Religious
Visions and Sacred Terror:
The Case of Islam
Charles Selengut
This
article is an excerpt from the book,
Muhammad’s Monsters,
David Bukay (ed.),
AR: Balfour Books and
Israel: ACPR Publishers, 2004.
To order the book, contact:
www.balfourbooks.net |
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
1 |
Byan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (London:
Oxford University Press, 1976). |
2 |
Charles Kutzman (ed.), Liberal Islam (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998) pp.3-26. |
3 |
Bruce Lawrence, Defenders of God (Columbia, South Carolina:
University of South Carolina Press, 1995) pp. 189-226. |
4 |
Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University
Press. 1984) p.21. |
5 |
Leon Festinger, et. al., When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956) p.25. |
6 |
Peter L. Berger, “Some Sociological Comments on Theological Education”,
Perspective, Summer 1968. |
7 |
Quoted in Mustonsi Mir, “Jihad in Islam” in Hadia Dajani-Shakeel &
Ronald A. Massier (eds.) The Jihad and Its Times (Ann Arbor:
Center For Near Eastern and North African Studies, The University of
Michigan, 1991) p.119. |
8 |
Ibid. |
9 |
Adams, op.cit., p.115. |
10 |
See
“A Jewish Temple Under Al-Aqsa?” The Jewish Voice and Opinion 14,
#2, p. 10-12, Oct. 2000. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, a leader of the
Italian-Muslim community, argues for the legitimacy of the State of Israel
and moreover sees no religious requirement for the Jewish state to give up
sovereignty over Muslim holy places like the Al-Aqsa mosque providing that
respect for the sanctity of Muslim sites is maintained. Pallazi explains
that although the prophet Muhammad’s ascension, Al-Miraj, to heaven took
place from the site of Al-Aqsa, “since at the time Al-Miraj took place the
city was not under Islamic but Byzantine administration”, there is no
Muslim requirement to reclaim the area for Islam. Palazzi’s approach like
that of many modernists seeks to reconcile Islamic jurisprudence with
political realities but mainstream Islamic sentiment demurs. |
11 |
This term is taken from Peter L. Berger, “Some Sociological Comments on
Theological Education,” Perspective 9 , Summer 1968, p. 129-41. |
12 |
Anas B. Malik, “Understanding The Political Behavior of Islamists: The
Implications of Socialization, Modernization, and Rationalist Approaches”
in Studies in Contemporary Islam, Vol.I, #1, Spring 1999, p. 19. |
13 |
Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim
Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994) p.31. |
14 |
Malik, op.cit. pp.19-20. |
15 |
For
the process of reinterpretation of Jewish eschatological expectations see
Charles Selengut, “By Torah Alone: Yeshivah Fundamentalism in Jewish
Society” in M. Marty and S. Appleby, Accounting For Fundamentalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1993). |
16 |
For
an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, see the extended
introduction in Adams, op. cit. |
17 |
A.S. Abraham & George Haddad, The Warriors of God (Bristol,
Indiana: Wyndham Hall Press, 1989) p.1. |
18 |
Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) chapter 3. |
19 |
Qutb, quoted in Sivan, Ibid., p. 24. |
20 |
Ibid., p. 68. |
21 |
Quoted in Yvonne Y. Haddad “Sayyid Qutb: Ideology of Islamic Revival” in
John L. Esposito, Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford
University press, 1983). |
22 |
For
a discussion and translation, see Johannes J.G. Jansen, The Neglected
Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle
East (New York: MacMillan, 1986). Jensen uses “neglected” but most
scholars prefer “absent” as a translation of the Arabic. Faraj’s argument
is that the contemporary ulama has knowingly ignored the centrality
of jihad and it has therefore become the “neglected” or “absent”
duty. In his words, “There is no doubt that the idols of the world can
only be made to disappear through the power of the sword.” Jensen, op
cit., p. 161. |
23 |
I
am using the term “sacred terror” to highlight the twin aspect of the
phenomenon. The murder and mayhem caused by militant Islam is certainly
terroristic but the religious motivation and definition given to these
activities renders them, also, sacred activity, at least from the
perpetrators’ point of view. I later refer to this issue as one of
“realities in conflict”. |
24 |
Muslim informants from Islamic areas of the former Soviet Union have
reported that militant authors are read and discussed – there are no
translations into native languages – widely and that the newly pious are
particularly moved by these ideas. |
25 |
See
English translation of Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah in Jensen, op cit.,
p. 188. I have used “nonsense” instead of Jensen’s “strange ideas”. |
26 |
What is absent in Faraj is any political or diplomatic plan to establish
an Islamic state. He is curiously silent about the specifics of any
particular Islamic political issue and appears uninterested, for example,
in the Israeli-Arab conflict or Muslim rights in Jerusalem, claiming that
the real problem of Islam, is “the establishment of God’s law in our own
land.” For Faraj, jihad and the willingness for martyrdom will
bring about a miraculous new order. There is no need for political or
economic programs other than waging an aggressive jihad to kill and
overthrow the enemies of Islam. Following the promises in the Qur`an
(9:14), God will bring miracles and the vision of Islam will be
established as a response to the dedication of jihad. |
27 |
See
the discussion and response of the Al-Azhar scholars to Faraj in
Jensen, op., cit., pp. 35-62. It is important to note that although the
Al-Azhar publications expressed disagreement with Faraj’s conclusions
and argued that he misinterpreted the Qur`anic traditions, the cleric’s
response to Faraj and to those who carried out the assassination of Sadat
can only be characterized as sympathetic. The official journal,
Majallat al-Tusawuf, for example, expressed appreciation for the pious
motivations of Faraj and his followers acknowledging that much of the
concerns expressed by Faraj was justified and agreed that Westernization
was a danger to Islam and to the Muslim masses. Astoundingly, none of the
Al-Azhar writers called for punishment for Faraj but rather urged a
“calm dialogue” with the assassin’s group. It is clear that the
establishment clerics were in accord – despite their official disagreement
– with much Faraj’s theological conclusions. A recent book authored by
Geneive Abdo, No God But God: Egypt And The Triumph of Islam (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000) continues the tale to the current
period and describes the radical “Islamization” taking place in Egypt in
both the public and private realms. Much of this transformation is an
outgrowth of the ever-wider acceptance of militant transformative Islam as
presented by Faraj and his then radical followers. This book illustrates
that “ideas” do matter and that radical Islam has been incorporated in
mainstream Egyptian society and popular culture. |
28 |
“Killing For the Glory of God In a Land Far From Home”, The New York
Times, 16 January 2001, p.1 reports on the growing number of jihad
activists and their international networks. |
29 |
Abu
Amr, op. cit. |
30 |
Jeffrey Goldberg, “Arafat’s Gift”, The New Yorker, 29 January 2001,
pp. 52-67. |
31 |
“An
Interview With the Grand Mufti About the Pope’s Visit”, Al-Ahram
Al-Arabi (Egypt) March 29, 2000. Translated by the Middle East Media
and Research Institute. www.memri.org |
32 |
Bill Musk, Passionate Believing (Turnbridge Wells: Monarch
Publications, 1992) points out that in such Muslim areas as Yemen, Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, statistics show that high levels of education is
correlated with high levels of involvement in militant groups. The
expectation that high levels of education would lead to lower levels of
religiosity was proved wrong in Muslim countries. This has also been
pointed out in Joyce M. Davis, Between Jihad and Salaam (New
York: St. Martins press, 1997). |