by Reza Aslan
This was also an era in which religion and the state were one unified entity. With the exception of a few remarkable men and women, no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confessional experiences of individuals. Quite the contrary. Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship. Thus, the Holy Roman Empire had its officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Christianity, just as the Sasanian Empire had its officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Zoroastrianism. In the Indian subcontinent, Vaisnava kingdoms (devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations) vied with Saiva kingdoms (devotees of Shiva) for territorial control, while in China, Buddhist rulers fought Taoist rulers for political ascendancy. Throughout every one of these regions, but especially in the Near East, where religion explicitly sanctioned the state, territorial expansion was identical to religious proselytization. Thus, every religion was a “religion of the sword.”
As the Muslim conquerors set about developing the meaning and function of war in Islam, they had at their disposal the highly developed and imperially sanctioned ideals of religious warfare as defined and practiced by the Sasanian and Byzantine empires. In fact, the term “holy war” originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. “Holy war” was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as “war”; jihad is not one of them.
The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred to as “the greater jihad”), it means the struggle of the soul to overcome the sinful obstacles that keep a person from God. This is why the word jihad is nearly always followed in the Quran by the phrase “in the way of God.” However, because Islam considers this inward struggle for holiness and submission to be inseparable from the outward struggle for the welfare of humanity, jihad has more often been associated with its secondary connotation (“the lesser jihad”): that is, any exertion—military or otherwise—against oppression and tyranny. And while this definition of jihad has occasionally been manipulated by militants and extremists to give religious sanction to what are in actuality social and political agendas, that is not at all how Muhammad understood the term.
War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never “holy.” Indeed, jihad should best be understood as a primitive “just war theory”: a theory born out of necessity and developed in the midst of a bloody and often chaotic war that erupted in 624 C.E. between Muhammad’s small but growing community and the all-powerful, ever-present Quraysh.
STRANGELY, THE QURAYSH seemed at first to be completely untroubled by the success of Muhammad’s community in Yathrib. Certainly they were aware of what was taking place. The Quraysh preserved their dominant position in Arabia by maintaining spies throughout the peninsula; nothing that could endanger their authority or threaten their profits would have passed their notice. But while they may have been concerned with the growing number of his followers, as long as they remained confined to Yathrib, Mecca was content to forget all about Muhammad. Muhammad, however, was not willing to forget about Mecca.
Perhaps the greatest transformation that occurred in Yathrib was not in the traditional tribal system but in the Prophet himself. As the Revelation evolved from general statements about the goodness and power of God to specific legal and civil rules for constructing and maintaining a righteous and egalitarian society, so too did Muhammad’s prophetic consciousness evolve. No longer was his message to be addressed solely to “the mother of cities [Mecca] and those who dwell around it” (6:92). The dramatic success of the Ummah in Yathrib had convinced Muhammad that God was calling him to be more than just a warner to his “tribe and close kin” (26:214). He now understood his role as being “a mercy to all the creatures of the world” (21:107) and the Messenger “to all of humanity” (12:104; 81:27).
Of course, no matter how popular or successful his community became, it could never hope to expand beyond the borders of Yathrib if the religious, economic, and social center of Arabia continued to oppose it. Eventually, Muhammad would have to confront and, if possible, convert the Quraysh to his side. But first, he had to get their attention.
Having learned in Mecca that the only effective way to confront the Quraysh was through their pocketbooks, Muhammad made the extraordinarily bold decision of declaring Yathrib to be a sanctuary city (haram). This declaration—formalized in the Constitution of Medina—meant that Yathrib could now conceivably become both a religious pilgrimage site and a legitimate trading center (the two being almost inseparable in ancient Arabia). This was not merely a financial decision. By declaring Yathrib a sanctuary city, Muhammad was deliberately challenging Mecca’s religious and economic hegemony over the peninsula. And just to make sure the Quraysh got the message, he sent his followers out into the desert to take part in the time-honored Arab tradition of caravan raiding.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, caravan raiding was a legitimate means for small clans to benefit from the wealth of larger ones. It was in no way considered stealing, and as long as no violence occurred and no blood was shed, there was no need for retribution. The raiding party would quickly descend on a caravan—usually at its rear—and carry off whatever they could get their hands on before being discovered. These periodic raids were certainly a nuisance for the caravan leaders, but in general they were considered part of the innate hazards of transporting large amounts of goods through a vast and unprotected desert.
Though small and sporadic at first, Muhammad’s raids not only provided the Ummah with desperately needed supplies, they also effectively disrupted the trade flowing in and out of Mecca. It wasn’t long before caravans entering the sacred city began complaining to the Quraysh that they no longer felt safe traveling through the region. A few caravans even chose to detour to Yathrib instead to take advantage of the security Muhammad and his men were assuring. Trade began to dwindle in Mecca, profits were lost, and Muhammad finally got the attention he was seeking.
