Jihad As Unarmed Struggle
by Martin Kramer
According to Barbara
Stowasser, professor of Arabic at Georgetown
University, “Jihad is
a serious personal commitment to the faith,” a
struggle against “evil
intentions,” and a “working toward
the moral betterment of society.” Only
at the very end of the Qur'an is it used
to denote armed struggle, and even then,
she added, Muslims are enjoined only to engage
in defensive war. In Stowasser's view, al-Qa‘ida “goes
against the majority of Islam and against
most of Islamic legal theory.” They
were a group that “picks and chooses
in its approach to the Qur'an.”
Well, of course they do,
but so do the American scholars who have
picked and chosen their way through the Qur'an
and Islamic legal theory, in a deliberate
effort to demilitarize both, or even to turn
Islam into a pacifist faith — a kind
of oriental Quakerism. This interpretation
is as tendentious as al-Qa‘ida's. Emile
Tyan, author of the article on jihad in the Encyclopaedia
of Islam, described this approach as
“wholly apologetic.” “Jihad consists of
military action with the object of the expansion
of Islam,” he determined; presenting
it as peaceful persuasion or self-defense
“disregard[s] entirely the previous doctrine
and historical tradition, as well as the
texts of the Qur'an and the Sunna.” In fact,
someone has to be “imperfectly educated”
to argue that jihad must be understood
as struggle without arms. As Rudolph Peters
wrote in his book on the doctrine of jihad,
it is the idea of pacifist or defensive jihad
that is new; Islamists (like bin Ladin) are
much closer to classical doctrine. And
that doctrine has enjoyed an obvious revival
over the past twenty years.
Sources: Excerpted from
“Jihad
101,” by Martin Kramer, Middle
East Quarterly, (Spring 2002)
|