The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  A Kosovar imam named Idriz Bilalli, who opposed the Saudi influence, later declared: “This is Wahhabism coming into our society. The first thing the Wahhabis do is to take members of our congregation, who understand Islam in the traditional Kosovo way that we had for generations, and try to draw them away from this understanding. Once they get them away from the traditional congregation, then they start bombarding them with radical thoughts and ideas. The main goal of their activity is to create conflict between people. This first creates division, and then hatred, and then it can come to what happened in Arab countries, where war starts because of these conflicting ideas.”34

  After Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, the Saudis sponsored the building of 240 mosques in that tiny country alone.35 In those mosques, of course, they taught Wahhabism, but the Saudis were not able simply to buy the allegiance of Kosovars or anyone else. They spent enormous amounts of money to promote Wahhabism, but Wahhabism was still able to gain only footholds around the world because of its scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Qur’an and Sunnah. The Wahhabi message resonated among Muslims because of its basis in the teachings of the Qur’an and Muhammad.

  The global result of this massive Saudi cash outlay was that in 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as a principal source of terrorism worldwide.36 The Saudis were the chief financiers of the jihad movements that convulsed the world beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century.

  Most of those movements were rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.

  III. THE RISE OF JIHAD MOVEMENTS

  The Muslim Brotherhood:

  The Qur’an and the Sword

  Determined to fight Western influence and restore the caliphate, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Al-Banna decried the abolition of the caliphate, which separated “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” Al-Banna characterized it as just part of a larger “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.”37

  He saw this Western influence as all-pervasive. Al-Banna lamented that “a wave of dissolution which undermined all firm beliefs, was engulfing Egypt in the name of intellectual emancipation. This trend attacked the morals, deeds and virtues under the pretext of personal freedom. Nothing could stand against this powerful and tyrannical stream of disbelief and permissiveness that was sweeping our country.”38

  Like Islamic movements going back to Ibn Tumart’s and those before him, Al-Banna’s was a revivalist movement. In 1928, al-Banna decried the indifference of the Egyptian elite to Islam: “What catastrophe has befallen the souls of the reformers and the spirit of the leaders…? What calamity has made them prefer this life to the thereafter [sic]? What has made them…consider the way of struggle [sabil al-jihad] too rough and difficult?”39 When the Brotherhood was criticized for being a political group in the guise of a religious one, al-Banna met the challenge head-on:

  We summon you to Islam, the teachings of Islam, the laws of Islam and the guidance of Islam, and if this smacks of “politics” in your eyes, then it is our policy. And if the one summoning you to these principles is a “politician,” then we are the most respectable of men, God be praised, in politics.… Islam does have a policy embracing the happiness of this world.… We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order.40

  The Brotherhood invoked the Qur’an—“Fight them until there is no fitnah [sedition] and worship is for Allah” (2:193)—in exhorting Muslims worldwide to recapture the glory days of Islam, to reestablish the caliphate and once again make it into a great power. Al-Banna also insisted that “every piece of land where the banner of Islam has been hoisted is the fatherland of the Muslims.” In line with another Qur’anic directive, “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), the Brotherhood urged Muslims to reconquer Spain, as well as Sicily and southern Italy and the former Ottoman domains in the Balkans.41

  The Brotherhood grew in Egypt from 150 branches in 1936 to as many as fifteen hundred by 1944. In 1939 al-Banna referred to “100,000 pious youths from the Muslim Brothers from all parts of Egypt,” and by 1944 membership was estimated as being between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand.42 By 1937 the group had expanded beyond Egypt, setting up “several branches in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco, and one each in Bahrain, Hadramawt, Hyderabad, Djibouti, and even in Paris.”43

  Thus many thousands of Muslims dispersed around the world heard al-Banna’s call to “prepare for jihad and be lovers of death.”44 The Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper explained: “No justice will be dealt and no peace maintained on earth until the rule of the Koran and the bloc of Islam are established. Moslem unity must be established. Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Palestine, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco all form one bloc, the Moslem bloc, which God has promised to grant victory, saying: ‘We shall grant victory unto the faithful.’ But this is impossible to reach other than through the way of Islam.”45 Al-Banna told his followers: “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.”46

