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The Koran and Fighting Unbelievers
Professor XXXXX wrote:
"It is my turn to be astonished by Prof. Cole. The following link:
http://www.geocities.com/pnoak/some.html
includes 24 passages from the Koran enjoining believers to fight
unbelievers. The one closest to the words I used is no. 21, although, to
be completely accurate, it refers only to Jews and Christians, not all
unbelievers."
This argument and this citation are perfect examples of why it is so dangerous to get one's information from an amateur web site at geocities. The passages cobbled together here are from the 1930s translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, a British upper crust convert who simply was not an academic and often translates infelicitously. The verses listed are a hodgepodge, lacking any context and failing to make any distinctions.
The word usually translated as "infidel" or "unbeliever" in English is the Arabic kafir, pl. kuffar. It literally means "ingrate," and often refers to human ingratitude in not recognizing the one God or in persecuting the prophet or Muslims. It almost always refers to the Meccan idolators, who are characterized by kufr or the ingratitude of active disbelief. The Koran enjoins Muslims to fight back against the idolatrous Meccans who were attacking Medina.
Ordinary Jews and Christians are not kafirs in this sense in the Koran, but rather are "people of the book" with their own, valid, divinely revealed scripture.
Koran 5:82 says (Arberry): "Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow."
The Koran thus considers Judaism and Christianity true religions, in whose scriptures there is "light and guidance." It says that Christians are "closest in love" to Muslims. Muhammad made alliances with the Medinan Jews against the Meccans, and some at least of those alliances survived all the way through. It is true that some Jewish tribes fell out with the Muslims, and one appears to have gone over to the Meccan idolators to fight against monotheists. This betrayal caused bitterness toward those specific Jews, but not toward Judaism or Jews in general, who continue to be praised as in 5:82 above.
Anyone, of course, can become an "ingrate" toward God if they do the wrong thing. So Koran 2:105 speaks of "those who committed kufr from among the people of the Book." The locution of this verse demonstrates conclusively that most Jews and Christians (people of the book) have not committed kufr and are therefore not kafirs or infidels in the eyes of the Koran.
The verse Professor Kaiser refers to most specifically is 9:29-30. Arberry gives it as: "Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden--such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book--until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled." The verse cannot possibly be referring to Christians and Jews in general, since as we have seen in verse 5:82, they are considered to believe in God and the last day and to be deserving of recompense with God in the afterlife. The reference is probably rather to Christians or Jews who threw in with the Meccan idolaters, thus effectively resigning from the ranks of the monotheists, or committed other enormities such as to bring into question their status as people of the book.
The great scholar Claude Cahen writes of this verse and the meaning of "tribute" (jizya) here in the Encyclopedia of Islam:
"The word jizya, which is perhaps connected with an Aramaic original, occurs in the Qur'an, IX, 29, where, even at that time, it is applied to the dues demanded from Christians and Jews, but probably in the somewhat loose sense, corresponding with the root, of "compensation" (for non-adoption of Islam), and in any case as collective tribute, not differentiated from other forms of taxation, and the nature of its content being left uncertain (the examples given in the works on the biography of the Prophet are very variable; tribute was adapted to the individual conditions of each group concerned). It is possible that, mutatis mutandis, precedents can be found in pre-Islamic Arabia outside the religious sphere, in the conditions of submission of inhabited oases to more powerful tribal groups, in return for protection; but as a result of their conquests the Arabs, heirs of the Byzantine and Sasanid regimes, were to be faced with new practical problems."
I actually prefer a Persian origin for the term jizya. And I think it is anachronistic to read back into 9:29 the meaning of "poll tax" that was paid by all Jews and Christians in the later Muslim empires. I think Cahen is closer to the mark when he sees its payment as simply a mark of clientelage or subsidiary alliance in a tribal society. Muslims also paid "tribute" to the Muslim city-state, by the way. The khums or "one-fifth" on certain kinds of income is an example.
I contend that virtually the only Koran verses that commend violence are referring to the need to defend against the Meccan siege of Medina and the machinations of the Meccans' allies. Since the pagan Meccan civilization no longer exists and since aggressive Meccan polytheism is not a force in today's world, it is not clear that any of these verses have any relevance whatsoever any more. There are no Koran verses that commend violence against anyone but the Meccan pagans and their allies. Jews, Christians, even the Mandaean gnostic sect of the Sabeans, are all granted freedom to practice and to live in peace.
I would be the first to admit that an abstract understanding of the Koran is different from contemporary Muslim interpretations of it, which are various. (Note, however, that 99.9 percent of Muslims are not falling upon their non-Muslim neighbors). But the latter are not the grounds on which this debate was waged. Rather, it was asserted that the *Koran* prescribes belligerancy toward non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians in general. This allegation is simply untrue. I have been studying the Koran in Arabic for 30 years, and I am saddened that anyone should have held this misconception.
