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394chapter sixpolitics and the political opportunism of our honourable scholars.This book’s aim is to recover Islam’s lost universality and restore itspowerful message as it is laid out clearly in All§h’s Book. But onlyGod knows whether we will achieve this aim.JIH§DIn this section we tackle the complex problem of how to understandjih§d. We accept that it is a very sensitive issue and recent events inworld politics, in particular after 9/11, have unduly emotionalisedthe entire debate and severely hampered our understanding. Inrecent publications on the topic we recognise how easily religiousdoctrines are mixed up with politics, how legitimate anger about theWest’s neocolonialist expansionism is expressed in religious terms,and how readily learned scholars conflate the concept of jih§d withthe killing of unbelievers and innocent civilians. We also observe, inresponse to the threat of terrorism, how authoritarian regimes in theArab-Muslim world have managed to eradicate any democraticopposition to their autocratic rule, while attempting to appease theIslamist opposition by allowing outdated, medieval ideas of religionto dominate the public debate. In this sensitive debate about jih§d,we are faced with a dual invasion of our freedom: externally, by theever more aggressive globalisation of Western capitalism, and internallyby the elimination of our civil liberties by oppressive statesfirmly in the grip of the mukh§bar§t.This is not just a recent development, however. The entire historyof Islamic fiqh is basically characterised by efforts of the #ulam§" todefine jih§d with bellicose connotations and to advance reasons forthe so-called legitimate killing of the enemies of Islam. Some scholarsclaim to be innocent because of their ignorance of the subject or tryto justify their misunderstandings by saying that they were blindlyfollowing the authority of a school of law, while, in fact, they wereactively involved in power politics and wanted to please authoritarianrulers by providing them with an expansionist ideology for theirimperial ambitions. That Islamist groups today resort to the conceptof jih§d as a cloak of legitimacy to hide their lust for political powerand authoritarian rule unashamedly, is also not new in Islamic history.This history of abuse begins with the first civil war and the