Post by peterd on Dec 21, 2007 14:10:23 GMT -8
The takeover of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Tehran and the taking of American hostages by Iranian students on November 4, 1979 was greeted throughout the Muslim world as a victory of Islam over the infidels. Iranian students had managed to humiliate the great American superpower – and had thereby confirmed the Islamist belief that, by acting fearlessly in the name of Islam, Muslims could defeat the infidels. The fact that this was a victory by Shi'ites, a minority group in the Islamic world, did not detract from the sense of achievement among Muslims in general. In the grand division of the world into two camps – believers and infidels – there was a near-universal Muslim solidarity with Khomeini's Iran.
For the Saudi regime, however, the prestige earned by the Islamic Revolution in Iran posed a problem. After all, it is the House of Saud, the Defender of the Two Holy Places (i.e., Mecca and Medina), that should rightfully be the guardian of the true Islam – that is, Sunni Islam in accordance with the Wahhabi doctrine. In their view, it was they who deserved to lead the Islamic awakening – not the heretical Shi'ite Ayatollah Khomeini, whom they considered not much better than an infidel. The religious aura of the House of Saud was a political asset in the pan-Arab and international arena, and even more so within its own kingdom. In order to preserve its religious status, it had to win the struggle for primacy as the champions of Islam throughout the world. Therefore, in response to the challenge posed by the Iranian Revolution, the Saudis took a dual course of action: They embarked upon jihad against the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and they launched a far-reaching operation for the propagation of Islam.
To achieve the latter goal, they invested billions of dollars through Islamic charities in order to build mosques and religious seminaries (madrasas) throughout the world. Obviously, these madrasas and mosques were venues for Wahhabism, disseminating the doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya. The propagation of Wahhabi Islam worldwide served an internal purpose as well, countering charges of moral laxity directed against the Saudi regime. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, beginning in 1979, there has been a process of "Wahhabization" throughout the world. Although this process cannot be quantified, its effects are evident in far-flung Muslim communities, from Manchester to San Diego, from Shanghai to Oslo.
The 1989 Soviet debacle in Afghanistan was a great victory for Islamism. A decade after Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran, Sunni Islam triumphed over the infidel Communist power. The U.S. believed at the time that they had effectively manipulated Islam to deal a blow to the Soviets, but for the Islamists this was only a single battle in the global drama that would unfold until the ultimate victory of Islam, which would include the defeat of the U.S.
A series of terrorist operations during the 1990s signaled the direction and goals of the Islamists: jihad against the "infidel power" – the U.S.(23)
On February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden and four of his aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued their "Declaration of Jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews," which was a declaration of all-out holy war against the U.S. and its allies. The unique significance of this declaration lay in the fact that bin Laden and his associates had pronounced this jihad to be the personal obligation of each and every Muslim throughout the world. They based their decision on the teachings of medieval Muslim authorities, primarily Ibn Taymiyya, maintaining that the circumstances, which the declaration describes, warranted this unusual decision. The declaration stated: ""Killing the Americans and their allies – both civilians and military personnel – is a religious duty for every individual Muslim who can do this, in any country in which he can do this."
Islamist jihad has two goals, both global. One of these is to wage war against the main infidel power, the U.S., and all of its allies. Israel and the Jews are singled out in bin Laden's jihad declaration as allies of America. It presents the 1991 Gulf War as an operation by "the Crusader-Zionist alliance." It further states that one of the goals of the U.S. in its campaigns in the Middle East is "to help the tiny Jewish state and to distract attention from the fact that it is occupying Jerusalem and murdering Muslims."
The other goal is to topple the evil regimes in the Muslim countries, because their leaders are only outwardly Muslim. It is thus a religious obligation to fight them, depose them, and establish a truly Islamic regime in their place. The ultimate goal of jihad is to impose Islam on the entire world as the only true religion. This fundamental stance of Islam is manifested in bin Laden's call on the American people to embrace Islam, thereby putting an end to the war in Iraq.(24) Bin Laden reminds the Americans that "the biggest and most irreversible error one can commit in this world is to die without surrendering oneself to Allah, namely, to die without embracing Islam."
Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad is not an isolated document. Similar calls – and even stronger ones – are made regularly in Friday sermons that are broadcast live on Arab television across the Arab and Muslim world, and even in the West. These sermons include exhortations to slaughter Jews and Americans because "Allah has commanded the killing of the infidels."(25) From the Islamist perspective, Muslims are in a no-holds-barred war of jihad.
The phenomenon of jihad, and the idea of self-sacrifice in battle for the sake of Allah (shahada), which is closely linked to it, are not easy to comprehend. In some liberal circles in the West, Islamic terror in Europe is often claimed to be the consequence of economic and social factors, such as the frustration, unemployment, and economic hardships suffered by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Europe.
This explanation, based on concepts familiar to the secular Westerner, appears to make sense and is therefore readily accepted. Indeed, many liberal-minded researchers and commentators, who see 'the West' as historically guilty vis-à-vis the Third World, are not prepared to accept an explanation linking terrorist activities with jihad and religious extremism, which they construe as disparagement of Islam. Therefore, they prefer explanations that deny or at least blur the connection between suicide terrorist attacks and the Muslim identity of their perpetrators. The problem with such an approach is that, when we look at the profiles of Islamic terrorists in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, we see that they do not belong to the population evoked by this explanation, namely those suffering from unemployment and economic deprivation. Neither the perpetrators of the Madrid train bombing on March 11, 2004 nor the 19 Al-Qaeda members responsible for the September 11th attacks were uneducated, unemployed young men. Without recognizing that the Islamist belief system is at the root of all these terrorist acts, we cannot possibly understand the nature of these acts or the motives of their perpetrators.
MUSLIM PROTEST AGAINST JIHADIST ISLAM
In the preceding sections I have described the phenomenon of modern jihad and its early Islamic roots. It is now necessary to present the limits of its power and influence.
Islamist terrorism has won sympathy in the Muslim world, but the Islamist call for universal jihad has had only limited success. The extremist Islamic organizations are all clandestine, and the Arab regimes, in the interest of self-preservation, fight them in various ways – including some attempts to delegitimize them from the Islamic religious point of view. The Egyptian and Saudi Arabian media publish abundant information about the struggle of officially ordained clerics against extremist Islamic groups. Bin Laden's call for all-encompassing jihad has thus clearly failed to move the entire Muslim world. In fact, even some of the extremist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt do not subscribe to the idea of global jihad waged here and now, and against all infidels, within and without.(26) On October 1, 2007, Saudi Mufti Sheikh Abd Al-'Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. The fatwa stated that setting forth to wage jihad without authorization by the ruler is a serious transgression, and that young Saudis who do so are being misled by dubious elements from both the East and the West who are exploiting them in order to accomplish their own aims, and who are actually causing serious damage to Saudi Arabia, to Islam, and to the Muslims.(27) This fatwa is a clear example of the ideological struggle led by the Saudi authorities and a group of Wahhabi religious scholars against the jihadist propaganda.
In addition to the authorities' struggle against this propaganda, there is an ongoing ideological struggle by the educated circles against extremism in Islam in general, and against jihad with its culture of death in particular. Muslim thinkers and writers who strive for social and cultural reform in their countries are calling to abandon the jihad ideology and to desist from fostering hatred of other religions and cultures. Some of these reformist writers have a clearly secular worldview, such as Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al-'Azam, or Arab-American psychiatrist and author Wafa Sultan. Most of the active reformist thinkers, however, do not follow an openly secular doctrine but call for adjustments to Islam to fit it to modern life.
