In the wake of 9/11, the Islamic concept of jihad has been described as both “holy war” and “terrorism.” In this paper, I unpack this twofold conflation within the context of a broader discussion of the problem of some Muslims’ interpretive extremism and the West’s long-standing and willful politics of misrecognition of Islam.2 This politics confuses Islam with Muslims; disregards the role of political, economic, cultural, and historical factors in shaping Muslims’ attitudes, actions, and readings of Islam; and denies western complicity in creating conducive conditions for extremism. In critiquing both Muslims and non-Muslims, the idea is to alert them to what may equally be at stake for them in the egalitarian readings of Islam.

Of Jihads and Holy Wars

Many Muslims and non-Muslims render jihad as holy war. However, when used in the Qur’an, jihad means a “striving” or “struggle,” and not war –much less a holy war – defined by propagating and/or enforcing religious beliefs.3 In fact, Islam has no scriptural sanction for holy war, unlike Judaism and Christianity (the Old Testament). Hence, using the holy war template to explain jihad obscures the specificity of Islamic, and in particular Qur’anic, formulations of jihad.

Depicting holy wars as quintessentially Islamic also ignores the historical fact that holy war is a western tradition, inasmuch as such wars were decisive in shaping Church–state relationships in medieval Europe until about the twelfth century. But from then on, this concept increasingly came to be contrasted to a “just war,” and eventually was displaced by it following the Protestant Reformation and the carnage wrought by internecine European holy wars. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans had come to regard as unjust any war fought to propagate or enforce religious beliefs, not to defend them.4

This explicit equating of religion with injustice, as well as attempts to separate religion and politics, was another result of the “Enlightenment’s prejudice against religion,” the tendency to think of religion as a “theological set of issues rather than ... a profoundly political influence,” and the belief that modernity and religion were incompatible.5 Of course one can question the validity of these assumptions – which were never universally shared – on both theoretical and historical grounds.

For instance, Muslims in general have not found it meaningful to pit faith against reason (one of the binaries underlying Enlightenment thinking) or to view religion as irrelevant to the politics of worldly life. Historically, they also did not have to contrast a holy war to a just war, because a war fought in accordance with the Qur’an’s teachings “would necessarily have to be a just war in its cause, its aim and the manner in which it is waged.”6

Since the Qur’an does not use “jihad” for war and forbids coercion in religion, such a war is not intended to enforce Islam. Therefore, rendering jihad as “holy war” is doubly misleading, since it reduces jihad to war and implies that the war is unjust because it is religious. However, since Muslims do not always observe the Qur’an’s teachings, its position on jihad must be analyzed before discussing how it has been reframed in the classical and modern doctrinal formulations.

The Qur’an and Jihad

In the Qur’an, “jihad” (and its derivatives) occurs 36 times and refers in all cases to a moral-ethical struggle, such as the jihad of the soul, the tongue, or the pen, of faith or morality, and so on. (In the Islamic tradition, when the jihad of the tongue, the heart, and the hand are taken together, they are said to constitute the “greater jihad.”) The “lesser jihad” is considered to be the jihad of arms, for which the Qur’an uses “qital [fighting] and its derivations [not jihad] for the practice of warfare.” Islamic tradition “very early associated the two concepts.”7 Thus, “jihad, as signifying the waging of war, is a post-Koranic usage”8 and must be understood in light of how Muslims interpreted the Qur’an at a particular political and historical conjuncture.

In the Qur’an, the “permission to engage in armed combat has explicit motives and is immediately limited. ... Aggression and the initiation of combat without any valid reasons are forbidden.”9 The Qur’an defines the purpose of fighting as to defend oneself, “to protect the community and to free isolated believers from persecution.”10 Several verses bear this out. For example: “Permission to fight is given to those against whom war is being wrongfully waged ... those who have been driven from their homelands against all right for no other reason than their saying, ‘Our Sustainer is God.’” Indeed, the Qur’an recognizes the right of Muslims, Christians, and Jews to resist religious persecution, since the same verse also states that if God had “not enabled people to defend themselves against one another, all monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques – in all of which God’s name is abundantly extolled – would surely have been destroyed [before] now” (22:39-40).11

Muslims also are urged to fight on behalf of those “utterly helpless men and women and children who are crying ‘O our Sustainer! Lead us forth [to freedom] out of this land whose people are oppressors, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, a protector, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, one who will bring us succor!’” (4:75).12 Although this verse poses interpretive challenges in how to define oppression and liberation, it is not an invitation to aggression. Those who read aggression into the Qur’an often point to such lines as: “fight in God’s cause ... [and] slay them wherever you may come upon them,” and “fight against them until ... all worship is devoted to God alone,” and so on. However, quoting lines and verses randomly cannot generate a con/textually accurate interpretation, for the Qur’an’s verses (and the text itself) must be read in their entirety. Thus, when we contextualize the lines quoted above, we can arrive at a radically different understanding of their meaning:

And fight in God’s cause against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression – for, verily, God does not love aggressors. And slay them wherever you may come upon them, and drive them away from wherever they drove you away – for oppression is even worse than killing. And fight not against them near the Inviolable House of Worship unless they fight against you there first: but if they fight against you, slay them: such shall be the recompense of those who deny the truth. But if they desist – behold, God is much forgiving, a dispenser of grace. Hence, fight against them until there is no more oppression and all worship is devoted to God alone: but if they desist, then all hostility shall cease, save against those who [willfully] do wrong (2:190-93).13

As I cannot give a lengthy or nuanced exegesis of these verses here, I will restrict myself to pointing out what may be obvious even on a cursory reading. The first sentence sets the framework for interpreting the injunctions that follow and categorically forbids aggression. Subsequent sentences, which have to be understood in light of this command, establish that Muslims are to fight those who wage war against them and to end hostilities if the aggression ceases.14 While some may read the “[until] all worship is devoted to God alone” to mean that Muslims must end religious differences by killing or assimilating their enemies through conversion, such a reading is not warranted for at least two reasons. First, the Qur’an forbids compulsion in religion (2:256 reminds the Prophet that his mission is to call people to Islam, not to force their compliance) and teaches that religious diversity exists because of Divine Will (I will return to this point below). Second, on both textual15 and historical grounds,16 one can read this line as referring to the Muslims’ right to worship freely.

Significantly, the Qur’an cautions against injustice even during a state of war. Thus, the verse that medieval Muslims read as summing up the ethos of Islamic rules of war instructs Muslims to “stand up firmly for God, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice” (5:8).17

Of course, one cannot acquire a comprehensive understanding of the Qur’an’s position on warfare by reading a few verses. My purpose in quoting them was to point out that one can read aggression into them only by reading them selectively and ignoring the relationship between the text and its revelation’s historical contexts. Such piecemeal, decontextualized, and ahistorical readings, which unfortunately are the norm on many issues, arise in a hermeneutics that cannot yield a holistic or a contextually or textually accurate understanding of the Qur’an’s teachings.18

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