Making War In The Name Of God. Christopher Catherwood
we recognize—or at least I hope we do—that Christians do not, for example, behave now as they did in the sixteenth century, when one group of believers would burn another at the stake. Religions are not absolute objects. In our own times, Islam is undergoing a major change: for the first time in Islamic history, such an enormous proportion of Muslims are living outside the Realm of Belief, the Dar al-Iman, that their faith cannot help but be affected, to literally take a more worldly view.
So if most Muslims today—and opinion polls would support this—believe that their faith is indeed one of peace, I see no reason why we should reject their sincerity. Muslim leaders such as the late Sheikh Badawi in Britain, and the happily still living Akbar Ahmed in the United States, have to me striven genuinely for peace and reconciliation.
But that does not mean that we should reinterpret the violence of the past in the light of the peace-loving present. There is something ridiculous to me about well-meaning writers glossing over the more bloodthirsty elements of Islamic history because we want, as we should, to be friendly and inclusive toward Muslims living in the West today. Such authors—Karen Armstrong, to take just one well-known example—never give the same leeway to the many atrocities in the Christian past, almost certainly because Christianity, being the majority faith of Western culture, is for them a source of criticism not of admiration.
Let us face it—for centuries, practicing Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and members of many other faiths, have all committed the most appalling deeds in the name of their particular religious faith. Not only that, but they have often done so regardless of what their founding faith documents and teachers have proclaimed is the correct way in which to live. The slaughtering of Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099 and Srebrenica in 1995 is hardly compatible with the command of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself, or to reject violence in the name of the Prince of Peace. Likewise, Muslims, for over a millennium, from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries, embarked on imperial conquest and domination, in the name of Islam, and that surely is every bit as much colonialism as the kind perpetrated by Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If it was wrong for Britain to conquer large swaths of Africa, it was wrong for eight-century Muslim armies to conquer Spain.
So much ink, all contradictory, has been spilled over the subject of jihad that this vexing subject has become, if anything, even more confused than before. Many contemporary writers talk about two kinds of jihad: the lesser, or military version; and the greater, or religious one that speaks about the inner struggle toward holiness. Ask most Muslims in the West today about which version they choose, they will almost invariably select the latter. But, for example, read many a work with the word jihad in that title and you will gain the impression that jihad always means violence, bloodshed, and warfare, and, especially since 2001, holy war against the West.
So what should we believe, given the contradictory evidence? Do we believe, for example, John Esposito’s books, propagating a sympathetic and almost apologetic version of Islam, past and present, or the hostile and conspiracy oriented view of Robert Spencer, author and founder of the Web site Jihadwatch.org?
Thankfully, 2005 saw the publication, by the University of California Press, of Understanding Jihad by Rice University professor David Cook. (It could of course be the case that my enthusiasm for this particular work exists because Cook’s views so closely parallel my own.) While I might be more inclined to give contemporary Muslims the benefit of the doubt in the interpretation of twenty-first-century jihad, nonetheless, I think that Cook makes out superbly the historical understanding of mainstream Islam and consequently of what jihad is and entails.
Melding my views with those of Cook, I would say that while it is true that most Muslims today interpret jihad in the sense of the struggle for inner righteousness—my own Muslim friends and colleagues, and many recent opinion polls would back this up—historically jihad has meant one thing and one thing only: war in the name of Allah.
This of course does not and should not mean that most Muslims around today, and certainly those living in the West, would ever see it that way now themselves. When some American-or British-based imam says that today Islam is a religion of peace, I see no reason why we should disbelieve him; I am not a conspiracy theorist, or one to think that supposedly peace-oriented Muslims are secretly out to kill us. Those who do hate the West and all its works, and who follow the extremist, murderous salafiyya form of Islam (of which more in the last chapter) are usually explicit enough in what they think of us and why.
However, to read present-time peaceful Islam back into the past is, to me as well as to Professor Cook, sheer anachronism. While, like me, he much admires the work of University of Edinburgh historian Carole Hillenbrand, for instance, on what Muslims thought of the Crusades both then and since, he points out that there is simply no written evidence that Muslims adopted a predominantly peaceful view of jihad in the way that she states. (Cook makes the same point of the numerous works of Georgetown professor John Esposito, cited earlier.)
We will look in much more detail at the actual history of early Islam in chapter 3. But first, we need a framework within which to interpret events.
My own take is that Islam is undergoing a process of change, particularly among Muslims living outside of the traditional Islamic world, in states under non-Islamic rule. Some younger Muslim men are, if anything, becoming more aggressive, as evidenced by the British-born and-raised Islamic terrorists of 7/7 (July 7, 2005) and those found guilty of attempted atrocities in the United Kingdom since then. However, by contrast, many other Muslims, especially women, are moving in the opposite direction, toward accommodation with the West, yet without in any way giving up their Islamic spiritual beliefs and values. Islam, in other words, is not static in all places or even within the same generation.
But as for the past, it is hard to disagree with the overwhelming historical case made by Cook’s Understanding Jihad, not to mention similar works, some written for a more academic audience, by experts such as Rudolf Peters and Reuben Firestone. It could be that these writers also have a political agenda behind what they say, but if they do I have not found it. What Cook demonstrates conclusively is that the distinction between the greater and lesser jihad is itself anachronistic, and certainly the current-day split between the peaceful and aggressive forms is entirely modern. Jihad as traditionally understood and practiced by hundreds of years of Islam has always been primarily an expression of warfare; and the internal-struggle aspect, while real, is as often as not linked to inner preparation for outward military action.
Jihad has, therefore been part of Islam since the very beginning, even if, as Firestone shows, the actual doctrines relating to holy war took time to evolve. As several writers put it, with Sunni Islam, the gates of new or personal interpretation, or ijtihad, were closed in the tenth century, with reinterpretation being effectively banished since around 900. Most Islamic commentary on jihad, therefore, even if written after that time, such as the commentaries of the famous Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), is more to do with the details—in the case of Averroes, for instance, making it very clear that Islam does not agree with killing women and children, a point that countless Muslims reminded the world of after the atrocities of 9/11.
Islam, as I hope to prove, is a faith in which “church and state” are by definition permanently enmeshed, with none of the sacred/secular divide that has characterized, say, Christianity since the late seventeenth/early eighteenth centuries, not to mention Christianity’s first three hundred years as a banned, illegal, underground, and persecuted faith. One of the very reasons why Muslims in the West are turning either, in the minority, to extreme violence, and, in the majority, to peaceful accommodation, is precisely because they are, for the first time, having to live as Muslims in a non-Islamic society.
In the past, however, this was not the case, and that is why, I would argue, the predominant meaning of jihad within the Islamic world has changed.
In the past, faith and state were inexorably interlinked, and, as Andrew Wheatcroft reminds us in his superb Infidels, the Ottoman Empire believed in permanent expansion, and thus in continuous enlarging of the borders of Islam.
Today, as both surveys of Muslims and the writings of eminent Islamic peace activists such as Akbar Ahmed demonstrate, Sufi, or mystical, Islam is overwhelmingly peaceful, contemplative and nonviolent. However, Cook shows from both