The Jordanian-born historian Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi, who resides in the U.S.; the Saudi director-general of Al-Arabiya TV and former editor-in-chief of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed; the Egyptian intellectual Sayyed Al-Qimni; Professor of Psychology at Al-Zaytouna University in Tunis Iqbal Al-Gharbi; Tunisian poet and civil rights activist Basit bin Hassan; Ahmad Al-Baghdadi, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kuwait; Syrian journalist Nidhal Na'isa; former dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University Dr. 'Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari; and Egyptian playwright 'Ali Salem are only some of the figures prominent in the ideological struggle against the jihadist culture.(28)
This ideological struggle – whether it is fought by the official clerics or by writers and other independent circles – is no simple matter, because jihad is a religious duty, and the reverence for the martyrs of jihad (the shuhada of Islam's first generation – al-salaf al-salih) is shared by all Muslims. This makes the ideological struggle against the Islamists, who evoke the authority of "the pious forefathers," all the more difficult. Arab regimes face an inherent ideological contradiction: On the one hand, their security forces battle the jihadist organizations, while on the other, state-funded schools and mosques continue to disseminate the idea of jihad for the sake of Allah. The conflict within Islam over the issue of jihad is essentially a conflict over the path that Muslim societies should follow – either hostile isolation and war vis-à-vis everything non-Muslim, or integration into the modern world.
*Menahem Milson is professor emeritus of Arabic Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and MEMRI's academic advisor.
Endnotes:
(1) Some of the other attacks were the February 26, 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center; the March 1995 assassination of the American diplomats in Pakistan; the bombing at the Saudi military base in Riyadh in November 1995; the June 1996 bombing at the American barracks in the Saudi town of Dhahran; the double bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Al-Salam in August 1998; the attack on the U.S.S. Cole near Aden in October 2000; the March 2004 Madrid bombings; the July 2005 bombings in London; and the deadly bombings in Bali tourist resorts in 2002 and 2005.
(2) Al-Thaqafa Al-Islamiyya (Islamic Education), Ministry of Education, Palestinian Authority, Ramallah, 2003, p. 208.
(3) Jihad can refer not only to actual war, but also to the struggle between good and evil within an individual's soul. This metaphorical understanding of jihad was developed by the Sufis, the Muslim mystics, in the ninth century CE, based on a hadith (oral tradition) of the Prophet Muhammad. On the basis of this hadith, spiritual jihad was termed "the Greater Jihad" (al-jihad al-akbar), while jihad on the battlefront was termed "the Lesser Jihad" (al-jihad al-asghar). However, this understanding of jihad did not supersede the original, historical understanding of the term to mean war against the infidels as a duty incumbent upon every Muslim.
(4) In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is not only a month of fasting but a month of victory. In the October 1973 war, the codename of the Egyptian-Syrian offensive, which began on the tenth day of Ramadan in the Muslim year of 1393, was "Operation Badr," after the victorious battle of Badr. The war itself is called the Ramadan War (harb ramadhan) in Arabic.
(5) It should be noted that there is a significant discrepancy between Muslim law and what most Muslim leaders did in practice. The far-ranging Muslim conquests brought large populations of different religions – not only Jews and Christians – under Muslim rule, and all were granted the status of dhimmi. The Muslim scholars found pretexts to allow this, thus granting religious justification for what was essentially a practical necessity.
(6) For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that the word shahada has three meanings: a) "testimony" or "bearing witness"; b) the Islamic pronouncement of faith; c) self-sacrifice in battle for the sake of Allah, that is, martyrdom, also known as "the greater shahada."
(7) In the Koran, they are called hur 'ayn. Islamic scholars and commentators have discussed this expression at length, and it is generally agreed that the virgins have wide, black eyes.
(8) Al-Risala (PA), July 7, 2001.
(9) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), October 4, 2001.
(10) Al-Risala (PA), August 16, 2001.
(11) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 11, 2001.
(12) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 17, 2001.
(13) USA Today, June 26, 2001.
(14) Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), September 30, 2007.
(15) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 17, 1999.
