<em>Jihad</em>: how a word became a weapon

A Sufi dervish waging the greater jihad

To understand jihad as an epithet of badness ignores an honourable and complex history in Muslim discourse. The word ‘crusade’, which deals with a less historically complex phenomenon, puts the emotional response of Muslims to the word jihad in perspective.

When George W. Bush announced a ‘crusade’ after 9/11, the Muslim world was horrified. The Crusades were a series of bloody wars undertaken to seize the holy places of Christianity. In Arabic, ‘crusade’ reads Hurub al-Salib – ‘Wars of the Cross’.

To Arabs, it must have sounded as if Bush and his Christian armies were planning to cut a swathe across the Middle East with fire and sword. Yet to many from within the same broad tradition as the United States leader, the connotations of the word remain basically positive. In common usage it means ‘an effort of altruistic will’, ‘a moral mission’.

Yet there is a great disinclination in the west to understand that jihad might similarily in essence be a ‘good’ thing. You still find people demanding that ‘the Muslim community should distance itself from jihad’. This is absurd. For the original meaning of the word is taken from the root jahada ‘to struggle’. As the 13th century Syrian scholar Ibn Taymiyya summed it up: ‘ Jihad means to do one's utmost - all that one possibly can, in order to do that which God loves and to repel that which he hates’.

Jihad – the struggle against unbelief – is a concept central to almost any religion you care to name – a struggle which in Islam has interior, as well as exterior dimensions. The interior jihad, or the ‘greater jihad’ is mankind’s struggle against sin, and it is the ‘lesser jihad’ which involves military action.

The greater and the lesser Jihad

From the evidence of the Koran at least, jihad seems to have developed in meaning during the two phases of Muhammad’s ministry. In the early days in Mecca, when he was dismissed by the pagan Quraysh as a poet, madman or soothsayer, jihad was used to mean a spiritual struggle against ignorance and unbelief.

After migrating to Medina, Muhammad became a political as well as spiritual leader, and jihad must then have developed military connotations, which were drawn upon after Muhammad’s death, when his followers, and the next generations of Muslims led a jihad to create a new domain ruled by Islam – a new territory where the faithful would be in control.

By the time historical writing really gets going, in the 9th century CE, Islamic thought had developed a sophisticated workbox of intellectual tools to control and limit meaning. The concept of jihad was subject to this as well. The jihad against the Byzantines, and against the pagans in the east, was just about kept up – a few raiding parties across the frontier every year – but the individual was not personally and directly responsible.

The two key concepts that developed to mediate the call to jihad in Sunni Islam are those of defence and corporate responsibility. The jihad was to become primarily defensive – designed to rally the faithful to protect the existing lands of Islam. Corporate rather than personal responsibility was governed by the terms fard ‘ain and fard kifayah. The former refers to the Islamic duty which was, and is, incumbent individually on each Muslim, like prayer or fasting; the latter to the Islamic duty which is up to the community as a whole (like keeping weights and measures standard). This tends to be left to the state or the pious elite, supported by individual Muslims through taxes and alms. Jihad increasingly was seen to be the duty of the community as a whole – represented by the political authorities, rather than the individual.

As Max Weber asserted in his famous definition of statehood, states are founded on the legitimate application of violence. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, it was inevitable that it should be adapted to the ugly practicalities of power. No state can wholeheartedly adopt the doctrines of a religion that espouses ‘turning the other cheek’ to the blows of an aggressor. Conversely, Islam – a religion formed in a period of violent expansion – soon adapted itself to the creation of an environment of peace and relative stability. No empire can exist in a state of perpetual full-scale war either.

Perhaps more significant, the word jihad had been steadily developing an inner dimension – supported by its sense in the Koran. Returning to the Arabic root of the word, meaning ‘to strive’, a mystical reading of jihad as an inner struggle began to coalesce. This was to be known as al-jihad al-akbar, or ‘the greater jihad’, while jihad as holy war against non-Muslims was demoted to the status of al-jihad al-asghar – ‘the lesser jihad’.

