The very word Islam, which means "surrender," is related to the
Arabic salam, or peace. When the Prophet Muhammad brought the
inspired scripture known as the Koran to the Arabs in the early 7th
century A.D., a major part of his mission was devoted precisely to
bringing an end to the kind of mass slaughter we witnessed in New
York City and Washington. Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a
vicious cycle of warfare, in which tribe fought tribe in a pattern
of vendetta and countervendetta. Muhammad himself survived several
assassination attempts, and the early Muslim community narrowly
escaped extermination by the powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had
to fight a deadly war in order to survive, but as soon as he felt
his people were probably safe, he devoted his attention to building
up a peaceful coalition of tribes and achieved victory by an
ingenious and inspiring campaign of nonviolence. When he died in
632, he had almost single-handedly brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an all-out war,
several passages deal with the conduct of armed struggle. Warfare
was a desperate business on the Arabian Peninsula. A chieftain was
not expected to spare survivors after a battle, and some of the
Koranic injunctions seem to share this spirit. Muslims are ordered
by God to "slay [enemies] wherever you find them!" (4: 89).
Extremists such as Osama bin Laden like to quote such verses but do
so selectively. They do not include the exhortations to peace, which
in almost every case follow these more ferocious passages: "Thus, if
they let you be, and do not make war on you, and offer you peace,
God does not allow you to harm them" (4: 90).
In the Koran, therefore, the only permissible war is one of
self-defense. Muslims may not begin hostilities (2: 190). Warfare is
always evil, but sometimes you have to fight in order to avoid the
kind of persecution that Mecca inflicted on the Muslims (2: 191; 2:
217) or to preserve decent values (4: 75; 22: 40). The Koran quotes
the Torah, the Jewish scriptures, which permits people to retaliate
eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but like the Gospels, the Koran
suggests that it is meritorious to forgo revenge in a spirit of
charity (5: 45). Hostilities must be brought to an end as quickly as
possible and must cease the minute the enemy sues for peace (2:
192-3).
Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its "pillars,"
or essential practices. The primary meaning of the word jihad is not
"holy war" but "struggle." It refers to the difficult effort that is
needed to put God's will into practice at every level--personal and
social as well as political. A very important and much quoted
tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after
a battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to
the greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of
extirpating wrongdoing from one's own society and one's own heart.
Islam did not impose itself by the sword. In a statement in which
the Arabic is extremely emphatic, the Koran insists, "There must be
no coercion in matters of faith!" (2: 256). Constantly Muslims are
enjoined to respect Jews and Christians, the "People of the Book,"
who worship the same God (29: 46). In words quoted by Muhammad in
one of his last public sermons, God tells all human beings, "O
people! We have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may
know one another" (49: 13)--not to conquer, convert, subjugate,
revile or slaughter but to reach out toward others with intelligence
and understanding.
So why the suicide bombing, the hijacking and the massacre of
innocent civilians? Far from being endorsed by the Koran, this
killing violates some of its most sacred precepts. But during the
20th century, the militant form of piety often known as
fundamentalism erupted in every major religion as a rebellion
against modernity. Every fundamentalist movement I have studied in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that liberal, secular
society is determined to wipe out religion. Fighting, as they
imagine, a battle for survival, fundamentalists often feel justified
in ignoring the more compassionate principles of their faith. But in
amplifying the more aggressive passages that exist in all our
scriptures, they distort the tradition.
It would be as grave a mistake to see Osama bin Laden as an
authentic representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the
alleged killer of an abortion provider in Buffalo, N.Y., a typical
Christian or Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 worshipers in the Hebron
mosque in 1994 and died in the attack, a true martyr of Israel. The
vast majority of Muslims, who are horrified by the atrocity of Sept.
11, must reclaim their faith from those who have so violently
hijacked it.
Karen Armstrong has written many books on religion, including Islam:
A Short History, published last year by Modern Library
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