The History of Jihad- From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  When King Charles XII of Sweden fled to the Sublime Porte after being defeated by Czar Peter the Great in 1709, the Ottomans, who had a treaty with the Russians, nonetheless refused to turn Charles over to them; they saw a chance to expand their domains north of the Black Sea at the Russians’ expense.

  Charles spent his time in Constantinople trying to gain support for an Ottoman attack on the Russians, which the Tatar Ottoman clients in the Crimea very much wanted as well. After much intrigue, in October 1712, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia.1 The Ottomans, victorious, forced Peter the Great to give up Azov on the Don River, east of the Crimea, along with other territories, as well as to provide a safe conduct for Charles XII to get back to Sweden and to promise to withdraw Russian armies from Poland. Peter, in a deep depression, lamented: “The Lord God drove me out of this place, like Adam out of paradise.”2

  Peter the Great was being a trifle overdramatic. The Russian losses were not actually very great. In fact, Charles of Sweden was enraged that the Ottomans did not pursue and destroy utterly the retreating Russian army. By this time, however, the sultanate had neither the will nor the resources to take the jihad to the Russian infidels in a major and concerted effort to win and hold more territory; its posture toward the Russians remained primarily defensive, even as it declared war in 1712.

  The Ottomans had at the same time lowered their sights in Europe. In 1715 they seized Morea from the Republic of Venice, which, like the Ottoman Empire, had seen better days. But they were not able to enjoy their victory for long, as the Habsburg emperor Charles VI, who was allied with the Venetians, saw the capture of Morea as an act of war. The Austrians advanced upon Belgrade, defeating the Ottomans in 1716, taking from them by a subsequent treaty most of their Balkan territories.3

  The days of Ottoman jihadis threatening the very survival of Christian Europe were at an end. The states of Europe began to look for opportunities to strengthen their domains against the Ottomans. The eighteenth-century Muslim historian Umar Busnavi recounted what led the Russians to declare war against the Ottomans in 1735, and the Austrians to join two years later, ascribing it all to the perception of Ottoman weakness. Busnavi’s language also shows that even if the Ottoman ability to pursue jihad had waned, the Ottomans still tended to see the world in terms of Islam’s uncompromising believer/unbeliever division:

  It was owing to the perfidious Muscovite infidels having violated their engagements with the Porte, that five thousand chosen men, standard-bearers, surgeons, and a number of brave officers, had been sent to the Russian frontiers, for the purpose of aiding the army of the faithful against the aggressions of the infidels. This circumstance left the kingdom of Bosnia in a great measure exposed, and also afforded an occasion to the infidel Germans to believe, that the country was in such a defenceless state, that they also were induced to violate the peace. Both Germans and Muscovites had formed, long before this, schemes against the peace and tranquillity of the empire; and now both began to put their wicked designs into execution. Owing to the disasters which had befallen the empire in the east, these hateful wretches, the Germans, were led to think, when they perceived that Bosnia and the adjacent provinces were in a defenceless state in consequence of the war with the Muscovites, that the exalted Mohammedan power had become lax and feeble. They became inflamed with prospects of success, and wickedly resolved on attacking the Ottoman empire in various quarters.4

  This time, however, the Ottomans were victorious, and won back all the territory the empire had lost twenty years before in Serbia, Bosnia, and Wallachia. Busnavi attributed this in large part to the valor of the Bosnian Muslims, Europeans who had embraced Islam rather than the sufferings that dhimmitude entailed. He explained that “by reason of this country’s vicinity to the infidel nations, such as the deceitful Germans, Hungarians, Serbs [Sclavonians], the tribes of Croats, and the Venetians, strong and powerful, and furnished with abundance of cannon, muskets, and other weapons of destruction, it has had to carry on fierce war from time to time with one or other, or more, of these deceitful enemies—enemies accustomed to mischief, inured to deeds of violence, resembling wild mountaineers in asperity, and inflamed with the rage of seeking opportunities of putting their machinations into practice.” The Bosnians, said Busnavi, “know this,” and were in response “strong, courageous, ardent, lion-hearted, professionally fond of war, and revengeful.”5 Europe would see more of these aggressive and warlike qualities in the late twentieth century.

