Jihadism: Theology and Ideology

Part 1

Religious scholars throughout Islamic history agree that jihad is an individual duty when an enemy attacks Muslim countries. With God’s permission we call on everyone who believes in God and wants reward to comply with His will to kill Americans and seize their money wherever and whenever they find them. We also call on religious scholars, their leaders, their youth, and their soldiers, to launch the raid on the soldiers of Satan, the Americans, and whichever devil’s supporters are allied with them, to rout those behind them so that they will not forget it.1

This excerpt from a “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders,” written by Osama bin Laden in 1998 (see part 2, chapter 1), contains the essence of the worldview of Islamic extremists, particularly those who belong to or identify with al Qaeda. It reveals much of the motivation that drove the terrorists to hijack the planes on 9/11 and crash them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The per- petrators of 9/11 believed that they were God’s soldiers fighting a holy war against God’s enemies, that they had a divine imperative to fight for the establishment of God’s sovereignty on earth, that killing many infidels was serving God, and that sacrificing their life in the process would earn them God’s gratitude and the blessings of Paradise. This belief was based on their understanding of religious doctrines and traditions that began with Muhammad. The Prophet had conveyed to his followers their religious obligation to perform jihad, a complex term whose two essential meanings are an internal striving by an individual for moral self-improvement and a collective military struggle to defend Islam against its enemies and to extend Muslim power over other lands so that all people will be subject to God’s laws as revealed to Muhammad. Historically, the doctrine of jihad held that the Islamic community (umma), the recipient of Allah’s revelation and the “best community ever produced” (Sura 3: 106), is commanded to make Allah’s directives supreme over the whole world. Either by conversion or conquest, infidels are destined to submit to Islamic jurisdiction. Westerners, who are 8 Theory and Practice of Islamic Terrorism repulsed by the Islamic concept of jihad and feel threatened by jihadist terrorists, generally interpret jihad as a Muslim’s fanatical duty to engage in holy war against the perceived enemies of Islam. Seeking to defend their faith against critics who attack contemporary Islam as an incubator of terrorism, some Muslim intellectuals and religious authorities and Western apologists often respond by stressing Islam’s peaceful, tolerant, and humanitarian characteristics, its command to win converts by preach- ing and persuasion. Central to their argument is the traditional distinc- tion in Islam between the “Lesser Jihad” and the “Greater Jihad,” first developed in the ninth century by a group of ascetics who formed the nucleus of the early mystical Sufi movement. An oft-quoted hadith text (that is, a text dealing with traditions about the life of Muhammad) relating to the concept of a spiritual Greater Jihad is as follows:

A number of fighters came to the Messenger of Allah, and he said: “You have done well in coming from the ‘lesser jihad’ to the ‘greater jihad.’ ” They said: “What is the ‘greater jihad?’ ” He said: “For the servant (of God) to fight his passions.”

The Greater Jihad then is an internal struggle by the individual to achieve dominance over his passions, to achieve a spiritual reformation, to lead a religious life, whereas the Lesser Jihad retains the military meaning of the term—armed struggle against infidels and apostates. Over the centuries, however, most classical theologians and jurists interpreted jihad as a military obligation. For centuries preceding the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, Muslim rulers invoked jihad primarily to wage wars of conquest that imams legitimized with religious edicts. As Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of the Middle East, points out:

For most of the fourteen centuries of recorded Muslim history, jihad was most commonly interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power. . . . [T]he presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule. Those who fight in the jihad qualify for rewards in both worlds—booty in this one, paradise in the next.2

And Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian American, is even more emphatic:

After 9/11 many Muslims in the West reinterpreted the meaning of jihad as an inner struggle for self-improvement. . . . This “inner struggle” busi- ness is hogwash. In the Arab world there is only one meaning for jihad, and that is: a religious holy war against infidels. It is a fight for Allah’s cause. Ask anyone in the Arab street what “Jihad for the sake of Allah’s cause” means and he will say it means dying as a shahid [martyr] for the sake of spreading Islam. I have never heard of any discussion of inner struggle in Jihadism 9

my thirty years living in the Middle East. Such nonsense is a PR ploy for Western consumption.3

