The House of Islam

by Ed Husain

  Based on seventh-century modes of conflict between the Arabs and Byzantines or Persians, today’s violent radicals justify killing innocents, burning forests, practising deception, lying, and bringing harm to the enemy in every way possible. It was this worldview that led to Faisal Shahzad’s response to a US judge when he asked: ‘Didn’t you swear allegiance to this country?’ Shahzad, a naturalised US citizen on trial for an attempted car bombing in 2010, replied: ‘I swore, but I didn’t mean it.’ It was this same mental state, this mixture of Salafi religion and politics, that allowed several of the 9/11 hijackers to drink, dance and visit prostitutes before carrying out their attacks. In the abode of war, such actions are permitted in order to deceive the enemy, and the rules of the sharia do not apply.

  The term dar al-harb, like others mentioned above, does not appear in the Quran or the hadith literature. Early Muslim jurists devised this demarcation subsequently to distinguish lands in which Muslims were persecuted, or Islam could not be freely observed, from territory under Muslim jurisdiction (dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam). During imperial times, emperors from the Abbasids to the Ottomans used this ‘abode of war’ concept to expand the borders of their kingdoms, in tune with expanding dar al-Islam. In the modern world, however, where empires do not threaten to kill en masse or subjugate entire populations to an emperor, the notion of imperial offensive warfare is defunct.

  Thanks to religious freedom, Muslims in the West are full citizens, can and do rise to high political office, have our own mosques, cemeteries and butchers for halal food, and much more. In other words, we are free as citizens and Muslims in the West. The West, therefore, is not dar al-harb, as early Muslims saw Rome, or later generations viewed European empires led by France, Germany, England and Italy. Contemporary Muslim clerics have suggested that such antiquated terms should be done away with in the teaching of Muslim seminaries.

  What sustains enthusiasm for this entire theopolitical project is, in religious language, yaqeen, or certainty. The Salafis confidently believe in the literal, unilateral truth of their interpretation. There is no room for doubt – they are practically prepared to die for their beliefs. The utter certainty that suicide is martyrdom, and is rewarded (rather than punished) in the afterlife, is based on the same scriptural literalism that underpins their entire radical and violent worldview. It is this yaqeen that allowed Mohamed Sidique Khan, London’s lead suicide bomber in 2005, to hold his baby daughter in his hands and say to her on camera that he would see her soon – that he had something important to do, but that God would let him meet her in the next life.

  The above beliefs are all interconnected and interdependent, feeding off and strengthening each other to compose a worldview that is at once both political and religious. Here, there is no question of separating the secular from the sacred: they are one and the same. Whatever they call themselves – al-Qaeda or Boko Haram or al-Shabab, or some new name next year – they are all global manifestations of and adherents to this Salafi-jihadi ideology.

  Today, in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, Salafism is on the rise again. In November 2014, for instance, there were 664 jihadi attacks in fourteen countries, killing 5,042 people. The vast majority of the victims of Salafi-jihadism are Muslims: between 2004 and 2013, about half of jihadi terrorist attacks and 60 per cent of fatalities occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  We cannot reverse the rising tide of jihadism unless we uproot its theology and ideology. The mainstream of Sunni Muslim sharia scholars believe and teach that jihad is acceptable or legitimate only in defence (difa‘i) and cannot be initiated as aggressive (ibtida’i) war. In 1948 the highest authority within Sunni Islam, the sheikh of Al-Azhar Mosque and University in Egypt, Sheikh Mahmud Shaltut, pronounced that only defensive jihad is permissible, and even then it has to be in keeping with the verse of the Quran that says: ‘Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but begin not hostilities. Verily God loveth not aggressors.’ (2:190) Modern jihadi violence is marked by its aggression. As we have seen, however, Salafism is based on rejecting the Muslim mainstream, and its jihadi brethren are products of that approach.

