LEE HARRIS: JIHAD THEN AND NOW

Lee Harris takes on the must have & must read book edited by Andrew G. Bostom MD, The Legacy of Jihad.

This lengthy article/review/analysis is a must read and it must be read completely from front to back. Below I shall excerpt what I feel are the important pieces of the article/review/analysis:


Jihad Then and Now
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Bostom expresses the touching wish that his own children and their children may “thrive in a world where the devastating institution of jihad has been acknowledged, renounced, dismantled, and relegated forever to the dustbin of history by Muslims themselves.”

Yet, after reading and pondering this invaluable book, it is difficult not to ask, Why should Muslims renounce and dismantle an institution that, while it may have been devastating to those who have been its victims, has nevertheless been the historical agent by which Islamic culture has come to dominate such a vast expanse of our planet? What would prompt any culture to abandon a tradition that has permitted it not only to expand immensely from its original home, but also to make permanent conquests of so many hearts and minds?

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for those who wish to see Muslims repudiate the classical tradition of jihad, it may be beneficial to encourage the illusion that jihad has always meant an internal struggle against sin or a fight for a just cause and that any other interpretation is contrary to the “real” message of Islam.

Yet for those who are seeking to understand the nature of historical Islam, it is imperative to come to grips with what jihad has actually meant to Muslims throughout their history, and especially during those periods in which Islam expanded its domain, not only by conquering new territory, but also by transforming utterly the cultures of those who fell under its sway.

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The Arab conquerors, on the other hand, not only retained their own unique culture, but also were able to impose it on the cultures they conquered. Furthermore, those thus transformed by the Arabs were not primitive cultures existing on a far lower plane of social organization, but were, rather, more civilized and sophisticated societies than those of the “backward” camel nomads who toppled them — two such examples being the conquest, in the first century of Islamic expansion, of the Byzantine Empire in Syria and the Sassanian Empire in Persia. How did this remarkable achievement come about?

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from Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani in the tenth century through the eleventh-century al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth, to Sayyid Qutb in the twentieth century. Letting these Muslim thinkers and scholars speak in their own words, Bostom is able to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the historical institution of jihad did not mean a personal and individual struggle against evil or the nonviolent pursuit of a just cause, but rather a violent struggle by the entire Muslim community against those outsiders who were not Muslims. Jihad, in other words, was the collective project of the whole community and not of a single individual.

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But was Islamic jihad the same thing that Medieval and later European thinkers regarded as a just war?

The very concept of a just war makes sense only where there is an established and settled order of nations, each of which implicitly recognizes the right of other nations to exist. The underlying assumption is that there exists a more or less stable balance of power among the various players on the international stage. This rough stability represents the status quo, and all the players are expected to accept the status quo precisely for the sake of the stability and order that it provides. Any player who challenges this stability and order, therefore, is properly seen as a threat to it by all other players. If a nation decides to take a chunk out of its neighbor’s territory, this will upset the balance, and it will be necessary to force the player who is acting out of line to return back to his own borders.

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By European standards, a just war is a war of self-defense or a war fought to preserve a stable balance of power. The concept is dependent on the acceptance of the legitimacy of a pre-existing status quo — what is unjust is any disturbance of this status quo; what is just is the attempt to restore it.

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Islamic jihad, from its commencement, refused to recognize the legitimacy of any status quo other than that achieved in Dar el-Islam, or “the domain of peace.” Other peoples’ delicate balance of power meant nothing. Outside the domain of peace there was only the domain of war, and here no entity could hope to be treated as representing a legitimate order, for no order that was not based on Islamic law could ever be recognized as legitimate in the eyes of Muslims. The only legitimate order was a Muslim order.

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Like the French revolutionaries, Muslims wished to liberate humanity, and they were aware that they could do this only by violently overthrowing the status quo and disregarding any claims to legitimacy based on mere custom or tradition.

Another way of putting this is that the concept of jihad does not fit the clash-of-civilizations paradigm that is so often used to describe the current world situation. In this model, each player will try to improve his position within the framework of a settled order, but none will seek to demolish and annihilate the framework.

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But no nation will embark on a course not merely of conquering another nation, but of transforming its culture into a replica of its own. Yet this is precisely the goal of jihad: to destroy the status quo of those outside the ambit of Islam in order to expand its realm — to create a realm in which Muslim culture completely transforms the old cultural traditions, as occurred repeatedly during those periods of Muslim expansion. Islam did not conquer territories to create a colonial empire, but to expand its own domain. It did not want subjects; it wanted converts.

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what is most striking about the collective project of jihad has been its immense and, with few exceptions, permanent success. Once Islamic culture sank in, it became virtually impossible for any foreign cultural influence to make any headway against it — and here again we can see its profound difference from those ephemeral military conquests that, while capturing territory, are unable to capture the hearts and minds of those who have been conquered.

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Hitler’s wars of conquest provide another example of the failure of the clash-of-civilizations paradigm. Hitler was not interested in the balance of power or in preserving the status quo — his aim was to destroy both and to replace the old system with a New World Order. This New World Order would replace the old balance-of-power system with German hegemony in Europe and empire in the East.

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Indeed, as Andrew Bostom observes, a person could be pardoned even for crimes of the utmost wickedness — once he sided with Islam, all was forgiven.

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To many in the West, this may not appear to be much of a difference: For us it is axiomatic that no one may threaten another man with death in order to make him change his religion or cultural traditions. But in terms of designing a successful policy of permanent conquest over new territories full of new people, this distinction is fraught with world historical implications.