This definition came into its own with the great harmonisation of mystical Islam and legalistic Islam achieved by the theologian al-Ghazali, who died in 1111. Al-Ghazali, worried about what he saw as an increasingly exteriorised, legalistic practice within Islam, and he recommended turning inwards, embracing the mystical dimensions of faith for those cut from the right cloth, and focusing on intention, rather than just action.

Jihad’s meanings remained intact, but the meaning was put into a hierarchy which favoured mankind’s personal struggle with his baser nature over the exterior battle against non-Muslims. In moments of crisis and overwhelming threat that hierarchy is reversed, but essentially, since the medieval articulation of Islamic thought, the interior jihad has been the fulcrum of belief.

The call to jihad over Iraq

We saw the Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf (or Comical Ali as the British media christened him), call Muslims to jihad against the invaders, in the name of the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a man who dearly wanted to emulate Saladin.

Al-Sahaf used the formula familiar to Muslims from the call to prayer adapting it from Hayaa ala al-Salat – Hasten to prayer! to Hayaa ala al-Jihad – Hasten to the struggle! It is a formulation that must have an immediate emotional significance for any Muslim who heard it. Many will have responded to it in disgust at this cynical manipulation of religious language. Others might well see the use of this word as justified in the context, despite the militaristic secularism of the man who conveyed it.

In retrospect, al-Sahaf’s invocation of jihad seems as inevitable as George Bush’s clumsy misuse of the word ‘crusade’. The language of each reflected the conceptual environments which nurtured them, and both squalidly resorted to a militarism enshrined in an honourable web of connotation. The difference is that while Bush did not really mean to declare a ‘crusade’ in the Hurub al-Salib – ‘Wars of the Cross’ sense, al-Sahaf did not have the authority to call for a jihad.

But his words did have a precedent. Just before the war broke out, the Islamic Research Academy (IRA) of al-Azhar Islamic university in Cairo issued a statement calling for jihad against Iraq’s aggressors, in the event of an invasion. This was a worrying step. Al-Azhar has usually been seen as toady to the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s venal administration which, since normalisation with Israel, has received huge amounts of aid from the US every year – a flow of cash it does not want to see interrupted.

On this occasion, there was no hope of reining in the scholars. Even the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed al-Tantawi, though he did not sign the document, seemed to give his approval to the fatwa. And one of the crucial elements of the statement is that the jihad was designated an individual responsibility:

“Jihad is an individual duty in case an enemy occupies Muslims’ lands. Our Arab and Muslim nation will face new crusades that aim to deprive us of our homeland, doctrine and dignity.”

As was pointed out by Muslim commentators at the time, this was nothing new. Jihad is still defensive, and in the end the responsibility of the individual depends on a Muslim ruler leading his nation. Al-Azhar’s secretary-general El-Sayed Abu-Wafa Aggour added that, in line with classical Islamic law, “This is a religious obligation but it is up to the ruler to decide when and how to fulfil it.” The element of individual responsibility is therefore undermined – at least for the Egyptian – by the fact that Mubarak does not intend to lead a jihad against the Americans. The statement then, was both an expression of defiance and of frustration.

But the use of the word ‘crusade’ by the Bush administration alters the character of individual responsibility in the matter. This call to jihad from al-Azhar is explicitly contrasted with Bush’s crusade. Reporting the statement in the Egyptian (English-language) al-Ahram weekly, Gihan Shahine notes: “El-Sayed Abu-Wafa Aggour, the IRA’s secretary-general, explained that the academy ‘was just using the same term that President Bush himself used’”.

However, scholars “did not mean to imply any conflict of religions or civilisations”.

Unfortunately of course, this is what it implies. Samuel Huntington’s simplistic ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis has attracted many followers on both sides of the fictional ‘fault-line’. Gilles Kepel mentions it making the bestseller lists among Islamists in Egypt.

