PC: Thank you for agreeing to the interview. Your new book investigates the Islamic doctrine of Jihad or holy war and its impact throughout history. As a physician by profession, how did you become interested in the topic?
AB: September 11, 2001 shocked me out of the complete absorption in my career in medicine—specifically, epidemiology and clinical trials—and an accompanying uninformed complacency about world affairs. I grew up in New York City, spending the first 34 years of my life there, and the wife of one of our nephrology fellowship trainees barely made it out of the second World Trade Center tower before it collapsed. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had very little context for me, so I set out to learn about Islam, reading voraciously. Starting with the writings of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito (how naïve and ironic it seems in retrospect!), I became thoroughly dissatisfied, in short order, with the entire genre of thinly veiled, treacly apologetics, sadly characteristic of modern popular and “academic” works on Islam. So I began what has become a ceaseless endeavor to educate myself, making liberal use of the vast research resources of the Brown University system. Learned, patient mentors, in particular Bat Ye’or and Ibn Warraq, facilitated my efforts. They encouraged me to complete what became The Legacy of Jihad, sharing my view, expressed so appositely by the prominent Middle East Studies Professor, Dr. Raphael Israeli, that the book filled a “yawning gap” in the literature on jihad. That is why in one rather large volume I combined a comprehensive analysis of both jihad theory and practice, the latter being a detailed survey of the brutal way jihad campaigns have always been waged—using a physician’s favorite learning and teaching tool, the mnemonic, in this case “MPED”—massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation.
PC: Since 9/11, President Bush and a number of prominent politicians on the left and right alike painted Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists as exploiters of Islam, maintaining that Islam is a religion of peace. Is this accurate?
AB: Mr. Bush is our President, not our theologian-in-chief. Neither he nor any of the politicians you referred to have made informed comments about Islam, least of all the utterance that Islam is a “religion of peace”. Ironically, the renowned 20th century Muslim ideologue Sayyid Qutb, perhaps the most brilliant Muslim scholar of the 20th century, who is demonized as a fomenter of “radical” Islam, has also referred to Islam as a “religion of peace”. But Qutb’s context is unapologetic and clear—he is referring to the Pax Islamica that would prevail when the entire world was submitted to Islamic domination, and the rule of Islamic law (i.e., the Shari’a), by jihad war.
Furthermore, in a recent speech President Bush insisted that the “ideology” of the most notable Muslim terrorists, who he maintained “distort the idea of jihad,” is “very different from the religion of Islam” and indeed “exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision.” The President’s even more specific and assertive comments regarding jihad were a profound disappointment. Indeed, such words could have been written and uttered by the most uninformed, or deliberately disingenuous apologists for this devastating, and uniquely Islamic institution, well over a millennium old, and still wreaking havoc today.
The origins of the Muslim institution of jihad are found in the Qur’an. Sura (chapter) 9 is devoted in its entirety to war proclamations. There we read that the Muslim faithful are to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. . . . Fight against such as those who have been given the scripture as believe not in Allah. . . . Go forth, light-armed and heavy armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah. That is best for you, if ye but knew.” From such verses in the Quran and in the hadith, Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the Islamic institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims to bring the world under Islamic rule (Sharia law).
The consensus on the nature of jihad from major schools of Islamic jurisprudence is clear. Summarizing this consensus of centuries of Islamic thought, the seminal Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406, wrote:
In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense.
Only Islam, Ibn Khaldun added, “is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
Muhammad himself waged a series of proto-jihad campaigns to subdue the Jews, Christians and pagans of Arabia. For example, within a year after the massacre of the Medinan Jewish tribe the Banu Qurayzah (described here), Muhammad, according to a summary of sacralized Muslim sources,
…waited for some act of aggression on on the part of the Jews of Khaybar, whose fertile lands and villages he had destined for his followers…to furnish an excuse for an attack. But, no such opportunity offering, he resolved in the autumn of this year [i.e., 628], on a sudden and unprovoked invasion of their territory.
