Islamic scholars historically have placed “too much emphasis on jihad as basically a violent” rather than nonviolent doctrine, stated Mount Holyoke College international relations professor Sohail Hashmi in an April 11 webinar. Hosted by the Muslim group Critical Connections in Hashmi’s Pioneer Valley region of Massachusetts, his lucid lecture on “Jihad vs Just War: A Comparative Analysis” provided detailed, disturbing insight into Islamic doctrines of jihad warfare.
As in a previously analyzed webinar, Critical Connections founder Mehlaqa Samdani moderated and worried in her introduction about “Islamophobic groups” dominating discussion of hot-button issues like jihad. Her “Islamophobia” reference ironically recalled the religiously repressive nature of the terrorism-sponsoring Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the home of her co-moderator, Karachi University student Rutaba Tariq. She represented Pakistan’s branch of the Model Organization of Islamic Cooperation (MOIC), a student affiliate of the OIC, whose fifty-seven member states (including “Palestine”) have long sought to ban “Islamophobic” criticism of Islam worldwide. While Hashmi took no critical notice of the OIC, she encouraged viewers to join MOIC; additionally, Georgetown University professor John L. Esposito, an apologist for these efforts and all things Islamist, made a brief cameo appearance.
Yet Hashmi’s presentation did not deny that serious concerns about jihad are well-founded, not irrational, even as he claimed that Christian just war and Islamic jihad doctrines are “extremely alike.” He argued that Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament are “very heavily biased in the pacifist direction,” such that Christian thinkers developed just war theory largely on the basis of self-defense in natural law. More disturbingly, although “jihad is a very broad concept,” which “means simply to struggle,” in the eighth-ninth centuries Islam’s “classical jurists spent most of their time talking about what we could call an expansionist or an offensive jihad.”
This was a “jihad to expand the Islamic empire, to expand the realm of Dar al-Islam,” Hashmi noted. The “fundamental aspect of Dar al-Islam is that this is the territory where Islamic law is supreme” and “Muslims are not necessarily the majority.” Thus Muslim-conquered areas like Mesopotamia and Egypt “remained primarily non-Muslim for centuries,” he explained.
This “imperialist jihad” in the classical view, Hashmi explained, would supposedly benefit non-Muslim “benighted peoples.” “Once non-Muslims had lived under the benefits of this divine law, of this Islamic law, they would of their own accord realize the merits of Islam, the religion, and they would of their own accord, of their own free will, convert to Islam,” he said. He later specified how the modern Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution advocates the “spread of an Islamic community of nations.”
Jihad conquests obviously violate modern norms, Hashmi analyzed. “Within the UN Charter, which is, of course, the ultimate expression of international law and, one could say, the ultimate result of the evolution of just war thinking in Western societies, there is no room at all for a war of imperialism.” After “tremendous discussion and indeed reinterpretation and reform” therefore “today most Muslim scholars are taking great pains to define the legitimate causes for jihad as being strictly self-defense,” he added.
Irrespective of these discussions about offensive jihad, Hashmi emphasized that modern jihadists in groups such as the Islamic State “are “overwhelmingly obsessed with defensive warfare.” This conclusion shocks Americans and others, he noted, who think of modern jihadist outrages such as Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. However, these attacks served jihadists whose “first and foremost goal is to overthrow” in Muslim-majority states what jihadists view as “only nominally Muslim rulers and Muslim governments” often backed by countries such as America.
In this alliance of a foreign “far enemy” and a “near enemy” of non-sharia compliant states in Muslim lands, jihadists feel that “these governments have declared war on Islam and against true Muslims,” Hashmi explained. Osama bin Laden therefore argued that the “there was no way to fight the near enemy unless the far enemy could be pushed out of Muslim lands.” As Hashmi stated alarmingly, the “militant discourses on jihad, they are in fact quite conservative, they are not radical at all,” and are “very much in line with classical defensive jihad discourses.”
By contrast, Hashmi stressed that jihadist terrorism tactics had brought widespread condemnation from modern Muslim scholars. Between combatants and noncombatants, the “principle of discrimination is discussed widely in the classical works on fiqh” or Islamic jurisprudence, he noted, and thus jihad “is never unrestrained warfare.” But for modern jihadists, “because jihad is being waged for such lofty purposes, any and all means may be used to pursue it,” he stated, which recalled jihadist resort to the Islamic doctrines of necessity.
