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Vol. 6 / October
2004
A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE
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Religious Visions and Sacred Terror:
The Case of Islam
All religions have, at their
core, a sacred vision of the ideal utopian community based upon their
religious scriptures, traditions and laws. This is the case in Christianity
with its vision of a Christian society organized according to the gospels and
faithful to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, in Judaism with its view of the
ideal Jewish society based upon talmudic tradition and observance of halacha
and in Islam whose history and theology call for establishing societies and
states under the sole authority of Muslim religious leaders and governed by
the Muslim shari`ah, religious law.
Western religions have, for the
most part, compromised or reinterpreted their historical aspirations and
eschatological expectations and reconciled themselves with cultural and
historical change. The processes of modernization, secularization and
pluralism in Western culture has made it impossible for any one religion to
establish itself as the absolute purveyor of truth. Christianity, once at the
epicenter of political and cultural life throughout Europe, has redefined and
reinterpreted critical and central elements of its theology and practice to
accommodate itself to its marginal situation in modern society. The Christian
church now acknowledges, even in countries like Italy, Spain, France and
Belgium, where they are an overwhelming majority, that Christian doctrine and
dogma cannot serve as the legal basis for the state or for rules governing
civil society. This is not to say that religion has disappeared or is
unimportant. Religion has a role to play in modern society, but a severely
attenuated and restricted one; as a provider of meaning, to alleviate
suffering by appeal to the supernatural and to organize rituals to celebrate
and commemorate personal and family events. Put differently, religion in
Western culture has moved from the ”public realm” of government and society
to the “private realm” of personal relations and voluntary affiliation.1
Islam, for complex historical
reasons, has never religiously accommodated to modernity and, with the
exception of a small cadre of liberal theologians and intellectuals,2 its mainstream laity and religious
leadership have steadfastly maintained its classical outlook and religious
vision. Islam has refused to retreat to the “private realm” of personal life
and still asserts its rightful place in the public sphere of government, the
legal system and civil society.3
Nonetheless, the forces of modernization and secularization are worldwide and
have affected Muslim as well as European societies and Islam has been
confronted by its inability to carry out its religious vision as it finds
Islamic religious, political and social programs challenged by both Muslim
states intent on modernization and an emerging global order antagonistic to
its religious worldview.
Islamic Dilemmas, Religious Disappointment and Cognitive Dissonance
From the time of the prophet
Muhammad onward, Islam has divided the world between the lands and states
under Muslim control, referred to in Muslim jurisprudence as Dar Al-Islam,
the domain of Islam, and those lands and territories not under Muslim
jurisdiction, called Dar Al-Harb, the domain or abode of war. The
faithful Muslim’s duty is to engage in religious struggle, jihad, to
transform non-Muslim lands, the Dar Al-Harb, into Dar Al-Islam
lands, governed by Muslim law. The goal of jihad is not to force
individual conversion, but the transformation, by forcible conquest if
necessary, of non-Muslim areas into Muslim controlled states, whereby they
become part of the Islamic world, the Dar Al-Islam. Islam, from its
earliest periods, permitted monotheistic religions like Christianity and
Judaism to maintain their religious institutional life but these communities,
known as dhimmi communities, while permitted religious and economic
rights, were consigned to an inferior status within Muslim society, and
subject to special taxes and obligations. Unlike the dhimmis, who are
tolerated minority communities, citizens of non-Muslim societies are seen as
harbi, people living in a war zone, and therefore subject to conquest.
For Islam, “there is a canonically obligatory perpetual state of war” between Islamic civilization and non-Muslim
societies, which must be fought by faithful Muslims “until the whole world
either accepts the message of Islam or submits to those who bring it.”4
The world, in the Muslim view, is divided between “Islam” and “war”
and the devout Muslim believer must answer the call of jihad to
advance Allah’s message for all humankind. Theologically, Muslims should
throw themselves into an unrelenting, unyielding and unending jihad
until their duty of world transformation is complete. Political reality,
military considerations and historical developments, however, makes this
impossible even for the pious Muslim. Jihad is not fought in a divine
battlefield but in the material world and a Muslim will find it necessary and
permissible to delay or renounce the battlefield, for a time, in order to
make alliances, obtain war materials and assemble a capable force. A truce,
however, is a temporary matter to be followed by a continuing jihad.
