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 The
Legacy of Jihad
A review of the book edited by Andrew G. Bostom…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 9/9/05
Four years
after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus
on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies
and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and
cultural corruption that in part made possible many of those
misjudgments and mistakes does not receive the public attention
it deserves. The politicizing of the academy, for example,
that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the study of
Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared
on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion,
centuries of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and
expansionist nature of Islam–– an agreement reflecting
both the facts of the historical record and the words themselves
of the Koran and Muslim theologians and jurists–– were
discarded in the service of an anti-Western political and ideological
agenda.
In this politicized
narrative, the West is the arch-villain of history, and its
primal sins of colonialism
and imperialism
are the engines of oppression responsible for all the world’s
ills. With regard to Islam and the Middle East, the West’s
scholars are accused of creating “orientalism,” a
collection of degrading myths and stereotypes that masqueraded
as scholarship and provided the intellectual grease for the wheels
and gears of colonial and imperial exploitation. With some few
notable exceptions, the myth of orientalism has corrupted many
of the scholars studying Islam in American and European universities.
The result has been a reduction of history to a melodrama in
which a noble, tolerant, cultured Islamic world had been unjustly
attacked by an intolerant, greedy West addled by Christian bigotry
and racist stereotypes of blood-thirsty jihadist warriors. All
the problems in the Middle East today, in this Orwellian rewriting
of history, thus derive not from anything dysfunctional in Islam
or Arab regimes but rather in the sins of the West and its Middle
Eastern minion, Israel.
Among the brave scholars who have worked to correct
these distortions––Bernard
Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or,
Ibn Warraq, to name just a few––Dr. Andrew G. Bostom
has recently been one of the most tireless. In his columns at
American Thinker (www.americanthinker.com), Dr. Bostom has exposed
the politicized interpretations, half-truths, and outright lies
that our enemies and their Western enablers have used to obscure
the truth about the struggle we are in. Now Dr. Bostom has compiled
an invaluable collection of primary documents and scholarly commentary
concerning jihad. This compendium shows that Islamic jihad has
for fourteen centuries meant exactly what bin Laden, Zaraqawi,
and every other so-called “Islamic fundamentalist” says
it means: a war to compel the whole world to embrace Islam, die,
or live under intolerant, humiliating restrictions designed to
force the unbeliever every day to acknowledge his own inferiority
and the superiority of his Islamic overlords.
Given the ideological and political corruption
of the academy mentioned above, it’s not surprising that a physician has
stepped up and played the role of the child who announces that
the academic emperor is strutting down the street buck-naked.
From Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century to Raymond Tallis
today, there is a long tradition of medical doctors examining
and exposing the follies of academics and scholars. After all,
unlike the inhabitants of the ivory tower––who rarely
have to be accountable for their ideas and so have the luxury
of abstract speculation no matter how fantastic or dangerous–– doctors
are grounded in the very real world of suffering and sickness,
where concrete evidence and practical application have value,
and where accountability is literally a life and death matter.
And that is the important point about the issue of Islam’s
true nature: understanding it is not rocket science. One has
only to read the historical record, read the words of the Koran
and the hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet), and read
the centuries of interpretations in Muslim theology and jurisprudence,
to know that today’s jihadists have not “highjacked” or “distorted” Islam
but are simply traditionalists, squarely in line with Islam’s
historical identity.
The Legacy
of Jihad is organized precisely to
show that continuity. Bostom starts with some examples of the
sort of propaganda that
has made his book necessary in the first place. For example,
Georgetown professor John Esposito has called the five centuries
before the Crusades an era of “peaceful coexistence” between
Islam and Christendom, one ruined by the European greed and power-hunger
that drove the Crusades. So much, as Bostom quotes Bat Ye’or,
for the “’pillage, enslavement, deportation, massacres,
and so on’” that accompanied the Islamic rampage
throughout the Mediterranean, the Near East, and southern Asia.
Or listen to UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl saying “’Islamic
tradition does not have a notion of holy war. Jihad simply means
to strive hard or struggle in pursuit of a just cause.’” Bostom
exposes such sophistries simply by quoting Islamic scholars like
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406): “’In the Muslim community,
the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism
of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody
to Islam either by persuasion or by force.’” Or listen
to Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328): “’Since lawful warfare
is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is
God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore
according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this
aim must be fought.”
Complementary to the phenomenon of jihad was
the dismal fate of those conquered peoples, Jews and Christians
mostly, who refused
to convert to Islam. Called “dhimmi,” they were (and
still are in some places) subjected to a whole host of restrictions
and limitations of their lives whose purpose was to force them
to proclaim publicly their humiliation and their inferiority
to their Muslim conquerors. As documented in many of the excerpts
in Bostom’s book, the historical details of the lives of
Jewish and Christian minorities living in Muslim lands, the Islamic
legal documents and opinions regarding their status, and the
hardships suffered by dhimmi peoples well into the 20th century
and continuing even today, should explode the widely circulated
myth of Islamic tolerance of non-Muslims.
