Fight in the Way of God 79Lewis, that the image of the Muslim horde charging wildly into battle
like a swarm of locusts has become one of the most enduring stereo-
types in the Western world. “Islam was never really a religion of salva-
tion,” wrote the eminent sociologist Max Weber. “Islam is a warrior
religion.” It is a religion that Samuel Huntington has portrayed as
steeped “in bloody borders.”
This deep-rooted stereotype of Islam as a warrior religion has its
origins in the papal propaganda of the Crusades, when Muslims were
depicted as the soldiers of the Antichrist in blasphemous occupation
of the Holy Lands (and, far more importantly, of the silk route to
China). In the Middle Ages, while Muslim philosophers, scientists,
and mathematicians were preserving the knowledge of the past and
determining the scholarship of the future, a belligerent and deeply
fractured Holy Roman Empire tried to distinguish itself from the
Turks who were strangling it from all sides by labeling Islam “the reli-
gion of the sword,” as though there were in that era an alternative
means of territorial expansion besides war. And as the European colo-
nialists of the eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries systematically
plundered the natural resources of the Middle East and North Africa,
inadvertently creating a rabid political and religious backlash that
would produce what is now popularly called “Islamic fundamental-
ism,” the image of the dreaded Muslim warrior, “clad in a long robe
and brandishing his scimitar, ready to slaughter any infidel that might
come his way,” became a widely popular literary cliché. It still is.
Today, the traditional image of the Muslim horde has been more
or less replaced by a new image: the Islamic terrorist, strapped with
explosives, ready to be martyred for Allah, eager to take as many inno-
cent people as possible with him. What has not changed, however,
is the notion that Islam is a religion whose adherents have been
embroiled in a perpetual state of holy war, or jihad, from the time of
Muhammad to this very day.
Yet the doctrine of jihad, like so many doctrines in Islam, was not
fully developed as an ideological expression until long after Muham-
mad’s death, when Muslim conquerors began absorbing the cultures
and practices of the Near East. Islam, it must be remembered, was
born in an era of grand empires and global conquests, a time in which
the Byzantines and Sasanians—both theocratic kingdoms—were