A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

The Justness of the Cause
Most Muslims painfully acknowledge that their own societies are riddled with
deep problems. But they also have little doubt about the justice of resisting
Western dominance and even counterattacking if need be. Indeed, for a Muslim,
or anyone else, to give one’s life for a cause suggests that the cause is just and
worthy. Yet this linkage of war and religion poses complex ethical problems in
all major religious traditions. The Christian tradition of thinking about the moral
foundations of war goes back at least to St. Augustine and poses a question that
defies definitive response: what makes a war “just”? Traditional Western moral
thinking about justice in war contained at least two distinct elements: the reasons
for going to war, and the ethics of behavior in war. Classical Western thinking
also sets forth various other criteria as well: on the need to go to war as opposed
to alternative means for settlement of dispute; on the scope of war; the
legitimacy of the authority that calls for war; the relative degree of justice of
one’s own cause; the proportionality of destruction to be inflicted; and the
position of noncombatants, civilians, and civilian infrastructures in war.
To speak of ethics in war seems almost oxymoronic, when death and
destruction lie at the heart of most military operations. And in absolute terms, of
course, the taking of any life is immoral. But in war, ethical or moral principles
are all relative: Whose justice? What kind of proportionality? How are limits set
on inflicting civilian casualties? Who is right, and to what extent? Nearly all
states in history that march off to war invariably claim—and generally believe—
that justice is on their side in the face of an iniquitous enemy.
In democratic societies, the dilemma often grows: were the state to
acknowledge any notions of moral ambiguity in the course of conflict, it would
invite disaffection among its own troops and population and undermine the
proclaimed absolute justice of the cause and its implementation. Hence the need
to demonize the enemy and paint the struggle in black-and-white moral terms.
Modern communication complicates the problem further when the course of a
war can be viewed on television and the Internet from multiple perspectives. The
administration of George W. Bush managed to impose serious (self)censorship
upon American media in covering the bloody details of the Iraq War. Indeed, to
Washington one of the great outrages of the Arab satellite station al-Jazeera was
its regular, on-site, and graphic portrayal of the impact that bombing and combat
were having on real people on the ground in real neighborhoods. Pictures of
American dead, sometimes even civilian casualties, are often termed “obscene”
in American media, partly in order to prevent them from being witnessed. And

---

the acts that produced the pictures are likewise obscene. War is most easily
fought when its human consequences remain distant, invisible, abstract.

---

Jihad
Theories of jihad and the extensive literature around it are the functional
equivalent of Christian “just war” theory; the concept is designed to define and
limit the actions of Muslims in war. Jihad is probably the most controversial and
emotive word that the West associates with Islam today; not a day goes by in the
media when the word is not invoked, either by jihadis themselves or critics of
Islam. Many observers are impatient with examinations on the origins and use of
the word, feeling it represents little more than rationalization of the horrific
character of the jihadi challenge to Western power, to peace and stability.
In the Qur’an and the Hadith, jihad has many meanings. The basic root of the
word jihad in Arabic means “effort” or “struggle.” It is widely used to refer to
the struggle of the individual to live a virtuous life, to uphold religious values in
one’s personal life, to help propagate Islam through personal effort by way of
personal example and promoting the Faith. In that context the word jihad for
Muslims retains quite positive religious connotations of personal devotion
toward betterment. It is also routinely used in colloquial Arabic simply to mean
“I’ll make an effort, do my best.” That is the “great jihad,” or personal jihad, as
defined by the Prophet.
“Lesser jihad,” as defined originally by the Prophet, came to refer to military
efforts in a context of military struggle in which the key obligations were
defense and preservation of Islam and the umma. Since the fledgling Muslim
community in Medina was under siege from pagan forces from Mecca over
repeated years of battle, the defense of the community was central to many
Qur’anic revelations and personal concerns of the Prophet. But as the early
Muslim community stabilized, it moved into a phase of military expansion. As
Islam spread, it encountered other states and empires with which it fought for
control over vast regions.
Islamic jurisprudence set forth lengthy rulings on rules of conduct in war,
including the fact that women and children could not be targeted, that
proportionality of force must be used, that civilian structures should not be
gratuitously destroyed, that jihad must be declared by a legitimate ruler or head
of state, and that warfare outside of the rules of jihad is not legitimate. The
Prophet is on record for ordering his soldiers to “avoid harming women,
children, the elderly, or people at temples and monasteries.” The ‘ulama in the
Middle Ages, for example, debated whether it would be lawful to use catapults
against enemy fortresses. Quite a few ‘ulama found them unlawful, because such

