Not long ago I commented here on an article by Caroline Glick in which she attributed to scholar Matthias Küntzel the idea that “the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s.” I remarked: “If Küntzel means that violent jihad was invented in the 1930s, he betrays his ignorance of Muhammad’s own career, and of Islamic history.”
Yesterday Matthias Küntzel kindly sent me this clarification, indicating that his views on this matter are in fact entirely correct:
Caroline Glick’s essay “The beginning of the reckoning” deserves indeed much praise. The tiny correction I want to add does not reduce her merit at all.
I did not write that “the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s.”
My essay states: “The Moslem Brotherhood was the organization which first developed the concept of a belligerent jihad FOR OUR MODERN TIMES and which turned the longing for death into an Islamic ideal.” Whenever their bataillons marched down the boulevards of Cairo in semi-fascist formation, they sang: “We are not afraid of death, we desire it. Let us die in redemption for Muslims.” THIS PARTICULAR INTERPRETATION OF THE MEANING OF JIHAD did not arise until the 1930s.”
(See www.matthiaskuentzel.de or Antisemitism International, An Annual Research Journal of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2004, pp.44-52)
In my book “Djihad und Judenhass” (Jihad and Jew-hatred) the English version of which will be published soon, I refer to El-Awaisi’s important book about “The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947” (London-New York: Tauris Academic Studie, 1998):
“Al-Banna called the Muslim Brothers” concept of Islam ,the Islam of
Muslim Brothers”, as it represented a new understanding of Islam at the time. What concerns us here about this new understanding is the concept of jihad, which has been almost absent from Islamic education before the foundation of the Muslim Brothers. Muslim groups of the time paid no attention to it. Political parties were involved with political struggles and mosque Imams and preachers treated jihad as irrelevant to their religious brief. ” (p.124)
This is accurate, but it describes a quite temporary condition in the history of the Islamic world.
In analyzing the roots of Islamism — a modern mass movement which came into being during the same decade as Fascism and National Socialism I am concentrating on the particular. This does not mean to excuse or ignore Mohammed’s wars or the anti-Jewish suras of the Koran which I cite in my writings.
However, anti-Judaism as laid down in the Koran, is not the same as antisemitism as laid down in the “Protokolls of the Elders of Zion”. My particular topic is not the root cause of dhimmitude but the root cause of modern antisemitism within the Islamic world which has resulted in the desire not to oppress but to annihilate Jews.
My most recent paper on “National Socialism and anti-Semitism in the Arab World” discusses in detail why and how the decisive transfer of a Nazi-like antisemitism to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945. See “Jewish Political Studies Review” 17:1 (Spring 2005), pp. 99-118 or: http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-kuntzel-s05.htm