Islām and war

The Prophet Muhammad ascending to Heaven

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has an article available online (they keep them online for a few weeks) by Malise Ruthven, How to Understand Islam 11/08/07 issue. It has some worthwhile thoughts on the Islāmic religious doctrines on war. It also has several quotes from Hans Küng's excellent book Islam: Past, Present and Future, one of the volumes he's reviewing. (Küng is my own favorite contemporary theologian.)

But there are some definitely problematic things about Ruthven's argument, too.

On the useful side, he gives the following description of the concept of sharia, or Islāmic law.

The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad — independent reasoning — in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As [John] Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

Ruthven's focus is not on Islāmic law as such, but his article is valuable background not only on the way Muslims think about just war issues as well as on sharia more generally. Sharia is not a single body of jurisprudence in the Anglo-American or European Continental sense. There are four major schools of Sunni sharia, called the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbalite schools.

There are also two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs, compared to the Sunni schools of sharia. (I posted on sharia at more length in Varieties of Islāmic law 03/19/06).

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

(For more on the that trio Mawlānā Abu'l-A‛la Mawdūdī, Hasan al-Bannā and Sayyid Qutb see my posts Sayyid Qutb 09/06/04 and Intellectual godfathers of jihadism 03/22/05.)

On the negative side, Ruthven argues - or rather implies fairly disingenuously - that the 9/11, London and Madrid bombings were somehow a direct application of Islāmic principles:

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle - his "just war" - against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics - will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" - their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. (my emphasis)

But the argument he makes doesn't begin to carry the weight of such a charge. Most people in the world recognize some form of the just war, and at least a lot of us apply some kind of religious viewpoint to making judgments on whether a war is just. The question of whether the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" has been a basic part of the Christian doctrine of the Just War for centuries, at least since the days of St. Augustine, i.e., since the end of the Roman Empire.

That's in itself isn't necessarily a persuasive argument of its value, given the bloody history of the Christian world. But you have to be a person like say, Dick Cheney to not try to make some kind of judgment whether "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good", especially when you're talking about war and killing.

I'm not making any judgment on whether Sheikh al-Azhar's statement against terrorism is totally satisfactory. I'm just saying that Ruthven's argument is exceptionally weak. More specifically, he makes a very broad generalization about "official Islamic authorities" that he doesn't really support in his article.

This has been a big failing on the part of Western critics and scholars, especially the neoconservatives, is that they denounce Islāmic religious leaders for not speaking out enough against terrorism. And then when they do speak out against it in the name of Islām, there's just dissed, as Ruthven does in that paragraph.

I also notice that these mostly unidentified "official Islamic authorities" fail in Ruthven's eyes because they "usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy". Just what does that mean? That they see Al Qa'ida as a legitimate political authority? To say that is a stretch would be to understate how off the charts it is. Whatever the problems within the Islmaic religion, the "official Islamic authorities" conferring political legitimacy on Al Qa'ida is not one of them.

In making this argument, he smoothes over the degree of radical departure from Sunni Islām by thinkers like Qutb. Qutb is a strong influence over jihadist thought. His brother, who shared much of his outlook, was actually one of Osama bin Laden's teachers in the university. The other fundamentalist founding fathers that he mentions, Mawdūdī and Hasan al-Bannā did not go nearly so far as Qutb. (All of those three were Sunnis.)

One of the key elements of Qutb's contribution to the jihadist ideology practiced by violent Salafist groups like Al Qa'ida was the notion that even Sunni Muslims who didn't share the particular, eccentric brand of Islam are not real Muslims and therefore they can be regarded as legitimate targets for killing.

Ruthven cites Muhammad's struggles with the pagan Quraysh tribe dominant in Mecca, which is certainly important to examine in this context, because Muhammad and his four immediate successors as caliph (they are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided caliphs") are taken as especially important models for right practice and interpreting the Qu'ran, including on matters of war.

