The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  O soldiers of the Islamic State, do not be awestruck by the great numbers of your enemy, for Allah is with you. I do not fear for you the numbers of your opponents, nor do I fear your neediness and poverty, for Allah (the Exalted) has promised your Prophet (peace be upon him) that you will not be wiped out by famine, and your enemy will not himself conquer you and violate your land. Allah placed your provision under the shades of your spears.141

  He called upon them also to “persevere in reciting the Quran with comprehension of its meanings and practice of its teachings. This is my advice to you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”142

  In June 2014, a video circulated of a masked Islamic State commander telling a cheering crowd: “By Allah, we embarked on our Jihad only to support the religion of Allah.… Allah willing, we will establish a state ruled by the Quran and the Sunna.… All of you honorable Muslims are the soldiers of the Muslim State.” He promised that the Islamic State would establish “the Sharia of Allah, the Quran, and the Sunna” as the crowed repeatedly responded with cries of “Allahu akbar.”143

  The Islamic State is Not Islamic

  U.S. and Western European leaders immediately denied that the Islamic State had anything to do with Islam. “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion,” said Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf in August 2014. “The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”144 CIA director John Brennan said in March 2015: “They are terrorists, they’re criminals. Most—many—of them are psychopathic thugs, murderers who use a religious concept and masquerade and mask themselves in that religious construct. Let’s make it very clear that the people who carry out acts of terrorism—whether it be al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—are doing it because they believe it is consistent with what their view of Islam is. It is totally inconsistent with what the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world [believe].”145 In September 2014, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced: “This is a terrorist group and not a state. I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists.”146

  The Islamic State professed contempt and amusement over all this confusion and denial. In his September 21, 2014, address calling for jihad strikes in the U.S. and Europe, Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad Adnani ridiculed John Kerry (“that uncircumcised old geezer”) and Barack Obama for declaring that the Islamic State was not Islamic, as if they were Islamic authorities.147

  And indeed, everything the Islamic State did was clearly based on Islamic texts and teachings. Its public beheadings applied the Qur’an’s directive: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks.” (47:4)

  Similar calculations hold true regarding the Islamic State’s practice of kidnapping Yazidi and Christian women and pressing them into sex slavery. The Qur’an says straightforwardly that in addition to wives (“two or three or four”), Muslim men may enjoy the “captives of the right hand” (4:3, 4:24). These are specified as being women who have been seized as the spoils of war (33:50) and are to be used specifically for sexual purposes, as men are to “guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess.” (23:5–6).

  If these women are already married, no problem. Islamic law directs that “when a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.”148

  In May 2011, a female Kuwaiti activist and politician, Salwa al-Mutairi, noted that Harun al-Rashid, the renowned Abbasid caliph from 786 to 809, “had 2,000 sex slaves.”149

  On December 15, 2014, the Islamic State released a document entitled “Clarification [regarding] the Hudud”—that is, punishments Allah specifies in the Qur’an. This was essentially the Islamic State’s penal code, and every aspect of it was drawn from Islamic teaching.150 Blasphemy against Islam was punishable by death, also as per the Qur’an: “If they violate their oaths after pledging to keep their covenants, and attack your religion, you may fight the leaders of paganism—you are no longer bound by your covenant with them—that they may refrain.” (Qur’an 9:12) Adulterers were to be stoned to death; fornicators would be give one hundred lashes and exile. Stoning was in the hadith—a hadith in which the caliph Umar said it had once been in the Qur’an:

  Umar said, “I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, ‘We do not find the Verses of the Rajam [stoning to death] in the Holy Book,’ and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession.” Sufyan added, “I have memorized this narration in this way.” Umar added, “Surely Allah’s Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him.”151

  Sodomy (homosexuality) was also to be punished by death, as per Muhammad’s reported words: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.”152

  The Islamic State’s rapid success was partly attributable to its fidelity to Islam and partly also to its financial backing, which came, predictably enough, in great part from Saudi Arabia. In August 2014, Hillary Clinton wrote to John Podesta, an adviser to President Barack Obama: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Isis] and other radical Sunni groups in the region. This effort will be enhanced by the stepped-up commitment in the [Kurdish Regional Government]. The Qataris and Saudis will be put in a position of balancing policy between their ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world and the consequences of serious US pressure.”153

  But nothing was done.

  At its height, the Islamic State controlled a territory larger than Great Britain and attracted thirty thousand foreign fighters from a hundred countries to travel to Iraq and Syria to join the caliphate. It gained the allegiance of other jihad groups in Libya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Muslims took its apparent success as a sign of Allah’s favor: the caliphate had indeed returned.

