Jihad and Ethics: A Survey of the Current Literature

S. Parvez Manzoor

All political views of the world must take cognizance of the fact that war and statehood represent two sides of the same coin. All philosophies of power, whether pragmatic and sober or romantic and delusional, are inevitably forced to reckon with the calculus of organized violence. Redemptive violence is as indispensable to the ideology of the modern state, which incarnates its own secular version of the messianic myth, as it is part and parcel of the holy doctrines of Islam.

Today, the political discourse is saturated with the Manichean imagery of good and evil, and the ideology of ‘holy war’ has made an unwelcome comeback. Unfortunately, terror has also acquired an ‘Islamic’ face. Not as a Muslim fact, for that is hardly to be disputed, but as an ‘Islamic’ ideal! As soon as any phenomenon shows a Muslim visage, the pundits only construe it in terms of its ‘Islamic quotient’. All theories and insights into the human condition, pride and joy of the modern man, are then thrown overboard. Islam, the politically correct refrain now resonates, is a mysterious and impenetrable realm of the irrational that is accessible only to the insiders. Modern secular analysis in terms of politics and economics can therefore have no validity for such a self-referential and self contained system of thought and action. The discourse on terrorism deals therefore only
with protean symbols and monstrous abstractions: it is metaphysical through and through.

Notwithstanding some isolated attempts to see jihad in the light of history, the general consensus in the West is to passionately reject any interpretation of jihad that would relate it to the paradoxes of political existence. What in the Western context is theorized as the ‘state of exception’ has no relevance in the case of jihad. All the noticeable parallels between the modern theory and the Muslim jurists’ attempts to mediate between law and fact, between transcendental norm and political existence, are conspicuously absent in the modern discussion. Jihad for the West is nothing but a categorical imperative of the Islamic faith, a theology of domination and expansion that recognizes neither the virtues of compromise nor the imperative of self-preservation. Islam, then, is presented not only as the West’s adversary in history but also as the antithesis of her values. It is both irredeemable by faith and ungovernable by law. Whatever its other benefits, the essentialist vision of Islam, it ought to be apparent to any analytical mind, is a great hindrance to any perceptive analysis of ‘terror’, to any cogent account of contemporary history, indeed to any conciliatory politics of humanity.

It is against the backdrop of this ideologically biased, indeed even morally ambivalent, discourse that we present some modern studies that deal with jihad and Islam. A few of these works appeared in the wake of the first Gulf War, the rest are post 9/11. They are informed with the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ consciousness within which contemporary
political theory, for all its assertions to the contrary, articulates itself and finds its moorings. The links between academic theory and global politics, indeed between past history and present ideology, are all too apparent. The scholars’ analysis of the historical debates of is embedded in, if it does not actually emanate from, a vision of politics that is unmistakably contemporary. Whether the political vision be egalitarian or imperial, humanitarian or triumphalist, it finds a home in a reading of the ancient texts. If nothing else, this survey reinforces the insight about the relativity the historical vision. Against all the hopes of the modern man, the historical inquiry yields no definitive answers.

Among the synoptic studies that deal with this subject, Rudolph Peter’s Jihad in Classical and Modern Times, though invariably focusing on the military aspects of jihad, is notable for being a compendium and a primer that presents selected Muslim texts along with the author’s own studies on the re-emergence of jihad in the modern political discourse. Peters’ approach is scholarly, his tone educational and informative and his concerns the issues of international law and world-order. He recognizes that jihad, like revolution, is a protean concept

Among the synoptic studies that deal with this subject, Rudolph Peter’s Jihad in Classical and Modern Times, though invariably focusing on the military aspects of jihad, is notable for being a compendium and a primer that presents selected Muslim texts along with the author’s own studies on the re-emergence of jihad in the modern political discourse. Peters’ approach is scholarly, his tone educational and informative and his concerns the issues of international law and world-order. He recognizes that jihad, like revolution, is a protean concept that means different things to different people, that it acted as an ideology of resistance against colonialism, and that its reentry in the language of politics is part of the general trend towards the Islamization of national discourses in the Muslim world. Though not intended to be a comprehensive survey (it bypasses the moral, literary and mystical interpretations of this seminal doctrine), Peters’ study is nonetheless a lucid presentation that makes a valuable contribution to the current debate.

