JIHAD: HOLY WAR

Of all the key notions of Islam, that of jihad is certainly the most controverted. For non-Moslems it means that a Holy War has been declared against them. For most Moslems it is a religious imperative which implies bringing non-Moslems to Islam by good example and persuasion. For an extremist minority it is an absent religious imperative in virtue of which Islam ought to be imposed, and by force if necessary, on ‘non-Moslems," that is, Moslems who do not share their views. To clarify the debate we will proceed in the form of three questions: What is the primary meaning of the term jihad? How did it evolve? What is its actual meaning?

THE PRIMARY MEANING OF HOLY WAR (JIHAD)

In Arabic the etymology of jihad indicates an effort directed toward a determined objective. From this derived many meanings to apply oneself with determination to a task, obstinately to resist in adversity, or simply to fight for survival, eventually by combating an adversary.

During the Meccan period of the Koranic Revelation (610-622) the term jihad had an essentially moral and spiritual meaning. It meant to face bravely the plots of the pagans, to preserve the nascent Moslem faith, and not to give in to despair. These senses appear in the verses: "We will guide in our way those who shall have fought (Jahado) for us God is with those who do good (XXXIX, 69); "If (your parents) force you to (Jahadaka) associate with me that whereof you have no knowledge, do not obey them" (XXIX, 8); and "Do not submit to unbelievers, but struggle (Jahedo) against them with force" (XXV, 52).

During the Medanese period (622-632) the term jihad went beyond a simple moral sense to include, among others, personal and collective struggle against the pagans of Mecca. The Prophet and the new community of believers, under threat by the pagans were forced to undertake the hejira or emigration whereby they installed themselves at Medina 500 kilometers north of Mecca. With the development of the Medanese community, jihad acquired a material sense: it came to mean not only resisting aggression, but giving the community the means to subsist and to organize itself by financial contributions. This meaning for jihad is found in the verses: "The only true believers are those who believe in God and in His Prophet—without ever doubting later—whilst they have struggled (Jahado) in the way of God with their wealth and their lives; these were the true believers" (XLIX, 15); who "struggled (Jahado) in God’s way with your possessions and your lives" (IX, 41).

In view of the circumstances, the original ethical and spiritual sense of the terms gave way to a material sense which in time would predominate. The Prophet himself, aware of that evolution, continued to insist on the spiritual meaning of jihad for the Moslem community. Thus, in 624, after Badr where the Moslems won their first great battle against the pagans, he said to them on the road back to Medina: "We return from the minor jihad and go now towards the major jihad." In other words, for Muhammad, important though it was, that battle constituted only a minor jihad. The most important battle remained, namely the moral and spiritual jihad, that is, the continuous effort of self-discipline to vanquish avarice and cupidity, fear and laxity, tyranny and ignorance, submission to desires and passions. Jihad is then the refusal of comfort and ease and of a vain and meaningless existence.

In the course of the Meccan period the Prophet was asked through Revelation to endure permanently the trials which the pagans of Mecca inflicted on him and not to oppose violence with violence: "Remind them; you are only a reminder; you are not charged to oversee them" (LXXXVIII, 22), "support them with a noble patience" (LXX, 5); "But if you cry out at lies, nations before you have done the same; the messenger need only believe the message with all clarity" (XXIX, 18). Finally, the first Moslems are described as "those who encourage each other to search for the truth and to endure" (CIII, 3).

When the situation became untenable the Prophet and his faithful emigrated to Medina. Thence they menaced the Meccan caravans coming from Syria, attacking them in order to force recognition of their community and the right to visit Mecca where their families and goods remained. For the Moslems, Mecca had always been the center of gravity of Islam; it was the place where Abraham and Ismael constructed the Kaàba to which the pilgrims came each year.

