This doesn’t appear to be a call to “inner spiritual struggle” either. And yet there are still people who refuse to believe that a a violent jihadi agenda even forms a part of the Islamic religion.
This is a straw man, since no one disputes that members of Al-Qaeda believe this!
Nor should any reasonable person doubt that Al-Qaeda represents an extreme edge of Islamic opinion. However, that leaves at least three important questions open:
- What is the historic mainstream of Islamic opinion (i.e., what have most Islamic scholars held);
- What is the dominant view among Muslims today?
- What view appears to be gaining ground.
On 1 I think there are some fairly clear answers: as I understand it, jihad has been traditionally defined in terms of warfare (as well as an inner spiritual struggle), including aggressive warfare against non-Muslim governments. However, this has involved strict limitations on the methods that can be used, limitations that Al-Qaeda ignores owing to their typically fundamentalist disregard for tradition. A purely spiritual definition of jihad has always been a minority view among Muslims.
It seems to me that one big issue for Muslims today is whether democratic Western governments should be classed with the “tyrannical” non-Muslim governments faced by early Muslims (such as the Byzantine Empire, which for all its glories was neither democratic nor religiously tolerant). I think that Muslims who accept the authority of the traditions of Islamic law can make the case that a pluralistic, tolerant non-Muslim country is not a fit object for Jihad.
Of course, that doesn’t settle the question. For one thing, even bin Laden did not base his fatwa merely on the fact that the U.S. is not Muslim, but on the alleged American aggression against Muslims both directly and by means of support for Israel. For another, fundamentalists on the one hand and liberals on the other do not necessarily accept the traditions of Islamic legal scholarship as binding. And finally, Islamic fundamentalists typically see Western pluralism and tolerance as a deadly threat in and of themselves.
So it remains very much open to question which way Muslims will go in the future. I think the most important thing to remember is that there are and always have been many different kinds of Islam and that Muslims will never be entirely of one mind on these issues. Therefore, we should not overgeneralize or be hasty to rule out the possibility that peaceful versions of Islam will become dominant–but neither should we assume that peaceful Islam is the “real” Islam and militant Islam is an aberration of a tiny minority.
Edwin