John Kelsay’s Islam and War, written in the aftermath of the Desert Storm, is more ambitious and analytical in terms of history of ideas and war ethics. It also makes a sensitive contribution to the discourse of Just War, inviting even Muslim thinkers to elaborate on jus in bello (justice in war; ethical restraints on the conduct of warfare) issues from their Islamic vantage point. While Kelsay is convinced that classical theorists of jihad conceived the role of religion as a limit on war, modern Muslims are mostly interested in jus ad bellum (justification of war; war as a just cause). In fact, he feels that ‘Muslims who have been doing the most thinking about the conduct of war have not been doing as self-conscious developers of the traditions of Islamic thought.’ Kelsay also has his own views on the alleged ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory, and in expressing the seminal issues at stake, he minces no words: ‘In encounter between the West and Islam, the struggle is over who will provide the primary definition to world order. Will it be the West, with its notions of territorial boundaries, market economies, private religiosity, and the priority of individual rights? Or will it be Islam, with its emphasis on the universal mission of a transtribal community called to build a social order founded on the pure monotheism natural to humanity?’

In the Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Tradition, James Turner Johnson pursues the same theme as Kelsay, though with greater passion, polemical candour and self-righteous rancour. No wonder that to the Muslim reader of the book, it appears as a stern and unending reprimand. Johnson builds his case against the classical jurists of Islam (notably Shaybani in Khadduri’s translation) and contrasts them against the laudable representatives of his own tradition, both Christian and secular. (The West, for him, stands for Western, Catholic Christianity and for secular Euro-America; Orthodox Christianity is not part of the West.) The visible cause of his ire is the juristic, though not the Qur’anic, division of the world into Dar-al-Islam and Dar-al-Harb, which he construes literally as a theory of world-order: ‘The Islamic distinction between dar al-harb and dar al-islam was fundamentally different [i.e. from the Augustinian scheme of the heavenly and the earthly cities] in origin and conception; not only was it juristic rather than theological, aiming at ensuring right behaviour rather than right motivation, but it defined the world in control of territory rather than the invisible progress of divine grace, and it defined embership in the two spheres by behaviour (submission to God’s will, islam, whether or not it was accompanied by faith, iman) and not the invisible presence of divine grace.’!

Unfortunately, Johnson is so blissfully ignorant of Islam that neither his invidious comparison nor his squeamish Christian rhetoric calls for a rejoinder; any common Western scholar of Islam ought to remove those lapses of knowledge and perception that vitiate his whole statement. Suffice it to say that the jurist’s discourse, as it has been duly recognized within Islam, is zahiri; it is concerned with the outward, empirically verifiable aspects of the social reality. One may even say that juristic reason represents the Islamic variant of raison d’état.

Thank God that the poor jurist did not try to measure ‘the invisible presence (or progress) of divine grace”, or the inner reality of iman, and incorporate it in his praxis. Had he done so, he would have become indistinguishable from any inquisitor of the Western church, and perhaps as cruel as well! The notion of divine grace, however, is indispensable to his system, though, blissfully, he does not wield it as a confessional scourge! That the Muslim jurist devised a legal scheme, which was based on ‘rule of law’ and territory rather than on ‘the invisible presence of grace’, today stands against him. However, when the same principles, territoriality and legal sovereignty, become, under the aegis of the West, the defining characteristics of statehood, they are deemed salubrious for mankind Johnson and Kelsay’s edited volume, Cross, Crescent, and Sword, represents an earlier attempt by a group of academics to examine the medieval, Islamic and Christian, arguments for the justification and limitation of war. It is a sober and scholarly work whose ideological balance and intellectual earnestness are not reflected in the tabloid title of the book, which appears to pander to common tastes by insisting on the pernicious dichotomy of Islam and the West! Outcome of a conference held at Rutgers University, and ‘supported by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace’, the present volume undoubtedly reflects the current concerns and anxieties of the sponsors. It is nevertheless a gratifying work that introduces, inter alia, the Muslim reader to a tradition
of ethical reflection and allows him access to a moral debate where his presence was deemed unnecessary earlier. All the essays touching upon Islamic themes have been handled with exemplary competence and sensitivity (Abdulaziz Sachedina; ‘The Development of Jihad in Islamic Revelation and History’; Charles Butterworth: ‘Al-Farabi’s Statecraft: War and the Well-Ordered Regime’; Tamara Sonn: ‘Irregular War and Terrorism in Islam: Asking the Right Questions’; and Khaled Abou El-Fadl: Ahkam al-Bughat: ‘Irregular Warfare and the Law of Rebellion in Islam’), just as the Western tradition has been represented with enviable incisiveness and sympathy.

