jihad and the islamic law of war - The Royal Islamic Strategic ...

jihad and the islamic law of war
with a rigid obedientialism. Religion is thus reduced to a
system of commands and prohibitions, with an excessive
emphasis on outward conformity. Even worse, often these
ideas are little more than a theological veneer for a crude
ethnic chauvinism which seeks to universalize a tribal culture.
The modernists, for their part, generally share with the
fundamentalists an aversion to the spiritual, artistic, and
intellectual accomplishments of Islamic civilization, and
have an undiscerning “West is best” approach to Islamic
reform. Yet they both readily celebrate Islam’s advances in
science in technology, and both readily accept any modern
technological innovation the West has to offer. These
shared characteristics can be explained in light of the fact
that both modernism and fundamentalism, in the Islamic
world, are largely responses to the loss of power to theWest
over the last two hundred years.Thus, both modernism and
fundamentalism blame traditional Islam for this failure,
and both seek to re-establish the balance. The modernists
hope to accomplish this by imitating their conquerors,
while the fundamentalists hope to emulate the successes of
the first generations of Muslims.
The secular fundamentalists and the takfiris, at the two
extremes, are both intrinsically utopian in their outlook, the
former striving to create a yet unseen paradise on earth
while the latter hope to emulate a once realized golden age.
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