root cause analysis

Submitted by allen smith (United States), Jan 9, 2006 at 23:18

A lawyer defending al Qaeda-linked suspects standing trial for the 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul told a court that jihad, or holy war, was an obligation for Muslims and his clients should not be prosecuted.

"If you punish them for this, tomorrow, will you punish them for fasting or for praying?" Osman Karahan -- a lawyer representing 14 of the 72 suspects -- asked during a nearly four-hour speech in which he read religious texts from an encyclopedia of Islam.
The November 2003 blasts targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate and the local headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank, killing 58 people.

"If non-Muslims go into Muslim lands, it is every Muslim's obligation to fight them," Karahan said."

Always helpful to have the statements made by Muslim defendants, and their lawyers, in Muslim lands. In Turkey, in Indonesia, and elsewhere, the lawyers and defendants feel no need to obscure or hide the teachings of Islam. They are forthright. In the United Kingdom, in France, in Spain, in all of Europe and North America, they will, not wishing to harm the "cause of Islam" and its steady uninterrupted march within the Lands of the Infidels, in places where Islam has not yet been permanently established, and the time not yet ripe for revealing too openly the truth (and counting on lazy Infidels not to find out too much -- and so far, those lazy Infidels have been happy to oblige) about Islam.

An interesting comparison can be made between the words of the lawyers and defendants in terrorism trials in Muslim countries, and in non-Muslim ones. Interesting and revealing.

Until the West begins to pay attention to what Muslims are saying in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, rather than what their apologists sprout forth for foreign consumption, we will continue to be in the situation of England under Chamberlain. Let us hope that our political leadership wakes up before it is too late.

Let's examine the concept of Jihad once gain as discussed yesterday in order to fully understand it

"Recently, apologists in the West have asserted that Jihad means primarily "spiritual struggle." There are several things to be said about this. First of all, the tradition to which they are referring is a late Sufi tradition, of the eleventh century, which divides jihad into a "Jihad of the Sword" and a "Jihad of the Spirit," stating that the former is the "lesser" Jihad and the latter is the "greater." This tradition is not contained in any of the canonical volumes of Sunni traditions, however, and has occupied, historically, only a very minor place in the Islamic tradition.

How do we know this to be so? There have been thousands of books composed on the religious duty of Jihad throughout the 14 centuries of Islamic history. Every last one of those books was about the "Jihad of the Sword" but one - and that one was composed only in the 20th century, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shi'ite, and not exactly a pacifist. Second, and far more important: all that this tradition states is that the "Jihad of the Spirit" is the greater Jihad; it does not in any way abrogate the "lesser Jihad," the "Jihad of the Sword"- on the contrary. It is not accidental that the word for a Sufi monastery and for a fortress of volunteer border warriors (ribat) is identical in the Islamic languages; the same people who were "struggling in God's path" in the Jihad of the Spirit were simultaneously "struggling in God's path" in the Jihad of the Sword; even the Sufis who invented this tradition saw the two types of Jihad as being complementary, not mutually exclusive. Moreover, even had the late Sufi tradition actually been the dominant one in Islam, it would in no way abrogate the militaristic Qur'anic verses which order the believers variously to "fight' or to "kill" the unbelievers.

Every classical treatise on Islamic government has viewed the primary duty of a ruler as essentially that of ordering the world according to God's will. The world is divided into two mutually antagonistic parts: the "Abode of Islam" (Dar al-Islam), in which God's rule has already been established, and which is ruled according to Muslim law; and the "Abode of War" (Dar al-Harb); that portion of the world which is not yet under God's rule, but which the Muslims must eventually bring into the Islamic oecumene by force or by persuasion. What the apologists are not revealing when they talk of Islam as a religion of peace is that the "peace" they are referring to is a Pax Islamica."

Qur'an 9:29, which is regarded by all the exegetes as the specific passage commanding Muslims to fight Christians and Jews until they accept Dhimmitude: "Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in Allah and the last Day, do not forbid what Allah and His Apostle have forbidden and do not profess the true religion, till they pay the poll-tax out of hand and submissively." According to Muslim exegesis, it was after receiving this revelation in the year 630 that the Prophet Muhammad sent a raiding party to fight the Byzantines. This verse is cited as abrogating virtually all prior Qur'anic verses calling for patience or forgiveness toward Scriptuaries.

Also, the Prophetic sunna (as recorded in the Hadith) gives a hierarchy of those values considered most meritorious. For instance, in one tradition included in most of the 6 canonical collections (and, by the way, Jihad in all of these collections unambiguously means unconditional warfare against non-Muslims): " A man came to God's Apostle [Muhammad] and said: 'Show me an act equal to Jihad.' [Muhammad] answered: 'I cannot find one.'" In other traditions, Jihad against non-Muslims is accounted as "better than the world and all that is in it."

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".