect example of the Prophet, as found in the sunna;
3. An Islam that was universal: applicable to all times and places, for
the whole of humanity.1
Al-Banna explicitly defined the Muslim Brotherhood as “a Salafiyya
message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic
group, a cultural-educational union, an economic company, and a social
idea.”2 The Brotherhood was tightly run: patient planning, organization,
program, and action—this alone could guarantee victory.
When in 1943 he thought he was about to be arrested by for nationalist
agitation that would have led to the harassment of the British occupation,
al-Banna wrote a message to his followers, which reads in part:
My Brothers: you are not a benevolent society, nor a political party,
nor a local organization having limited purposes. Rather, you are a
new soul in the heart of this nation to give it life by means of the
Qur’an; you are a new light which shines to destroy the darkness of
materialism through knowing God; and you are the strong voice
which rises to recall the message of the Prophet….You should feel
yourselves the bearers of the burden which all others have refused.
When asked what it is for which you call, reply that it is Islam, the
message of Muhammad, the religion that contains within it
government, and has one of its obligations freedom.3
In late 1942-early 1943, a new unit developed, called “the special
section” (al-nizam al-khass) by Muslim Brotherhood insiders and “the
secret apparatus” (al-jihaz al-sirri) by outsiders. The Brotherhood was not
averse to using violence to achieve its aims, and was “were more effectively
violent than other groups” since members had been taught that militancy
and martyrdom were Islamic virtues as found in the notion of jihād. As al-
Banna wrote,
Jihād is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be
ignored nor evaded. Allah has ascribed great importance to jihād and
has made the reward of the martyrs and the fighters in His way a
splendid one. Only those who have acted similarly and who have
modelled themselves upon the martyrs in their performance of jihād
can join them in this reward. Furthermore, Allah has specifically
honoured the Mujahideen with certain exceptional qualities, both
spiritual and practical, to benefit them in this world and the next.
Their pure blood is a symbol of victory in this world and the mark of
success and felicity in the world to come.
Those who can only find excuses, however, have been warned of
extremely dreadful punishments and Allah…has reprimanded them
for their cowardice and lack of spirit, and castigated them for their
weakness and truancy….The weaknesses of abstention and evasion of
jihād are regarded by Allah as…one of the seven sins that guarantee
failure.
Islam is concerned with the question of jihād and the drafting and the
mobilisation of the entire Umma into one body to defend the right
cause with all its strength….The verses of the Qur’an and the Sunnah
of Muhammad (PBUH) are overflowing with all these noble ideals
and they summon people in general (with the most eloquent
expression and the clearest exposition) to jihād, to warfare, to the
armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting.4
Al-Banna goes onto quote verses from the Koran exhorting Muslims to
jihād,5 and hadīth from the six canonical collections of of Sunni Islam,
followed by scholars from the various law schools.
Al-Banna rules out the pacific interpretation of jihād as an internal
struggle against one’s lower instincts. For him, that particular hadīth is
inauthentic, not in the canonical collection, but “even if it were a sound
tradition, it would never warrant abandoning jihād or preparing for it in
order to rescue the territories of the Muslims and repel the attacks of the
disbelievers.”6
While emphasizing the principle of Commading Right and Forbidding
Wrong, he states, “It is said in the hadīth: ‘One of the greatest forms of
jihād is to utter a word of truth in the presence of a tyrannical ruler.’ But
nothing compares to the honour of shahadah kubra (the supreme
martyrdom) or the reward that is waiting for the Mujahideen.”7 Muslims
should therefore seek an honorable death:
My brothers! The ummah that knows how to die a noble and
honourable death is granted an exalted life in this world and eternal
felicity in the next. Degradation and dishonour are the results of the
love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihād
and be the lovers of death.…
…[O]ne day you will face death and this ominous event can only
occur once. If you suffer on this occasion in the way of Allah, it will
be to your benefit in this world and your reward in the next. And
remember brother that nothing can happen without the Will of
Allah….
You should yearn for an honourable death and you will gain perfect
happiness. May Allah grant myself and yours the honour of
martyrdom in His way!8
Violence Necessary
The Muslim Brotherhood came to believe that only in the period of the
four orthodox caliphs (al-khulafā’ ar-Rāshidūn) was the state “truly
representative of Islam as a faith and a system”; thereafter the Islamic
community began its decline and disintegration.9 Al-Banna was totally
disillusioned with al-Azhar, which the Brothers later took to task for failing
to speak for a dynamic Islam and keep foreign influences at bay, and
ultimately held responsible for the decline in Egypt’s religious and cultural
life.10 Their ultimate goal was the creation of an Islamic order: a state run
according to the Shari‘a, derived from the Koran, the Sunna, and hadīth.
There was no danger of theocratic tyranny, the Brothers argued, since there
is no religious class in Islam.
The Muslim Brotherhood held that women are equal to men in the eyes
of Islam, and any discrimination that exists (in inheritance, legal hearings,
prayer) is a function of the greater responsibility of men, and due to the
differences in mental and emotional capacities of men and women.
Violence was necessary to operations. It was seen as a way to defend the
Brotherhood’s ideas, derived, as discussed, from the Islamic concept of
jihād in the military sense. The Brothers were “an Islamic army for the
protection of the message,” the late Richard P. Mitchell explains in his
classic work, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1969).11 Though there
were political elements in their acts of violence, the religious dimension,
Mitchel believed, had a wider significance: “[O]ut of the fact of power in
being, and in use in defence of ‘eternal’ goals, emerged a self-righteous and
intolerant arrogance which opened an unbridgeable gap between the Society
and its fellow citizens.”12
Al-Banna and the Brothers created a sense of group and religious
exclusiveness in which political opponents became the objects of violence.
Though al-Banna was perhaps more moderate on the issue of commanding
right and forbidding wrong, the Brothers generally took a more aggressive
line. While this brutality was not unique to the Brothers, their apporach
contained an Islamic dimension that led to all kinds of political and social
violence and further intolerance.13 For example, the Brotherhood was
responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmad Mahar in
February 1945 just after he had read Egypt’s declaration of war on the Axis
(the Brotherhood was pro-Nazi; al-Banna received regular subsidies from
Hitler). Government minister Amin Uthman was murdered in January 1946,
British soldiers were attacked regularly from 1946 onward, and in March
1948, “a respected judge was murdered by two members of the secret
apparatus”:
Two more attempts were made on sometime Prime Minister Nahhas
Pasha [1879–1965]. In June, houses were blown up in the Jewish
quarter of Cairo, two large Jewish-owned department store were
bombed. Cinemas were dynamited, and hotels and restaurants
catering to the “infidels and the heretics” were set on fire. Women
wearing “inadequate dress” were the victims of knife attacks, and
homes said to belong to apostates were raided and ransacked by angry
believers gathering for “spontaneous demonstrations.” In December,
widespread riots brought the university to a stop. The Cairo police
chief was killed by a bomb. Dozens of of other officials,
businessmen, and intellectuals were likewise killed. Prime Minister
Nuqrashi Pasha [1888–1948, the second prime minister of Egypt]
finally ordered the society dissolved—he was gunned down twenty
days later. As al-Banna had said, “The dagger, poison, the
revolver….These are the weapons of Islam against its enemies.”14
On January 25, 1952, British forces attempted to disarm some of the
auxiliary police by attacking the Ismā‘īlīyya police headquarters; more than
forty people were killed in the ensuing battle. Mitchell describes the
following day:
[T]he heart of modern and westernized Cairo was left a charred ruin
in the wake of the most devastating riot in modern Egyptian history.
In the early morning members of the auxiliary police in Cairo
marched across the bridges to the university in Giza and with students
and soldiers collected along the way, returned to the parliament where
demands were voiced for an immediate declaration of war on Britain.
At the same time other groups, well-organized and well-equipped,
began the systematic burning of the centre of the city. The fire
consumed department stores, cinemas, bars, nightclubs, social clubs,
luxury food and clothing establishments, novelty shops, automobile
showrooms and garages, airline offices, and the like.15
This was actually a well-planned operation organized by the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood and the Totalitarian Core of Islam
The Egyptian government accused the Muslim Brotherhood of being
Khawarij—the Khārijite movement was often evoked as a model. In al-
Mabāhith (May 1950–January 1951), a weekly news magazine edited by
Muslim Brotherhood acting head Salih ‘Ashmawi, he actually praised the
“rectitude” of the Khārijites and their spirit of “struggle in the path of
God.”16 And “in that sweep of developments in the Arab world beginning
with movement of the Wahhābiyya in the late eighteenth century,” Mitchell
observes, “the Society of the Brothers emerges as the first mass-supported
and organized, esentially urban-oriented effort to cope with the plight of
Islam in the modern world. This fact complicates the attempt to trace its
geneology, but does not osbscure the general harmony of its aims with those
of earlier reform movements.”17
And while they admired earlier reformers such as Jamal al-Din al-
Afghani (d. 1897), Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905), and Rashid Rida (d.
1935), the Brothers felt that their reforms were inadequate because they
failed to see Islam in the totality.18 While al-Banna’s father had been a
student of Abduh, and he himself an avid reader of Rida’s al-Manar, he
remained critical of these reformers, who he felt lacked the Brothers’
comprehensive view:
We believe the provisions of Islam and its teachings are all inclusive,
encompassing the affairs of the people in this world and the hearafter.
And those who think that these teachings are concerned only with the
spiritual or ritualistic aspects are mistaken in this belief because Islam
is a faith and a ritual, a nation (watan) and a nationality, a religion and
a state, spirit and deed, holy text and sword….The Glorious Qur’an…
considers [these things] to be the core of Islam and its essence.19
To preserve a vital Islamic tradition the Brothers urged all Muslims to
relate to their own heritage, but al-Banna bequeathed the Brotherhood a
rigidity and puritanism that rendered its followers impatient of all dissent—
or as Mitchell put it, “Profoundly genuine though it was, the call to return to
Islam and its code of behaviour was nevertheless vitiated by a sterility born
of obedience to inherited forms and a self-righteousness born of
sanctimonious claims to omniscience.”20
As discussed, there was a marked preference among the Brothers for
action: “Our message means jihād, struggle and work…it is not a
philosophical message.”21 They talked of “programme” versus “ideology,”
and Mitchell’s harsh judgment on the Brothers’ anti-intellectualism is
important: “[T]his outlook reflected a modern and mass expression of
classical Islamic thought patterns. Al-Banna was steeped in both the
theological and Sufi traditions, and from both he absorbed, and in his
teachings demonstrated, the non-rationalist, even non-intellectaulist quality
which has been observed to be an aspect of Muslim thought.” Significantly,
“neither Banna nor the movement produced any work remotely identifiable
as theology or philosophy.”22
In his unjustly neglected The Politics of Social Change in the Middle
East and North Africa (1963), the late Princeton professor of politics
Manfred Halpern does not hesitate to name the Muslim Brotherhood,
Mawdūdī’s Jama’at –i-Islam, and the Khaksar Movement responsible for
the assassination of Pakistani Liaqat Ali Khan in 1951, or to label several
others groups in the Islamic world as neo-Islamic totalitarian and fascist.23
The totalitarian nature of such groups and movements becomes clear when
contrasted with extreme nationalism, because the latter limits itself
geographically, while the neo-Islamic variety has universal ambitions where
Islam is the defining element.
