Look at any college textbook on comparative religions or world geography and what you learn about Islam is essentially the harmless but colorful doctrines of devotion and worship that Muslims around the world practice on a daily or seasonal basis, referred to as The Five Pillars of Islam.
These are; the
shahada or declaration that Allah is the only God and that Muhammad is his prophet, the
haj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), sala (daily prayer five times a day), zaka (the giving of alms), and (saum), the month long fast from sun-up to sun-down during the month of Ramadan. If mentioned at all, Jihad is reported as an "internal struggle" of the individual to suppress his baser instincts. Nothing is mentioned of the hundreds of citations of the word Jihad in the
Koran and in the sunnah and sirah that all focus on war against the infidel and pay attention to Islam's geography and its role in international affairs
Sunnah is an Arabic word that means habit or usual practice. The Muslim usage of this term refers to the sayings and habits of Muhammad. The Sunnah includes his specific words, actions, and practices. It is significant because it addresses ways of life dealing with friends, family, government and non-Muslims. It describes in detail what Muhammad believed, implied or tacitly approved and was noted down by his companions in form of what is today known as hadith (traditions).
Sira may be translated with "way of acting" in the sense of a "biography", which early Islamic authorities accepted as an authoritative account of the prophet's life. In all of these works, Jihad is a fundamental principle of Muslim supremacy and the right to dominate all infidels (non-believers).
In order to understand JIHAD as a veritable sixth essential element in the spread of Islam historically and the threat it poses today, one must understand how Islam radically differs from other faiths and functions politically and geographically. Its role relates not simply to how Islam was spread and became a "world religion" from it original narrow basis in the Arabian peninsular. It has been a major political force in the 20
th century and extends its potential threat into the 21
st.
The 20
th century has witnessed examples of jihad used as incitement to commit genocide and in two world wars in which a "selective jihad" was used by Muslim and European tyrants as allies to mobilize the political and economic resources of the Muslim world against Western civilization and democracy. In 1914, the only focus of Muslim power in the world was the Turkish Ottoman Empire whose sultan still commanded the respect and obedience of most of the world's Sunni Muslims whether or not they were citizens. The Turkish Sultan, Mahomet V, was the only acknowledged "
Caliph" and he and his court in alliance with the "Young Turk" movement followed a pro-German line, convinced that a victory by the Central Powers would help reverse the backward slide of the empire and enable them to recover territory lost to the hated Russians who had connived to help liberate the Christian Slavic peoples and the Greeks from Turkish rule.
In response to the call for Jihad, approximately a million and a half Armenians throughout the Turkish Empire died as a result of executions, mass violence, hunger and forced expulsions during 1915-1917. Several similar genocidal crimes against Greeks in the 1890s and again in the period 1919-1924 resulted in close to a million fatalities. In both cases, civilians, many of them aged men, women and children were the victims. All of the soldiers following the orders of their superiors were Muslims (Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Druze) convinced that they were following the justified edict of Jihad.
The court of the previous Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II (deposed in 1909), had welcomed and flattered Kaiser Wilhelm II on his visit to Palestine in 1898 and expressed a favorable attitude towards the construction of a German financed Berlin to Baghdad railway. German military officers were involved in the training of both the Turkish army and navy. The controlled Turkish press represented the Kaiser in the most favorable light and hinted that he was considering conversion to Islam and regarded himself as a European "Protector of Islam". In a future European conflict, the Ottoman Sultan would endeavor to promote religious extremism by calling upon Sunni Muslims everywhere to join a "selective jihad" against the British, French and Russian infidels. The Germans with no Muslim subjects and Austria with only a few in Bosnia could be regarded as allies in spite of their Christian faith.
Mussolini and Hitler's Appeal to the Jihadists
For more than sixteen years since Mussolini's regime came to power in 1922, anti-Semitism was rejected by Fascist Italy. Like Kaiser Wilhelm however, Mussolini felt that considerations of power politics ultimately required favoring Muslim sensitivities to keep them as allies or acquire new ones rather than the potential benefits that Italy might derive from favoring the Jews. The Fascist movement in Italy was not favorably disposed towards the Catholic Church and resented the opposition the Vatican had demonstrated to Italian unification. Until the Lateran Treaty (1929) that recognized the sovereignty of the Vatican City State, relations between the Catholic Church and Mussolini's Fascist regime were cold and relations with Nazi Germany reached a low point in 1934 that brought Mussolini into direct confrontation with Hitler over the question of Austria's independence.
