RECLAIMING THE JIHAD:
A RESPONSE TO TAREK FATAH
Maryam Sakeenah
To condemn the Woolwich incident, spine-chilling and
disgusting as it may be_ is pointless. Not because it may by any stretch of
imagination be justified, but because the haste and anxiety with which this is
so promptly done both by spokespeople of Western nations and by Muslim leaders
denotes the uncritical acceptance of the predominant narrative on terrorism on
the terms of the powerbrokers and the media that tell us who to condemn, how
and how much. It is also inadequate to only condemn these instances when they
occur while failing to understand and take on the deeper dynamics that set them
off. For, terrorism and the usage of the term are far more nuanced than these
facile proclamations make us believe.
While Tarek Fatah has rightly pointed out this inadequacy in
his article ‘UK Beheading Shows It’s Time
to Fight the Doctrine of Jihad’, and reminded Muslims of the need to take
on such criminal elements within their ranks, the rest of the article teeters
on presumptions that are ignorant at best and dangerous a worst: ignorant
because of a complete inability to understand the ground realities of
contemporary international politics and dangerous for the ideologization of
terrorism that lends credence to the idea that Islam is inherently violent and
Muslims inherently predisposed towards violence.
The writer makes the same error many neoconservatives
calling for a ‘War on Terror’ made, with disastrous consequences: accepting the
motives and objectives of terrorism as interpreted and explained by American
rhetoric. He tells us that such elements wish to ‘sow fear into the soul of
British people’ and are ideologically motivated ‘by one powerful belief of the doctrine
of Jihad against the kuffar...’ Readers are asked to make some leaps of faith
here as this denies any possibility that such dastardly acts may be a crazed
protest out of desperation and frustration, driven by vengeance over what is
seen to be unfair and brutal, such as unfair occupations, drone strikes and
brutal torture in illegal detention camps. By ideologizing the motives,
attention is deflected away from the policies that provoke extreme and desperate
reaction. Moral culpability is ruled out and the inaccurate and dangerous idea
that the problem is with the ideology believed in by these people is given
credence. Hence an image is conjured up of a clash between Islam and the West: a
false and pernicious idea that makes the world madly careen towards a clash of
civilizations.
The fallacy of the
premise of this ideologization of terrorism and whose interests it serves, need
to be exposed. Terrorism, in fact, is a tactic used by disaffected individuals
and communities, not an ideology. It is not inspired by a hatred of all that
the West stands for, but is a reaction to policy and actions of Western
nations. Michael Scheuer states: “There
is no record of a Muslim urging to wage jihad to destroy democracy or credit
unions, or universities. What the US does in formulating and implementing
policies affecting the Muslim world is infinitely more inflammatory.” The
smokescreen of rhetoric, however, keeps a dispassionate analysis of the real
grievances that fire such acts at bay.
Fatah goes on to state that Muslim terrorists
have been ‘emboldened’ by the West’s ‘passivity’ towards terrorism, implying
that Western nations are victims too infirm to take on the horrifying, audacious
enemy consolidating its ranks in the wings. There clearly is in this a criminal
oversight of the glaring and undeniable reality that wars, occupations,
kidnappings, tortures, detentions have been carried out by Western nations on
the pretext of pre-empting and countering terrorism; that Guantanamo still
detains thousands without charge, that only 2% out of the many thousands killed
in drone operations against terrorists have any suspicion against them.
While what happened at Woolwich was
grotesquely inhuman, refusing to acknowledge similar grotesque wrongs at the
hands of powerful occupying armies in other parts of the world is diabolical.
While Woolwich is unjustifiable, one cannot lose sight of the connection
between the actions of armies abroad and the psychology of vengeance. In all
honesty, one may also be reminded of the fact that barely weeks ago an unarmed
seventy-five year old was similarly hacked and butchered to death in Birmingham
while on his way home. The reason no one heard of it was because the victim
being a Muslim on his way back from the local mosque made the story not
newsworthy enough. Islamist terror is the in-thing- other acts of violence and
terrorism are relegated to individual criminality or insanity.
The writer reminds us that the tactics used by the Woolwich
attackers were ‘straight from medieval times’, recklessly making a direct link with
Islamic doctrine and tradition. Anyone with a basic understanding of terrorism
would know that desperate tactics like this one are used when the might of
perceived enemies is too great and invincible, defying conventional tactics.
Reading more than that into it and connecting it to medieval Islamic doctrine
is grossly irresponsible for the devastating social and inter-subjective
consequences in an atmosphere of great prejudice and hostility against Muslims
and Islam. The UK Muslim community is already targeted for hate-speech by white
supremacist groups like the English Defence League, and Mr. Fatah’s proclamations
serve to keep this atmosphere of hate and suspicion charged.
It is vital and urgent that Muslims take responsibility for
such elements and tendencies within their community and the writer did well to
highlight this, but to interject ‘Islam is the enemy!’ when the religion and
its practitioners already stand much stereotyped and pigeonholed,
misunderstood, mistrusted and maligned is highly irresponsible and reckless.
However, such reform has to come from within the Muslim
community from authentic representatives and spokespeople of Islamic tradition.
