84 No god but God
It is not that Arabia was short on “rules of war.” A host of regula-
tions existed among the pagan tribes with regard to when and where
fighting could take place. But for the most part these rules were meant
to contain and limit fighting to ensure the tribe’s survival, not to
establish a code of conduct in warfare. In the same way that absolute
morality did not play a significant role in tribal concepts of law and
order, neither did it play a role in tribal notions of war and peace.
The doctrine of jihad, as it slowly developed in the Quran, was
specifically meant to differentiate between pre-Islamic and Islamic
notions of warfare, and to infuse the latter with what Mustansir Mir
calls an “ideological-cum-ethical dimension” that, until that point, did
not exist in the Arabian Peninsula. At the heart of the doctrine of jihad
was the heretofore unrecognized distinction between combatant and
noncombatant. Thus, the killing of women, children, monks, rabbis,
the elderly, or any other noncombatant was absolutely forbidden under
any circumstances. Muslim law eventually expanded on these prohibi-
tions to outlaw the torture of prisoners of war; the mutilation of the
dead; rape, molestation, or any kind of sexual violence during combat;
the killing of diplomats, the wanton destruction of property, and the
demolition of religious or medical institutions—regulations that, as
Hilmi Zawati has observed, were all eventually incorporated into the
modern international laws of war.
But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of
jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars.
“Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but
do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190).
Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “permission to fight is given
only to those who have been oppressed... who have been driven from
their homes for saying, ‘God is our Lord’ ” (22:39; emphasis added).
It is true that some verses in the Quran instruct Muhammad and
his followers to “slay the polytheists wherever you confront them”
(9:5); to “carry the struggle to the hypocrites who deny the faith”
(9:73); and, especially, to “fight those who do not believe in God and
the Last Day” (9:29). However, it must be understood that these
verses were directed specifically at the Quraysh and their clandestine
partisans in Yathrib—specifically named in the Quran as “the poly-