  It didn’t last long, however. When Donald Trump replaced Barack Obama as president of the United States, Iraqi forces and others began rolling up Islamic State strongholds, such that within a year of the beginning of the Trump presidency, the Islamic State had lost ninety-eight percent of its territory. The jihad threat posed by the Islamic State did not lessen, however, as those foreign fighters who survived returned to their home countries, often welcomed back by Western leaders who were convinced that kind treatment would compel them to turn away from jihad.

  The Jihad Continues

  In any case, the Islamic State was gone from Iraq and Syria, but the dream of the caliphate and the obligation to jihad remained, and other Muslims were quite willing, even eager, to take up arms in service of both.

  The early twenty-first century saw a sharp rise in jihad massacres perpetrated all over the West by individuals or small groups of Muslims: in London, Manchester, Paris, Toulouse, Nice, Amsterdam, Madrid, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, Malmö, Stockholm, Turku (in Finland), Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Beslan, among other places. Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was massacred on an Amsterdam street in 2004 for offending Islam; as mentioned previously, the cartoonists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were murdered in Paris in January 2015 for the same offense. In July 2016, Islamic jihadists murdered a French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, at the altar of his church for the crime of being Christian.

  After each one of these atrocities, the local and national authorities called for prayer vigils and vowed their resolve against the “terrorists” of unspecified ideology, but they did nothing to address the immigration and
appeasement policies that had led to these attacks in the first place.

  As crime rates skyrocketed and jihad terror attacks became an increasingly common feature of the landscape in Europe, authorities all over the West seemed more concerned with making sure their people did not think negatively about Islam than defending them against the jihad onslaught.

  The Jihad Against Myanmar

  One notable example of this came in 2017 when the international media focused in horror upon the South Asian country of Myanmar (formerly Burma), which was, according to press reports, destroying the homes, exiling, and often massacring the nation’s Muslim community, known as the Rohingyas.

  According to news reports, this was entirely the fault of Buddhist leaders in Myanmar who were stirring up hatred against the Muslims. This was the media’s consistent line. In 2013, TIME magazine’s cover featured a Buddhist monk glowering over the caption: “The Face of Buddhist Terror: How Militant Monks Are Fueling Anti-Muslim Violence in Asia.”154 When the violence intensified in 2017, the UK’s Guardian newspaper claimed that the Buddhists of Myanmar had been stirred up against the Rohingyas by a fanatical monk named Ashin Parathu who was, it charged, “stoking religious hatred across Burma. His paranoia and fear, muddled with racist stereotypes and unfounded rumors, have helped to incite violence and spread disinformation.”155

  The government of Myanmar denied committing any atrocities against the Rohingyas, asserting that many widely reported incidents had been fabricated, but the media generally brushed aside these denials.156 Few news outlets reported that the conflict had intensified in the summer and fall of 2017 because of an August 2017 jihad attack on Myanmar police and border posts.157 And hardly any news reports informed the public about the roots of the conflict: the Rohingya Muslims had actually been waging jihad against the Buddhists of Myanmar for nearly two centuries.

  As is so often the case, the British were behind this. After they annexed Arakan, the area of western Burma now known as Rakhine state, in 1826, they began encouraging Muslims to move to the area to serve as a source of cheap farm labor.158 The Muslim population grew rapidly, as did tensions with the Buddhists. In 1942, the British armed the Rohingyas to fight the Japanese, but the Rohingyas instead turned their weapons on the Buddhists, destroying whole villages, as well as Buddhist monasteries.159 When the British withdrew that same year in the face of the Japanese advance, the Rohingyas set upon the Buddhists of Arakan in force, killing at least 20,000.160 In 1946, as the partition of India was beginning, Rohingya leaders asked Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah to make Rakhine state part of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).161 Jinnah refused, whereupon Rohingya jihadis began a series of attacks against the Burmese government with the aim of joining East Pakistan or forming an independent Islamic state of their own.162

  Those attacks have continued up to the present. But for the media, the crisis in Myanmar was simply a matter of “anti-Muslim bigotry,” as was resistance to the Muslim migrant influx in Europe.

  The End?

  The failure of today’s leadership and the international media to inform the public about what was really going on was an abdication of responsibility unparalleled in history, and one that rebuked the leaders throughout history who died to defend their people from the advancing jihad. On May 28, 1453, the day before the warriors of jihad finally broke through the defenses of Constantinople and realized their seven-hundred-year-old dream of conquering the great city, the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Paleologus, said to his officers:

  You know well that the hour has come: the enemy of our faith wishes to oppress us even more closely by sea and land with all his engines and skill to attack us with the entire strength of this siege force, as a snake about to spew its venom; he is in a hurry to devour us, like a savage lion. For this reason I am imploring you to fight like men with brave souls, as you have done from the beginning up to this day, against the enemy of our faith. I hand over to you my glorious, famous, respected, noble city, the shining Queen of cities, our homeland. You know well, my brothers, that we have four obligations in common, which force us to prefer death over survival: first our faith and piety; second our homeland; third, the emperor anointed by the Lord and fourth; our relatives and friends.

