The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  II. THE RECONQUISTA GAINS GROUND

  The Almohads

  In the early twelfth century, a Berber Muslim scholar named Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Tumart began to preach that the ruling Almoravids had strayed from the pure religion of Muhammad, and that the Muslims in its domains needed to return to full implementation of the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. His message found a ready audience among Muslims who had imbibed the Qur’anic notion that Allah bestowed or withheld his blessings to a society in direct correlation to how obedient it was to his commands. In 1121, his followers proclaimed him the Mahdi, the savior figure who was to return before Judgment Day in order to prepare and purify the believers. His followers, according to a contemporary chronicler, “swore that they would fight for him and dedicate their lives to his service.”65

  Ibn Tumart died around 1130, but the movement he began lived on. The rigorists, who called themselves Almohads (monotheists), rapidly gained ground, and in 1147 were able to overthrow the Almoravids in North Africa; the Almohad leader, Abd al-Mu’min al-Gumi, declared himself caliph. Over the next twenty-five years, the Almohads gained control over all the remaining Muslim domains of al-Andalus.

  Life was not pleasant for non-Muslims in Almohad Spain. The Muslim historian Ibn Baydhaq detailed how the Almohads treated the Jews as they advanced:

  Abd al-Mumin…the leader of the Almohads after the death of Muhammad ibn Tumart the Mahdi…captured Tlemcen [in the Maghreb] and killed all those who were in it, including the Jews, except those who embraced Islam.… [In Sijilmasa] one hundred and fifty persons were killed for clinging to their [Jewish] faith.… All the cities in the Almoravid state were conquered by the Almohads. One hundred thousand persons were killed in Fez on that occasion, and 120,000 in Marrakesh. The Jews in all [Maghreb] localities [conquered]…groaned under the heavy yoke of the Almohads; many had been killed, many others converted; none were able to appear in public as Jews.66

  The renowned Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, was born in Córdoba but fled the supposedly tolerant and pluralistic Muslim Spain in the 1160s. He later remarked:

  You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.… No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.… We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear. We have become as in the words of the psalmist, “But I am as a deaf man, I hear not, and I am as a dumb man that opens not his mouth” (Ps. 38:14). We have done as our sages of blessed memory have instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael. We listen but remain silent.… In spite of all this, we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness and their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently toward us. Thus David has depicted our plight: “I am at peace, but when I speak, they are for war!” (Ps. 120:7).67

  The Almohads meant to revive the spirit of jihad among the Muslims of Spain and expand those domains. Driven by a revivalist fervor rivaling that of the jihadis of earlier centuries, the Almohads won a series of victories over the Christians, capturing Alcácer do Sal, the gateway to Lisbon, in 1191. Four years later, they declared a new jihad against the Christians of Spain and decisively defeated King Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1195—the most disastrous defeat the Christians of Spain had suffered since the debacle at Sagrajas 109 years before. In 1197, they besieged Madrid.

  In line with their rigorist origins, the Almohads made sure to enforce the humiliation of the dhimmis in their domains. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian al-Marrakushi noted that in 1198, Abu Yusuf, the Almohad ruler in Spain,

  ordered the Jewish inhabitants of the Maghreb to make themselves conspicuous among the rest of the population by assuming a special attire consisting of dark blue garments, the sleeves of which were so wide as to reach to their feet and—instead of a turban—to hang over their ears a cap whose form was so ill-conceived as to be easily mistaken for a pack-saddle. This apparel became the costume of all the Jews of the Maghreb and remained obligatory until the end of the prince’s reign and the beginning of that of his son Abu Abd Allah [Abu Muhammad Abd Allah al-Adil, the Just, 1224–1227].68

  Abu Abd Allah, however, was not offering actual justice or equitable treatment:

  The latter made a concession only after appeals of all kinds had been made by the Jews, who had entreated all those whom they thought might be helpful to intercede on their behalf. Abu Abd Allah obliged them to wear yellow garments and turbans, the very costume they still wear in the present year 621 [1224]. Abu Yusuf’s misgivings as to the sincerity of their conversion to Islam prompted him to take this measure and impose upon them a specific dress. “If I were sure,” said he, “that they really had become Muslims, I would let them assimilate through marriage and other means; on the other hand, had I evidence that they had remained infidels I would have them massacred, reduce their children to slavery and confiscate their belongings for the benefit of the believers.”69

  Meanwhile, with Saladin’s defeat of the Crusaders at Hattin and Jerusalem in 1187, just a few years before these reversals in Spain, the Christian losses in the Holy Land and in Spain made it appear as if Christendom was beset by an implacable foe with a global reach. And, indeed it was. In February 1210, Pope Innocent III wrote to Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo, urging the Christians of Spain not to make the same mistakes that had led to so many defeats at the hands of the Muslims in the Holy Land—chiefly disunity and impiety.70 His warning appeared all the more urgent the following year, when the Almohads under the leadership of their caliph, Muhammad al-Nasir, invaded Spain with a huge army of jihadis and began advancing again. Innocent, aware of the urgency of the situation, sent new letters calling for unity and renewed religious fervor to other Christian leaders, both spiritual and temporal, culminating in letters in 1212 to the bishops of France, informing them of the gravity of the jihad threat and calling for spiritual and material aid for Alfonso and the other Christian rulers who were preparing to confront the Almohads.71

  Innocent also wrote to Alfonso, urging him to humble himself before the Lord, and not to try to engage the Almohads if he was not confident of victory, but to seek a truce if necessary.72 Then he called for a general fast among the people of Rome and a procession in the city to pray for the peace of the Church and the favor of God in the battle with the Muslims in Spain.73

  On July 16, 1212, the Christians won a massive victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in the southern Spanish province of Jaén. The caliph Muhammad, in imminent danger of being captured, fled in a panic, leaving behind his standard, which the Christians recovered and sent to the house of a religious order near Burgos, where it remains to this day. King Alfonso VIII wrote happily to Pope Innocent III:

  In order to show how immense were the numbers of the enemy, when our army rested after the battle for two days in the enemy camp, for all the fires which were needed to cook food and make bread and other things, no other wood was needed than that of the enemy arrows and spears which were lying about, and even then we burned scarcely half of them.74

  Innocent received the news as an answer to his prayers. The power of the jihad in Spain was definitively broken, not to be revived until centuries later. From 1212 on, the Christians in Spain made steady gains. Not only the jihad that the Almohads had called in 1195, but the jihad that began when Tariq ibn Ziyad burned his boats and declared to his men that they were going to conquer or die, was now a spent force, although it would still be nearly three hundred years before Islamic rule in Spain ended completely.

  In 1236, the Christians captured Córdoba; in 1243, they took Valencia; and in 1248, Seville. By 1249, the emirate of Granada was all that was
left of Islamic al-Andalus. In 1280, however, the Muslims of Granada defeated an invading Christian force, and the Reconquista was stymied for a time. By that point, however, the Muslims of Spain were directing their energies solely to holding on to the territories they had, not to winning more.

  Elsewhere, however, the jihad met with greater success.

  III. THE JIHAD RESUMES IN INDIA

  If Innocent III had been aware of the larger global picture and had a comprehensive understanding of how not just Christians but all non-Muslim states and individuals are threatened by the jihad imperative, he might have been just as alarmed by the news out of India as he was by the tidings from the Holy Land and Spain. For just as Saladin was reviving the fortunes of the jihad in the Holy Land, another Muslim commander, Mu’izz ad-Din Muhammad Ghori, was reviving the jihad in India.

