By Suzanne Schneider

I was in my first weeks of college in New York City when the Twin Towers came down, a transplant from rural South Dakota who had never met a Muslim in my life, or at least that I was aware of. Islam was neither part of my material world nor conceptual reality, but soon—like the dust that settled eerily over the city that fall—its terms were everywhere. We were told that Al Qaeda had launched a jihad against America, and academics, retired intelligence officers, and terrorism experts lined up to explain to the mourning public precisely what that meant. We were told it was a holy war, a culturally specific and exotic phenomenon that was central to Islam. Scholars did their best to explain that the term jihad could and did mean many things related to the struggle for truth; they offered lessons in etymology and recounted a hadith in which Muhammad told his warriors that the lesser jihad is against the enemy, and the greater one against one’s own ego and desires. Even so, the general sense was that jihad was something that Muslims did for which we Westerners had no equivalent, and that we should approach it in theological rather than political terms.

Much has happened in the intervening fifteen years, but the emergence of a diverse new crop of militant groups, often with quite different aims, has not served to nuance our public thinking about the contemporary intersection between Islam and violence. Rather, Americans now face what seem to be an endless list of “jihadi” organizations, a sea of interchangeable acronyms that are all associated with terrorism. Much is lost in this blanket treatment – not only about the characteristics and aims of different, sometimes oppositional groups, but about jihad itself, whose one-dimensional association with “religious” violence or “holy war” does us a great disservice in trying to assess what the heck is going on in large swaths of the world.

In this article, the final installment of a three-part series on religious violence, I would like to suggest an alternate framework for grappling with what can sometimes seem like an unending stream of attacks, one that breaks away from the two most popular narratives: 1. That Islam is the problem, duh; or 2. That Islam is innocent because the underlying causes of violence are not truly religious, but rather socio-economic and political in nature. I find that both explanations are fraught with theoretical and empirical shortcomings.

On the one hand, those who favor theological explanations are unable to provide an account for the sudden proliferation of militant groups and insurgencies over the last three decades. If Islam is the problem, shouldn’t it always have been a problem? Conversely the materialist explanation—for which I have far greater sympathy—often comes tinged with apologetics in its suggestion that “genuine” Islam is something apart from practices associated with militants. In short, it asks that we do not take radical groups seriously when they explain their actions in a theological register, or worse, assert that theirs is just another case of false consciousness. In both explanations “Islam” remains a remarkably discrete, timeless, and conceptually stable entity rather than a materially and historically embedded one.

I argued in the second installment of this series that the tendency to view religion in these terms actually unites peoples with otherwise differing views on just about everything—ranging from Bill Maher to the Breitbart crew to President Obama himself. As Elayne Oliphant has recently noted, this unexpected overlap is symptomatic of a larger divide that separates public and academic treatments of religion, with the former generally assigning to “religion” some sort of conceptual fixity that scholars dedicate their careers to disputing. Thus unlike critical insights about race, gender, and sexuality that originated in academic settings and have slowly (albeit unevenly) found their way into mainstream thinking, public discussions about religion seem incredibly simplistic. Moreover, the dangers associated with this fact are not the stuff of scholastic hair-splitting, but rather relate to whether the United States or “the West” is at war with “Islam” and if so, how many ground troops we should send to which countries.

As a result, we have collectively spilled far too much ink debating the “religious” credentials of ISIS/Boko Haram/al-Shabbab/et al. and far too little trying to understand why, at this particular moment in time, they have come into existence. After all, the text of the Qur’an has been established for nearly 1400 years, and many commentaries about jihad date from the medieval period. Why then have we witnessed a surge of violence over the last three decades, often directed against civilians, justified through reference to these texts? Those who would argue that fanaticism is an inherent or stable component of Islam are unable to answer this question. This fact should point to the inadequacy of any attempt to account for contemporary violence as something wholly internal to the tradition or distinct from the larger conditions of modernity. In what follows I will try to sketch, in broad outlines, what a historically-oriented theory of contemporary Islamic violence might look like – and importantly, what becomes visible when we rethink jihad in more familiar terms.

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It has become something of a platitude to note that humans possess both an unquenchable thirst for “lessons” from history on one hand, and remarkably short historical memories on the other. For those of us whose adulthood has been shaped by the events of September 11, 2011, it may seem as though Islamic violence is a lasting feature of human existence. Yet for most of the 20^th century, this was not the case. My own research about religious education in Mandatory Palestine has revealed that, if anything, Islam was felt by many to represent a useful tool for cultivating civic obedience and fostering social and political stability. With this perspective in mind, what I find most remarkable about the current situation is the emergence of so many Islamic militant groups within a relatively concentrated period of time, beginning in the end of the twentieth century and continuing to the present. Here we can look not only to Islamic Jihad (est. 1979), al-Qaeda (1988), al-Shabaab (whose parent organization, the Islamic Courts Union, dates to the late 1990’s), or ISIS, but to the dizzying array of lesser-known groups that have been created in the last few years.

