Customer Reviews

Understanding Jihad

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It is difficult nowadays to get an objective, nuanced opinion on Islam, neither flattering nor biased against it. If I were to recommend a way to try and achieve that, I would suggest reading several good books on the matter, including this among them, for in my opinion it is quite complete and fairly assessed.

This work aims to answer the following question: Which is the meaning of jihad? Holy war or spiritual striving to improve oneself?

Pursuant to the author, during the first several centuries of Islam the interpretation of jihad was unabashedly aggressive and expansive, and the conquest achieved by Islam in the VII and VIII centuries C.A. have been seen by Muslims as one of the incontrovertible proofs of Islam, so that nowadays they are unwilling to confront the fact that such conquest were basically as unjustified as European colonial conquests. The so-called "greater jihad" (i.e., the one with an ascetic and pacific meaning) seems a patently apologetic device not well attested in the hadith literature, which was adduced in order to overcome a resistance to the acceptance and legitimacy of jihad.

Cook also points out a reasonable outsider must conclude that radical Islam is indeed a legitimate expression of Islam, yet the fact that the majority of contemporary Muslims do not actively participate in militant jihad demonstrates a decisive rejection of which the radical Muslims are keenly aware. The reality is that jihad during the past two centuries has been a dismal failure, with the possible exception of the expulsion of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Besides, it also represents a danger to Muslims, for it is all too easy to turn it against them.

All that (and much more that I do not mention in this summary) is developed in 235 pages (footnotes included), the book being divided in the following chapters: 1. Qur'an and Conquest; 2. The "Greater Jihad" and the "Lesser Jihad"; 3 The Crystallization of Jihad Theory: Crusade and Counter-crusade, 4 Jihad during the Nineteenth Century: Renewal and Resistance; 5. Radical Islam and Contemporary Jihad Theory; 6. Globalist Radical Islam and Martyrdom Operations; Afterword; Appendix: Some Translated Documents (e.g. A Communiqu' from Qa'Idat Al-Jihad concerning the Testaments of the Heroes and the Legality of the Washington and New York Operations, April 24, 2002).

Nevertheless, although the content is very interesting, the book often happens to be a tough reading; therefore I have rated the book as a 4 start book (content: 5 starts; pleasure of reading: 3 to 1).

Other books that I would recommend to read would be the following:

ASSESSMENTS OF ISLAM:

1) The best, impartial, wise: "Islam. History, present, future" by Hans Küng (written in German, already available in Spanish, English translation coming in 2007).

2) Harsh but well argued: "Muslims in the West: Redefining the Separation of Church & State" by Sami Awad Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh.

3) Moderate Islam at its best: "The Great Theft : Wrestling Islam from the Extremists" by Khaled M. Abou El Fadl

4) Autobiography of a courageous woman: "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is a controversial thinker with a very interesting life.

HISTORY:

1) General: "The Venture of Islam", by Marshall G. S. Hodgson (nowadays a classic included in any bibliography on Islam).

2) Turks: "The Turks in World History" by Carter Vaughn Findley.

3) Political theory: "God's Rule : Government and Islam" by Patricia Crone.

4) Jihad: it also seems interesting although I have not read it yet: "Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice" by Michael Bonner

This is an excellent book on the subject of jihad and the books it cites include all the key canonical texts of Islam, including the Qur'an, which is rife with incitements against non-Muslims, and the ahadith (the 'traditions' of Muhammad's words and deeds, compiled by pious Muslims). It will certainly get some people's backs up since it reveals the doctrinal and historical basis of militant, offensive (as opposed to merely defensive) jihad. Cook maps the origins of jihad from the time of Muhammad, who conducted numerous raids and unprovoked attacks upon local tribes (attested by his authoritative Muslim biographer Ibn Ishaq), through to its crystallization within Islamic law. He utterly refutes the Islamic apologist nonsense of John Esposito et al in showing that jihad as a struggle within one's 'soul' - called the 'greater' jihad - never appeared in any authentic hadith, and never superseded the prevailing notion of jihad as 'warfare to spread Islam'. The fact that offensive jihad to spread Islam is an obligation for the Muslim community in all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence is never tackled by such Islamic apologists. The meaningless charge of Cook being 'right' wing may be expected but is a typical and empty accusation made by people who don't like the truth be told. It does nothing to address the facts and arguments presented by Cook, who is an Arabic scholar with direct access to all of the primary source materials. Considering that most Islamic studies departments in Western universities are dominated by 'scholars' of the Edward Said school - i.e. 'intellectual terrorists' as Ibn Warraq would call them - or are funded by Saudi money with a vested interest in sanitising Islamic studies, it comes as no surprise that many academics would shun this work. However, this is lucid, dispassionate, insightful and brilliantly articulated. If I could recommend one book on jihad, in addition to Andrew Bostom's Legacy of Jihad, Bat Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude or Walid Phares's Future Jihad - OK, that's four in total - then I would strongly recommend this. Militant jihad for the sake of rendering Islam dominant did not start with Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, nor with the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyed Qutb, as some "moderate" Muslims claim (take Ed Husain's autobiographical The Islamist as an example of a work that pretends to be authoritative on this but fails miserably to be so). Cook's book puts the entire lineage of jihad theory and practice into historical context, and despite its permutations he concludes that it has always been pushing at the horizon.