  In 1191 and 1192, Muhammad Ghori twice defeated a force of Rajputs led by the Hindu commander Prithviraj Chauhan in northern India. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Hasan Nizami revealed his contempt for the Hindus as he noted that a primary objective of the jihad remained the destruction of Hindu “idolatry”:

  The victorious army on the right and on the left departed towards Ajmer.… When the crow-faced Hindus began to sound their white shells on the backs of the elephants, you would have said that a river of pitch was flowing impetuously down the face of a mountain of blue.… The army of Islam was completely victorious, and a hundred thousand groveling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell.… He destroyed [at Ajmer] the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established.”75

  At Aligarh, the Muslims put down a Hindu uprising and, said Hasan Nizami, raised “three bastions as high as heaven with their heads, and their carcasses became food for beasts of prey.” As was so often the case in jihad warfare, brutality mixed with piety: “The tract was freed from idols and idol-worship and the foundations of infidelism were destroyed.”76

  The following year, Muhammad Ghori defeated the Indian king Jayachandra of Kanauj and plundered the Hindu treasures at Asni and Varanasi. The contemporary Muslim historian Ibn Asir recounted: “The slaughter of Hindus [at Varanasi] was immense; none were spared except women and children, and the carnage of men went on until the earth was weary.”77 The women and children were, of course, enslaved. The warriors of jihad then set out to seal the triumph of Islam: according to Hasan Nizami, “In Benares, which is the centre of the country of Hind, they destroyed one thousand temples and raised mosques on their foundations.”78 After a victory by the jihad commander Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji in another place, according to a thirteenth-century Muslim historian, “great plunder fell into the hands of the victors. Most of the inhabitants were Brahmins with shaven heads. They were put to death. Large numbers of books were found…but no one could explain their contents as all the men had been killed.”79

  At Delhi, the Muslims destroyed twenty-seven Hindu temples and built a grand mosque. They were under the command of Qutbuddin Aibak, a slave soldier who succeeded Muhammad Ghori and founded the Mamluk sultanate. Nizami recounts that the Muslims decorated the new mosque “with the stones and gold obtained from the temples which had been demolished by elephants.”80 In 1196, Aibak and his jihadis attacked Anahilwar Patan, the capital of Gujarat. According to Nizami, “Fifty thousand infidels were dispatched to hell by the sword” and “more than twenty thousand slaves, and cattle beyond all calculation fell into the hands of the victors.”81 After Aibak’s conquest of Kalinjar in 1202, said Nizami, “the temples were converted into mosques.… Fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”82

  Nizami summarized Muhammad Ghori’s reign as a triumph for Islam: “He purged by his sword the land of Hind from the filth of infidelity and vice and freed the whole of that country from the thorn of God-plurality and the impurity of idol-worship, and by his royal vigour and intrepidity left not one temple standing.”83

  The jihad continued relentlessly. In 1234, Aibak’s successor, Shamsuddin Iltutmish, invaded Malwa in west-central India and destroyed an ancient Hindu temple at Vidisha. The sixteenth-century Muslim historian Abdul Qadir Badauni recounted that Shamsuddin imitated Mahmoud of Ghazni in using the destruction of the Hindu idols to portray the victory of Allah and Islam: “Having destroyed the idol temple of Ujjain which had been built six hundred years previously, and was called Mahakal, he leveled it to its foundations, and threw down the image of Rai Vikramajit from whom the Hindus reckon their era, and brought certain images of cast molten brass and placed them on the ground in front of the doors of mosques of old Delhi and ordered the people to trample them under foot.”84

  The Hindus resisted wherever they could, but the Muslim response to such effrontery was ruthless. In 1254, the Mamluk sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban left Delhi and crossed the Ganges with a jihad force. Badauni stated that “in two days after leaving Delhi, he arrived in the midst of the territory of Katihar and put to death every male, even those of eight years of age, and bound the women.”85

