From the Victory Institute Lecture Series
Hello.
My name is Gary H. Johnson, Jr.
I am the Senior Advisor for International Security Affairs at the Victory Institute.
In offering me the International Security Affairs desk, Chris Carter has tasked me with developing a “curriculum” specifically geared toward mapping and vanquishing international Islamic Supremacist movements.
My background and qualifications are uniquely geared to the task, but we can talk about those later. What I’d like to do now is welcome you to the first Victory Institute lesson on Islam’s ideology of Jihad. It will be a short lesson. Grab a pen so you can jot down a few notes, and we’ll get started.
Now, most Westerners who are paying attention to this message were given a cursory education about Islam in world civilizations or world religions classes. And, whether taught in a public or a private school, the lesson went like this – Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world today. It is a religion of peace. It is monotheistic and follows in the Abrahamic tradition, like Judaism and Christianity. The lesson continues simply – Islam was founded in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad; and, today, it is a diverse religion with numerous sects. But regardless of sect, the followers of Islam, known as Muslims, all pretty much hold to the five sacred pillars of faith.
The first pillar of Islam is the Affirmation of faith, known as the Shahada, which states that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. The second pillar is ritual Prayer, or Salat, which is performed five times a day facing Mecca, the home of the holiest shrine in Islam – the Kaaba. The third pillar is the paying of alms, or Zakat, which is a system of tithing. The fourth pillar is fasting, performed during the month of Ramadan. And the fifth pillar is the hajj, or the pilgrimage to the sacred Ka’aba that all able Muslims are required to embark upon this journey at least once in their lifetime in remembrance of the hegira, the flight of Muhammad to Medina.
The lesson continues simply – originating in modern day Saudi Arabia, the Muslim empire expanded rapidly throughout the Middle East and North Africa, largely by peaceful conversion. Later expansions of Islam pushed into modern day Spain, into central and south Asia, and northward as far as modern day Poland.
The primary language of Islam is Arabic. And the main religious text of Islam is the Quran, which translates as “Recite” or “Read”. Referring to the Quran as the Islamic “Bible”, the lesson naturally proceeds with the teaching that there are many traditions that Judaism, Christianity and Islam hold in common.
Generally, during the instruction, a few maps of the expanding Muslim empire are shown, and sometimes a few passages from the Quran are read and discussed. Jihad is identified in terms of an internal spiritual struggle to realize the oneness of Allah. The word “Islam” is translated as “surrender to the will of Allah”. And that is the id of it, Islam in a nutshell.
Inevitably, a few weeks later, the crusades are discussed and the teacher introduces the concept of “holy war” in terms of the campaigns waged by the Catholic Church to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims.
This tiny corpus is the limit of the average American’s knowledge of Islam…and by their mid-twenties and early thirties most Americans have forgotten this little taste of Islamic awareness in the rush to earn enough money to pay the rent, put food on the table and budget to buy soccer cleats and ballet slippers for their children.
So, on 9/11, when jihadists performed an act of war on America’s symbols of power, the average American had no idea what to think.
The question was simple that day – Why do they hate us?
When Americans learned of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s global terror threat, the journalistic community went into overdrive pulling facts and quotes from the leaders in DC. Americans wanted some sort of satisfaction. We wanted the perpetrators of the attacks to pay for their crimes. So, when President Bush announced that the suicide hijacking attacks were “acts of war” and named all terrorists of global reach and those who harbored them as the enemies of America, we all nodded our heads, united as a nation in our grievances.
Soon we learned that the Taliban in Afghanistan were harboring these terrorists. Hardly anyone knew who the Taliban were, but we knew we would strike them hard and soon…we would go to war. Of course, we had no idea what a war with these non-state actors would look like. All we knew, by and large, was that Jihad had attacked America and we were going to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s hosts in Afghanistan before they could strike again.