The precise contexts and
meanings of jihad and Dar Al-Harb have shifted in the course of
Islamic history. In the earliest periods of Islamic history, when Islam was
steadily advancing in the ancient and medieval world, it was assumed that all
non Muslim lands would be conquered and take their place in the greater Dar
Al-Islam. After the Spanish Reconquista and the expulsion of Islam from
Europe, this classical view of total and constant jihad was modified
somewhat to fit the gradual loss of Muslim hegemony. Despite these changes,
the call to jihad remains central to Islamic doctrine and religious
imagination. While the ultimate goal of jihad is the creation of a
universal world community living according to the shari`ah, the Muslim
religious code based on the Qur`an and the various Islamic legal traditions,
the immediate task of the faithful is to make certain that existing Muslims
states remain loyal to Muslim teachings and practices.
Islam rejects the secular state
and acknowledges no separation between a distinctly religious realm and a
secular realm.. The Islamic state is the community of believers, the ummah,
those faithful to Islam and living under Islamic law wherever they may be.
National boundaries are irrelevant. Muslims may have state entities but the
Muslim ummah transcends national or ethnic categories and includes all
who are faithful to the Muslim vision. Allegiance then is not to any national
state authority but to the ummah and to those Islamic religious
leaders who will forge an Islamic entity which will be true, in every way,
to the full gamut of Muslim law, custom and government. Practically,
this means the establishment and enforcement of shari`ah law in all
Muslim societies and in all international relations.
The Islamic civilization,
envisioned, required and desired by faithful Muslims, has not occurred. A
recalcitrant reality involving the international community, modern economics
and international trade and, perhaps most painful of all, the passivity and,
not infrequently, the antagonism of fellow Muslims have come together
to deny the faithful their deepest religious goals. Muslim states have
abandoned fidelity to Islamic jurisprudence and have been cooped by the West
and serve Western and not Muslim interests. The injunction to wage jihad
is denied by these so-called Muslim states and secular legislation and
secular elites have stymied the creation of an authentic Muslim ummah. The
leaders of nations like Egypt, Pakistan and Algeria, with populations of
millions of faithful Muslims, remain disloyal to the tenets of Islam.
Perhaps most painful and tragic
for the Muslim faithful is the continued existence of an alien Jewish State
of Israel. In the Islamic view, the State of Israel now illegitimately
occupies, with the assent and backing of Western military power, Islamic
lands. According to Islamic perceptions, hundreds of thousands of the Muslim
inhabitants of Palestine were terrorized and forced to leave their ancestral
home and the holy places of Islam, the Haram el Sharif in Jerusalem and the
Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron which are under Jewish control. Not to be
discounted, is the everyday consciousness and experience, by an indigenous
and religiously autonomous Muslim community, of being a conquered people in
what is considered a sacred center of Islam.
Disappointment is a stressful
human experience and religious disappointments, in particular, may be among
the most painful of such states because the believers invest so much of themselves
in a religious faith. The psychologist, Leon Festinger, has described the
experience of religious disappointment as a state of “cognitive dissonance” –
i.e. a state where two elements of belief or “fact” turn out to be
contradictory or inconsistent. Festinger argued that human beings seek
consistency between their beliefs and goals and their experience of external
reality, because of a human propensity for order and consistency. In a series
of experimental studies, Festinger and his colleagues have demonstrated that
the experience of cognitive dissonance leads to severe states of discomfort
and to attempts, of all sorts, to reduce or eliminate the inconsistencies and
discomfort.
Dissonance produces
discomfort and, correspondingly, there will arise pressures to reduce or
eliminate the dissonance. Attempts to reduce dissonance represent the
observable manifestations that dissonance exists. Such attempts may take any
of three forms; the person may try to change one or more of the beliefs,
opinions, or behaviors involved in the dissonance; to acquire new
information or beliefs that will increase the existing consonance and thus
cause the total dissonance to be reduced; or to forget the importance of
those cognitions that are in a dissonant relationship.5
The desire to reduce dissonance
and disappointment is psychologically equivalent to the desire for food, when
hungry, or sleep, when fatigued. Living with disappointment, being ridiculed
for ones beliefs, being unable to fulfill ones religious obligations is an
intensely difficult situation. As Peter Berger described it, the longer it
continues “it becomes very difficult to take yourself seriously.”6 The Muslim faithful find themselves in
such a psychological dilemma. Their essential religious theology and religious
obligations – the call to jihad, the conquest of non Muslim lands for
Islam, the institutionalization of shari`ah and an essentially
clerical leadership – are inherently in conflict with the nationalistic
modernizing Muslim regimes and the democratic secular traditions of Europe
and the United States. The challenge facing Islam is both religious and
psychological and an appreciation of the Islamic dilemma must consider both.
