The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  The killing went on elsewhere in Ottoman domains as well. At Erzurum in 1895, the Ottomans massacred Christians indiscriminately and then buried three hundred of them in a mass grave. At Urfa in December 1895, the Armenians gathered in their cathedral and requested Ottoman government protection, which the officer in charge granted, surrounding the cathedral with troops. Then other Ottoman troops, along with local Muslim civilians, rampaged through the city, slaughtering Armenians and plundering their houses. A large group of young Armenians was taken to the local imam, who ordered them to be held down. An eyewitness said that the sheikh then recited some verses of the Qur’an and “cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep.”70

  The French ambassador reported that in September 1896 in Egin, the Ottomans perpetrated “a terrible massacre” of “upwards of 2,000 Armenians,” including “many women and children.”71 Here again, according to a British official on the scene, “an indirect order was sent from the Palace for the massacres in question to be carried out.”72 Another British official reported that at Malatya, “over 100 Armenians had gathered for safety” when Ottoman troops entered. The Armenians here received much the same treatment they had been given the previous year in Urfa: they “were circumcised, and afterwards killed as ‘kurban,’ i.e. thrown upon their backs and their throats cut, after the manner in which sheep are sacrificed.”73

  The German historian Johannes Lepsius visited the devastated areas at the time and chronicled the atrocities. He referred to the cover-up of these horrific events that had already begun:

  Are we then simply forbidden to speak of the Armenians as persecuted on account of their religious belief? If so, there have never been any religious persecutions in the world.… We have lists before us of 559 villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword; of 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed to the ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques; of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Gregorian [Armenian] priests who were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered on their refusal to accept Islam. We repeat, however, that those figures express only the extent of our information, and do not by a long way reach to the extent of the reality. Is this a religious persecution or is it not?74

  Lepsius also reported that the Muslims had destroyed 2,500 Christian villages and 645 churches and monasteries, and that the number of those who had been forced to convert to Islam was fifteen thousand. Three hundred twenty-eight churches were converted into mosques, and 508 more were plundered.75 One Ottoman soldier wrote home enthusiastically:

  My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs.… Mother, I am safe and sound. Father, 20 days ago we made war on the Armenian unbelievers. Through God’s grace no harm befell us.… There is a rumour afoot that our Batallion will be ordered to your part of the world—if so, we will kill all the Armenians there. Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded, one or two perish every day.76

  In its dotage, the Ottoman sultanate was more savage than ever.

  II. THE BARBARY WARS

  The Barbary (Berber) states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which were nominally Ottoman possessions but de facto independent, continued their jihad piracy and slave raids throughout the eighteenth century. They targeted American colonial vessels along with European ships, and when the United States of America declared its independence, they targeted its fleet as well. In 1784, pirates from neighboring Morocco captured the American ship Betsey and took its crew hostage, demanding that the new nation pay tribute to avoid future such incidents.77

  The Americans, newly independent and having neither the resources nor the desire to get involved in a war with the Barbary states, paid the tribute. But once it had been established that the Americans would give in to the jihadi demands, those demands grew. In 1795, a payment to Algiers of nearly a million dollars comprised sixteen percent of federal revenue for that year.78

  Even peace overtures came from a posture of bullying superiority: in June 1796, Pasha Hamouda, the bey of Tunis, offered to conclude a peace treaty with the United States, and stipulated that the Americans had six months to consider the offer, during which Tunisian pirates would not attack American ships. If they rejected the offer, the raids would resume, leaving the Americans no room to maneuver. Hamouda signed his treaty officer as “commander…of the frontier post of the Holy War,” suggesting at once that the piracy was in service of a larger goal—jihad, conquest, and Islamization of the non-Muslim world—and that if the Americans rejected the offer, they would face war not just with Tunis but with the entire global forces of jihad.79

  In the treaty that the United States concluded in 1797 with Tripoli, the payment of earlier tribute by the Americans was acknowledged, and the U.S. consul in Tripoli was directed to deliver to the ruler of Tripoli “twelve thousand Spanish dollars” as well as various supplies for the construction of ships.80 That treaty also contained, in the English text only, a statement designated as Article 11, which appears to be designed to reassure the bey of Tripoli that the United States was not hostile to Islam; for reasons never explained, however, this article does not appear in the treaty’s Arabic text.81

  As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.82

  The lack of hostility of any “Mehomitan nation” toward the United States, however, could not be assured. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, the eyalet (administrator) of Tripolitania’s ambassador to London. Jefferson recounted to Congress what Abdrahaman’s response was when he and Adams asked him “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury”:

  The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.83

  Thus it had been since the beginning of Islam, and thus it would remain. This particular eruption of the long hostility that Barbary piracy represented came to a head in 1801, when Yusuf Karamanli, the bashaw of Tripoli, increased his demands on an already cash-strapped republic, demanding two hundred and twenty thousand dollars up front and twenty-five thousand dollars each year from the United States.