Ali (later, the fourth “Rightly Guided Caliph”, and especially revered by Shi’ite Muslims) asked Muhammad why the Jews of Khaybar were being attacked, since they were peaceful farmers, tending their oasis, and was told by Muhammad he must compel them to submit to Islamic Law.
The renowned early 20th century scholar of Islam, David Margoliouth, observed aptly:
Now the fact that a community was idolatrous, or Jewish, or anything but Mohammedan, warranted a murderous attack upon it.
Within two years of Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, launched the Great Jihad. The ensuing three decades witnessed Islamdom’s most spectacular expansion, as Muslim armies subdued the entire Arabian peninsula, and conquered territories which had been in Greco-Roman possession since the reign of Alexander the Great.
The essential pattern of the jihad war is captured in the classical Muslim historian al-Tabari’ s recording of the recommendation given by Umar b. al-Khattab (the second “Rightly Guided Caliph”) to the commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636 C.E.), during the conquest of Iraq. Umar reportedly said:
Summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, (This is to say, accept their conversion as genuine and refrain from fighting them) but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. (Qur’an 9:29) If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard to what you have been entrusted.
By the time of al-Tabari’s death in 923, jihad wars had expanded the Muslim empire from Portugal to the Indian subcontinent. Subsequent Muslim conquests continued in Asia, as well as Eastern Europe. The Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in addition to parts of Poland and Hungary, were also conquered and Islamized. Arab Muslim invaders engaged, additionally, in continuous jihad raids that ravaged and enslaved Sub-Saharan African animist populations, extending to the southern Sudan. When the Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, over a millennium of jihad had transpired. These tremendous military successes spawned a triumphalist jihad literature. Muslim historians recorded in detail the number of infidels slaughtered, or enslaved and deported, the cities and villages which were pillaged, and the lands, treasure, and movable goods seized. Christian (Coptic, Armenian, Jacobite, Greek, Slav, etc.), as well as Hebrew sources, and even the scant Hindu and Buddhist writings which survived the ravages of the Muslim conquests, independently validate this narrative, and complement the Muslim perspective by providing testimonies of the suffering of the non-Muslim victims of jihad wars.
A prominent 14th-century Muslim treatise on jihad written by Ibn Hudayl revealed the violent methods employed during the conquest of the Iberian peninsula:
It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden — if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them — as well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word to do everything that might ruin and discourage him.
Terrorism was often a prelude to conquest. The Muslim historian al-Maqqari, commenting in the 17th century on the brutal tactics of Arab raiders, wrote,
Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.
Later centuries saw Muslim fortunes decline. Many conquered lands liberated themselves from Muslim rule. But the ideology of jihad was handed down unchanged to all future Muslim generations.
Armand Abel, the esteemed mid-20th century Belgian scholar of Islam, has provided this elegant analysis of the concept of “Dar ul Harb”, which is critical to an overall understanding of the jihad, past and present:
Together with the duty of the “war in the way of God” (or jihad), this universalistic aspiration would lead the Moslems to see the world as being divided fundamentally into two parts. On the one hand there was that part of the world where Islam prevailed, where salvation had been announced, where the religion that ought to reign was practiced; this was the Dar ul Islam. On the other hand, there was the part which still awaited the establishment of the saving religion and which constituted, by definition, the object of the holy war. This was the Dar ul Harb. The latter, in the view of the Moslem jurists, was not populated by people who had a natural right not to practice Islam, but rather by people destined to become Moslems who, through impiousness and rebellion, refused to accept this great benefit. Since they were destined sooner or later to be converted at the approach of the victorious armies of the Prophet’s successor, or else killed for their rebelliousness, they were the rebel subjects of the Caliph. Their kings were nothing but odious tyrants who, by opposing the progress of the saving religion together with their armies, were following a Satanic inspiration and rising up against the designs of Providence. And so no respite should be granted them, no truce: perpetual war should be their lot, waged in the course of the winter and summer ghazu. [razzias] If the sovereign of the country thus attacked desired peace, it was possible for him, just like for any other tributary or community, to pay the tribute for himself and for his subjects. Thus the [Byzantine] Empress Irene [d. 803] “purchased peace at the price of her humiliation”, according to the formula stated in the dhimma contract itself, by paying 70,000 pounds in gold annually to the Caliph of Baghdad. Many other princes agreed in this way to become tributaries – often after long struggles – and to see their dominions pass from the status of dar al Harb to that of dar al Sulh. In this way, those of their subjects who lived within the boundaries of the territory ruled by the Caliphate were spared the uncertainty of being exposed arbitrarily, without any guarantee, to the military operations of the summer ghazu and the winter ghazu: indeed, anything within the reach of the Moslem armies as they advanced, being property of impious men and rebels, was legitimately considered their booty; their men, seized by armed soldiers, were mercilessly consigned to the lot specified in the Koranic verse about the sword, and their women and children were treated like things.
