A short history of jihad
Jihad means "struggle" and has both martial and non-martial applications. It means to suppress one's own desires in order to follow the true path of righteousness revealed in the Quran. Jihad conceptually has both individual and communal aspects, always oriented toward the triumph of Islam, an orientation that forms the basis for military jihads. According to Farida Khanam, the arabic word, "jihad," by itself,

... does not connote the sense of reward or worship in the religious sense of the word. But when the word jihad became a part of Islamic terminology, the sense of reward or worship came to be associated with it, that is to say, if struggle is struggle in the simple sense of word, jihad means a struggle which is an act of worship, the engagement of which earns reward to the person concerned. As the Quran says: Strive for the cause of God as you ought to strive.(22:78)

Hence, for Muslims to wield weapons in a war in which Islam itself is defended is literally an act of worship. The Muslim jihadi has the right to expect reward proportionate to his sacrificial worship. In military jihad, the ultimate sacrifice is to die, which deserves the ultimate reward, immediate entry by the slain jihadi's soul into Paradise. This belief springs from the words of Mohammed himself, who during the battle of Badr told his soldiers,

"I swear by the One in whose hand Muhammad's soul is, any man who fights them today and is killed while he is patient in the ordeal and seeks the pleasure of Allah, going forward and not backing off, Allah will enter him into Paradise."

Hence, military jihad arose from Mohammed himself, although the word appears in the Quran only four times, none of them in a military context. (Qital is used to refer to combat and war.) The battle of Badr in the year 623 (some sources date it in 624) was pivotal in Mohammed's later successes. This battle was the first between Mohammed's followers and others, or as Muslims put it, between believers and non-believers. With only about three hundred foot soldiers, Mohammed defeated an army of several hundred Meccan infantry (some sources say one thousand) plus a hundred cavalry.

As battles go, the butcher's bill was not great. Of the thousand enemy troops, only seventy died, but twenty-four of them were key warlords. Muslims believe that there were crucial interventions by Allah at key moments, including a heavy rain upon the enemy the night before, making their movements difficult. Mohammed's side, though, was refreshed by only a light drizzle. Then, at a key moment in the battle, Mohammed threw a handful of sand toward the enemy, and though none were hit by it, they were blinded. At that, unable to fight, they were defeated.

The lessons of this battle are very obvious. An army outnumbered three to one was victorious because it was fighting in the path of Allah, because it stood firm to raise the banner of Allah and to defend Allah's religion, so Allah helped them. Anyone who stood on the same principle, the result would be the same.

After this battle, convinced that Allah would uphold him, Mohammed marched against Mecca in 628. However, he and the city's remaining leaders (Meccans had been the principal vanquished at Badr) negotiated a truce. Called the Treaty of Hudabiyah, after the town where it was finalized, Mohammed and the Meccans agreed to a ten-year truce. By 630, though, Mohammed had made other conquests and had recruited very large numbers of new troops. He decided to march against Mecca regardless of the truce, using as his excuse the deaths of several Muslim men in a tribal feud at the hands of some Meccans. So large and impressive was Mohammed's army that the Meccans surrendered without a fight. Again, this outcome was seen as ordained by Allah.

Contrary to typical Western belief, general military jihads are quite rare in Muslim history; one source cited only four since Mohammed's day. This is probably the main reason that the declaration of a general jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan had such great impact in 1980.

One of the problems with the concept of military jihad, though, is that Islam does not have a clear "chain of command" of clergy. Religious leadership of Islam was fractured immediately after Mohammed died. Sunni Islam, of which the great majority of Muslims are adherents, has no formal "ordination" or theological education requirements; mullahs are recognized by acclamation of a mosque's members based on their learning, wisdom and leadership. In theory, any Sunni Muslim can issue a fatwa , or religious decree, but unless the issuer already has significant religious standing, it will be meaningless.

Saudi clerics have a generally high standing across Islam because Saudi Arabia is the keeper of the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca (where all faithful Muslims are obligated to visit at least once) and Medina, Mohammed's home town. A fatwa from Saudi clerics, then, carries great weight.

One of the earliest issuers of a fatwa for jihad against the Soviets, though, was a Palestinian, not a Saudi. He was Abdullah Azzam. Azzam had fought with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s but became disillusioned with its secular outlook. Trained in Islamic law, he moved to Saudi Arabia and began teaching at a university. Osama bin Laden was one of his students. After the Soviet invasion, Azzam published a series of books and articles stating that every Muslim was duty-bound to fight the Soviets.

The Saudi royal family, ruling the country, embraced the fatwa probably less from religious fervor than as a means to enhance their Muslim credentials. Long criticized by other Muslim countries and their own people for pro-Western, secular politics and extravagant lifestyles, the royals saw the Afghan war as a means to deflect criticism. Self interest always guides foreign policies of nations, and Saudi Arabia's was no different. The Saudi royals were careful to instruct the country's clerics to issue a jihad against only the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan, not against the whole Soviet Union.

Like Azzam, who seems to have originated the idea of an Afghan jihad, the Saudi clerics expected that once the infidel invaders were defeated and expelled from Afghanistan, the jihadis who answered the call would pack up and go home. However, said Saudi Islamist Saad al-Faqih, the war in Afghanistan dragged on for much longer than anyone expected and so "created a longer-term 'mentality of jihad' which some found hard to abandon."

One of the men who decided never to give up the jihad was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi man of privilege whose family had amassed an enormous fortune in construction contracts paid for by the luxury-loving Saudi royals.

by Donald Sensing, 10/27/2004 08:40:07 PM. Permalink |