  The Wahhabi Revolt

  Even as the Ottomans remained, for people such as Busnavi, guardians and foremost exponents of Islam, they presently faced a challenge from other Muslims on precisely those grounds. In the 1740s, a Muslim preacher in Arabia named Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab began to preach against “ignorance, shirk, and innovation.”6 Shirk is worshipping others along with or aside from Allah, and is the foremost sin in Islam; innovation (bid’ah) is the adoption of practices that neither the Qur’an nor Muhammad mandate. Wahhab demanded that all shirk and bid’ah be swept away, and that Muslims return to strict observance solely of what was taught in the Qur’an and Sunnah. Wahhab’s teachings were so simple that one of his publications, The Book of Monotheism (Kitab al-Tauhid), consisted of nothing but ahadith, traditional reports of Muhammad’s words and deeds, without a single word of comment or explanation from Wahhab at all.7

  But Wahhab’s message was as powerful as it was crude. He wrote to the people of Qasim in Arabia:

  I assert that jihad will always be valid under the Imam’s leadership, whether [he is] righteous or sinner; praying behind [sinner] imams is also permissible.

  Jihad cannot be stopped by the injustice of the unjust or even the fairness of those who are just.

  I believe that hearing and obeying Muslim rulers is [mandatory (wajib)], whether they are righteous or sinners, as long as they do not enjoin Allah’s disobedience.

  And he who becomes the Caliph and the people take him as such and agree to his leadership, or if he overpowers them by the word to capture the Khilafah [until he captures it, then obedience to him becomes a necessity and rising against him becomes haram (forbidden)].

  I believe the people of bid’ah should be boycotted and shunned until they repent.

  I judge people of bid’ah according to their outward conduct and refer knowledge of their inward [state of faith] to Allah…8

  Despite these declarations that the Muslim ruler must be obeyed, Wahhab and his jihadis began to wage jihad against the local authorities in Arabia, coming ever closer to a direct challenge to Ottoman power. (Wahhab’s statements about obeying Muslim rulers, however, would prove quite useful to the later Saudi state.) The Ottomans and other Muslims, he charged, had departed from this strict observance and were thus guilty of bid’ah and apostasy; they were no longer Muslims.

  After gaining the loyalty of Uthman ibn Muammar, the emir of Uyayna in Arabia, Wahhab and his warriors began to gain notice by smashing the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, a companion of Muhammad, as Wahhab held that the tombs of the saints were idolatrous. Shortly thereafter, Wahhab personally stoned an accused adulteress to death, an act that won him great admiration; he began to gain followers in large numbers. “Thereafter,” writes a modern-day Saudi biographer of Wahhab, “his cause flourished, his power increased, and true tauhid [monotheism] was everywhere disseminated, together with the enjoining of virtue and the prohibition of vice.”9

  Expelled under pressure from Uyayna, Wahhab moved on to Diriyya, cementing an alliance with the local emir that would have global consequences: the ruler’s name was Muhammad ibn Saud.10 Wahhab told Saud about his plans to wage jihad against all those who were not, in his view, implementing Islam properly, and Saud agreed to help. In 1746, they formally announced the beginning of this jihad, and began to plunder and pillage their way across Arabia. The Wahhabis soon conquered most of Najd, and then Riyadh in 1773.11 According to the nineteenth-century French historian
Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez, who wrote a history of the Wahhabis from their origins though 1809:

  At the moment when they were least expected, the Wahabis would arrive to confront the tribe they wished to subject, and a messenger from Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud would appear bearing a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other. His message was stark and simple: Abd el Aziz to the Arabs of the tribe of _____, hail! Your duty is to believe in the book I send you. Do not be like the idolatrous Turks, who give God a human intermediary. If you are true believers, you shall be saved; otherwise, I shall wage war upon you until death.12