For Sa’id Ramadan, who was the son-in-law of al-Banna and a leader of
the Muslim Brotherhood, nations have became idols—“[M]y religion is
dearer to me than my family and clan. My religion is the first country that I
take shelter in”24—therefore all nations that were once Muslim must return
to Islamic sovereignty. According to The Call of the Moslem Brotherhood:
the Moslem faith makes it the clear duty of every strong Moslem
whose soul has drenched in the doctrines of the Koran to consider
himself the protector of every other Moslem whose soul has also been
drenched in …in Islam. The doctrine is everything. And is faith
anything other than love and hate? Hereafter, we want the banner of
Allah to fly high once more in those regions which were once happy
in Islam….But ill luck deprived them of the light….Anadalusia,
Sicily, the Balkans, the Greek Islands—all these are Moslem colonies
which must come back into the Moslem fold. The Mediterranean and
the Red Sea must be two Muslim lakes, as they were before….
Following that, we would want to issue our call to the world, and
subdue every powerful man to it completely, that there may be no
confusion, and that all religions may be Allah’s.25
The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements are fascist, Halpern explains,
because “they concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the
power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement. They
view material progress primarily as a means for accumulating strength for
political expansion, and entirely deny individual and social freedom.” And
while they “champion…a heroic past,” these movements “repress all free
critical analysis of either past roots or present problems.”26
Referring to the work of the late British historian Norman Cohn,27
Halpern was the first to point out the similarities between these Middle
Eastern fascist movements and certain religiopolitical movements in
Western Europe at the beginning of the Modern Age, when groups adopted
a militant social chiliasm (the doctrine that at some future time Christ will
reign bodily upon the earth for 1000 years).28 This was a theme taken up
more recently by the French neoconservative Laurent Murawiec.29
Neo-totalitarian movements urge the individual to merge his destiny with
the group struggling to resurrect the past. The movement then becomes the
whole life of its members. Unable to cope with modernity, neo-Islamic
totalitarianism pursues its vision “through nihilistic terror, cunning, and
passion.”30 The leadership demands absolute obedience, and as members
lose their individuality they identify with the leader, “whose power,
emotion, and style of living pantomime the yearning of his followers,”
thereby stimulating “an intoxicating sense of nihilism in which the
willingess to sacrifice one’s self becomes more important than the object for
which the sacrifice is made. Those who are sent to death as robots have the
illusion of dying as martyrs.”31 At meetings, religious slogans are chanted
over and over:
God is our goal!
The Prophet is our leader!
The Koran is our constitution!
Holy War is our path!
Death in God’s service is our loftiest hope!
God is greatest, God is greatest!
Dangerous in their exclusivism, intolerance, and sacrifice of the individual,
unable to answer difficult questions or brook opposition, these neo-Islamic
totalitarian movements can only resort to violence.
1 “Al-Mu’tamar al-Khāmis,” quoted in Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (1969;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14.
2 Ibid.
3 Quoted in Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers, 30.
4 Complete Works of Hasan al-Banna, vol. 10, “al-Jihad.,” 4.
5 Verses cited: suras 2:216; 3:156–58, 169–70; 4:74; 8:60, 65; 9:14–15, 29, 41, 81–83, 88–89, 111;
47:20–21; 48:18–19; 61: 4.
6 Complete Works of Hasan al-Banna, vol. 10, “al-Jihad.,” 20.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers, 210.
10 Ibid., 212.
11 Ibid., 319.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 320.
14 Murawiec, Mind of Jihad, 34–35.
15 Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers, 92.
16 Ibid., 320n63.
17 Ibid., 321.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 232-23.
20 Ibid., 325.
21 Ibid., 326.
22 Ibid., 326-27.
23 Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 134, 135.
24 Ibid., 135.
25 The Call of the Moslem Brotherhood, Cairo, October 1938; quoted in Halpern, Politics of Social
Change, 147–48.
26 Halpern, Politics of Social Change, 135–36.
27 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical
Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957).
28 Halpern, Politics of Social Change, 136.
29 Murawiec, Mind of Jihad.
30 Halpern, Politics of Social Change, 140.
31 Ibid., 142.
18 - Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husaini and the Nazis
IN NAZIS, ISLAMISTS, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2014),
Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz cogently argue that the Grand Mufti
Haj Amin al-Husaini (also “el-Husseini,” 1895–1974) was an important
figure in the founding of modern Arab and Islamist politics who “played a
central role in the Islamist movement’s survival during the 1950s and
1960s,” making it possible for “the movement’s revival in the 1970s to gain
hegemony in Iran, Turkey, and much of the Arabic-speaking world and Iran
by the early twenty-first century.”1 This alone warrants al-Husaini’s
inclusion in this study, but his collaboration with the Nazis, which has been
misinterpreted by some recent scholars such as Matthias Küntzel,2 must
also be taken into consideration.
Historians like Küntzel claim that modern Islamic antisemitism was
derived entirely from the Nazis. But as Rubin and Schwanitz repeatedly
emphasize, al-Husaini and later Islamists such as al-Banna, Sayyd Qutb,
and the Ayatollah Khomeini all drew on their own backgrounds, traditions,
and doctrines to spread their antisemitism. Al-Husaini advocated
genocide even before the Nazi government did so. His 1937 Appeal
to All Muslims of the World urged them to cleanse their lands of the
Jews, and it was translated into German in 1938. Urging the use of
force against all Jews in the Middle East, al-Husaini both gave his
parallel version of Hitler’s doctrine and laid the foundation for the
antisemitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamist
down to this day. A half-century later, every speech and sermon from
Hamas, Hizballah, Iran’s regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-
Qaeda echoed all of the grand mufti’s main points in his declaration.3
In his analysis, Rubin and Schwanitz explain, al-Husaini “combined
traditional Islamic hatred of Jews with arguments framed by modern
political concepts.”4 He quoted constantly from the Koran, Sira, and hadīth
to lay out his claims: Jews are cursed and evil; they were expelled from
Egypt because they exploited the Egyptian people; (citing al-Tabarī) they
tried to kill Moses; they were punished by God for their sins; they spread
disease; they hated, tried to discredit, and, finally, tried to poison
Muhammad; they are out to destroy Islam. The Grand Mufti’s diatribe ends
thus:
I present to my Muslim brothers in the entire world the history and
the true experience which the Jews cannot deny. The verses from the
Koran and hadith prove that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies
of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them. They
know only hypocrisy and guile. Hold together, fight for Islamic
thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until
your land is free of the Jews. Do not tolerate the plan of division, for
Palestine has been an Arab land for centuries and shall remain Arab.5
Rubin and Schwanitz conclude: “It is wrong to see al-Husaini and his
fellow radicals as merely importing European antisemitism or being
influenced by the Nazis. The two groups’ ideas developed in parallel from
their own histories and political cultures….The two sides came together on
the basis of both common interests and similar worldviews.”6
In an October 1944 speech to the imams of the Bosnian SS Division
fighting for the Nazis, al-Husaini stated: “Nearly one-third of the Koran
concerns the Jews. The Koran calls upon all Muslims to protect themselves
against the Jews and to fight them wherever they may meet.”7
Al-Husaini, Islam, and Violence
On the whole, al-Husaini’s role as the father of modern, violent Arab
radical movements has been overlooked because he allied himself with the
Nazis and the losing side in World War II, and was implicated in the
humiliating defeat of the Arabs by the Israelis in 1948. He was too closely
identified with the Palestinian cause, when he was actually the leader of the
international radical Arab forces, both Islamist and nationalist. When the
nationalists gained power, al-Husaini’s earlier part in keeping the two
factions together was again forgotten. And, as noted above, al-Husaini was
responsible for fundamentalism Islam’s survival in the 1950s and 1960s and
its 1970s revival.8
Muslims from many Muslim countries recognized al-Husaini’s
leadership and came to pay their respects in Jerusalem, his personal base.
He was in close contact with the Muslim Brotherhood through Muhammad
Mustafa al-Maraghi. In 1931, al-Husaini organized the General Islamic
Congress in Jerusalem, which resulted in the formation of the Islamic World
Congress and his election as president. Several international branches
contributed funds to the head office in Jerusalem.
At first, al-Husaini concentrated in building a strong united state that
would be nationalist and Islamist, and playing both cards, garnered mass
support from a religiously oriented public that was not ready to accept
secular nationalism. He also persuaded the Nazis that he was leader of the
world’s Muslims and Arabs. Al-Husaini’s and the radical faction’s most
significant tactic at this stage “was to make militancy the test for legitimacy.
The most extreme stance became the legitimate mainstream one; anything
more moderate was portrayed as treason to Islam and the Arab people.
Using this standard, al-Husaini and his allies could blackmail and intimidate
Arab governments, threatening to discredit or even assassinate anyone who
wanted to compromise with the West or to oppose their goals.”9
Al-Husaini was also able to impose his will on how the Palestinian cause
would be handled. He and his allies were now in a position to influence and
galvanize the masses through sermons at mosques, rousing speeches,
“intimidating mobs, and demonstrations.”10 Al-Husaini also demonized the
British and Americans, presenting them as enemies of Islam and
simultaneously convincing his followers that Germany would soon rule the
world. The result was an alliance of Palestinian Arabs, Syrian and Iraqi
nationalists, and Egyptian Islamists with Hitler’s regime.
Whereas the earlier German-Ottoman bond “had been built on defending
the status quo in the Ottoman Empire while destroying their rivals’
colonies, [t]he new Nazi-Arab nationalist and Islamist alliance…sought
revolutionary political and social change everywhere in the Middle East.”11
The radicals, with their intransigence and violence, were obviously at odds
with the moderate politicians and leaders who doubted that a hardline
approach could succeed, but al-Husaini believed he could win because
Allah was on the side of the Muslims. This indicates how al-Husaini’s
influential tactics would determine the future of the Middle East: “The basic
approach of al-Husaini and his comrades continued through the careers of
such leaders as Abd an-Nasir, Arafat, the al-Assad family, al-Qaddafi,
Saddam Hussein, and bin Ladin, as well as with Iranian Islamists like
Khomeini and Mahmud Ahmadinejad.”12
Al-Husaini laid down the halt to the exodus of Jews from Germany as a
condition for his support for Hitler, and bargained in the same way with the
Allies—any migration from Germany would mean the migration to
Palestine. The British had to close all migration of Jews to Palestine as well
in order to keep the ambiguous support of the Grand Mufti and the Arabs.
Al-Husaini, thus, can be justly held accountable for his role in the
Holocaust.
Nazi Germany launched a well-organized campaign in the Middle East,
urging the elite in the respective countries to embrace pro-Nazi, antisemitic
sentiments. “In Beirut and Baghdad, Cairo and Jerusalem, Kabul and
Tehran, Tripoli and Tunis, local Nazi Party branches coordinated military
and SS intelligence, businessmen, and academics to spread the influence of
Hitler’s regime. There were also Nazi Party branches in Alexandria and
Port Said; Haifa and Jaffa; and Adana, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir.”13 It
was Nazi policy to subsidize and use ideologically compatible Islamist and
nationalist groups such the Muslim Brotherhood, the fascist Young Egypt
Party, al-Husaini’s forces in Palestine, and various other groups in Iraq and
Syria.
In Iran one of the students to benefi from German training was Nawab
Safavi, who later became the main radical Islamist leader and al-Husaini’s
closest ally. But it was in Iraq that Germany held the greatest influence,
since the Iraqi nationalists were hoping for help to develop their economy.
Acting for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, al-Banna received
about one thousand Egyptian pounds a month from 1939, and perhaps
earlier, from the German News Bureau in Cairo.14
In June 1940, when the war seemed to be going Germany’s way, al-
Husaini wrote to Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey,
offering him his support. Unlike the nationalists, al-Husaini dreamed of an
Islamic caliphate with himself as the caliph ruling over the Islamic umma.