Islamic
Responses
There are three ways religious
groups can attempt resolution to the experience of cognitive dissonance and
chronic religious disappointment: surrender, reinterpretation and
revolutionary transformation. In the Muslim case, these correspond to what I
will refer to as modernism, traditionalism and militant Islam.
Modernism
Muslim modernism deals with the
contradictions and dissonance engendered by Islamic faith by surrendering
those elements of dogma and behavior which are in conflict with modern
sensibilities and culture. In this fashion, the painful experience of
dissonance is dealt with by rejecting implausible faith positions for the
newer “truths” of modernity, science and political reality. Perhaps the
earliest modernist writing developed in nineteenth century British India
where the Muslim community found itself living under severe colonial rule.
After the British had suppressed the Muslim revolt of 1857, some Muslim
intellectuals, wanting to accommodate to the new political realities and
because some were captivated by European superiority, began to abandon jihad
and conquest as an obligation for Muslims. One prominent acculturated Muslim
writer, Moulavi Cheragh Ali, who spoke for a whole cadre of modernist
Muslims, explained that all the verses in the Qur`an relating to jihad
were of historical importance only and that Islam was opposed to jihad
and had no call to wage wars of conquest.7
Ali’s writings are of interest because he works so hard to make a case for
the similarity between European Christianity and Islam.
For contemporary modernists, as
well, the classical doctrines of the division between Dar Al-Islam and
Dar Al-Harb and the obligation of aggressive jihad is rejected.
Modernist scholars like Mahmud Shalut and Abu Zahah argue that taking the
full context of the Qur`anic passages on jihad into account –
“contextualized interpretation” – demonstrates that Islam is opposed to
violent confrontation and is encouraged to make permanent peace with non
Muslim communities. There is a full rejection of the classical approach to
Islamic treaties as temporary and limited in time as exemplified by the
Muhammad’s agreement with the Meccans at Hudabiyya.8 The modernist insistence that Islamic
law permits permanent peace between Muslims and others, including former
enemies of Islam, permits the modernists to accept the legitimacy of non
Muslim societies and relieves them from being obligated to wage an ongoing jihad
and to transform all Muslim society into religious theocracies. They can take
their place in modern secular multicultural societies, without experiencing
cognitive dissonance, due to the contradiction between religious faith and
political reality.
Muslim modernists invoke the
category of “silent shari`ah” to indicate that Muslims are left
considerable leeway in decision making because, in the modernist view, the
Qur`an only prescribed broad principles but has left details and specifics
for the human community to decide. For example, in their rejection of a
religious state, modernists argue, “there is nothing in the Islamic shari`ah
that compels one to bind religion to state-setting, the shari`ah does
not deal with any specific form of government.”9 The modernists also invoke the “silent shari`ah”
to show that Islam can be fully compatible with western political democracy,
pluralism and equality. One Muslim scholar has found Islam compatible with a
Jewish state in the Middle East.10
The modernists are frequently pious and highly acclaimed scholars of the
Qur`an and its associated literature but their worldview represents a
surrender of classical Islam, as they create a synthesis between modernity
and Islam traditionalism.
Traditionalism
Traditionalism is a complex
phenomenon and presents elements of surrender, resignation and, despite
all this, maintains crucial elements of the classical tradition. Traditionalists
tend to ambivalence both in language and action and unlike modernists refuse
to outrightly reject classical doctrine while de facto discouraging or even
forbidding followers from strictly following those same scriptural
admonitions. There is no cognitive or theological capitulation to political
and cultural reality but there are elaborate reinterpretations of classical
doctrine to make it compatible with current reality. Traditionalists engage
in “cognitive and theological bargaining”11
willing to compromise on some issues so they can achieve the more important
goals at some future point.
The Muslim Brotherhood
organization in Egypt and Jordan and its affiliates all over the Muslim
world, originally a sectarian revivalist movement and later, in the sixties
and seventies, a radical revolutionary organization before it was transformed
into a popular Islamic movement, illustrates the traditionalization response.