  The Ottomans, meanwhile, were too busy with the Russians to pay all of this much notice. The partition of Poland in 1764 by Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia enraged the sultan Mustafa III, who was anxious for a new war with Russia. His advisors, noting the weakness of the empire by that point, counseled against it, but Mustafa was determined, telling them, “I will find some means of humbling these infidels.”13 The war came in 1768, and ended disastrously for the Ottomans in 1774, with the Muslims, not the infidels, ending up humbled. They lost, among other things, political sovereignty over the Tatar territories north of Black Sea, although the treaty recognized that the Ottoman sultan, as the caliph of Islam, would still have spiritual authority there. The Russian czar, in a reciprocal arrangement that displayed Ottoman weakness to the world, was acknowledged as the protector of the Christians in the Ottoman domains of Wallachia and Moldavia, with the right to intervene militarily on their behalf.14

  Another war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia and Austria between 1787 and 1792 only confirmed the loss of the Crimea and other Black Sea territories, which had been formally annexed by Russia. The sultan Abdulhamid, mindful of Catherine the Great’s designs on Constantinople, had Ottoman coins of this period labeled “Struck in Islambol,” a name for the city meaning “Full of Islam” that was common among Ottoman Turks of the time, rather than “Struck in Constantinople” (although after the war, the Ottomans began using the name Constantinople again).15 This both emphasized the Islamic character of the city and courted divine favor. The Islamic scholars of Islambol awarded Abdulhamid himself the title Warrior for the Faith.16

  Enter Napoleon

  But in the end, none of it helped. The Ottomans were so weak that they could not prevent Napoleon Bonaparte from invading Egypt in 1798. Napoleon professed his love for the Qur’an and Muhammad. To one imam he actually professed the Islamic faith, saying: “Glory to Allah! There is no other God but God; Mohammed is his prophet, and I am one of his friends.… The Koran delights my mind.… I love the prophet.”17 He told Egyptian imams that it was “the will of Mohammed” that the Egyptians ally with the French against the Mamluks.18 He denounced the Russians to the Ottoman sultan, saying that they “abhor those who believe in the unity of God, because, according to their lies, they believe that there are three,” an echo of the Qur’an’s warning to Christians to “say not ‘Three’” (4:171), that is, do not profess the faith in the Holy Trinity.19 But when asked later if he had actually become Muslim, Napoleon laughed off that idea, saying: “Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.”20

  The Egyptian people, however, were never convinced and never accepted his rule. The Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, who lived through the French occupation of Egypt, gave one reason why Napoleon and his men were so unpopular: the French, he wrote, treated the dhimmi populations as equals; they allowed “the lowliest Copts, Syrian and Orthodox Christians, and Jews” to mount horses and bear arms, in blithe indifference to Sharia rules.21

  The Ottoman sultan Selim III declared jihad against the French.22 The French ventured into the Ottoman province of Syria in 1799 but were defeated, after which Napoleon returned to France, leaving his troops in Egypt under the command of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who quickly won several victories over the Ottomans and the Egyptians. The following year, however, Suleiman al-Halabi, a student at Cairo’s venerable Islamic university, al-Azhar, stabbed Kléber to death. Al-Halabi was executed and, in a foreshadowing of the twenty-first-century tendency in the West to see all jihad activity as a manifestation of mental illness, his skull was sent to France, where for years it was displayed to enable students of phrenology to study its “bump of crime and fanaticism.”23

  Kléber’s successor, Jacques François de Menou, took Napoleon’s professed admiration for Islam one step farther, marrying an Egyptian woman and actually converting to Islam, taking the name Abdallah. But even this did not endear the French to the Egyptians, and gained Menou the contempt of his troops.24 When the British arrived in 1801 to help the Ottomans against the French, they found Menou, who was not nearly as able a commander as Kléber (Napoleon called him “that fool Menou”), totally unprepared; the French withdrew from Egypt that same year.25

  Egypt was not under direct Ottoman control (it was semiautonomous under the Mamluks), but the French had defeated the Ottomans more than once, and this invasion from a far-off Western European Christian state was yet another serious blow to the Ottoman self-image as tough, if no longer invincible, jihadis. The most memorable result of Napoleon’s Egyptian venture is widely believed to be the loss of the Sphinx’s nose, shot off by French soldiers during target practice. This, however, is yet another piece of Islamic apologetic mythmaking; in reality, the nose had been removed centuries before the French got there, by the fourteenth-century Sufi Muslim leader Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr. Al-Dahr had discovered that some of the Muslim peasants in Egypt, ignorant of their own faith’s prohibitions against idolatry, were worshipping the Sphinx; he had the nose chipped off in order to show the impotence of this massive god statue.26