His short-term goal was the creation of a fully independent state comprising
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, which he would lead. Having
already created a popular network throughout the Arabic-speaking world
and Muslim countries further East, al-Husaini had managed to unite, for the
moment, the nationalists and Islamists.15
By March 1941 Hitler accepted al-Husaini as the de facto leader of the
Muslims of the entire Middle East, and accordingly gave his total support to
the Grand Mufti, praising the Arabs as an ancient civilization. The Germans
gave al-Husaini a hundred thousand reichsmarks,16 with twenty thousand
more every month paid equally by Germany and Italy.17
Pro-German forces were now on the rise in the Middle East. Ba’th, a
Pan-Arab nationalist party closely based on the fascist model, had been
founded in November 1940, Alfred Rosenberg’s antisemitic 1930 work on
racial theory, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20.
Jahrhunderts), having influenced the party’s founders.
As Rubin and Schwanitz point out, for both Hitler and al-Husaini the
Jews were the arch-villains responsible for the sorry state of their respective
countries and civilizations:
For Islamists, hostility to Jews and other infidels was rooted in their
reading of Muslim texts but they identified the modern turning point
[in their recent decline] as the 1924 decision to abolish the caliphate.
Ignoring the fact that this system had not functioned for centuries, al-
Husaini argued that to dissolve Islam’s unique global bond was
suicidal, especially given its clash with Anglo-American democracies
and their “Jewish advocates.”….
…So while Hitler and the Nazis blamed the Jews for the fate of
Germans and “Aryans” generally, al-Husaini and the radical
nationalists and Islamists did the same thing regarding the fate of
Arabs and Muslims. They did not need the Nazis to teach them this
idea. They had already invented stories using elements from their own
religious, cultural, and historical traditions.18
Al-Husaini asked Hitler’s help in destroying the Jews in Palestine, and
beseeched him to stop Jews from leaving Germany. Hitler had allowed
537,000 Jews to leave Germany between 1933 and 1941, but with al-
Husaini’s antisemitic rhetoric and his insistence on eliminating Jews “fresh
in his ears,” Hitler made the decision to prepare the “final solution of the
Jewish question.”19
A True Radical Muslim Hero
After the war, al-Husaini escaped prosecution as a war criminal because
Western powers calculated that such prosecution would harm their
geopolitical standing in the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood, and the
rest of the Muslim world, considered al-Husaini a true Muslim hero because
of his past radicalism. Al-Banna wrote:
Great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign
of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the
Arabs.…What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know
what the Arab youth, cabinet ministers, rich men, and princes of
Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to
be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and
fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and
Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husaini will continue the struggle.20
After returning to Egypt, al-Husaini continued his struggles in the name
of Islam with Arabs who had been Nazi collaborators and now served as his
military commanders, men such as al-Qawuqji, Abd al-Qadir al-Husaini,
and Salama. In 1939 the Nazis had sent the Arabs some arms that were
hidden in the Egyptian desert. These were recovered by al-Husaini with the
help of the Muslim Brotherhood, and used to drill the Holy Jihad Troops
(al-Jihad al-Muqaddas), organized by Abd al-Qadir, who had fought in Iraq
as a pro-Nazi, in a secret training camp near the Libyan border.
Al-Qadir was killed leading al-Husaini’s main army in the Palestine War
in 1948, but al-Husaini continued to intimidate Arab leaders to accept his
uncompromising position: “Like al-Husaini and his own movement, most
of the other forces pushing for intransigence and war over the Palestine
issue also came from the same radical Arab and Islamist faction that had
cooperated with the Nazis: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria as
well as militant nationalists and Islamists in Syria and Iraq.”21
After the Arab’s disastrous defeat by newly-created Israel in 1948, al-
Husaini devoted the next twenty-five years to promoting radical Islamism
in order to take revenge not only on the West and Israel, but also the Arab
nationalists. He kept the movement alive, though savagely repressed by its
former radical nationalist partners, looking to create a worldwide radical
Islamist movement—a goal that today no longer seems impossible. Al-
Husaini began by founding the League of Jihad Call in Cairo in 1951,
which reestablished his ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and the fascist
Young Egypt Party.
Consolidating Efforts
Al-Husaini was undoubtedly behind the assassinations of moderate
leaders from Jordan and Lebanon who wanted to establish some sort of
peace with Israel. He also helped former German Nazis, some of whom he
managed to convert to Islam, to obtain new identities and jobs in the Middle
East. (It is forgotten that nearly four thousand Germans involved in war
crimes escaped to the Middle East, finding welcome and work. The number
of German war criminals who escaped to South America was considerably
smaller: between 180 and 800.)
Al-Husaini maintained his contacts in Pakistan, where he organized
annual meetings of his Islamic World Congress from 1949 to 1952. In Iran
he consolidated his standing with Islamists such as Nawab Safavi, the ex-
Nazi agent. At the 1953 Islamic World Congress in east Jerusalem, al-
Husaini met and encouraged the Iranians Abd al-Qasim al-Khasani, the
leading Islamic cleric, and Safavi, the leader of the radical Islamist group,
Fidaiyyun al-Islam. He reestablished his friendship with the Egyptian Said
Ramadan, who worked with al-Husaini and the Muslim Brotherhood. Also
present was Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s leading ideologue who would
become the godfather of modern Islamist ideology.
Despite a short-term decline of the Islamist groups due to Safavi’s
execution, Kashani’s withdrawal from politics, and Qutb’s eventual
imprisonment and execution, it was clear that al-Husaini had planted the
seeds of revolution and violence, for “one of al-Kashani’s disciples was
Khoemini; Safavi’s example inspired revolutionary terrorist Islamist groups
in Iran…. The Muslim Brotherhood, its many even more radical spin-offs,
and indeed all the revolutionary Islamist groups of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries owe a big debt to al-Husaini’s and Qutb’s
innovative thinking.”22
Just as the Muslim Brotherhood was about to takeover in Egypt in 2011,
Tariq Ramadan, the highly regarded Islamist intellectual living and teaching
in the West, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that the Muslim
Brotherhood and its leader, his grandfather, had never been Nazi
collaborators. He even insisted that the Brotherhood was an antifascist
organization that had wished to emulate “the British parliamentary model”
during the 1930s and 1940s. But Rubin and Schwanitz have carefully
demonstrated otherwise:
[T]he Brotherhood was clearly well financed and armed by the Nazis
before and during the World War II. Collaborating with the Germans
and al-Husaini, it planned an uprising to support the German army’s
conquest of Egypt as well as to kill Cairo’s Jews and Christians. The
only reason this plot failed was that the British stopped the German
advance and forced King Faruq to replace pro-German politicians in
the government. One aspect of the Brotherhood’s campaign to portray
itself as moderate in the early twenty-first century was to rewrite its
history.23
The cooperation of Said Ramadan, who, it has been mentioned was
Hasan al-Banna’s son-in-law and Tariq Ramadan’s father, with al-Husaini
was noted by the CIA in 1953. Ramadan acted as al-Husaini’s agent,
running messages to Iran’s al-Kashani. Later, Al-Husaini “selected Said
Ramadan as his successor to lead the European-based Islamist
movement.”24 He was al-Husaini’s protégé, and would eventually inherit
the ex-grand mufti’s “Islamist network, financial base, and institutional
assets in Switzerland and elsewhere.”25 Al-Husaini made him a member of
the secretariat of the World Muslim Congress, and two years later its
secretary general. Ramadan moved to Syria, where he continued working
for al-Husaini and the Brotherhood. Al-Husaini helped finance his
magazine, al-Muslimin, a vehicle for the ideas of the Syrian Muslim
Brotherhood.
When the Arab nationalist regimes began repressing the Islamists, the
latter retreated to Europe, where they began a relentless campaign of
Islamic propaganda, building mosques, founding Islamic institutes, and
taking control of Muslim associations and journals. Said Ramadan’s
decades of activity and energy saw to it that by the year 2000 many Islamic
communities were led by Brotherhood members. Ramadan’s primary
concern was to keep control of the Munich mosque built by Syrian-born Ali
Ghalib Himmat and an Uzbek, Nur ad-Din Namanjani. When Himmat took
over in 1973, Ramadan was able to found the Islamic Center in Geneva
with funds from Saudi Arabia. A similar center appeared in London, but the
Munich center remained the most important to Islamism and the
Brotherhood in West Germany.26
The ideological parallels between the Nazis and the Muslim
Brotherhood, and in fact all Islamist movements, are striking, and
compounded by the Brotherhood’s collaboration with the Nazis. A
comparison of statements and declarations by key Islamist ideologues
reveals their resemblence to one another, and to those of al-Husaini. For
example, Sayyid Qutb wrote:
The Jews did indeed return to evil-doing, so Allah gave to the
Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the
whole of the Arabian Peninsula….Then the Jews again returned to
evil-doing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his
servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule
over them. And once again today the Jews have returned to evil-
doing, in the form of “Israel” which made the Arabs, the owners of
the land, taste of sorrows and woe.27
For many Islamists, the Holocaust enjoyed divine sanction.
1 Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle
East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 87.
2 Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York:
Telos Press Publishing, 2009).
3 Rubin and Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, 94–95.
4 Ibid., 95.
5 Andrew G. Bostom, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslin Pope’
(Washington, DC: Barvura Books, 2013), 25–33.
6 Rubin and Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, 95.
7 Quoted in Bostom, Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred, 19.
8 Rubin and Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, 87.
9 Ibid., 89.
10 Ibid., 90.
11 Ibid., 91.
12 Ibid., 92.
13 Ibid., 110.
14 Ibid., 118.
15 Ibid., 119.
16 In 1930s, one reichsmark was worth $4.20, so 100,000 reichsmarks would have been worth
$420,000.00.
17 Ibid., 127.
18 Ibid., 158, 159.
19 Ibid., 162.
20 Quoted in ibid., 199.
21 Ibid., 201.
22 Ibid., 206.
23 Ibid., 234.
24 Ibid., 233.
25 Ibid., 248.
26 Ibid., 249.
27 Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist’s View of the
Jews (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 86–87; quoted in Rubin and Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, 251.
19 - Sayyid Qutb
SAYYID QUTB (1906–1966) was a prominent thinker who is seen as the
primary influence on many contemporary Islamic terrorists. He wrote
extensively on what he believed was the cause of the present malaise in
Islamic societies, and offered a reasoned solution to restore the glory of
Islam. He had contempt for the West and it “decadent” values, and hated
democracy, which he regarded as a tyranny of man-made laws.
Qutb was born in Middle Egypt in 1906, went to local schools, and got
involved in his father’s anti-British Egyptian nationalist political activities
at a young age. His family moved to Cairo, where he went to a teacher’s
college and eventually obtained a B.A. in education. Qutb worked for the
Ministry of Public Instruction, serving as a ministry inspector between 1940
and 1948. Qutb had developed a love for literature, particularly poetry, and
considered himself a man of letters. He wrote novels and short stories, but
after 1945 Qutb’s writings dwelt more on political matters. In 1948 he was
sent to the United States to study the American system of education, and
earned an M.A. in education from the Teachers College at the University of
Northern Colorado. He also spent time in New York, San Francisco, and
other cities.
Qutb wrote about his stay in Greeley, Colorado, by all accounts, “a very
conservative town, where alcohol was illegal,” according to Robert Seigel,
senior host of NPR’s All Things Considered. “It was a planned community,
founded by Utopian idealists looking to make a garden out of the dry plains
north of Denver using irrigation. The founding fathers of Greeley were by
all reports temperate, religious and peaceful people.”1
At a gentle church dance, Qutb was appalled by what he saw as sexual
promiscuity and the mingling of the sexes, which disgusted his reawakened
Islamic sensibilities:
The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive
capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and
thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full
buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this
and does not hide it.2
The whole scene’s immorality was compounded by the pastor of the church
dimming the lights!
