The Gospel of Jihad

Ma’arka (The Struggle); Faza’il-Jihad (The Virtue of Jihad); Tuhfa-e-Saadat (The Gift of Virtue)
By Maulana Masood Azhar
Karachi: Idara Al-Khair, 2001 (in Urdu)
Daawat-e-Jihad (Invitation to Jihad)
By Fazal Muhammad
Karachi: Bait-ul-Jihad, 2001 (in Urdu)
Zaad-ul-Mujahid(Mujahid’s Companion)
By Abu Nauman Muhammad Saifullah
Lahore: Markaz Daawa Wal Irshad, undated (in Urdu)

Soon after overthrowing the vestiges of the Islamic Mogul dynasty in 1857, the British faced rebellion from their Muslim subjects. In the northwest frontier, including parts of present-day Afghanistan, a puritanical militant movement had fought the region’s Sikh rulers. The rise of British power simply changed the militants’ target. The movement’s founder, Sayed Ahmed, organized cells to supply the frontier movement with men and money. Calling themselves mujahideen, the movement’s followers interpreted the Islamic concept of jihad in its literal sense of holy war.

The British dubbed Ahmed’s mujahideen movement the "Wahhabi movement" because of the similarity of its ultra-orthodox beliefs with those of Muhammad ibn-Abdul Wahhab, an 18th-century religious reformer in Saudi Arabia. Ahmed’s revival of the ideology of jihad became the prototype for subsequent Islamic militant movements in South and Central Asia and is also the main influence over the jihad network of al Qaeda and its associated groups.

The recent jihad literature in Pakistan invariably draws parallels between British colonial rule in the 19th century and U.S. domination since the end of the 20th. Unlike in Ahmed’s time, today’s jihad battlefield is not limited to a single geographic area. Nor are the various mujahid cells dependent on hand-written messages delivered by couriers riding (and hiding) for thousands of miles. Modern communications facilitate jihad without frontiers. After all, the enemy is also global in reach. But despite the differences in technology, the 19th-century mujahideen remain the role model for today’s jihadis: a network aimed at waging holy war at a time when the majority of Muslims seek to synthesize their faith with modern living.

Until September 11, 2001, the present-day jihad movement had received limited attention in the West. But within the Muslim world, the literature of jihad has become a popular genre, with books distributed by Islamic publishing houses throughout Pakistan and the Middle East. The books are sold outside mosques after Friday prayers and at regular bookshops. Given the low literacy rate in Pakistan (around 40 percent of a population of 145 million), most books selling more than a few thousand copies are considered a publishing success. The readers are often young practicing Muslims who are searching for meaning in their lives and who have little to look forward to in a stagnant economy and virtually lawless society.

The books trace the history of Muslim grievances. According to this view, the world as shaped over the last two centuries is unfavorable to Muslims. Palestine has been taken over by the Zionists, Kashmir occupied by India, Chechnya devoured by Russia, and the Muslim sultanates in southern Philippines subjugated by Catholic Manila. The battle in each case, irrespective of the political issues involved, is one of Muslim against non-Muslim. And the Muslims’ disadvantage comes from their lack of effective military power vested in the hands of the righteous.

"Every Muslim must just turn to God" is the remedy for this imbalance, according to Maulana Masood Azhar, author of The Struggle and The Virtue of Jihad, in the foreword of his third book, The Gift of Virtue. Azhar was imprisoned in India for six years for his militant activities in Indian-controlled Kashmir. He was released on the demand of hijackers who diverted an Indian Airlines plane from Katmandu, Nepal, to Kandahar in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 1999. Soon after his release, he organized Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Prophet Mohammed), a group deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and, more recently, by Azhar’s native Pakistan.

Azhar wrote parts of his books in prison and partly while organizing his army after his release. As a tribute to the 19th-century Wahhabis and Ahmed, Azhar penned the preface of The Struggle in the mountainous redoubt where Ahmed died in battle. The Virtue of Jihad, whose publisher claims to have sold 20,000 copies in Pakistan, cites the Koran and hadith (sayings attributed to Prophet Mohammed) and praises those who fight in Allah’s way. The fundamental argument appears to be that puritanical Islam faces extinction at the hands of an ascendant secular culture, just as the fledgling religion was challenged by unbelievers in its earliest days during the seventh century A.D.

