Crusade, Jihad, and Holy War
In this week's contribution, I had intended to continue my account of the First Crusade. However, the terrible events in the USA have made issues of the troubled relationship between Islam and the West horribly relevant. In particular, the vocabulary of Crusades and Jihad (Muslim 'holy war') has been employed in a potentially dangerous way. I hope in this article to dispel some of the misunderstandings attached to these terms.
The rhetoric of war has been employed on both sides of the gathering conflict. 'We' in the West seem to have already decided that we are at war, although we do not know exactly against whom, or how such a war is to be fought. In this context, George W Bush's use of the term ‘crusade’ was particularly unfortunate. In the western tradition, this word has come in everyday speech to mean any kind of struggle for a just cause, so it seems natural to use terms such as ‘crusade against terrorism’. However, given that the crusades were wars launched primarily against Islam, the word has very different connotations in the Muslim world, as shown by Usama bin Laden’s vow to clear ‘crusaders’ out of the Muslim world, or Colonel Gadaffi’s condemnation of President Reagan as a ‘dirty crusader’ after the US bombing of Libya in 1986.
The need for western politicians and media to exercise restraint, and not whip up anti-Islamic sentiment, has been demonstrated by the attacks on Muslims that have occurred in the USA and Britain since the 11th September. Mosques and schools have been attacked, and individual Muslims (or those taken to be Muslims) beaten up or even murdered. In Swindon, a town near my home city of Oxford, a teenage girl was bludgeoned around the head by thugs wielding baseball bats, for the ‘crime’ of wearing hijab (the traditional head-scarf). In such ways do some among us demonstrate the superiority of Western Civilisation.
What of the other side of the equation? We read that Muslim clerics supporting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan have called for a jihad against the West, while those responsible for the appalling crimes committed in the USA almost certainly acted in the belief that they were waging a Holy War. However, the true Islamic teaching on jihad could never be used to justify such mass-murder, and the perpetrators have been widely condemned by mainstream Muslim opinion. Jihad literally means a striving; the idea of fighting a war for the faith is only one form of jihad. At an individual level, it can mean personal striving to live a better life; Muhammad declared that ‘the supreme jihad is against oneself’. This form is known as the interior jihad.
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