The Future of Violence In Islam, Sherman Jackson, Feb. 23, 2013

The Emergence of the Muslim Community

As the annual pilgrimage took place in the 12th lunar month, the forbidden months afforded the Arabians time to travel to and from Mecca in peace. The Quran confirms the sanctity of the forbidden months, and in so doing underscores the persistence of the overall state of war well into the time of Muhammad's mission. Along with its emphatic monotheism, Muhammad's message introduced another entirely new element into the Arabian theater, namely a community known as Muslims.

The Emergence of the Muslim Community

Coming as they did from all the local clans and tribes, they constituted for a time a rather anomalous entity in a deeply conservative and deeply tribal society. In this context, the situation would ultimately gravitate towards the reality that the only people Muhammad's followers could assume would allow them to thrive as Muslims would be other Muslims themselves. Thus, while the Quranic injunction to wage jihad pit Muslims against non-Muslims, religion was hardly the only element in this confrontation.

As de Tocqueville wrote of 19th century France, and I quote, "the unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political opponents rather than their religious adversaries." In a similar vein, speaking of the situation in the early United States, de Tocqueville cites the view of those who justified subjugating the Indians of the western frontier in purely survivalist terms. Quote, "it is in our interest that the new territories should be religious in order that they may permit us to remain free."

End of quote. Of course, Muhammad and the Muslims after him would strive to bring as many of the infidels as possible into the true faith. The question, however, is whether this was the raison d'etre of jihad with nothing short of conversion fulfilling its basic purpose.

The Early Expansion of Islam

The period after Muhammad's death would witness the massive expansion of Islam, or perhaps one should say of Muslim power, as the actual rate of conversion on the ground would not bring the conquered territories to a simple majority for at least a couple of centuries. Of course, in theory, non- Muslims were required to pay a special tax, the so-called jizya, in exchange for security and the right to practice their religion. Still, the overall state of war persisted, no less in the world of late antiquity than it had in Muhammad's Arabia.

And jihad remained thus a priority for Muslims. And yet, that its purpose was widely understood to be the preservation of the physical integrity of the Muslim community rather than converting the entire world to Islam might be gleaned from such explicit articulations as those of the famous 12th of the Common Era century Spanish judge and jurist Ibn Rushd the Elder, a major authority in the history of Islamic law, and the grandfather, incidentally, of the celebrated Averroes of Western fame. Summing up a lengthy discussion of jihad in his highly influential manual called Al-Muqaddimat, or First Things, Ibn Rushd writes the following:

"Thus, whenever we are placed beyond the reach of the enemy, and the outlying districts of the Muslim lands are secured, and the gaps in their fortifications are filled, the obligation to wage jihad

falls from all of the rest of the Muslims."

Ibn Rushd's Perspective on Jihad

Ibn Rushd clearly reflects here the sense that the basic aim of jihad is to provide for the physical integrity of the Muslim community in a world perceived as holding Muslims under constant threat. Just how deeply ingrained this perception was might be measured by the fact that Ibn Rushd himself issued fatwas in which he banned Muslims from taking up residence abroad, prohibited them from traveling to foreign parts to do business, and required those who converted to Islam while living in non-Muslim territories to migrate to the lands of Islam. Such sensibilities might be difficult for us to understand today.

But we might be reminded that while Christian, Jewish, and even Zoroastrian communities might be able to sustain a sense of community in Muslim Iberia, Cairo, or Shiraz, as Norman Daniel points out in his classic book Islam in the West, Christian tolerance of Muslim communities in the pre-modern West was quite a mercurial affair. In the long run, he writes, and I quote, "it was only Islam that tolerated other religions within, admittedly, only with second-class citizenship."

The Historical Context of Jihad

In sum, my answer to the question of why Islam sanctioned jihad to begin with was that the religion itself was born into a world where organized violence underwrote a community's ability to survive and sustain itself.