These groups continue to affirm the complete legitimacy of jihad and
accept fully the obligation to create Islamic states who will be govern in
full conformity to religious law. But while they view the current leadership
of Muslim nations as “infidels”and enemies of Islam, members of
the Brotherhood serve in parliaments, in Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere,
and take their place as legitimate political parties. The Muslim Brotherhood
justifies their participation by appeal to the Qur`anic narrative of Joseph
who, as a prophet doing divine bidding, took a most active role in the evil
and idolatrous Pharaonic regime. Similarly, argue Muslim traditionalists,
while we desire jihad, while we await a true Islamic state and world
order, we can and are obligated to participate in governmental activity as
did the prophets in the Qur`anic narratives.12
Muslim Brotherhood members in
the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan, who prior to the Intifada of the late
nineties, refused to participate fully in organized violence against Israel
and secular Muslim regimes, justified their inaction by appealing to
Muhammad’s hijra, migration to Medina, when he could not overcome the
powerful opposition in Mecca and establish an Islamic state, only to return
13 years later and triumph over his opposition. Traditionalists argued that
there is no violation of Muslim doctrine and no inconsistency or cognitive
dissonance in their refusal to engage in a violent jihad at a time
they saw as importune, because their course of action is fully compatible
with the example of the Prophet Muhammad. In the past when challenged even
taunted by more activist groups by their refusal to engage in terrorist
action against Israel, Brotherhood leaders proclaimed
work for Palestine
does not come in one form, that is bearing arms. It also includes
the awakening the youth to work for Palestine. Only the Muslims can undertake
this duty, taking the youth out of their soft childhood to manhood, from
nothingness to self realization, from fragmentation and diverse concerns to
unity and cohesiveness. The Muslim Brotherhood does all these things and all
such efforts are being made on the road to the liberation of Palestine which
is part of the land of Islam.13
Some Islamic groups like Shukri
Mustafa’s Al-Takfir wa’al Hijra have made the Hijra an essential part
of their program, calling for periods of purification and withdrawal, before
returning to violence against enemies of Islam.14 After a time, many of these traditionalist groups,
like the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank, responding to pressure from
more radical groups and to their growing sense of dissonance and infidelity
to religious teachings return to a more activist orientation. Traditionalism
without engaging in violent confrontation is a difficult stance to maintain
in the Islamic world. The collective traditions, religious texts and the
continued activity of more radical groups challenge the “theological
bargaining”, reinterpretations and compromises made by traditionalists as
they attempt to forge a reconciliation between Islamic theology and political
reality.
Militant
Islam: The Transformation of Reality
The transformation response
seeks to change reality, to make it conform to religious expectations and
dogma. Transformationists see modernists and traditionalists as faithless and
weak minded in their willingness to compromise their essential religious beliefs
and goals. Militant Islam rejects Islamic modernism as theological surrender
and apostasy. Traditionalism and its willingness to compromise aids and abets
the enemies of Islam and deludes the Muslim faithful. Militant
transformationists are pure believers, impatient with waiting and zealous to
do battle for God. God spoke and his truth is literal. Any other response is
blasphemous.
Muslim theology has not
undergone liberalization, as has Christianity, nor has it been modified in a
traditionalist mode as has Haredi Judaism with its rabbinical adjustments to
new realities.15 Islam has
remained an essentially literalist Qur`anic tradition and deviations from the
texts receive no legitimization or support from the religious virtuoso class
of leading clerics.16 The
militant response in its demand to engage in jihad, to make
the literal texts come alive, to fulfill the precise demands of scripture is
not sectarian or idiosyncratic as many Western secular observers imagine, but
central to the inner life of Islam. The Islamic injunction to establish a
universal Islamic society, to reclaim immediately Muslims lands and to
establish shari`ah as the state law is the Muslim obligation.
Compromises, theological bargaining and sophisticated reinterpretations do
not ultimately address the failure of responsibility and the experience of
dissonance for pious Muslims. The texts, the oral histories and worldview
passed on within the closed Muslim world of Islamic schools, mosques and
universities worldwide do not permit abandonment of the classical traditions.
One commentator put it this way:
To a considerable
extent, all Muslims are fundamentalists, that is they believe that the
Qur`an, the holy scripture of Islam is God’s final, complete and
perfected revolution for all mankind. The Qur`an is therefore the supreme
guide for the human race, the direct words of god, covering all aspects of
human life transmitted directly to his last prophet and messenger, Muhammad.
importance.
