Jehad and the truth

HE highest form of jehad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler.” This one saying of Prophet Muhammad suffices to demolish the myth about jehad, fostered, alike, by the fundamentalists and very many in the West and, not to overlook, in India. Ijtihad (reason) is one of the recognised sources of Islamic law, the sharia. Ijtihad is jehad of the mind. Jehad means exertion.

Ayesha Jalal renders a service by her erudite study of jehad in Islam; the perversion of the concept by the ulema (clergy) in the service of rulers as they embarked on military campaigns of imperialist expansion, armed with fatwas (rulings) sanctioning them as jehad in the cause of Islam; the invocation of jehad in the struggle for freedom from colonial rule; and its cynical revival in our times by bodies such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda.

The focus is on South Asia. The author, born in Pakistan, is the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University in the United States. She is a highly respected historian of South Asia. Unlike some expatriate scholars, including many from India, who act as apologists for their country, Ayesha Jalal rightly prides herself on her detachment and objectivity. It would, however, be unjust to her work to concentrate on her strictures on the Lashkar and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and neglect her thesis, which constitutes its core.

It was in the desire to gain a deep understanding of religion as faith that she launched her research for the book: “My exploration of the literature on the subject immediately brought home to me the intrinsic connection between the concept of jehad as endeavour and the Muslim faith. Far from being a passive and mindless activity, submission (Islam) assumes dynamic effort and reasoned self-control against the personal inclinations and social tendencies preventing a believer from heeding God’s commands, and thereby destroying any internal or external sense of balance and proportion…. It is commonplace to assert that the sacred and the temporal in Islam are inextricably intertwined. However, the interplay of ethics and politics in the unfolding of Muslim history has not been subjected to critical scrutiny. One way of remedying that oversight is to train the spotlight on the much-contested idea of jehad and its practice. To what extent was a concept that is at the heart of Islamic ethics transformed in shifting historical contexts as a consequence of temporal imperatives?”

The author discusses jehad in pre-colonial South Asia: the jehad waged by Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly (1786–1831), jehad in colonial India and as anti-colonial nationalism. The last chapter is on the subversion of the concept as a justification for terrorism. With her familiarity with the primary sources in Urdu, she brings to life the debates conducted by the adherents and the critics. Particularly useful for the English reader is her discussion of Sayyid Ahmed, who fell in battle at Balakot, about 18 miles (29 kilometres) from Manshera in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Among the first militant groups that surfaced in Kashmir in 1989 was Operation Balakot of Azan Inquilabi. Such was the hold that Sayyid Ahmed’s example had come to acquire over the minds of the jehad-prone. It is, however, to the very first chapter, “Jihad as Ethics, Jihad as War”, that the reader must pay particular attention.

Even in the early years of Islam, “some Muslims questioned the application of the concept of jehad to wars fought by temporal rulers that had nothing to do with struggle for the cause of God. One popular tradition justified the reservation. Upon returning from one of the early wars in defence of the newly established community, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have told his companions that they had come back from waging jehad al-asghar, or the lesser war, to fight the jehad al-akbar, or the greater war against those base inner forces which prevent man from becoming human in accordance with his primordial and God-given nature. This tradition was not included in any of the authoritative collections of hadith during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, an omission that in itself reveals the mindset of the compilers and the political climate of the times.”

There is, of course, no Quranic sanction for jehad as it is understood by most in the West – armed struggle in the name of religion. “The Quran itself defines jehad in terms that are much broader than the political uses made of it in response to the exigencies attendant on Arab expansion. What was spread by the sword was not the religion of Islam but ‘the political dominion of Islam’. Instead of paving the way for an egalitarian and just order, the expansion of Islam was a secular process that, even when drawing upon religious ideology, rarely managed to achieve the ideals prescribed in the Quran and underscored in the practice of the Prophet. Notwithstanding changes in Islamic jurisprudence and theology in response to political developments from the end of the seventh century on, mystical, ethical, poetic, and philosophical Muslim literature attest to the indissoluble connection between jehad and the quality of a believer’s faith and actions.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali is one of the great authorities on Islamic thought. “Like the Sufis, he focusses on the inner spiritual jehad, which he likens to a battle between the armies of good and evil. Good conduct based on self-control and sincere effort in the way of God is described as constituting half of religion, and being of greater merit than ritual worship. In addition to including the famous tradition in which the Prophet makes a distinction between the greater and the lesser jehad, Ghazali quotes him as saying: ‘Fight your passion with hunger and thirst. Its merits are equal to those gained by Jehad in the way of God…. Shorn of its inner dimensions and reduced to perpetual holy war against non-Muslims, jehad is a recipe for dis-equilibrium and an inversion of a key concept in Islam.’”

Falsehoods

In South Asia none exposed the falsehoods retailed in the name of jehad as thoroughly as did Maulvi Chiragh Ali, colleague of the founder of the Aligarh movement, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. He was far more critical of Muslim jurists than most. His was a comprehensive refutation of Muslim orthodoxy in law as well as in theology. “It was a crying shame that morality had become concretised for Muslims in external rituals instead of being ‘a certain disposition of heart towards God and man’. Far from confining ‘practical morality and piety’ to the ritual exertions of believers, the Quran ‘lays the foundation of that far-reaching charity which regards all men as equal in the sight of God and recognises no distinction of races and classes’. These teachings were capable of keeping ‘pace with the most fully and rapidly developing civilisation’ if ‘rationally interpreted’ and ‘enforced by the sentiment of a nation’….

“The essence of Chirag Ali’s argument was that Islam was being judged by the standards of the sharia, created by men, rather than the ethical principles of the Quran. The division of the world between Dar-ul-Islam (abode of Peace) and Dar-ul-Harb (abode of War) was a construct of legists that had no basis in the Quran. Even the detractors of Islam conceded that the real meaning of jehad was exertion and striving in a noble cause. Only in the post-Quranic period had Muslim legal scholars developed the theory of unprovoked war, tribute taking, and conversion to Islam at sword point. The Quran sanctioned only defensive wars under the most adverse circumstances, and it strictly prohibited aggression…. Striking out at the religious guardians, Chiragh Ali asserted that the sharia had not been held sacred or unchangeable by enlightened Mohammedans of any Moslem country and in any age since its compilation in the fourth century of the Hejira.” His classic A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad was written in 1805. It is doubtful if any Muslim scholar in South Asia would care or dare to write a work as courageous, as erudite.