A number of people have asked me to comment on the concept and practice of jihad in Islam. This is an important topic simply because it is not a matter of indifference. It is not a matter of indifference to Muslims who comprise nineteen percent of the world’s population and are extremely sensitive to the way they are portrayed in the West. It is not a matter of indifference to the non-Muslims who are threatened most everywhere around the globe at present by the rhetoric and tactics of the modern-day Jihadists. It is not a matter of indifference to Americans who believe that “9/11” was an act of war that has sparked a conflict between Islamists and the West that will likely last for several generations. The subject, then, is a delicate one on many levels and for many reasons requiring much empathy to treat fairly.

Let me frame this response by quoting from one of the more popular college texts, Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. Smith invokes the problem Muslims have with many Westerners, including some Western scholars who portray Islam as an aggressive and threatening religion: “To Westerners it [jihad] conjures scenes of screaming fanatics being egged into war by promises that they will be instantly transported to heaven if they are slain” (Harper Collins 1991: 257). The word surely “conjures” such images today, images that Muslims claim is driven by media sensationalism and corporate greed.¹ Is this charge warranted? Some Christians might be forgiven their suspicions if they tend to think that most secularists are likely to view Islam through the same prism they view Christian Fundamentalists, a politically benign group that is arguably the most misunderstood and the most demonized of all Americans. That Islam is unfairly depicted in our literature in the West is a subsidiary issue that is partly addressed here as well, in addition to the main question of the meaning of jihad.

Turning to the substance of this matter, let me start with some definitions. Almost all Muslim spokesmmen and Islamic scholars that have appeared on our national media since 9/11 have tried to reassure the rest of us that jihad simply means “striving,” and that the heart of the concept has to do with striving to obey Allah. In other words, jihad is a spiritual concept akin to the Christian doctrine of the “mortification of the flesh.” These same persons go on to tell us we have noting really to be concerned about, as Islam is a religion of peace.  One can readily find something akin to this understanding of jihad in the Koran: “And strive for Allah as you ought to strive…. So, perform the prayer, give alms and hold fast to Allah” (Surah 22:78). Also, in the Koran jihad has to do with resisting the infidel and preaching to them the Word of God (Koran): “So, do not obey the unbelievers and strive against them with it [Koran] mightily” (Surah 25:52). Jihad in these passages has to do with a struggle against one’s temptations, or a struggle to establish Islamic law (Sharia) in society, or to attempt to convert the infidel. In each case, context determines the way the concept of jihad is to be interpreted. In a certain sense, Muslims employ the term in much the same the way that Christians employ the term crusade, as in “a crusade against drugs” or a “Billy Graham crusade.” This is what is called in Islam the greater jihad.

There is also another use of the term that is to be found in Islamic literature however. Muslims refer to this aspect of jihad as the lesser jihad. This understanding is more prominent in the Koran than is that of the greater jihad. For example, “Fight those among the People of the Book [Jews and Christians] who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, do not forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden and do not profess the true religion, till they pay the poll tax (jizya)² out of hand and submissively” (9:29). In this case jihad means “actual armed conflict in defense of the faith or for its prorogation” (JIHĀD, Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions). This is jihad as “holy war.”

To be even handed, here, we must acknowledge that many religions at one time or another have engaged in the past in “holy war.” One can find the concept in the books of Joshua and Judges of the Old Testament. Bernhard Anderson in his influential Old Testament textbook says this about holy war during the tribal period: “Holy war…was a kind of guerrilla warfare based on a voluntary response” that used “scare tactics, ambush, maneuvers, feigned fight, and so on” (141). Even in Israel’s early monarchy, states Anderson, the strategy of holy war was not so much to fight pitched battles as to frighten the enemy with the “terror of God” so that they would flee in panic and confusion (217).³ The important point to be made is that the warfare spoken of in the Old Testament (and I would say even of the Crusades under the papacy) is not anything that was institutionalized or that represented permeant policy. The one possible exception to this in Christianity is the Inquisition.  The Inquisition is usually dated to several bulls issued by Pope Gregory IX in 1231.  Pope Innocent IV even sanctioned torture in 1252, but the Inquisition was eventually abolished in 1834 (See "Inquisition" in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought).  One might say those occurrences of holy war are to be considered more as phases, or stages even, and not something that was a part of the fabric of religion. The bottom line is that Jews and Christians have never had anything in their religion past or present that can be understood as holy war qua institution or dogma.  Moreover, Christians formally and in en masse have roundly condemned the use of violence and torture associated with its past, such as the Inquisition to be something that is incompatible with what it means to be a follower of Christ or to be his church.