Today, when militant Muslims identify themselves as jihadists, moral striving is not their principal concern; for them jihad means the personal duty of every Muslim to wage holy war against God’s enemies—those who obstruct the establishment of an Islamic world community in which all the laws ordained by God are strictly enforced. These enemies of God include Muslim rulers, those so-called Muslims, really apostates and agents of the West, who do not make shari’a, Islamic law, authoritative in their own lands; Jews, “children of the Devil” who have planted their Zionist entity in the Muslim heartland; and Americans and their western allies, contemporary crusaders and infidels who occupy Muslim lands and propagate hateful liberal and secular values that undermine the sanctity of Islamic law—the only legitimate way of organizing a just society—and promote unbelief and immoral behavior. Jihadists seek to reverse the decline of Islamic power, which began in the Late Middle Ages, by liberating lands that were once part of the caliphate and are now under non-Muslim control—Kashmir, Spain, and Israel, among others. Jihadist ideology is an integral part of historic Islam with roots that extend back to Muhammad and early Muslim theologians. (To be sure, militants today read the Qur’an selectively, searching only for those passages that support and legitimize their militant world-view and ignoring other passages that call for tolerance and coexistence with other faiths.) Jihadists view themselves as defenders of the true faith against its enemies and regard terrorism as a legitimate tactic in fulfillment of sacred obligation. As one Egyptian radical expressed it: “Islam is the religion of strength and the Muslim has the duty to be a terrorist, in the sense that he has to terrorize the enemies of Allah to represent peace and security to the faith- ful. Terrorism against the enemies of God is a duty in our religion. Whoever leaves jihad lives in humiliation.”4 This view is echoed by Ayman al Zawahiri (see part 2, chapter 2), often a spokesman for al Qaeda: “Waging jihad against the infidels is the basis of glory and honor, whereas abandoning it results in humiliation and debasement.”5 And jihadists concur with bin Laden that in waging war against the alliance of Jews and crusaders, “the most honorable death is to be killed in the way of Allah.”6 In May 2005 in a television lecture Ibrahim Mudayris, a senior Palestinian cleric, described the ultimate aim of militant jihadists: “We [Muslims] have ruled the world [in the past] and a day will come by Allah, when we shall rule the world [again]. The day will come and we shall rule America, Britain; we shall rule the entire world, except the Jews [who will meet a dire end].”7 Jihadist ideology calls for the extension of Islamic law, strictly interpreted and enforced, to all Muslim lands. An illustration of the type of society bin Laden and his cohorts envision is seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. In seeking to impose Islamic law throughout the land, the Taliban outlawed movies, television, music, and 10 Theory and Practice of Islamic Terrorism the Internet; banned singing and dancing at weddings, an old Afghan tradi- tion; prohibited decorating the walls of homes with photographs or pictures; commanded men to wear beards as a sign of piety; and placed strict prohibitions on women. The Taliban’s religious police rigorously enforced these regulations. Executions and floggings in a former soccer stadium became regular public spectacles. The religious police beat, often brutally, women who did not wear the burqa—which covered the body from head to toe leaving only a narrow slit for the eyes—used cosmetics, or walked the streets without a male chaperone. Forbidden from working, many Afghan women were made destitute, and with schools for females closed, they were deprived of a future. Al Qaeda maintains that it is acting in self-defense against the United States and its allies who, like westerners in the Middle Ages, are waging a crusade against the Muslim world and they point to specific grievances: American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the land of Muhammad; westerners fighting Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq; American support for “the Zionist usurpers of Palestinian land” and so forth. But ultimately their aims are more theological, ideological, and sinister. What drives jihadists is an abhorrence of Western civilization, which they believe perverts their faith and way of life, and a fierce deter- mination to establish Allah’s will—a total truth that permits no dissent or alternative viewpoints—throughout the globe and, in the process, to destroy competing systems and ideologies. For this reason, it has been suggested that Islamic jihadism, like fascism and communism, is another totalitarian movement that threatens Western civilization’s core values, if not its very existence.

Notes 1. Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, trans. James Howarth (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 60–61. 2. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 31–32. 3. Nonie Darwish, Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror (New York: Sentinel, 2006), p. 201. 4. Quoted in Lorenzo Vidino, Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), pp. 49–50. 5. Quoted in Raymond Ibrahim, ed. and trans., The Al Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), p. 161. 6. Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 225. 7. Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, “Kill a Jew—Go to Heaven: The Perception of the Jew in Palestinian Society,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4 (Fall 2005), p. 127.