Pakistan has arrested 500 suspected al-Qaida operatives in the past year, and has turned 443 over to the US authorities, according to Pakistani officials, as reported today in the Pakistani press. Now, there probably weren't more than 5000 "Arab Afghans" in Afghanistan before 9/11, and some large number was killed by AC-130s or by massive bombing. Others escaped through Iran. I saw one estimate that about a thousand went to Pakistan. If that were true, than Pakistan has captured half of all the al-Qaida operatives that escaped there from Pakistan, and has captured ten percent of all the Afghan Arabs that had been guests of the Taliban. Of course, a lot of them are probably lower-level camp attendees and so forth, but this is a pretty impressive number.
Pakistani military intelligence says that those captured came from 18 countries, including "Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Chechnya and France." Most were Arab nationals and the biggest group came from Yemen.
The ongoing manhunt has caused friction with the new Islamist government of the Northwest Frontier Province, which wants it stopped. Since the Pakistani military is actually still in control of the country behind the scenes, however, the manhunt will continue as long as the top officers want it to.
There has been a lot of friction between the US troops in Afghanistan and Pakistani border guards the past few days, after an angry border guard took a shot at an American. It is still not clear exactly why he did so. The US announced that it had the right of hot pursuit of al-Qaida and Taliban elements into Pakistan. Pakistan denounced this statement and denied that any such permission had been given. Apparently the practice was secretly acknowledged tacitly by both Musharraf and Colin Powell, who talked yesterday, but it was a faux pas for the US military to state it so baldly. Of course, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of the fundamentalist Jama`at-i Islami, used the incident to whip up anti-American feeling in Pakistan, even though there hasn't actually been much real hot pursuit anyway. The US military hasn't had much look with search and destroy missions on the Afghanistan border lately.
A huge tiff is going on between India and Pakistan in the wake of this week's comments on nuclear war by General Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf said earlier this week that he was ready to use nuclear weapons had India crossed the Pakistan border last summer. Although his spokesman tried to retract the statement, it seemed clear enough when he said he had avoided war without committing conventional forces (i.e. just by the nuclear threat). Indian government officials have been sputtering ever since that they were not deterred by any Pakistani nuclear capability, and would not hesitate to go to war against Pakistan if they felt it necessary. The Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has said recently that at first she had protested the Western discourse about South Asian nuclear arms being in the hands of immature third world governments. Then she saw the governments of India and Pakistan behave childishly on the issue and began to be worried herself.
I don't think the tiff has anything to do with maturity in the sense of character. As if Kennedy, Nixon, Kruschev and Brezhnev were mature!. It is simply that the nuclear capability of both sides in South Asia is still minimal and their ability actually to deliver a warhead is not entirely assured. So we don't yet have MAD--mutually assured destruction--only LAD, likely assured destruction. That uncertainty gives the generals wriggle room to consider conventional war. When the nuclear capability expands, there will be less opportunity, even if the drum beating continues.
The rest of us should just demand an independent Kashmir and settle the damn thing before we get strontium 90 blown into our childrens' milk.
Recommended reading of the day: Amir Tahiri on French plans to centralize and liberalize the French Muslim community and why they are likely to fail. (The link is clickable).
India almost went to war with Pakistan twice in the last year, according to India Today. Last winter, Indian forces prepared to attack the Pakistani line of control in Kashmir, but were dissuaded by the US and by the relocation of Pakistani terrorist camps from Kashmir to Pakistan itself. The war plans in the summer were dampened by fears of the approaching monsoons (heavy rains are no weather in which to fight) and by uncertainty about the exact nuclear capabilities of Pakistan (Delhi feared a nuclear reprisal and could not rule one out). This Indian war mobilization was, as Clausewitz would have foreseen, also a form of politics. It was a way of pressuring the US to pressure Pakistan to stop cross-border infiltration of Kashmir by terrorists.
The world dodged a bullet twice here, since two South Asian nuclear powers going to war with one another would be unpleasant for us all. But we are clearly not yet out of the woods.
From a discussion of so-called Koranic "belligerancy" in the Medinan chapters
In general, theological explanations by themselves do little to explain foreign policy, while foreign policy debates tend to distort the meaning and history of theology. In Islam, the difference between the Medina chapters of the Koran (c. 622-632 A.D.) and the Meccan chapters of the Koran (610-622 A.D.) can be explained with proper reference to historical context. The two sections are not different because the former are "tolerant" and the latter are "belligerent", but because the political situation had changed.
The pagan Meccan leadership in Mecca deeply disliked Islam and Muhammad from the time (c. 613?) he started denouncing polytheism. They harassed the Muslims, punished the weak among them, boycotted them, even chased away some to Ethiopia, for being monotheists. But the Meccans did not take really drastic action in the teens. In response, the Koran instructs Muhammad that he is only a 'warner' and has no sovereignty or political power.