Indeed, given the overall state of war prevailing both in Arabia and then the world into which Islam subsequently spread, it would have been odd, if not grotesque, if such an institution or its functional equivalent had not emerged. Rather than limit oneself then to Islamic scripture or religion, as my NPR interlocutors seem to have been prone to do, a more accurate understanding of jihad requires an appreciation of Muslim history. Indeed, it would be more with history than with scripture that the jurists would remain in conversation as they went about the business of negotiating the contours and application of jihad as an institution.

Alternative Interpretations of Jihad

Of course, this understanding of the role and purpose of jihad was not and is not shared by all. As one influential Western scholar describes it in its classical guise, jihad, and here I quote again, "is directed against the infidels who need not be guilty of any act of hostility against Muslims. Their very existence is a cause for war, and its aim is to incorporate the infidels in the abode of Islam, preferably as converts, but alternatively as dhimmis, the so-called protected minorities, until the whole world has been subdued."

This view is actually confirmed by one of the four orthodox Sunni schools of law. The going opinion of the classical Shafi'i school was precisely that the mere unbelief of unbelievers, not their aggression, was not only a justification, but a bona fide legal cause obligating jihad against them. In essence, if

not precisely in form, this is also the view of those modern Muslim radicals who hold it to be a communal obligation upon Muslims to wage perpetual war against the entire world until the whole globe embraces Islam or agrees to pay the minority tax.

Thus, it is not at all the case that only non-Muslim Western critics, or those who simply have inadequate access to the sources and or tradition of Islam, understand jihad as a fundamental contradiction of the principle of live and let live. And yet, the minority position of the Shafi'i school aside, there is an extent to which Western alarmists and violent Muslim radicals seem to share and proceed on the basis of a very particular historical consciousness.

Historical Determinism vs. Historical Change

Western critics often appear to embrace a form of historical determinism, according to which Islam cannot, in good conscience or with any integrity, evolve beyond what it was at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past, except as an admission of inadequacy or dereliction.

In this sense, it is history that makes Muslims. Muslims do not make history. Jewish and Christian traditions may be accepted as having evolved to the point that not every medieval interpretation is understood to constitute binding orthodoxy.

But if Muslims signal a similar move, this is viewed as suspect, if not duplicitous, taqiyya, as many have branded it. Meanwhile, in their own way, violent Muslim radicals note a similar, if not identical, attitude. Romantic recollections of an imperial Islamic past continue to bind them to a singular reading of the Muslim present, divergence from which is condemned as an act of religious treason.

But this was clearly not the approach of the premodern masters themselves, from whom the authority for this frozen historical consciousness is supposed to be derived. As we saw clearly in the case of Ibn Rushd, and I could cite countless others, changes in the factual, that is, historical circumstances on the ground, could warrant, and indeed necessarily warranted, substantive changes in the applicability of the obligation to wage jihad.

Modern Changes in International Order

In Jihad in the Modern World, I argued that such change had actually occurred in the form of modern notions such as territorial sovereignty and modern institutions such as the United Nations.

This, I argued, effectively replaced the medieval state of war with a modern state of peace, at least in the sense that peace, not war, now constitutes the presumed norm. Recognition of this fact, certainly given the example of the likes of Ibn Rushd and the classical tradition, would seem to go a long way in reducing the role of violence in Islam as the preferred medium of exchange. But a Western or a Muslim historical consciousness that freezes and shackles Islamic normativeness to a particular pre- modern relationship between Islam and the world would only be able to look upon such changes agnostically, if not with a deep sense of resentment, if not contempt.

Signs of Change: Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi

There are, however, signs that the wages of this frozen historical consciousness are increasingly being recognized and explicitly rejected by modern Muslims. And perhaps one could cite no better example of this than the highly influential Egyptian-born cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who was actually born in 1926. In his most recent opus, his two-volume Fiqh al-Jihad, or The Jurisprudence of Jihad, Sheikh al-Qaradawi sets out to privilege what he terms moderation, or the middle way, as the normative position for Muslims.

