But even the Crusades didn’t stop the fighting for good. The ongoing back-and-forth conflict between Christian and Muslim kingdoms continued for centuries, right up until the Ottoman Empire was held back from seizing Vienna in 1683. In fact, radical Islamists’ penchant for referring to Americans as “Crusaders” today suggests that, at least in their mind, the conflict may still be going on.
LIE #3
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“JIHAD IS A PEACEFUL, INTERNAL STRUGGLE, NOT A WAR AGAINST INFIDELS.”
“Jihad as struggle pertains to the difficulty and complexity of living a good life: struggling against the evil in oneself—to be virtuous and moral, making a serious effort to do good works and help to reform society.”
—John Esposito, Georgetown University
“Jihad is a personal commitment to service, patience, determination, and taking the higher road, as such, it tasks us with confronting our own weaknesses, vices, and shortcomings; it is about taking personal responsibility.”
—MyJihad campaign, 2012
“Many Muslims and Islamic scholars consider the more correct definition [of jihad], refers to the inner struggle to do good and follow God’s teaching; Muslims strive to attain this every day.”
—Salon.com, 2013
[J]ihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify onself or one’s community.”
—John Brennan, Deputy NSC Adviser, 2010
Within hours of the September 11 attacks, most Americans had heard the word jihad. Major television networks and Internet sites showed video of a confident Osama bin Laden declaring that his terrorist organization was on a mission to destroy the United States.
Jihad had come to America.
Nearly fifteen years later, this exotic Arabic word has become frighteningly familiar. And yet there are still many across the world engaged in a massive effort to disassociate the word jihad from what we can see with our own eyes—the aggressive war under way against non-Muslims.
A 2003 article in National Geographic, for example, quoted Maher Hathout, the author of Jihad vs. Terrorism, in an effort to “set the record straight about jihad.” Hathout concluded that jihad refers to “a range of activities all based on the Arabic meaning of the word ‘exerted effort.’ In the Koran it’s projected as exerting effort to change oneself, and also in certain situations physically standing against oppressors if that’s the only way.”
In late 2012, Ahmed Rehab, the director of the Chicago branch of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), began a public relations campaign to rebrand the concept of jihad in the United States. He started by taking advantage of a sympathetic media and, once he had the support of donors behind him, plastered buses in major American cities with smiling Muslims testifying to their personal, nonviolent jihads. Rehab explains on his website, MyJihad.com: “Jihad is a personal commitment to service, patience, determination, and taking the higher road, as such, it tasks us with confronting our own weaknesses, vices, and shortcomings; it is about taking personal responsibility. . . .”
Georgetown University professor John Esposito is one of the more prominent of those who’ve made a good living as an apologist for jihad. From his perch as the director of the lavishly Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Esposito has become a prominent figure in the media as a consultant to government officials. His post-9/11 book, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam, set the tone for much of the confusion about the true meaning of jihad. “Jihad as struggle pertains to the difficulty and complexity of living a good life,” he wrote. “Struggling against the evil in oneself—to be virtuous and moral, making a serious effort to do good works and help to reform society.”
When Esposito isn’t busy telling Americans what he thinks we need to know about Islam, he has served as a character witness and cheerleader for the Muslim Brotherhood, both in the United States and abroad. In a letter to a judge, he referred to now-deported Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian as “an extraordinarily bright, articulate scholar and intellectual-activist, a man of conscience with a strong commitment to peace and social justice.” Despite Esposito’s reviews, al-Arian himself confessed to his extensive involvement with the Brotherhood, a State Department–designated Palestinian terrorist organization.
Just as alarmingly, Esposito has expressed admiration for the chief jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He wrote glowingly of the sheikh’s “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism and human rights.” This is the same Qaradawi who, in January 2009, called on Muslims to put the Jews in “their place” as Hitler had done.
“Throughout history,” Qaradawi said, “Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”
Thankfully, we don’t have to depend on Georgetown professors of Islamic studies, or bloggers, or even presidents to understand what jihad really is—we can discover the truth ourselves in primary Islamic sources. We can—and must—read what Muslims read about their own religion. When we finally make an effort to look, we find that Islamic law is remarkably clear about jihad.
In order to bolster Americans’ impression of jihad as a peaceful, internal struggle, apologists refer to a single statement attributed to Muhammad in a Hadith. It is the distinction between the nonviolent “greater jihad” and “lesser jihad,” which means warfare.