Qutb also complains of the racism he encountered, and yet he is able to
write racist diatribes against “jazz” such as the following: “This is that
music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as
well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial
tendencies on the other.”3
Qutb is often said to have a profound knowledge of history, and yet he
mangles American history. “He informed his Arab readers that it began
with bloody wars against the Indians, which he claimed were still underway
in 1949,” Siegel reports, and wrote that before independence, American
colonists pushed Latinos south toward Central America—even though the
American colonists themselves had not yet pushed west of the Mississippi...
Then came the Revolution, which he called ‘a destructive war led by
George Washington.’”4
On his return to Egypt in 1951, Qutb began frequenting the meetings of
the Muslim Brotherhood, which he joined.5 He and many other members
opposed the ongoing presence of the British in Egypt, and thus at first were
enthusiastic about the 1952 coup that brought Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser to
power and put an end to colonialism. But Nasser was essentially secular; he
certainly did not envisage an Islamic state for Egypt. In fact, he began
arresting the leaders of the Brothers, and Qutb was imprisoned and tortured
several times, suffering three heart attacks as a result.
In 1964, Qutb was arrested for the third and last time, just after the
publication of his book, Ma ‘alim fi’l-tariq (Signposts Along the Road).
Accused of participating in a conspiracy against government, his book was
used as evidence against him. Qutb was sentenced to death in 1966 and
hanged soon after the verdict.
Core Ideas
Like all Salafists, Qutb believed that the Koran, the Sunna, and the
society established by the Prophet and the Companions in seventh-century
Arabia provided adequate guidance on how to bring about an Islamic polity.
Religion and politics were inexorably connected. The ideal Islamic society
and political system, as seen in the days of the Prophet, were based on the
Koran, which was the ipsissima verba of God. “What an amazing
phenomenon in the history of mankind, Qutb wrote, “a nation emerging
from the text of a Book, living by it, and depending on its guidance as the
prime mover!”6
The “later generations drifted away from the Koran,” he continued, so
that “today we see mankind in a miserable condition.” Qutb’s ambitious
project to bring mankind back to Islam is based on three concepts, which
are presented and explained by University of Arizona sociologiy professor
Albert J. Bergesen, in “Sayyid Qutb in Historical Context”:
First, there are the divine revelations of the Koran, and the Islamic
concept of life that they specify and imply. Second, there are socio-
political obstacles in the form of existing socio-political systems,
from race and economic relations to the power of the modern state.
All of this he characterizes as jahiliyya (ignorance of God). This
existing state of the world actively opposes God’s will. Third, given
that such jahili societies actively resist the implementation of the
word of God, there must be an equivalent power, in the form of an
Islamic social movement, to remove these socio-political obstacles,
thereby liberating mankind to realize the way of life God has
designed. In short, there is (1) goal to be realized, (2) obstacles to be
overcome, and (3) a means to overcome these obstacles and realize
that goal.7
For Qutb, the effort to return mankind to Islam begins with the
understanding that sovereignty over people is the major attribute of divinity.
Thus, when man rules over man, as in a democracy or kingship, man is
usurping God’s role: “If only God is to exercise sovereignty over people,
then when humans claim sovereignty over each other this implicitly takes
people away from God. This, of course is the mirror opposite of the
Western separation of the religious and the political: leave to Caesar what is
Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But in Qutbian Islam, what is Caesar’s
is God’s, and to leave it to Caesar is to take it from God.”8
And what God wants for humanity is found in the Koran, and should be
followed. To exercise some level of political authority is to exercise
sovereignty, and if sovereignty is a core attribute of God, then in accordance
with tawhīd (“the unity or oneness of God”) it cannot, and must not be
divided with others. Therefore, only God is to exercise sovereignty through
His laws as found in the Koran. We cannot follow the laws of the state—
that would mean that the state is usurping the prerogative of God. Qutb
wrote:
This religion is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man
from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires,
which is also a form of human servitude; it is a declaration that
sovereignty belongs to God alone and that He is the Lord of all the
worlds. It means a challenge to all kinds and forms of systems which
are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in other words,
where man has usurped the Divine attribute. Any system in which the
final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the sources
of all authority are human, deifies human beings by designating
others than God as lords over men.9
This principle stemming from tawhīd leads to practical consequences,
political action. In Qutb’s words, “[T]o proclaim the authority and
sovereignty of God means to eliminate all human kingship and to announce
the rule of sustainer of the universe over the entire earth…. Anyone who
serves someone other than God in this sense is outside God’s religion,
although he may claim to profess this religion.”10
For Qutb, democracy and its separation of religion and politics is a direct
challenge to God. “This means that to bear behavioral witness that ‘there is
no deity but God’ means to take political action, for if there is no deity but
God, there is no sovereignty but God, and to bear witness to that is to avoid
submission to other sovereignties, which means to defy existing secular
political authorities.”11 As Qutb himself wrote:
The nature of the Islamic concept is not to remain hidden in the
human mind. It must be translated immediately into action and
become a concrete reality in the world of events. The believer cannot
be content to have his faith remain concealed in his heart, because he
feels compelled to make his faith an effective force in changing his
own life and the lives of the people around him.12
Thus God’s plan for mankind has been revealed to Muhammad and is in the
Koran. Earlier prophetic revelations to the Jews and Christians have been
fatally compromised and distorted. God expects man to translate his faith
into action. The duty of all Muslims is to guide all humanity back to God. It
is a revolutionary project of universal significance.13
Normally, the Arabic term jāhilīya (also jahiliyya, jahiliyyah) means “a
state of ignorance; pre-Islamic paganism, pre-Islamic times,”14 but Qutb
expands its meaning to signify the condition where one submits to an
authority other than God, creating a “servitude of servants”:
If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it
becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in jahiliyyah, and all
the marvelous material comforts and high-level inventions do not
diminish this ignorance. This jahiliyyah is based on rebellion against
God’s sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest
attributes of God…and makes some men lords over others. It…
now…takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to
legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose any way of life
rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed. The result
of this rebellion against the authority of God is the oppression of His
creatures.15
In other words, jahiliyyah is the wilful ignoring of God’s guidance,
which leads to a totally different political system, a state of error. Qutb
argues:
There are only two possibilities for the life of a people, no matter in
what time and place they live. These are the state of guidance or the
state of error, whatever form the error may take; the state of truth or
the state of falsehood, whatever may be the varieties of falsehood…
the state of obedience to the Divine guidance or the state of following
whims, no matter what varieties of whim there may be; the state of
Islam or the state of jahiliyyah, without regard to the forms of
jahiliyyah; and the state of belief or the state of unbelief, of whatever
kind. People either live either according to Islam, following it as a
way of life and a socio-political system, or else in the state of
unbelief, jahiliyyah, whim, darkness, falsehood, and error.16
The Solution: Jihād
The first generation of Muslims, Muhammad’s Companions, looked in
the Koran for guidance on how to act, and as Qutb points out, “this Koran
does not open its treasures except to him who accepts it with this spirit…of
knowing with the intention of acting upon it. It did not come to be a book of
intellectual content, or a book of literature, or to be considered as a book of
stories or history, although it has all these facets. It came to become a way
of life, a way dedicated to God.”17
The Islamic movement must confront the jahiliyyah state using the
“methods of preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs,” but
Qutb clearly states that it must also use “physical power and jihād for
abolishing the organizations and authorities of the jahili system which
prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to
obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the
Almighty Lord.”18 Qutb is critical of those putative Muslims
who are a product of the sorry state of the present Muslim generation,
have nothing but the label of Islam and having laid down their
spiritual and rational arms in defeat. They say, “Islam has prescribed
only defensive war”! and think they have done some good for their
religion by depriving it of its method, which is to abolish all injustice
from the earth, to bring people to the worship of God alone, and to
bring them out of servitude to others into the servants of the Lord.
Islam does not force people accept its belief, but it wants to provide
the free environment in which they will have the choice of beliefs.”19
For Qutb, jihād and faith are fundamentally linked, and those “persons who
attempt to defend the concept of Islamic jihād by interpreting it in the
narrow sense of the current concept of defensive wars…lack understanding
of the nature of Islam and its primary aim…to spread the message of Islam
throughout the world.”20
If anything, defensive jihād diminishes the Islamic way of life: “Those
who say that Islamic jihād was merely for the defense of the ‘homeland of
Islam’ diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life and consider it less
important than their ‘homeland.’”21 Jihād must involve the use of force to
remove all the obstacles to establishing an environment where all can
choose freely. Islamic history is full of jihād in the military sense, and the
early Muslim conquests are examples of successful jihād for the sake of
Islam. Qutb explains:
The reasons for jihād which have been described in (surahs, Q3. ’āl
‘Imrān, the Family of Imran; Q8. al-’anfāl, the Spoils of War /
Voluntary Gifts; Q9. at-Tawba, the Repentance / al-Barā’at, the
Immunity) are these: to establish God’s authority in the earth; to
arrange human affairs according to the true guidance provided by
God; to abolish all the Satanic forces and Satanic systems of life; to
end the lordship of one man over others, since all men are creatures of
God and no one has the authority to make them his servants or to
make arbitrary laws for them. These reasons are sufficient for
proclaiming Jihād.22
Qutb’s view of Islam leads to direct challenge of the established political
order, a challenge that can only end in some form of struggle:
When the purpose is to abolish the existing system and to replace it
with a new system which in its character, principles and all its general
and particular aspects, is different from the controlling jahili system,
then it stands to reason that this new system should also come into the
battlefield as an organized movement…with a determination that its
strategy, its social organization, and the relationship between its
individuals should be firmer and more powerful than the existing
jahili system.23
In Qutb’s world, religion and politics are one. Jihād “is a witnessing of
the faith; it is inherent in the faith; to have the faith is to struggle for its
sociological implementation in an existing jahili world.”24 Jihād exists,
therefore, “not because of any threat of aggression against Islamic lands or
against the Muslims residing in them. The reason for jihād exists in the
nature of its message and in the actual conditions it finds in human societies
and not merely in the necessity for defense, which may be temporary and of
limited extent.”25
In fact, according to Qutb, Islam has the right to initiate jihād since it is
“in the very nature of Islam to take initiative for freeing the human beings
throughout the earth from servitude to anyone other than God,” and “Islam
has a right to remove all those obstacles…so that it may address human
reason and intuition with no interference and opposition from political
systems,” which means that “it is the duty of Islam to annihilate all such
systems…as they are obstacles in the way of freedom.”26
In his commentary on the Koran, Qutb states that “to fight for Islam is to
fight for the implementation of this way of life and its systems. Faith, on the
other hand, is a matter for free personal conviction, after the removal of all
pressures and obstacles.”27 It is a universal struggle: “It is not possible that
Islam will confine itself to geographical boundaries, or racial limits,
abandoning the rest of mankind and leaving them to suffer from evil,
corruption and servitude to lords other than God Almighty.”28 Therefore,
“when we understand the nature of Islam…we realize the inevitability of
jihād, or striving for God’s cause, taking a military form in addition to its
advocacy form.”29
1 Robert Siegel, “Sayyid Qutb’s America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality”
May 6, 2003, All Things Considered, NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=1253796.
