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The Theology of Jihad
January/February 2006
by Mary Habeck '96PhD

Mary Habeck '96PhD, who taught at Yale from 1994 to 2005, is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. This essay is adapted from her book Knowing the Enemy (Yale University Press).

To understand the Muslim extremist groups collectively known as jihadis, it is essential to understand their relationship to the religion of Islam. The struggle over who controls the Qur'an and the hadith—traditions about Muhammad that explain and expand the Qur'an—is, in many ways, the key to the upheaval in the Islamic world. On the one side are the extremists, who want eternal conflict with the unbelievers to define their community and their future. On the other side are socialists, liberals, moderates, and most traditionalists, who want peaceful accommodation with both nonmembers of their community and modernity as a whole. Both factions appeal to the sacred works, which they say support their ideas; both claim to be the true voice of Islam.

The jihadis, and their intellectual supporters from among the Islamists, accept only the most literal readings of the sacred texts and the most medieval of the Islamic exegetes. In their view, all other readings are not just mistaken, they are pernicious and sinful and must be stamped out.

Two verses most often quoted by the jihadis concern fighting. The first is “fight against those who believe not in God, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by God and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth among the people of the Scripture [Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” The second is “fight them until there is no more dissension and all worship is for God alone.”

Yet their discussion of Qur'anic verses and hadith on jihad shows the willingness of the jihadis to pick and choose which texts they will and will not accept as valid for Muslims today. The emphasis is always on those parts of the books that define jihad as fighting and that paint the relationship between believer and unbeliever in the bleakest terms. Jihadis never mention the texts that talk about tolerance or peace and have declared invalid an important hadith that calls the internal struggle to follow God the “greater jihad” and fighting the “lesser jihad.”

They also ignore verses that command Muslims to respect Christians and Jews as fellow believers. Two verses of the Qur'an in particular say that “there is no compulsion in religion” and that every community (even polytheists) has a right to its own beliefs: “To you be your religion, and to me my religion.”

Passages that seem to an outsider to contradict each other are explained by a verse on “abrogation”: later revelation can change or even nullify earlier revelation. Traditional Islamic exegesis of the Qur'an is based on the belief that when Muhammad first began to call people to Islam, he was in Mecca, a city that did not welcome his message. It was here that the verses speaking of commonalities with Jews and Christians were revealed. Later, after the migration to Medina, he was allowed to call for armed struggle. Jihadis cite abrogation to claim that later verses completely negate those that came before. Christians and Jews have only the choices outlined in the later verses—to accept Islam, to submit to Muslim domination, or to die. Polytheists, such as Hindus, have only the choice of conversion or death.

The jihadis state that they will reject any system of laws not based on these texts—particularly democracy, which is the ultimate expression of idolatry. They also assert that the future Islamic state will conduct a foreign policy of perpetual jihad.

During 1,400 years of interpretive work, however, Islamic scholars have found other ways to understand the militant and intolerant sections of the Qur'an and hadith. In particular, legists have called into question the concept of “abrogation” since it implies that parts of the sacred texts are no longer valid and that Muslims can therefore ignore them. If the entire Qur'an is the very word of God sent down from an unchanging and perfect book in the heavens (as Islamic dogma affirms), how can whole sections of the infallible word be declared void?

The applicability of the militant sections of the Qur'an and hadith to current situations is also problematic, according to some scholars, who ask why only the peaceful and tolerant revelations have been abrogated. The jihadis, they point out, never give full interpretive weight to the fact that every text was revealed in a set of specific circumstances in the past. Traditionally scholars used these “occasions of revelation” to inform legal rulings based on analogy, but the jihadis play fast and loose with the strict rules that governed analogy. The effect is that they pull the specifics of the life of Muhammad out of their historical setting to justify whatever actions they wish. Further, traditional jurisprudence never accepted all hadith as equally valid, but assigned varying degrees of reliability and legal responsibility to them. Khaled Abou El Fadl, one of the foremost Islamic legal scholars, argues that while the Qur'an and other sources offer the possibility of intolerant interpretations, they do not command them.

Indeed, some of the most cogent criticisms of jihadist thought and action have come from among the traditional jurists, who have trained for years in the complex rules of interpretation and who see the jihadis as heterodox if not outright heretics. For many Muslims who take their religion seriously, the willingness of the jihadis to selectively ignore a thousand years of interpretive work and the traditional exegesis of the people of knowledge is a serious affront to their understanding of Islam. The fact that Islamic civilizations have been able, throughout the long history of Islam, to find and implement tolerant readings of the texts also offers hope that they can do so in the future. 

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