Bostom continues his own introductory essay with
a survey of Islamic conquest and the accompanying massacres,
raids, kidnapping,
ethnic cleansing, devastation, and enslavement that marked the
advance of Islam from Spain to Southeast Asia. Given how obsessive
we are over the European enslavement of Africans, it’s
eye-opening to read about the extent of Islamic slave-trading:
an estimated 17 million Africans, over one-and-a-half times the
estimated 10 million purchased by Europeans, were acquired and
then forced-march across the Sahara to their masters’ territories,
thousands dying along the way, their bones littering the desert
sands. This trade continued for centuries after Europe and America
had ended the slave trade: slavery wasn’t formally abolished
in Saudi Arabia until 1962, and continues in Sudan and Mauritania
today. And let’s not forget the millions of Europeans kidnapped
and sold into slavery by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean,
or the African men cruelly castrated to provide eunuchs for harems
and government service, or the Balkan Christian boys, perhaps
as many as one million, taken from their parents, forcibly converted,
and made to serve the Ottoman regime.
Finally, Bostom concludes his overview with a
series of excerpts from European and Muslim historians on the
nature of jihad, and
with the proclamations of modern jihadists and terrorists from
around the globe whose interpretations of jihad are consistent
with those of the historians. Particularly significant, given
the distortions surrounding the Arab world’s assaults on
Israel, are the comments arising out of a conference of Muslim
scholars and jurists held in 1968 after the humiliating Arab
defeat in the Six Day War: “Repeated declarations,” Bostom
summarizes, “expounded the classical Islamic doctrine of
jihad war, focusing its bellicose energy on the destruction of
Israel.” Lest you distrust Bostom’s interpretation,
he quotes liberally from the proceedings. Here is Abdullah Ghoshah,
Chief Judge in Jordan: “’Jihad is legislated in order
to be one of the means of propagating Islam. Consequently Non-Muslims
ought to embrace Islam either willingly . . . or unwillingly
through fight and Jihad. . . . War is the basis of the relationship
between Muslims and their opponents.’” Likewise the
Mufti of Lebanon specifically characterized the struggle to destroy
Israel as a jihad: “’We do not think this decree
[Allah’s regarding Palestine] absolves any Muslim or Arab
from Jihad (Holy War) which has now become a duty incumbent upon
the Arabs and Muslims to liberate the land, preserve honor, retaliate
for [lost] dignity, [and] restore the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem]
. . . from the hands of Zionism.’” Notice that not
a word is said about the frustrated nationalist aspirations of
the Palestinian people.
Having laid out the general theoretical and historical
overview of jihad, Bostom goes on to provide both primary and
secondary
sources that support his analysis. After listing the verses from
the Koran and hadiths regarding jihad, Bostom gives excerpts
from fourteen centuries of Islamic commentary that quite explicitly
detail how imperialistic conquest is justified and mandated by
the Islamic faith. What is striking about this compilation is
the agreement among these commentators concerning the necessity
of jihad, the justice of enslaving and plundering the conquered,
and the humiliating treatment to which dhimmi should be subjected.
And this continuity extends to 20th century commentators who
provide a justification for terrorism. The comments of Ayatollah
Khomeini, for example, explicitly define jihad as violent conflict
divinely mandated to ensure the world’s salvation: “But
those who study jihad,” he wrote in 1942, “will understand
why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries
conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked
for everlasting salvation.” Or as the Ayatollah later said
in 1979, “Islam grew with blood.”
Khomeini’s traditional assessment of jihad as a divine
mandate to use force to bring the world into the House of Islam
is also consistent with the writings of Islamic fundamentalism’s
most important theorist, Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966). Quoting from
the eighth-century writer Ibn Qayyim, Qutb says, “This
legal formulation [regarding the relationship of Muslims to other
groups] is based on the principle that Islam––that
is, submission to God––is a universal message which
the whole of mankind should accept or make peace with. No political
system or material power should put hindrances in the way of
preaching Islam.” And if such “hindrances” do
exist, Islam then “has no recourse but to remove them by
force.” Hence this struggle between Islam and the non-Islamic
world “is not a temporary phase but an eternal state.” The
only way for non-Islamic societies to co-exist with Islam is
if the former “submit to its [Islam’s] authority
by paying Jizyah [the poll tax], which will guarantee that they
have opened their doors for the preaching of Islam and will not
put any obstacle in its way through the power of the state.”
This continuity over the centuries in the understanding
of jihad is evident as well in Bostom’s next section, a series of
excerpts and essays reprinted from the work of modern scholars;
the essay by Bassam Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam,” is
particularly valuable. His comments on the possibility of Islam’s
adaptation to the modern model of interstate relations based
on international law are sobering: “Though the Islamic
states acknowledge the authority of international law regulating
relations among states, Islamic doctrine governing war and peace
continues to be based on a division of the world into dar al-Islam
[the House of Islam] and dar al-Harb [the House of War]. The
divine law of Islam, which defines a partial community in international
society, still ranks above the laws upon which modern international
society rests.”
