The Mind of Jihad (review)

As the beautiful hotel in Mumbai was set ablaze, his children asked him who those terrorists are and why they would do this. That moment Aijaz Zaka Syed had nothing to say. This well-known journalist of the Dubai Gulf Times admitted that this speechlessness happened to him often. He could not answer his friend, as he remarked that Muslims and Islam had a problem that they alone are able to solve. If they do not, the whole world would turn against them. Aijaz, a Muslim from Hyderabad, asks himself: How many innocents have still to die before the leaders of the Muslim regions will take decisive actions so that Islam does not sink into an extreme cult? It is senseless to hide or to delude oneself by saying that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. A majority of Muslims should actively defend their religion.

Readers find help in this timely book. It contains a proper diagnosis, without which there will not be a proper healing. According to Murawiec, jihad — fateful and shrouded in darkness — like a Sphinx transfixes us. The common analysis of jihadism in Washington, the author laments, suffers from being monocausal and ahistorical. The expressions “war on terror” and “terrorism” merely focus on the tool, but fail to capture the essence of terror as a continuation of politics and a system of power.

The author, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, deals in three chapters with the cult of death, elites, and the Mahdi. There follow chapters on tribalism, jihad, Islamic revolution, and jihad as terror. The author confronts the reader with two striking features: the way he links some seemingly unconnected phenomena and how, often in a profoundly challenging manner, he presents his new synthesis. Through the course of his study, he defines jihad not simply as “irregular“ warfare directed solely against the West, but rather as regular, systematic warfare directed also against democracies in the East — as the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai illustrate — aimed at killing as many infidels as possible and thus terrifying people through the media. Before picking up on some of these ideas, it may be useful to discuss briefly the doctrine of jihad.

Generally, the Arabic verb jahada means “to strive,” and in the original Islamic sense, “to strive for God.” This includes moral endeavors and the waging of a holy war (mostly against infidels). The Qur’an contains both, although as Muhammad grew from the rebel in Mecca to the founder of a state in Medina, jihad came to describe more the military than the spiritual activity. But jihad did not count as one of the five pillars of Islam. Some Muslim leaders, such as the Mahdi of Sudan, sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to change this. However, even in the military sense of the term, there was a distinction between the jihad of defense and jihad of attack.

Murawiec illuminates how the doctrine of jihad was employed in Islamic regions. Interestingly, he also shows how Europeans “adopted” jihad. In the years leading up to the First World War, Berlin and Istanbul, in a concerted fashion, altered the doctrine of jihad in an effort to kindle Islamic revolts in the colonial hinterland of British India and Arabia, French North Africa, and Russian Central Asia. As the Ottomans sided with the Germans in late 1914, the Sultan-Caliph’s fatwa pushed to oblige all Muslims to wage jihad on the side of favored infidels (the Central Powers) against others (the Allied Powers) and their Muslim allies (the latter had no right to fight back against the Ottomans). Accordingly, Istanbul, with authority over all Muslims, stoked the fire of many native Islamist revolts. Thus, one might add, Euro-Islam was born.

Murawiec also describes how “red” jihad was invented. After World War I, the Bolshevist leader Vladimir Lenin tried to incite all “colonized people” to world revolution. In pursuit of this aim, Lenin convened the Congress of the Suppressed People in Baku in 1920. Soon his agitators subversively...