162 DESTINY DISRUPTED
he proposed, lay with Muslims: they had stopped practicing "true" Islam,
and God therefore had made them weak. To get back to their victorious
ways, Muslims had to go back to the book and purge Islam of all new
ideas, interpretations, and innovations: they must go back to the religious
ways of Mohammed and his companions, back to those values and ideals,
back to the material details of their everyday lives: the earliest rulings were
the best rulings. That was the core of his judicial creed.
Second, Ibn Taymiyah asserted that jihad was a core obligation of every
Muslim, right in there with praying, fasting, abjuring deceit, and other
sacramental practices; and when Ibn Taymiyah said "jihad" he meant
"strap on a sword." The Umma, he said, was special because they were
martial. No previous recipients of revelations from God had "enjoined all
people with all that is right, nor did they prohibit all that is wrong to all
people." Some of them did not "take up armed struggle at all," while oth-
ers struggled merely "for the purpose of driving their enemy from their
land, or as any oppressed people struggles against their oppressor." To Ibn
Taymiyah, this limited, defensive idea of jihad was inaccurate: jihad meant
actively struggling, fighting even, not just to defend one's life, home, and
property but to expand the community of those who obeyed Allah.
Ibn Taymiyah went to war himself, against some Mongols. The Mon-
gols he was fighting had converted to Islam by this time, which raised a
question about Muslims fighting Muslims. But fighting these Muslims was
legitimate jihad, Ibn Taymiyah expounded, because they were not real
Muslims. He also opposed Christians, Jews, Sufis, and Muslims of other
sects than his own-chiefly Shi'is. He once overheard a Christian making
derogatory comments about the Prophet, and that night, he and a friend
tracked down that Christian and beat him up.
You can see why his aggressive stance might have resonated for some of
his contemporaries. Basically, he was saying, "We can't roll over for pagan
Mongols and Crusaders; let's come together and fight back, finding
strength in unity and unity in singleness of doctrine!" This sort of rallying
cry has inevitable appeal in societies under attack by outsiders, and by this
time the Islamic world had been under fearsome attack for over a century.
Ibn Taymiyah expanded the list of those against whom jihad was valid
to include not just non-Muslims but heretics, apostates, and schismatics.
In these categories he included Muslims who attempted to amend Islam or