Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 211
The Enemy Within: Ibn Taymiyya
Holy war is, then, a religious obligation for Muslims, a duty
whether for the community or the individual, forcefully to resist
the enemies of Islam. The division of the world into the Abode of
Islam—the territories under Muslim political sovereignty—and
the Abode of War—the lands beyond that pale—draws a rather
precise line between the community and its enemies. But the early
Muslim jurists who laid down those boundaries were aware that
the political and religious reality they sought to define was far
more complex. The very first problem faced by Abu Bakr (r. 632–
634), Muhammad’s immediate successor as the head of the umma,
was whether to use force, in effect, whether to invoke jihad against
those Arabian tribes who, at Muhammad’s death, refused to pay
the alms-tithe required of all Muslims. This was judged apostasy
(irtidad), and so the use of force to coerce the defiant tribes was
legitimate. The decision to do so redrew the boundaries of jihad:
holy war, the only war permissible to Muslims, might also be
waged against God’s enemies within the umma.
The attack on the faith to which jihad is a legitimate and necessary
response most often came from external enemies, from that
area designated by classical jurisprudence as the Abode of War,
whether because its inhabitants were in fact hostile to Islam or
were constantly in a state of war among themselves. But as soon
became apparent, Islam had its enemies within, those who likewise
threatened the faith, either as apostates, like those who had refused
the pay the zakat, or dissenters like the Kharijites. Jihad was
waged against both groups.
By the thirteenth century the problem of internal enemies had
changed not so much in kind as in scale. Central Asian newcomers
called Mongols had entered the Abode of Islam and threatened to
destroy the very fabric of the umma. In 1258 Baghdad, the heart
and seat of the caliphate, was taken, sacked, and so thoroughly
destroyed that the city never quite recovered. But the Mongols,
who were inexorably pushing westward toward the Syrian and
Egyptian heartlands, were by then themselves Muslims and so not