Pakistan is hardly a good place to find an active debate over the role of Islam in society, but an editorial, “Outlawing ‘incitement to terrorism’ and ‘call to jihad,'” featured in the Pakistani Daily Times defies this expectation by examining the role of “personal” jihad inside Muslim states, within the context of the UN”s latest efforts to condemn religious extremism. An excerpt:
The real problem in the Islamic world will be two concepts that the West increasingly associates with terrorism. The first is the call to jihad by non-state actors and the second is the freedom to act in defiance of the state under the concept of amr and nahi (enforce that which is good and stop that which is bad). Both concepts violate the sovereignty of the nation-state as it exists today but both are so far only weakly opposed by the states that they undermine. Some Muslim scholars think that the call to jihad should only be given by the state. But they are outnumbered by clerics who lean on a literal interpretation of the scripture to insist that the madrassas should go on teaching the concept of private jihad.
The writers thus confirm what many Muslim apologists have refused to admit: the basis for personal jihad — as opposed to jihad called by a state authority — is firmly rooted in Islamic scriptures.