(16) www.qudsway.com/Links/Jehad/7/Html_Jehad7/hinadi/hinadi2/hinadi_qudsnet_003.htm.
(17) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 476, March 5, 2003, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP47603, "Bin Laden's Sermon for the Feast of the Sacrifice." The poet quoted is Al-Tirimmah ibn Al-Hakim Al-Ta'i (660–743 CE).
(18) See MEMRI TV Clip No. 1468, "Graduation Ceremony at the Islamic Association in Gaza on Hamas TV," May 31, 2007, www.memritv.org/clip/en/1468.htm.
(19) This historical incident appears in numerous medieval Muslim sources. The version given here is taken from the chronicle by Jarir Al-Tabari (d. 923), from the chapter describing the events of the 12th year following the hijra.
(20) The decline of the Ottoman Empire was a protracted process, which began long before it reached the awareness of the Ottoman elites. Admittedly, as early as the beginning of the 18th century, as a result of the 1699 Karlovitz agreement, the Ottomans could not avoid the realization that the balance of power between the Muslims and the Christian world had shifted against them and that a reform in the system was therefore necessary. However, the sense of crisis did not become widespread among the Muslim elites until the turn of the 19th century.
(21) It is significant that the concept of nationalism as a foundation for collective identity came to Islam from the Western culture.
(22) Though all Salafis regard ibn Taymiyya as a religious authority and source of inspiration, not all of them interpret the duty of jihad in the same way. The largest differences concern their perception of intra-Muslim jihad, i.e. jihad against Muslim leaders.
(23) See Endnote 1.
(24) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 1709, "Osama Bin Laden's Video Message to the American People," September 11, 2007, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP170907.
(25) See MEMRI Special Report No. 25, 'Contemporary Islamist Ideology Authorizing Genocidal Murder," January 27, 2004, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sr&ID=SR2504
(26) Pressure on the part of the Egyptian authorities has caused most of the members of the Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya movement to abandon their claim that it is every Muslim's obligation to fight any government that is outwardly Muslim but that fails to apply Muslim religious law.
(27) The mufti's speech was published in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), in Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia), and in Al-Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) on October 2, 2007.
(28) Ample material on reformist opponents to jihad can be found on MEMRI websites www.memri.org and www.memritv.org.
For the Saudi regime, however, the prestige earned by the Islamic Revolution in Iran posed a problem. After all, it is the House of Saud, the Defender of the Two Holy Places (i.e., Mecca and Medina), that should rightfully be the guardian of the true Islam – that is, Sunni Islam in accordance with the Wahhabi doctrine. In their view, it was they who deserved to lead the Islamic awakening – not the heretical Shi'ite Ayatollah Khomeini, whom they considered not much better than an infidel. The religious aura of the House of Saud was a political asset in the pan-Arab and international arena, and even more so within its own kingdom. In order to preserve its religious status, it had to win the struggle for primacy as the champions of Islam throughout the world. Therefore, in response to the challenge posed by the Iranian Revolution, the Saudis took a dual course of action: They embarked upon jihad against the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and they launched a far-reaching operation for the propagation of Islam.
To achieve the latter goal, they invested billions of dollars through Islamic charities in order to build mosques and religious seminaries (madrasas) throughout the world. Obviously, these madrasas and mosques were venues for Wahhabism, disseminating the doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya. The propagation of Wahhabi Islam worldwide served an internal purpose as well, countering charges of moral laxity directed against the Saudi regime. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, beginning in 1979, there has been a process of "Wahhabization" throughout the world. Although this process cannot be quantified, its effects are evident in far-flung Muslim communities, from Manchester to San Diego, from Shanghai to Oslo.
The 1989 Soviet debacle in Afghanistan was a great victory for Islamism. A decade after Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran, Sunni Islam triumphed over the infidel Communist power. The U.S. believed at the time that they had effectively manipulated Islam to deal a blow to the Soviets, but for the Islamists this was only a single battle in the global drama that would unfold until the ultimate victory of Islam, which would include the defeat of the U.S.