The respected contemporary Muslim cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, “spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, head of the “European Council for Fatwa and Research”, and popular Al-Jazeera television personality, reiterated almost this exact formulation of Dar ul Harb in July 2003:
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for the domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected…in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its continuation, and to provide it with the material and human fuel required for it to assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies. Every citizen in society must take upon himself a role in the effort to provide for the battle. The entire domestic front, including professionals, laborers, and industrialists, stands behind the fighting army, even if it does not bear arms.
Thus it is the consensus view of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence regarding jihad, since its formulation during the 8th and 9th centuries, through the current era, that non-Muslims peacefully going about their lives—from the Khaybar farmers whom Muhammad ordered attacked in 628, to those sitting in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01—are muba’a in the Dar ul Harb. And these innocent non-combatants can be killed, and have always been killed, with impunity simply by virtue of being “harbis” during endless razzias and or full scale jihad campaigns that have occurred continuously since the time of Muhammad, through the present. This is the crux of the institutionalized ideology that we are fighting, i.e., jihad, notwithstanding President Bush’s unfortunate public mischaracterization.
The larger, pervasive political correctness in this country, has engendered a stultifying “Islamic correctness” among our academic, political and media elites that prevents frank and meaningful discussions of Islam, jihad, and their relationship to terrorism. Moreover, when Bin Laden criticizes America for its “debauchery and secularism”, and seeks its replacement with an Islamic entity, he is simply arguing in accord with widely held, orthodox Islamic beliefs. That is why Bin Laden remains so popular in the Islamic world, and few so-called moderate or traditional Muslims actively condemned Al-Qaeda, especially in Muslim societies. And there are very disturbing trends evident among Muslims living in the West, particularly in Europe. For example, survey results from British Muslims polled shortly after the 7/7/05 London bombings. revealed that one-third were brazen enough to admit following 7/7/05, “Western society is decadent and immoral and …Muslims should seek to bring it to an end”, expressing ostensibly, their desire to replace Britain’s current liberal democracy with a Shari’a-based theocratic model. Ultimately, the denial and intellectual cowardice that accompany “Islamic correctness” as practiced by elites across the political spectrum emboldens those Muslims most committed to jihad in all its manifestations, including jihad terrorism.
PC: Do you believe that the Bush Doctrine of liberation and democracy promotion in the Middle East is compatible with Islam? Will it lead to peace between Islam and the West?
I am not sanguine about the democratization policy, although, of course, I long for its success. Unfortunately, recent local and national elections across the Arab Muslim word (for example, in Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Egypt, and the territories under Palestinian Arab suzerainty in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria), in particular, have been highlighted by gains for theocratic parties who seek to implement more “authentic” Islamic regimes, i.e., full or at least forme fruste versions of Shari’a states.