  Islam, the Answer to the World’s Problems

  The Armenian-American journalist Arthur Derounian met al-Banna in 1948. Writing later under the name John Roy Carlson, Derounian described al-Banna as “a short, squat ratty-faced man with puffed cheeks and fleshy nose.… We sat in the shade, under the shield showing the Koran above a pair of crossed swords.… I disliked him instantly and thoroughly. He was the most loathsome man I had yet met in Cairo.”47 Al-Banna told Derounian: “The Koran should be Egypt’s constitution, for there is no law higher than Koranic law. We seek to fulfill the lofty, human message of Islam which has brought happiness and fulfillment to mankind in centuries past. Ours is the highest ideal, the holiest cause and the purest way. Those who criticize us have fed from the tables of Europe. They want to live as Europe has taught them—to dance, to drink, to revel, to mix the sexes openly and in public.”48

  Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s great theorist, shared that puritanical revulsion. He sharpened his distaste for the West while living in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950.49 Moving to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches in the city but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do.… Yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing intensified.… The hall swarmed with legs.… Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.”50 The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating “a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”51 He regarded American popular music in general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.”52

  Ultimately he concluded: “I fear that when the wheel of life has turned and the file on history has closed, America will not have contributed anything.” He didn’t find American prosperity to be matched by a corresponding wealth of spirit. “I am afraid that there is no correlation between the greatness of the American material civilization and the men who created it.… In both feeling and conduct the American is primitive [bida’a].”53

  Qutb’s influential book Milestones positioned Islam as the true source of societal and personal order, as opposed to both capitalism and Communism. “Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” he as
serted in this Cold War–era manifesto, “not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head—this being just a symptom and not the real disease—but because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development but also for its real progress.” Perhaps with his time in America in mind, he went on: “Even the Western world realizes that Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence.”

  Qutb concluded: “It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!”54 That new leadership would come from Islam. To Qutb, what the Muslim umma needed was a restoration of Islam in its fullness and purity, including all the rules of the Sharia for regulating society. “If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in Jahiliyyah [Ignorance of the Divine guidance], 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, namely sovereignty, and makes some men lords over others.”55

  He advanced Islam as “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.”56

  Qutb taught that jihad was necessary in order to establish Sharia. “The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law [Sharia]…and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of establishing God’s religion in the world would have been very easy for the Prophets of God! This is contrary to the evidence from the history of the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread over generations.”57

  Qutb emphasized Islam’s universal character and call: “This religion is not merely a declaration of the freedom of the Arabs, nor is its message confined to the Arabs. It addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth.… This religion wants to bring back the whole world to its Sustainer and free it from servitude to anyone other than God.”58

  Al-Banna likewise explained: “We want an Arabian United States with a Caliphate at its head and every Arab state subscribing wholeheartedly to the laws of the Koran. We must return to the Koran, which preaches the good life, which forbids us to take bribes, to cheat, to kill one’s brother. The laws of the Koran are suitable for all men at all times to the end of the world. This is the day and this is the time when the world needs Islam most.”59

  To impress upon Egypt its need for Islam, the Brotherhood attacked Jews who lived there and assassinated several leading officials, including several judges. Al-Banna ordered one young member of the Brotherhood, a twenty-three-year-old student named Abdel Magid Ahmed Hassan, to do his duty before Allah—which, a sheikh explained to the young man, involved killing “the enemies of Islam and of Arabism.” Hassan agreed to murder anyone al-Banna told him to, and so on December 28, 1948, the young man gunned down Egypt’s prime minister, Mahmoud El Nokrashy Pasha.60 Al-Banna was himself assassinated on February 12, 1949, most likely in a revenge killing.61 Qutb, hospitalized in Washington, D.C. for a respiratory ailment in February 1949, claimed implausibly that a radio broadcast of the news of al-Banna’s assassination set the hospital staff to open rejoicing.62

  Egypt’s Arab Socialist ruler, Gamel Abdel Nasser, had no patience for the Brotherhood, and had Qutb imprisoned and tortured. Qutb wrote from his prison cell: “The whole of Egypt is imprisoned.… I was arrested despite my immunity as a judge, without an order of arrest…my sole crime being my critique of the non-application of the Sharia.”63 As his trial began, he declared: “The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement.”64 When he was sentenced to death, he exclaimed: “Thank God! I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.”65 He was executed in 1966.