Equally informative are the accounts of Muslim
conquests that restore for us the horrendous costs borne by
those unfortunate
enough to be in the path of Allah’s armies. Bostom provides
both modern historical descriptions and excerpts from accounts
contemporary with the events, as well as a chart and color maps
detailing Islamic conquests. This material is extremely important,
for we moderns, incessantly scolded about the presumed sins of
Crusaders and colonialists, need to be reminded how bloody and
devastating was the process by which lands that had been Greco-Roman,
Judaic, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist for centuries became something
else.
All of these studies are illuminating, but a
few are worth particular mention. The great French historian
C. E. Dufourcq’s description
of the razzia–– the preliminary raids by Islamic
warriors to acquire slaves and plunder and to test a region’s
suitability for full-scale conquest–– should be read
by anybody tired of hearing about Western depredations against
the “religion of peace.” For centuries, town after
town in southern France, Spain, and Italy was plundered, sacked,
and looted for slaves; churches were particularly targeted for
the precious articles of worship they contained. One purpose
of such raids was to instill terror in the inhabitants so that
they either would not resist and thus be softened up for later
conquest, or would pay ransom to avoid this devastation. The
17th-century Muslim historian al-Maqqari is quite explicit about
the intended effect of this terror: “Allah thus instilled
such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and
fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants,
to beg for peace.” One can’t help but think of the
modern Europeans who have appeased today’s jihadists because
they fear terrorists whose victims add up to a tiny fraction
of the number killed and enslaved in earlier centuries.
For us Westerners who may be ignorant of Indian
history, K. S. Lal’s work on the impact of 1000 years of Muslim invasions
of India will provide an important background to current problems
such as the status of Kashmir. Similar to Islamic invasions everywhere,
the incursions were accompanied by massacres, pillaging, depopulation,
enslavement of women and children, and the destruction of temples
and idols. Such exploits are celebrated in the pages of Muslim
historians, as in this description of the attack on Thanesar: “The
blood of the infidels flowed so copiously that the stream was
discolored, and people were unable to drink it.” This aggression
continued under the Turks. And like the earlier invaders, these
brutal wars were justified as part of the divinely sanctioned
jihad: in the memoirs of Babul, founder of the Mughal dynasty,
the “narrative of Jihad is laced with quotations from the
Quran in dozens which shows that he was . . . a scholar of Quran
and Hadis [hadiths] and no simple secular warrior.”
As excerpt after excerpt in The
Legacy of Jihad makes clear, Islam’s expansion was accompanied by the fate Dimitar Angelov
describes for Asia Minor and the Balkans under Turkish attack: “The
ruination of entire cities, the massacre, deportation, and enslavement
of thousands of inhabitants––in a word, a general
and lasting decline in the productivity of the country.” This
history, moreover, is constantly ignored in analyses of current
conflicts involving Islamic states, which endlessly catalogue
the Western crimes that presumably explain and often rationalize
Islamic terrorist aggression. For example, we constantly hear
about the “occupied West Bank” as the obstacle to
peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Yet the ancient
Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria were conquered and occupied
by Islamic armies, their Jewish and Christian peoples compelled
to live as humiliated oppressed subjects. I fail to see how it
is just that lands taken in a defensive war by the peoples whose
ancestors occupied them for centuries, are now to be restored
to the peoples who initiated the conflict and whose ancestors
occupied those lands as conquerors.
This valuable book raises an important question:
can Islam reform itself and discard the ideology of jihad?
Can jihad be redefined
to mean an inner spiritual struggle, or defensive war, or the
effort to propagate Islam through peaceful means, as many apologists
claim today? Attempts to reformulate the doctrine of jihad have
been going on for a century, but with scant success, for such
redefinitions fly in the face of centuries of orthodoxy. On this
issue, the words of Clement Huart, though written in 1907, are
still pertinent today: “The reformers of Islam may be right
[that jihad is not holy war]. The intention of Mohammed, in what
he said of jihad, may have been misunderstood and misrepresented.
But into this question we do not desire to go. For what we are
considering is, what Mohammedanism is and has been––that
is, what orthodox Mohammedanism teaches concerning jihad, founding
its doctrine of a certain definite interpretation of those passages
in the Koran which speak of jihad. Until the newer conceptions,
as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the believer towards
non-believers, have spread further and have more generally leavened
the mass of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older and orthodox
standpoint on this question which must be regarded by non-Moslems
as representing Mohammedan teaching and as guiding Mohammedan
action.” The widespread support among Islamic peoples everywhere
for terrorist jihad shows that Huart’s comments are as
true today as they were in 1907. The Islamists are not “distorting” Islam,
but rather the reformers and so-called “moderates” are.
Given that the academic study of Islam is so
politicized, we are dependent on those like Andrew Bostom who
make available
for us the truths necessary for understanding the nature of the
conflict with Islamic terrorism. Even fiction can on occasion
be more useful than corrupted scholarship: Arabel, by Alexandra
Paris, is a gripping tale of just how bio-terrorism could come
to America, one that takes seriously the traditional spiritual
motives of the jihadists; it very well could be to the so-called
war on terror what Raspail’s Camp of the Saints is to the
problem of Europe’s suicide-by-immigration.
If we are to prevail in the war against Islamic
jihad, we need to know the facts of history and understand
the motives of our
adversaries and not reduce them to our own materialist prejudices.
Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad does precisely that. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
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