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Is the Islamic jihad ideology newly minted? It's easy to be misled into thinking so, given the jihadist propensity to explain their actions as defensive responses to non-Muslim provocations. A fresh example comes from B. Raman in Asia Times: he associates the radicalization of Britain's Muslim youth of Pakistani origin with British and U.S. actions in Serbia in the early 1990s.
And in the this generally good article in the Jerusalem Post about the kinship between Nazism and Islamic anti-Semitism, Carolyn Glick cites a work by German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel, "Islamic anti-Semitism and its Nazi Roots." This again is to mistake a secondary cause for a root cause. Islamic anti-Semitism found a kindred spirit in Nazism, but it did not spring from Nazism. One need only recall the virulent anti-Semitism of the Qur'an itself, particularly as it is understood by mainstream Muslims today, to say nothing of Islamic tradition (especially the story about how at the end of the world, the stones will cry out, "Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me! Come kill him!"), to realize that. Says Glick:
As Kuntzel argues, the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s and, as he notes, "its concurrence with the arrival of a newly virulent anti-Semitism is verified in no uncertain terms." Husseini's gangs in the Palestine Mandate were joyously praised by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which held mass demonstrations with slogans like "Jews get out of Egypt and Palestine," and "Down with the Jews!"
There is no doubt that there was a resurgence of jihadist violence in the 20th century. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 as a direct reaction to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, and its violent activity, as well as its propagandizing, makes it true in a sense that the doctrines of violent jihad were newly present among Muslims beginning in the 1930s. But they were not new in the 1930s. The Ottomans declared jihad (futilely) as late as 1914. Jihads are found throughout Islamic history. If Kuntzel means that violent jihad was invented in the 1930s, he betrays his ignorance of Muhammad's own career, and of Islamic history.
Posted by Robert at July 18, 2005 7:20 AM
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Mr. Raman in the Asia Times is off by 1300 years. But you don't expect him to go and read a few books do you, beginning with the collection edited by Munshi, or those of K. S. Lal? Indian publishers have reprinted some of the most important works by Western scholars of Islam, with more coming. Why doesn't an Indian commentator, writing in an Indian newspaper, do a little more research on Jihad in India -- centuries before this supposedly newfangled-doctrine came to be "in the 1930s"? This is akin, in its way, to Bernard Lewis's highly unsatisfactory claim that antisemitism in the Arab world is a European import. He might have said that the anti-Jewish strain that runs throughout the canonical texts of Islam, and that is inseparable from Islam, assumed in some quarters a new aspect, a new cast, copied for European antisemitism. That would have been true. But in suggesting that everything was more or less hunky-dory vis-a-vis the Jews in the Muslim world until the bad European antisemites helped contaminate the innocent Muslim world, Lewis has damaged his own reputation, and along with his unbridled enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords, and his repeated misstatements about Iraq's modern history, he has blotted his own copybook -- the one that Posterity will be judging. A pity that he did not come round, admit how wrong he had been on so many essentials -- things which he had not studied, for if he had studied the treatment of non-Muslims, he would not have confined the subject of the dhimmi to three paragraphs (two of them exculpatory) out of 400 pages in his popular survey, "The MIddle East."
Posted by: Hugh
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at July 18, 2005 10:23 AM
Can't help but feel our forefathers were more wide awake than modern generations who have failed to understand...............and are in a state of denial..........acculturation into advanced democratic societies is not possible for each fresh wave from the world's most backward countries with repressive regimes.
To import people who despise what you stand for yet use your freedom to destroy is exactly what Karl Popper warned about in The Open Society & Its Enemies.
Must each generation learn the lesson anew and pay in blood for ignoring the lessons of history passed down to us, convinced that it will be different this time around ?
Posted by: Voyager at July 18, 2005 11:06 AM
The Kharajites -- Islamic terrorists who assassinated and killed any other Muslim they thought was not "Muslim" enough -- emerged within two decades after Muhammad died. I'd say that "Islamists" have been around for a very long time.
Posted by: Suzan at July 18, 2005 11:56 AM
Voyager...the lesson is very simple, "the floggings will continue until moral improves"...
Have a good day...