Regarding jihad, he places this position between what he depicts as two extremes. On the one end are those who would jettison jihad altogether, limiting themselves to a spiritual struggle against the enemy within. On the other extreme are those who see organized violence as the only medium of exchange between them and their adversaries, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

al-Qaradawi dismisses both of these positions as flawed, but it is the latter group, the hawks as he calls them, that form the primary focus of his attack. al-Qaradawi's primary target is the tendency to accept the historical reality and perspective of the ancients as the historical perspective of Islam, and from there to process the data of scripture on the basis thereof. On such an approach, modern Muslims can hardly move beyond the conclusions of their pre-modern forebears.

Al-Qaradawi's Methodological Approach

For if the latter lived in a world that could be characterized as constituting a state of war and processed the scriptural injunctions on jihad on that basis, modern Muslims who uncritically follow them will invariably be led to similar if not identical conclusions. But al-Qaradawi is clear that pre- modern and modern Muslims are separated by distinct sociopolitical realities. As such, the textual interpretations of the ancients made on the basis of their reality should not be granted any unassailable authority in the modern world.

As he put it, and I'm going to quote here, "true jurisprudence is not simply transmitting the contents of books, for books reflect their respective times and places. True jurisprudence obtains when the jurist engages in fresh interpretation for his own time and place, just as the ancients did for theirs. Not everything that is appropriate for one time is necessarily appropriate for another."

"And not everything that is appropriate to one place is necessarily appropriate to another. Especially given that the changes that have obtained in these our modern times are so very substantial indeed," end of quote.

For Al-Qaradawi, ignoring the space-time differential between pre-modern and modern times leads to the problem of subsequent generations getting shackled to bygone histories in the name of a normative commitment to religious texts, and then laboring under the assumption that all juristic or religious meaning is independently dictated by the text themselves.

On this understanding, the only way to challenge or revise a particular rule is to challenge or revise the authority or authenticity of the text upon which it is based. Not only does Al-Qaradawi dismiss this approach as methodologically flawed, he points out that it is not likely to go far with the majority of committed Muslims. As an alternative, Al-Qaradawi insists that it is contemporary and not pre- modern reality that must serve as the basis of modern Muslims' deliberations.

Al-Qaradawi's Assessment of Contemporary Reality

And for him, contemporary reality is simply no longer the medieval state of war. While prejudice and anti-Muslim feelings persist, it is no longer the case that all non-Muslims are simply lying in wait to pounce on Muslims militarily at the first opportunity. Nor is it the case that Muslims cannot establish and sustain a sense of community in non-Muslim lands.

Nor, given the advances in modern technology and communication, can it be presumed that the powers and principalities that oppose Islam can prevent Muslims from spreading their religious message, as they might have been able to do in the past. To be sure, there are indeed hawks to be found among non-Muslims. And against these, Muslims, insists Al-Qaradawi, must remain ready to prosecute the jihad.

But this, Al-Qaradawi intimates, is the exception rather than the rule. And in this light, he declares boldly and explicitly that in these, our modern times, jihad is primarily a defensive mechanism directed against and I quote, "those who attack the persons, property, lands, or religion of the Muslims in an attempt to undermine the latter or block the path to it. Or to those who oppress the weak among the Muslims or their allies."

End of quote. Of course, we should not be so taken by the perceived novelty of Al-Qaradawi's approach that we are led to misread him. Indeed, it is important to recognize that he does not see the transition from a modern to a pre-modern frame of reference to be something that Muslims can either engender or sustain unilaterally.

The Role of Non-Muslims in Al-Qaradawi's Framework

As an ontological reality and actual existence outside the Muslim mind, the modern state of peace as opposed to the pre-modern state of war is fundamentally informed, if not instantiated by the actions of powerful western nations, especially the United States. Thus, if the Muslim re-reading of jihad in the modern world is to enjoy any depth and permanence, non-Muslims, according to Al-Qaradawi, will have to conduct themselves towards Muslims in a manner that does not represent, in effect, a return to the medieval state of war.

Al-Qaradawi is, of course, a formally trained cleric. As such, his articulations might be looked upon as exceptional, being limited to the most formally educated and those who follow their cue. This is especially relevant in the present context, given the fact that violent Muslim radicalism has been virtually the exclusive preserve of non-clerical actors. Bin Laden, for example, was an engineer.