2 Quoted in Robin Wright, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (New York:
Penguin Press, 2008), 107. Wright is quoting Qutb’s essay, “The America I Have Seen: In the Scale
of Human Values,” 1951, available at
https://archive.org/stream/SayyidQutb/The%20America%20I%20have%20seen_djvu.txt.
3 Quoted in James A. Nolan Jr., What They Saw in America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), 196.
4 Siegel, “Sayyid Qutb’s America.”
5 Albert J. Bergesen, “Sayyid Qutb in Historical Context,” in The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected
Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society, ed. Albert J. Bergesen (London: Routledge, 2008), 3.
6 Sayyid Qutb, The Islamic Concept and Its Characteristics (Plainfield, IN: American Trust
Publications, 1991), 2; quoted in Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 14.
7 Ibid.
8 Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 18.
9 Ibid., 37.
10 Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus, Syria: Dar al-Ilm, n.d.), 57–60.
11 Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 19.
12 Qutb, Islamic Concept, 155; quoted in Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 19–20.
13 Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 31.
14 Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, s.v. “jāhilīya.”
15 Qutb, Milestones, 10–11.
16 Qutb, Islamic Concept, 78; quoted in Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 22.
17 Qutb, Milestones, 18.
18 Ibid., 55.
19 Ibid., 56.
20 Ibid., 62.
21 Ibid., 71.
22 Ibid., 70.
23 Ibid., 47.
24 Bergesen, Sayyid Qutb Reader, 27.
25 Qutb, Milestones, 71.
26 Ibid., 74-75.
27 Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of the Qur’an, trans. Adil Salahi, sura 8 (Leicester: The Islamic
Foundation, 2003), 7:24.
28 Ibid., 22.
29 Ibid., 12.
20 - Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salām Faraj and The
Neglected Duty
IT IS OFTEN argued that a cause of Islamic terrorism is the Arab-Israel
conflict, and it was assumed that when President of Egypt Anwar Sadat was
assassinated by an Islamic fundamentalist group in October 1981, it was
because of Sadat’s rapprochement with Israel. And yet, as Johannes J.G.
Jansen pointed out in the preface to his translation of The Neglected Duty, a
tract that spelled out that group’s ideology, their statements “hardly
mentioned Israel—and even stated that the war against the Zionist enemies
of Islam ought to be postponed until after a more important question could
be resolved: Egypt must first introduce the Sharia, the detailed Islamic legal
system, as the law of the land…. ‘Reintroduction of application of the
Sharia,’ the assassins believed took precedence over any other duty.’”1
The fifty-five page tract, written in Cairo, probably in 1980, explained
the group’s theology and ideology. It was authored by Muhammad ‘Abd al-
Salām Faraj (executed in 1982), who titled it al-Farīda al-Ghā’iba,
variously translated as “The Absent Precept,” “The Forgotten Obligation,”
or “The Neglected Duty,” The title refers to jihād, which was, in Faraj’s
opinion, a religious duty, regrettably neglected: “The failure to apply the
Sharia had rendered Jihād the sacred individual duty of every Muslim.”2
The Neglected Duty, Jansen states, “contains all ideological material needed
to justify the attacks of 9/11 or any other recent act of terror committed to
frighten non-Muslims.” And he thinks the document explains the criminal
behavior of suburban and center-city immigrant youngsters in many
European cities; its author clearly “sees Islam as a license to kill, rob, and
commit arson.”3
What makes The Neglected Duty particularly interesting is that it was not
written for outsiders. Nor it is an apology or a justification of an
assassination—Sadat is never mentioned. It is an internal memo circulated
among strict Muslims. It does not sugarcoat or omit potentially offensive
matter, but offers readers a glimpse of what the Islamic militants are really
thinking, without euphemism or subterfuge.
As might be expected, the tract’s 143 paragraphs are interlaced with
quotes from the Koran (verses from more than fifteen suras are cited, with
suras 2 and 9 predominating) and the hadīth as reported by Ibn Hanbal,
Muslim, Bukhārī, and many others, as well as references to founders of
schools of Islamic law such as al-Shāfi‘ī, and to Muslim theologians and
scholars such as Ibn Qayyim, Ibn Kathir, and above all Ibn Taymiyya, who
is quoted several times.
After a quote from sura Q57 (al-Hadīd, Iron, 16) exhorting Muslims not
to be like earlier generations, followed by praise of God and Muhammad,
The Neglected Duty denounces innovations: “every novelty is an innovation
(bid‘a) and every innovation is a deviation, and all deviation is in Hell”
(para. 2). Then in paragraph 3 it launches into how jihād has been
neglected:
Jihād (struggle) for God’s cause [jihād fī sabīl Allāh], in spite of its
extreme importance and its great significance for the future of this
religion, has been neglected by the ‘ulamā’ (leading Muslim scholars)
of this age. They have feigned ignorance of it, but they know that it is
the only way to the return and the establishment of the glory of Islam
anew. Every Muslim preferred his own favorite ideas and
philosophies above the Best Road, which God—Praised and Exalted
He is— drew Himself (a road that leads back), to (a state of) Honor
for His Servants.4
Paragraphs 4 and 5 emphasize the power of the sword, which alone can
rid the world of idols, and the importance of tawhīd, God’s unity, quoting a
hadīth from Ibn Hanbal, where Muhammad says: “I have been sent with the
Sword at this Hour, so that God alone is worshipped, without associate to
Him, He put my daily bread under the shadow of my lance, He brings
lowness and smallness to those who disagree with what I command.”
Paragraph 5: “God sent [Muhammad] to call with the sword for
(acknowledgment of) God’s unity.”
The next topic is the establishment of an Islamic state, and the
reintroduction of the caliphate, abolished in 1924. Paragraphs 8 to 13
describe how the glory of Islam is destined to return, while paragraph 14
deals with the despair that many Muslim activists have fallen into,
counseling patience, because God has promised Muslims success.
Paragraph 14 ends with quotes from al-Tirmidhī and others. Paragraph 16
argues for the Muslim duty of the establishment of an Islamic State, while
paragraph 18 makes it clear that they are not yet living in an Islamic State,
since (para. 19) “a House must be categorized according to the laws by
which it is ruled. If (a House) is ruled by the laws of Islam, then it is the
House of Islam. If (a House) is ruled by the laws of Unbelief, it is the
House of Unbelief.” The Neglected Duty supports this view with quotes
from Ibn Taymiyya and Abu Hanifah: Rulers who do not rule by the laws of
Islam must be considered apostates, and apostasy is punishable by death.
Faraj himself lists seventeen objections to his own views and then
answers them one by one. He does not accept, for instance, the Sufi’s
personal piety as the answer to all the ills of Egypt, since a life of private
devotion would mean neglecting a Muslim’s highest duty— jihād—as long
as long as all the other pillars of Islam are respected (para. 50). The
Neglected Duty rejects the notion that jihād can be interpreted to mean
“struggle to obtain knowledge.” Faraj quotes the Koran, “Prescribed for you
is fighting” (Q2. al-Baqara, the Cow, 216), and “Scholarship is not the
decisive weapon which will radically put an end to paganism” (para. 64).
Faraj also refutes the argument that it is only permissible to fight under a
caliph or a commander, and ends by quoting Ibn Taymiyya, who wrote,
“Any group of people that rebels against any single prescript of the clear
and reliably transmitted prescripts of Islam has to be fought, according to
the leading scholars of Islam, even if the members of this group pronounce
the Islamic Confession of Faith” (para. 66).
Paragraph 68 introduces the idea of the near and the far enemy: “To fight
an enemy who is near is more important than to fight an enemy who is far.”
Muslims must not waste their energies fighting imperialism, for example,
but first concentrate on their own situation, that is, to establish the Rule of
God’s Religion in their own country, and make the Word of God supreme
(para. 70).
The Neglected Duty rejects the idea that jihād is for defensive purposes
only. The Prophet was asked “What is jihād for God’s cause?” He replied,
“Whosoever fights in order to make the Word of God supreme is someone
who really fights for God’s cause”: “To fight is, in Islam, to make supreme
the Word of God in this world, whether it be attacking or by
defending….Islam was spread by the sword….It is obligatory for the
Muslims to raise their swords against the Leaders who hide the Truth and
spread falsehoods.” (para. 71).
Faraj also denies the validity of the distinction between the greater and
lesser jihād, a distinction, as Ibn al-Qayyim showed, was a fabrication put
into circulation in order “to reduce the value of fighting with the Sword, so
as to distract the Muslims from fighting the infidels and the hypocrites.”
(para. 90).
Paragraphs 98 and 99 make clear the rewards for those who fight in the
Cause of God. Muhammad said, “God turns towards whomever goes out for
His cause. He will not send someone out but to wage jihad for His cause
and for belief in Him and for accepting the truthfulness of His Apostle. He
guarantees that He will (either) make him enter Paradise or will make him
come back to his home from which he went out with whatever reward or
booty he obtained” (para. 98). Muhammad also said, “A martyr has six
virtues in the eyes of God. He will be forgiven upon the first drop of blood.
His seat will be in Paradise. He will be free from the punishment of the
grave. He will be safe from the Great Fright. He will be dressed in the garb
of faith. He will marry the heavenly dark-eyed virgins. He will intercede for
70 of his relatives” (transmitted by al-Tirmidhī, para. 99).
Equally, there are punishments for neglecting the duty of jihād, which is
also the cause of humiliation and dissension in the Muslim world. The
Neglected Duty quotes sura Q9. at-Tawba, the Repentance/al-Barā’at, the
Immunity, 38–39:
O ye who have believed, what is the matter with you? When one says
to you: “March out in the way of God,” ye are weighed down to the
ground: are you satisfied with this nearer life as to neglect the
Hereafter [l-’ākhirati]? The enjoyment of this nearer life is in
comparison with the Hereafter only a little thing. If you do not march
out He will inflict upon you a painful punishment, and will substitute
for you another people; ye will not injure Him at all. God over
everything has power. (para. 100)
Contempt for this world is clearly quite common among the jihadist groups.
Another problem that The Neglected Duty addresses is that of Muslims
engaged in jihād who may have to fight an enemy army with Muslims in its
ranks, potentially killing fellow Muslims. Once again, Faraj turns to Ibn
Taymiyya:
Whoever doubts whether he has to fight them is most ignorant of the
religion of Islam. Since fighting them is obligatory, they have to be
fought, even if there is amongst them someone who has been forced
to join their ranks. On this the Muslims are in agreement. Al-‘Abbās
(once) said, when he was taken prisoner on the Day of Battle of Badr:
“O Apostle of God, I was forced to go out.” Then the Apostle of God
said: “Outwardly you were against us. Only God knows what is in
your heart.” (para. 103)
Lying to the enemy is perfectly acceptable; war is deceit (paras. 107–9).
But is it permitted to a Muslim to serve in a non-Muslim army? The
question’s relevance is obvious, given that those involved in Sadat’s
assassination were officers in the Egyptian army. (Remember that Egypt is
considered a non-Muslim country, as it is not ruled under Shari‘a.) The
Neglected Duty answers affirmatively, citing Ibn Taymiyya: “Muslim
transmitted…the story of the people of the Trench, wherein (there is
mention of) the youth who was ordered to kill himself for the benefit of the
religion, and therefore the four Imams permit a Muslim to penetrate into the
ranks of the infidels even if he considered it probable that they would kill
him, when this (penetration) is to the advantage of the Muslims” (para.
118).