This is not the case with Islam. Holy war represents at the least a stratagem that Muslims have employed from the beginning to the present to extend their power and influence.⁴ When reading Islamic texts, it is clear that there are many more references to “holy war” (lesser jihad) and to “fighting the infidel” in the Koran, and in the authoritative writings (Hadith) and traditions (Sunna) than there are references to jihad as “spiritual striving” (greater jihad).⁵ The religion that Muhammad introduced to the world was a fighting religion: ‘“I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no God but Allah.”’⁶ Even before his death Muhammad had effectively unified the Arabian Peninsula through warfare. In the process, he drove out two Jewish tribes from Yathrib (Medina) and confiscated their land. The male members of the last remaining Jewish tribe were all beheaded. Here is how one historian described this event: “Charged with collaboration with the enemy, the tribe’s six to eight hundred men [members of the Quraiza tribe] were brought in small groups to trenches dug the previous day, made to sit on the edge, then beheaded one by one and their bodies thrown in. The women and children were sold into slavery and the money they fetched, together with the proceeds from the tribe’s possessions, was divided among the Muslims.”⁷ Jihad as holy war became institutionalized in Islam under Muhammad and has remained so.

The successors of Muhammad, called Caliphs, also employed holy war to expand the power and wealth of Islam.⁸ There is no other way to account for its amazing rise and spread other than to point to Islam’s institutionanlization and practice of holy war. In other words, the Muslim Conquests did not simply happen because peoples and nations were attracted to a superior culture and religion; rather, Islam spread primarily because peoples and nations were subdued by force. One would not know this through reading some historians and commentators who have been afflicted with the twin diseases of multiculturalism and political correctness. In 1991 the prominent French Protestant scholar Jacques Ellul made an important observation concerning the way in which historians and those who should know better have ignored the role of holy war in the Muslim wars of conquest. He wrote: “In a major encyclopedia, one reads such phrases as: ‘Islam expanded in the eighth or ninth centuries…’; ‘This or that country passed into [Muslim] hands’….Indeed, it would seem as if events happened by themselves, through a miraculous or amicable operation… Regarding this expansion little is said about jihad. And yet it all happened through war!”⁹ Political correctness and fear rule no small number of scholars and journalists today, and have for some time, when it comes to their overly delicate and sometimes deceptive treatment of history and curent issues pertaining to Islam. This is not the case with their treatment of Christians, especially Fundamentalists Christians. Secularists and liberals bash and demonize traditional and Fundamentalist Christians with impunity because they know they have nothing to fear from them.

At this point, let me clear up a major source of confusion. The term Fundamentalists is properly applied only to certain American Protestant Christian sects of the present who adopted this movement name in the 1920s. They did so in view of the rise of theological and social liberalism in the general culture and within their churches, and because of their strict adherence to the teaching of the Bible and to its norms. They believed and practiced the “fundamentals” of the Christian religion; thus the terms Fundamentalist and Fundamentalism. It is inappropriate to apply this name to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews because the name is historically conditioned. In truth, if one were to apply this name indiscriminately to groups other than Fundamentalist Christians, then most all Muslims could rightly be called Fundamentalists.  This is so because of their strict views universially held regarding the Koran and the practice of their religion. Secularists and liberals, however, demur more than a little at this point, as they are want to make a distinction between extremist Muslims and the more moderate Muslims.  It is only the former, or extreemists that are to be credited with the label Fundamentalists.  Are we not reminded constantly by these same persons that the extreemist Muslims represent only a very small portion of Islam; that we ought not to denigrate an entire religion because of the actions of a few?

