One of the goals of jihad was to conquer and dominate non-Muslims. [...] In summarizing the teachings of the Quran with regard to the subject of jihad, it is important to emphasize that we have a very martial and well-developed teaching here. Although it is not an exhaustive treatment of jihad—many of the hadith and subsequent jurisprudence are devoted to annotating topics only adumbrated in the suras—the Quran nonetheless presents a well-developed religious justification for waging war against Islam’s enemies. p.10-11,
There is a redemptive aspect to jihad that is crucial to understanding its development. We have already noted Quran 9:111, where this salvific contract is spelled out. In ‘Abdallah b. al-Mubarak’s Kitab al-jihad we see similar attitudes. In the above hadith, “the sword wipes away sins” in a manner similar to the Christian tradition, which places redemption in the Cross: “Being killed in the path of Allah washes away impurity; killing is two things: atonement and rank [in heaven].” Fighters were encouraged to wear white so that the blood of their sacrifice would be apparent. p.15
Incitement and psychological fear are both important components of jihad, as is recognized in the Quran 3:151: “We will cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers on account of their associating with Allah that for which He sent down no authority.” The Prophet Muhammad further amplified this idea by noting that God had helped him with a fear (ru‘b or mahaba) that He had sent before the Muslim armies to a distance of a month’s journey. According to this idea, all who lived at this distance from the Muslims would feel this fear and be defeated by it even before meeting the Muslims in battle. The psychological preparation for victory or defeat is also a theme of the hadith literature, in which we find a great many references to poetry, flags, and slogans intended to aid the fighters. Probably the most popular slogan— Allahu akbar! (God is greater!)—is usually said to precede Muslim advance into battle. p.17-18
One of the bases for this type of regulation was defining the manner in which war should be declared and what its limits were. The Messenger of Allah, when he would send a commander with a raid or an army would enjoin upon him the fear of Allah, especially with regard to himself, but also with regard to the Muslims, and say: When you meet your polytheist enemy, call to him [to choose] between three possibilities—accept whichever one they accept, and desist from them:
1. Call them to Islam; if they accept, then accept it from them and desist from them. Then [if they accept Islam] call them to move from their homes to the home of the muhajirun [immigrants]; if they do this, then they will have the rights and the responsibilities of the muhajirun. Ifthey refuse, then designate their home, and inform them that they will be like the Muslim Bedouin—Allah’s law, which is incumbent upon the believers, will be incumbent upon them, but they will not have any right to the movable or nonmovable spoils, except when they fight at the side of the Muslims.
2. If they refuse, then call them to pay the jizya [poll tax]. If they accept, then accept it from them and desist from them.
3. If they refuse, then ask Allah for aid against them, and fight them. If you besiege the people of a fortress, and they desire to surrender unconditionally (‘ala hukm Allah), do not accept this from them, but let them surrender according to your judgment, and do with them what you wish afterwards. p. 19-20
The Prophet Muhammad is portrayed, as Patricia Crone has stated, as a doomsday prophet, sent just before the end of the world to warn those who would heed a warning and to punish those who would not. Here, the process of jihad, as in the traditions cited above, is one in which the hold of worldly things over the believer is diluted. Because of the impermanence of the soldier’s life, and the difficulties of establishing a stable family or gathering substantial possessions, many of the ties that bind people to this world are weakened or even dissolved entirely. When this is taken into consideration, the spiritual significance of jihad becomes even more pronounced. It is clear why the connection with the end of the world had to be maintained in the jihad literature. Without this final date in mind, it would have been difficult for Muslim fighters to summon up the necessary energy to achieve the conquests. p.23
Martyrdom in Islam has a much more active sense: the prospective martyr is called to seek out situations in which martyrdom might be achieved. p.26
For the true beginnings of the “greater jihad” we must go to the great theologian and Sufi al-Ghazali (d. 1111). It is to his formulations that we owe the success of this doctrine. In his great work Ihya _ulum al-din (Revival of the Religious Sciences), al-Ghazali presents the lusts and passions of the soul as an invading army trying to conquer the body and to keep it from following the path of mysticism. In an interesting reinterpretation, he strips a passage from Quran 4:95 from its context (indicated in bracketed text) to argue that Muslims must fight not by means of their possessions and “persons” (the word being the plural of nafs, soul), but against their possessions and their souls: [Those of the believers who stay at home while suffering from no injury are not equal to] those who fight in the cause of Allah with their possessions and persons. Allah has raised those who fight with their possessions and persons one degree (over those who stay at home; and to each Allah has promised the fairest good. Yet Allah has granted a great reward to those who fight and not to those who stay behind). This creative reinterpretation of the Qur‘anic verse turns the focus radically away from the original intent to concentrate on the battle against one’s lower passions, especially the soul. Al-Ghazali takes this argument further when he deals with the subject of exercising the soul. Throughout the Ihya, he uses military, and especially jihad, imagery to describe this battle. However, al-Ghazali nowhere indicates that he sees the jihad against the soul as a substitute for militant jihad (he in fact rarely deals with militant jihad in the Ihya). But in the section on enjoining the good and forbidding the evil (al-amr bi-lma _ruf wa-l-nahi _an al-munkar, one of the most fundamental principles of Islamic social law), al-Ghazali adduces the example of the jihad fighter who sacrifices himself for the greater good and leads a charge against a large number of the enemy in an attempt to cause them distress (this would later become the legal basis for the suicide attack or martyrdom operation of contemporary times). p.37
Others have fallen into this error as well [of assuming the division between greater and lesser Jihad is legal or actual- T]. They comprise two basic groups: Western scholars who want to present Islam in the most innocuous terms possible, and Muslim apologists, who rediscovered the internal jihad in the nineteenth century and have been emphasizing it ever since that time as the normative expression of jihad—in defiance of all the religious and historical evidence to the contrary. The motives of the first group are well intentioned, probably undertaken with the goal of furthering interreligious dialogue and skirting an issue that has long been used by polemicists as a vehicle for attacking Islam. p.40
In his more recent Unholy War, while discussing the many meanings of jihad, Esposito continues to avoid all historical context for his discussion and simply repeats what contemporary Muslim apologists say about this doctrine. Since he has already decided that radical Muslims are terrorists, Esposito is able to avoid dealing with the fact that they have extensive support in the central texts and doctrines of Islam. p. 42
From an outsider’s point of view, after surveying the evidence from classical until contemporary times, one
must conclude that today’s jihad movements are as legitimate as any that have ever existed in classical
Islam, with the exception of the fact that they disregard the necessity of established authority—that a legitimate authority such as a caliph or an imam could declare jihad. Other than this one major difference, contemporary jihad groups fall within the confines of classical definitions of jihad. That this is true can be seen by their careful regard for classical and contemporary law, their heavy emphasis on the spiritual rewards of jihad, and their frequently voiced claim to be fighting for the sake of Islam. p.164
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