Although Aggour was probably sincere in trying to distance himself from the clash of civilizations, in focusing on Bush’s use of the word ‘crusade’, he misread the cultural context simply as an anti-Arab battle cry. Many English speakers interpreted the calls to jihad from al-Azhar and the Iraqi information minister as equal to each other as well as to the jihad called by bin Laden.

But while al-Sahaf’s jihad-bluster was rhetorical opportunism, the al-Azhar statement represented the estrangement of people from power in the Arab world, and a continuation of the pattern whereby in the politically-choked atmosphere of Egyptian life, the primary means of expression of dissatisfaction with the regime is through the Islamic opposition.

Claiming ownership of the concept

We should not confuse articulation of meaning with its reception. The significance of the al-Azhar statement lies less in any concrete incitement to action, and more in the overheated rhetorical duelling of this false ‘east-west’ dichotomy. In this battle of bluster, language becomes bifurcated, containing within it the inevitability of a clash of misunderstanding.

To take an example from the archives of openDemocracy, after a march against the impending Iraq war, Douglas Murray seized on the word as a stick to beat the ‘Stop the War Coalition’: “Take some of the posters carried by other Muslims on the day – ‘Boycott Israel’. Well the ‘Boycott Israel’ campaign advocates, among other things … Jihad. You’d have thought that this would worry nuclear disarmament ‘Stop the War Coalition’ people.”

The style of this invocation implies a trump card. The word ‘jihad’ is employed as a signifier of foulness, the product of a kind of demotic-folkloric etymology rather than any precise, rooted definition. This understanding of the language of Islam, such as it is, owes more to the likes of Mohammed Atta and Sheikh Abu Hamza than to serious scholars of the religion.

Benjamin Barber’s essay (and later book) Jihad vs McWorld, acknowledges the complexity of the term but makes it the fulcrum, and scapegoat, of an alarmist global vision: “a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe – a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality”.

If I were a Muslim I would be outraged if someone were to make light of a term of sacral significance to me and use it to stand for the forces of chaos in the world. Barber’s essay is a rhetorical product rather than an analysis of something with concrete form in the world – like Huntington, though more nuanced, it seeks to bind the world up into manageable bundles.

The degradation of meaning of a Muslim term in a non-Muslim rhetoric cannot lead to mutual understanding, nor to peaceful resolution of problems. The fear of a violent jihad becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as jihad is deprived of any meaning but violence.

What can we do about it?

A leap of imagination is required to understand a word like jihad from the point of view of the speaker. We should be alive to the great diversity within Islam, which militates against easy definitions and generalisation.

It may be that Muslims do not always come across as ready to develop the intellectual mechanisms to satisfactorily limit violence, and to tolerate difference in meaning. Fundamentalism in the Muslim world has yet to be comprehensively repudiated. It often tends towards an uncompromising claim of access to the truth that allows for little resistance, a rhetoric of power which does not allow for weakness. While suicide is un-Islamic – only God should deign to take life – still suicide bombing is often supported, as in the case of Palestinians and Chechens. But, amidst the murk, no clarity is achieved by  attending only to the single glowering thought of violence and extremism.

The current habit instead is to wield ‘jihad’ as the crusader of the old world might have wielded his scimitar to cut down the Muslim foe – but this is a semantic rather than military crusade, and those responsible are taking possession not of holy soil but of meaning.

This uncompromising linguistic self-belief creates, as its echo, a cultural adversary that is just as unyielding in its definitions. The west's ruthless appropriation of jihad resounds in the minds of those Islamic ‘others’ who seek likewise to instrumentalise it as a weapon against enemies of their own imagination. These linguistic fundamentalisms brook no competing definitions - neither for the word jihad, nor for alternative explications of the world at large. In the end, understanding depends not only on intellectual models, but on an imaginative empathy. As such the effort truly to understand - whether or not it results in agreement - would ultimately allay one side's belligerent fear of the other.