A series of terrorist operations during the 1990s signaled the direction and goals of the Islamists: jihad against the "infidel power" – the U.S.(23)
On February 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden and four of his aides, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued their "Declaration of Jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews," which was a declaration of all-out holy war against the U.S. and its allies. The unique significance of this declaration lay in the fact that bin Laden and his associates had pronounced this jihad to be the personal obligation of each and every Muslim throughout the world. They based their decision on the teachings of medieval Muslim authorities, primarily Ibn Taymiyya, maintaining that the circumstances, which the declaration describes, warranted this unusual decision. The declaration stated: ""Killing the Americans and their allies – both civilians and military personnel – is a religious duty for every individual Muslim who can do this, in any country in which he can do this."
Islamist jihad has two goals, both global. One of these is to wage war against the main infidel power, the U.S., and all of its allies. Israel and the Jews are singled out in bin Laden's jihad declaration as allies of America. It presents the 1991 Gulf War as an operation by "the Crusader-Zionist alliance." It further states that one of the goals of the U.S. in its campaigns in the Middle East is "to help the tiny Jewish state and to distract attention from the fact that it is occupying Jerusalem and murdering Muslims."
The other goal is to topple the evil regimes in the Muslim countries, because their leaders are only outwardly Muslim. It is thus a religious obligation to fight them, depose them, and establish a truly Islamic regime in their place. The ultimate goal of jihad is to impose Islam on the entire world as the only true religion. This fundamental stance of Islam is manifested in bin Laden's call on the American people to embrace Islam, thereby putting an end to the war in Iraq.(24) Bin Laden reminds the Americans that "the biggest and most irreversible error one can commit in this world is to die without surrendering oneself to Allah, namely, to die without embracing Islam."
Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad is not an isolated document. Similar calls – and even stronger ones – are made regularly in Friday sermons that are broadcast live on Arab television across the Arab and Muslim world, and even in the West. These sermons include exhortations to slaughter Jews and Americans because "Allah has commanded the killing of the infidels."(25) From the Islamist perspective, Muslims are in a no-holds-barred war of jihad.
The phenomenon of jihad, and the idea of self-sacrifice in battle for the sake of Allah (shahada), which is closely linked to it, are not easy to comprehend. In some liberal circles in the West, Islamic terror in Europe is often claimed to be the consequence of economic and social factors, such as the frustration, unemployment, and economic hardships suffered by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Europe.
This explanation, based on concepts familiar to the secular Westerner, appears to make sense and is therefore readily accepted. Indeed, many liberal-minded researchers and commentators, who see 'the West' as historically guilty vis-à-vis the Third World, are not prepared to accept an explanation linking terrorist activities with jihad and religious extremism, which they construe as disparagement of Islam. Therefore, they prefer explanations that deny or at least blur the connection between suicide terrorist attacks and the Muslim identity of their perpetrators. The problem with such an approach is that, when we look at the profiles of Islamic terrorists in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, we see that they do not belong to the population evoked by this explanation, namely those suffering from unemployment and economic deprivation. Neither the perpetrators of the Madrid train bombing on March 11, 2004 nor the 19 Al-Qaeda members responsible for the September 11th attacks were uneducated, unemployed young men. Without recognizing that the Islamist belief system is at the root of all these terrorist acts, we cannot possibly understand the nature of these acts or the motives of their perpetrators.
MUSLIM PROTEST AGAINST JIHADIST ISLAM
In the preceding sections I have described the phenomenon of modern jihad and its early Islamic roots. It is now necessary to present the limits of its power and influence.