Islam is God’s plan
for the world, every inch of it, not only just the Islamic regions. Islam is
for everyone, whether one wants it or not. It is the duty of every Moslem to
help expand the borders of Islam until every being on this planet
acknowledges that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger.”17
Islam never rejected these
beliefs and religious duties but they lay dormant in the Muslim world under
the yoke of colonialism and later by the attractions of nationalism and
economic modernization, whether in the form of socialism or capitalism.18 Two 20th-century thinkers, the Indian
Muslim, Maulana Maudoodi and the Egyptian, Syyid Qutb gave new life to the
core Islamic goals and in doing so ignited a transformation of Islam. Maulana
Madoodi, an Indian Muslim argued that Islam is entirely incompatible with
modernity and the modern state and that modernity in its rejection of God’s
laws for society and in its depraved moral order is actually identical to the
jahiliyya, the barbarism and pagan immortality which Muhammad came to
destroy and replace with the new moral and political order of Islam.
Modernity is not a neutral matter, it is lethal to a genuine and faithful
Islam and a Muslim can not under any circumstance accommodate or compromise
with jahiliyya. Qutb who incorporated Madoodi’s ideas in his own
rejection of modernity explained that jahiliyya
...denotes rejection of the divinity of God and the
adulation of mortals. In this sense, jahiliyyah is not just a specific
historical period (referring to the era preceding Islam) but a state of affairs.
Such a state of human affairs existed in the past, exists today, and may in
the future, taking the form of jahiliyyah, that mirror image and sworn
enemy of Islam. In any time and place human beings face that clear cut
choice: either to observe the Law of Allah in its entirety, or to apply laws
laid down by man of one sort or another. In the latter case they are in a
state of jahiliyyah. Man is at the crossroads and that is the choice:
Islam or jahiliyyah.19
Qutb excoriated the modernists
who sought to imitate Western societies or to define Islam in Western
religious categories. Qutb went back to the texts and challenged the
acquiescing Muslim clergy and politicians for failing to demand the full
implementation of Islam in the political, social and economic realm. Qutb’s
Islam is aggressive and all encompassing and he refused to dilute or
compromise, what he took to be, authentic Islam. For Qutb, Islam is not a
private or theoretical matter but the obligation to implement Muslim law and
values in everyday life.
Qutb worked for most of his life
as an educational inspector for the Egyptian government and during the early
part of his life, felt that education and preaching could lead to the
establishment of a Islamic state. The recalcitrance of the Egyptian state and
his own religious development changed his position and led him to champion
violent jihad as the correct path. His stay in the United States,
during 1948-40, studying educational administration had a profound effect on
him and highlighted for him the depravity and inferiority of the Christian
West.
During my years in
America, some of my fellow Muslims would have recourse to apologetics as
though they were defendants on trial. Contrariwise, I took an offensive
position, excoriating the Western Jahiliyya, be it in its
much-acclaimed religious beliefs or in its depraved and dissolute
socioeconomic and moral conditions: this Christian idolatry of the Trinity
and its notions of sin and redemption which make no sense at all; this
Capitalism, predicated as it is on monopoly and interest-taking,
money-grubbing, and exploitation; this individualism which lacks any sense of
solidarity and social responsibility other than that laid down by law; that
crass and vacuous materialistic perception of life, that animal freedom which
is called permissiveness, that slave market dubbed “women’s liberation”.20
The Islamic response to this
sordid, immoral and God denying situation, which Qutb now saw as invading
Muslim countries, is a full uncompromising return to the fundamentals of
Islam which for Qutb will only occur by means of a militant jihad.
Moreover, the enemies of Islam are not only those who wage war against
Muslims or deny Muslims their religious, political or civil rights but the
entire world of jahiliyya whose very existence should not and cannot
be tolerated by Islam. Islam has, in this view, a universal
liberating and humanizing message for all humanity and it is inevitable that
other religions and systems will not recognize the truth of the Islamic
message. Consequently, these others powers must be “destroyed” and their
leaders “annihilated”. As Qutb explains, “truth and falsehood cannot exist on
earth... The liberating struggle of jihad does not seize until all
religions belong to God.”21
Qutb went even further, basing
himself on the widely recognized medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya, he argued
that Muslim governments who are disloyal to Islamic law and do not rule
according to shari`ah are themselves to be classified as jahiliyya
regimes and are rightfully to be violently overthrown. This was a revolution
– which Qutb successfully carried out by his astute use of the legacy of the
unimpeachable Ibn Taymiyya – certainly within Sunni Islam whose
traditionalist leadership had for centuries been materially dependent and had
accommodated the distinctly non Muslim policies of the ruling elites.
