44 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Omar's decision to call a war of conquest a "jihad" has obvious ramifi-
cations for modern times and has been much debated. In Mohammed's
day, the word jihad did not loom large. Etymologically, as I said, it didn't
mean "fighting" but "striving," and though it could be applied to fighting
an enemy, it could also be used to discuss striving against temptation,
struggling for justice, or trying to develop one's compassion. The word
jihad as "fighting" does come up in the Qur'an, bound explicitly to self-
defense. Those verses were revealed at a time when the Quraysh were try-
ing to erase Islam and Muslims from the face of the earth. In that context,
it was no stretch to argue that fighting had a moral dimension: if the com-
munity of believers was what made justice possible on earth, then those
who let hostile forces extinguish it were helping Satan, while those who
put lives and property at risk to defend it were serving Allah.
But calling upon Muslims to leave home, travel to distant lands, and
fight people with whom they had virtually no previous interaction-how
could wars such as these be called defensive? And if they weren't defensive,
how could they qualify as jihad?
They were connected through an idea that originated in Mohammed's
time and that Muslim thinkers began fleshing out during Abu Bakr and
Omar's khalifates: the idea that the world was divided into the mutually
exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, "the realm of peace" and
"the realm of war." This schema depicted Islam as an oasis of brotherhood
and peace surrounded by a universe of chaos and hatred. Anything a per-
son did to expand Dar al-Islam constituted action in the cause of peace,
even fighting and bloodshed, because it shrank the realm of war.
Personally, I wonder how many people in the seventh century thought
wars of conquest needed justification. In any case, calling a campaign of
conquest a jihad met with no dispute among the Umma. Having survived
the shock of Prophet Mohammed's death, they had regrouped, and Omar
probably understood that setting them a heroic quest at this juncture
would consolidate and deepen their unity.
In 15 AH (or thereabouts), near a town called Qadisiya, an Arab force
traditionally numbered at thirty thousand warriors found itself facing a
Sassanid army of sixty thousand crack troops. Only a river separated them.
Several times, the Arab commander Waqqas sent envoys to negotiate with
Rustum, the commander of the Sassanid force. As the story goes, General