Jihad In Islam — Myth and Reality

By Bassam Javed
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Courtesy Of "The International"

Today, the Muslim world faces a dilemma removing misconceptions about Islam. The process is becoming more and more difficult as the western media continues to hype non-events and minor incidents and concoct conspiracies to malign Islam and the Muslims. The stereotypes in the western media that implicate Islam and the Muslims in every act of terror around the world expose their deep rooted prejudice and ignorance about the Muslims and the religion of Islam. Their linking of Muslims to every act of terror and dubbing them as extremists or terrorists misleads their masses and widens the gap between societies and religions.

The biggest misconception that the western media spreads relates to is Jihad, which literally means struggle in the path of Godí. The word has on many occasions been taken out of context to propagate negative views on Islam.

After subduing communism, the guns have now been trained on Islam and the phenomenon of Jihad. Jihad is being projected in a distorted manner and the Muslims as fanatics and terrorists. It is that the way Jihad is being perceived and portrayed in the western world as references are made from contemporary journalistic material. In the present-day world around us, we can observe a strange phenomenon wherein one country strives for ascendancy over another through exploitation of the religions and their manifestations. The analyses of trends of negativity being projected about Islam and the Muslims by the western media provide credentials to the theory that there is dire need for the west to get educated on the religion of Islam and its contents and manifestations. Today, wherever conflicts are taking place wherein one party is Muslim, the conflict depicts the regional power struggle or the overtones of religious conflict between Islam and the other religions. To name a few conflict-stricken areas, Kashmir, Palestine, Kosovo, Chechnya and a few others may be cited, where one party is always Muslim. In the endeavour to preserve the sanctity of Islam, the conflicts turn into resolute struggles and acquire the characters of Jihad (holy struggle).

Jihad is a much wider concept. The religious connotation of the word is strife or struggle. Jihad is multi-faceted. At the very basic level, it means struggling against instincts within oneself that militate against the following of basic tenants of Islam. Secondly, it directs Muslims to enjoin the good and forbid the evil. In fact, this is a universal message for everybody and even the Quran directs its followers to respect Christians and Jews as they are followers of holy books. Thirdly, Jihad also means struggle against aggression and oppression. Wherever there is oppression, injustice, denial of rights or of the freedom to practice religion, struggle against these is also jihad. The tools employed against Jihad are no different than those employed by western powers against the weaker powers; however they are given the name of sanctions. The tools such as diplomacy, politics, economic pressures, etc. so often used by the west are also the tools used against jihad. Jihad is waged against the aggressor and the oppressor. Killing of innocent people including children, women, the sick and the elderly in the name of jihad is simply not permitted by the Muslim religion. Jihad encompasses much more than the ëwaging of holy warsí as resorting to the same is limited and very well defined in Islam. Islam propagates harmony and peace, contrary to popular western belief, and is not a religion of war.

If we examine recent history, the areas of conflict wherein the armed forces or the people took to jihad, like Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, a number of common factors emerge from these conflicts. The first factor is aggression or oppression against Muslims. In each of these conflicts, be it Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir or Palestine, the Muslim communities were forced to take up arms against aggression. They were either invaded without provocation or subjected to brutal oppression that forced them to fight back. In some of the cases even genocide was carried out. Had they not been obliged to take up arms to defend themselves, their rights and freedom would have been usurped. Indian State terrorism against the people of Kashmir with frequent rapes of their women, Israeli intransigence in refusing Palestinian rights, Russian repression against the Chechens, and so on, are some of the black incidents wherein those at the receiving end had to fight for defence of their religion.

Seeing the resolute belief in Jihad of the followers of Islam, some foreign elements have started exploiting its spirit for their own nefarious designs. Jihad is also at times exploited by militant groups independently of their respective countriesí official policies. Jihad can be declared only by an Islamic state and not by religious or militant groups. What is jihad carried out for? It is for freedom, for an end to occupation, and for response to aggression. Islamic history tells us that jihad never seeks to occupy othersí territories or to employ force to spread Islam.

The image of armed jihad is very different to the one that is often portrayed in the western media. With the clock ticking away, the gap between the reality and the image is being constantly being widened, courtesy the western press. Sometimes, the distortion of the same is so obvious and deliberate to portray jihad as ëIslamic fundamentalismí. The mantra of the terminology draws sympathy from international community as a threat to global security. When it comes to Islam the masses forget that every religion has fundamentalists. Some of the radical states like Israel and India have been successful in enlisting global support for the conflicts that they are engaged in and the ones that are essentially of their own making.

In their respective cases it is Kashmir and Palestine. They successfully exploit the western media for publishing their version of the conflict whereas the version of the ones that are striving through jihad to resist the dominance of the aggressors, dose not find a place in any of the international publishing house. The exploitation by the western media with its distorted reporting has done a great harm to the image of Islam and the concept of Jihad especially through routine stereotyping of the Muslims as being bad guys. In the Bosnian conflict it was commonly reported that ëthe Bosnians are being killed by Serbiansí but never reported as ëthe Muslims are being killed by Christiansí. This is the dangerous path the west has embarked upon to malign Islamic tenets that may one day create havoc when these conflicts would turn into major wars fought on religion basis. Let us all hope and pray that time remains a mirage.