In 624, a full year before the disastrous defeat at Uhud, Muhammad received news that a large caravan was making its way to Mecca from Palestine, the sheer size of which made it too tempting to ignore. Summoning a band of three hundred volunteers—mostly Emigrants—he set out to raid it. But as his group arrived outside the city of Badr, they were suddenly confronted by a thousand Qurayshi warriors. Muhammad’s plans had been leaked to Mecca, and now the Quraysh were ready to give his small band of insurgents a lesson they would not forget.
For days the two armies surveyed each other from opposite sides of a sizable valley: the Quraysh arrayed in white tunics, straddling ornately painted horses and tall, brawny camels; the Ummah, dressed in rags and prepared for a raid, not a war. In truth, neither side seemed eager for a fight. The Quraysh probably assumed their overwhelming numbers would elicit immediate surrender or, at the very least, contrition. And Muhammad, who must have known that fighting the Quraysh under these circumstances would result not only in his own death, but in the end of the Ummah, was anxiously awaiting instructions from God.
“O God,” he kept praying, “if this band of people perishes, you will no longer be worshipped.”
There was something more to Muhammad’s reluctance at Badr than fear of annihilation. Although he had known for some time that his message could not expand outside Arabia without the capitulation of the Quraysh, and while he must have recognized that such capitulation would not come without a fight, Muhammad understood that just as the Revelation had forever transformed the socioeconomic landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia, so must it alter the methods and morals of pre-Islamic warfare.
It is not th
at Arabia was short on “rules of war.” A host of regulations existed among the pagan tribes with regard to when and where fighting could take place. But for the most part these rules were meant to contain and limit fighting to ensure the tribe’s survival, not to establish a code of conduct in warfare. In the same way that absolute morality did not play a significant role in tribal concepts of law and order, neither did it play a role in tribal notions of war and peace.
The doctrine of jihad, as it slowly developed in the Quran, was specifically meant to differentiate between pre-Islamic and Islamic notions of warfare, and to infuse the latter with what Mustansir Mir calls an “ideological-cum-ethical dimension” that, until that point, did not exist in the Arabian Peninsula. At the heart of the doctrine of jihad was the heretofore unrecognized distinction between combatant and noncombatant. Thus, the killing of women, children, monks, rabbis, the elderly, or any other noncombatant was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances. Muslim law eventually expanded on these prohibitions to outlaw the torture of prisoners of war; the mutilation of the dead; rape, molestation, or any kind of sexual violence during combat; the killing of diplomats; the wanton destruction of property; and the demolition of religious or medical institutions—regulations that, many centuries later, would be incorporated into the modern international laws of war.
But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed … who have been driven from their homes for saying, ‘God is our Lord’ ” (22:39; emphasis added).
It is true that some verses in the Quran instruct Muhammad and his followers to “slay the polytheists wherever you confront them” (9:5); to “carry the struggle to the hypocrites who deny the faith” (9:73); and, especially, to “fight those who do not believe in God and the Last Day” (9:29). However, it must be understood that these verses were directed specifically at the Quraysh and their clandestine partisans in Yathrib—specifically named in the Quran as “the polytheists” and “the hypocrites,” respectively—with whom the Ummah was locked in a terrible war.
Nevertheless, these verses have long been used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to suggest that Islam advocates fighting unbelievers until they convert. But this is not a view that either the Quran or Muhammad endorsed. This view was put forth during the height of the Crusades, and partly in response to them, by later generations of Islamic legal scholars who developed what is now referred to as “the classical doctrine of jihad”: a doctrine that, among other things, partitioned the world into two spheres, the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the House of War (dar al-Harb), with the former in constant pursuit of the latter.
As the Crusades drew to a close and Rome’s attention turned away from the Muslim menace and toward the Christian reform movements cropping up throughout Europe, the classical doctrine of jihad was vigorously challenged by a new generation of Muslim scholars. The most important of these scholars was Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), whose influence in shaping Muslim ideology is matched only by St. Augustine’s influence in shaping Christianity. Ibn Taymiyya argued that the idea of killing nonbelievers who refused to convert to Islam—the foundation of the classical doctrine of jihad—not only defied the example of Muhammad but also violated one of the most important principles in the Quran: that “there can be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). Indeed, on this point the Quran is adamant. “The truth is from your Lord,” it says; “believe it if you like, or do not” (18:29). The Quran also asks rhetorically, “Can you compel people to believe against their will?” (10:100). Obviously not; the Quran therefore commands believers to say to those who do not believe, “To you your religion; to me mine” (109:6).
Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of the classical doctrine of jihad fueled the works of a number of Muslim political and religious thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In India, Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–98) used Ibn Taymiyya’s argument to claim that jihad could not be properly applied to the struggle for independence against British occupation because the British had not suppressed the religious freedom of India’s Muslim community—a Quranic requirement for sanctioning jihad (as one can imagine, this was an unpopular argument in colonial India). Chiragh Ali (1844–95), a protégé of Ahmed Khan and one of the first Muslim scholars to push Quranic scholarship toward rational contextualization, argued that the modern Muslim community could not take Muhammad’s historical Ummah as a legitimate example of how and when to wage war, because that community developed in a time when, as mentioned, the whole of the known world was in a state of permanent conflict. Early in the twentieth century, the Egyptian reformer Mahmud Shaltut (1897–1963) used Chiragh Ali’s contextualization of the Quran to show that Islam outlaws not only wars that are not made in direct response to aggression, but also those that are not officially sanctioned by a qualified Muslim jurist, or mujtahid.
Over the last century, however, and especially after the colonial experience gave birth to a new kind of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East, the classical doctrine of jihad has undergone a massive resurgence in the pulpits and classrooms of a few prominent Muslim intellectuals. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) relied on a militant interpretation of jihad, first to energize the anti-imperialist revolution of 1979 and then to fuel his destructive eight-year war with Iraq. It was Khomeini’s vision of jihad as a weapon of war that helped found the Islamic militant group Hizbullah, whose tactical use of the suicide bomber launched an appalling new era of international terrorism.
In Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–89), professor of Islamic philosophy at King Abdulaziz University, used his influence among the country’s disaffected youth to promote an uncompromisingly belligerent interpretation of jihad that, he argued, was incumbent on all Muslims. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” Dr. Azzam proclaimed to his students. “No negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.” Azzam’s views laid the foundations for the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which adopted Hizbullah’s tactics in their resistance against the Israeli occupation. His teachings had an exceptional impact on one student in particular: Osama bin Laden, who eventually put into practice his mentor’s ideology by calling for a worldwide Muslim campaign of jihad against the West, thus launching a horrifying wave of terrorism that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
The bloody terror organization that Osama bin Laden ultimately founded, al-Qaeda, is but one manifestation of a much larger movement of militant Islamic puritanism commonly called Jihadism (jahadiyyah). What makes Jihadism unique—indeed, what gives the movement its name—is its radical reinterpretation of the concept of jihad. What has for centuries been defined as a collective duty that can be waged solely in defense of life, faith, and property has, in Jihadism, been transformed into a radically individualistic obligation, totally divorced from any institutional power. In the hands of al-Qaeda and like-minded Jihadist organizations around the world, jihad has become an offensive weapon, one that can be wielded against all perceived “enemies” of Islam, whether Muslim or not. In fact, a recent report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that between 2004 and 2006, Muslims accounted for 85 percent of the casualties from al-Qaeda attacks (between 2006 and 2008, that number surged to 98 percent!). Women, children, the elderly, the sick, the lame—these are all legitimate targets according to Jihadism, regardless of the Quran’s clear prohibition against harming noncombatants. That is why, despite common perception in the West, the actions of Jihadist groups like al-Qaeda have been so roundly condemned not only by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims, but even by other militant groups like the Palestinian Hamas or Lebanon’s Hizbullah.
The fact is that nearly one out of five people in the world are Muslims. And while some of th
em may share bin Laden’s grievances against the Western powers, very few share his interpretation of jihad. Indeed, despite the ways in which this doctrine has been manipulated to justify either personal prejudices or political ideologies, jihad is neither a universally recognized nor a unanimously defined concept in the Muslim world. It is true that the struggle against injustice and tyranny is incumbent on all Muslims. After all, if there was no one to stand up to despots and tyrants, then, as the Quran states, our “monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques—places where the name of God is honored—would all be razed to the ground” (22:40). But it is nevertheless solely as a defensive response to oppression and injustice, and only within the clearly outlined rules of ethical conduct in battle, that the Quranic vision of jihad is to be understood. For if, as political theorist Michael Walzer claims, the determining factor of a “just war” is the establishment of specific regulations covering both jus in bello (justice in war) and jus ad bellum (justice of war), then there can be no better way to describe Muhammad’s doctrine of jihad than as an ancient Arabian “just war” theory.
The Battle of Badr, in 624 C.E., became the first opportunity for Muhammad to put this theory of jihad into practice. As the days passed and the two armies steadily inched closer to each other, Muhammad refused to fight until attacked. Even as the fighting began—in traditional Arab fashion, with hand-to-hand combat between two or three individuals from both sides, at the end of which the field was cleared and another set of individuals chosen to fight—Muhammad remained on his knees, waiting for a message from God. It was Abu Bakr who, having had enough of the Prophet’s indecisiveness, finally urged him to rise and take part in the battle that, despite Muhammad’s reluctance, had already begun.