America’s journalists took a stroll down memory lane to the USS Cole bombing in Yemen the previous year, the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the Khobar Tower devastation in Saudi Arabia back in 1996…reports that President Clinton had launched a couple tomahawk missiles at Osama bin Laden in one of his Africa bases made sense. This was truly a died in the wool world-wide terrorist network we were facing – that much was starting to become clear as numbing video repeats of the World Trade Tower strikes brought fresh tears again and again as we connected the dots.
Fresh out of college, I considered military service and stood by my brother-in-law as he signed up for the Army…but was informed by the recruiter that the screws in my knee from an old ACL reconstructive surgery would disqualify me from service.
I listened to the debates raging on TV about whether Islam was the source of inspiration for the al Qaeda terrorists, with Western middle east experts quoting the Koran, exhorting the faith for its permissions to kill infidels wherever Muslims found them and I kept on hearing the mantra “you have to understand the context of that verse” from the Muslim defenders. So, I decided to re-read my JM Rodwell copy of the Koran to gain the context. It was frustrating to say the least, until I read Sura IV, entitled “Women”. When I came to verse 34 – it clearly stated “…and commit not suicide”. I double underlined the words of Allah and closed the text, saying to myself “Osama bin Laden is not a true Muslim.” All of the arguments of the Muslim defenders seemed to make sense. The terrorists and suicide bombers of the Islamic world were obviously “perverting Islam”.
At that point, I decided that I was not in a position to help in the fight against the terrorists and – determined to become a writer – I went about completing my personal studies on Friedrich Nietzsche, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Ayn Rand, and Albert Camus, leaving the hard work of rooting out al Qaeda styled jihadists to the military and the CIA as I studied the philosophies of rebellion. I tuned out. I did not pay attention to the buzz over Islam for the next few years. The Iraq war was unsettling to me, particularly when an attack on a Mosul mess tent in late 2004 wiped out many of my brother-in-law’s unit; but, for the most part, I continued my studies and tried to earn a living.
The July War of 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel changed everything for me. In that war, around 4,000 rockets rained down on northern Israeli settlements and farmlands over the course of 33 days. Watching the guerilla activity of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s “Party of Allah”, I was incensed by the blatant use of human shields by Hezbollah fighters and the genocidal mania displayed by Hezbollah’s katyusha rocketeers.
To my mind, the war in the Levant was a cut and dry case of pirate diplomacy gone terribly wrong, yet the world was calling on Israel to exercise restraint. My question was, “why weren’t we helping Israel?” After all, Hezbollah was identified alongside al Qaeda in the initial announcement of the global war on terror by President Bush. I was enraged by the fact that America’s leadership was not responding to the Hezbollah menace and was growing tired of the new mantras of the Muslim defenders from CAIR and MSA, who continually said “Islam is a religion of peace” and “Islam is not a monolith”. The refrains didn’t pass the sniff test for me any longer as I watched an enflamed Muslim street. Protestors of “American arrogance” and “Zionist oppression” were gathering by the thousands in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, in the West Bank and Gaza, burning Israeli and American flags, while chanting “Death to Israel! Death to America! Allahu Akbar!” I asked, “is this the face of Islamo-fascism? Are books next?”
Following the ceasefire, I embarked on a personal quest to understand the enemy the world was facing. I soon found myself reading four or five books at a time. The Islamic tradition, after all, spanned 1400 years. I did not have a teacher, so I had to follow my own questioning mind. I immersed myself into the culture, history and geographic expansion of Islam through books and magazines.
It was painful at first – the Arabic names, the dates of the battles of antiquity combined with the recent exploits and foreign roots of the political orders in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia were challenging concepts to grasp. However, in time, I would develop a level of intimacy with the religion and its multiple narratives, traditions, and modern political outcroppings.
By November of 2007, I had come to a definition of Jihad. A full year had passed in my studies. I had spent a thousand dollars on books and magazines. But for me, three books, out of the hundred or so I had poured through, summed up the reality that Jihad was “an ideological nexus of deceit” made up of five key components. The five components of Jihad are – (1) Fatah, (2) Dawa, (3) Loyalty and Enmity, (4) Jahaliya, and (5) Abrogation.