One of the best ways to understand the scale of this phenomenon is to visualize it. The Mapping Militant Organizations (MMO) project at Stanford University enables us to do so, at least for certain conflict regions. For example, they have charted the emergence of militant groups in Pakistan from 1950 (i.e. its first years of independence) to the present. Leaving aside the student wing of Pakistan’s major political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, the first group that makes a blip on the radar is the Balochistan Liberation Front (founded in 1964 and modeled along the lines of more familiar movements like the PLO), which MMO describes as “ethno-nationalist separatist military organization that is currently fighting against the Pakistani government for an independent Balochi state.” For anyone who lived through the 1960’s and 1970’s, this should sound familiar, and possibly even quaint given the situation today.

Things begin to change noticeably in the 1980’s with the emergence of a number of organizations that drew upon the language of Islam (e.g. Harakat ul-Jihadi al-Islami, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen) to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan on one hand, and against Indian control of Kashmir on the other. The upward trend continues through the 1990’s and then seems to explode during the first decade of the 21^st century, with approximately a dozen new groups founded since 2000. It is important to note that many militant groups currently operating in Pakistan were created as paramilitary forces to fight the Soviet Union and India, which gestures at the fact that the state, either explicitly or tacitly, ceded its own right to monopolize violence within its territorial boundaries. And indeed, if we consider the outlying areas that remained largely in control of semi-autonomous tribes, it becomes clear that the state never actually achieved this benchmark to begin with. As we will see, this is far from an incidental detail.

MMO charts similar phenomena in other countries as well, including Iraq and Syria. In both countries, the militant groups that operated prior to the 1980’s were affiliated with the struggle for an independent Kurdistan, but things change radically following the U.S. invasion in 2003, and the Arab Spring in 2011. In the Iraqi context, insurgent groups that deployed the language of Islam proliferated, yet their immediate goal was ridding Iraq of foreign troops. In Syria, the civil war has spawned over two-dozen new militant groups of various ideological persuasions, many of which are explicitly Islamist in outlook.

In interpreting this data, we might be tempted to attribute the proliferation of Islamic militant groups to the menacing “return of religion,” wherein the secular promise of an earlier time has been overrun. The idea of this return has been thoroughly dismantled by scholars (present company included), and seems to be built on the dubious assertion that Muslims were less “religious” in the past. Is this really so? From my own research, it rather seems that Muslims assumed different postures toward militancy previously than they do in many contemporary circles, which is not at all surprising if you treat religions as evolving practice rather than a fixed code of conduct or belief. Consequently, we need not set out to explain the move from secular peace to religious war, but the relative sway of different forms of religiosity.

An alternative way to interpret the proliferation of Islamic militant groups is sorely needed, but developing it requires first taking a detour through the concept of jihad. Insofar as we conceive of jihad as a “religious” obligation—at least in the way that Americans use the term “religion”—we miss the fact that jihad is a concept that has always been deeply entwined with politics, war, and the state, and is not a mere question of faith, religious conviction, or of an innate fanaticism to kill. As Faisal Devji has argued in his Landscapes of the Jihad:

The debate on jihad in the Muslim tradition is largely juridical in nature, concentrating upon attempts to define legitimate occasions for holy war, permitted rules of engagement and the like. There is for instance the distinction between the offensive war to spread Islam and the defensive one to protect it, as well as that between the greater or spiritual jihad against one’s own evil impulses and the lesser or military jihad against an internal enemy. For our purposes, however, what is of chief interest is the fact that this debate, like every legal discussion, is concerned primarily with the privileges of authority—in this case with reserving the jihad’s military function for the properly constituted authority of a state.[1]

One of the chief conceptual hurdles for Westerners acclimatized to conceiving of jihad in “religious” terms is that, as I detailed previously, the normative structures of the modern European state came into being through a process that involved inventing something called “religion” that would be private and peaceful while actual communities of believers were stripped of their right to use force. Only by redefining “religion” in apolitical terms could the right to violence be effectively (too effectively) concentrated in the hands of the state. Here it is useful to remember John Locke’s argument in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” that Catholics could not be tolerated because the Pope constituted a competing political sovereign who might compromise their loyalty to the state. Shades of this sentiment were still alive and well when John F. Kennedy made a campaign pit stop to assure Protestant ministers that his Catholicism did not represent a threat to national security.