  IV. THE JIHAD IN ISRAEL

  Hajj Amin al-Husseini

  One of the Muslim Brotherhood’s foremost friends and supporters was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who for years before the establishment of the state of Israel fought strenuously against Jewish settlement in the Holy Land, which had accelerated after Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

  Beginning in 1919, al-Husseini began organizing jihad attacks against Jews, as well as riots in Jerusalem in 1920 during which six Jews were killed and two hundred injured. The following year, British high commissioner Herbert Samuel responded to al-Husseini’s instigation of jihad violence by appointing him mufti of Jerusalem, hoping that this gift would lead al-Husseini to be “devoted to tranquility.”66

  Instead, al-Husseini continued to incite violence, including riots in Petach Tikvah and Jaffa just weeks after he became mufti; forty-three Jews were killed. A British government report stated that “the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties.”67

  This continued to be true as Muslim Arabs attacked Jews over the next two decades, largely at al-Husseini’s instigation. Instead of confronting its mufti, in May 1939 the British government limited Jewish settlement in Palestine to seventy-five thousand over the next five years, thereby rewarding jihad violence by giving the mufti part of what he wanted (if it had been up to him, Jewish entry into the Holy Land would have been halted entirely, and the Jews there expelled) and condemning to death in the Holocaust untold numbers of Jews who might have escaped.

  Al-Husseini stirred up the mobs by claiming that Jews had designs on large portions of the Islamic world: “Palestine does not satisfy the Jews, because their goal is to rule over the rest of the Arab nations, over Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and even over the lands of Khyber in Saudi Arabia, under the pretext that this city was the homeland of the Jewish tribes in the seventh century.”68

  Had that been true, Islamic law would have obligated Muslims to wage a defensive jihad against the Jews, for, as noted previously, defensive jihad becomes obligatory upon every Muslim whenever a Muslim land is attacked. As far as al-Husseini was concerned, his effort against the Jews was indeed a jihad. At a conference in Syria in 1937, he contributed an address entitled “Islam and the Jews,” in which he explained:

  The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina.… In those days the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was a swindler.… They tried to undermine his honor.… They began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mohammed…and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today…the verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.69

  From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini lived in Berlin, where he became close friends with Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler, and met with Adolf Hitler. Eichmann’s assistant, Dieter Wisliczeny, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that the mufti had been a central figure in the planning of the genocide of the Jews:

  The Grand Mufti has repeatedly suggested to the Nazi authorities—including Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Himmler—the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this a comfortable solution to the Palestine problem.…The Mufti was one of the initiators
of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.70

  Eichmann denied this, but in any case, there is no doubt of the fact that the mufti was openly calling for the mass murder of Jews. In a broadcast on July 7, 1942, the mufti exhorted Muslims in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine to kill Jews, basing his exhortation on a flagrant lie:

  A large number of Jews residing in Egypt and a number of Poles, Greeks, Armenians and Free French, have been issued with revolvers and ammunition in order to help them against the Egyptians at the last moment, when Britain is forced to evacuate Egypt.

  In the face of this barbaric procedure by the British we think it best, if the life of the Egyptian nation is to be saved, that the Egyptians rise as one man to kill the Jews before they have a chance of betraying the Egyptian people. It is the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to destroy their property.…

  You must kill the Jews, before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews, who have appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for? The Jews are planning to violate your women, to kill your children and to destroy you. According to the Muslim religion, the defense of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race, which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune and destruction on your countries. Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism. Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.71