However, the nasty question, whether war can be theorized in the abstract or whether the historicity of each war need be focused in an ethical forum, remains unanswered.
A work of similar nature, though more ambitious and comprehensive in scope and vision, is the collection of essays edited by Terry Nardin: The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives. Since the basic divide within this framework is between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ worldviews, it is but natural that it situates the Christian discourse of Just War within a broader, cross-cultural perspective. Not only Islam and Judaism, but also the pacifist and feminist critics of the established ethical systems have been duly represented in this dialogue which, according to the editor, is meant to be ‘a conversational and comparative inquiry into different views about a common topic – not a debate that can be won or lost, but an exchange of information.’ In other words, it is from an ideologically less assertive position that this cautious inquiry with uncertain goals is being pursued.

For all this, however, it is an intellectually exciting, though morally daunting, work that provides a befitting testimony to the ethical pluralism and foundational relativism of our age, including its ‘messianic’ hopes and Utopian dreams. Ted Koontz, for instance, argues from an ‘abolutionist perspective’ that the main focus of our inquiry ought not to be the ethics of war but the construction of a just international order in which law will substitute for war! (How we will find a common basis for such a transcendent law is,however, left unexplained!) The two Muslimcontributions are quite uneven and disparate; while Sohail Hashmi delivers a reflective, often perceptive statement (‘Interpreting the Islamic Ethics of War and Peace’), Bassam Tibi, on the other hand, is unduly critical of the Islamic tradition, examining it, as duly noted by the editor, ‘through the lens of a self-confessed internationalist’ (‘War and Peace in Islam’)!

An earlier French study by Jean-Paul Charnay, L’Islam et la guerre, is notable on account of the perceptive insights it provides into the phenomenology of jihad and how this traditional doctrine has been appropriated by modern revolutionaries. Charnay, who in the opening chapter of his book distinguishes between the various senses jihad, viz. sociological, ritual, eschatological, teleological etc., nevertheless comes to the insight that, ultimately, jihad is an affair between the believer and God and not between the believer and his enemy. It is an act of faith and a passion of penitents which is essentially religious and mystical not political.

One must pause here, for even if jihad may, in ultimate terms, be construed as an expression of personal piety beyond the calculus of politics and rule, a religious obligation beyond the logic of victory and defeat, it is nonetheless never totally severed from the historical mission of the community. Only when this link is intentionally broken, only when the interests of the community are made subservient to the pursuit of partisan politics, may the imperative of jihad turn into nihilistic anti-politics. Without the mediating, instrumental logic of fiqh, without the disciplined deliberation of the jurists, without the sacrament of Ijma´, jihad becomes a caricature of faith. Our tragedy is that the fiqh has lost its intellectual vigour, and fuqaha their moral authority. For all its discontents and limitations, therefore, the rule of fiqhi reason must return to Islam, but it must be a reason that has become thoroughly reinvigorated by the absorption of all forms of knowledge, from within the Islamic tradition and outside it. Paradoxically, despite their explicit concern with the issues of world-order and the ethics of war and peace, none of the works mentioned so far assists us in understanding the political world as it is, or as it its evolving. For all their intellectual acumen, ethical sensitivity and polemical fervour, these works speak not only of a bygone Islam (Dar al-Islam) or a bygone Christianity (Christendom), but also of a bygone West, the West of the sovereign states, of national cultures, of local economies.