The Struggle is written as an invitation to young Muslims to join Jaish, complete with motivational anecdotes from the early history of Islam. For example, Azhar reminds readers of how the Battle of Badr, in A.D. 623, was won by the earliest Muslims with an ill-equipped army of 313 fighters facing Arabia’s pagan tribes numbering in the thousands. At the time of the book’s writing, there was no effort to keep Jaish covert. Pakistani authorities had looked upon Jaish as an instrument of unconventional warfare against traditional rival India. Ironically, since September 11, 2001, Azhar’s army has turned on the Pakistani authorities. One of Jaish’s top officials, British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was recently sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Classical Islamic literature on jihad is the inspiration for two other recent Pakistani books: Invitation to Jihad and Mujahid’s Companion. The author of the first, Fazal Muhammad, is a teacher at a seminary in Karachi. Writing in a classical scholarly framework, Muhammad provides a bibliography of medieval and early books on the subject. Abu Nauman Muhammad Saifullah, author of Mujahid’s Companion, teaches religion at the Center for Islamic Learning in Muridke, which is closely linked with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure). Both books reveal a mind-set that attributes the degradation of Muslims to their lack of religious purity. According to this reasoning, Islam’s earliest period was also its greatest. For Muslims to regain their ascendancy, they must adopt a lifestyle as close as possible to that of the religion’s earliest followers. "The decline of Muslims," writes Muhammad, "started with the fading of the spirit of jihad and sacrifice."

The Prophet Mohammed was forced to fight those who sought to eliminate Islam, as were his early companions. To follow their example, the authors of all five books argue that Muslims must define the contemporary detractors of Islam in similar terms and fight them in a similar manner. To the jihadis, it does not matter that the nature of relations between peoples and nations has changed over the 14 centuries since the Prophet’s era.

Indeed, Azhar’s argument for fighting India in Kashmir is rooted in the same theological arguments that Osama bin Laden has cited in his declarations of war against the United States. The Indian military’s presence in Kashmir compromises the sovereignty of Muslims in a territory over which they should actually rule, Azhar argues. Bin Laden resents the United States because its troops defile the holy land of Saudi Arabia. Azhar expresses respect for bin Laden partly because of shared beliefs and partly because bin Laden has financed jihad with his inherited wealth. For Azhar, the struggle for sovereignty is also an existential struggle for Muslims. "Submission and slavery damage our faith and religion," he writes in The Struggle. In his view, Islam risks being diluted as a system of belief unless it is politically ascendant.

The focus of all current jihadi thinking appears to be the quest for political power on behalf of puritanical Islam as defined by the jihadis themselves. The ends justify the means. Perhaps for that reason, no jihadi writers offer a convincing explanation for how terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center can be defined as jihad in religious terms.

Similar questions arose in the 19th century when the viceroy of India, Richard Southwell Bourke Mayo, asked whether Indian Muslims were compelled by their faith to rebel against British rule. A civil servant, William Wilson Hunter, answered the question in the 1871 book The Indian Musalmans. Hunter found that the conception of Muslims as a conquering rather than a conquered people left open the possibility for disloyalty to the empire. But he also found that "the law and the prophets can be utilized on the side of loyalty."

The British approached the Muslim muftis of the time and found that the majority were quite happy to coexist with the Raj. "The Musalmans here are protected by Christians and there is no jihad in a country where protection is afforded, as absence of protection and liberty between Musalmans and infidels is essential in a religious war and that condition does not exist here," said a fatwa signed by the most notable religious scholars of the time. But the more important argument made by the muftis who signed the edict was that jihad should not be started without reasonable expectation of success. "It is necessary that there should be a probability of victory to Musalmans and glory to the Indians. If there be no such probability, the jihad is unlawful."

Contemporary jihadis believe that their tactics of terror, however morally dubious, have some prospect of success. But the jihadis’ measure of success seems based on their ability to destroy. It is here that the religious veneer of jihadi ideology wears especially thin.

Islam, like all religions, emphasizes and celebrates the creative. The decline of Muslim power and the inability of contemporary Muslim governments to evolve modern institutions of governance and learning have created a vacuum in the Muslim world. Extremist jihadis are striving to fill that vacuum. If the West, in particular the United States, wants to help Muslims cope with extremist theology, it should encourage the building of institutions of ijtihad (exertion of the mind for independent judgment). It is significant that the words jihad and ijtihad come from the same root. Jihad literally means struggle. But jihadis play down the mention of nonviolent struggle in the sayings of Prophet Mohammed. For example, the author of Invitation to Jihad denies the sanctity of a hadith that describes the struggle with one’s base desires as the greater jihad. But for a majority of Muslims, Islam is a source of spirituality and not worldly power. The jihadi movement represents only a minuscule percentage of the world’s 1 billion plus Muslims. Yet given the reach of terrorism, even that small percentage represents too many.