It was however, Mussolini's quest for a new and grand version of ancient Rome with colonial possessions in North Africa, naval supremacy in the Mediterranean ("Our Sea" – "
Mare Nostrum"), the Italian desire for revenge against Abyssinia for the disastrous defeat suffered at Ethiopian hands at Adowa in 1896 that resulted in a total change of his position on a possible alliance with Zionism. In his view Italy had sacrificed much in World War I only to be denied the fruits of victory with an expanded colonial role in the Middle East and Africa. This led him to pursue an aggressive campaign that ultimately brought him into an alliance with Nazi Germany and Hitler whose ideology he had previously ridiculed.
In March 1937, Benito Mussolini opportunistically proclaimed himself as "Protector of Islam" following a state visit to the Italian colony of Libya where he opened a new military highway. The occasion was to mark the brutal suppression of resistance to Italian occupation that ended with the execution of a Senussi rebel leader, Omar al-Mukhtar. Italy simultaneously began a propaganda campaign designed to pacify Muslim sentiment around the Mediterranean and deflect anti-colonialist sentiment against the British and French presence in North Africa and the Middle East.
This policy included secret Italian support of the most extreme anti-Zionist of the Palestinian Muslim political figures, Haj Amin al-Husseini who had been installed in office by the British in 1931 even though he finished fourth in an election of Palestine's chief religious leader (mufti) by Muslim notables. The British tried to impress the Arab population that even though they were widely blamed for the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine as a "Jewish National Home," they respected Muslim concerns and rights. Ironically, Italian support was provided for the same reason – exploitation of the mufti's appeal to the most radical fundamentalist Muslim religious sentiment in the expectation that they could "outbid" the British for Arab sympathy.
Mussolini, in a typically extravagant and bizarre dramatization of his manly image, and newly established title of Protector of Islam, arranged for a ceremonial girding on of the "Sword of Islam" in Libya in 1937. At the ceremony in Tripoli, he declared "Italy will always be the friend and protector of Islam throughout the world." Italian Foreign minister Ciano noted that Islam was totally compatible with the Fascist outlook and added that "
The Islamic world, in accordance with its traditions, loves in the Duce, the wisdom of the statesman united to the action of the warrior."
In the Italian campaign of aggression against Abyssinia, the Catholic Church was exploited by Mussolini to lend its approval to a war it characterized as one on "behalf of Western civilization against African barbarism." Nevertheless, a large proportion of the Italian forces were Muslim recruits from Libya, Eritrea, Somaliland and the Muslim dominated Galla region who were Jihadi-inspired Arab volunteers cynically exploited by the Italians to fight against the "infidel" Christian Ethiopians.
Hitler and Germany's Endorsement of Jihad against the Jews
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers'
Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das "Dritte Reich", die Araber und Palästina, (
Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine)published in September, 2006 documents the Arab sympathies for Nazism, particularly in Palestine and German attempts to mobilize and encourage the Arabs with their ideology.
In a telegram to the Palestinian Grand Mufti,Haj Amin al-Husseini, on November 2, 1943, Heinrich Himmler wrote; "
The National Socialist Movement of greater Germany has since its inception, inscribed upon its flag, the fight against world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common fight against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist greater Germany and the freedom loving Muslims of the whole world." To all Muslims aware of the telegram, this meant Germany endorsed the mufti's call to jihad.
When the British quelled an Arab revolt in Palestine in 1938-39, al-Husseini fled to Iraq where he helped orchestrate a pro-Axis coup and vicious pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad. Thanks to the counteroffensive of the Red Army in front of Moscow in 1941/1942, at Stalingrad in 1942/1943, and the defeat of the German Africa Corps at El Alamein, the Germans never managed to actively intervene militarily in the Middle East. Many Bosnian Muslims were nevertheless recruited by the Mufti and served in a special SS division. For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia after the war by a court in Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito.
The Call for Jihad Against the Jews in Palestine and Israel
The unrest in Palestine during the British Mandate is most frequently presented as a unilateral struggle between rival nationalisms (Arab vs. Jewish). The impulse towards Jihad on the part of the Muslim extremists dominating the Arab nationalist cause is downplayed or purposely ignored by Leftwing opinion. In spite of repeated propaganda campaigns by anti-Zionists that the Muslims of Palestine bore no ill will against ultra-orthodox religious (and non-Zionist) Jews, the violent pogrom of 1929 in Hebron was motivated by traditional calls of Jihad against the veteran Jewish community in the town resulting in dozens of aged Orthodox men, women and children killed.
Even the official Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1938 gave evidence of the religious fanaticism animating the Palestinian Arab national movement reporting in detail how the Arab Higher Committee under the leadership of the Grand Mufti had employed violence and intimidation against scores of village chieftains and Bedouin as well as moderate Muslim Arab personalities culminating in the murder of Nasr el Din Nasr, the Mayor of Hebron and attempts on the life of Hasan Shukri, the Mayor of Haifa. Christian Arabs were hardly exempt from gross intimidation by the Mufti's leadership to express support for the Palestinian cause. Here too, Jihadist calls were frequent to pressure Christian Arabs to give up the tarboosh (fez) in favor of the keffiyah, for Christian women to wear the veil just as their Muslim counterparts and for Christian shopkeepers to close on the Muslim Sabbath of Friday instead of Sunday.