Some Muslim states seem to have other understandings of jihad in areas such as biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons possession. “Muslims should categorically reject any attempt to incorporate weapons of mass destruction into jihad thinking,” he said, but the nuclear weapons state Pakistan, and the nuclear proliferator Iran, seem to disagree. He also noted that in jihad doctrine Muslims had the option of enslaving the women and children of “non-Muslim combatants,” an uncomfortable reminder of recent Islamic State horrors.
Hashmi’s review of jihadist doctrine made his humanistic desires for Islam a bit like a pious hope. He highlighted the division between the Quran’s verses reflecting Islam’s prophet Muhammad as a preacher in seventh-century Mecca and the chronologically later, more warlike verses about Muhammad as a military-political leader in Medina. Muhammad in Mecca “understood jihad in line with Quranic revelations as essentially nonviolent direct action,” Hashmi stated; correspondingly “jihad is both the use of soft power as well as hard power.”
His clear sympathies for Islamic law shone through in his comments on Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Iqbal. “If anything, I would consider myself to be an accommodationist, in the line of Mohammed Iqbal,” Hashmi said. “There is something particular about relations between Muslims, and these responsibilities, are not captured by the current state of international law that has state sovereignty at its core.”
Nonetheless, Hashmi provided, perhaps unintentionally, glimpses of jihadist danger all too rare in the academic field of Middle East studies, saturated as it is with deceptive, biased scholarship. Rather than naïve falsehoods, he proffered sobering facts, even if his equation of jihad and just war is too optimistic. His scholarship should at least be the beginning of the end of illusions about jihad.
Andrew E. Harrod is a Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter at @AEHarrod.
CogitoErgoSum says
No mention of how the Surahs in the Koran are NOT arranged in chronological order and of how abrogation works? Surah 9 was actually the second to last Surah “revealed” to Muhammad and it contains verse 9:29 about fighting until EVERYONE submits one way or another to Islam. I wish some “scholar” would explain to me what abrogated that verse or what caused it to expire. I’ve been waiting a long time now.
Jillian says
According to the OIC Organization of Islamic Congress) they have 58 countries! They either take their people or they can be sent back from where they came from. No one needs Islamists in the west. In fact it’s just a matter of time before they take our countries from us. We better open our eyes, or should I say our leaders better wake up now! I cannot imagine why or what blinds them to the blatantly obvious facts on the ground as well as history.
Jillian says
I’ve been studying Islam for twenty five years. I have come to the conclusion that Islam does not belong in countries such as the west where we have nothing in common with them and are awaiting their attacks to ultimately attempt to conquer our nations. They tell us every day if you listen. It’s coming soon that the UK and other western nations will be involved in a bloody war. It’s time to get together with other western nations and discussing how to handle it. The nations that don’t listen will die by their own naive and idiocy.
tim gallagher says
I agree with your comment, Jillian. My policy for all non-Muslim countries in the world would be to keep Muslims out. They are definitely always out to impose Islam on all of us, so just slam the door shut on them. Muslims can live their barbaric lives in their Muslim countries. Most of them have nothing good to offer our non-Muslim countries. If only enough people in our countries would wake up to this fact.
Michael Copeland says
Impose
Sharia
Law on
All
Mankind
James Lincoln says
Clever, but also true Michael…
Quazgaa says
International
Society of
Lunatics
And
Murderers.
tim gallagher says
Both of those are accurate and succinct summaries of Islam alright, James and Quazgaa. A while back, here at Jihad Watch, I’m pretty sure it was Emilie Green who said that one day Islam will be gone (what a great day that will be for humanity) and she said that, when that happens, Islam will be Waslam, which I thought was pretty clever. If it ever happens, what a tremendous day that’ll be. On this man in this report, I think Islam is so fundamentally violent that, if you took the violence out of Islam, there would be nothing there at all. Violence and thuggishness is all that islam consists of.
Frank Anderson says
The “scholar” (Hashmi) touting the idea of non-violent jihad is attempting to change or reform a basic teaching of islam, which is prohibited on penalty of death, which may be imposed without trial or warrant by any pious believer. He needs to have security. There is no reform allowed in islam.
gravenimage says
Hashmi *may* be trying to reform Islam, Frank–or he may just be whitewashing it for Infidel consumption; Taqiyya.