If a conqueror gives the conquered people a choice between becoming one of his kind on the one hand and being subjugated or liquidated on the other, he will gain an enormous advantage over those conquerors who do not offer such a choice. If the conquered people know that they have no choice but to accept their status as slaves and chattel, their hearts will continue to be rebellious: They may obey, but only out of fear; they will certainly never come to feel that the conquerors represent legitimate authority; they will never be willing to fight to defend their conqueror’s position of supreme domination, but will rather work to subvert and undermine his hold on power.

Things will go quite differently, however, if the conquered people know that by conversion to the faith of their conquerors they will be able to escape the humiliation of servitude and subjugation. If those who choose to convert are looked upon as members of the community of the faithful and no longer as infidels, then there will be a powerful incentive to convert. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any method by which a quicker pacification of a conquered people could be achieved than by allowing them to make a swift and easy transition from being outsiders to being insiders — a transition that only required a person to accept the simple principle, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.”

There is another ingenious feature to jihad that makes it unique, and that is the institution of what Bat Ye’or has called dhimmitude — the policy of offering “special” treatment to those whom Mohammed dubbed Peoples of the Book, i.e., Christians and Jews and, sometimes, Zoroastrians. Here again Bostom’s book is invaluable in the insights it provides. While normal pagans were given the choice “convert, or die,” Jews and Christians were offered the choice between conversion to Islam and the acceptance of an inferior status within the community of Muslim believers — a community in which every aspect of the public life of the Jews and Christians was under the control of Islam. Yet, as the Koran itself had commanded, and as the classical Islamic scholars continued to insist, it was not enough that the Jews and Christians within Dar el-Islam accept the cultural hegemony of Islam with their lips and outward behavior — they must, in the words of the Koran, “feel themselves subdued.” Like children brought up as slaves, they must psychologically feel their own helplessness and inferiority.

Instilling this sense of submission in those who most stubbornly held on to their old faith was vital — it was necessary that Jews and Christians cease imagining that there could be an alternative to life under Islam. Islamic hegemony must be made to seem second nature to them, so that they would not think of rebelling but would go about their business resigned to the status quo achieved by Islam. Over time, this psychological submission would become an increasingly unattractive position for those who wished to be free of it — but here again there was a path to liberation from this state of mental dependence and servitude: conversion to Islam.

Andrew Bostom speaks of jihad as a “devastating institution,” yet the evidence he provides demonstrates that jihad was also a devastatingly effective institution. It succeeded in transforming whatever cultural traditions fell before it, and this — not the fanaticism and brutality with which jihad was systematically carried out — is what accounts for its uniqueness.

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Why would Muslims want to abandon an institution that permitted them to expand Dar el-Islam across so much of our planet? Why should they dismantle jihad so long as it continues to work for them?

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Islamic jihad has demonstrated an astonishing adaptability to different historical and material conditions.

The spirit of jihad first emerged out of the plundering raids of Arab camel nomads who, like all warlike bands, took whatever they wanted from those who were weaker. They attacked merchant caravans and carried off their loot. Yet as they grew bolder they began to make raids into the settled and civilized populations of the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires — without the intention of seizing these empires for themselves, but merely to rob them. Under Omar, however, a new project began. Seeing how weak and fragile these tempting empires were, it was decided that the warlike Arab bands would hijack the empires and control them for themselves. From that point on, the warlike bands lived off the labor of the peasants who had been the support of all the various empires that had emerged in the Levant since the time of the Assyrians. Yet the secret of the success of the Arab bands lay less in their own warlike qualities than in the weakness and decadence of the empires they overthrew. (A similar attempt to conquer Abyssinia around the same time failed miserably: The Abyssinians were still far too warlike themselves.)

For the Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun, the conquest by the warlike Arabs of more advanced yet weak and decadent empires represented a deep historical pattern. When a civilization becomes too sedentary, too decadent, too forgetful of the struggle for existence that originally put it on top, it becomes ripe for conquest by those who are still warlike and driven by a fanatical sense of mission. Thus, he noted, superior wealth and superior civilization were no guarantee that those who possessed them could hold on to them in the face of small but determined bands of fanatics united by a sense of what he called “group feeling.” In short, for Ibn Khaldun, jihad can be devastatingly effective even when it is waged against a civilization that, in material terms, is far in advance of the jihadists.

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But the objective of jihad is not Clausewitzian politics continued by other means. Its objective is the destruction and dissolution of politics as we have come to understand it in the West. The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos.

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It is by destroying order, by undermining the normal rules and regulations that preserve order, that those who wish to overthrow the status quo succeed. They do not need to achieve the same degree of force that is the monopoly of the established order. In the crash-of-civilization paradigm — contrary to Clausewitzian warfare — the enemy of a particular established order does not need to match it in organizational strength and effectiveness. It needs only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardized. This fear of anarchy — the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason — can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets.

In short, on the clash-of-civilization model, the revival of jihad would not be threatening; on the crash-of-civilization model, however, things look quite different. The jihadists do not need to “win” in the battle against the West; it is enough if they can force the West to choose between a dreaded plunge back into the Law of the Jungle and acceding to their demands. This is a formula that has worked many times before and may work again.

It is a great pity that one cannot regard Andrew Bostom’s book simply as a fine work of historical scholarship on a fascinating but outmoded institution.


Pertinent Links:

1) Jihad Then and Now & PDF file of the Jihad Then and Now

2) Lee Harris & Lee Harris

3) Civilization and Its Enemies, The Next Stage of History

4) Andrew G. Bostom, MD

5) The Legacy of Jihad

READ THE WHOLE THING ! ! !