The Hadith, while authoritative in Islam, does not carry the same weight as the Quran itself, which is believed to be from Allah alone. One of the most recognized and honored scholars of Islamic law, Ibn Taymiyyah, explained the difference between the two jihads and shattered the idea that jihad is anything but holy war against the infidel:
There is a Hadith related by a group of people which states that the Prophet said after the battle of Tabuk: “We have returned from Jihad Asghar [Lesser Jihad] to Jihad Akbar [Greater Jihad].” This Hadith has no source, nobody whomsoever in the field of Islamic Knowledge has narrated it. Jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions, and moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind.
Still, even if an apologist will concede Taymiyyah’s point that Muhammad never made a distinction between the “lesser jihad” and “greater jihad,” they will insist that, according to Islamic law, Allah will countenance only a “defensive” jihad. Jihad, they argue, is justifiable only once Muslim lands are attacked or Muslims are being persecuted.
Sufi author Kabir Helminski writes in the Huffington Post that, according to Islam, “Fighting is allowed only in self-defense, and it is only against those who actively fight against you.” He continues, “Yet, Islam is not a pacifist religion, it does accept the premise that, from time to time and as a last resort, arms must be taken up in a just war.” That sounds peaceful and moderate enough, right? Who’d argue with a right of a people to self-defense? Or with having to fight a “just war” reluctantly, as a last resort?
The Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, or “Umdat al-Salik” in Arabic, was composed in the fourteenth century by Shihabuddin Abu al-’Abbas Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri. It is a one-volume authoritative summation of Islamic law from one of its major schools of jurisprudence called Shafi’i. Despite its age, it is the single most popular handbook of Islamic law in the United States and a leading authority throughout the world. It was translated into English because so many Muslims in America and elsewhere don’t speak classical Arabic. In fact, Reliance is the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive certification from the most important seat of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. In addition, its opening pages contain a similar endorsement from the Muslim Br
otherhood’s think tank in the United States, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.
Reliance’s section on jihad is located in chapter 9, “Justice.” It states:
Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser Jihad.
The entry on jihad gets even more explicit when Reliance outlines “the scriptural basis for Jihad” in three definitive verses from Mohammed in the Quran:
1. “Fighting is prescribed for you.” (Quran 2:216)
2. “Slay them wherever you find them.” (Quran 4:89)
3. “Fight the idolaters utterly.” (Quran 9:36)
As these commands are in the Quran itself, Muslims believe they originated with Allah and, as such, are obligatory. Reliance then goes on to reference justifications for jihad warfare in the two most authoritative Hadith collections, Bukhari and Muslim, which relate what Muhammad himself said:
I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah.
After looking at Islamic law, jihad turns out to be an exhortation to real, physical violence. It is, as well, a command to plunder the possessions of those who do not “testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat”—or, in other words, become a Muslim.
This interpretation of jihad is supported by numerous other authoritative sources written by Islamic scholars. Ibn Khaldun, one of classical Islam’s most prominent scholars, discussed the meaning and goal of jihad as a “holy war” and contrasted it with the aspirations of other religions or nations in his revered text Muqaddimah:
In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. . . . The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. . . . Among them, royal authority comes to those who have it, by accident and in some way that has nothing to do with religion. It comes to them as the necessary result of group feeling, which by its very nature seeks to obtain royal authority, as we have mentioned before, and not because they are under obligation to gain power over other nations, as is the case with Islam. They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people.
In the 1930s, Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote a pamphlet on the centrality of jihad:
Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded. Allah has ascribed great importance to jihad and has made the reward of the martyrs and the fighters in His way a splendid one. Only those who have acted similarly and who have modeled themselves upon the martyrs in their performance of jihad can join them in this reward. Furthermore, Allah has specifically honored the Mujahedeen with certain exceptional qualities, both spiritual and practical, to benefit them in this world and the next. Their pure blood is a symbol of victory in this world and the mark of success and felicity in the world to come.
Islam is concerned with the question of jihad and the drafting and the mobilization of the entire [global Muslim community] into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength than any other ancient or modern system of living, whether religious or civil. The verses of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of Muhammad (PBUH) are overflowing with all these noble ideals and they summon people in general (with the most eloquent expression and the clearest exposition) to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting.