What we are witnessing today is far more radical a transformation of our world, of its power structures, its economic enterprises, its technological projects, indeed of its moral discourses, than can be captured by the innocuous concept of ‘globalization’, or by the pert jargon of ‘pax americana’. It would be more apt to conceptualize our situation in terms of Empire. Such, at least, is the argument presented in a radically original and provocative study that, despite its associations with a totally different, and for most Muslims wholly unfamiliar, discourse, is as relevant to our inquiry as anything else discussed so far.

A very different portrait of terrorism as a radically modern phenomenon, sprung from the loins of a totalitarian, positivist and imperial modernity, emerges from John Gray’s brilliant little volume, Al-QAEDA and what it means to be MODERN. Indeed, Gray who possesses exceptional facility with language, being able to expresses complex ideas in the simplest words, also has the enviable gift of analysis and perception. He exposes the intellectual land moral pretense of modern ideologies as no one else, and his writings have attained the status of being the veritable landmarks of cogent and powerful kulturkritik. Gray is censorious of all kinds of totalitarian projects and universalist visions which give rise to illusions of omnipotence and megalomania. Modernity’s mistress, science with a capital S, he believes, is the mother of the mythic belief in humanity’s ability to control its destiny.

Al-Qaeda’s closest precursors, we are informed in the beginning, are the revolutionary anarchists of late nineteenth century Europe: ‘If Osama bin Laden has a precursor, it is the nineteenth century Russian terrorist Sergei Nechaev.’ (21). Hence, to view Al-Qaeda as an anti-modern movement, a relic of the past, is, according to Gray, simply wrong. ‘Like communism and Nazism, radical Islamism is modern. Though it claims to be anti-Western, it is shaped as much by western ideology as by Islamic traditions. Like Marxists and neoliberals, radical Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All are convinced they can remake the human condition. If there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it.’ (3) An even more sombre insight is expressed as, ‘the conflict between Al-Qaedaand the West is a war of religion. The Enlightenment idea of a universal civilization, which the West upholds against radical Islam, is an offspring of Christianity. Al-Qaeda’s peculiar hybrid of theocracy and anarchy is a by-product of western radical thought. Each of the protagonists in the current conflict is driven by beliefs that are opaque to it.’ (117)

In brief sketches, Gray presents a history of modernist illusions, paying equal attention to their political, economic and ideological matrices. Whatever the topic, be it positivism or globalism, free-market or PaxAmericana, limits to growth or the end of history, his is a lucid and intellectually gratifying analysis. Nor is there any reticence when it comes to describing the follies of the modern ways. Some examples: ‘It is a mistake to think that opponents of liberal values are enemies of the Enlightenment….

The European right is not so much a return of fascism as an attempt to modernize it.’ (14-15); ‘French nation is an artifact of military conscription and the school system.’ (19); ‘America’s peculiar religiosity is becoming ever more strikingly pronounced. It has by far the most powerful fundamentalist movement of any advanced country… In truth, the US is a less secular state than Turkey.’(23); ‘The limits to growth have not disappeared. They have re-turned as geopolitics.’ (61); ‘The aftermath of September 11th has produced a new kind of unlimited war. The Hobbesian anarchy that flows from failed states has enabled stateless armies to strike into the heart of the world’s greatest power. In response, the US and other liberal regimes are turning themselves into Hobbesian surveillance states.’ (84); and, finally, ‘ G l o b a l i z a t i o n b e g e t s d e -globalization.’ (112)

John Gray is a highly perceptive, outspoken and eloquent critic of modernity’s totalitarian– missionizing as well as imperialistic– theories and practices. His numerous writings, especially an earlier work Enlightenment’s Wake (Routledge, 1995), are indispensable for any Muslim attempt to understand modernity as a Western enterprise of din and dawla!

