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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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The Doctrine of Jihad - Holy War in Islam
Hank Roth
Jihad is a fundamental tenet in Islam.
Reform is an idea which is attractive to many Muslims who have lived in
the West but it remains out-of-reach to most Muslims because of cultural
incompatibility and even where there is a flirtation with progressive
ideas they are generally anti-Zionist and the trends at accommodation with
Western ideas are marginal, if at all.
Most of the progressives which come out of the Islamic culture do so by
their rejection of Islam; like the well-known Ibn Warraq - who is a former
Muslim and has criticized Islam in his books, including one of the
most definitive critiques, Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995).
To remain a Muslim, one must also follow the general precepts of Jihadism.
Jihad is a Islamic collective religious duty which binds the entire/all of
the Muslim community and each individual in the Islamic community.
A jihad was being declared against the West even before the U.S. attacked
Iraq. "In Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer has documented many of
the calls by Muslims for a general jihad, issued in the Arab countries,
Europe, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, before the operations in
Iraq." (Bat Ye'or, Eurabia, The Euro-Arab Axis, 2006)
It is important to point out that Islamic jihad was not a response to the
Christian Crusades. Jihad is an ideology which was practiced as
Bat Ye'or has written, "was unremittingly active in Asia, Africa, and
Europe FOUR CENTURIES BEFORE THE CRUSADES. Beginning early in the eight
century, a formal set of rules ot govern relationships between Muslims and
non-Muslims was elaborated, based upon Islamic conquests, practice,
theology, and jurisprudence. This theological-juridical conception is
called jihad....Living during and after the great wave of Arab-Muslim
expansion over the mainly Christian lands they had conquered, they built
their theory of jihad on their interpretations of the Qur'an and the
hadith (the words and acts attributed to the prophet Muhammad). Their
elaboration of the concept and doctrine of jihad established the
relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in terms of belligerency,
temporary armistices, and submission..."
Bat Ye'or, a pioneer researcher on dhimmitude, writes:
"The universality of jihad was proclaimed from the beginnings of Islam.
Jihad has been ordered not only against specific groups or for specific
times, but, like Muhammad's mission (Qur'an 34:28), it is a universal
injunction that will endure until the only religion remaining is that of
Allah (Qur'an 2:189). This ongoing striving `in the path of Allah'
triggers the process that Huntington has called `Islam's bloody borders';
that is, Islam's continuous expansion through attacks on its neighbors, in
accord with the Qur'an's command to `fight the unbelievers who gird you
about' (9:124)."
Professor Hugh Fitzgerald has also written critically and extensively
about Islam, especially since 9/11. In Islam for Infidels (Part 2), he
writes:
"....There are allusions to "fundamentalist Muslims" and, of course, to
"moderate Muslims," but no discussions of what these terms mean...."
He writes:
"The Jihad that promoted and justified the conquest of vast territories
in early Islam and subsequently led to the subjugation, by the Muslim
Arab conquerors, of far more numerous, settled, and advanced
populations of non-Muslims."
And the reason why Western journalists have stayed away from this topic of
jihad and of "moderate versus fundamentalist" Mulims is because in some
countries, in the West, doing so; that is, being severely critical of
Islam can get them arrested - but being critical of Islam in Islamic
countries can get them dead. And also because it is not socially approved
(politically correct) to do so but most of all because economically it is
not a good idea to piss off those you want to do business with.
The Qur'an, which provides the guidance, the sense of purpose and most
importantly the theology of conquest, is the constitution of Islam. It is
followed fastidiously and to the letter. Jihad, which is a "holy war" is
advocated, and the truth is irrelevant to achieving the objective of
Islamization of everyone on the planet. Jihad is central to Islam. And if
they can't be conquered and converted they will be killed.
About Israel and Muslims, Professor Fitzgerald wrote:
"The Arab-Israeli dispute, a topic obsessively discussed on every
conceivable news program and guaranteed to receive sinisterly
hypertrophied coverage around the world, is raised on every occasion by
every Arab or Muslim spokesman whatever the ostensible matter at hand, and
always discussed as if it had nothing to do with the promptings, or
teachings, of Islam. But surely, in the Middle East, among Arabs who are
almost entirely Muslims, the main subject to be analyzed is Islam. What
does it teach? What are Muslims taught to think? Would it not be useful
for listeners and readers, to come to understand that in Islam, no Infidel
state, whatever its dimensions, can be permitted, for that would violate
the essence of Islam. Islam, said Muhammad, is to dominate and not to be
dominated. No land once part of dar al-Islam can ever fall under Infidel
control again. The whole world belongs to Allah, and to his people, the
Believers, but pride of place must go to the territories once conquered by
the forces of Islam. The land on which Israel now sits, and other lands,
including the Balkans, much of south-central Europe, much of Russia, most
of India, and of course Spain, were once all part of dar al-Islam, and
must be returned to it. But Israel, an Infidel sovereign state run by the
despised Jews, and sitting smack in the middle of dar al-Islam, is
particularly disturbing. If it remains a sovereign state, not only is land
once Muslim not yet regained (as the whole world will eventually be either
regained, or gained, for Islam), but the non-Muslims in it will not be
living as dhimmis, subject to Muslim rule, and owing whatever rights they
have to Muslims. And this is impossible under Islam. Infidels can be
permitted to exist only as dhimmis, and in such a non-Muslim state as
Israel they would no longer be dhimmis."
(See dhimmitude discussed elsewhere in
http://pnews.org/archives/)
"If the Islamic basis for Arab opposition to Israel were understood, then
much that is otherwise undiscussed because it cannot be understood, and
confuses and un settles commentators with prefabricated and fixed
narratives, would become clear. The hostility to Jews by the Arabs existed
long before the state of Israel was declared. The Jews of Mandatory
Palestine did not follow the script the Arabs both expected and demanded,
and failed to recite their traditional lines as dhimmis, submissive to,
and dependent on, Muslims in a world run by Muslims."
Israel is an Affront to Islam - Why it Cannot Stand:
A state of war will always exist between Israel and Muslims - just as it
will between Islamists and all non-believers. It will exist because Israel
is like having pork served to Jews on Passover. Israel is a non-Muslim
presence in dar al-Islam, the land of Islam. Fitzgerald says,
"Israel possessed land that was supposed to remain Muslim land. Between
dar al-Islam and dar al-harb a state of war exists until the final spread
of Islam across the globe. In Israels' case, it is irrelevant what its
borders are; if it exists, it remains an affront, an outrage, a
catastrophe, the greatest injustice in the history of the world (as Arab
spokesmen routinely say). The very phrase a final peace settlement rings
hollow to anyone familiar with the tenets of Islam. For there can be no
final peace settlement between Muslims and non-Muslims, anywhere. The
model for treaties between them is the agreement made between Muhammad and
the Meccans in 628 A.D., the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya. It was supposed to
be a truce treaty that would last 10 years. It lasted scarcely 18 months,
when Muhammad, feeling that his forces had grown sufficiently, breached
the agreement on a pretext, and attacked the Meccans. As Majid Khadduri
notes in War and Peace in Islam, this Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya became the
model, and basis, for all future treaties with Infidel peoples and
polities."
Hank Roth
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