  The new president, Thomas Jefferson, opted to go to war rather than continue paying these increasingly exorbitant tributes. Emerging victorious against the Barbary states in 1805 and again in a second war in 1815, the Americans freed themselves from paying tribute and put an end to this long episode of jihad on the high seas. The Americans would, of course, hear again much later from those who believed, as did Sidi Haji Abdrahman, that “all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found.”

  III. THE MUGHALS IN DECLINE

  The British Raj and Jihad in Abeyance

  The best days of the Mughal Empire, like those of the Ottoman Empire, were behind it by the beginning of the eighteenth century. But even as the power of their state diminished, the Mughals kept up the pressure on the Hindus as much as they could. In the 1720s, the nawab of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan, who was ostensibly under the authority of the Mughal emperor but operated independently, decided to attack the Hindu stronghold of Tipara.

  An eighteenth-century Muslim
historian, Azad al-Husaini, noted that “Tipara is a country extremely strong. The Raja is proud of his strength and the practice of conch-blowing and idol-worship prevailed there.”84 The Tipara soldiers fought valiantly to defend their fort at Udaipur but were defeated. As Murshid Quli’s men entered the fort, they found the Hindu soldiers lying dead “in heaps.”85 The Muslims cried out “Allahu akbar” and repeated the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”86 They immediately destroyed the temple and had an Islamic sermon read out at its ruins in the name of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah. Azad al-Husaini concluded his account of this by writing: “The world-illuminating sun of the faith of Muhammad swept away the dark night of infidelity, and the bright day of Islam dawned.”87

  The world-illuminating faith of Muhammad, however, was not able to save the Mughals from the Hindu Maratha Empire, which steadily gained ground against the Mughals until it ruled most of India by the middle of the eighteenth century. The Mughals, by that time, ruled over little more than the capital of Delhi. When the Marathas moved into Punjab in 1758, however, they attracted the notice of Ahmad Shah Durrani, a military commander who had just staked out his own imperial realm in Afghanistan.

  Durrani had invaded the Mughal Empire several times, but this time the issue was larger than the question of who would rule in a particular area: the Marathas, as Hindus, should not be ruling over Muslims. “The Marathas,” Ahmad Shah told an allied leader, “are the thorn of Hindostan.” Now “by one effort we get this thorn out of our sides for ever.”88 Both sides courted the allegiance of Shujau-d Daula, the ruler of Oudh in northern India, who, if he sided with the Marathas, could have impeded the passage of Ahmad Shah’s forces into the heart of India. Shujau-d Daula, like the Marathas, was Indian, and Ahmad Shah Durrani and his forces were Afghan. But Shujau-d Daula was a Muslim, not a Hindu, and sided with Ahmad Shah.

  Egging them on was the Indian Sufi Shah Wali Allah, a popular Islamic revivalist of the period who exhorted Muslims to take up the sword of jihad:

  It is the general authority to undertake the establishment of religion through the revival of religious sciences, the establishment of the pillars of Islam, the organization of jihad and its related functions of maintenance of armies, financing the soldiers, and allocation of their rightful portions from the spoils of war, administration of justice, enforcement of [the limits ordained by Allah, including the punishment for crimes (hudud)], elimination of injustice, and enjoining good and forbidding evil, to be exercised on behalf of the Prophet…89

  Shah Wali Allah had an extremely elastic interpretation of the Qur’an’s dictum that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), arguing that forcing infidels to accept Islam was an act of mercy toward them:

  It is no mercy to them to stop at intellectually establishing the truth of Religion to them. Rather, true mercy towards them is to compel them so that Faith finds a way to their minds despite themselves. It is like a bitter medicine administered to a sick man. Moreover, there can be no compulsion without eliminating those who are a source of great harm or aggression, or liquidating their force, and capturing their riches, so as to render them incapable of posing any challenge to Religion. Thus their followers and progeny are able to enter the faith with free and conscious submission.90

  Reading Islamic history, Shah Wali Allah saw the action of Allah, and he exhorted Muslims of his own day to enable the deity to act anew:

