{"id":203052,"date":"2009-05-23T07:00:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-23T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/?p=203052"},"modified":"2017-01-27T16:58:47","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T15:58:47","slug":"english-david-cook-understanding-jihad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/2009\/english-david-cook-understanding-jihad\/","title":{"rendered":"David Cook: Understanding Jihad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>David Cook. Understanding Jihad. University of California Press: Berke- ley, 2005, 288 pp., ca. 22.50 \u20ac.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIslam is peace\u201d. This sentence could be heard especially frequently after September 11 th , 2001, from groups within organized Islam in Germany. It was said that there was no \u201choly war\u201d in Islam, that \u201cjihad\u201d was to be understood as a moral-spiritual \u201ceffort\u201d to walk \u201con the path of God\u201d (\u201cGreat Jihad\u201d). It was proclaimed that Islam abhors every kind of violence against human beings, apart from the right to self-defense (\u201cSmall Jihad\u201d). The word \u201cIslam\u201d, of course, has the same linguistic root (s-l-m) as the word \u201csalam\u201d (peace), but is really a different word, and means \u201csubmission, devotion\u201d. Sura 5:32 also was quoted frequently, and in a shortened version: \u201cIf someone kills another person (\u2026) it is as if he had killed all human beings.\u201d The obvious intent was to persuade the uninformed non-Muslim that Muslims in no case could be violent criminals and terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>Religious scholar David Cook, from Rice University in Houston, Texas, has written a commendable work on the subject of \u201cjihad\u201d that brilliantly refutes talk of a throughout \u201cpeaceful\u201d Islam. Muhammad himself was not only a \u201cspiritual\u201d leader of the Muslim community in Medina, but also a political leader and military commander. Thus, from 622 until his death in 632, he took part (on average) in nine warlike actions (battles, raids, and internal conflicts) per year (p. 6). In regard to the treatment of the subject in the Qur\u2019an, Cook arrives at the sobering result that, here, we \u201chave be fore us a highly developed justification for conducting war against \u2018the enemies of Islam\u2019\u201d (p. 11). With competence and a keen eye for the essential, Cook unfolds the complex history of jihad in Islam. He shows the contexts of concrete historical developments, and the reflections upon them in the writings of legal scholars. The triumphal conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries, the conflicts with the Crusaders (from the tenth to the thirteenth century), the defeat at the hands of the Moghuls (thirteenth century), the Reconquista in the fifteenth century, the numerous internal Muslim struggles, the second wave of Islamic conquest from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and the resistance to colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have found their expression in the diverse conceptions of jihad among legal scholars.<\/p>\n<p>Jihad occupies a prominent place in all six \u201ccanonical\u201d collections of Hadith. It is represented as the obligation on the part of every Muslim to fight for the dissemination and the final global victory of the \u201cHouse of Islam\u201d (Arabic: dar al-Islam) over the \u201cHouse of War\u201d (Arabic: dar al-harb). Cook lays out in detail the arguments of prominent legal scholars (some Sufi authors, al-Shafii, al-Sarakhsi, Ibn Taimiyya, al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Ibn Hazm, al-Kasani, al-Haythami, and others). The reasons for war, declaration of war, conduct of war, the treatment of the vanquished, the distribution of the spoils of war (among others, the enslavement of women and children), and negotiations for peace are investigated in detail in the classical literature. Whoever dies in battle for Allah is a \u201cshahid\u201d (martyr), to whom a rich reward in Paradise is granted (pp. 27 ff.). This body of writings is cited to the present as a justification for violence against the \u201cenemies of Islam\u201d or \u201capostates\u201d. Cook states that the interpretation of jihad during the first centuries of Islam\u201d [was] \u201cno less directly aggressive and expansive\u201d (p. 30). Cook writes that Islam was not spread, as is often claimed, by use of the sword. Nevertheless, the \u201cconquests and jihad\u201d [had] \u201ccreated the preconditions for conversion or the call to conversion\u201d (p. 30). The interpretations of jihad by spiritual Islam (Sufism) that increasingly are emphasized today are, in the author\u2019s opinion, suitable only up to a point as evidence proving the \u201cpeaceful\u201d character of Islam, for, although Sufis in the ninth and tenth centuries emphasized the alternative of the \u201cGreat Jihad\u201d (as a moral-spiritual effort to combat one\u2019s own personal passions), the \u201cSufi warriors\u201d in no way doubted (pp. 44 ff.) the legitimacy of the militant (\u201csmall\u201d) jihad. The \u201cjihad of the soul\u201d was not considered as a \u201creplacement\u201d for an armed, military effort (so the famous legal scholar al-Ghazali). It is not without a certain irony that Western, non-Muslim authors (for example, John Esposito) of all people, whether out of ignorance of tradition or with purely apologetic intent, overemphasize the spiritual, \u201cpeaceful\u201d character of Islam (pp. 39 ff.).<\/p>\n<p>Cook sketches the modern development of the concept of jihad from the nineteenth century to the present day, that is, from the \u201cmodernists\u201d Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and his student Rashid Rida (1865-1935) to the jihadists gathered around Osama bin Laden. Abduh and Rida spiritualized jihad, but, differently than the Sufis in the ninth and tenth centuries, accepted it almost exclu sively as the proclamation of the truth of the Islamic faith. Here, the close connection between jihad and \u201cda\u2019wa\u201d (mission) is emphasized. Only in the very limited case of defense is violence said to be justified as jihad (p. 97).