At the time, I did not realize that this definition of Jihad was a quantum leap in thought in the arena of contemporary jihadism studies. Hundreds of books dedicated to unveiling the jihad menace were pouring onto the library and bookstore shelves, yet no one in the expert community was putting the pieces together. Experts from near and far were declaring that America needed to understand the ideology of Jihad, but no one was putting the planks of the doctrines into any sort of intelligible order for the average man on the street.
Future Jihad by Walid Phares expounded on the concept of Fatah in a remarkably clear discussion of Islamic conquest. The world was divided, according to Fatah logic, into Dar al Islam (the house of Islam) and Dar al Harb (the house of war). The borderland between the two houses, according to the tenet was called the Fatah or “the opening”. Considered divinely ordained, the expansionist conquerors of Islamic history were merely following the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the rightly guided caliphs that built the golden age of Islam as they waged Jihad on the kafir, the infidel. “In this frame,” I wondered, “was the Palestinian terror group known as Fatah named for its geographic locale between the land of the Arabs and the land of the Jews?”
Hamas by Matthew Levitt discussed the power of Dawa in the process of indoctrination and radicalization. Dawa, the call of Islam, and the propagation of the Islamic faith through charitable, political, and ultimately violent means is placed into a Palestinian terror setting by Levitt’s text. By delivering social services in areas of the world where governments do not hold the capacity to provide basic services to the poor, Dawa is the ultimate grassroots formula for radicalizing Muslims toward an ideal Islamic state. My reading of Hamas coincided with the Holy Land Foundation trials in Texas. As the guilty verdicts were laid down by the court, it was obvious that Islamic charities in America were funding Jihad. My question was simple, “How does the money make it into the hands of suicide bombers and jihadist terror organizations?”
The Al Qaeda Reader by Raymond Ibrahim discussed Loyalty and Enmity, Jahaliya, and Abrogation through a sharp focus on al Qaeda’s own words – primarily those of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Following a year of studying Islam, Jihad, al Qaeda and Hezbollah, upon reading Ibrahim’s book, I wrote a review that was published by The American Thinker. Though I had blogged and written journals on the topic of Islam, I consider this my first published effort.
Simply put, Loyalty and Enmity describes the relationship ordained by Allah between the believer and the infidel – a relationship in which the hatred of any infidelity toward Allah’s laws drives Muslims to separate themselves from the society of unbelievers that they might remain true to the umma, the Muslim peoples, and the truth laid down by the Prophet in the Quran.
Jahaliya takes this identity separatism to a pure movement towards Islamic Supremacy by identifying all laws and borders and thought that came before the establishment of Muhammad’s Quran as belonging to an age of ignorance. According to jahaliya teachings, true knowledge and justice were only possible through the revelations of the seal of the prophets, Muhammad. All political organizations such as democracy were instituted by man and represented a blasphemous infidelity to the Sharia – the law of Islam.
Abrogation, through the eyes of al Qaeda’s ideologues, was a concept that clarified the context of Jihad and martyrdom (suicide) operations. Abrogation states that when one concept discussed by Prophet Muhammad held two conflicting conclusions, the final teaching of the Prophet would prevail on the issue. Western scholars have taken this to mean that the suras in the Koran that were recited in Medina took precedence over the more peaceful Meccan suras when interpreting Sharia Law and Jihad’s proper application in modernity. In other words, the Medinan Suras of the Koran, which were focused on the establishment of a just political order and the overthrow of the Meccan elite, held the true jihad teachings of Muhammad as compared to the early teachings of Muhammad in the initial start-up of the faith in Mecca.
At this point in my studies, I turned back to sura IV, entitled “Women”, to determine if the injunction against committing suicide was a Meccan teaching. The JM Rodwell edition did not have notations on the locations of the revelations; however, the Pickthall translation and the Maulana Muhammad Ali translations both identified the Sura as one revealed at Medina. Moreover, the translations were different – and verse 34 was found in both as verse 29.
