Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

206 t CHAPTER EIGHT
ill-shaped Muslim consensus that custom and the community were
more important than tossing dead sinners into hell and live ones
out of office or out of the community.
The Enemy Without: Jihad
The complex of concerns and conditions that have collected
around the Muslim notion of holy war (jihad) reduces itself to a
discussion of the circumstances under which an individual Muslim
or, more commonly, the community of Muslims, is faced with the
obligation to use force against an enemy. Although some considerations
are directed to the extent or degree of that force, the main
thrust of the discussion in Muslim circles from the Prophet down
to the present has been about the enemy and the hostile act that
triggers the use of force.
In the quranic passages on jihad, there is certainly a wider dimension
to the term than the use of force. The believer must energetically
strive “in the path of God” to overcome the temptations
of the world and his own inclinations to sin; that ethic of striving,
the jihad of the heart that is not terribly far from the Christians’
miles Christi or Moral Rearmament, is built into the Muslims’
moral code. The question at hand, however, deals with the other
component of jihad, the jihad of the sword, the use of force, or
“killing” (qital), as the Quran calls it in what appears to be the
earliest revelation (22:39) to address the issue: “Leave is given to
those who fight because they are wronged . . . who were expelled
from their dwellings without right.” The date must have been soon
after the Hegira, and the verse obviously looks to the cause of the
Migrants who had recently had to take refuge in Medina. Permission
was granted to take up arms against their Meccan oppressors.
If the Meccan suras of the Quran are circumspect on the subject
of violence—the few and defenseless Muslims there would almost
certainly have suffered in its use—and generally appear to counsel
its avoidance (Quran 15:94–95; 16:125), the mandate for force
granted at Medina was eventually broadened (2:191, 217), until, it
seemed, war could be waged against non-Muslims at almost any