Lt. Col. Joseph Myers bucks the establishment. “Army Colonel Says U.S. Needs Better Focus in the War on Terror,” by Matt Korade for CQ Politics, May 15:
To better understand the Quranic basis of jihad as practiced by extremists without sifting through a library of interpretations, you should read one book above all others, says Lt. Col. Joseph Myers.
“The Quranic Concept of War,” by Pakistani Brig. Gen. S.K. Malik in the late 1970s, isn’t much studied in the West.
But it should be, Myers said, if America, and more specifically, the U.S. military, wants to gain a better understanding of the enemy in the war on terrorism.
Yes, Malik’s is a very important book. I discuss it in my 2003 book Onward Muslim Soldiers.
Malik attempts to teach his readers about the doctrinal aspects of “Quranic warfare,” said Myers, who wrote a paper on the subject published in Parameters, the Army War College quarterly, and delivered a presentation at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa annual conference in April.
This is the religious definition of war as outlined by Malik with explanations from the Quran, and it is “infinitely supreme and effective,” the general wrote.
Because the West does not associate war with the divine, however, Western interpretations of the motivations for jihad are unaccustomed to the general’s Quranic view; the ideas, for example, that “tumult and oppression [of Muslims] are worse than slaughter,” and that because of this, “war must be waged “˜only to fight the forces of tyranny and oppression.” “…
Myers explains:
The reason I studied this work, once I was able to find it, is because I had heard or had read in an article that nowhere in our military education institutions are we studying the campaigns of the Prophet Mohammed in any similar way that we studied military campaigns that are famous and popular in Western military history. And I know that to be true because I do work in the military professional education system. Generally speaking, I believe that to be true.
So Malik’s treatise is an important contribution to what I think would be called the canon of strategic jihad studies, jihad, the Quranic and Islamic approach to warfare. It’s not widely read in the West, but then you could argue that a lot about Islam and understanding the war-fighting doctrines in Islam are not widely studied in the West, or studied at least professionally.
You asked the question about the divide between, let’s say academia, and a lot of debates over what is the meaning of the threat we”re facing in the war on terror. Who are they? What are their roots? For me professionally, as a military officer, I think our process for doing threat analysis is fairly straightforward. We have our own doctrine for it, it’s called [the] intelligence preparation of the battlefield process. Step three is evaluate the threat. If you go to the army FM [field manual] on the IPB [intelligence preparation of the battlefield] process, it will tell you that the doctrinal assessment of your enemy is based on how your enemy expresses his doctrine to you, based on the way he sees it, says it, writes it, reads it orients on it, and organizes around it. The enemy we”re facing in the war on terror, al Qaeda, says they are fighting a jihad against the West to establish the faith of Islam. Now, if that’s their doctrine, then arguably that is the doctrine that we template, irrespective of whether their interpretation of jihad or their discussion of Islam within the theological community of Muslims is correct or incorrect; that is irrelevant to our discussion and understanding of how the enemy presents his doctrine to us, and it is his doctrine that we template over the terrain….
Read it all.