Within the polemical literature on Jihad, distinguished only by sectarian outrage, Richard Bonney’s study, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden, is an exception:  it brings to the subject the objective vision of a professional historian but does not eschew a moral judgement on the politics and anti-politics of the contemporary phenomenon. The chief merit of the work is its comprehensiveness. Its historical span stretches, from the inception of the Muslim community to the present day. Within its covers, some 600 pages, it touches on the Biblical notion of the ‘War of Annihilation’ (a very terse statement); introduces the early historical environment in which the idea of jihad, as just armed struggle, emerged; delves into the medieval debates on its legitimacy and scope in various historical contexts; analyzes the thought of its modern interpreters who have become the ideologues of ‘Islamism’; discusses its reemergence as an ideology of struggle within the context of Palestine-Israel conflict; and, finally, denounces its metamorphosis as a doctrine of global insurgency by Muslim terrorists.

‘This is a work of history, not of theology’, insists Bonney at the outset. Since theological imagination and vision pervade the entire discussion of the theme, it would be more appropriate to say that it is not a work of theory. Certainly, Bonney does not provide any theoretical insights into the very seminal issues of redemption, violence and transcendence which this theme gives rise to and which would have been appropriate in a theological tract. In his volume, there is wealth of historical detail but very little of sustained theoretical inquiry. Instead, he allows the perpetrators, and their interpreters, to speak for themselves, just as he is able to deal with the immense diversity, even radical disparity, of the sources at his disposal by a technique of selection and reduction.

The historical vision, we may recall, is not a great leveller but a great divider: it relativizes everything. And so is it with this effort. The putative unity of the Muslim holy war tradition, so pervasive and strident in the Islamophobic discourse, gives way to a host of contending theories and practices, each valid and meaningful within its specific historical context but carrying little universal validity. Though Bonney would rather construe his effort as ‘a work of synthesis’, alluding perhaps to its comprehensive coverage of the theme, it soon becomes obvious to the reader that the prism of history readily breaks the luminescence of the Jihad theory, doctrine if you will, into a number of lesser lights.

Contrary to the essentialist view of Islam that the title of the book advertises (even if it is the publisher and not the author who is responsible for this choice), the evidence of the historical texts fails to testify the existence of an all consuming and overpowering passion for militancy and conquest in the house of Islam. And this is the chief merit of the work.

By exposing the intelligent reader to a number of authentic voices, intelligent and dumb, xenophobic and conciliatory, spiritual as well as militant, Bonney’s study restores to the civilisation of Islam its human visage. After reading it, one cannot see jihad as the scourge of an unforgiving faith, or a mere phantom of the Islamophobic imagination, but a genuine human dilemma!

Someone who would passionately disagree with this assertion is David Cook. His present work, Understanding Jihad, is an unending censure of those ‘apologists’, Muslims or otherwise, who uphold ‘the validity of an exclusively spiritual notion of jihad’ (p. 4, italics added) For such a position to be authentic, he is adamant, they would have to prove ‘that this doctrine had some kind of reality outside of the Sufi text books and to demonstrate that a substantial minority or a majority of Muslims believed and acted upon it or that spiritual jihad actually superseded the militant jihad.’ (p. 166).

Needless to say, no scholar, according to him, has accomplished this. He contends further, addressing those Muslims who question the Islamic ‘legitimacy’ of radical Islamism (Usama and his ilk), that this problem ‘has never been resolved exclusively’ by them, for example, ‘by declaring it(i.e. radical Islamism) to be apostasy’, and then until this happens ‘the reasonable outsider must conclude that it is indeed a legitimate expression of Islam.’ (ibid.) Neither is Cook reticent in his criticism of ‘unreasonable outsiders’, the scholars who disagree with him. John Esposito’s statement that one of the meanings of jihad would be ‘to lead a good life, to make society more moral and just’ is for him ‘bathetic and laughable’; Carole Hillenbrand’s stance on the spiritual aspects of jihad ‘is essentially dogmatic and unsupportable’; Robert Crane’s claim that ‘the Qur’an refers to jihad only in terms of the intellectual effort to apply divine revelation in promoting peace through justice’ simply ‘ignores the entirety of Muslim history and law’ (pp. 42-43). Only Usama bin Ladin, it seems, may speak on behalf of Muslim history and law!