Why then are Fundamentalist Christians lumped together with Radical Jihadists by also calling the Jihadist fundamentalists?  To apply the "fundamentalist" label indiscriminately to the most radical elements in Islam I believe is a tactic designed to isolate and sully certain Christians more than it is a thing done out of ignorance.  This is surely the case with the clerisy.  Conservative Protestant and Islamic radicals are painted with the same brush simply so some can get the satisfaction of associating these particular Christians with the Jihadists, real terrorists by any definition.  Little wonder, then, that Fundamentalist Christians are seen as a dangerous lot, only one social mutation removed from blowing up babies and other innocents in the marketplace. These tactics have been extraordinary successful in marginalizing these believers, believers who happen to take their religion seriously and who might want simply to exercise their franchise as citizens to engage in politics lawfully. It is entirely understandable why Dante reserved the lower circles of hell for the falsifiers and the betrayers.

Retruning to our main point, however, do not think that customary Muslims attitudes toward non-Muslims have changed all that much over time. Islam began as a tribal religion. Muhammad was born into the Hashimite clan of the Quraysh tribe. Under his leadership his clan and his tribe grew wealthy and powerful through trade, brigandage, and warfare. It would not be any great stretch to say that Muslims have continued to think of themselves in terms of tribe, a big tribe for sure, but no less a tribe. The Muslim community of believers is called the umma, and its religious scholars the ulamā, distinctions that are to be understood in sharp relief vis-à-vis all other religious peoples. To the very present Islam bears the marks of this origin.

Maybe the best way to illustrate the implications of this tribalism is to invoke the concept of “spheres of dominion", a lens through which Muslims have traditionally viewed the world. That sphere where Islamic law prevails (Sharia) is labeled simply as Dar al-Islam (territory of Islam). Territories outside of Muslim control are referred to as Dar al-Kufr (territory of unbelief). Those territories in closest proximity to Muslim lands but not under their control or influence, however, are referred to ominously as Dar al Harb (the territory of war). It is to be noted in this conjunction that where Islam itself has been under threat, Muslims have sought to negotiate with the infidels a “dominion of contractual peace” (Dar al-Ahd). These kinds of treaties, however, “might licitly be abrogated [by Muslims] when the Muslim side was stronger.”¹⁰ This whole concept, it goes without saying, has to be problematic for relations between Islamic countries and the West, and especially problematic considering that negotiated contracts and settlements can be broken where expedient for reasons rooted in religious obligation.

Islam is a religion where these distinctions remain in place and have since they were fashioned and established under the hand of Muhammad. Given Islam’s history and Islam’s current growth in numbers and power, the rest of the world has no choice but to remain vigilant against the Jihadists.  Furthermore, those nations that can should use economic and political pressure against Muslim lands that treat non Muslims as second-class citizens (This practice is called Dhimmitude).  We should require, in other words, understandings and exchanges with Muslims and Muslim nations that are based upon reciprocity.  The challenge today for all Muslims is that they will have to come to terms with reality, that their way of life is only one way among many on this shrinking planet, and that the only legitimate means of spreading any religion is through peaceful missionary activity and persuasion.

1 Note that Smith probably wrote his book in 1958 and no later than 1991. See the copyright dates of his work.

2 This is a type of tribute levied against non-Muslims.

3 Understanding the Old Testament, 4th ed. Prentice-Hall. 1986.

4 Islam is the religion; Muslims are the adherents of the religion.

5 See The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, edited by Andrew G. Bostom (Prometheus Books, 2005).

6 Quoted in Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History. Yale University Press, 2006:62.

7 Karsh, 11-13.

8 Islam does not naturally make a distinction between Islam as a religion and Islam as a government. Most Muslims, still, disclaim that this lack of distinction translates into a theocracy. They prefer, at least many Sunni Muslims prefer, to say that Allah has simply provided Muslims with a constitution in which to govern themselves, a constitution of divine laws coterminous with the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunna. This is the meaning of Sharia. I believe we are dealing here with a distinction without a difference. It seems as long as Muslims hold this position, Islam cannot be accommodated to democracy, a reality our political leaders want to ignore or play down.

9 Jacques Ellul, foreword to Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996). First published in French as Les Chrétientés d’Orient entre Jihâd et Dhimmitude (Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1991), 18.

10 Barry Cooper, New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 94.