But the Meccans intransigently refused any compromise with Muhammad. In 624 they raised an army of a thousand, three times more than the Moslems, and headed north to annihilate them. It was in this context that jihad acquired its new meaning of Holy War. The revealed Koranic verses authorized this war while defining its limits:

Thus jihad as a Holy War should be subject, according to the Koran, to precise limits: a well-defined cause and enemy, strict limits and an ethics of war. Here, the cause was the unjust treatment inflicted upon the Moslems by the pagans of Mecca; the enemy was those Meccans who had expelled them from their birthplace; the Koran specified that only those were to be fought who in effect had fought against the Moslems and sought to eliminate them; finally the most important ethical rule, namely, that the Moslems should not be the first to unleash hostilities.

Two years later, while the Meccans laid siege to Medina, the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe of Medina, betrayed the Prophet and made an alliance with those by whom the Moslems were besieged. At that point they were in a weak position and risked being vanquished and decimated. A verse was then revealed which ordered them to combat the Jews who had broken their commitments:

From this verse it is clear that the combat against the people of the Book is not general and absolute, but limited by precise conditions: it must be against only those who do not believe in God and the Day of Judgment, and who do not forbid what God has forbidden through His Envoy. The sole goal of this combat is to force them to pay tribute to Moslems; the Koran does not speak about either the conversion or elimination of the people of the Book.

After the conquest of Mecca (630), the notion of jihad in the sense of Holy War underwent a new development when it became a matter of forcing the Meccans to convert to Islam:

Jihad had become an open war against the pagans of Mecca in response to their intransigence and with a view to obtaining their conversion, whether willingly or by force.

On the contrary, as regards the people of the Book, jihc2d consists simply in the imposition of a tribute which materializes their submission to the Moslem community and their commitment not to rebel against it. Jihad has the sense of combat only as regards those among them who break that engagement. Later, in medieval history, the tribute paid by the Jews and Christians living in the Moslem community acquired another function: it became a substitute for recruitment into the army to which non-Moslems were not admitted—for at that time the state in both the Islamic and the Christian worlds was religious.

The semantic evolution of jihad can be sketched then as follows:

1. At first, jihad designated the immense effort which should be made by a Moslem against adversity in order to survive and to affirm his manner of life in the face of the polytheists: in a hostile environment he has to maintain both his faith and his peace of mind.

2. The term next acquired the sense of active resistance, both collective and individual, in confrontation with the polytheists of Mecca, in showing strength of spirit before their aggression and in materially supporting the Moslem community.

3. From the time the Meccans unleashed total war against the Moslems, jihad took on the meaning of combat, those Moslems not fit for combat being obliged to contribute financially.

4. After the conquest of Mecca, the term implied the imposition of Islam, but only on the Meccan polytheists: they were obliged under penalty of death to make the profession of Moslem faith: "There is no other divinity than God, and Muhammad is his Prophet."

5. Upon the treason of a Jewish tribe Moslems considered them as infidels to their own faith. In this context, jihad came to signify combat against these infidels to force them to submit to the Moslem community and to pay a tribute as a symbol of that submission. Later, the tribute would be imposed on all the people of the Book and would come to be perceived by the state as a substitute for conscription.

6. Beyond these changes, the basic sense of jihad remained, that is, as the Prophet explained, the continued fight of the soul against contrary elements in order to prevail in force and in serenity. Such is the major jihad; holy war (in the sense of physical combat) is only the minor jihad.

The major jihad signified, unquestionably, an elevation of the soul to overcome the self. This basic sense was not understood by the jurists however, and came to be deformed by political practice during the classical age. Many jurists, including the most influential, conceived jihad only as a war against non-Moslems which would end only with the conversion of the entire world to Islam. War thus became a permanent state rather than only a temporary one. That conception of (jihad) constitutes a serious departure from its initial sense and derives from a bad reading of one verse and two hadiths.