David Cook’s work falls squarely within the tradition of Orientalism: it shares not only the much problematic essentialism of that tradition but its Islamophobic passions
as well (e.g. Islam is presented as ‘a religion rooted in and emphasizing domination and violence.’(p. 166)). To these passions, Cook also brings the New Frontier spirit of America and the messianic energy of Israel. His is a historical survey, covering the same ground as Bonney’s Jihad but the political tenor is far from conciliatory. Indeed, if anything, his work is a monumental indictment of the ideology of jihad. Despite his familiarity with the original sources, however, Cook’s conception of history, even of the human condition, borders on the inane.

How could anyone otherwise insist that the problem of the Islamic legitimacy of Usama’s jihadism has not been conclusively resolved? Could there ever be such a conclusive resolution, other than by the force of law? Where in modern Islam does he perceive such a supreme legal authority to exist, possessing the power to enforce its verdicts, whose judgement might satisfy him? One is entitled to ask him, how would Judaism have conclusively resolved such a problem, in the period of the Exile, or, today, after the establishment of the Jewish state? Indeed, how would Christianity, now that the unity of its church is a memory of the past, achieve a conclusive resolution of doctrinal disputes? To ask these questions in the context of these religions would indeed be ‘bathetic and laughable’. But Islam, of course, is a different world!

And yet, given the inability of the ummah to resolve this issue legally, or that of the powers-that-be to find a solution to this plague by the might of arms, it is mind boggling
that Cook, the reasonable outsider, has no problem regarding his own ability to be an arbiter of what does or does not constitute ‘a legitimate expression of Islam’! That he regards Usama bin Laden as the incarnation of Islamic jihad, is of course, his privilege, but for a man of reason, such a contention is not epistemologically unproblematic. If the normative answer from within the tradition is fraught with uncertainties, how could the judgement of a single outsider, no matter how reasonable, be true, valid or authoritative? Do we not have an obligation to treat such a judgement as arbitrary?

Other, disturbing questions remain, however. We might ask, for instance, why more weight be given to Cook’s reading of the Muslim texts than those of Esposito, Hillenbrand, Crane or Bonney, or more credence be vested in his integrity than that of other honourable and competent scholars? After all, Cook is just another reader, and as such, the creator of a particular text on jihad! Alternatively, if the answer has to be that we are defined by our political constituencies, then it would reinforce the suspicion that Cook’s dismissal of their work is a matter of political choice, for these scholars do not dismiss the possibility, no matter how remote, of a common political platform with the Muslims, something which Cook obviously abhors!

But to exclude Islam from a common politics of humanity cannot be the hallmark of true scholarship. We may still wonder, what is the basis of Cook’s normative judgement? If it is history, then, he should know that history does not, and cannot, pass a judgement on the validity and veracity of norms. For if it were so, everything that happens within the Muslim world, or even without it by Muslim actors, may be construed as ‘the legitimate expression of Islam’. Surely, it is the nihilistic perception of modernity that nullifies all distinctions between history and norm, between the is and the ought of the human situation. Such a perception, shared alike by Cook and Usama, is a gift of modernity and not of Islam. To accept it would be to deprive Islam of all normativity, of all criteria of self-judgement, and to equate it with any secular, transcendence-denying worldview. Little wonder that terror has acquired an Islamic face: Muslim terrorists are all true children of modernity!3 The greatest problem that a Muslim has with Cook’s position has to do with his credentials as a scholar.

For as a historian, he cannot define normative Islam and take sides with Usama against the convictions of his innumerable Muslim critics. That he does so merely shows that he is a partisan and not an observer in this debate, and that the basis of his judgement is not history but some other passion or dogma. Only a non-committal answer to the normative question of Usama’s Islamic credentials can be the scholar’s legitimate response: the rest is passion and politics.