Some Muslim scholars, like India’s Maulana Waris Mazhari, acknowledge that “it is clear that traditional understandings of jihad are urgently in need of careful scrutiny, study and revision.” He writes:
The majority of Islamic jurists and Quranic commentators (mufasirin) consider war to be the real basis of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. They regard the infidelity of non-Muslims as the cause (‘illat) of such war. They believe that Muslims must engage in war with non-Muslims continuously till Islam establishes its supremacy over all other religions. Since, in actual fact, this, as Muslims believe, can only happen just before the Day of Judgment, they argue that Muslims must necessarily continue to wage war against non-Muslims till the Day of Judgment finally arrives. The opinion of Imam Shafi’i and some other [Islamic jurists] is even more extreme in this regard—they argue that only Ahl-e Kitab or “People of the Book” can be permitted to stay alive in exchange for paying the jizya, and that all other non-Muslims must accept either Islam or death.
Osama bin Laden, Hamas, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, and every other Muslim terrorist group justify what they do by claiming they are fighting a defensive jihad. They believe the goal of Islam is to spread its system of law across the world; therefore any opposition to spreading Islamic law could be defined as a “defensive” act.
In 1998, bin Laden and al-Qaeda issued a statement to the West and to the Muslim world, declaring a defensive jihad against the United States. It was called “the Declaration of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders World Islamic Front.” Notice as you read how important it is for al-Qaeda to back up everything they say with references to figures that Muslims would consider authoritative or legally binding:
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in “Al-Mughni,” Imam al-Kisa’i in “Al-Bada’i,” al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: “As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed by the [Islamic scholars]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.”
Bin Laden, and the Islamic authorities he relies on, are in fact referencing Quran 5:33, which reads:
The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States, at Saudi Arabia’s invitation, stationed armed forces in Saudi Arabia to ensure that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t again attempt to annex one of Iraq’s neighbors. But that wasn’t how bin Laden viewed America’s actions. He and al-Qaeda charged America with “attacking religion and life” in these Muslim-controlled lands.
Lebanon’s late grand ayatollah, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Shia, defined the nature of the defensive jihad in terms the al-Qaeda leader would certainly approve of (emphasis added):
Jihad in Islam (the violent confrontation of the enemy) is the fighting movement that aims at preventing the enemy from forcing its hegemony over the land and the people by means of violence that confiscates freedom, kills the people, usurps the wealth and prevents the people’s rights in self-determination. Therefore, Jihad is confronting violence by means of violence and force-by-force, which makes it of a defensive nature at times and a preventive one at others. . . . In the light of this, jihad is no different than any human and civilized concept of self-defense. It expresses the innate human nature of self-defense, or preventing the others from building the ability for a sudden aggression. There is also the case of defending the downtrodden who are prosecuted by the arrogant and who have no means of defending themselves.
As Fadlallah made clear, there are plenty of things that Islamic law considers cause for defensive j
ihad. If Muslims in non-Islamic societies are not permitted by the authorities to live their lives according to sharia—with all its mandatory antidemocratic and outdated rules—it could be considered “persecution” of the Muslim community.
This is a very broad definition that leaves plenty of room for interpretation and justification of defensive jihad. For example, the killers who massacred the staff of the irreverent, satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris did not believe they were taking an offensive action. They believed they were actually defending the reputation of Islam’s prophet from those who attacked it. More important, though, they believed they were informing the world of the sharia-prescribed penalty for mocking or questioning Muhammad, and thereby dissuading others from following suit.
Even Islamic authorities that are identified as “moderate” by academics and the media, like Yusuf al-Qaradawi—the Hitler-praising Muslim Brotherhood leader and Al Jazeera talk show superstar—accept this rationale for defensive jihad. Qaradawi is the most influential living Sunni imam. His program, Sharia and Life, has an estimated audience of some 60 million throughout the Muslim world.
In 2011, Qaradawi famously issued a fatwa outlining the Islamic standard for jihad, including:
To ensure the freedom to propagate the call to Islam . . . and to remove the physical obstacles which prevent the call to Islam from reaching the multitudes of people. This was the reason for the conquests of the rightly-guided (caliphs) and the companions (of the Prophet), as well as those who followed them in righteousness. (They fought) to remove the power of the tyrants who controlled the necks and minds of men. . . .
This is a very loose standard, and it could apply in a multitude of scenarios where there is any kind of obstacle to mass conversion to Islam, real or imagined. The same logic applies to blasphemy, ridicule, or anything else our First Amendment permits that influential voices like Qaradawi might believe interferes with the “call to Islam.” Mocking Muhammad in a cartoon, speaking out against Islamic law, or even writing this book to expose the truth—all could be considered acts that might prevent Americans from converting to Islam, which is the Islamist’s goal, and justify violent acts of jihad.