But Muhammad sought to convert the Quraysh in Mecca, not to kill them. The Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh of Medina did have battles. But in the end, Muhammad negotiated a peace with the Quaraysh. When Muhammad's fighters took Mecca, it was through a peace agreement, not by fighting their way into the city or laying seige to it. How blowing up commuters in Madrid is any kind of obvious application of the lessons of the Prophet's dealings with the Quraysh escapes me.

As Karen Armstrong describes in Islam (2000), the peace treaty that the Prophet made with the Quraysh of Mecca was unpopular among both the Meccans and the umma (the Muslim people, the followers of the Prophet). "Many of the Muslims were eager for action," she writes, "and that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammand was determined to achieve victory by peaceful means."

It's worth noting the intellectual figures of the 19th century that Ruthven cites as hopeful directions in Islamic theology:

The intellectual groundwork for change has been laid in the works of modernist reformers who have been revisiting the sources of Islam for more than a century. They include Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) and Syed Ameer Ali (1848–1928) in India and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), the influential chief jurist of Egypt. The problems do not lie in the realm of theology, where Muslim intellectuals have charted retreats from the received certainties of the medieval paradigm that are just as ingenious and (for true believers) just as plausible as the efforts of Western theologians. The obstacle lies rather in the absence, in the majority traditions, of structures of leadership through which reformist ideas can be effected at the popular level.

But why he couldn't have given more emphasis there to some contemporary examples of reformist Islāmic theologians like Adkolkarim Soroush or Mohammed Arkoun, I don't know. He does mention Arkoun in connction with Hans Küng's comments on historical-critical analysis of the Qu'ran.

A strange article, all things considered.

Tags: hasan al-banna, islam, islamic law, mawdudi, sayyid qutb, sharia

Sayyid Qutb

This post is about Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist who is considered a major influence on today's Islamic extremism. Since most of the sources I've used are not online, I've listed them at the end and refer to them by number in the text.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologist and leader, who is considered a key intellectual figure for present-day Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda. But his influence extends to Islamists who do not share the terrorist approach of Al Qaeda, as well. Rohan Gunaratna calls Qutb "the leading ideologue of Egyptian fundamentalists" and a "pioneer" of "the Islamist revival in the Middle East." (2) Karen Armstrong has written:

Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili [barbaric] ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. (4)

Qutb provided a religious justification for fighting against Muslim rulers and for considering Muslims who didn't share the radical goals of the Islamists as not being true Muslims. He took the idea of "jahiliyya" and gave it a new meaning. For most Muslims, jahiliyya refers to the society in Arabia before the Prophet's revelation, a time of ignorance of God's true religion. Gilles Kepel suggests that "barbarism" may be the closest translation. (6)

Qutb was a journalist who also wrote essays and novels. Up until 1945, his interests were mainly literary. When he first started writing political pieces, he wound up having to leave Egypt in 1948 to avoid arrest by the royalist government, though his political friends arranged for him to do so on the government's dime. He came to live in the United States, an experience which he found quite unpleasant. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1951, he was ready to join up with the fundamentalist ("Islamist") Muslim Brotherhood.

It's interesting to speculate in what ways his encounter with America as such shaped his views, as opposed to the experience of effectively being exiled and taken away from his regular community and his country under those circumstances. John Voll suggests that Qutb's hostility to the West had been influenced by British behavior in Egypt during the Second World War and by what he saw as Anglo-American encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. Voll sees Qutb's stay in America as having reinforced those ideas:

He found Americans to be materialistic and lacking in spiritual values and was disturbed by the popular and media support in the United States for the nascent state of Israel. After his return to Egypt, he wrote that in the United States, "any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed and any human element other than ego is not recognized. Where the whole life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production. The result is class struggle which becomes inevitable and visibly evident." (1)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir) seized power in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Nasser favored a much more secular approach to government than the Muslim Brotherhood sought. Qutb wound up going to prison for a three months in 1954. After Qutb's release, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Nasser in October of 1954. Qutb was rearrested, and was incarcerated in the Tura concentration camp until 1964. The experience of persecution by the Nasser regime and the conditions of the concentration camp were the context in which he prepared his most influential works, Milestones and Under the Aegis of the Koran (also in English translation as In the Shade of the Qu'ran), a long commentary on the Qu'ran.