Instead of ordaining Muslims not to commit suicide, the Pickthall translation said simply “…and kill not one another.” The Ali translation was “…and kill not your people”; however, the Ali footnotes described how the phraseology could be construed to mean not to kill each other in one sense and not to commit suicide in another sense. So, here was a teaching at Medina, which could be construed as a denunciation of suicide. I immediately delved for context and soon recognized that the chapter was laid down around the battle of Uhud, which was the second battle between the Muslims and Meccan elite, and the battle occurred around the 3rd year after the Hegira or year 3 AH in the Islamic calendar. So my natural question was, “were Muhammad’s teachings about suicide and martyrdom consistent in his final years of revelation at Medina?”
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a chronological Koran, so Westerners who did not read and understand what are known as the Hadith traditions were not in a position to understand the ijma, or the consensus of the jurists of Islamic figh, simply by reading the Koran. Worse, depending on the Islamic school of thought you were studying, the Hadith traditions, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, were broken up into differing categories of authenticity and validity. Context was everything in this regard and context was nowhere to be found for the non-Arabic speaking Westerner, unless he turned to the Sira, or the biography, of the Prophet Muhammad.
To this end, I had already picked up Muhammad the Prophet by Maulana Muhammad Ali, In the Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan, The Truth About Muhammad by Robert Spencer, and Muhammad by Yahiya Emerick. Upon completing my study of these texts by September of 2007, I quickly recognized that the capture of Mecca and a series of battles that led up to the capture of the Kaaba, including the failed “siege of Taif” which followed the fall of Mecca, pretty much closed out the exploits and teachings of the Prophet. Logically, then, Muhammad’s final teachings on Jihad would be found in the literature surrounding these battles.
Raymond Ibrahim’s Al Qaeda Reader pointed out that Ayman al-Zawahiri’s treatise “Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents” discusses martyrdom. And while the justification of suicide operations in jihad figured prominently, what caught my eye more than any other passage was Zawahiri’s reference to the Taif tradition in which Muhammad ordered the use of catapults to attack the walled city. Many traditions of the siege of Taif exist, but what is certain is that after his forces were picked off by Taif archers for a couple weeks, Muhammad ordered catapults brought to the walls of the town. Boiling pots, incendiaries and stones were mounted in the catapults and Muhammad gave the order to launch. His Muslim followers balked at the order in fear of Allah, saying that Muslim prisoners, women, children and innocent elders were on the other side of the wall and to launch the unguided projectiles without knowing where they would land would mean inadvertently transgressing against the word of Allah, which expressly ordained Muslims not to kill other Muslims and not to kill innocents. To this, Muhammad chided his soldiers and said that Jihad could not be stopped because martyrs would be created and infidels would be killed.
In terms of abrogation, this siege occurred some five years after the injunction at Uhud against committing suicide. My mind immediately compared the siege of Taif to the Hezbollah strikes on Israel in 2006. Just as Muhammad’s drive to wage Jihad led to the launching of unguided projectiles over the walls of Taif, Hezbollah’s drive to wage Jihad led to the launch of unguided katyusha rockets in Nasrallah’s genocidal siege of Israel. Not only did a religious justification exist, an exact parallel existed. The context was striking.
Moreover, in Ibrahim’s Reader a number of Hadith traditions and interpretations were brought to light by al Zawahiri on the nature of suicide upon which martyrdom is permissible so long as it comes “by way of empowering the call [to Islam] and placing people in the religion of Allah Supreme.” Al Zawahiri continues “The way to spread Islam and emulate the messengers [of Allah] is through patience against adversity, firmness in truth, and boldness with the truth in the face of kings, tyrants, and oppressors – even if this leads to death. This is the way of the believers, when they are in a weakened position.”