The gusto for ‘fixing Islam’ from the West is misplaced, insincere, uninsightful
and comes loaded with malafide agendas and political interests. Tarek Fatah’s exhortation to Western leaders
to take on the Jihadic ideology and defeat it, is fatal nonsense.
Having said that, Fatah’s disappointment with liberal
Muslims rubbing in the fact that ‘Islam is Peace’ and keeping mum about the
doctrine of physical Jihad as part of Islam, is valid- but for different
reasons. Liberal Muslims desperately try to deny and eclipse this aspect of
Islam and in so doing, implicitly accept the ignorant allegation that physical Jihad
is a violent doctrine. Mr. Tarek Fatah too shares this inability to understand
and appreciate the concept of Jihad with its contemporary ramifications in a
holistic and insightful manner. This explains his enthusiastic call for
rejecting Jihad altogether, and his great disappointment that Islamic scholars
are not too excited about jettisoning the murderous idea once and for all.
Liberal Muslims often either deny
or denigrate Jihad, as if it was an embarrassment. Jihad, standing for struggle
spanning all means to resist injustice, evil and falsehood is to safeguard and
protect the sanctity of human life, not to violate it. It aims at protecting
the weak, the suffering and the sinned-against. Jihad purged the concept of war
from excesses. The first Quranic exhortation to fight came with the emphasis to
‘be not aggressive.’
The Quran and the
example of the Sunnah clearly and categorically lay down the conditions when
Jihad should be resorted to. Simply, all is not fair in war, and rulings for
protecting non combatants and those not directly engaged in confrontation are
explicit. Besides, its objectives are clearly laid down: it is neither for
territorial aggrandizement nor national power nor spreading the faith, but for
resisting oppression and injustice and helping in the establishment of a just and
peaceful social order. Fatah makes an ignorant and misleading connection
between the senseless butchery at Woolwich and the concept of Jihad: the same criminal
mistake that the perpetrators themselves made.
Mr. Fatah makes a pathetic attempt to validate his claim
that Jihad is a savage expansionist ideology by quoting an inaccurate and false
definition of Jihad from A Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam which makes the
unforgivable error or defining Jihad as ‘the
spread of Islam by arms’, a claim unsubstantiated by any Islamic text or
source of authority.
The need of the hour, contrary to Mr. Fatah’s prescription,
is to rediscover and elucidate the concept of Jihad in contemporary context and
expose its distortion, misperception and abuse by those hostile to Jihad as well
as those claiming to wage it. The silence on this from Muslim scholars leaves
the misconceptions and confusions to proliferate and hence provide
justification to fringe extremist and criminal elements like those who carried
out the brutal display at Woolwich in the name of Jihad.
This said, Mr. Fatah needs to be reminded that resistance to
wrong and defence of the weak and marginalized against oppression and injustice
is a basic virtue attested to by all spiritual and moral doctrines, hence the
Jihadic philosophy is not an invention of Islam even though it may be a culmination
of this universal idea. Stripping Islam off this beautiful crowning glory is a preposterous
and revolting idea he can never find any support for. Both Mr. Fatah and his
ilk as well as sheepish Liberal Muslims need to be reminded of the fact that Islam
extols and idealizes peace but also accepts the idea that when the rhetoric and
pretense of peace hides the demons of injustice, it must be exposed and
rejected and resisted. Farid Esack writes, “When
peace comes to mean the absence of conflict on the one hand and when conflict
with an unjust political order is a moral imperative on the other, then it is
not difficult to understand that the better class of human beings will be
deeply committed to disturbing the peace and creating conflict.”
What is important to realize, however, is that in the
absence of this understanding of Jihad and the spineless, fragmented state of
the Muslim world, resistance to the great wrongs by Western nations at present
is febrile, maniacal and as vicious as the actions of the powerful perpetrators.
Yeats lamented, ‘the best lack all
conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.’ Esack writes, ‘The problem with Muslim fundamentalism is that it is as totalitarian
and exclusivist as the order that it seeks to displace. It seeks to create an
order wherein they are the sole spokespersons for a rather vengeful,
patriarchal and chauvinistic God.’ That is a judicious and vital
understanding we as Muslims must acquire in order to reclaim the Jihad for our
time.
Incidents like Woolwich as well as the great wrongs that engender
such sickness: stemming from both Western policy as well as Muslim degeneracy-
are to be rejected and actively opposed. The underlying logic of wars of powerful
Western nations against “terrorism" and terrorist attacks provoking or
provoked by them is the same: both punish human beings for the actions of their
governments or of individuals or groups sharing religious or ethnic identity. We
are left with an important question: If terrorism is the direct and intentional
killing of innocent people with the purpose for achieving a greater goal they
are not directly linked with, are not both terrorism? While we correctly
acknowledge Woolwich as savage terrorism, why are similar instances in
Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Iraq also not recognized as equally unacceptable,
intensely provocative and deeply damaging? As long as contemporary politics
continue to operate on the premise of ‘some
are more equal that others’, such ugly outrages will keep happening at the
hands of the psychologically vulnerable. The need is an all-out struggle- a
progressive ‘Jihad’ if you will- against all wrongs that fuel the vicious
cycle, regardless of who the perpetrators may be.
