The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (7 page)

The jurists insist that the spoils of war must be an incidental benefit, not a prime purpose. Some go so far as to say that if they do become the prime purpose, this invalidates the jihad and annuls its benefits, if not in this world then in the next. The jihad, to have any validity, must be waged “in the path of God” and not for the sake of material gain. There are, however, frequent complaints of the misuse of the honorable name of jihad for dishonorable purposes. African jurists in particular lament the use of the term jihad by slave raiders to justify their depredations and establish legal ownership of their victims. The Holy Law prescribes good treatment for noncombatants but accords the victors extensive rights over the property and also over the persons and families of the vanquished. In accordance with the universal custom of antiquity, enemies captured in warfare were enslaved, along with their families, and could be either sold or kept by their captors for their own use. Islam brought a modification of this rule by limiting this right of enslavement to those captured in a jihad but not in any other form of warfare.

The rules for war against apostates are somewhat different and rather stricter than those for war against unbelievers. The apostate or renegade, in Muslim eyes, is far worse than the unbeliever. The unbeliever has not seen the light, and there is always hope that he may eventually see it. In the meantime, provided he meets the necessary conditions, he may be accorded the tolerance of the Muslim state and allowed to continue in the practice of his own religion, even the enforcement of his own religious laws. The renegade is one who has known the true faith, however briefly, and abandoned it. For this offense there is no human forgiveness, and according to the overwhelming majority of the jurists, the renegade must be put to death—that is, if male. For females a lesser penalty of flogging and imprisonment may suffice. God in His mercy may forgive him in the other world, if He so chooses. No human has authority to do so. This distinction is of some importance at the present day, when militant leaders have proclaimed a double jihad—against foreign infidels and against domestic apostates. Most if not all of the Muslim rulers whom we in the West are pleased to regard as our friends and allies are regarded as traitors and, much worse than that, as apostates by many if not most of their own people.

From early times, a legal distinction was made between those territories acquired by force (Arabic
‘anwatan,
the equivalent of the Roman jurists’
vi et armis
) and those acquired
sulhan,
that is by some form of truce or peaceful surrender. The rules regarding booty and, more generally, the treatment of the population of the newly acquired territory differed in some important respects. According to tradition, the difference was symbolized in the mosque every Friday. In territories taken
‘anwatan,
the preacher carried a sword; in those taken
sulhan,
a wooden staff. The imagery of the sword remains important. To this day, the Saudi flag has two emblems set in a field of green. The one is the Arabic text of the Muslim creed: “There is no God but God, Muhammad is the prophet of God.” The other is an unmistakable representation of a sword.

In certain periods, jurists recognized an intermediate status, the House of Truce (
D
r al-Sulh
) or House of Covenant (
D
r al-‘Ahd
) between the Houses of War and Islam. These consisted of non-Muslim, usually Christian, countries whose rulers entered into some sort of agreement with the rulers of Islam whereby they paid a form of tax or tribute, seen as the equivalent of the
jizya,
or poll tax, and retained a large measure of autonomy in their internal affairs. An early example was the agreement made by the Umayyad caliphs in the seventh century with the Christian princes of Armenia. The classical example of the
D
r al-Sulh
or House of Truce was the pact agreed in 652
C.E.
with the Christian rulers of Nubia, whereby they did not pay poll tax but provided an annual tribute, consisting of a specified number of slaves. By choosing to regard gifts as tribute, Muslim rulers and their legal advisers could adjust the law to cover a wide variety of political, military, and commercial relationships with non-Muslim powers. This approach has not entirely disappeared.

From an early date, Muslims knew that there were certain differences among the peoples of the House of War. Most of them were simply polytheists and idolaters, who represented no serious threat to Islam and were likely prospects for conversion. These were to be found primarily in Asia and in Africa. The major exception was the Christians, whom Muslims recognized as having a religion of the same kind as their own, and therefore as their primary rivals in the struggle for world domination—or, as they would have put it, world enlightenment. Christendom and Islam are two religiously defined civilizations that were brought into conflict not by their differences but by their resemblances.

