Pakistani scholar Tariq Rahman’s latest book Interpretations of Jihad in South Asia: An Intellectual History (OUP) is a must-read. That is, if one wants to disenchant oneself of the myth of Islamic war accepted as truth in Pakistan. Muslims may say they have created a “modern state” but will insist on jihad – not the quibbling “peaceful effort” but actual bloody conflict that doesn’t fit the modern state in the 21st century.
19th century Indian Muslim scholars like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan – long taken off the pantheon of the Pakistan Movement – and Maulvi Chiragh Ali, reinterpreted the concept of Jihad and concluded that Muslims could fight a defensive war only when attacked and not a war to convert or collect jizya. Their thinking would be considered anathema today. But after a plethora of interpretive literature trying to equate the city-state of Madina to the nation-state of our times, Maulana Maududi emerged as the big milestone that guided the way Muslims had to go.
Maududi was followed by others who today rule the thinking of Muslims around the world. Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) of Egypt followed by Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982) thought that “an aggressive jihad became necessary to overthrow their own Muslim regimes, often much tied up with outside forces, and to install a fully Islamic system”. That has turned out to mean for countries like Pakistan that the state will lose internal sovereignty through non-state actors denying the exclusive right to declare jihad to the modern state. If the state succumbs to its non-state actors like Pakistan, it risks falling apart before tackling the supposed enemy. Author Rahman recognises that jihad actually aims to capture the modern state first to refashion it for jihad in defiance of international law.
Pakistan’s jihad was inspired by the founder of Al-Qaeda, Abdullah Azzam (d. 1989), who first founded the Islamic University of Islamabad and brought the concept of jihad into the heart of the Pakistani state. He was killed in Peshawar because of Al-Qaeda’s internal struggle for leadership but when the University was given to a clearly non-jihadi vice-chancellor it was subjected to violence by Al-Qaeda.
Abul Ala Maududi
Alongside, the state converted tamely through generals such as Hamid Gul and absorbed the jihad of the radical madrassa where “externally” funded leaders like those of Sipah-e-Sahaba thought that if the state refused to fight jihad then it was incumbent on all Muslim citizens to wage it against the enemies of Islam. When jihad was forcibly closed with external aggression, Osama bin Laden died hiding inside Pakistan while his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri may still be around even as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) threatens sanctions if Pakistan doesn’t come clean.
The book discuses the interesting phenomenon of Dar-al-Harb when the state you live in is not ruled according to Islam and “harb” here means war, in other words, to get rid of the state. This concept was the easy guide to violence to any cleric who had a following in India and never looked awkward in Pakistan the way it was presented in the school textbooks, as in the case of Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed. The embarrassed cleric who could not get the war started then had to coin another doctrine of hijrat (migration) recommending that if you can’t defeat the pagan state then simply get up and leave.
The history of hijrat from “pagan” British India doesn’t read well today but has been presented as “right action” in our school textbooks. In 2019, the gates of the external world are closing as fast as the Islamic state is unraveling. Mass hijrat from a number of Muslim states has shaken “pagan” Europe to its foundations. The coming hijrat from Afghanistan – mostly into Pakistan – will take place shortly after the Taliban take over; and it will be a flight from the Islamic state already rent asunder by non-state actors waging jihad.
Sayyid Qutb
General Shahid Aziz wrote a book titled Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak (How long this silence?) with a telltale subtitle Ek Sipahi ki Dastan-e-Ishq-o-Junoon (A Soldier’s Story of Passion and Madness) in 2013 where Pakistan’s surrender to the forces of jihad is seen as a “disease within”. The enemy called India may defeat jihad but the “state of jihad”, Pakistan, will not surrender. General Aziz, who is said to have gone for jihad either in Afghanistan or Syria and embraced martyrdom there, condemns democracy on page 214 as an “ill-smelling” order where politicians make money hand over fist while the common man starves.
According to him, the “greedy intellectuals” who relentlessly speak for democracy also come in for scathing criticism. Despite his stint in the analysis wing of the ISI there was scant reference to terrorism and Taliban who equally criticise democracy as being abhorrent to Islam. He abstained from taking a look at Al-Zawahiri’s negative treatise on Pakistan’s constitution, treated by many as the blueprint for Pakistan’s next constitution if the Taliban ever come to rule in Islamabad. But the jihad of the Taliban managed to kill 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar in 2014 and it had to flee thereafter to Afghanistan when Pakistan went after them under its National Action Plan (NAP) in 2015-16. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s disenchantment with jihad.
The intellectual shortcut that jihad offers is deeply seductive, obviating any examination of the functioning of the national economy and the global environment, ducking regional and global factor-analysis so that conspiracy theories could be inducted as a substitute for intellectual effort
But people like the martyred General Shahid Aziz still flourish. He was what one might call a typical success story. Commissioned in 1971, he saw action in Kashmir and was smart enough to rise to the level where he was trained at the National Defense University (NDU) before being appointed Director Military Operations. As Major General, he was placed at the head of the Analysis Wing of the ISI from where he studied the Kargil Operation.
He, however, shocked a deflated Musharraf by suggesting during a top-level meeting that certain defeat could be avoided by expanding the war into “other theatres”. The intellectual shortcut that jihad offers is deeply seductive, obviating any examination of the functioning of the national economy and the global environment, ducking regional and global factor-analysis so that conspiracy theories could be inducted as a substitute for intellectual effort.
Maududi was followed by others who today rule the thinking of Muslims around the world. Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) of Egypt followed by Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982) thought that “an aggressive jihad became necessary to overthrow their own Muslim regimes, often much tied up with outside forces, and to install a fully Islamic system”. That has turned out to mean for countries like Pakistan that the state will lose internal sovereignty through non-state actors denying the exclusive right to declare jihad to the modern state. If the state succumbs to its non-state actors like Pakistan, it risks falling apart before tackling the supposed enemy. Author Rahman recognises that jihad actually aims to capture the modern state first to refashion it for jihad in defiance of international law.
