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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam's religious history is inseparable from its conquests -- which is why the concept of holy war lives on today.
Oct 11, 2001 | On Sept. 9, I was giving an introductory lecture to my Religion 203 weekend seminar at Iona College. I began as usual with some definitions of some commonly heard terms used in the study of religion. As an example on the term "fundamentalism," I wrote the word "jihad" on the board. I explained that the word could be interpreted as "religious war," but that it was perhaps more accurately translated as "struggle," meaning simply that Muslims were encouraged to struggle for their religion.
"Only an Islamic fundamentalist would interpret it as a rationalization for physical violence," I continued. "The vast majority of Muslims define jihad as the jihad al'akbar, or the greater warfare, meaning to wage war against human ignorance and cruelty."
The entire class wrote what I had said down in their notebooks. Nobody asked any questions.
Two days later, I witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. I was unlucky enough to see it happen from the rooftop of my apartment in Brooklyn. It was my day off from teaching and I had just got out of bed. My Russian neighbor knocked on my door to tell me that there had been an accident in Manhattan and that I should take a look from my roof. So I invited her in and we climbed through the roof from where I had a picture-perfect view of the south tip of Manhattan. It did not seem that bad when I first saw it. An accident, I assumed -- bad, yes, catastrophic, no.
"Was the pilot drunk?" my neighbor, Olga, laughed.
I laughed too. "He must have been," I agreed.
"Look," I said, "here comes another one."
"He must be drunk too."
It looked green to me -- although I am told now that it was blue, a blue United 767. The morning light played tricks on me and it looked a dark shade of green. It flew over Staten Island and New York Harbor. It looked like it was going to fly up the Hudson River.
I do not need to say anymore about what happened next. We have all seen the pictures. The smoke, the chaos and the unimaginable cruelty of the events are the closest I have ever come or want to come to having an apocalyptic vision. I did not believe it had happened, even when I saw the fireball bulging out from the tower. The pandemonium approached the surreal when charred office memos from the towers floated over the East River and landed on my roof. It was letterhead from a company called Marsh, 1 World Trade Center, 98th floor. I looked at it in tears and considered that it might have been in the hands of a secretary in the towers just moments before.
Oddly, my neighbors and I decided that the only reasonable immediate response to the attack was to go shopping for food. In retrospect, the idea seems somewhat inane. At the time, however, information was scarce and we did not know what was going to happen. Whatever it was, we were not going to experience it on an empty stomach. We were not alone. Our local bodega was jammed.
Several weeks later, when I met my class again, there were many questions about jihad. And not only among my students but also in my own mind. Since the attacks, great care has been taken to emphasize that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida terrorist network do not represent Islam or the concept of jihad as presented in the Quran. Everybody certainly wishes that this were true, that Islam is a religion of peace, as the president said, and that the bin Ladens of the world are nothing more than aberrations in the history of religion.
This is the viewpoint of James Reston, author of "Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade." During a recent interview on NPR, Reston likened bin Laden and his terrorists to the cult of the Assassins, a medieval group of Islamic heretics who used assassination to intimidate adversaries. "Bin Laden no more represents Islam than [Jim] Jones and David Koresh represent Christianity," he said.
Other scholars and writers, both Western and Islamic, have endorsed the same position repeatedly in the press over the last months. They are challenged by the messages of the terrorists themselves who cite the Quran with as much familiarity as any academic does and who have a vastly different interpretation.
Yet, when asked about the origin of jihad as expressed in the Quran, Reston and the others get a bit tongue-tied. There are several reasons for this. The Quran is a notoriously difficult text to understand in some ways. For one thing, it lacks almost any sense of context: Verses are addressed to mysterious Yous and Theys from an equally mysterious We. Moreover, the subject of the verses follow no discernible pattern, moving from questions of jurisprudence to theological and mythological concerns and back again, sometimes without any apparent pattern. For this reason, the Quran has inspired an extensive body of exegetical texts that purport to explain the original meaning of the text. Nevertheless, untangling the original meaning, or creating a distinct context in which to interpret the verses, is a nightmarish problem.
Thus the question of what the Quran has to say about jihad, or any other subject, is exceedingly difficult. As could be expected from a document that arises in an environment of unceasing internecine warfare, as the Arabian Peninsula was in the seventh century, the Quran contains no argument for pacifism. To the contrary, it makes conflict a requirement of the new faith. "Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it" (2:216). Those who remain at home during wartime are repeatedly denigrated as shirkers (e.g., 9:37) and warned that hellfire is hotter than the heat of battle (e.g., 9:81).
