Twenty-First Century Jihad

Law, Society and Military Action

Elisabeth Kendall, Ewan Stein

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The term 'jihad' has come to be used as a byword for fanaticism and Islam's allegedly implacable hostility towards the West. But, like other religious and political concepts, jihad has multiple resonances and associations, its meaning shifting over time and from place to place. Jihad has referred to movements of internal reform, spiritual struggle and self-defence as much as to 'holy war'. And among Muslim intellectuals, the meaning and significance of jihad remain subject to debate and controversy. With this in mind, Twenty-First Century Jihad examines the ways in which the concept of jihad has changed, from its roots in the Qur'an to its usage in current debate. This book explores familiar modern political angles, and touches on far less commonly analysed instances of jihad, incorporating issues of law, society, literature and military action. As this key concept is ever-more important for international politics and security studies, Twenty-First Century Jihad contains vital analysis for those researching the role of religion in the modern world.

Part I
Historical Antecedents of Contemporary Jihad

1
Divine Authority and Territorial Entitlement in the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an

Reuven Firestone

Current public debates about jihad tend to examine religious war in Islam as a virtually sui generis phenomenon, and inquiries into religiously sanctioned war in Islam tend to investigate Islam independently of any larger context. But religions always exist within historical contexts, and religious responses to historical exigency can be compared and yield surprisingly fresh and interesting results. This chapter compares and contextualises the formation of biblical religion and Qur’anic religion to posit how and why the scriptural stratum for both is so similar on war and relations with the other. It then isolates the variables that caused the major difference in religious doctrinal expectations between Judaism and Islam regarding territorial control. Both Judaism and Islam recognise a divine right to be in political control of territory, and both accept the legality and even the responsibility of engaging in military force in order to achieve that control. Both base their positions on the authority of scripture, which in both Bible and Qur’an authorises bloodshed in order to secure proper monotheistic religious practice within a polytheistic environment that is believed to be threatening and improper. Both scriptures also provide significant detail regarding military tactics as well as the treatment of peoples holding other religious beliefs within the areas under divinely authorised control. The result is a scriptural stratum in both Judaism and Islam that reveals a remarkably similar phenomenology of war and relations with peoples outside the community.

This chapter argues that the similarity results from the related political, social and economic conditions in the local context under which the two religions emerged into history, even though their geneses are separated by more than 15 centuries and several hundred miles. While the local contexts exhibit important parallels and initially produced similar behaviours, both behaviours and expectations changed significantly after the initial stages of community emergence. The topic of concern for this chapter is territoriality. Whereas one religious community remained focused on a very limited area of political control, the other developed a position that assumed no geographical limit to political control. The divergence appears to reflect differences in two general areas: first, the relative success of the movements within the local context; and second, the impact of the larger religious and political environments outside of the local contexts. The initial similarities elicited similar behavioural and doctrinal responses, while the environmental differences that were later encountered caused the two communities to develop different paradigms of political expectation with regard to the control of territory.

This observation is of interest because it shows that the major differences in religious doctrine do not reflect essential differences in religion at the scriptural level. They reflect, rather, the differences in the way that religion has responded to the circumstances of history. One perhaps surprising conclusion is that, unlike the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an lacks the notion of conquest and control of territory as divine command.

The Torah and the Qur’an

The Torah and the Qur’an are understood in their respective religious systems to represent the literal word of God. The Torah, which literally means ‘instruction’ in Hebrew, is the common religious term for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) that are understood in Jewish tradition to have been given fully and directly by God through the prophet Moses in one great public revelation at Mt. Sinai. While the other 19 books that make up the remainder of the Hebrew Bible have different levels of importance in the development of biblical and post-biblical Jewish legal and ethical tradition, the Torah represents the absolute core for Jewish legislation in all spheres of human activity. The Qur’an, likewise, represents the record of divine instruction given not in one public experience, as at Mt. Sinai, but rather serially throughout the course of the approximately 23-year prophetic career of Muhammad. Both represent the core of divine authority as a record of God’s personal communication. Even when other factors become sources or motivations for the development or even genesis of religious law and tradition, such as custom or local tradition, historical exigencies, influence from other cultures and peoples or internal politics and social movements, the authority for religion resides in God, and the most obvious and acknowledged repository of divinely authoritative information is scripture. It is therefore appropriate to examine the Torah and the Qur’an as the authoritative foundation for the development of religious law and tradition, and the worldviews that these reflect and perpetuate.