<\/p>\n<p>The question of who might be authorized to proclaim jihad, and whether jihad might be \u201coffensive\u201d or \u201cdefensive\u201d, or both, has been discussed repeatedly. Cook cites numerous examples to document how broad the range of militant action was that was characterized as jihad, and how willfully legal scholars, political ideologues, and rulers handled the classical texts. The Wahhabites in the eighteenth century declared their campaigns of conquest to be a \u201cpurifying\u201d jihad carried out against other Muslims. The African legal scholar Dan Fodio, who fought for the consolidation and expansion of Muslim rule in West Africa at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, defined jihad as a threestep process of the erection of the rule of \u201cpure Islam\u201d on the pattern of the example of the Prophet Muhammad: first, the \u201ctrue Muslims\u201d withdraw from their \u201cunbelieving\u201d environment (\u201chijra\u201d), form Islamic islands, and, from this base, begin the struggle for supremacy (p. 77). This is the strategic blueprint of the Islamists, above all for those advocating the Islamization of Europe, as the attentive reader easily can discover through study of their writings. The Grand Moghul of India, Aurangzeb (1658-1707), attempted to justify his predations and oppressive measures against the Hindus as jihad, and the Indian rebellion against the British in 1857-58 was seen by the Muslim side as jihad, although the great Muslim scholar and reformer Sayyid Ahmed Khan (died 1898) preferred a non-violent interpretation of jihad (p. 81). In Dagestan, Ghazi Muhammad led a ji had against the Russians, and Abd al-Qadir fought under the flag of jihad against the French colonial power. The legendary \u201cMahdi\u201d (Mohammed Ahmed) considered himself to be Allah\u2019s chosen tool for the struggle beginning in 1881 against the British and \u201capostate\u201d Muslims. The Russian-Persian wars of 1808-1813 and 1826-1829 also were jihad, in the opinion of Persian legal scholars. Finally, in World War I, the Ottoman Empire declared its struggle against the Al-lies (Great Britain, France, Russia, USA) to be jihad, a unique event in the history of interpretation of jihad, since here Muslims fought together with \u201cChristian\u201d powers against other Christians (p. 92).<\/p>\n<p>Cook\u2019s analyses of the politization and radicalization of the understanding of jihad, as it developed beginning with the fathers of Islamism (the Indian Abu-l Ala al-Maududi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb), are very revealing. The theses put forward by the Egyptian Islamist Muhammad Farrag (\u201cal-Farida Gha\u2019iba\u201d \u2013 \u201cThe Neglected Duty\u201d, pp. 107 ff.) have influenced the form of an Islamist understanding of jihad just as decisively as the experiences of the self-proclaimed \u201cmudjahidin\u201d (warriors) in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Jihad in the sense of war for global rule is shifted to the center of Islam in the jihadist visions of an Osama bin Laden (pp. 97 ff.). Islam thus becomes permanent jihad. Belief or unbelief is decided on the basis of one\u2019s view of jihad. The struggle against \u201cunbelievers\u201d and \u201capostates\u201d is the chief duty of the \u201ctrue\u201d Muslim. Suicide attacks are reinterpreted as \u201cmartyrdom\u201d for Allah and justified by reference to Koran suras (2:207 and 2:96), and the death of innocent Muslims as well as non-Muslims is accepted willingly. Whoever sacrifices himself \u201cfor Allah\u201d will taste the delights of Paradise.<\/p>\n<p>The author comes to a sobering conclusion. Since, as he writes, the jihadist interpretation has not been rejected in the inner-Islamic discourse as incompatible with the classical texts, it must be considered as just as legitimate as other, \u201cpeaceful\u201d conceptions. Nevertheless, the \u201cmajority of contemporary Muslims\u201d, he states, is not ready within the framework of political reality to follow the jihadist conception; it, however, remains the ideological focus of marginalized groups. The conception of a \u201cmilitant jihad\u201d will not disappear because \u201cthere is too much evidence\u201d [for it] \u201cin Arabic-Muslim sources\u201d, and because it represents \u201cone of the most important proofs of the truth of Islam\u201d for Muslims to the present day (p. 165). The Sufi, peaceful interpretation, the author says, has had practically no significance in real terms because it never left the level of Sufi theory. Only Western scholars and Muslim apologists have claimed an impact for it in concrete history. The close association of religion and political power and the memory of the conquests in the \u201cglorious\u201d Islamic past, which is considered to be proof of the truth of Islam, have impeded a critical confrontation with the concept of militant jihad.<\/p>\n<p>Militant jihad will continue to play a central role for the religious and political orientation of Muslims in the Islamic world and in the diaspora as long as this painful debate does not begin in earnest.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIslam is peace\u201d. This sentence could be heard especially frequently after September 11 th , 2001, from groups within organized Islam in Germany. It was said that there was no \u201choly war\u201d in Islam, that \u201cjihad\u201d was to be understood as a moral-spiritual \u201ceffort\u201d to walk \u201con the path of God\u201d (\u201cGreat Jihad\u201d). It was proclaimed that Islam abhors every kind of violence against human beings, apart from the right to self-defense (\u201cSmall Jihad\u201d). The word \u201cIslam\u201d, of course, has the same linguistic root (s-l-m) as the word \u201csalam\u201d (peace), but is really a different word, and means \u201csubmission, devotion\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[233],"tags":[157,836,174,149,62,771,705,53],"class_list":["post-203052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rezensionen","tag-dawa","tag-david-cook","tag-gewalt","tag-jihad","tag-koran","tag-rezension","tag-sufismus","tag-terrorismus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203052"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204871,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203052\/revisions\/204871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.islaminstitut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}