  The Wahhabis in Mecca

  Meanwhile, the Wahhabis continued advancing in Arabia. Saud died in 1766, and Wahhab in 1791, but the movement did not die with them. In 1801, the Wahhabis raided Karbala in Iraq, slaughtering about two thousand of the city’s inhabitants, destroying the gravesite of Husayn and carrying off the jewels that had adorned his tomb, along with all the gold, silver, and other precious items they found in the city. They took Ta’if in Arabia in February 1803, killing two hundred people and burning all the books they found aside from the Qur’an and volumes of the hadith. Then, in April 1803, they entered Mecca and demanded the submission of the city’s Islamic scholars; they were, however, driven out that summer. After seizing Medina in 1805, the Wahhabis returned to Mecca the following year, staying for six years this time, during which they destroyed many of the tombs it contained.

  The Ottomans, as busy as they were with the Russians, could not ignore the Wahhabi occupation of the two holiest sites in Islam. Yet even they must have known that the Wahhabi/Saudi challenge to their power was in the tradition of many other such challenges throughout Islamic history. The Ottoman caliphate itself began as a challenge to the Abbasids. The Abbasids arose in revolt against the Umayyads. Muawiyya, the first Umayyad caliph, challenged the authority of Ali, the last “Rightly-Guided Caliph,” and waged jihad against him. Wahhab was an Islamic revivalist in the mold of Ibn Tumart, who led the Almohad revolt against the Almoravids in Morocco in the early twelfth century. Ottoman officials had their own comparisons. The Ottoman admiral Eyüb Sabri Pasha compared the Wahhabis to the Qarmatians, the tenth-century thieves of the Black Stone of Mecca; other Ottoman officials likened them to the Khawarij, who in the beginning decades of Islam waged bloody jihad against all Muslims they considered sinful—that is, all other Muslims.27

  In 1812, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt, drove the Wahhabis from Medina and several months later from Mecca as well. Seven years later, he sacked the Wahhabi capital of Diriyya and executed two of Wahhab’s grandsons. Abdullah ibn Saud, by this time the leader of the Wahhabis, was sent to Constantinople, where he was also executed.28 But the Ottomans were too weak to keep Muham
mad Ali Pasha’s troops stationed in Arabia indefinitely and, once they left, the Wahhabis began a resurgence, establishing their new capital in Riyadh. In 1832, the Wahhabis invaded Oman and forced the sultan of Muscat to pay them tribute.29

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British realized the Wahhabis’ potential as a tool in their long-term plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire. In 1865, they put the Saud family on the imperial payroll; by 1917, the Saudis were receiving five thousand pounds from the British every month, just to keep up the pressure on the Ottomans.30 Once again, the shortsighted calculations of non-Muslim politicians practicing realpolitik ended up aiding the global jihad.

  Meanwhile, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, jihad raged with new intensity in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam and its wars of conquest had been a presence since the fourteenth century. The Islamic scholar Usman dan Fodio declared jihad against the Hausa kingdoms of northern Nigeria and ultimately established the Sokoto Caliphate, with himself as caliph, in what is today Nigeria and Cameroon. Dan Fodio’s success led to the creation of other Islamic states in Central and West Africa, which lasted until they were defeated by European colonialists. Dan Fodio’s Sokoto Caliphate fell to the British in 1903.

  Greek Independence

  By the early nineteenth century, the Wahhabis were the least of the Ottomans’ troubles. In 1804, the Serbs rose in rebellion against their Ottoman masters, who ruthlessly put the uprising down. The governor of Belgrade, Suleiman Pasha, had the rebels burned alive as they hung by their feet. Others he had castrated or bastinadoed (caning the soles of their feet). Still others he had impaled outside the city gates, their bodies serving as a warning to others who might have been contemplating rebellion.31