Around 621-622 the Meccan leadership became so threatened by the continued spread of Islam in the city that they decided to assassinate Muhammad and to try to wipe Islam out. He knew that the city was becoming dangerous for him and when the notables of nearby Medina came to him seeking a "sheriff" figure to put their own town in order, he decided to leave his hometown. He escaped with a companion to Medina in 622, avoiding assassination, and was joined there by the Muslims.
The Meccan elite found the idea of Muhammad in charge of a rival city-state to be unacceptable, and it was clear there would be hostilities between the two. Muhammad's forces fought three wars and several bedouin-style "raids" with the Meccan pagans, who wanted to wipe them out and kill their prophet. By 629 Muhammad and the Muslims had prevailed. Had the war gone the other way, they would have been slaughtered or enslaved by the Meccans. As it was, Muhammad announced a general amnesty and showed impressive generosity to his defeated foes, some of whom later emerged as leaders of Islam.
Even at the time that the Muslims were defending themselves from Meccan aggression, the Koran urges that peace be made if it can be, and forbids naked aggression. It is the Medinan chapters that assure pious Jews and Christians that they have nothing to fear in the afterlife and which praise the Hebrew Bible (Torah) and the New Testament (Injil) as full of "guidance and light."
The odd sectarian enterprise of Mahmud Muhammad Taha (d. 1985) of Sudan, which aimed at discarding the Medinan chapters and creating a Meccan reading of the Koran, is not likely ever to be more than a minor heresy in Islam. It is in any case perfectly possible to construct a moderate Islamic modernism that eschews aggression on the basis of the entire Koran, and this has been done over and over again in the modern Middle East by scholars from Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) to Abdul Karim Soroush and Muhammad Sa`id `Ashmawi in the present. Indeed, violent radical Muslims can only make their case by neglecting to quote key Koranic verses (Bin Laden typically quotes only half a verse, completely skewing its meaning).
Where serious pacifist activists have arisen among the Palestinians, as with Mubarak Awad, they have been summarily expelled from the Occupied Territories by the Israeli authorities. See Mubarak's profile at: http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/awad.htm
Ultimately, theology is not much related to foreign policy. Theology does little to explain the foreign policy of Christians and Jews, who have behaved with enormous aggressiveness toward the Muslim world in the past two centuries, invading, colonizing, displacing, and invading again. Episodes such as the French tenure in Algeria (1830-1962), the British in the Suez (1882-1956), or the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza (1967-present) are not in any way related to the Bible. After all, the Bible contains both rather bloodthirsty works like the Book of Joshua as well as more irenic passages. As for Muslims, the most aggressive and expansionist power in the Middle East, the Baath Party of Iraq, is a secular nationalist organization that has little to do with Islam.
A letter by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's right-hand man, has been published by Asharq al-Awsat. Dated February 1998, the letter speaks of Americans as "the foreign investors" who "must be hit." The term "investor" is part of a code in the letter, where everything is referred to as a "company" and an economic transaction. This sort of language is presumably something al-Qaeda learned from the CIA ("the Company") during the period when the two were cooperating against the Soviets.
Al-Zawahiri complains that "The Upper Egyptian Company" has ceased its commerce, a reference to the decision of the jailed leadership of the Islamic Grouping (al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya) to give up armed struggle after the disastrous 1997 shooting of dozens of tourists at Luxor. The Gamaa is famed for being disproportionately drawn from Asyut and other areas of Upper Egypt. He says that since both "firms" (the Gamaa and his own al-Jihad al-Islami) are facing international monopoly capital (sharikat al-ihtikar ad-dawliyya), it is counterproductive to fight internally. At this point the commercial code seems to be more than just code, echoing Marxist ideas.
His correspondent seems to have been Egyptian; he expresses at the beginning of the letter his hope that they will meet again in "our country" (i.e. that the Islamists will overthrow Hosni Mubarak, which is the only way such a meeting could take place).
He says, however, that the Omar Brothers Company is open for business, referring to the Taliban/al-Qaeda. He thus seems to implicate Mulla Omar in al-Qaeda terrorism, the exact details of which are still murky. He also refers to Mulla Omar as "Amir al-Mu'minin," or "Commander of the Believers," a title of the Caliph.
Using the same sort of code, he refers to the joining of his al-Jihad al-Islami terrorist organization with al-Qaeda, producing the new improved "Qa`idat al-Jihad" or "Base for Holy War." (Al-Qaeda means base in Arabic, and actually refers to Bin Laden's earliest data base of graduates of his terror training camps in 1986-88). His correspondent is apparently a contributor to the Taliban cause and is assured that under Mulla Omar, the Omar Brothers Company is flourishing.
Al-Zawahiri hopes for success in an operation in "the Village" (Egypt) and urges sympathizers to come to Afghanistan for training. He said that his organization could not bear the travel expenses, and that volunteers would have to pay for the ticket out of their own pockets or take a small loan for that purpose.