Again, the call of Islam is known as Dawa. So, when al Zawahiri states that “Whenever they are able…believers are to enjoin good and forbid evil – which, by nature, is Jihad in the path of Allah and spreading the call to the Most High…” he is referring to the spreading of Dawa through martyrdom from a weakened position. In this regard, the al Qaeda interpretation of “a weakened position” resides as their ultimate religious justification for the 9/11 attacks.
Al Zawahiri’s conclusion on the suicide strikes on America is summed up well in the following passage regarding the bombarding of the infidel: “…when Muslims are defending their religion and their sanctities, and the infidels are surrounding them from every corner, and instead they are the ones who are seeking them out and pursuing them, and whenever they overcome, they torture and murder the Muslims; or when the infidels settle in the lands of Islam trying to impose infidelity by the power of the sword, making Muslims embrace their laws after first forfeiting the sharia of Allah – in these situations it becomes a binding obligation on every Muslim to fight them any way he can. He should never abandon the obligatory duty because some Muslims might be killed mistakenly, not intentionally. Whoever does die is in the hands of Allah, and we trust that he is a martyr.”
Al Zawahiri then immediately shifts gears to the siege of Taif and quotes Ibn Taymiya, the sheikh of Islam, as saying “Based on the consensus of the ulema, those Muslims who are accidentally killed are martyrs, and the obligatory jihad should never be abandoned because it creates martyrs.” Al Qaeda’s ideologue then concedes that it is this view that the jihadists hold to, stating unequivocally that “Bombarding the organizations of the infidels and apostates in this day and age has become an imperative of jihad in our war with idolatrous tyrants, where weakened mujahidin battle massive and vigilant armies armed to the teeth. It has become next to impossible to confront them in open warfare.”
Returning again to Ibn Taymiya, al Zawahiri quotes him as saying, “Defensive warfare is the most critical form of warfare, [since we are] warding off an invader from [our] sanctities and religion. It is a unanimously accepted duty. After belief, there is no greater duty than to repulse the invading enemy who corrupts our faith and the world. There are no rules or conditions for this; he must be expelled by all possible means. Our learned ulema and others have all agreed to this. It is imperative to distinguish between repulsing the invading, oppressive infidel [Defensive Jihad] and pursuing him in his own lands [Offensive Jihad].”
Reckoning with the rationale of America’s 9/11 offenders by weighing their own words revealed four primary realities to this student of Islam and Jihad. First, suicide in Islam, according to al Qaeda, is permissible so long as it is pursued from a position of weakness and in the name of empowering the Dawa. Second, al Qaeda viewed the attacks on America to be an act of “Defensive Jihad” in the face of an invading infidel force that was imposing oppressive laws that forced Muslims to forfeit the “sharia”. Third, the “ulema”, the highest body of Islamic teachers, hold it as a consensus that defensive jihad ranks second only to faith in Islamic obligation. And fourth, ibn Taymiya was the primary source of justification for al Qaeda’s jihadi terror.
The process of expelling the oppressive infidel army from Muslim lands, in full, then, had no rules or conditions – all possible means, including suicide, were not only justified from a position of weakness, but were, at times, required and obligatory according to al Qaeda’s rendering of Islam.
A whole host of natural questions flow forth from this quick rundown. Who are the ulema? What is the difference between defensive and offensive jihad? How could al Qaeda claim to be fighting against an oppressive infidel army on 9/11, when civilians were targeted and considering America’s military was not in Afghanistan where al Qaeda found harbor? Who was ibn Taymiya? What is sharia? But, most importantly, how do purportedly “moderate” Muslims reconcile this al Qaeda rationale with less militant interpretations of Islam?