  Well, my brothers, if we must fight for one of these obligations, we will be even more liable under the command strength of all four; as you can clearly understand. If God grants victory to the impious because of my own sins, we will endanger our lives for our holy faith, which Christ gave us with his own blood. This is most important of all. Even if one gains the entire world but loses his soul in the process, what will it benefit! Second, we will be deprived of such famous homeland and of our liberty. Third, our empire, renowned in the past but presently humbled, low and exhausted, will be ruled by a tyrant and an impious man. Fourth, we will be separated from our dearest children, wives and relatives.…

  Now he wants to enslave her and throw the yoke upon the Mistress of Cities, our holy churches, where the Holy Trinity was worshipped, where the Holy Ghost was glorified in hymns, where angels were heard praising in chant the deity of and the incarnation of God’s word, he wants to turn into shrines of his blasphemy, shrines of the mad and false Prophet, Mohammed, as well as into stables for his horses and camels.

  Consider then, my brother and comrades in arms, how the commemoration of our death, our memory, fame and freedom can be rendered eternal.163

  In the twenty-first century, the leaders of Europe, as well as many in North America, have brought almost certain doom on their countries no less unmistakable than that which befell Constantinople on May 29, 1453. Instead of taking responsibility for what they have done, they have doggedly stayed their course. They would have denounced the doomed Emperor Constantine XI, like his tragic predecessor Manuel II, as “Islamophobic,” and his exhortation to defend Constantinople to the death as “militaristic” and “xenophobic.”

  Muhammad is supposed to have said it so long ago: “I have been made victorious through terror.”164 In the early twenty-first century, he is being proven correct. As the fourteen-hundred-year Islamic jihad against the free world continues to advance, the best allies the warriors of jihad have are the very people they have in their sights.

  ENDNOTES

  Introduction

  1.Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, rev. ed., translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, bk. 19, no. 4294 (Kitab Bhavan, 2000).

  2.Ahmed ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller (‘Umdat al-Salik): A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Amana Publications, 1999), section o9.0.

  3.Reliance of the Traveller, o9.8.

  4.Al-Hidayah, vol. Ii. P. 140, in Thomas P. Hughes,” Jihad,” in A Dictionary of Islam, (W.H. Allen, 1895), pp. 243-248.

  5.Al-Hidayah, vol. Ii. P. 140, in Thomas P. Hughes,” Jihad,” in A Dictionary of Islam, (W.H. Allen, 1895), pp. 243-248.

  6. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosenthal; edited and abridged by N. J. Dawood, (Princeton University Press, 1967), 183.

  7. Ibn Taymiyya, “Jihad,” in Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, (Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 49.

  Chapter One

  1. Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2977 (Darussalam, 1997).

  2. Ibid., bk. 64, no. 4428.

  3. Ibid., bk. 56, no. 2977.

  4. For much more on this, see my book Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins (ISI Books, 2010).

  5. Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by Alfred Guillaume (Oxford University Press, 1955), 131.

  6. Ibid., 287–88.

  7. Ibid., 288.

  8. Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, translated by S. Moinul Haq and H.
K. Ghazanfar, vol. 2 (Kitab Bhavan, n.d.), 9.

  9. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 294.

  10. Ibid., 297.

  11. Ibid., 298.

  12. For various estimates on the number of Muslim warriors, see Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, 20–21.

  13. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 300.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., 301.

  17. Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 58, no. 3185.

  18. Ibid., vol. 1, bk. 8, no. 520.

  19. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 308.

  20. Ibid., 304.

  21. Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 57, no. 3141.

  22. Ibid., vol. 4, bk. 58, no. 3185.

  23. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 306.

  24. Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, 40.

  25. “Banu” means “tribe.”

  26. Abu Ja’far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 7, The Foundation of the Community, translated by M. V. McDonald (State University of New York Press, 1987), 86.

  27. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 363.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., 367.

  30. Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4037.

  31. Ibid.,

  32. Ibid.; Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, 37.

  33. Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, 37.

  34. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 369; Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, 36.

  35. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 369.

  36. Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, bk. 64, no. 4065.

  37. Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, 382.

  38. Ibid., 386.

  39. Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 7, 158.