  Jihadis frequently cite the importance and significance of jihad in the life of the Prophet Mohamed, but theirs is a fundamental rejection of the Prophet’s priorities and also of the nature of his struggle. His was not jihadism, the killing and raping of innocents, or declaring believers to be disbelievers, in the total absence of compassion and mercy. He was fighting back after a decade of torture, expulsion, persecution, boycott and violence in Mecca. His entire twenty-three-year career as a prophet calling people to God added up to 8,142 days. Of these, he spent seventy days, or 0.9 per cent, on military expeditions, and of those seventy days, only ten days were spent in actual fighting, representing just 0.1 per cent of his entire life’s work in God’s service.1 How, then, is it possible to claim to be following the Prophet’s example when jihadis spend decades in warfare in the name of Islam?

  Let us consider an alternative and altogether more authentic model of jihad, based on a different and more consistent interpretation of the Prophet’s message.

  Back in the 1850s, the West African country of Senegal was controlled by the French. In 1853, in the Senegalese village of Mbacké, a woman named Maryam Bousso and her husband Habibullah gave birth to a son, Ahmadu Bamba, who was to change his country for generations to come.

  As a toddler, Ahmadu Bamba liked playing and sleeping in the prayer area of his parents’ room, rather than his own bed and dedicated play area. A spiritual presence seemed to surround him. He received his basic education from his parents, both of whom were pious Muslims (his father was a marabout, or learned religious scholar in Africa) and who taught the child Arabic, the Quran, poetry and Muslim jurisprudence. By the age of fifteen, Bamba was writing poetry and had composed 1,600 verses in perfect Quranic Arabic.

  He was also showing signs of considerable piety, and from a young age started inviting pagan African communities to worship the one God, love His creation and be of service to their fellow human beings. His humble personality, sincerity in serving people and, some say, his healing powers and miracles drew the Senegalese Wolof tribespeople away from paganism to the worship of Allah.

  As he became known as a major cultural and spiritual figure in Senegal, and as a cheikh, a venerated religious teacher, tribal chiefs began to respond to Ahmadu Bamba’s call to peace, submission to God, worship and spiritual growth. And as the number of his followers grew, along with rising resentment of French rule, so did the level of French concern. They saw that this was no ordinary African leader. His followers reported that in the small village of Touba, which he had established in 1887 for his disciples, away from the distractions of the world, the Prophet Mohamed’s spirit had come to Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba. After that visit, Bamba became known throughout Senegal as Khadim al-Rasul, or the Servant of the Prophet. For the Arabian Prophet to bless a new village in Africa was no ordinary matter. That visit to the village still reverberates in Senegal today.

  The French colonial authorities took their time, but they eventually began to worry. What if this wandering Sufi preacher declared war on Senegal’s occupiers? The tribal chiefs who so revered him commanded sufficient numbers to put Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba in control. Fearing a mass outbreak of violence and rebellion against France, they decided to take pre-emptive action. In 1895 the French exiled Bamba to Gabon, another French-occupied West African state, giving his many followers the impression that he would shortly be released. Bamba’s agitated supporters wrote to him vowing that they were prepared to rise against the French and demand justice. Bamba wrote back saying that justice should be sought from God. Repeatedly, he cautioned against violence. One, two, three years went by. The French did not seem to realise that the man they held was not a man of violence.

  That is not to say that others did not take up arms against the French in Senegal, but Ahmadu Bamba refused to engage in armed resistance and forbade his followers to do so, eith
er. He wrote letters explaining to the French that he was not interested in worldly power, that his ambitions lay in the next world, but the French saw this as a ploy to deceive them. From prison in Gabon, he wrote:

  The only weapons I will use to fight my enemies are the qalam [pen] and the ink I use to write qasa’id [poems] in the glory of the Elect, the Prophet Mohamed.

  Finally, after seven years, in 1902 the French released Bamba to his vast number of followers, now increased and more resilient having been trained by him to show restraint. Rather than diminish his authority through his absence, the French had only increased Bamba’s stature.

  Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba dressed in white, with a turban, and was remarkably serene. Word of miracles he had performed while in French custody spread like wildfire throughout Senegal, contributing to the increase in his following. It is said in Senegal to this day that the French threw him into a den of lions to scare the Cheikh, instil fear in the minds of his followers, and ensure their continued obedience. Bamba’s soothing, tranquil presence led the lions to sit down beside him, not harming the Sufi healer in their midst.

  Another story goes that on the ship to Gabon, the French denied Bamba room to pray, saying that the ship was French property and Muslim worship was not allowed on board. Bamba took his prayer mat, stepped out on to the water, and prayed on what he considered to be God’s property. The millions of followers who gather to remember him in July every year face the ocean to pray, remembering the supernatural acts of their spiritual master and his commitment to serenity and worship. Three generations on, even in New York’s Harlem district, where Bamba followers dominate the area called ‘Little Senegal’, they still hold large annual processions to remember the miracles of Africa’s great son.

  Noting his increased popularity and powers among the masses, the French colonial government imprisoned Bamba again, from 1903 to 1907, this time in Mauritania – another French-controlled country in Africa. It was only in 1910, after years of imprisonment and observation of him at close quarters, that the French authorities realised that Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba was a genuine pacifist, a Gandhi before Gandhi’s time, and was religiously committed to non-violence even against the persecuting, imperialist French.

  From where did Ahmadu Bamba’s commitment to non-violence derive? Bamba himself cited the last sermon of the Prophet Mohamed in Mecca. Amid a vast gathering of his followers, the Prophet advised Muslims to abandon racism, ‘superiority of black man over white, and white over black’, and ensure fairness to women and adherence to regular prayers. In that same mass sermon he invoked non-violence in the phrase: ‘From now on, do not shed blood.’ That was a command Ahmadu Bamba refused to violate. His was a literalism of peace.

  The French prison administrator Antoine Lasselves wrote of the man he saw:

  This Cheikh Bamba is gifted with some innate power whose origin the human mind cannot understand so as to explain his befriending capacity. The way people give themselves up to him is extraordinary, and their love of the Cheikh is unconditional. He seems to have some divine light and secret similar to what we read in the stories of the great prophets and their people.

  Within fifty years of Bamba’s release from prison, the French had left Senegal. In 1960 the country became independent, and today it is often cited as a rare model of democracy in Africa. The village he founded in 1887, Touba, is now Senegal’s second-largest city. The Sufi Mouride order he left behind following his death in 1927 is one of four major Sufi movements in Senegal, with over 4 million Senegalese adherents – more than a quarter of the population. Every year, 2 million Senegalese people gather in Touba to remember Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba. In Rome, Paris and New York, the ‘Muslim Rastas’ with dreadlocks and tall, smiling West Africans are fans of Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba. The Senegalese musician and pop sensation Youssou N’Dour continues to sing about Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba to vast audiences.

  A peaceful leader who rejected death, destruction, carnage – Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba’s reputation lives on. But where is his legacy among angry Muslims claiming to resist ‘Western imperialism’ through violence today?

  Jihadism is not the same thing as jihad.

  11

  Who is a Kharijite, or Takfiri?

  The Prophet was distributing to his companions some newly acquired possessions when a man approached him and said: ‘I‘dil [Be just], O Mohamed.’ The one-word rebuke, the imperative I‘dil, unsoftened by any of the polite language of the Arabs, sounded insulting to the Prophet and his disciples. ‘Woe unto you,’ the Prophet reproved back. ‘If I am unjust, who will be just?’ The Prophet’s companions, visibly shocked by the man’s rudeness, wanted to punish him. ‘Leave him,’ ordered the Prophet. ‘He is not alone. He has acquaintances; he will have descendants. If you compare your prayers with their prayers, your fasting with their fasting, you will think that your worship falls short. But they will go out of this faith as an arrow darts through a game beast’s body.’