While scripture represents the timeless and unlimited universal wisdom of God, it is contextualised in the particulars of ‘scripted’ – meaning written or recorded – revelation. The very nature of scripture reduces revelation to a finite record bound to the narrow particulars of era, culture, physical setting and language. It is limited further by its contextualisation within the limiting particularity of language in general. That is, words are finite vessels of meaning. In scripture, words are the containers holding specific messages of the divine. They are the remaining evidence of communication by a transcendent power no longer immediately accessible. In fixed form, words are the inert record of the unfathomable will of God, reduced to a static form in orthographic signs that are forbidden from being altered or replaced. While the will and wisdom of God is by definition eternal and unlimited, once recorded it becomes limited by the confining attributes of scripture described above.

On the other hand, the supple nature of language is such that words, phrases and idioms always have a range of meanings, and those meanings evolve and are adjusted by changes in culture, technology and social systems, among other factors. These same cultural and technological changes influence the worldviews of the believers who read and respond to their scripture. New ways of reading and understanding the meaning of scripture therefore emerge in every generation based on the changes and evolution in language and in the human condition in general (which are of course closely related). Evolving ways of reading are then reflected in the derivative literatures and behaviours recorded by communities of believers. This record is ‘interpretation’ in its widest sense, and many genres and schools of interpretation have evolved within both Judaism and Islam, not only within the specific discourse of official scriptural interpretation in these religions (midrash, perush, ta’wil, tafsir) but in law, ethics, theology, cosmology, metaphysics and ritual practice, among other fields. It is the combination of the fixed wording of the scriptural core and the constantly changing and evolving process of interpretation that makes for the development of religion.

With that in mind, our first task in understanding the divine right of a religious authority or community to exercise political control over territory in these religions is to understand the most basic, contextual messages regarding this issue as conveyed in scripture. ‘Contextual’, in this sense, means getting as close as possible to the meaning of scripture in its un-interpreted, original context of articulation. It must be acknowledged that from the scholarly perspective this is an impossible task. We do not have all the necessary tools to understand the full contextual meaning of scripture because we cannot reconstruct the exact meanings of the ancient words in which it was conveyed, the historical contexts of its revelation, or even the absolute veracity of the text itself. While religious authorities sometimes claim to have resolved these problems, the literatures of religious tradition prove the opposite by their intense examination of the structure of scriptural discourse and the meanings of scriptural language, and by their obvious disagreements about virtually any issue that is discussed.

War and Territorial Control in the Hebrew Bible

The Torah is the core of the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of all forms of Judaism. Many modern studies have examined the notion of war in the Hebrew Bible, with special emphasis on the Book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic material found in other biblical books because of their late redaction according to most biblical scholarship, and their well-developed notions of war. Fighting between polities, usually defined as tribal (kinship) groups, was a well-attested activity in the ancient Near East, and the Israelites, like all the communities among whom they lived, are depicted in both biblical and extra-biblical texts as engaging in wars. Wars – or what might be more accurately called battles – in the ancient Near East were typically sanctioned by divine powers. Just as God or ‘the God of Israel’ provided authority, moral and material support, and is even depicted as fighting on behalf of the Israelites,¹ other gods are depicted as doing virtually the same on behalf of their own peoples.²

The Torah is contextualised in the experience of the Sinaitic revelation that occurred, according to the Bible, prior to the biblical conquest of Canaan and...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction Contextualising Twenty-First Century Jihad
• Prologue A Short History of Jihad
• Part I Historical Antecedents of Contemporary Jihad
• Part II Jihad in Modern Politics and Society
• Part III Representations of Jihad in Modern Culture