Jansen discusses the implications of such a policy: “It is easy to imagine
how army activists were indeed in need of pastoral advice. Many of them
must at times have wondered whether they should remain where they are,
wait for things to come, and hope for the best. If this impression is right,
there may be more potentially militant activists in the Egyptian army than
anyone suspects.”5
Many paragraphs are devoted to military tactics and ethics. Faraj quotes
various Muslim theologians and scholars to justify the total destruction of
enemy property. Innocent bystanders, women, and children may
accidentally be killed in an attack. This cannot be helped, and the jihadists
are not cuplable for such casualties.
Then Faraj returns to the true nature of jihād. In paragraph 130, Ibn al-
Jawzī is cited: “Satan deceived many people so that they went out to wage
jihad, their intention being vainglory and pride, hoping that it would be said
that So-and-so is a Fighter for God. Probably, however, the real intention
was that (they hoped that) people would say that So-and-So was a hero, or
in pursuit of booty. Deeds, however, are (to be judged) according to their
intentions.”
Finally, the leaders of Islamic organizations must strive to be above
reproach, but they cannot be on the right path as long as they do not prepare
for true jihād. The real aim all along is to establish a true Islamic state in
Egypt.
1 Johannes J.G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins (1986; New York: RVP
Publishers, 2013), viii.
2 Ibid., xi.
3 Ibid., xxi.
4 Ibid., 153. All further references to this work are cited parenthetically by paragraph number in the
text.
5 Ibid., 29.
21 - Abdullah Azzam and Defense of the Muslim
Lands
SINCE 1979, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–1989) has had an enormous
influence on the jihādi movement born in the wake of Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan. Azzam was able to use his mastery of Islamic texts and
jurisprudence for propaganda to recruit vacillating Muslims to the cause of
fighting for Allah, to expel foreigners from Afghanistan, and to seek to
reestablish Islam as the dominant creed worldwide. As there was no caliph,
he argued that there was no need for permission from an imam. His Islamic
scholarship added much to his prestige.
Abdullah Azzam was born in the village of Silat al-Harithiyain, in the
Janin district of the West Bank. After earning a degree from Khaduri
College, an agricultural college in Tulkarm, and a short teaching stint,
Azzam began his Islamic studies in the Shari‘a Faculty at Damascus
University in Syria in 1963. He had already been deeply influenced by and
joined the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1950s. The writings and political
activities of Hasan al-Banna also made a particular impression on Azzam,
but his personal mentor was Shafiq Asad ‘Abd al-Hadi, who gave him
direction and convinced him to fight for the cause of Islam.
Azzam received his B.A. in Shari‘a, Islamic Law in 1966. After the 1967
Six-Day War, when Israel took over the West Bank, Azzam and his family
settled in Jordan. Thereafter, Azzam took part in military actions against
Israel, but he soon became disillusioned with the secular and entirely
parochial nature of the PLO. Azzam began formulating ideas of a Pan-
Islamic movement that would restore pride and glory to the Islamic umma,
and cut across the artificial political boundaries drawn up by colonialists.
Azzam continued his Islamic studies at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University,
acquiring an M.A. in Shari‘a. After teaching briefly at the University of
Jordan in Amman, Azzam returned to Al-Azhar on a scholarship, where he
obtained his Ph.D. in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence in 1973. These
are important details, and serve as a counterargument to those who pretend
that jihādists know nothing of Islam and are not competent to pass
judgment on any aspect of Islamic law or theology.
Azzam returned to teaching at the University of Jordan, but was forced
to leave because of his radical views. He found a warm welcome in Saudi
Arabia, where he became a lecturer at King Abdul Aziz University in
Jeddah. He remained at the university until 1979, when he was expelled,
and it is possible during his tenure Azzam met Osama bin Laden. Then
things happened in 1979 in the larger world that decided his destiny.
What happened in 1979 that was so decisive?
It turned out to be the most important year in the modern history of
Islamic radical movements because of three key events: the success of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran when the Ayatollah Khomeini introduced a
theocracy (although a Sh‘ite revolution, this had an enormous impact on all
Islamic movements); the Soviet Union’s decision to send troops into
Afghanistan to support a Marxist regime (marking the beginning of modern
global jihādist movements); and the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca
by armed extremists demanding the overthrow of the Saudi regime (Saudi
Arabia ended the siege after two weeks but with great loss of lives).
Azzam moved to Pakistan where he began teaching, but then devoted all
his energies to fighting the Soviets and formulating his philosophy of jihād.
Azzam published his best-known tract, Defense of the Muslim Lands,
sometime between 1979 and 1984. Like The Neglected Duty, Azzam’s
Defense brims with citations from the Koran, hadīth, and Islamic scholars
and theologians such as Ibn Kathir and, inevitably, Ibn Taymiyya. Indeed,
chapter 1 opens with an Ibn Taymiyya quote: “The first obligation after
Iman [faith, belief, right belief] is the repulsion of the enemy aggressor who
assaults the religion and the worldly affairs.”
Allah, according to Azzam, has chosen Islam for the entire world,
through the last Prophet on earth, Muhammad,
[t]o bring it victory by the sword and the spear, after he had clearly
expounded it with evidences and arguments. The Prophet (saw) said
in a Sahīh [authentic] hadith narrated by Ahmad and Tabarani: “I
have been raised between the hands of the Hour with the sword, until
Allah the Exalted is worshipped alone with no associates. He has
provided sustenance from beneath the shadow of spears and has
decreed humiliation and belittlement for those who oppose my order.
And whoever resembles a people, he is of them.”1
Allah does not like those who turn away from their duty of jihād. He will
replace them with those who are braver, and punish cowardice. But despite
clear rules and guidance, Muslims have fallen away from their religion,
which explains why they are now lost, humiliated by infidels and
imperialists. Only a return to religion and reestablishment of the caliphate
will restore Islam’s glory.
What of this neglected duty? “One of the most important lost obligations
is the forgotten obligation of fighting. Because it is absent from the present
condition of the Muslims, they have become as rubbish of the flood
waters.”2 Azzam quotes the Prophet, who said, “‘Allah will put Wahn
[weakness, feebleness] into your hearts and remove the fear from the hearts
of your enemies because of your love for the world and your hate of death.’
In another narration it was said: ‘and what is the Wahn, O messenger of
Allah?’ He (pbuh) said: ‘love of the world and the hate for fighting.’ (Abu
Dawud).”3
The theme of true Muslims loving death as others love life, as has been
shown throughout this text, appears in the Koran and reaches back to the
earliest Islamic traditions, which the quote above from Abu Dāwūd reminds
us. Martyrdom is the highest honor of a Muslim fighting in the cause of
Allah. As Azzam writes:
History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not
build its lofty edifice except with skulls. Honour and respect cannot
be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.
Empires, distinguished peoples, states and societies cannot be
established except with examples. Indeed, those who think that they
can change reality, or change societies, without blood, sacrifices and
invalids, without pure, innocent souls, then they do not understand the
essence of this dīn [religion, that is, Islam] and they do not know the
method of the best of the Messengers (may Allah bless him and grant
him peace).4
Scholar’s Ink, Martyr’s Blood
For Azzam, both offensive and defensive jihād are obligatory. Offensive
jihād becomes fard kifaya (a collective obligation fulfillable by some
members of the community on behalf of the community at large) and its
object can be to collect the poll tax (jizya), terrorize the enemy, and
“da‘wah [call, invitation, or missionary activity for the cause of Islam] with
a force,” which believers are obliged “to perform with all available
capabilities, until there remain only Muslims or people who submit to
Islam.”5 Defensive jihād is fard ayn (an obligatory duty of every Muslim)
to expel unbelievers from Muslim lands, and furthermore, “It has been
made clear to us that no permission is required for anyone when jihād is
fard ayn, as no permission is required from the father, the sheikh or the
master for the obligatory morning prayer before the rising of the sun.”6 At
the moment, the most urgent problem for a Muslim to deal with is
Afghanistan, and then Palestine.
But as Gorka points out, Azzam is fully aware of the necessity of
scholar’s ink as well as martyr’s blood:7
Indeed nations are only brought to life by their beliefs and their
concepts and they die only with their desires and their lusts.…As for
the Muslim Umma, it does continue to exist in the course of history of
humankind, except by a divine ideology and the blood which flows as
a result of spreading this divine ideology and implanting it into the
real World. The life of the Muslim Umma [community] is solely
dependent on the ink of its scholars and the blood of its martyrs. What
is more beautiful than the writing of the Umma’s history with both the
ink of a scholar and his blood, such that the map of Islamic history
becomes coloured with two lines: one of them black, and that is what
the scholar wrote with the ink of his pen; and the other one red, and
that is what the martyr wrote with his blood. And something more
beautiful than this is when the blood is one and the pen is one, so that
the hand of the scholar which expends the ink and moves the pen, is
the same as the hand which expends its blood and moves the Umma.
The extent to which the number of martyred scholars increases is the
extent to which nations are delivered from their slumber, rescued
from their decline and awoken from their sleep.8
In his 1987 work, Join the Caravan, Azzam goes through the same
arguments justifying jihād, citing by now familiar quotes from the Koran,
hadīth, and Islamic scholars. He gives sixteen reasons for carrying out
jihād:
1. In order that the Disbelievers do not dominate.
2. Due to the scarcity of men.
3. Fear of Hell-fire.
4. Fulfilling the duty of Jihād, and responding to the call of the Lord.
5. Following in the footsteps of the Pious Predecessors.
6. Establishing a solid foundation as a base for Islam.
7. Protecting those who are oppressed in the land.
8. Hoping for martyrdom.
9. A shield for the Umma, and a means for lifting disgrace off them.
10. Protecting the dignity of the Umma, and repelling the conspiracy
of its enemies.
11. Preservation of the earth, and protection from corruption.
12. Security of Islamic places of worship.
13. Protection of the Umma from punishment, disfiguration and
displacement.
14. Prosperity of the Umma, and surplus of its resources.
15. Jihād is the highest peak of Islam.
16. Jihād is the most excellent form of worship, and by means of it
the Muslim can reach the highest of ranks.9
Azzam’s immediate concern was to defend Islamic lands from infidels in
Afghanistan. This should, in his scheme of things, be followed by the
establishment of a caliphate, and eventually an umma ruled solely by God’s
law as manifested in the Koran, sunna, and developed by the religious
scholars. Only then, would Muslims regain freedom from colonialists and
man-made laws, and Islam her past glory and dignity.
Azzam was assassinated by a car bomb in 1989. It remains unsolved
who was responsible; everyone from Osama bin Laden to the Iranians to the
CIA to Mossad has been accused at one time or another.
1 Abdullah Azzam, Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Imam, trans. Brothers in
Ribatt, 1979–1984, 11–12, https://islamfuture.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/defence-of-the-muslim-
lands.pdf.
2 Ibid., 13.
3 Abū Dāwūd, Sunan, hadīth 4284, 3:1196.
4 Abdullah Azzam, “Document—Martyrs: The Building Blocks of Nations,” Religioscope, February
1, 2002, http://english.religion.info/2002/02/01/document-martyrs-the-building-blocks-of-nations/.
Also quoted by Sebastian Gorka, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (Washington, DC: Regnery
Publishing, 2016), 88.
5 Azzam, Defense of Muslim Lands, 14.
6 Ibid., 34.
7
8 Azzam, “Document—Martyrs.”
9 Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, Join the Caravan, 1987, archived at
https://archive.org/stream/JoinTheCaravan/JoinTheCaravan_djvu.txt.