If the Muslim critique merely relates to the issue of Cook’s legitimacy as a historian, our, universal, commonsense finds his perception of reality philosophically and metaphysically myopic, if not downright incompressible. For by chiding Muslim ‘apologists’ for not being able to validate ‘an exclusively spiritual notion of jihad’, is he not only tilting at windmills? For who dwells in the realm of the pure spirit? Who knows it? Is there any human experience that is exclusively spiritual? Is pure spirituality part of the human condition? Surely, the Muslim cannot escape the reality of body and flesh, even if he believes in the existence of soul and spirit; nor can he bypass the world of immanence simply because his goal is transcendence. Like any other seminal concepts, jihad is subject to the limitations and ambiguities of the human condition. It is capable of being conceived of in both spiritual and militant terms: it denotes after all a struggle of body and soul. To deny the Muslims the right to a spiritual vision of the ultimate struggle, simply because it is not, cannot be, exclusively so, is an act of bigotry on the part of Cook. It is in fact analogous to denying the Christians the right to their own, spiritual interpretations of the lordship of the Messiah, for he is, in the original vision of the Hebrews, a warlord, and must therefore forever remain so!

A totally different breed is Faisal Devji’s original and highly suggestive study, Landscapes of Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity , which is a milestone in the landscapes of the modern jihad.

If anything, it makes it abundantly clear that the Western thought, stifled as it is by the inherited propensity to explain Muslim, and now global, politics in terms of ‘Islam’, has come to the end of its tether. Devji book is by no means a historical study on jihad that is meant to be read between the lines. Rather, it provides a sophisticated account of our times in which ‘the interiority of the jihad to America’s new world-order’ is fully recognized, but in which all those politically opportune theories which reduce the contemporary phenomenon to a recurrent and enduring problem of ‘Islamic violence’, are also forcefully repudiated. The sheer range of sources from which those involved in the global jihad derive their ideas and information’, he is adamant, ‘is staggering and gives lie to any theory that would associate militancy with a strictly confined, madrasa style education.’

Instead, Devji underlines the fact that ‘most militants have received not a religious but a secular education, and … that in addition to following the international media rather closely, many also seem to be voracious readers in more than one language.’ (p. 159). Not inconsistently, he is quite censorious of ‘the scholar’s conservative instinct’ to place jihad within the genealogical paradigm of political Islam because such genealogies are ‘drawn up by systematic procedures of racial, religious and regional apartheid that maintains what is essential to every genealogy: its purity.’(p. 23). The jihad of Al-Qaeda, he posits to the contrary, destroys ‘all the inherited forms of Islamic authority’ and by so doing ‘puts itself in a paradoxically intimate relationship with other groups that it might well consider beyond the pale of Islam.’ (p. 16).

Only the legacy of the colonial scholarship, he insists, is responsible for placing the jihad within some exotic genealogy of its own, and keeping it ‘completely separated from the larger world of ethics and politics.’ What distinguishes the jihad (his term for describing the global nature of Al-Qaeda’s militancy) from traditional Islam is its modernity. It is also modernity which imparts to it its moral profile, its anti-global pathos, its metaphysical disdain for history and geography and its fascination with the media.

The most significant insight of Devji’s study however is that the global jihad is devoid of all political content and meaning; it is a religion born out of the ‘Death of God’, a theatre of effect without causes, a mystical subjectivity gone berserk, a messianic cult of violence without any expectation of the mahdi; in a phrase, anti-politics and nihilism under the banner of ‘holy war’. Devji’s extenuating expression however depicts the jihad as a quest for ‘ethics’ beyond the intentionality of ‘politics’; a ‘protestant’ orientation towards ‘faith’ beyond the instrumentality of ‘law’; an urge ‘to de-instrumentalize Islam and make it part of everyday ethics’; ‘an effort to define the terms of global social relationships outside the language of state and citizenship’ and much else that is far more forgiving of the Al-Qaeda’s theory and practice than is warranted by the dictates of any kind of ethical or moral sensibility. Infact, Devji is not loath to seeing in the jihad a kind of liberating force in its ‘democratization of Islam, accomplished by its fragmentation of traditional forms of religious authority and the dispersal of their elements into a potentially endless series of re-combinations’ (p. 162).