Islamist terrorism has won sympathy in the Muslim world, but the Islamist call for universal jihad has had only limited success. The extremist Islamic organizations are all clandestine, and the Arab regimes, in the interest of self-preservation, fight them in various ways – including some attempts to delegitimize them from the Islamic religious point of view. The Egyptian and Saudi Arabian media publish abundant information about the struggle of officially ordained clerics against extremist Islamic groups. Bin Laden's call for all-encompassing jihad has thus clearly failed to move the entire Muslim world. In fact, even some of the extremist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt do not subscribe to the idea of global jihad waged here and now, and against all infidels, within and without.(26) On October 1, 2007, Saudi Mufti Sheikh Abd Al-'Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from engaging in jihad abroad. The fatwa stated that setting forth to wage jihad without authorization by the ruler is a serious transgression, and that young Saudis who do so are being misled by dubious elements from both the East and the West who are exploiting them in order to accomplish their own aims, and who are actually causing serious damage to Saudi Arabia, to Islam, and to the Muslims.(27) This fatwa is a clear example of the ideological struggle led by the Saudi authorities and a group of Wahhabi religious scholars against the jihadist propaganda.
In addition to the authorities' struggle against this propaganda, there is an ongoing ideological struggle by the educated circles against extremism in Islam in general, and against jihad with its culture of death in particular. Muslim thinkers and writers who strive for social and cultural reform in their countries are calling to abandon the jihad ideology and to desist from fostering hatred of other religions and cultures. Some of these reformist writers have a clearly secular worldview, such as Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al-'Azam, or Arab-American psychiatrist and author Wafa Sultan. Most of the active reformist thinkers, however, do not follow an openly secular doctrine but call for adjustments to Islam to fit it to modern life.
The Jordanian-born historian Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi, who resides in the U.S.; the Saudi director-general of Al-Arabiya TV and former editor-in-chief of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat 'Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed; the Egyptian intellectual Sayyed Al-Qimni; Professor of Psychology at Al-Zaytouna University in Tunis Iqbal Al-Gharbi; Tunisian poet and civil rights activist Basit bin Hassan; Ahmad Al-Baghdadi, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kuwait; Syrian journalist Nidhal Na'isa; former dean of Islamic Law at Qatar University Dr. 'Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari; and Egyptian playwright 'Ali Salem are only some of the figures prominent in the ideological struggle against the jihadist culture.(28)
This ideological struggle – whether it is fought by the official clerics or by writers and other independent circles – is no simple matter, because jihad is a religious duty, and the reverence for the martyrs of jihad (the shuhada of Islam's first generation – al-salaf al-salih) is shared by all Muslims. This makes the ideological struggle against the Islamists, who evoke the authority of "the pious forefathers," all the more difficult. Arab regimes face an inherent ideological contradiction: On the one hand, their security forces battle the jihadist organizations, while on the other, state-funded schools and mosques continue to disseminate the idea of jihad for the sake of Allah. The conflict within Islam over the issue of jihad is essentially a conflict over the path that Muslim societies should follow – either hostile isolation and war vis-à-vis everything non-Muslim, or integration into the modern world.
*Menahem Milson is professor emeritus of Arabic Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and MEMRI's academic advisor.
Endnotes:
(1) Some of the other attacks were the February 26, 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center; the March 1995 assassination of the American diplomats in Pakistan; the bombing at the Saudi military base in Riyadh in November 1995; the June 1996 bombing at the American barracks in the Saudi town of Dhahran; the double bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Al-Salam in August 1998; the attack on the U.S.S. Cole near Aden in October 2000; the March 2004 Madrid bombings; the July 2005 bombings in London; and the deadly bombings in Bali tourist resorts in 2002 and 2005.
(2) Al-Thaqafa Al-Islamiyya (Islamic Education), Ministry of Education, Palestinian Authority, Ramallah, 2003, p. 208.
(3) Jihad can refer not only to actual war, but also to the struggle between good and evil within an individual's soul. This metaphorical understanding of jihad was developed by the Sufis, the Muslim mystics, in the ninth century CE, based on a hadith (oral tradition) of the Prophet Muhammad. On the basis of this hadith, spiritual jihad was termed "the Greater Jihad" (al-jihad al-akbar), while jihad on the battlefront was termed "the Lesser Jihad" (al-jihad al-asghar). However, this understanding of jihad did not supersede the original, historical understanding of the term to mean war against the infidels as a duty incumbent upon every Muslim.