The idea of jihad as a state obligation obviously reflects a very different conceptual configuration of political forms, but I would caution the reader against overstating this difference. Indeed, there is much to support the effort to familiarize jihad and situate it within the realm of Western political theory by arguing, as John Kelsay has done, that jihad should be understood an Islamic doctrine of just war. Classical texts on jihad, much like those written by Christian thinkers (Aquinas, for example), articulated a theory of just war that  assumes the existence of a state structure that is waging war on behalf of a collective, establishes the legitimate causes for war, and stipulates the rules of engagement.

Importantly, these juridical texts also specify the conditions under which this collective obligation passes to the individual, such as when the state structure is no longer operative or is unable to perform its protective function. Thus, if one lives in frontier region that has been invaded by non-Muslims, the obligation to wage jihad and defend one’s land becomes incumbent upon the individual, not merely a state-sponsored collective enterprise. In this sense, these texts have something in common with the work of later European writers like Thomas Hobbes, who argued that the individual regains his or her private right to violence if the state is no longer able to perform its protective functions. As he states in Leviathan, people enter into civil society to secure a greater chance of protection that they would enjoy the state of nature; this is the origin of the social contract. If the sovereign is no longer able to ensure this security, the subject consequently regains his or her right to private violence. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power latest, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.”[2]

By considering jihad alongside concepts like the just war and the social contract, I believe it is possible to approach the proliferation of Islamic militant groups in a very different fashion than currently prevails. If so much effort has gone into making violence the sole right of the modern state, what else can the sudden proliferation of non-state actors that appeal to Islam mean but the dissolution of the state itself? In what follows, I will briefly outline why I think that questions of individual authority and state legitimacy should be at the forefront in our attempts to understand contemporary jihad.

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It is often noted that classical Islamic theories of the state afforded rulers an extraordinary amount of power and commanded subjects to remain obedient even in the case of tyranny. The idea that individual Muslims could rebel against the authority of an unjust ruler was mostly unknown before the late 19^th century, when figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani tried to reconcile contemporary European political thought with classical Islamic theories of statehood by asserting that individuals did have the right to revolt against tyrants. Al-Afghani was one of Islam’s great liberal thinkers, and the idea as articulated here has a decidedly democratic ring. Twentieth century radicals such as Sayyid Qutb (an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood) built upon this foundation to argue that the hypocrisy and indeed, apostasy, of contemporary Muslim rulers rendered them illegitimate and unworthy of obedience. In a remarkably liberationist tone, he states that Islam:

…is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude; it is a declaration that sovereignty belongs to Allah alone and that He is the Lord of all the worlds. It means a challenge to all kinds and forms of systems which are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in other words, where man has usurped the Divine attribute…This declaration means that the usurped authority of Allah be returned to Him and the usurpers be thrown out – those who by themselves devise laws for others to follow, thus elevating themselves to the status of lords and reducing others to the status of slaves. In short, to proclaim the authority and sovereignty of Allah means to eliminate all human kingships and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth.[3]

Given such view, the reader will probably not be surprised to hear that Qutb was convicted of plotting an assassination attempt against Jamal Abdel Nasser and executed by the Egyptian state in 1966.

Written against the backdrop of state persecution, a major theme of Qtub’s seminal work, Milestones, is the essential connection between Islam and human emancipation. Here he argues that the goal of jihad is to create the conditions of human freedom so that individuals are not artificially separated from Islam by social, political, or economic structures of oppression. Only then can they said to be truly free to either accept or reject Islam, and he does not assume that everyone will or must do so. But most noteworthy for our purposes, Qutb went one step further by linking the reality of unjust human sovereignty to the question of jihad. In light of the corrupt nature of Muslim rulers, he argued that the obligation to engage in jihad shifted from the collective to the individual:

They [the scholars] all agreed unanimously that Jihad is a fard kifayah [collective duty] imposed upon the Islamic Ummah in order to spread the call of Islam, and that Jihad is a fard ‘ayn [individual duty] if an enemy attacks Muslim lands. Today, my brother, the Muslims as you know are forced to be subservient before others and are ruled by disbelievers. Our lands have been besieged, and our personal possessions, respect, honour, dignity and privacy violated. Our enemies are overlooking our affairs, and the rites of our din [religion] are under their jurisdiction…Hence in this situation it becomes the duty of each and every Muslim to make Jihad. He should prepare himself mentally and physically such that when comes the decision of Allah, he will be ready.[4]

This radical upending of the link between state authority and jihad produces a very different kind of thinking, one in which the question of individual moral agency becomes paramount. That is, in an era characterized by corrupt and despotic regimes whose hold on authority is all but guaranteed through alliances with global superpowers, jihad is what provides the true believer an avenue for ethical action.