Cognizant of the fact that ‘jihad has not always played a prominent role in the Muslim past’, Devji feels convinced that ‘the ethical element in holy war may very easily transform it into a non-violent enterprise. Violence, therefore, may be a necessarily short-term aspect of the new Islam that is today best represented by the jihad. Among the long-term features of this Islam are its fragmentation, democratization and individualism, all of which … the jihad shares with other global movements.’ (p. 132) This transformation of politics by ethics—a trait shared by other global, or anti-globalisation, movements—illustrates for Devji the limitation of traditional politics and the failure of classical notions of citizenship around the world. In sum, Devji’s work is full of provocative insights, just as its reading of many of the original sources of the jihad, (whose authenticity, one may hasten to add, remains questionable) is highly original, bordering often on the sympathetic. It is fully at home in the various subdisciplines of modern theory, fecund in ideas, and, even when it fails to convince, it remains stimulating and gratifying. Indeed, more than an incisive study of landscapes pf the jihad’, Devji’s analytical vision affords an intimate glimpse into the conditions of modernity itself. A commendable effort and a valuable contribution to the current debate!

In the end, with regard to the perennial tension between ethics and politics, a few words are in order. For all its discomfort to the ethical vision, the ‘instrumentality’ of politics remains indispensable to civilized life and humane existence. It is through the exercise of the instrumental intellect that morality finds its historical home.

The Biblical tradition, we may remember, is heir to its own scandalous texts like the following:  ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I will punish what the Ama’lek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came out of Egypt. Now go and smite Ama’lek and utterly destroy all that they have: do not spare them but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”’ (I Samuel 15:2-3. ‘The Lord of Hosts’ would in modern terminology translate into ‘Field Marshal’.)  Little wonder that a modern critic of imperialism contends that genocide is divinely sanctioned in the Bible.

Furthermore, redemptive violence in the Biblical perspective has given legitimacy to the paradigms of ‘holy war’ (Yahweh’s war) and ‘just war’ (Jesus’s war). It is however through the instrumentality of politics that the Western tradition made its ethical discoveries regarding the permissibility of war and its actual conduct. And so did the Muslim tradition, whose debate on jihad, as Devji remarks, ‘is largely juridical in nature, concentrating upon attempts to define legitimate occasions for holy war, permitted rules of engagement and the like’ (p. 33). The symmetry of Just War and Jihad discourses is even explicitly recognized by modern scholars as well:  ‘The formal parallels between these (Muslim) rules of war and the Western just war criteria are rather striking. Just cause, right intent, competent authority, a reasonable hope of success, the aim of peace—all these criteria of the jus ad bellum are formally present in the rules governing jihad, as is the jus in bello requirement for discrimination in targeting. (See: Kelsay, above. P. 36)

Today, the Messianic myth has been secularised and brusquely commissioned in the service of the globalisation project. And yet the moral vision of a politics of humanity has not become defunct. In fact, only such a vision can make us renounce the redemptive violence of terror and counterterror.
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S Parvez Manzoor is an independent scholar and critic. Some of his writings may be accessed at the following site: http://www.pmanzoor.info

Works Discussed in this Essay
Landscapes of Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. By Faisal Devji. New
Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005. Pp. 184. ISBN: 1850657750 (HB).
Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden. By Richard Bonney. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 594. ISBN: 1403933723. (HB).
Understanding Jihad. By David Cook. University of California Press, 2005.
Pp. 259. ISBN: 0520244486 (PB).
Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam. By Rudolph Peters. Markus Wiener
Publishers, Princeton, 1996. Pp. 204. ISBN 1-55876-109-8.
Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics. By John Kelsay. Westminster/
John Knox press, Louisville, Kentucky (USA), 1993. Pp.149. ISBN 0-664-
25302-4.
The Holy War Idea in the Western and Islamic Traditions. By James
Turner Johnson. Pennsylvania State University press, 1997. Pp. 185. ISBN 0-
271-01633-7.
Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and limitation of War in
the Western and Islamic Tradition. Ed. By James Turner Johnson & John
Kelsay. Greenwood Press, New York, 1990. Pp. 236. ISBN 0-313-27348-0.
The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives. Ed. By
Terry Nardin. Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. 286. ISBN 0-691-03713-2.
L’Islam et la guerre: De la guerre juste à la révolution sainte. By Jen-Paul
Charnay. Fayard, Paris, 1986. Pp 354.
AL-QAEDA and what it means to be Modern. By John Gray. Faber and Faber
Ltd, 2003). Pp. 145. ISBN 0-571-21980-2