Posted by: duh_swami at July 18, 2005 12:07 PM
And what these reporters don't know is that most of the "traditional" anti-semitism that is associated with Europe and Christianity, did not occur/appear until after contact and export from Islam. I can't find any of the traditional images (jews control the money; jews control the gov't; jews killed Jesus) until after contact with Islam. Gregory of Tours does display anti-Jewish sentiment, but it is because they greeted a King in Syriac instead of Latin. It had nothing to do with being Jews per se.
But then, Origen or Tertullian may have some precursors to anti-semitism, but it's too early in time for it to be fully formed.
Posted by: Ibn Rushd at July 18, 2005 12:09 PM
So now we've pushed it back to the 1930s. Now let's see if we can get it back to the world-wide Jihad declared from Constantinople in 1915 (the one about which the American State Department did not release the relevant documents until quite recently, for reasons that remain unclear). And then back to 1798 when Napoleon entered Egypt. And then back to -- oh, I don't know -- back to 1100 A.D., and then 900 A.D.,and then let's keep going, back as far as Muslim mythology has placed its mythological or quasi-mythological figures, and by george, we can carbon-date it to then. Let's say, oh, 660 A.D. -- would that be within a century or so?
Posted by: Hugh at July 18, 2005 11:02 PM
Are there any good web sites about Haj Amin al Husseini? If so, please tell me.
Posted by: Christian at July 19, 2005 12:06 AM
Hugh,
What was the American State Department doing with documents about the Ottoman Empire in 1915?
Posted by: metaxy at July 19, 2005 12:38 AM
So I guess the Mopillah uprising of 1921 was not a Jihad? It took the British government 6 months to crush it, afterwards it was discovered that 600,000 Hindus were killed for not accepting Islam and an almost equal number converted to Islam by force. Without going back into history, do these authors ever bother to sit down and realise that they are lying or are they complusive liars? Where do these idiots come from and where do they get the nerve to write such crap? What
Posted by: Gorkhali at July 19, 2005 3:51 AM
Christian: Are there any good web sites about Haj Amin al Husseini? If so, please tell me.Tell The Children The Truth.
Bookmark it!
Posted by: Shy Guy at July 19, 2005 3:56 AM
Christian: Are there any good web sites about Haj Amin al Husseini? If so, please tell me.Tell The Children The Truth.
Bookmark it!
Posted by: Shy Guy at July 19, 2005 3:57 AM
In 1915 a very violent fatwa directed at whipping up violence against all non-Muslims, was written by a certain Sheik Shawish, a cleric who for a while held an official (Ottoman) post in Cairo. The Jewish community in Alexandria discovered that this fatwa was circulating everywhere, managed to obtain a copy, and sent it to the office of the American Ambassador to the Ottomans, Henry Morgenthau. He checked, discovered it was indeed circulating widely throughout the empire, and believed – with reason – that it would imperil all non-Muslims. In 1915, as we all know, the terrible massacres of the Armenians began (and Greeks in Anatolia, and Jews in “Palestine” also suffered from Turkish oppression).
A copy of the Fatwa was sent to the State Department. This fatwa, incidentally, should not be confused with the milder fatwa issued, its language toned down at the request of the Germans, so that it would be directed only at non-Muslims who were part of the Allies fighting the Ottoman Empire (thereby exempting the Germans).
What is curious is that Sheikh Shawish’s fata remained “classified” by the State Department until at least 1958. Why? Why did it take so long for a document, that had nothing to do with secret American communiqués back and forth, remain “classified” until then? Might it be those famous State Department Arabists, who for so long managed to conceal the true nature of Islam, and of course, in regard to the Arab violence against Israel, the fact that it was merely a classic Jihad. Indeed, one wonders if until the last few years anyone at all in the American State Department ever bothered to read Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira (perhaps not even now) or had any clear idea of what the duty of Jihad entails, and how central it is to Muslims and to Islam.
The puzzlement of why this document remained unknown, essentially unobtainable, for so long – that is a question for everyone to ponder.
This 1915 declaration of Jihad will be discussed, incidentally, in the forthcoming “The Legacy of Jihad” by Andrew Bostom.
at July 19, 2005 6:36 PM
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