STRUGGLING OVER JIHAD

Months after the furor over the "American Jihad" speech at Harvard, an interesting debate has broken out over the malleability of the term. MuslimPundit argues that defining Jihad as "non-violent struggle" can not be supported by Islamic text and history. While the sources that define Jihad as a holy war are binding, the sources that uphold the countervailing view are insufficient to establish a legal precedent. Aziz Poonwalla on the other hand, argues that MuslimPundit's analysis is Sunni-centric, and that within other schools of Islamic thought, especially Shi'a Islam, the textual support for Jihad as holy war is not beyond dispute, and that the non-violent form can be justified from the highest source of authority in Islam - the Qu'ran.

From my own admittedly limited understanding of Islamic jurisprudence, they are both correct. Traditional Sunni jurisprudence has established certain hadith (the oral tradition that supplements the Qu'ran) as "authentic", and it is not the place of modern jurists to base their rulings on their own view as to which hadith are incompatable with a rational reading of the Qu'ran in the modern context. The gates of "itjihad", or rational exigesis are closed. It is disingenuous for those who adhere to such a rigid, fixed form of Islam to thrust forward the version of Jihad that is most convenient for them at the moment. It is dishonest to pretend that the militant form of Jihad is a "minority view" of a few extremists, and not central concept in the Islamic tradition.

Aziz, however, is also correct. In the larger theological universive that is Islam - the gates of itjihad are not closed - the discussion is still ongoing. Shi'a Islam, despite its recent foray into the blood-soaked path of Khomeinism, has its own juridical tradition, one in which the hadith do not play as central a role. Sunni Islam itself began as a reaction to a highly rationalist school of Islam, the Mu'tazilis. The Islamic tradition contains the tools to construct a humanist Islam. Whether humanistic Muslims have the strength to build institutions capable of thwarting Islamist efforts to take over the faith remains to be seen.