This is how history recounts one of Muhammad’s companions enacting jihad. Even though the record contains the slaughter of non-combatants, it appears to be more consistent with a plain reading of surah 9 than do views of peaceful or defensive jihad.
The Hadith and Jihad
What ultimately convinced me that jihad was primarily violent and often offensive was reading the hadith collections for myself. For example, in Sahih Bukhari, the collection of hadith that Sunni Muslims consider most trustworthy, we find an entire book dedicated to Muhammad’s teachings on jihad. There I found a tradition in which Muhammad says, “I have been ordered to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger…. [O]nly then will they save their lives and property from me” (Sahih Bukhari 1.2.25).
Similarly in the next most reliable collection of hadith, Sahih Muslim, there is also a book on jihad, and in it Muhammad says, “I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslims” (Sahih Muslim 1767a).
These traditions in hadith collections that Muslims consider most authentic seem to go even further than surah 9 of the Quran. They imply that Jews and Christians will not be allowed to live in Arabia. While surah 9 does not command this of Muslims, it does not prohibit it either.
Consider another hadith that says fighting in jihad is better than praying and fasting ceaselessly.
A man came to Allah’s Messenger and said, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad [in reward].” He replied, “I do not find such a deed.” Then he added, “Can you, while the Muslim fighter is in the battle-field, enter your mosque to perform prayers without cease and fast and never break your fast?” The man said, “But who can do that?” Abu-Huraira added, “The Mujahid [Muslim fighter] is rewarded even for the footsteps of his horse while it wanders about tied in a long rope.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 4.52.44)
Another hadith from the same book bolsters our understanding of surah 9, focusing on the good outcomes of jihad and Allah’s bargain with Muslims.
I heard Allah’s Messenger saying, “The example of a Mujahid in Allah’s Cause … is like a person who fasts and prays continuously. Allah guarantees that He will admit the Mujahid in His Cause into Paradise if he is killed, otherwise He will return him to his home safely with rewards and war booty.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 4.52.46)
A pithy hadith tells Muslims that jihad is the best thing in the world.
The Prophet said, “A single endeavor [of fighting] in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.” (Sahih al-Bukhari 4.52.50)
These are but five of hundreds of hadith in the canonical collections that clarify the nature of jihad in the foundations of Islam. Islam is built on Muhammad’s teachings, and these teachings are contained within the canonical traditions. Simply reading the books on jihad found in these collections clarifies much. Appendix B includes many more hadith on jihad selected from Sahih al-Bukhari, Islam’s most trusted canonical collection. I strongly suggest reading them for further study.
Conclusion
Although the average American Muslim agrees that the Quran and hadith are the ultimate basis of their faith, many have not critically read the traditions. Like me, they would be surprised to find violent, offensive jihad shot through the foundations of Islam. The Quranic revelations reflect the development in Muhammad’s life as he moved from a peaceful trajectory to a violent one, culminating in surah 9 of the Quran, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran and its most expansively violent teaching.
Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians so that Islam may “prevail over every faith.” The scope of violence has no clear limits; it’s fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued, or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final surah of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites. If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits.
The summary in this chapter is not an alarmist attack against Islam or intended in any way to be polemical. It is simply an overview of Islam’s foundational teachings on jihad with a focus on final orders. These teachings propelled a people to conquer much of the world at a speed and with a lasting impact arguably unparalleled in human history, save Alexander the Great.
Yet most Muslims today do not live their lives based on chapter 9 of the Quran or on the books on jihad in the hadith, and there are good reasons for this. We will discover why in the answer to the next question, “What is sharia?”
Question 5
Question 5, What is Sharia?
WITHIN 150 YEARS of the advent of Islam, Muslims had expanded an empire from the Atlantic Ocean to India. Significant changes had transpired in their leadership and governance, as Muslims had also fought multiple civil wars and the seat of the caliphate had moved to Syria (see appendix C). It was at this time that Muslims began to record in writing the life and sayings of Muhammad.
Why had they waited so many years before doing so? The answer is not entirely clear, but it may have to do with the novelty of writing long works in Arabic at that time. The Quran was the first Arabic book ever put into writing, and the Arabic script of the seventh century remained too deficient to capture the richness and complexities of its text. Muslims’ desire to write the Quran drove the development of the Arabic script. This is the charitable answer to the question of why Muhammad’s life and sayings were recorded so long after his death; a growing opinion in scholarship is that the traditions were being fabricated, but I will leave that discussion aside.
Whatever the reason, Muslim biographers began to write about Muhammad’s life around 770 AD. By 797 AD, the warrior ascetic Abdallah bin al-Mubarak had compiled his text, The Book of Jihad, specifically documenting the development of Islamic warfare between Muhammad’s day and his own. It was a precursor to similar books that would be found in the canonical hadith collections.