Now, while it doesn’t fall into the purview of this introductory discussion on Jihad to answer all of these questions, it is necessary to follow the concept of abrogation to the moderate interpretation of jihad. According to certain traditions, Taif was not the final testament of Muhammad on jihad. The conquest of Mecca and the siege of Taif led to the eventual conversion of the entirety of the Arabian peninsula. According to Islamic tradition, the same year, a Byzantine force of upwards of 100,000 men was rumored to be threatening invasion of Muslim lands. At this point, Muhammad raised some 30,000 Muslim warriors to ride North to meet the Byzantine threat at a place called Tabuk. The Byzantine army never showed and after scouting the territory and finding no invading force to repel, Muhammad turned his warriors back to Medina. On the journey back to his seat of power, Muhammad was reported by one account to have said, “we have returned from the lesser jihad (jihad al-asqhar) to the greater jihad (jihad al-akbar). By this, Islamic theologians claim that Muhammad was differentiating between militant jihad, the lesser jihad, and the internal striving on the path of Allah, the greater jihad.
Sufi mysticism has drawn heavily from this tradition; however, the Hadith rendering is not drawn from the main line accepted authentic traditions. In other words, the tale is considered a spurious report by many within the Islamic faith. Thus, the claim of the Sufi mystics and the supposed modern moderates of Islam to be deciphering the term jihad as an internal “struggle” or “striving” toward the oneness of Allah is not based on the Koran, and it is not based on the unanimously accepted teachings of the faith.
Western educators, in their politically correct desire to paint Islam as a “religion of peace”, then, have taken the concept of jihad and twisted it to ends which are not only disputed, but also sit at the heart of the faith’s internal sectarian schisms and interpretations. This gross glossing has left Western students from the Atlantic to the Pacific, for the last three or four decades, intellectually unarmed as to both the serious nature of jihad as a pillar of the Islamic faith and the epic nature of the Islamic culture’s written record of imperial and caliphal expansion by the sword.
It is well documented that Muhammad defined warfare as “deception”, “deceit” or “trickery”, depending on which translator is chronicling his story. And as Bernard Lewis notes in his 1988 book The Language of Political Islam, while some classical theologians argued that “jihad should be understood in a moral and spiritual, rather than military, sense…. The overwhelming majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionists…understood the obligation of jihad in a military sense, and have examined and expounded it accordingly.”
Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find the following teaching of Bernard Lewis in a modern day Western school: “The basis of the obligation of jihad is the universality of the Muslim revelation. [Allah’s] word and [Allah’s] message are for all mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to strive (jahada) unceasingly to convert or at least to subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state.”
OK. I am sure that was a lot to take in for the first lesson on jihad. I have done my best to try to keep the discussion brief. We have discussed Jihad in terms of defensive and offensive, lesser and greater, militant and moderate. There are multiple topics, such as taqiya, takfirism, dhimmitude, slavery, and human rights that I look forward to discussing in time. The Sunni-Shia split, the current geopolitical realities of Islamic states, and the map of Islamic Supremacy these too will figure prominently in future talks here at the Victory Institute.
But be assured, as a fan of objectivity and reason, I do not intend to drive my conclusions or thoughts down your throat as an absolute. I expect that those who are paying heed this message are all arriving at differing arcs of learning on the subjects at hand and all come from a variety of directions and points of pre-formed conclusions and opinions. I mean no offense, but if you have been offended, I give you leave to express your grievances in a thoughtful e-mail. If you have questions or wish to discuss these topics as presented, do not hesitate to contact the Victory Institute.
At the end of the day, what I do hope you take away from this discussion is a desire to read the books Future Jihad by Walid Phares, Hamas by Matthew Levitt, and The Al Qaeda Reader by Raymond Ibrahim. I also challenge you to come up with your own definition of jihad if my definition of jihad as “an ideological nexus of deceit comprised of Fatah, Dawa, Loyalty and Enmity, Jahaliya and Abrogation” does not answer your internal quest for truth. But realize, this definition is only a launching point for further inquiry.
In my next discussion, I will discuss the Sheikh of Islam, ibn Taymiya, and the nature of Jihad’s indoctrinating trigger. The question I will tilt at will be “Is Jihad a political or an ethical animal?”
And with that, I bid you good day and thanks for your attention to the International Security Affairs desk here at the Victory Institute.
This piece was published in the Oct. 15, 2010 edition of Liberty & Security Journal. View the digital version or subscribe to the print version.