Frank Anderson says
GI, as he is no doubt a scholar, much more familiar with the teachings than I, the laqiyya explanation is far more likely. A muslim’s word to an infidel is meaningless, and has been for 1400 years.
mortimer says
Response to GI: Is he trying to ‘reform’ Islam? Who is he to do that, since Islam is complete, perfect and eternal? He is trying to WHITEWASH Islam. When Muslims tell kafirs about Islam, there is always shovelfuls of hot, steaming, farmfresh taqiyya.
Wellington says
Not buying any of this. Might as well defend Marxism or Nazism as defend Islam.
Islam is rooted in antipathy to liberty, just as Marxism and Nazism are. No way around this.
Even assuming there is anything good in Islam, I would contend that there is nothing good in Islam that can’t be found in other ideologies and yet there is a great deal of rot in Islam that is deuce difficult to find anywhere else (e.g., death for apostasy, which is absent in the other major religions’ theological blueprints). So, why keep Islam around at all? At best it is superfluous, at worst an enormous menace. It belongs on the trash heap of history. The sooner the better.
tim gallagher says
I agree with your comment, Wellington. Islam is a load of garbage, and evil and barbaric garbage, that definitely belongs on history’s trash heap, right there beside the old, extinct Aztec religion. On what this person is saying, I’d say the neverending violence, all those murderous invasions of other countries and the slaughter that always followed, for the whole of islam’s 1400 year history, says it all about islam’s nature. I can see no peaceful aspect to Islam at all. This man may even have some noble intention in trying to make islam more peaceful, but, if so, he hasn’t got a chance of getting anywhere with his idea. There have, no doubt, been, by some miracle, some peaceful Muslims, but Islam is a very violent ideology. All those calls for violence in the Koran make that extremely clear.
gravenimage says
Muslim prof claims Islamic scholars have placed ‘too much emphasis on jihad as violent’
…………………….
Sohail Hashmi may hope this is true–but what is he basing it on? Violent Jihad is a core part of Islam, and a core part of the actions of the “perfect man” of Islam, the “Prophet” Muhammed.
Here he is, claiming that 9/11 was not actually Jihad–despite, oddly, the body of the paper proving just that:
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/58d6de87b3db2b57ce8245f9/593ad9aecab339dbf1f85624/593ad98fcab339dbf1f852ff/1497029007911/TerrorismandJihad.pdf?format=original
tim gallagher says
gravenimage, I’d say that this man hasn’t got a hope in hell of making islam more peaceful. As you say, violence and that ferocious, murderous hatred of all non-believers in the Koran make it very clear that islam has always been and always will be an extremely violent ideology. This man is probably just trying to lull the non-Muslims to sleep with lies, but, even if he has actually got a desire to change Islam and make it more peaceful, he hasn’t got a chance. As you mention, Islam’s truly bizarre idea of what a man should be like, Muhammad, was a murderous scumbag (if he existed at all, which I doubt).
Fred van de Bunt says
Humans did codify rules into laws to get the amount of conflicts manageable, that arose because everybody followed his own idea’s.
Probably one day Allah went through all those laws, and liked to help us?
So he directed Gabriel, a high-tech Angel, to implant a Wi-Fi chip into a guy named Mohammed and to set up a G5 system around Mecca and Medina to connect Mo’s brain-chip with Allah.
This way Mo received the latest update of divine law that is still valid.
This Windows Sharia version is in the meantime also available in a mobile app version.
It sounds convincing, but that pot I just smoked, is strong…
mortimer says
Mount Holyoke College international relations professor Sohail Hashmi is partly write, but not in a good way.
Much of JIHAD is the JIHAD OF THE TONGUE which turns out to be TAQIYYA and KITMAN (lying and dissembling about the true nature of jihad).
That is what Sohail Hashmi is doing here … TAQIYYA and KITMAN. I wonder what else he lies and dissembles about in his classes and relationships with colleagues.
If Sohail Hashmi doesn’t believe and practice TAQIYYA and KITMAN, he is not practicing VERBAL JIHAD.
mortimer says
addendum: Sohail Hashmi is partly right, but WHO IS HE TO CRITICIZE ISLAM’S TOP SCHOLARS and SAY THEY ARE WRONG?
Even worse, Sohail Hashmi is actually criticizing MOHAMMED’S VIEW of JIHAD, and thus, Sohail Hashmi is de facto a BLASPHEMER for condemning the ideas of his prophet:
The Prophet said, “The head of its matter is Islam and its pillar is the Salah and its highest peak is the Jihad.” – Sunan At-Tirmidhi 2616
Yes, Sohail Hashmi is blaspheming his prophet who said that JIHAD is the noblest and most valuable action in Islam.