Arrested again in 1965 in a government move against another alleged Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy, Qutb was hanged in August 1966, making him a martyr to the Islamists.

A Muslim Brother who was Qutb's cellmate in the Tura camp, Muhammad Hawwash, said that Joseph had appeared to him in a dream and gave him a message: "Tell Sayyid Qutb that in my sura he will find what he seeks." (6)

Joseph's sura (# 12) in the Qu'ran relates the story of Joseph being imprisoned in Egypt after his master's wife had attempted to seduce him. There, two of his fellow prisoners related dreams to him. (In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the story is in Genesis 40.) Before interpreting their dreams, he tells them:

This knowledge my Lord has given me, for I have left the faith of those that disbelieve in Allah and deny the life to come. I follow the faith of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We must never serve idols besides Allah. Such is the fight which Allah has bestowed upon us and all mankind. Yet most men do not give thanks.

Fellow-prisoners! Are numerous gods better than Allah, the One, the Almighty? Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has reveal no sanction. Judgement rests with Allah only. He has commanded you to worship none but Him. That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it. (5)

This concept of idolatry was key to Qutb's interpretation of jahiliyya. Qutb applied the term to present-day Muslim societies, including his own Epypt under the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb's most important book is Milestones (also known in English as Signposts and Signs Along the Path or Signposts Along the Road), which he wrote in the Tura camp and was published in 1964. In it, he wrote: "Nowadays, the entire world lives in a state of jahiliyya as far as the source from which it draws the rules of its mode of existence is concerned." (6) This allowed Qutb and his followers to view Muslim societies and Muslim leaders as enemies of Islam and enemies of God.

Qutb also emphasized that in struggling against the jahiliyya, no doubt having in mind in particular the repressive Nasser regime, true Muslims must not restrict themselves to jihad in only the sense of internal struggle or of defensive war. Instead, they must be prepared to propagate true Islam by "the sword" as well as by "the Book." The "jahiliyya regime" of Nasser, writes Kepel interpreting Qutb, "had to be fought in the way pagans were fought."

Qutb stressed that true Islamic faith must be expressed in action against the jahiliyya rulers.

The notion of idolatry was at the core of Qutb's new definition of jahiliyya. Those thought of themselves as Muslims had actually made gods of other things besides God himself. One of those idols is the concept of national sovereignty:

The principle on which [jahiliyya] is based is opposition to God's rule over the earth and to the major characteristic of the Divinity, namely sovereignty (al-hakimiyya): instead it invests men with this, and makes some of them gods for the others. This transference of sovereignty does not occur in the primitive manner of the pre-hegira jahiliyya [of Mohammad's time], but by allowing man to unduly arrogate to himself the right to establish values, to legislate, to elaborate systems, and to take positions, all without regard to divine ethics (minhaj allah lil-hayah), but rather in accordance with what He has expressly forbidden! Now, to oppose the rule of God in this way is to be the enemy of His faithful.

The degradation of man in general in the collectivists regimes [including Nasser's], the injustice suffered by the individuals and people dominated by capital and colonialism, are only the effects of this opposition to the rule of God, the negation of the dignity that God bestowed upon man! (6)

Earlier Islamists had considered Communist, democratic-capitalist and other non-Muslim societies to be jahiliyya, but Qutb's innovation was to place Muslim societies in that category as well.

Qutb argued that a vanguard of the ummah (Muslim society) must lead the drive for a truly Muslim form of rule. The vanguard must purge itself of idolatrous influences by returning to the true faith of the first Muslims, Muhammad and the first four caliphs who succeeded him as leader of the ummah, also known as the rightly guided caliphs.

