No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

(Sean Pound) #1

86 No god but God


sanctioning jihad (as one can imagine, this was an unpopular argu-
ment in colonial India). Chiragh Ali (1844–95), a protégé of Ahmed
Khan and one of the first Muslim scholars to push Quranic scholar-
ship toward rational contextualization, argued that the modern Mus-
lim community could not take Muhammad’s historical Ummah as a
legitimate example of how and when to wage war, because that com-
munity developed in a time when, as mentioned, the whole of the
known world was in a state of permanent conflict. Early in the twenti-
eth century, the Egyptian reformer Mahmud Shaltut (1897–1963)
used Chiragh Ali’s contextualization of the Quran to show that Islam
outlaws not only wars that are not made in direct response to aggres-
sion, but also those that are not officially sanctioned by a qualified
Muslim jurist, or mujtahid.
Over the last century, however, and especially after the colonial
experience gave birth to a new kind of Islamic radicalism in the Mid-
dle East, the classical doctrine of jihad has undergone a massive resur-
gence in the pulpits and classrooms of a few prominent Muslim
intellectuals. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) relied on a
militant interpretation of jihad, first to energize the anti-imperialist
revolution of 1979 and then to fuel his destructive eight-year war with
Iraq. It was Khomeini’s vision of jihad as a weapon of war that helped
found the Islamic militant group Hizbullah, whose invention of
the suicide bomber launched an appalling new era of international
terrorism.
In Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941–89), professor of
Islamic philosophy at King Abdulaziz University, used his influence
among the country’s disaffected youth to promote an uncompro-
misingly belligerent interpretation of jihad that, he argued, was
incumbent on all Muslims. “Jihad and the rifle alone,” Dr. Azzam pro-
claimed to his students. “No negotiations, no conferences, and no dia-
logues.” Azzam’s views laid the foundations for the Palestinian
militant group Hamas, which has since adopted Hizbullah’s tactics in
their resistance against the Israeli occupation. His teachings had an
exceptional impact on one student in particular: Osama bin Laden,
who eventually put into practice his mentor’s ideology by calling for a
worldwide Muslim campaign of jihad against the West, a campaign

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