The verse is the following: "0 believers, fight the unbelievers who are near you" (IX, 123). In examining this verse closely it is clearly not an order to combat all non-believers (all non-Moslems) in every time and place. It is rather a strategic advice to combat those unbelievers who live close to Moslems in order to assure the security of the Islamic community (Umma) and protect it against the enemies who surround it and wish to injure Islam. Certainly, the art of war teaches that the best defense is an attack. Thus, a little before his death (632), when the Prophet raised an army to combat his enemies to the north, he carried out the order implied in this verse. In effect, as the Byzantine empire and the Sassanid empire to the east menaced the Moslem community at that time, the best defensive strategy was to attack.

In addition, the poor interpretation of two hadiths contributed to the deformation of the exact sense of jihad. First, it is reported that before the Hegira the prophet, when provoked by the Meccans, replied: "People of Quraysh, I have brought you massacre." First, the authenticity of the hadith is very doubtful. Then, even if it were authentic, it concerns only a part of the Qurayshites, and was pronounced at a time when the Prophet was carried away and lost his composure. After the defeat at Uhud (625), seeing the Meccans carry in triumph the body of his uncle Hamza b. ‘Abd al-Muttalib, he threatened to kill two Meccans for every Moslem victim. But then a verse was revealed directing him not to chastise beyond the extent of the wrong caused ("If you chastise, chastise even as you have been chastised" XVI, 126). However that may be, unequivocal verses of the Meccan period ordained the Prophet to prove his strength of soul under the aggression of the pagans, and without question the last word belongs to the Koran.

According to the second hadith, the Prophet said, "I received the order to combat people until they bear witness that there is no other god than God and that Muhammad is his prophet." Here the question is to know what should be understood by "people". For many exegetes in Koranic usage that term does not refer to humanity in general, but only to the Meccans. Thus understood, this hadith is in perfect agreement with the Koranic verse which orders Moslems to combat the Meccans until they convert (LX, 36).

‘Umar, the second Caliph (634-644), hesitated for a long time before attacking the Roman and Persian Empires, and was finally forced to do so only in order to protect the Moslem community. But starting from the Umayyad dynasty, less than a half century after the death of the Prophet, the Moslem State was transformed into an empire in which the Caliphate was transmitted as a family inheritance. The Caliph-emperors often followed a politique of conquest in order to augment their power, riches and the number of their subjects, or to protect these gains. They employed the call to Holy War (jihad) to galvanize their armies and spread the idea that they were engaged in a battle cry in the name of Allah in order to give Islam more power and to guide other peoples toward the truth. Though Moslem conquerors were generally more merciful than others, it remains that many conquests were made for purely temporal goals, which the call to a Holy War (jihad) under the banner of Islam sought to legitimate.

It is often wrongly believed that the first objective of these wars was to propagate Islam. Without doubt that objective was not totally absent from thought, but the first goal of the conquests was the personal enrichment of the Caliphs, their entourage and their court. As an example, three centuries after their conquest the mass of Egyptians were not yet converted to Islam. In Spain under Moslem domination the majority of the population remained Christian certainly this is proof of tolerance, but also that the first goal of the conquests of the Caliphs was not the propagation of Islam. Rather, these conquests were of an essentially political order; in no case could they be qualified as a jihad.

For their part, dissidents within the Moslem empire have qualified their opposition to the Caliphs as a jihad and have sought to convince their partisans that jihad should apply not only to the unbelievers but also to those whom they considered to be unjust rulers. A third interpretation was thus forged by the fanatics and terrorists for whom jihad signified the elimination of all who opposed them, whether free thinkers or individuals who defended independent thought.

Today, after all these improper uses, Moslems have a most confused idea of jihad. Most ignore the real sense of the notion, and are not able to submit it to critical examination.

In sum, jihad has two meanings: the original one which is of a religious nature, and one acquired in the course of history which is of a political nature and is characterized by imprecision. The first usage of jihad is an individual ethic; its acquired sense, however, is that of a war against non-Moslems which in many cases is against Moslems. We do not doubt that the original sense will triumph in the end, so that jihad will become an instrument of justice and mercy, not of violence and war.