One hears so many different things about jihad, it is very easy to become totally confused. And much of it is so biased and politically motivated that it's hard to know what to trust. This book does a pretty good job discussing jihad- what it is, and its history. This author basically argues that, contrary to some who might argue that jihad is solely peaceful spiritual striving or only defensive, it traditionally has meant, among these other things, religiously sanctioned war, defensive or offensive, against non-Muslims.

The book does a better job at being objective than much of what I've read. This is not to say the author doesn't have a bias; it becomes evident that he probably does. However, he does a good job at backing his case with evidence- namely, numerous quotations from the Koran and hadith and from medieval Muslim jurists and other writers. Thus I am inclined to beleive his main argument. He may, however, be a bit harsh on those Muslims who argue that jihad is only peaceful or defensive- he calls them all "apologists" when some of them at least may be trying to reform one of the more outmoded, barbaric aspects of traditional Islam.

This book is very good at describing the martial aspect of jihad. The author articulates the historical literature about the subject very well. However, I do not feel that the conclusions he draws are accurate. He is rather dismissive of the connotation that the term has come to have in the last couple of centuries. Overall, the scholarship and writing are very well done. However, it should be read along with other books to get a complete view about what constitutes jihad. Anyone who says that it is objective, though, is terribly misled.

Daniel Pipes reviewed this book on ' FrontPageCom.' He praised its scholarship highly. He claims that Cook in tracing the development of the concept of Jihad says that aside from a Sufi interpretation of the concept relating it to personal spiritual development ,it has meant in most stages of Islamic history waging total war against one's enemy.
The most alarming element in his review is the fact that the present - day interpretation of Jihad is the most extreme that there has been historically. And the hostility displayed to the non- Muslim world by those who hold this concept is absolute. Thus those who try to sugarcoat the concept ignore the danger inherent in those who espouse it.

David Cook is a professor of Religious Studies at Rice. From that standpoint, he has mastered the religious literature on warfare and fighting, and that is all well and good and to be commended. But beware: he is not an historian and does not seem to understand that religious texts are only part of the story.

Cook seems determined to overlook many, many examples from history that run counter to the sort of sources his discipline draws from. And so he arrives at some very dogmatic conclusions of his own, painting Islamic history with a very broad brush dipped in intellectual -- rather than practical -- inkwells.

For example, in his discussion of the "greater jihad" tradition, he flatly states that a non-violent interpretation of jihad had no place in religious law and was never the norm. The former may well be true, the latter clearly is not. He is "reading back" on the Qur'an and hadith in exactly the same way his sources do, rather than attending to the historically contingent nature of the sources themselves. As a result, he ignores or discounts copious examples from history of women dying in childbirth being described as martyrs, of people dying during Ramadan described as martyrs, of references to the legitimacy of the "jihad of the pen" and the "jihad of the tongue", and so on.

One example suffices to expose the inherent biases in his sources, and therefore in his analysis. On page 40 he states, "But with internal jihad there is no practice, just theory." This statement is patent rubbish, and his own evidence belies him: he discusses the Sufi theorists of the internal jihad, and goes on to say how so many other Sufis followed them. Sufism is in fact practice, not mere theory, but Cook cannot see this because he cannot see past his sources to see how they fit into the larger conditions of life in the Islamic world. All efforts by actual historians to grapple with what Muslims actually did in various contexts he dismisses as mere apologetics.

It's as if he is irked by anyone who might see in Islamic history something other than war and conquest.

In short: if you want to read about classical Islamic scholarly discussions of fighting, Cook's book is a decent option -- certainly better than other, similar books by the likes of Bat Ye'or. But if you want to understand how jihad was lived by Muslims across the centuries, there are other, better books.