The term “jihad” has known, and still has, very different meanings depending on the periods, geographical areas, political and religious groups. The historian Olivier Hanne, associate researcher at the Center for Higher Studies of Medieval Civilization (CESCM), author of more than thirty works on the Middle Ages and Islam, has just published Histoire du Jihad, published by Tallandier, from the origins of Islam to Daesh, a work looking back on some 1,400 years of use of this notion. We present here an extract from the conclusion.
By Olivier Hanne, University of Poitiers
At the end of this work, let us summarize the main lines surrounding the evolution of the concept of jihad in the history of Islam. The tree structure above will provide a schematic framework.
The most difficult thing is probably to find the date of birth of this “sacred combat”, since the Koran is not sufficient to define it and the biography of the Prophet is too late to be reliable from a historical point of view. Whether it actually appeared with Mohammed or during the first century of Islam, the roots of jihad are neither explicitly Quranic nor strictly Muslim: the religious justification for war already had a long history in the Orient when Islam began. elaborates in the Hedjaz.
That a new religious doctrine claims to unify the temporal and the spiritual is nothing original either, just like the granting of promises in the afterlife for those who shed their blood for the cause of God. in martyrdom. The Koran is inspired by distant legacies of war (Roman just war, Christian theology, Sasanian ideology, Byzantine sacred war), tribal wars and opens the door to new wars “in the path of God”, which must, however, respect certain rules, which are increasingly codified. Despite the statistical predominance of belligerent passages, the Koran explicitly outlines paths for overcoming conflict in favor of ethics and the person’s commitment to his community and his God (we follow Bonner, 2004, p. 207-209).
The Book has a clear preference for the term qitālbut it is that of jihad who ended up winning at the beginning of the 9the century. Before the establishment of what we call the classical doctrine, four perceptions already compete in the sources, without ever excluding each other, which will be perpetuated throughout all of History.
The first approach is martyrial: the writing down of the hadith, their classification and the writing of the biography of the Prophet lead to a rooting of the war in the range of attitudes offered to the believer. In imitation of Mohammed who fought to “defend the rights of God and the rights of men”, committing oneself to the point of death becomes a blessing. But such a requirement is difficult to generalize to the whole of society, so it is always restricted groups who assume this physical gift of self, out of enthusiasm and piety, sometimes out of greed. It is on this heroic but exceptional model that the ribāṭ and the fight of the first Wahhabis.
The second definition of jihad is sectarian. The logic of martyrdom is accentuated by minority currents which establish jihad as an eschatological imperative, mainly mobilized to purify Islam from within, so it was often used against other Muslims, and this from the Ridda and the Fitna. If we find the first traces of it rather outside Sunnism (Kharijites, Ismailis, Qarmats, etc.), its ramifications extend up to the contemporary era in apocalyptic groups like the Ahl al-ḥadīṯ and especially Daesh, or among fanatic personalities acting independently.
The third dynamic, which is also the most striking and the most determining, is the early nationalization of jihad at the initiative of the Umayyads and then the Abbasid scholars who established it in all its nuances and legal conditions under caliphal authority. Sacred combat is a state monopoly, and even after the failure of imperial centralization in the 19th centurye century, it was recovered by local authorities in order to make it an instrument of their sovereignty and taxation (Morabia, 2013, p. 337-341). Until European colonization, Islamic empires used it deliberately against their enemies from within and without, to the point of secularizing its main characteristics. On the threshold of the 20the century, this state and national understanding of jihad can appear as a simple Islamic version of self-defense, or even just war (Fathally Jabeur, “The defensive vocation of jihād, its history and its contemporary legal reality”, International studies, 49(1), 2018, p. 133-176)
Finally, the ultimate definition of jihad comes from the symbol, namely that the “redoubled effort” is of an inner nature: ethical, intellectual, spiritual or even mystical. These definitions of jihad are preferred by the populations, who relieve themselves of all military service on the State and like to get closer to the Sufi elites who have made internal combat an art of living and praying (the “major jihad”). Instrumentalized by political and religious authorities, this ethical jihad accompanies social control and the imposition of standards of behavior. For a long time, the Imamite jihad was also allegorical, before the Persian imperial system modified its characteristics towards greater military efficiency. In contemporary times, due to the phenomena of secularization and modernization of societies, symbolic jihad is becoming the norm in a multitude of variants: social, educational, revolutionary, nationalist, ecological jihad, etc.
[…] No systemic interpretation accounts for the fluidity of the concept of jihad: as a state phenomenon, it is an object of law and therefore a collective inhibitor to the unleashing of violence, but as an eschatological path, it releases individual death drives. . Depending on the references that are highlighted, it can be emotional, pragmatic or political. René Girard’s theory is not enough either, since symbolic jihad breaks the idea of mimetic rivalry, and even armed jihad can be exercised both against a “completely other” (the pagan) and a ” very close” (the Muslim).
It is not possible to exclude jihad from the Islamic field in order to delegitimize terrorist actions, nor to assert that it is only internal (jihad al-nafs), or that Islam is only peaceful (even GW Bush used this approach on September 17, 2001 in a Washington mosque). In fact, like any religion based on sacred texts, on a tradition of high culture and backed by political systems, Islam has developed multifaceted reflections on armed violence, and has never intended in principle to exclude it from legal activities of human beings. The four attitudes that we have schematized are still found today and can claim a certain historicity.
Conversely, European media tend to accuse Islam of being violent, but the allegorization of jihad has been a widely shared norm for nearly a century, while its sectarian and martyrial forms are most often condemned. . On the other hand, we can regret that the religious elites, in reaction towards the West or philosophical and moral relativism, refuse a contextualized rereading of the Koran and the hadith, thus preserving the ambiguity on legal violence. The sincerity of their condemnation of jihadism and their participation in interreligious dialogue come into contradiction with the maintained sacredness of the classic doctrine of jihad (contradictions noted by Mr. Arkoun, Humanism and IslamParis, Vrin, 2005).
Olivier HanneAssociate researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Medieval Civilization (CESCM), University of Poitiers
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