The oldest surviving Muslim religious building outside Arabia, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, was completed in 691 or 692
C.E.
The erection of this monument, on the site of the ancient Jewish temple, and in the style and the vicinity of Christian monuments such as the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Ascension, sent a clear message to the Jews and, more important, the Christians. Their revelations, though once authentic, had been corrupted by their unworthy custodians and were therefore superseded by the final and perfect revelation embodied in Islam. Just as the Jews had been overcome and superseded by the Christians, so the Christian world order was now to be replaced by the Muslim faith and the Islamic caliphate. To emphasize the point, the Qur’anic inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock denounce what Muslims regard as the principal Christian errors: “Praise be to God, who begets no son, and has no partner” and “He is God, one, eternal. He does not beget, He is not begotten, and He has no peer” (Qur’an CXII). This was clearly a challenge to Christendom in its birthplace. A millennium later the stationing of American troops in Arabia was seen by many Muslims and notably Usama bin Ladin as a similar challenge, this time from Christendom to Islam.

To emphasize this early challenge to Christendom, the caliph, for the first time, struck gold coins, hitherto an imperial Roman prerogative. It is significant that the name of the first Islamic gold coin, the
d
n
r,
is borrowed from the Roman
denarius.
Some of these coins bore the caliph’s name, his title Commander of the Faithful, and the same polemical verses. The message was clear. In the Muslim perception, the Jews and later the Christians had gone astray and had followed false doctrines. Both religions were therefore superseded, and replaced by Islam, the final and perfect revelation in God’s sequence. The Qur’anic verses quoted in the Dome and on the gold coins condemn what, for Muslims, is the worst of these corruptions of the true faith. There is of course an additional message, from the caliph to the emperor: “Your faith is corrupted, your time has passed. I am now the ruler of God’s empire on earth.”

The message was well understood, and the striking of the gold coins seen by the emperor as a
casus belli.
For more than a thousand years the struggle was waged by the caliphs of Islam from their successive capitals in Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul against the Christian emperors in Constantinople, Vienna, and later, under other titles, in more distant countries farther west. Each of these, in his time, was the principal target of the jihad.

In practice, of course, the application of the doctrine of jihad was not always rigorous or violent. The canonically obligatory state of war could be interrupted by what were legally defined as truces, but these differed little from the so-called peace treaties the warring European powers signed with one another. Such truces were made by the Prophet with his pagan enemies, and they became the basis of what one might call Islamic international law. According to shari‘a, tolerance of religions based on previous divine revelations was not a merit but a duty (Qur’an II, 256: “No compulsion in religion”). In the lands under Muslim rule, Islamic law required that Jews and Christians be allowed to practice their religions and run their own affairs, subject to certain disabilities, the most important being a poll tax imposed on every adult male. This tax, called the
jizya,
is specified in the Qur’an: IX, 29: “Fight against those who do not believe in God or in the last day, who do not forbid what God and His Apostle have declared forbidden, who do not practice the religion of truth, though they be the People of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians] until they pay the jizya, directly and humbly.” The last few words have been variously interpreted, both in literature and in practice.

Other disabilities included the wearing of distinguishing garments or badges, and a ban on bearing arms, riding horses, owning Muslim slaves, or overtopping Muslim buildings. Except for the last two and the jizya, they were not always rigorously enforced. In compensation, the tolerated non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state enjoyed a very large measure of autonomy in the conduct of their internal communal affairs, including education, taxation, and the enforcement of their own laws of personal status, notably marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The pact or contract between the Muslim state and a non-Muslim subject community was called
dhimma,
and the members of such a tolerated community were called
dhimmis.
In modern parlance, Jews and Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by law and revelation and recognized by public opinion, was far better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West.