On May 15, 1948, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, General-Secretary of the Arab League, generally recognized as a "moderate spokesman" for Arab nationalism proclaimed that the conflict with the Jews was unavoidable and promised publicly in classical Jihadi religious terms that the Arab invasion of Palestine to crush the Jews "
will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades". Azzam was an Egyptian who, on many occasions, assured Zionist leaders that he did not wish to see a confrontation but that it would be inevitable and contrary to his moderate position, he would be forced by "Arab public opinion" (the Arab street) to couch his rhetoric in the most extreme position to capitalize on Muslim religious as well as nationalist emotion.
"Islamism" and Jihad vs. The World
In the 1960s, it could be said that the political leadership of every Muslim state had turned its back on the violent Jihadi past and set a course on imitating the Western concept of the nation state and paid lip service only to the concept of the idea that all Muslims constituted a world-wide community. These views were shaken by a renewed extremist Islamist campaign in Egypt led by the Muslim Brothers founded and inspired by the Islamist theorists Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949) and Sayyad Qutb (hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966), in Pakistan under the influence of the continuing conflict with India and the views of cleric Mawlana Mawdudi (1903-1979), and most dramatically by the triumph of the revolution led by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) that overthrew the Shah in Iran.
The credo of the Muslim Brothers (or Brotherhood) for which there is no possibility of misinterpreting states that "
Allah is our goal, the Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle is our way and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration".
Mawdudi, who founded the Islamist
Jamaat-e-Islami (Muslim Block) in 1942, argued that the ultimate goal of the Jihadi movement is to destroy all those regimes that are opposed to the precepts of Islam and replace them with a world wide government based on Islamic principles.
The emergence of militant Islamism among both Sunnis and Shi'ites and the call for all legislation to be based on the Koran as well as world-wide Jihad became as much a threat to the "moderate" rulers in these three states as against the Dar al- Harb. The assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (by the Muslim brothers) was a harbinger of the growing Jihadi threat and the desire to implement an Islamist solution wiping away the vestiges of Western and secular institutions everywhere in Muslim and Arab countries. Attempts to placate the Islamists in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Malaysia, Lebanon and elsewhere have only led to their increased strength.
Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim brothers and Hizbollah is an Iranian puppet committed to a Shi'ite variety of the same world-wide jihadist call. Western politicians and so called Leftwing or "progressive" political forces urging or pressuring Israel to "negotiate" with these two Jihadist terror organizations display a willful ignorance and simply refuse to acknowledge the reality of their violent heritage, fascist character and long term goals to destroy the West.
If we are to learn anything at all from history, it is that the Islamist concept of jihad was unequivocally understood throughout the ages as "violent holy war" against the infidels and not subject to interpretation. It remains a political weapon that has been used quite similarly by the last Ottoman Caliph, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs, Al-Qaeda and rival extremist Sunni and Shi'ite clerics in Iraq today. It is still attractive to much extremist opinion in large parts of the Arab world, Chechniya, the Sudan, Pakistan and even in Indonesia. Its attraction throughout the 20
th century for those autocratic and dictatorial European leaders who sought to become "Protectors of Islam" and "borrow" it, was to exploit its violent and evil appeal for their own purposes.
Jihad is directed not "just" against the unbelievers (the kaffirs, i.e., non-Mulsims), but all those who have "deviated" -- the Shi'ites, the Alawites, the Ahmadis, the Druze, Bahais, Yazidis, etc. It is holy war by armed resistance to all those who do not accept Muhammad's message as interpreted by the sacred traditions hallowed by all the schools of Sunni jurisprudence across fourteen hundred years of history.
But for our president, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan, there is the unshakable but blind, deaf, and dumb conviction that as they interpret it, Islam is a peaceful and noble religion that has been distorted by a "tiny minority," and jihad means a peaceful striving with oneself to overcome evil tendencies, As noted authority Bernard Lewis has so cogently argued, although a majority of Muslims at any given time may not be motivated by considerations of jihad, the phrase "Islamic terrorism" is apt, because Islam has had an essentially political character ... from its very foundation ... to the present day. An intimate association between religion and politics, between power and cult, marks a principal distinction between Islam and other religions. ... In traditional Islam and therefore also in resurgent fundamentalist Islam, God is the sole source of sovereignty. God is the head of the state. The state is God's state. The army is God's army. The treasury is God's treasury, and the enemy, of course, is God's enemy."