I want to highlight this emphasis on individual action—and indeed, violence—over and above the authority of the state. If we think through this assertion in terms borrowed from political theory, contesting the state’s right to monopolize violence (jihad as collective duty) signals the breakdown of the social contract itself. Whereas the modern state has been characterized by its attempt to wrest coercive power from religious communities so that it alone can be violent, the surge in Islamic militant groups can be understood as a refusal to accept the terms of this deal. In countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq—where the state structure is in disarray and not truly sovereign over its claimed territory—the proliferation of Islamic (and other) militant groups in fact reflect the dissolution of the social contract. But in less egregious cases, such as Pakistan or Egypt, it is not the total disintegration of the state but its perceived illegitimacy that becomes relevant. Besides the rhetoric of jihad, what militants in all five countries share is a refusal to acknowledge the state’s monopoly on violence.

In a related vein, we should cast a critical glance toward the recent gathering of Sunni Muslims in Chechnya—ostensibly to define “ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama’ah,” the community of legitimate interpreters of Islam—in which participants condemned the Wahhabi variants of Islam that are associated with many militant groups. Beyond the logical and ethical inconsistencies in blaming Wahhabism for its exclusionary practices, and then claiming that its adherents are heretics who have corrupted “true” Islam, we should pay close attention to who convened this celebration of moderation: Ramzan Kadyrov, a strongman with close ties to Vladimir Putin. According to James Dorsey, other participants included Egyptian scholars (‘ulema) who support President al-Sisi, a “close confidante” of Bashar al-Assad, and the head of the Islamic Tabah Foundation, who maintains close ties to UAE Crown Prince Mohammad ibn Zayed al-Nahyan. The latter was created to help counter the influence of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars, which is widely held to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

I suppose we could look at this in celebratory terms as an instance of internal criticism, in which the Muslim community gathered to reject the politics of salafi extremism. But the shadows of Putin, al-Sisi, and al-Assad should give us pause as we ask who is interested in cultivating this “moderate” Islam and toward what end? Undermining the strength of groups that challenge the authority and legitimacy of despotic governments is a very smart political play; but it is unlikely to achieve its goal. Indeed, the more we examine the link between Islamic militancy and state authority, the harder it is to believe that states whose legitimacy has been so widely contested will ever find the “peace” they claim to seek.

Of course, the illegitimacy or disintegration of the state does not by itself explain why violence is often tied, both conceptually and materially, to Islam. Nor does it explain attacks against Western targets, though we should note that—media attention aside—most instances of Islamic violence are carried out within Muslim countries. This question deserves a more comprehensive response (I’m working on it), but here it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in many post-colonial Muslim states historically ruled by “secular” strongmen, Islam has become the politics of opposition, sometimes the only politics of opposition that could not be fully squashed – though regimes did try. Few figures bring this fact home better than the example of Sayyid Qutb addressed above.

As we saw in that discussion, thinking about jihad evolved drastically during the twentieth century against the background of political corruption. Far from representing a return to pre-modern times, contemporary calls for jihad seem to represent a mash-up of medieval commentaries about individual responsibility within the context of a disintegrating polity (i.e. during the Mongol invasion) with the wholly modern notion that a sovereign’s legitimacy is derived from the will of the governed. In this sense, contemporary jihads draw upon a certain strain of democratization, however counterintuitive that might seem. They are deeply intertwined with concerns over individual agency in the face of overwhelming systemic power, and are intimately concerned with who has the authority to be violent. And in rejecting the authority of established elites and traditional (often state-sponsored) clerics, they have a populist ring that is more suggestive of contemporary American politics than 7^th century Arabia. Is that too close to home?

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I admit that these reflections are admittedly incomplete, but I hope they are nonetheless suggestive of what an alternative treatment of Islamic violence might look like when we step away from the religion is bad/religion is good debate. In addition, and though I have not treated the issue here, we have good reason to suspect that challenges to state authority are running parallel to those directed toward another locus of traditional authority, that of the ‘ulema. Elsewhere, I have situated the current wave of Islamic violence in a “protestant” context wherein individuals dismiss the authority of ‘ulema and assert their own right to interpret shari’a. We would be well served to situate contemporary jihad in the context of these two related challenges to traditional sources of authority, whether we speak of the state’s monopoly on violence or the ‘ulema’s position as the privileged arbiter of Islamic law.

At this point in election season, I cannot with good faith claim that this populist impulse is a “Muslim world” phenomenon. Similarly, much as I would like to blame the Saudis and call it a day (though they certainly do deserve some credit), this inquiry points to a far more global renegotiation of state violence and individual agency than a Wahhabi-focused narrative allows. Rather than accepting the commonplace and even comforting notion that jihad is a throwback to medieval times, we might instead approach it as wholly symptomatic of post-modern ones.

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[1] Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 33.

[2] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 147.

[3] Sayyid Qutb, Milestones , 67.

[4] Milestones, 235.

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This is part three of a series Suzanne Schneider has written on religious violence. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

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