---

imprecise weapons could harm civilians as well as soldiers.
Just as Christian doctrines of morality in warfare have been abused on the
ground, so, too, have Islamic precepts. “Collateral damage,” a terrifying clinical
euphemism designed to distance us from the human dimension of civilian
deaths, has been routinely adopted in the United States. And of course, during
World War II, the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, and the first use of
nuclear weapons in history against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were directed
almost exclusively against civilian populations in a demonstration of “shock and
awe.”
As von Clausewitz pointed out, war is fueled by emotion, which always
outruns intent. Once the conflict begins, hatred is ratcheted up on both sides,
atrocity generates counteratrocity in an endless upward spiral of mindless
violence.
Jihad in its more modern usage has been applied to many quite secular tasks,
just as the term “crusade” in English is casually applied to fighting crime or a
campaign against drugs. The Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-British
struggle was referred to as jihad in Arabic, as was the secularist President Habib
Bourgiba’s campaign for national economic development in Tunisia. Jihad has
been applied by some women to the struggle for women’s liberation or by others
to a struggle for a just moral and social order. But the term has primarily been
applied to those engaged in both defense of Muslim lands against the West and
offensive operations against numerous Western states, especially those involved
in military operations in the Muslim world. Indeed, some Wahhabis and zealous
Salafis even invoke the term, erroneously, to justify fighting against Shi’a.
Over time, defense and offense became increasingly conflated, and the
concept of jihad began to be used extensively to refer to warfare in Muslim
military campaigns. Muslim states often warred with other Muslim states, in
which the spread of Islam was obviously quite irrelevant to the struggle. Indeed
the “Mahdi,” the rebel leader in nineteenth-century Sudan, called his rebellion
against the Ottoman Empire a jihad, and he called for the death of all Turks. The
Wahhabis declared jihad against virtually all non-Wahhabi Muslims. So the term
has been used and abused heavily over the centuries, and has come into its own
again today in the resistance against the Western forces in the Muslim world.
Some extreme radical groups have now appropriated the Qur’anic concept
even for war against their own domestic political opponents within the Muslim
world. Some radicals declare jihad to be the “sixth pillar” of Islam alongside the
traditional five (prayer, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and so on). Whatever the name,
it is important to note that international law does justify armed resistance by a

---

people against invading or occupying foreign military forces.
The concept of jihad has now achieved a perfect symbiosis with Western
interventionism: they have both created a self-reinforcing two-way belligerence,
a kind of codependency of violence, each justifying the other. Furthermore, the
study of jihad has become a cottage industry in the United States, largely
dominated by committed partisans on both sides, who passionately debate the
nature of the problem. The bulk of these studies seek out various pathologies of
Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures, and Islam itself, to justify the struggles;
jihad becomes a key source of the “problem” rather than the symptom or
expression.
There is no question that extreme radical and violent groups have abused the
term jihad, along with their extreme interpretations of Islam, to promote hatred
of the West in times of conflict. We will discuss elements of that later. But is it
credible to believe that if the concept of jihad did not exist, that the Muslim
world would not then be carrying out guerrilla warfare against the West? After
all, the US attack against Saddam Hussein was a purely secular affair and the
earliest signs of resistance were from Ba’thist and nationalist forces who had
nothing to do with Islam or jihad. Yet jihad later became central to most of the
response of the Iraqi opposition to the US war and occupation. Here again, we
confuse the Islamic vehicle for the source of the problem.

---