The Hadith Collections
By the middle of the ninth century, there were more than 500,000 traditions of Muhammad’s life in written and oral circulation, and Muslim scholars decided to undertake the effort of sifting through them and distilling the most authentic accounts. Since the teachings of Muhammad are essential to Islam, it was necessary to distinguish accurate teachings from pretenders.
Among Sunni Muslims, who today make up approximately 80 percent of Muslims in the world, six collections of hadith are considered more reliable than any others: those of Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Daud, Ibn Majah, al-Nasai, and al-Tirmidhi. These are not the only collections used by Muslim scholars, but these collections are considered the most reliable, especially the collections of Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim. The titles of these two collections reflect this, as they are called the “Sahih”—“authentic” collections.
Each of these collections contains at least one book on jihad, collecting Muhammad’s purported statements about strife and warfare. These teachings are not presented systematically, however, but as collections of individual sayings or accounts of Muhammad’s deeds. The systematization of these teachings ultimately came with the great Muslim jurists, and the formalization of sharia was the result.
What is Sharia?
As I explained in the previous chapter, it is necessary to know the context of the Quran in order to understand its teachings. Islamic jurisprudence is the effort to understand all the teachings of Muhammad systematically, so that Muslims can know how to live. The end product, or the point of discovery, is sharia.
Put another way, Allah has given a code of conduct and a set of rules for all Muslims to live by. Following these rules is how one obeys Allah, thus securing his pleasure and living acco
rding to his created order. That is sharia.
The word sharia literally means “path” or “path to water.” This imagery is strong, especially for a desert people. Following sharia is what preserves the life of the believer as water preserves the life of the thirsty.
Not just anyone can engage in Islamic jurisprudence, called ijtihad. Since there are thousands of verses in the Quran and hundreds of thousands of hadith, it is expected that only trained Muslim jurists can engage in determining what sharia teaches. The jurist must give primacy to the Quran, then consider the actions (sunnah) and sayings (hadith) of Muhammad, followed by reviewing the consensus of Islamic scholars, or ijma, before using his own reasoning (qiyas). By following these four steps, a Muslim jurist can make a decision, or fatwa, about what sharia teaches on a given matter. The ultimate goal is to apply the teachings of sharia to Muslim life, and that is called fiqh.
This process may seem straightforward, but there are many complicating factors that give rise to significant disagreements among Muslims. One such important factor is abrogation.
Abrogation
According to Islamic tradition, as the Quran was being revealed during Muhammad’s life, certain teachings and passages cancelled previous revelations. For example, most classical Muslim jurists were convinced that the verse of the sword (9:5) cancelled peaceful passages of the Quran such as chapter 109. This process of cancelling teachings is called abrogation, and classical Muslim scholars believed there were multiple kinds of abrogation, wherein either the text or the application of a Quranic verse has been cancelled.
Perhaps the most problematic category of abrogation comprises those Quranic commands that still apply to Muslims even though the text itself has been abrogated. In other words, the Quran is believed to contain teachings that are not found in its pages any longer. To find these teachings, one must know the appropriate hadith traditions. A famous example that hadith traditions record is the verse of rajm, stoning. Although the Quran appears to teach that lashing is the appropriate punishment for adultery (24:2), hadith indicate that a text of the Quran has been abrogated, but that the punishment of stoning still applies (Sahih al-Bukhari 8.82.816).
This feature of abrogation in the Quran, called al-nasikh wal mansukh in Arabic, is the great complicating factor in sharia. How is one to know whether a command has been abrogated? Is there agreement on when a command is to be followed even though its text has been abrogated?
Schools of Thought and the Average Muslim
Historically, not all jurists agreed with one another on matters of sharia, and they began to pronounce differing fatwas. Throughout the expanse of the Islamic empire, pockets of Muslims followed various schools of thought: Shafi, Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, or Shii. The last school was so different from the rest that it is now considered its own branch of Islam, the Shia branch, which leaves the other four as the major schools of Sunni thought.
The scholars in each school developed complex legal decisions and precedents, all building upon one another over the centuries. Until the twentieth century, Muslims often found themselves in one or another school of thought and had to take their civil or criminal matters to their respective courts for judgment. For example, the decision of whether a woman would be allowed to divorce her husband had to be made by a jurist in her school, and the different schools had different rules.
As is probably clear by now, at no point was the average Muslim expected to read the Quran to decide upon correct Islamic practices by himself or herself. Not only is Islam not a faith that upholds the sufficiency of scripture alone, the complexity of its foundations virtually necessitates a reliance on jurists and scholars for proper practice.
Sharia and the Application of Surah 9
Sharia is not a book, and its laws are unclear until we reach the level of individual schools of thought. Even then, specific decisions need to be regularly explicated by Muslim jurists to this day.