  The Prophet was warning about a group of people who would follow this man, Dhil Khawaisira of the Bani Tamim tribe. They would have all the external manifestations of worship to an extreme degree, but without being believers, because their actions would invalidate their faith, their hearts not being imprinted with the fairness, compassion, kindness and mercy of Mohamed’s ways.

  Imam Ali relayed from separate conversations with the Prophet that he had warned of ‘a people who would be young in age and immature in thought, but would talk as if their words were the best among men. They would recite the Quran, but it would not reach their souls, the recitation would not go deeper than their throats; and they would pass through the religion. Kill them to cleanse your faith of them,’ Ali reported the Prophet as saying.

  From the very earliest days of Islam, then, there was a group of people who claimed to be within Islam but against whom the Prophet Mohamed issued a warning. The tribesman who had accused the Prophet himself of injustice was one of their forerunners, and Mohamed foresaw that their ways would lead to them leaving the mainstream body of Muslims. The Prophet’s prophecies came true within only a few decades, when Ali was caliph: the Kharijite movement came to prominence – and killed him. Their modern descendants are a curse to this day, spreading death and destruction in the world, as they continue to pray, fast, and claim to be the truest of true Muslims. I am referring, of course, to ISIS and its allies.

  King Abdullah of Jordan correctly identified them as Kharijites (in Arabic khawarij), as did even the Salafi religious leaders of Saudi Arabia, including Salafi-jihadis such as the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatadah. America’s then Secretary of State John Kerry followed suit by calling them ‘apostates’. But where do these people come from, and how did they emerge? What are their hallmarks, and why has their destructive worldview survived for over a millennium within Islam?

  During his twelve-year reign between 644 and 656, the third caliph, Uthman, revived and reorganised the administrative structure of the caliphate. He gave the Muslim empire a sophisticated legal system, political administration and a healthy treasury. Muslims are indebted to Uthman for safeguarding and providing leadership of the early community and, more important, preserving and standardising the Quran. He also appointed several of his kinsmen as senior administrators of the caliphate. His clan, the Umayyads, had been political leaders and rulers since the time before Islam, so to some Muslims this looked like a return to the old order and power structures. From Uthman’s point of view, though, his Umayyad relatives were now also Muslims, and their experience of governance was needed. He put his cousin Mu‘awiya in charge of Damascus as governor of the Levant – a controversial choice, but a necessary one for Uthman, who had to keep up a balancing act between rival political factions, and needed to appoint a strongman for the potentially rebellious province. Mu‘awiya was a successful, astute and wealthy governor, but he also made enemies in Syria.

  By the year 654, complaints, petitioning, agitation and even peaceful sieges against Uthman had begun. In 656 matters came to a hea
d when armed rebels and adversaries of Mu‘awiya came to Medina and demanded of Caliph Uthman, among other things, that he dismiss the controversial governor. Uthman seemed to agree to this, and so these adversaries left, heading for Egypt. On the way, however, they met a man carrying a letter for Mu‘awiya, which they duly intercepted: in it, Uthman gave orders for them and their tribal leader to be killed. They considered this evidence of the most heinous double-dealing, and immediately returned to Medina and laid siege to Uthman’s house. (Historians absolve Uthman of blame for the letter, attributing it to his sly Machiavellian secretary Marwan.)

  Uthman seemed unperturbed by the political crisis. He went ahead with leading Friday prayers and delivering the Friday sermon, determined not to be swayed by the mob. His opponents took a different attitude. Rebels in the mosque attacked Uthman with stones. Uthman’s supporters killed several of the rebels. Imam Ali attempted to arbitrate, but the rebels were no longer prepared to believe what Uthman said, because they had already been double-crossed. Uthman said little, and focused his attention entirely on reciting the Quran. He was in a Zen-like state when a large crowd killed him. His Syrian wife Naila came to his defence and threw herself on to her husband to protect him. The horde attacked and killed her, too. They then chopped off her fingers and sent them, along with Uthman’s bloodstained shirt, back to Damascus, sending the clear message to Mu‘awiya that his cousin, caliph and protector was no more.