Historically the fear of fitna, civil war had been so great among the
Sunni community that a great tolerance for religious compromise had been
legitimated. Oubt’s writings and revolutionary activity changed all that. Jihad
and revolt were now back on the Islamic agenda. Qutb saw those willing to
compromise as “spiritual and intellectuals defeatists”. He refused to
tolerate dissonance between the Muslim texts and traditions and political and
social reality and insisted on the transformation of reality in accordance
with the Muslim vision.
Seyyed Qutb was executed by the
Egyptian government in 1956 for his Islamic revolutionary activity and is
today a highly respected figure read by millions of Muslims all over the
world and he has inspired numerous revival and jihad organizations.
His enormous importance is both as a preacher of revivalist Islam and as the
contemporary thinker who successfully challenged the traditionalist Muslim
leadership on the obligation to institutionalize Islamic law and demanded
that jihad remains a central and critical way to establish the
universal Islamic order. Qutb and his comrades in the Muslim Brotherhood of
the fifties and sixties spurred the rise of a host of militant Islamic
ideologies and groups all over the world including not only Muslim countries
but also in the United States, Europe and the republics of the former Soviet
Union. Still, his writings on violence have elements of apology – he still
seems caught in the traditionalist argument which defines jihad as a
last if necessary resort – and his training as a teacher led him believe that
discussion and propaganda would bring some people to Islam. His revolutionary
rhetoric, strong as it was, gave a place for hijrah, separation and
migration from infidel regimes and his writing on jihad lacked an
immediate and programmatic quality.
The most sophisticated
theological continuation of militant transformative Islam was taken by Abt
al-Salam Faraj in his Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah (The Absent Duty),22 a booklet which provided the
theological justification for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Faraj was
executed by the Egyptian government in 1982 for his involvement in the
assassination but his work continues to be circulated widely, taken seriously
by both establishment clerics and militants and continues to be the major
inspiration for Islamic “sacred terror”23
worldwide, including followers in the United States, Europe and India and
most recently has gained a readership in Muslim areas of the former Soviet
Union whose religious leadership is increasingly adopting Qutb and Faraj as
their religious inspiration.24
Faraj’s critical point is that jihad, violent and physical
confrontation including death and destruction, is the “absent” and
neglected duty of contemporary Islam. Faraj puts it plainly, there
is no Islam without violent jihad and jihad must be fought not
only against infidels, pagans and non Muslims but continuing Qutb’s position
against all who oppose Islamic institutions and authority. Jihad is a
worldwide religious duty against all infidels. The Qur`an is clear “...Fight
and slay the pagans wherever you see them, seize them, beleaguer them, and
lie in ambush” (S.9:5). There can be no excuses, there can be no middle way.
It is Jihad and Islam or blasphemy.
Faraj dismisses any and all of
the traditional restraints on jihad. Such arguments for limiting jihad,
even those used by the most orthodox schools are excuses, are but examples of
Muslim cowardice. Hijrah is ridiculed; “All this nonsense – about
going out to the dessert – results from denouncing and refusing to follow the
right way to establish an Islamic state” writes Faraj.25 It is the unwillingness to fight jihad
that leads Muslim leaders to put their faith in preaching, propaganda or
scholasticism as ways to achieve the Islamic state. Muslims do not and will
not achieve their divine mission without jihad. And the Qur`an puts it
directly, “Fighting is prescribed for you and ye dislike it, But it is
possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you and you love a thing
that is bad for you. But God knoweth and ye know not.” (S.2:216) The high
value the Muslim community puts on religious study and knowledge is similarly
derided with Faraj’s argument that the great ages of Muslim conquest and
glory saw little scholarship but great jihad.
Faraj’s expansion of jihad
is most vividly seen in his encouragement of individual acts of religious
violence and treachery (fard ayn) and his strong theological position
that jihad needs no approval of Muslim religious authority and need
not be limited by earlier ethical restraints against murder of children and
certain other civilians. Moreover, the soldiers of jihad may use any
and all methods, including deception and deceit, surprise attacks,
trickery and large scale violence to achieve their religious goals.
Throughout his writing, Faraj is clear that jihad means “confrontation
and blood’’ and that no Muslim may legitimately avoid the call to jihad.
