Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 207
time or any place. Quran 9:5—“Slay the idolaters wherever you
find them”—is as broad a permission for war against the infidels
as can be imagined. In the traditional Muslim understanding of the
passage, it was thought to have abrogated all earlier limitations on
the use of violence against nonbelievers.
It was the thrust of these texts, and of the body of hadith that
grew up around them that led Muslim jurists to divide the world
into the Abode of Islam (Dar al-Islam), where Islamic law and
sovereignty prevailed, and the Abode of War (Dar al-Harb), lands
that were not yet subjected to the moral and political authority of
Islam, as inevitably they must in this triumphalist theology. In theory,
the Abode of Islam is in a permanent state of warfare with the
Abode of War, as the very name suggests, at least until the latter
submits, and jihad is the instrument by which that subjection will
be accomplished. Hostilities between the two spheres may be suspended
by armistice or truce, but they can never be concluded by
peace, only by submission.
A systematically framed doctrine of jihad emerges in the work of
the Muslim jurist al-Shaybani (d. 804). His Law of Nations became
one of the foundation texts of Muslim thinking on the subject,
and it was often glossed and expanded by later lawyers. It is
worth noting that this formulation of a doctrine of jihad occurred
during the full tide of Muslim expansion, when the Abode of Islam
was growing ever larger by conquest. But it was also a period
when the unity of the original umma was being replaced by local
Muslim polities whose rulers found the conduct of a jihad a convenient
and persuasive way of establishing their Islamic legitimacy.
Al-Shaybani and other early jurists appear, however, to have exercised
a certain caution on the matter of hostilities with the unbelievers,
which is the essence of holy war, and required that some
degree of provocation be present. This was not so with his somewhat
younger contemporary Shafii (d. 820). In his view, war with
the Dar al-Harb was not an occasional circumstance but a permanent
and continuous state since the cause was precisely the others’
unbelief (kufr). Jihad was, in the words of a later commentator, “a
duty enjoined (on Muslims) permanently till the end of time.” It
was in fact this notion of obligation that much exercised the ju-