Robert Spencer Offers a Different Definition of Jihad

William Caldwell isn’t going to insult my intelligence and get away with it. The Emory Wheel published the following article from Robert Spencer this morning:

In “Jihad Means Much More Than Violence” (Feb. 16), Will Caldwell objects to the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s ad, “What Americans Need to Know About Jihad,” as “propaganda,” and calls for it to be censored. He asserts that “most in our community are educated enough to understand that statements like ‘The goal of jihad is world domination’ are completely ignorant and intentionally provocative.”

Unfortunately, however, jihad as warfare against non-believers in order to institute “Sharia” worldwide is not propaganda or ignorance, or a heretical doctrine held by a tiny minority of extremists. Instead, it is a constant element of mainstream Islamic theology. It is affirmed by all four principal schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence (madhahib): the Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali and Shafi’i, to which the great majority of Muslims worldwide belong, as well as of all the other schools.

This is what I deal with here on the Anvil: facts. I will go out of my way from this point on to highlight (literally) definitions and terms that relate to Islamic theology and ideology whenever possible, in order to better educate myself and you, the loyal reader. In fact, you may note this morning if you are paying attention, that there are new symbols at work within the text itself pointing you to other things. This is quite intentional. The links will be to books, definitions, encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia, the CIA, the FBI, and any number of other relevant, factual (whenever possible — Wikipedia is not always reliable) sources. As with many things that revolve around Foehammer’s Anvil, this will be an ongoing and unobtrusive process that I hope just adds further merit to this project and aids my readers in their quest to better understand and contend with the threat of Islam.

These schools formulated laws regarding the importance of jihad and the ways in which it must be practiced, centuries ago. Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 996), a Maliki jurist, declared: “Jihad is a precept of Divine institution?.[Unbelievers] have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them.”

Likewise, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a Hanbali jurist who is a favorite of Osama bin Laden and other modern-day jihadists, taught: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”

The Hanafi school sounds the same notes: “If the infidels, upon receiving the call [to Islam], neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax, it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them?” (Hidayah) The Shafi’i scholar Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi (d. 1058) agrees, saying that if unbelievers “refuse to accept [Islam] after this, war is waged against them?” All this is not merely of historical interest. A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law was certified in 1991 by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.” This manual, Umdat al-Salik (available in English as Reliance of the Traveler), after defining the “greater jihad” as “spiritual warfare against the lower self,” devotes eleven pages to the “lesser jihad.” It defines this jihad as “war against non-Muslims,” and spells out the nature of this warfare in quite specific terms: “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians… until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”