Messenger of Allah was close to me, and when he saw me and how difficult the place was for me, he descended [into the trench] and took the pick from my hands. He struck the rock with force that caused lightning to flash from the pick…then he struck again, and lightning flashed from beneath the pick…and then struck a third time and again lightning flashed from beneath it. I said; “May my father and mother [be a redemption for you], O Messenger of Allah, what was that I saw beneath the pick when you struck?” He said: “Did you see that, O Salman?” I said: “Yes.” He said: “With the first [flash] Allah gave me the Yemen, with the second Allah gave me Syria and the Maghrib [Morocco] and with the third, Allah gave me the East.” This account is meant to relay the message that God had planned to deliver certain lands to Muhammad (or Muhammad’s followers) and it is easy to see how such an account could serve as a motivation for jihad. Although the result of this early jihad was the conversion of a vast number of people to Islam, the conversions (probably) were not forced upon the conquered people. As seen above there were several options listed in the Qur’an for many conquered people other than conversion, and there was also the command in Qur’an 2:256 that “there should be no compulsion in religion.” Rather, the early conquests created the “necessary preconditions for the spread of Islam,” and thus jihad played a crucial role in the early development of Islam. The early conquest movement also created a necessity for later Muslim scholars to continue to find ways to reconcile their faith with war, and also to outline situations for the licit use of violence. The Greater Jihad and the Lesser Jihad The multiple commands in the Qur’an to go and fight the unbelievers coupled with the early use of violent and widely successful conquests of a rapidly growing Islamic empire led to jihad taking a prominent role in Islam.Jihad was seen primarily as a war against unbelievers for the sake of establishing Islam, but there are also multiple mentions in early literature of jihad as a nonviolent movement as well. One of the most prominent of these texts is a hadith which can be traced to the first half of the ninth century:
Christians, Jews, and in some sources Zoroastrians – in which case they are given three options. These options where passed down in a hadith and are as follows: Summon them to become Muslims. If they accept their conversion. In that case summon them to move from their territory to the Abode of the Emigrants [i.e. Medina]. If they refuse that, let them know that then they are like the Muslim Bedouins and that they share only in the booty, when they fight together with the [other] Muslims. If they refuse conversion, then ask them to pay a poll-tax (jizya). If they agree, accept their submission. But if they refuse, then ask God for assistance and fight them. This hadithi summarizes that the goal in fighting a jihad was two-fold: conversions (in the case of all non-Muslims) or submission (but only for certain people). The Development of Jihad After the success the early conquests and jihad had in converting people to Islam and in expanding the realm of Islam, early Muslim scholars split the world into two distinct spheres: dar al-harb (the sphere or war) and dar al-Islam (the sphere of Islam). This distinction was based on the implicit division in the Qur’an of the world into spheres of belief and disbelief. For the sake of jihad there was a distinction between how the jihad could be waged and under what circumstances. Fighting within the sphere of Islam is reserved for the restoration of peace and justice, and if it occurs against protected peoples (people who have paid the poll-tax), once the conflict has ended they are to be restored to their protected status.Jihad against the dar al-harb is considered obligatory for all followers of Muhammad, who was “commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” The obligation to fight came down to “every able-bodied man who has reached puberty and is sane.” There are several recourses believers were instructed to take before a violent jihad could be allowed. In the case of unbelievers it was required that they be invited to Islam first, and
hadith Muhammad is reported as saying “the man who fights it the cause of the Lord may be compared to one who fasts and prays…” The two situations here, however, are distinctly different as Muhammad is directly praising a person for engaging in an act of violence, while Jesus’ praise for the soldier is not related to the soldier’s profession, but rather to the man’s faith in Jesus’ healing abilities. Nonetheless, both texts appear widely in discussions on war in their respective traditions. Since this paper is written in an era where “terrorism” and the “War on Terror” are still prominently featured on the nightly news, a brief discussion on the use of either just war theory or jihad to justify the use of violence by individuals or small groups of people is both necessary and probably expected given the literature being published today. Although in modern contexts we generally hear about Muslims claiming the right to declare a jihad, I believe the same conclusion can be drawn for both Islam and Christianity. According to the classical requirements for correct authority to wage either a just war or jihad, no group that would be labeled a “terrorist organization” can rightly declare jihad or claim their violent action to be a just war. While this point is still highly debatable, and could easily digress into discussions on topics such as defense, what constitutes a “terrorist organization,” colonialism, the fight to establish a “true” Muslim (or Christian) state, etc., it is not the point of this paper to engage in such discussions. As I have argued, these two theories, the Islamic jihad and the Christian just war, although truly distinct from each other, are not without their parallels. Jihad is fought primarily to expand Islam and at the urging of the Qur’an, against the unbelievers. From the evidence above, it would seem that President Bush was wrong in his assertion that “Islam is peace.” Although the religion does contain many peaceful aspects, it is incorrect to classify the religion