Traditionally, therefore, Muslims have received their religion from their leaders and scholars. To assume that Muslims must live a certain way because the Quran or hadith command it misses a crucial step in the Islamic worldview, the distillation of sharia through Muslim authorities. If jurists and imams say that surah 9 does not apply to a Muslim’s life today and that they should live peacefully with their Jewish, Christian, and polytheist neighbors, then it is entirely appropriate for a Muslim to follow his imam and live peacefully. Whether the imam is making the decision honestly or consistently is another matter.
Conclusion
Even though surah 9 of the Quran is very clear in what it teaches, and even though it is the final marching orders that Muhammad left for his people, and even though it strongly accords with the hadith on jihad, Muslim leaders in various schools of thought do not teach their followers to act upon its teachings today. Because of the expansive number of Islam’s foundational teachings and because of complicating factors such as abrogation, Muslims do not determine fiqh for themselves but receive it from their imams. So they ought not be faulted for believing Islam is a religion of peace, especially if they have never confronted the violent verses of the Quran and the hadith. Yet the legitimacy of their personal, peaceful practice does not mean Islam itself is a religion of peace. We must remember that we are not defining Islam as the practice of Muslims, but rather as the teachings of Muhammad.
There is a tension between the reality of violent jihad pervading Quranic sources and the peacefulness of many lay Muslims on account of sharia, which I will return to ahead. Next I turn to another of the most common questions I receive: Was Islam spread by the sword?
Question 6
Question 6, Was Islam Spread by the Sword?
THE SHORT ANSWER: technically no, but indirectly yes.
As I have mentioned, different jurists began to develop codes of conduct with myriads of rules, but an overarching understanding of jihad came to be shared in broad strokes. First, the world was to be seen as divided into two sections, one including those lands that were part of the Islamic empire and one that included everywhere else. The former is called Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, and the latter is called Dar al-Harb, the house of war. A third division is also discussed at times, Dar al-Sulh, the house of treaty, where a treaty prohibited Muslims from conquering a land.
Second, in Dar al-Harb, fighting was not incumbent upon Muslims but it was permissible should they want the land for themselves. If they wished to conquer it, they were to first invite its people to Islam. If the people agreed, they were safe and the house of Islam was spread without the sword.
Third, if people refused to convert to Islam, they were then offered the option of paying jizya, the ransom tax. If they agreed, they were considered a conquered people whose lands now belonged to Muslims and they received the rights of second-class citizens, dhimmis. This option was given even to polytheists despite surah 9 of the Quran.
Fourth, if the people refused to accept Islam or pay the jizya, then Muslims could fight them. If the Muslims won, it was because they either killed their enemies in battle or because their enemies surrendered. In the case of victory through surrender, Muslims could do whatever they wished with their vanquished foes (Sunan Abu Daud 2612).
There may have been occasions in history when Muslims gave an ultimatum of conversion under the threat of death, but that was not the norm. A much more common outcome, for example, was the systematized enslavement of captives that Muslims then trained and enlisted as slave soldiers, or mamluks.
Given this process of waging jihad, it can be seen that the primary goal of jihad was not to convert people at the point of the sword but rather to expand Muslim territory. Conversion was one of the outcomes of jihad, but not its main purpose.
Yet if it had not been for campaigns of the sword, Islam would not have spread as widely as it did. As David Cook summarizes in Understanding Jihad:
Islam was not in fact “spread by the sword”—conversion was not forced on the occupants of conquered territories—but t
he conquests created the necessary preconditions for the spread of Islam. With only a few exceptions … Islam has become the majority faith only in territories that were conquered by force. Thus, the conquests and the doctrine that motivated these conquests—jihad—were crucial to the development of Islam.
Although the object of jihad was not conversion, once lands had been conquered, people were more prone to converting. This is unsurprising, as second-class dhimmi status was at times harsh. Also, the jizya was not a set amount, and records indicate that it was prone to change over time. Conquered Christians record that Amr ibn al-As, one of Muhammad’s companions, is recorded to have tripled their taxes, and elsewhere he raised the jizya until the conquered Christians were unable to pay (Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu).
The Golden Age of Islam
It was through the injunctions toward Dar al-Harb that the Islamic empire expanded rapidly. Whatever the reality of that era and its warfare, many modern Muslims remember it with nostalgia as the Golden Age of Islam. Nostalgia is perhaps too mild a term; “longing” or “yearning” may more accurately convey the wistful sentiments of many Muslims. In their eyes, Allah rained his blessings upon the land because of the devotion of early Muslims, teaching them insights through the Quran that advanced them scientifically and intellectually beyond the rest of mankind. The world was as Allah intended it to be during this era when Muslims obeyed Allah and Islam reigned supreme.
This basic notion of supremacy through the practice of Islam appears in the Quranic concept of jahiliyya. The Quran teaches that, before the advent of Islam, mankind was in a state of ignorance and barbarism, jahiliyya. Obedience to Allah results in lifting mankind out of their base condition and into enlightenment.
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