22 - Ayman al-Zawahiri and Knights under the
Prophet’s Banner
AYMAN AL ZAWAHIRI (b. 1951) has been the leader of al-Qaeda since
Osama bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011. Al-Zawahiri was born into an
upper-middle-class family in the Maadi district of Cairo, Egypt. Both of his
parents came from wealthy families—an important point to bear in mind
when encountering the cliché that poverty creates Islamic terrorism. Ayman
studied medicine in Cairo, earned a degree in 1974, and went on to earn an
advanced degree in surgery a few years later. Along the way al-Zawahiri
acquired considerable knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence.
Religiously and politically active in his teens, al-Zawahiri joined the
Muslim Brotherhood at fourteen. He was deeply affected by Qutb’s
execution in 1966, and would later write, “The Nasserite regime thought
that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of
Sayyid Qutb and his comrades, but the apparent surface calm concealed an
immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the
nucleus of the modern Islamic jihād movement in Egypt.”1 That same year,
according to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the
Road to 9/11 (2007), al-Zawahiri, age fifteen, “helped form an underground
cell devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamic
state.”2
Like all Islamic fundamentalists, al-Zawahiri dreamed of restoring the
caliphate, which had been dissolved in 1924. Once it was reestablished, and
the secular regime replaced with one ruled under Shari‘a, Egypt would
become the rallying point for the Islamic world. As he wrote in Knights
under the Prophet’s Banner in 2001, “Armies achieve victory only when the
infantry takes hold of land. Likewise, the mujahid Islamic movement will
not triumph against the world coalition unless it possesses a fundamentalist
base in the heart of the Islamic world. All the means and plans that we have
reviewed for mobilizing the nation will remain up in the air without a
tangible gain or benefit unless they lead to the establishment of the state of
caliphate in the heart of the Islamic world.”3 But al-Zawahiri was also
aware that the conditions were not quite right yet for the establishment of
the caliphate. He counseled patience.
At the same time, there can be no solution without jihād: “With the
emergence of this new batch of Islamists, who have been missing from the
nation for a long time, a new awareness is increasingly developing among
the sons of Islam, who are eager to uphold it: namely, that there is no
solution without jihād.”4 For Zawahiri,
[J]ihād in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or
organisation. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until
Almighty inherits the earth and those who live on it….There is no
reform without jihād in the path of Allah. And every call seeking
reform without jihād condemns itself to death and failure.5
In Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, al-Zawahiri summarized the
strategies necessary to win this fight:
The Islamic movement in general and the jihād in particular must
launch a battle for orienting the nation by: exposing the rulers who
are fighting Islam; highlighting the importance of loyalty to the
faithful and relinquishment of the infidels in the Muslim creed;
holding every Muslim responsible for defending Islam, its sanctities,
nation, and homeland; cautioning against the ‘ulama’ of the sultan
and reminding the nation of the virtues of the ‘ulama’ of jihād and the
imams of sacrifice and the need for the nation to defend, protect,
honor, and follow them; and exposing the extent of the aggression
against our creed and sanctities and plundering of our wealth.6
In his book that first began circulating around 1991, The Bitter Harvest:
The [Muslim] Brotherhood in Sixty Years, al-Zawahiri laments that the
Brotherhood had lost its way by agreeing to participate in so-called
democratic elections instead of performing their Islamic duty of waging a
jihād against the current regime in Egypt, which must be considered un-
Islamic, and hence apostate.7 He bases this accusation of betrayal of on two
principles: (1) if a ruler of a putative Islamic country does not govern
according to the Shari‘a, which is God-given law, then Muslims have an
obligation to overthrow such a ruler, and (2) “democracy and Islam are
antithetical and thus can never coexist,”8 since democracy makes humans
sovereign, putting man-made laws above those of God, as enshrined in the
Shari‘a. He writes at the end of The Bitter Harvest: “Thus whoever claims
to be a ‘democratic-Muslim’, or a Muslim who calls for democracy, is like
one who says about himself ‘I am a Jewish Muslim,’ or ‘I am a Christian
Muslim’—the one worse than the other. He is an apostate infidel.”9
Here are some further thoughts from al-Zawahiri on democracy and
Islam, and their incompatibility:
The current rulers of Muslim countries who govern without the sharia
of Allah are apostate infidels. It is obligatory to overthrow them, to
wage jihād against them, and to depose them, installing a Muslim
ruler in their stead.10
These rulers must be considered apostates for the following reasons:
[because they] abandon the sharia of Allah…
[because they] ridicule the sharia…
[because they] institute democratic rule, which is, as Abu al-Ali al-
Mawdudi described in his book Islam and Modern Civilization, “rule
of the masses” and “the deification of man.”11
Under Islamic rule Allah alone is the legislator. Otherwise, Under the
Prophet’s Banner is filled with the by-now familiar quotes from and
references to the Koran, hadīth, and various Islamic theologians and
scholars such as Ibn Kathir and Ibn Taymiyya.
1 Farhad Kazemi, “The Fada’iyan-e Islam: Fanaticism, Politics and Terror,” in ed. Said Amir
Arjomand, From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam (State University of New York Press, 1985),
160.
2 According to Sohrab Behdad, Safavi was born in 1924, see Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-
Revolutionary Iran: Navvab Safavi and the Fad’ian-e Eslam”, in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.33,
No.1, January 1997, 40. Amir Taheri seems to think Safavi was born at the beginning of the twentieth
century, see Amir Taheri, Holy Terror. The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism, (London: Sphere Books
Ltd., 1987), 51.
3 Khomeini, Kashf al-Asrar, 74, quoted in Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-Revolutionary
Iran: Navvab Safavi and the Fad’ian-e Eslam”, 43
4 Quoted in Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: Navvab Safavi and the
Fad’ian-e Eslam”, 43.
5 Amir Taheri, Holy Terror, 57.
6 Also spelt: Fadi’ian-e Eslam; Fada’iyan-e Islam; however the strict Arabic transliteration should
be Fidā’īyīn-i Islām.
7 Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-Revolutionary Iran,” 45.
8 Quoted in Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-Revolutionary Iran,” 46.
9 Ibid., 49.
10 Amir Taheri, Holy Terror, 59.
11 Quoted in Amir Taheri, Holy Terror, 50.
12 Quoted in ibid., 53.
13 Sohrab Behdad, “Islamic Utopia in Pre-Revolutionary Iran, 62.
14 Con Coughlin, Khomeini’s Ghost. The Definitive Account of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic
Revolution and its Enduring Legacy (London: Macmillan, 2009), 87.
15 According to Con Coughlin, Safavi was hanged in January 1956, (Con Coughlin, op.cit., 87). But
according to Sohrab Behdad, he was hanged in December 1955, (Sohrab Behdad, op.cit., 51.)
16 Taheri, Spirit of Allah, 296–97.
17 Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 7.
18 Quoted in Taheri, Spirit of Allah, 155.
19 Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs Iran and the Islamic Revolution (London: Unwin
Paperbacks, 1985), 24.
20 Quoted in ibid., 26.
21 Quoted in ibid., 27.
22 Quoted in ibid., 29.
23 Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East
(Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court 1993), 390.
24 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, speech, Tehran Radio, September 8, 1979, trans. Foreign
Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), September 10, 1979; quoted in Rubin and Rubin, Anti-
American Terrorism, 35–36. FBIS, an open source intelligence component of the CIA’s Directorate of
Science and Technology, monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly
available news and information from media sources outside the United States.
25 Bakhash, Reign of the Ayatollahs, 4.
26 Ibid., 5.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 6.
29 Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (1941–1980), trans. with
annotations Hamid Algar (North Haledon, NJ: Mizan Press, 1981), 25.
30 Ibid., 27.
31 Ibid., 89, 109, 113, 127.
32 Ibid., 37.
33 Ibid., 37-38.
34 Ibid., 41-42.
35 Ibid., 43.
36 Ibid., 60.
37 Ibid., 70.
38 Ibid., 108-9.
39 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from a speech at Feyziyeh (Fayziyyah) Theological School,
August 24, 1979; quoted in Rubin and Rubin, Anti-American Terrorism, 32–33.
40 Bakhash, Reign of the Ayatollahs, 47.
41 Ibid., 48.
42 Ibid.
43 Quoted in ibid., 7.
44 Ibid., 78.
45 Ibid., 81.
46 Ibid., 83.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 241-42.
49 Ibid., 242.
50 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; quoted in Rubin and Rubin, Anti-American Terrorism, 29.
51 Ibid.
52 A peremptory norm (also called jus cogens or ius cogens, “compelling law”) is a fundamental
principle of international law accepted by the international community of states as a norm from
which no derogation is permitted.
53 “Executions,” Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, n.d.,
http://www.iranhrdc.org/english/executions.html.
54 Hamid R. Kusha1 and Nawal H. Ammar, “Stoning Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Is It
Holy Law or Gender Violence?” Arts and Social Sciences Journal 5, no. 1 (2014),
https://www.omicsonline.com/open-access/stoning-women-in-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-is-it-holy-
law-or-gender-violence-2151-6200.1000063.pdf. See also, Farshad Hoseini, “List of Known Cases of
Death by Stoning Sentences in Iran, 1980–2010,” International Committee against Execution, July
2010, http://stopstonningnow.com/wpress/SList%20_1980-2010__FHdoc.pdf.
55 “Iran: UK Grants Asylum to Victim of Tehran Persecution of Gays, Citing Publicity,” (London)
Telegraph, February 4, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/london-
wikileaks/8305064/IRAN-UK-GRANTS-ASYLUM-TO-VICTIM-OF-TEHRAN-PERSECUTION-
OF-GAYS-CITING-PUBLICITY.html. See also: Arhsam Parsi, “Iranian Queers and Laws: Fighting
for Freedom of Expression,” Harvard International Review 36, no. 2 (Fall 2014/Winter 2015),
http://hir.harvard.edu/iranian-queers-and-laws-fighting-for-freedom-of-expression/; “Denied Identity:
Human Rights Abuses against Iran’s LGBT Community,” Iran Human Rights Documentation Center,
November 7, 2013, http://www.iranrights.org/library/document/2636.
56 Omid: A Memorial in Defense of Human Rights, Human Rights and Democracy in Iran,
Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, https://www.iranrights.org/memorial
57 Yemen, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia: death by stoning; Qatar, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan.
Certain states in Nigeria where Islamic laws have been passed also prescribe the death penalty for
homosexual acts.
58 Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, “Denied Identity.”
59 Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 124–25.
60 Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, telephone interview with Bahman Rahbari, April 19,
2009.
61 “Deadly Fatwa: Iran’s 1988 Prison Massacre,” Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, n.d.,
http://www.iranhrdc.org/english/publications/reports/3158-deadly-fatwa-iran-s-1988-prison-
massacre.html.
62 Quoted in Foreign Affairs Committee, Crime against Humanity: Indict Iran’s Ruling Mullahs for
Massacre of 30,000 Political Prisoners (Auvers-sur-Oise, France: National Council of Resistance of
Iran, 2001), 2.
63 Christina Lamb, “Khomeini Fatwa ‘Led to Killing of 30,000 in Iran’” (London) Telegraph,
February 4, 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1321090/Khomeini-
fatwa-led-to-killing-of-30000-in-Iran.html. See also Geoffrey Robertson QC, The Massacre of
Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988, Report of an Inquiry (Washington, DC: Abdorraham Boroumand
Foundation, 2016), http://www.iranrights.org/library/document/1380.
64 Foreign Affairs Committee, Crime against Humanity, 21–26.
65 Ibid., 27.
66 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Annual Report 2015 (Washington,
DC: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2015),
http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/USCIRF%20Annual%20Report%202015%20%282%29.pdf
67 Robert P. George and Katrina Lantos Swett, “Iran Wants to Eradicate Baha’is: We Should
Demand Their Religious Freedom,” Religion News Service, May 13, 2016,
http://religionnews.com/2016/05/13/iran-wants-to-eradicate-bahais-we-should-demand-their-
religious-freedom.
