Jihad

This recognition of the modern state infuriated certain other thinkers who declared their own societies to be Islamic in name only; in reality, they said, these societies lived in jahiliyya, coarse ignorance, the condition of ancient Arabia before the coming of Islam. They summoned all Muslims to the jihad, calling this an individual (not a collective) obligation because of the gravity of the situation. Unlike the modernist reformers, they had no qualms about "offensive" jihad, which one of their books, by Muhammad 'Abd al-Salam Farag, called "the neglected duty." However, they concentrated their fury against the modern Middle Eastern state rather than non-Muslim powers. After the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981, radicals were driven abroad or deep underground in Egypt and other countries.

The 1990s brought a new, international turn. Osama bin Laden's fatwas of 1996 and 1998 call upon Muslims to set aside the war against the corrupt regimes in their own countries to fight the common enemy. Like other radical Islamists of modern decades, bin Laden identified the enemy as a "Crusader–Zionist" alliance, but he singled out the leader of the alliance, the United States, for special attention. This new, global jihad has vague, grandiose political projects that it postpones until some remote future time. Its real concern is to attract attention and arouse passions through spectacular acts of terrorism. The practitioners of this new jihad often begin with little knowledge of their own religion and its texts and are drawn by a desire for violence, destruction, and revenge. This desire coincides with one of the most shocking aspects of the new jihad, its promotion of suicide and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, including women and children, actions that the classical doctrine generally condemns and that have appeared in Islamic history only in marginal episodes.

As fundamentalists, these practitioners of the new jihad have little interest in what has happened since the mid–seventh century; when they look to the past, it is mostly to the Prophet's Medina and the earliest Islam. For these and other reasons, while it is certainly useful for us to know about the classical doctrine and about the long, complex history of the jihad within Islamic societies, one must not think that such knowledge will on its own lead to an understanding of the circumstances and conditions of the new, global jihad. These must be sought first of all in the world of the twenty-first century.