Once a vanguard has been established with a truly Islamic consciousness and truly Islamic practice, "In the meantime the battle begins between this nascent society that has declared its secession ... from jahiliyya society" and the jahiliyya society itself. and the latter..." (6)

One chapter of Milestones, that was replaced in many editions published after 1981 according to Kepel, Qutb defines jihad in his theology, insisting that jihad against the jahiliyya cannot be restricted to nonviolent measures alone:

To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to power out of the hands of those of His worshippers who have usurped it and to return it to God alone, to confer authority upon divine law (shari'at allah) alone and to eliminate the laws created by man ...all this will not be done through sermons and discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word alone, otherwise the task of His messengers would be far more easily done. (6)

John Voll summarizes the significance of Qutb's view for the Egyptian Islamist movement:

The major conceptual contribution of Qutb was to provide an intellectual and theoretical foundation for the concrete rejection of Nasserism and the other Western-based radical ideologies of his day. One could no longer simply attack the state as being a foreign puppet. Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler of the country for millennia. Egyptians had gotten what they wanted: a successful nationalist committed to social transformation. Qutb explained why true Muslims could not accept this. (1)

The "establishment" Muslim view of Sayyid Qutb, as enunciated by the authorities of Egypt's al-Azhar university, was simply that Qutb was a heretic and an agitator. But in fact, Qutb's ideas had a huge impact on the Egyptian Islamist movement, an impact which was taken in different ways by those who used his ideas.

Among the more militant strain, one of the most prominent in Egypt was the Society of Muslims, led by the agronomist Shukri Mustafa, who believed that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society in order to prepare to attack it. A more "moderate" interpretation within the Muslim Brotherhood and among other Islamists praised Qutb's ideas but had to refute parts of Qutb's Milestones.

If the concept of "moderate" Islamists seems strange, since Islamists as a group represent a "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islam, it's worth remembering that in 1997 even Al Qaeda disassociated itself, both in its pronouncements and in practice, from the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) after its repeated massacres of ordinary Muslims not associated with theAlgerian regime. GIA had also proclaimed the right to hold women captured in military actions as slaves. Al Qaeda, however, did manage to bring key operatives from GIA's European network into a new group, the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) which became part of the Al Qaeda network. (2)

One of Sayyid Qutb's most important interpreters was his own brother. Muhammed Qutb taught Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. At the university in Jeddah, he made a deep impression on one of his young students, Osama bin Laden.

In 1975, Muhammad Qutb published a piece in a journal of the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood defending Sayyid Qutb's views. He quoted the latter as having said repeatedly, "We are preachers and not judges. Our objective is not to legislate against people, but to teach them this truth: that there is no god but God. The problem is that people do not understand what this formula requires of them." (6)

Muhammad Qutb insisted that his brother's work should not be interpreted as the cult-like Society of Muslims did, to mean that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society. But he also opposed interpretations which sought to blunt the political-revolutionary implications of his brother's ideas. It's a measure of Sayyid Qutb's influence that the less militant tendencies in Egyptian Islamism, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s, still tried to interpret his ideas in ways favorable to their approach.

1. "Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" by John O. Voll in Fundamentalisms Observed (1991) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.

2. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna (2002)

3. Is This the Man Who Inspired Bin Laden? by Robert Irwin Guardian (UK) 11/01/01

4. Islam by Karen Armstrong (2000)

5. The Koran, N.J. Dawood, translator; 1974 Penguin edition

6. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh by Gilles Kepel; trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild (1985). Kepel's book uses the translation Signposts as the name for Milestones.

7. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terrorism" by Paul Berman New York Times Magazine 03/23/03

8. Sayyid Qutb's America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality NPR 05/06/03. This has more details about Qutb's stay in the US, which was mostly in the conservative town of Greeley, Colorado.

9. Truly, Madly, Deeply Devout by Jonathan Raban Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

Additional Web sites:

Young Muslims, a Canadian Islamic site with links to an English-language text of Qutb's Milestones. The NPR site above links to the Milestones text. It's perhaps a general indication of the perspective of this site that one of the two articles on Qutb currently featured on this page says that describing Muslim extremist violence as "terrorist" is the practice of the "mouthpiece of the zionist establishment in America."

The 9/11 Commission Report mentions Qutb briefly in Chapter 2. The brief analysis there is not too impressive.


Tags: islam, islamic fundamentalism, islamic law, jihadism, muslim fundamentalism, sayyid qutb, sharia