68 “Gender Inequality and Discrimination: The Case of Iranian Women,” Iran Human Rights
Documentation Center, March 8, 2013, http://iranhrdc.org/english/publications/legal-
commentary/1000000261-gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women.html#19.
69 Taheri, Spirit of Allah, 20–21.
70 Ibid., 121.
71 Ibid., 122.
72 Ibid., 39.
73 Ibid., 259.
24 - Conclusion: “The Life of the Muslim umma is
solely dependent on the ink of the scholars and the
blood of the martyrs.”
TO UNDERTAND the Islam in Islamic terrorism we need examine the
continuities between contemporary jihadists and similar movements
throughout Islamic history. It seems clear that these movements would not
have existed without Islamic history, and would not have had the aims they
do have without Islam. Not only do similarities exist between contemporary
movements and the religious riots in seventeenth-century Istanbul, for
example, but there is a causal, historical link between them. The Qādīzādeli
movement in Istanbul influenced the movement initiated by Ibn ‘Abd al-
Wahhāb in eighteenth-century Najd (Arabia), and Wahhābism has
influenced modern movements in Egypt as well in India and Southeast
Asia. All, in turn, were influenced by Ibn Taymiyya, the Islamic
philosopher who died in 1328.
But to concentrate only on the influence of this medieval Islamic thinker,
as many modern critics do, is to miss the point. For Ibn Taymiyya himself
was drawing upon a long tradition derived from Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 855)
—and that tradition did not originate with Ibn Hanbal either, but reaches all
the way back to early Islam, and its founding texts, the Koran, the Sira, and
hadīth, and the model to be followed as found in the Sunna.
To understand the Islamic aims of ISIS or ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant), one only need ask what will ISIL do once Syria, Iraq, and
the Levant are conquered? The answer is obvious: ISIL will establish an
Islamic State. That is exactly what happened in Iran: Khomeini took power
and established an Islamic State, applying Islamic Law. As Khomeini said,
Islam is politics. And as Mawdūdī, Hasan al-Banna, and Khomeini have
pointed out, Islam is a total system that regulates every aspect of an
individual’s life—from cradle to grave.
Two important concepts in Islam are brought forth in the following
quotes, the first from Ismail Faruqi, the late Palestinian-American professor
of religion, the second from Michael Cook, British historian and scholar of
Islamic history. “Islam teaches not only that the realization of the good is
possible in this world,” wrote Faruqi, “but that to bring it about here and
now is precisely the duty of every man and woman….Hence, the good must
be possible to actualize—indeed obligatory.”1 But this duty, this imperative
of putting into action the principles of Islam is emphasized over and over
again by all the thinkers and groups discussed in these pages: from the
Khārijites, to Khomeini, from the Hanbalites, to the rioters in tenth century
Baghdad, from Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb to Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.
Meanwhile, Cook observes, “The difference between Muslim thinking
and that of the modern West is thus not simply that there is no single
Muslim concept corresponding to the Western notion of privacy; it is also
that the Muslim concepts seem to be of a significantly different kind.”2
Combine these statements and it is but a short step to what Westerners, at
least, would call interfering in the private lives of others. Thence ensues all
kinds of mischief; these worldviews that cannot help but clash. As Thomas
Hobbes once said, “Certainly, peace among citizens cannot endure while
there is no consent about the factors thought necessary for eternal
salvation.”3
In the epilogue of his lucid Radical Islam and the Revival of Medieval
Theology, Daniel Lav points out that radical Salafists are fighting a war on
behalf of faith against unbelief:4
It is a mistake then to ascribe to these radicals too great an interest in
any specific grievance or too great a vendetta against any particular
flesh-and-blood enemy in its normal, real world existence. These
enemies are, first and foremost, ciphers of unbelief, and their
specificity dissipates under a glaring ultrafidian light to reveal their
primary identity as tāghūt [idol].5
For the Salafi jihadists, there are false idols everywhere, and these
radicals are equally ready to displace themselves “to Somalia, Yemen, Iraq,
or Waziristan, as these are, in their view, fundamentally one single
jihad….They do not trust ‘those who do not share this stark doctrine of total
war between faith and unbelief.’”6
As Lav says, there are no specific grievances, it is not something we, in
the West have done, it is simply the fact that we do not accept the Koran as
a blueprint for a model society. Our simple existence is provocation enough.
It is the duty of the Islamic terrorists to bring about a society ruled by God’s
laws as promulgated in the Koran. The Islamic terrorists throughout Islamic
history are galvanized by the same concerns: a desire for a return to the
purity of their ancestors (salaf), a rejection of innovations (bida‘), a
rigorous adherence to the concept of tawhīd (Unicity of God), the duty to
follow the principle of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong and the
necessity of carrying out, for the sake of God, jihād, in its military sense.
They all have recourse to the same sources, above all the Koran; they all
quote the same verses from the same suras, page after page.
Finally, it is not as the journalistic cliché has it, a simple matter of “a few
bad apples.” There is something immanent in Islam that engenders radicals
willing to kill and be killed in the name of Allah. Appeasing or attempting
to negotiate with the “bad apples” will not work. Nor will piecemeal
tinkering: while the Shari‘a, to paraphrase Martin Kramer, maybe open to
some reinterpretation, it is not infinitely elastic. Islam will produce Islamic
terrorists until Muslims take a critical look at the Koran, and no longer treat
it as the word of God. Lav concludes “When considered in the longue
durée, these Muslim radicals are only one recent irruption of the belligerent
potential inherent in every strong monotheism” (emphasis added).7
In the twenty-first century there is a world of difference between a (not
so strong) monotheism (Christianity) that expresses sorrow when
confronted with apostasy, and one that is indeed strong (Islam), and when
confronted by the same phenomenon expresses anger by killing the
apostate. In his epilogue to Radical Islam, Lav notes:
Thomas Hobbes remarked that a state’s monopoly on violence could
not deter those motivated to fight over “the factors thought necessary
for eternal salvation.” For this reason, the civil commonwealth must
circumscribe the ambit of revelation and establish its moral priority
over religious claims to authority if it is to bring peace. Centuries
later, this same basic conflict is unfolding in the Muslim world,
however different the parameters may be.8
Islamic revivalists divide the world into the Near Enemy and the Far
Enemy. The near enemy is represented by the urgent situation in present-
day Islamic countries where Islamic law is no longer applied. Here the
unbroken tradition that leads all the way back to early Islam comes to the
fore. But the far enemy will have to be confronted one day, and is
represented by paganism, mushrikun, all who stray from God’s Unicity
(tawhīd) such as Christians, Hindus, and even those who worship saints. It
also means democracy and liberty, where sovereignty belongs to the people,
a principle antithetical to Islam, where sovereignty belongs to God. They,
too, will have to be fought.
Thus jihadism is destined to remain with us for many decades, since
there is something inherent in Islam that demands action, an incumbent
religious duty to combat unbelief until only Islam remains across the face of
the earth.
Reading fundamentalist writers such as Mawdūdī, al-Banna, Qutb, or
Khomeini, one is struck by their certainty that they possess the Truth—that
they know the will of God and that it is their duty to implement His laws as
laid down in the Koran and other revered texts. They reveal no shred of
doubt. And because they are convinced they possess the Truth, they feel it
is their duty to impose it on the world. They cannot rest until Islam
dominates the globe. There is no subtlety or nuance in their thought, and
they are mediocre thinkers rather than profound philosophers, despite the
fact that they have seduced many Western intellectuals into believing that
what the Islamists are proposing is perfectly civilized and acceptable.
Western civilization on the other hand is racked by doubt, and until we
retrieve our civilizational self-confidence, the irresistible logic of things
will mean we will surrender our freedoms without a murmur.
Why has jihād reemerged with particular ferocity in the last forty years?
Prolific contributor to the New English Review and Jihad Watch Hugh
Fitzgerald offers gives three reasons for its resurrection, to which I add one
additional explanation.9
In my view, paradoxically, it was increasing literacy and education that
led to a growing dissatisfaction with current conditions in Islamic countries,
as well as a rise in fundamentalism. Before the rise in urbanization and
literacy, Islam was divided between a folk variant and an Islam accessible
only to a clerical elite who could read Classical Arabic. Now more people
have access to their own High Culture. They can read Ibn Taymiyya, and
recognize for themselves that their own societies have fallen away from the
true Islam, the pristine Islam of Muhammad and his companions.
Fitzgerald argues that “[t]he doctrine of Jihād wasn’t suddenly invented
in the past fifty years. It’s been the same, more or less, for 1350 years. It
had fallen into desuetude, but did not, and could not, disappear. What
happened to make things so very different? Well, some might point to the
end of ‘colonialism.’ But that is not the main thing.”10 Three developments
explain the reemergence of jihād.
Muslim countries in the Middle East became immensely rich thanks to
geology. Fitzgerald writes, “Since 1973, the Arab and other Muslim-
dominated oil states have received ten trillion dollars from the sale of oil
and gas to oil-consuming nations, the greatest transfer of wealth in human
history. The Muslims did nothing to deserve this, though many took the oil
bonanza as a deliberate sign of Allah’s favor.”11
Apart from buying billions of dollars in arms, Saudi Arabia has spent
millions on Islamic propaganda on the building of madrassas. During the
campaign against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, much money was
provided to jihādi groups for missiles and training. Saudi Arabia and other
Islamic countries such as Iran and Brunei have corrupted Western
universities by large donations with strings attached, so that Islam is only
taught in a manner acceptable to them.
Second, there has been large-scale immigration into the West, from
Islamic nations, often former colonies, of Muslims who are implacably
hostile to the West, have no desire to learn why the West became so rich
and tolerant, and certainly have no desire to assimilate. They feel no
gratitude or allegiance to their Western host nations; their only obligations
are to fellow Muslims.
The mere presence of so many Muslims in the West has affected the
domestic and international behavior of governments, whose foreign policy
is dominated by a fear of offending their own Muslim population, ready to
riot on the slightest pretext. These unassimilated Muslims are committed to
introducing Islamic laws in the West, and they are able to do so by cleverly
exploiting the freedoms created over centuries by the infidels.
Third, advances in technology, from cell phones to the Internet, from
satellite television to YouTube videos, has meant the spread of Islamic
propaganda, reaching all believers. By now no Muslim can claim ignorance
of his duties, from the daily five prayers to the duty of Commanding Right
and Forbidding Wrong to jihād. Theoretically, the West could use the same
technological advances, which it invented, to broadcast its own propaganda.
But the West, lacking confidence in its own values and afraid of offending
Islamic governments considered “allies,” has not done so. No Western
government dares point out the “connection between the political,
economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies, and Islam
itself.”12 In any case, Muslims only watch channels such as al-Jazeera, that
are broadcast in their own languages.
The Internet presents young Muslims access to Islamic material that was
totally unknown to their parents—everything from the Koran, hadīth, the
life of Muhammad, and the history of Islam. Islam is a totalitarian system
that demands the suppression of one’s individuality, and as surprising as it
may seem, there are thousands of Muslims willing to submerge their
identities into the group, where all answers are handed down from on high.
They breathe a sigh of relief as they join the collective, “the charismatic
community” in Watt’s description, a community whose actions are
undergirded by God. All these traits of Islam make it a kind of fascism, and
certainly a totalitarian construct. We defeated, in the twentieth century, two
such totalitarian systems, but not before it had destroyed the lives of many
millions. Let us prepare to confront, and defeat, another such ideology in
the twenty-first century.