  Jihad made it possible for the early followers of Islam from the Muhajirun and the Ansar to be instrumental in the entry of the Quraysh and the people around them into the fold of Islam. Subsequently, God destined that Mesopotamia and Syria be conquered at their hands. Later on it was through the Muslims of these areas that God made the empires of the Persians and Romans to be subdued. And again, it was through the Muslims of these newly conquered realms that God actualized the conquests of India, Turkey and Sudan. In this way, the benefits of jihad multiply incessantly, and it becomes, in that respect, similar to creating an endowment, building inns and other kinds of recurring charities.…

  Jihad is an exercise replete with tremendous benefits for the Muslim community, and it is the instrument of jihad alone that can bring about their victory.… The supremacy of his Religion over all other religions cannot be realized without jihad and the necessary preparation for it, including the procurement of its instruments. Therefore, if the Prophet’s followers abandon jihad and pursue the tails of cows [that is, become farmers] they will soon be overcome by disgrace, and the people of other religions will overpower them.91

  Shah Wali Allah accordingly wrote to Ahmad Shah Durrani: “We beseech you in the name of the Prophet to fight a jihad against the infidels of this region. This would entitle you to great rewards before God the Most High and your name would be included in the list of those who fought for jihad for His sake. As far as worldly gains are concerned, incalculable booty would fall into the hands of the Islamic gazis [warriors] and the Muslims would be liberated from their bonds.”92 The Afghan jihadis were able to pass into India without difficulty, and as the Maratha commander Sadashivrao Bhau put it, “The cup is now full to the brim and cannot hold another drop.”93

  The Marathas had to drink that cup in 1761 at Panipat, just north of Delhi, the site of two earlier pivotal battles that established and secured Mughal rule. Ahmad Shah Durrani (with Shah Wali Allah present) defeated them decisively and proved to the world that the Mughal Empire was only a shadow of what it had once been; the Afghan warriors routed the Hindus and destroyed the Maratha army. The Marathas were forced to withdraw from a good part of the territories they controlled. Ahmad Shah Durrani wanted to press forward and conquer all of India, bringing it once again under Islamic rule, but was stopped by a mutiny among his soldiers, forcing him to return to Afghanistan.94

  In his absence, the Marathas were able to regroup and hold on to power in much of central India, with two Muslim kingdoms in southern India. At this point, however, came a challenge to both Hindu and Muslim Indian rulers, which neither group proved able to withstand: the British colonialists. In 1765, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II gave the East India Company the right to collect tax revenues in Bengal, which made the British the effective rulers of the area; from there they expanded their holdings until by 1820, most of India was under their control.

  The presence and hegemony of the British presented the Muslim clerics of India with a question that had not previously been answered, as there had never before been occasion to consider it: was land that had previously been ruled by Muslims, but was now under the rule of infidels but with a substantial population of Muslims living there (as opposed to Spain, from which the Muslims had been expelled), dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) or dar al-harb (the house of war)? If India was still the house of Islam, jihad could not legitimately be waged against the British, but if it had become part of the house of war by dint of the British rule, it could.

  A prominent Muslim cleric, Shah Abd al-Aziz, issued a fatwa in 1803 to answer this question. In doing so, he relied upon the idea that jihad is not necessarily always to be carried out by leaders of Muslim states or other polities, but when a Muslim land is attacked, jihad becomes the responsibility of every individual Muslim. In his fatwa, he lamented that in Delhi,

  …the Imam al-Muslimin [leader of the Muslims] wields no authority at all whereas the authority of the leaders of the Christians is enforced without any trouble. By the enforcement of the rules of unbelief is meant that unbelievers can act on their own authority in governing and dealing with the subjects, in collecting land-tax, tolls, tithes, customs and excises, in punishing highway robbers and thieves, in settling disputes and punishing crimes. It is true that certain Islamic rules like those regarding the congregational prayers of Friday and the festivals, the call for prayer and the slaughter of cows are not being interfered with. This, however, is because the essence of these things is of no value to them, for they demoli
sh mosques without any scruples and Moslems or dhimmis can only enter this city or its surroundings by asking aman [protection] from them.95

  This situation was intolerable for believers in a religion that mandated that unbelievers be subject to them. Resistance to British rule grew among Muslims until finally in 1821, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi began a movement known as The Way of Muhammad (Tariqa-i Muhammadi). Barelvi exhorted the Muslims to take up the jihad once again: “One should know,” he wrote, “that jihad is an advantageous and beneficial institution. Mankind derives benefits from its advantages in various ways, just like rain, the advantages of which are imparted upon both plants, animals and men.”96

  Barelvi promised that if Muslims waged jihad, they would receive “the blessings of heaven,” including “timely downpour of rain, abundant vegetation, growth of profits and trade, absence of calamities and pestilences, growth of wealth and presence of men of learning and perfection.”97