Whitewashing Jihad

Submitted by Roger G. (United States), Jan 1, 2003 at 16:50

Dear Dr. Pipes,

It seems to me that you give too much weight to the "variant meanings" of Jihad, most notably the late (4th Hijri century) Sufi one that apologists are always trotting out.

First, the Sufi definition is, as noted, late; it does not appear in the cannonical hadith works, nor in any other pre-11th century work.

Second, the Sufi definition of the Greater Jihad, or the Jihad of the Spirit (jihad al-nafs) never denies the spiritual merit of the Jihad of the Sword (jihad al-sayf); indeed, many of the same sufis espousing the first definition also participated regularly in campaigns against the Infidel. It is not accidental that the word for Sufi Monastery and the word for a border fortress of volunteer warriors for the faith are one and the same in the Islamic languages: ribat.

Third, out of the hundreds of books on Jihad composed throughout the first 14 centuries of Islam, from 'Abdallah b. al-Mubarak up until the present, NONE has ever been devoted to the "greater Jihad", to the best of my knowledge, until the Ayatollah Khomeini composed one in the 20th century- and he was an excellent illustration of my second point; Sufism and militancy go hand in hand.

Every other book of Jihad for nearly a millenium and a half has dealt with Jihad in the way it is used constantly and every day in the Muslim world: namely, military action against Infidels on behalf of Islamdom. To give equal weight to minor, secondary definitions- which in any case never precluded the standard one- is, both historically and from an intellectual standpoint, simply incorrect.

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