More acutely ominous is the prospect that Hamas, with its openly expressed goal of jihad genocide vis a vis Israeli Jews, will achieve at least an electoral plurality and de facto control of key sociopolitical institutions within Gaza and the West Bank. In a Hamas pre-election video from December 12, 2005, the jihadist terror organization reiterated that it will not give up its armed struggle until Israel is destroyed entirely. The Hamas message also celebrates the organization’s love of death as being superior to Israel’s love of life, while expressing support for those Israeli Arabs who wish to destroy Israel “from within.” Hamas eagerly anticipates a day when their flag will fly over not only Jerusalem, but over all Israeli cities, including Acre and Haifa. The following are verbatim quotes from this Hamas video:
We succeeded, with Allah’s grace, to raise an ideological generation that loves death like our enemies love life. We will not abandon the way of Jihad and Shahada [Martyrdom] as long as one inch of our holy land is in the hands of the Jews….Congratulations to our people of 1948 [Israeli Arabs] on the liberation of Gaza. You wish to destroy them [the Israelis] from their interior. We will never forget you, and never leave you. A day will come when our flag will fly above all the quarters of our land. Our flag will fly on the minarets of Jerusalem, and the walls of Acre, and the quarters of Haifa.
Responding to an uncharacteristic European Union threat to terminate its “aid” payments to the Palestinian Authority, should Hamas gain significant Parliamentary seats in the January elections, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal warned about the dangers of “playing with the values of democracy and freedom”. What a bitter irony that a murderous jihadist organization has co-opted the rhetoric of true liberal democracies in order to impose the totalitarian Shari’a “democratically”. As writer Diana West noted appositely, “It is vox populi. And just because the people have spoken doesn’t mean we should applaud what they say.” Democracy—mere popular rule—should not be our primary objective for the Muslim world, but rather Muslim societies and governments who share our values, so we can safely share this planet.
Regarding relations between the Islamic world and the West, if we are to arrive at a meaningful peace, that bears no relationship to “Pax Islamica”, then I agree with the thrust of what Dr. Raphael Israeli described in his seminal analysis of modern jihad terrorism published in 2003. He proposes the creation of an Alliance of Western and Democratic States (AWADS), consisting of a nucleus of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (and these core nations can sponsor other countries proven to conform to its rules and standards, for example, India), with the following six avowed “rules of engagement”:
- Strict control of immigration from Muslim countries without reliance on the “efforts” of the countries of origin, who have shown neither the will nor the means to stop this massive flow, much of it already illegal. This policy should include interception and routine unceremonious repatriation of the illegal immigrants themselves, and expulsion from AWADS nations of those who assist them.
- Reciprocal arrangements for controlled immigration, tourism and educational exchanges between Muslim countries and AWADS nations to guarantee equivalent, unimpeded bilateral flow — Muslim nationals to AWADS, AWADS nationals to Muslim countries — devoid of characteristic Muslim discriminatory regulations towards other races, faiths, or nationalities.
- Rendering various forms of economic, technical/infrastructural, health, agricultural, and educational assistance by AWADS to Muslim countries contingent upon basic conditions met by the applicants, including: accountability; progress in human rights; meaningful efforts at population control; renunciation of force/violence in dealing with other nations/communities; and monitoring and controlling incitement to hatred and violence in mosques and media outlets.
- Terminating all military assistance and weapons sales by AWADS to non-member states, supplemented by a policy that any weapons-manufacturing third party which sells or transfers weapons to those regimes will itself forfeit the right to deal with AWADS members.
- Mosque construction, as well as the building of other Muslim institutions in AWADS nations, particularly projects funded by Saudi Arabia, will be contingent upon reciprocal arrangements to construct religious institutions for other faiths in Muslim nations, including each country situated on the Arabian peninsula, and the binding commitment by all parties — AWADS and non-members of AWADS — that no incitement or hatred will be propagated in any of these religious institutions.
- The importation into AWADS nations from Muslim countries of cultural commodities and assets — books, movies, art shows and exhibits, performing arts groups, clerics and missionaries, print media or audio/video tapes — must also be reciprocal, contingent upon the unrestricted flow of similar AWADS assets into Muslim countries- and all such assets will be required by law to be devoid of messages that disseminate hate.