Jihad is now democratized and it is the ordinary folk who carry on the
holy war without dependence on establishment Imams or state clergy. The power
to make jihad now belongs to the people and cannot in this new view be
subject to the will of Muslim ulema officials who are functionaries under the
control of infidel politicians.26
Faraj and his disciples laid the
theological groundwork for a fundamentalist, aggressive and increasingly
violent Islam. In its emphasis on violence and murder and in its
justification of individual and haphazard attacks, the new militants have
religiously institutionalized jihad as an everyman’s “sacred terror”.
The Qur`anic interpretations and specific guidelines for jihad
given by Faraj had been challenged in the eighties by the Egyptian Al-Azhar
scholars but the fact that these stellar scholars gave it so much attention
only resulted in raising Faraj’s theological importance as a bona fide Muslim
thinker after his death.27
The fact remains that the understanding of jihad and the nature of
violence tolerated by Muslim authorities has been transformed after the
publication of Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah. This is not to say that Faraj’s
policy of violence is the actual Islam of most Muslims. Followers of such
movements are not insignificant – likely in the hundreds of thousands
worldwide – but the ultimate importance of these transformative militant
thinkers is that they have created a sacred canopy under which purveyors of
“sacred terror” can operate, collect money, and recruit new followers among
the Muslim faithful. Qutb and Faraj were marginalized but their spiritual
children are among mainstream Muslims and it is these spiritual offspring who
are setting the Islamic agenda.
This sometime quiet and sometime
noisy transformation is occurring all over the Muslim world. The release from
the traditional restraints on violence offered by Faraj and others has
enabled Islamic activists all over he world to now legitimately proclaim
individual Fatwas, religious verdicts, and threaten
violence against anyone these activists define as “enemies of Islam”.28 The past obligation for consultation
with recognized religious authorities served to limit violence and constrain jihad,
but in this new decentralized and individuated understanding of jihad,
there is increased likelihood for greater violent confrontation. Indeed all
through the Muslim world calls for violence against the enemies of Islam have
now mushroomed, particularly against modernists and traditionalists who
challenge the new approach to violent aggressive jihad. The
Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, under the influence of the new theology, has
now enlarged its active jihad activities and given its theological
imprimatur to terrorist activity.29
The Palestinian Authority and its supporters, once given to political and
liberation movement rhetoric, has now appropriated the rhetoric of sacred
terrorism associated with Islamic groups.30
The current Palestinian Authority appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine,
Sheik Ikrima Sabri, explained that when mothers “willingly sacrifice their
offspring for the sake of freedom, it is a great display of the power of
belief. The mother is participating in the great reward of jihad...”31
Western observers and diplomats
are often shocked and scandalized by the growing legitimization of violence
in the Islamic world. Muslims see things differently. Militant
Islam and the new ideologies of “sacred terror”, aimed at transforming
political and social realty in accordance with Islamic injunctions, has
released Muslims from the psychological stresses of religious inconsistency
and cognitive dissonance. Islam is different and the transformative approach
including violence and armed struggle emerges from classical texts and the
lived history of Islam. We see here a spectacle of “realities in conflict”.
What, to outsiders, appears to be violence and terror is, from an
Islamic perspective, an obligatory and ethical response to paganism,
infidelity or apostasy.
Westerners have their own
ethnocentrism and frequently want to believe, against all evidence, that all
religions are the same, all religions .condemn violence and promote tolerance
and human brotherhood. Western secular humanists in their embrace of an ethic
of moral relativism and secular nationalism have erroneously assumed that all
peoples concur with this unique and .unusual approach of modern Western
civilization. Modernization and nationalism, along American and European
lines, have not worked in the Islamic world.32
While small economic and political elites have welcomed Westernization and
benefited from it, the bulk of the Muslim world have experienced,
in the prescient words of Emanuel Sivan, only ”doom and gloom” from an
embrace of modernity. The mood now all over the Islamic world – from the
Arabian Peninsula to Caucasus, in the Philippines, Indonesia and
among the émigrés to Western Europe and the United States – is for a search
for Islamic authenticity. It is at this moment that militant transformative
Islam has much to offer to Muslim seekers. It is a religion anchored in the
sacred texts without apology, it is a bulwark against globalization and moral
homelessness and it has a clear program to achieve the Muslim vision of
“there is no God but Allah” throughout the world.
Endnotes
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