(4) In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is not only a month of fasting but a month of victory. In the October 1973 war, the codename of the Egyptian-Syrian offensive, which began on the tenth day of Ramadan in the Muslim year of 1393, was "Operation Badr," after the victorious battle of Badr. The war itself is called the Ramadan War (harb ramadhan) in Arabic.
(5) It should be noted that there is a significant discrepancy between Muslim law and what most Muslim leaders did in practice. The far-ranging Muslim conquests brought large populations of different religions – not only Jews and Christians – under Muslim rule, and all were granted the status of dhimmi. The Muslim scholars found pretexts to allow this, thus granting religious justification for what was essentially a practical necessity.
(6) For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that the word shahada has three meanings: a) "testimony" or "bearing witness"; b) the Islamic pronouncement of faith; c) self-sacrifice in battle for the sake of Allah, that is, martyrdom, also known as "the greater shahada."
(7) In the Koran, they are called hur 'ayn. Islamic scholars and commentators have discussed this expression at length, and it is generally agreed that the virgins have wide, black eyes.
(8) Al-Risala (PA), July 7, 2001.
(9) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), October 4, 2001.
(10) Al-Risala (PA), August 16, 2001.
(11) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 11, 2001.
(12) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 17, 2001.
(13) USA Today, June 26, 2001.
(14) Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), September 30, 2007.
(15) Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (PA), September 17, 1999.
(16) www.qudsway.com/Links/Jehad/7/Html_Jehad7/hinadi/hinadi2/hinadi_qudsnet_003.htm.
(17) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 476, March 5, 2003, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP47603, "Bin Laden's Sermon for the Feast of the Sacrifice." The poet quoted is Al-Tirimmah ibn Al-Hakim Al-Ta'i (660–743 CE).
(18) See MEMRI TV Clip No. 1468, "Graduation Ceremony at the Islamic Association in Gaza on Hamas TV," May 31, 2007, www.memritv.org/clip/en/1468.htm.
(19) This historical incident appears in numerous medieval Muslim sources. The version given here is taken from the chronicle by Jarir Al-Tabari (d. 923), from the chapter describing the events of the 12th year following the hijra.
(20) The decline of the Ottoman Empire was a protracted process, which began long before it reached the awareness of the Ottoman elites. Admittedly, as early as the beginning of the 18th century, as a result of the 1699 Karlovitz agreement, the Ottomans could not avoid the realization that the balance of power between the Muslims and the Christian world had shifted against them and that a reform in the system was therefore necessary. However, the sense of crisis did not become widespread among the Muslim elites until the turn of the 19th century.
(21) It is significant that the concept of nationalism as a foundation for collective identity came to Islam from the Western culture.
(22) Though all Salafis regard ibn Taymiyya as a religious authority and source of inspiration, not all of them interpret the duty of jihad in the same way. The largest differences concern their perception of intra-Muslim jihad, i.e. jihad against Muslim leaders.
(23) See Endnote 1.
(24) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 1709, "Osama Bin Laden's Video Message to the American People," September 11, 2007, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP170907.
(25) See MEMRI Special Report No. 25, 'Contemporary Islamist Ideology Authorizing Genocidal Murder," January 27, 2004, memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sr&ID=SR2504
(26) Pressure on the part of the Egyptian authorities has caused most of the members of the Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya movement to abandon their claim that it is every Muslim's obligation to fight any government that is outwardly Muslim but that fails to apply Muslim religious law.
(27) The mufti's speech was published in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), in Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia), and in Al-Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) on October 2, 2007.
(28) Ample material on reformist opponents to jihad can be found on MEMRI websites www.memri.org and www.memritv.org.