Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 209
In the centuries after Muhammad, the combination of juridically
imposed conditions and political realities has diminished the
effectiveness of jihad as a practical instrument of policy, though it
remains a potent propaganda weapon both for Muslim fundamentalists
to brandish and for their Western opponents to decry. Muslim
jurists have rarely agreed on the exact fulfillment of the conditions
they have laid down for a genuine jihad (and Muslim public
opinion even less often), while the umma on whose behalf it is to
be waged has now been divided, perhaps irretrievably, into nationstates
that generally subscribe to a quite different (and decidedly
non-Islamic) version of international law.
Just Wars and Crusades
While the classical Islamic legal tradition prohibits all war (e.g.,
tribal warfare, raids, blood feuds) except on religious grounds,
Western ethical theories, on the contrary, have sanctioned “just
wars” on certain natural law grounds but never on the basis of
religious ones. This latter attitude is altogether quite modern and
altogether secular since most religious communities have permitted
and even encouraged war in the name of God. Yahweh was a
warrior God (Exod. 5:3; Isa. 42:13), and the Bible is not unnaturally
filled with conflicts that are palpably holy wars. The Israelites,
quite like the pre-Islamic Arabs, even carried their God with
them into conflict on occasion (Num. 10:35–36). Deuteronomy
20–21 provides rules for war, with God as the leader, and its terms
are not very dissimilar from those dictated by Muhammad, except
there is no agreeable dhimma status granted to the Israelites’ enemies.
With the progressive loss of Jewish sovereignty (and so the
capacity to employ force against its enemies), war eventually became
an anticipated eschatological event among the Jews, and
then, with the diminution of messianic enthusiasm, a school exercise
for the rabbis.
With the 1948 foundation in Palestine of a “Jewish state”—the
ambiguity of the expression is as profound as it is in “Islamic
state”—the question has been reopened for Jews. Israel’s battles