  In the same year that his fellow jihadis were destroying the last of the Crusader states, 1291, the Muslim warrior Jalaluddin Khalji, who established the Khalji sultanate in Delhi, led a jihad foray to Ranthambhor, destroying Hindu temples along the way. Emulating other jihad leaders in India, he ordered that the broken pieces of the Hindu idols be sent to Delhi, where they were to be placed, in what was by now a time-honored Islamic practice, at the entrance of the Jama mosque, so that the faithful would trample them on their way into the mosque to pray, and again on the way out.86

  The following year, Jalaluddin’s nephew Alauddin, who was to succeed him, led a jihad force to Vidisha. Badauni said that Alauddin “brought much booty to the Sultan and the idol which was the object of worship of the Hindus, he caused to be cast in front of the Badaun gate to be trampled upon by the people.” Jihad and humiliating the Hindus were profitable for Alauddin personally: “The services of Alauddin were highly appreciated, the jagir of Oudh also was added to his other estates.”87

  The Islamic state in India

  Despite these powerful appeals to embrace Islam, however, many Hindus still resisted, and the jihad went on. The Hindus had good reason to resist, as the society that the Muslim overlords established was hardly a pleasant one for them. Muhammad ibn Qasim’s granting of People of the Book status to the Hindus alleviated the misery of the conquered people to some degree, but only marginally. Around the turn of the fourteenth century, the sultan Alauddin Khalji asked the Islamic scholar Qazi Mughisuddin about the legal status of the Hindus within his domains and the permissibility of conferring dhimmi status upon them. The qazi answered:

  These are called payers of tribute, and when the revenue officer demands silver from them, they should without question, and with all humility and respect, tender gold. If the officer throws dirt in their mouths, they must without reluctance open their mouths wide to receive it.… The due subordination of the Dhimmi is exhibited in this humble payment, and by this throwing of dirt in their mouths. The glorification of Islam is a duty, and contempt for religion is vain. God holds them in contempt, for he says, “Keep them in subjection.” To keep the Hindus in abasement is especially a religious duty, because they are the most inveterate enemies of the Prophet, and because the Prophet has commanded us to slay them, plunder them, and make them captive, saying, “Convert them to Islam or kill them, and make them slaves, and spoil their wealth and property.” No doctor but the great doctor [Hanifah], to whose school we belong, has assented to the imposition of jizya on Hindus; doctors of other schools allow no other alternative but “Death or Islam.”88

  The Hanifah was one of the four principal Sunni schools of Islamic law. The qazi’s ruling was in accord with a manual of Islamic law that directed that “the main object in levying the tax is the subjection of i
nfidels to humiliation…and…during the process of payment, the Zimmi is seized by the collar and vigorously shaken and pulled about in order to show him his degradation.”89

  The fourteenth-century Muslim political theorist Ziauddin Barani, a high official in the Delhi sultanate, directed that even Hindus who converted to Islam were not to be accepted as equals, but to be treated with continued contempt: “Teachers are to be sternly ordered not to thrust precious stones [scriptures] down the throats of dogs [converts]. To shopkeepers and the low born they are to teach nothing more than the rules about prayer, fasting, religious charity and the Hajj pilgrimage along with some chapters of the Quran…they are to be instructed in nothing more.… The low born are capable of only vices.”90 The power of the Muslim state was the military, which was made up of Muslims. Even Muslims from other lands, including those who were illiterate or otherwise incompetent, received preferential treatment over Hindus for government positions, and here, as in Muslim Spain, the placement of a dhimmi in a position of authority and responsibility was viewed inconsistent with the state of humiliation in which he was supposed to be living.91

  The fourteenth-century Sufi scholar and poet Amir Khusrau looked around at the society thus created and liked what he saw. “Happy Hindustan,” he exclaimed, “the splendor of Religion, where the Law finds perfect honour and security. The whole country, by means of the sword of our holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire.… Islam is triumphant, idolatry is subdued. Had not the Law granted exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax, the very name of Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished.”92 That the name remained he regarded as an example of Islamic tolerance; the Hindus under the rule of the Muslims had a different view.