“Never will the Jews nor the Christians be pleased with you till you follow their
religion. Say: ‘Verily, the guidance of Allah is the (only)
guidance.’ And if you were to follow their desires after what you have
received of Knowledge, then you would have against Allah neither any
protector/guardian nor any helper.”
(TMQ 2:120)
In 1857, the Muslims of India rose up and fought a jihad against their British
occupiers. They were brutally suppressed. In the reprisals that followed, the
‘civilised’ Brits stuffed pork into the
mouths of those due for execution, and sewed them into pigs’ skins. Many
were then fired live out of cannons.
A new brand of ‘scholar’ emerged after what is now referred to as
the Indian Mutiny. These mentally defeated modernists, anxious to please their
British masters, insisted that armed resistance was not justified and sought to
re-define jihad. Sir
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, knighted for saving the life of a senior
British army officer during the uprising, presented Islam as a pacifist
religion. Another loyal
subject, Maulavi
Cheragh
Ali,
wrote A Critical Exposition of the Popular “Jihad”. According to
the subtitle, the books appendices showed ‘that the word jihad does not
exegetically mean warfare.’
Egypt,
too, has had its fair share of anti-jihad modernists who wanted to reconcile
Islam with Western ways, among them the notorious freemasons Muhammad
Abduh
and Jamaluddin Afghani. The former was rewarded by
being appointed Shaykh of Al-Azhar by the British.
Anwar
Sadat,
the Egyptian President who was assassinated because he had signed the infamous Camp
David accords with Israel,
did not shy away from trying to derail the concept of jihad. In 1979, the same
year as the peace treaty, he wrote an article entitled The Greater Jihad for
the first issue of a Sufi journal. He promoted the idea that fighting against
the disbelievers is far less important than struggling against one’s own
desires.
He based
his argument on a rather weak narration, which describes struggling against the
desires as being better than fighting on the battlefield.
The narrator, Yahya ibn
al-‘Ala’,
is described by Ahmad
bin Hanbal as “a
liar and forger of ahadith”. Ibn
Hajar
Asqalani says “he was accused of forging ahadith”. Moreover, this narration contradicts the
many authentic ahadith which prove the clear
understanding of jihad.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, George
Bush
declared, “Islam is peace”.
The concept of jihad came under scrutiny and a number of apologists were
wheeled out to tell the West what they wanted to hear. One of these media
darlings, who was given “100% security
clearance” by the FBI and now advises the White House,
declared: “The Prophet said the
greatest jihad is the struggle of a man against his own evil influences.”
He also insisted in a BBC interview on October 7, the same day the attack on Afghanistan
began, that the U.S.
had “no option” but to
take military action. He maintained, “Americans
have a right to defend and pre-empt any acts of aggression against themselves,
most certainly”. Apparently, while America
is entitled to carpet bomb Afghanistan,
Muslims must focus on following the Sufi path!
On British T.V., another self-appointed ‘shaykh’
proclaimed: “Jihad is a term used in
the Qur’an for striving, not for fighting…For instance if I
actually work as a teacher, as a carpenter, as anything I am called a mujahid, I am making jihad, that is striving to serve the
community at large.”
In fact, the Shari‘ah meaning of jihad is to
exert one’s utmost effort in fighting the disbelievers for the sake of
Allah (swt), directly by fighting in the battlefield
or indirectly by helping this struggle by monetary means, scholarly verdicts,
and encouraging people to participate in the jihad. Other tasks which may be
difficult and thus involve some exertion but are not related to fighting, such
as fixing a boiler or making a chair, are not termed jihad as understood in the
Shari‘ah.
In the verses of the Qur’an and ahadith about
jihad, the expression fi sabil
illah (in the cause of Allah) is commonly used. The
following hadith clarifies what this means:
Narrated Abu Musa al-Ash’ari
(may Allah be pleased with him): A man came to the Prophet (saw) and asked, “A man fights for war booty; another fights for
fame and a third fights for showing off; which of them fights in Allah's
cause?” The Prophet (sallalahu alaihi wasallam) said, "He who fights so that Allah’s word (i.e.
Islam) should be superior fights in Allah’s cause.” (Bukhari)
After the establishment of the first Islamic state in Madina,
the Prophet (sallalahu alaihi
wasallam) strove to make Allah’s word superior
through da‘wa, and by
waging jihad when the call was rejected so as to remove the obstacles in the
way of the Islamic call. The Quraysh had to be
removed, as it was a physical barrier
between Islam and the people, who could then be invited to Islam while
witnessing the justice of its rule. This method of spreading Islam was followed
by the Muslims after the Prophet (sallalahu alaihi wassalam) - Muslims such
as Rib‘i bin ‘Amir who was sent by Umar (ra) as an emissary to the
court of the Persian general Rustum, and who
announced:
“Allah has sent us forward so that we
may liberate, whomsoever he wills, from following men (and lead them) to the
obedience of Allah, and pull them out of their narrow world into the broader
one, and from under the tyranny of (various) ways of life into the justice of
Islam.” (Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah).
Today, the whole world suffers under the unchallenged tyranny of Capitalism and
U.S.
hegemony. The rule of Islam and its propagation through da‘wa and jihad is humankind’s only hope.
Abdul Malik
World Affairs Correspondent
Kcom Journal
09 November 2001
Source: Kcom Journal
