I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy)
—Islam’s prophet Muhammad, as recorded in the most important collection of Muhammad’s “traditions,” Sahih Bukhari,Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220
ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not Islamic
—Barack Obama, September 10, 2014
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There is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad despite the surfeit of contemporary apologetics. Dr. Tina Magaard—a Sorbonne-trained linguist specializing in textual analysis—published detailed research findings in 2005 (summarized in 2007) comparing the foundational texts of ten major religions. Magaard concluded from her hard data-driven analyses:
The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree [emphasis added]. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with.
For example, in her 2007 essay “Fjendebilleder og voldsforestillinger i islamiske grundtekster” [“Images of enemies and conceptions of violence in Islamic core scriptures”], Magaard observed,
There are 36 references in the Koran to expressions derived from the root qa-ta-la, which indicates fighting, killing or being killed. The expressions derived from the root ja-ha-da, which the word jihad stems from, are more ambiguous since they mean “to struggle” or “to make an effort” rather than killing. Yet almost all of the references derived from this root are found in stories that leave no room for doubt regarding the violent nature of this struggle. Only a single ja-ha-da reference (29:6) explicitly presents the struggle as an inner, spiritual phenomenon, not as an outwardly (usually military) phenomenon. But this sole reference does not carry much weight against the more than 50 references to actual armed struggle in the Koran, and even more in the Hadith.
Consistent with Magaard’s textual analysis, the independent study of Australian linguist and renowned Arabic to English translator, Paul Stenhouse, claimed the root of the word jihad appears forty times in the Koran. With four exceptions, Stenhouse maintained, all the other thirty-six usages in the Koran, and in subsequent Islamic understanding to both Muslim luminaries—the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam—and to ordinary people, meant and means, as described by the seminal Arabic lexicographer, E. W. Lane: “He fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like.” A concordant modern Muslim definition, relevant to both contemporary jihadism and its shock troop “mujahideen” [holy warriors; see just below], was provided at the “Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research,” at Al Azhar University— in 1968, by Muhammad al-Sobki:
[T]he words Al Jihad, Al Mojahadah, or even “striving against enemies” are equivalents and they do not mean especially fighting with the atheists . . . they mean fighting in the general sense.
Data for 2012 from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) were released December 19, 2013. Gary LaFree, START director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, highlighted the report’s most salient finding: the “incredible growth” in jihad terror attacks perpetrated by “al-Qaeda affiliates.” START identified the six most lethal jihad terror groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and the death tolls these organizations had inflicted during 2012, as follows: the Taliban (more than 2,500 fatalities), Boko Haram (more than 1,200 fatalities), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (more than 960 fatalities), Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (more than 950 fatalities), al-Qaeda in Iraq (more than 930 fatalities) and al-Shabaab (more than 700 fatalities). These attacks, as the START report acknowledged, were intrinsic to a broader phenomenon—the emergence of jihad terrorism emanating from the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa, as the predominant form of global terrorism, since the 1990s.
Another macabre tally—updated almost daily—is being kept assiduously in cyberspace: the number of attacks committed by jihad terrorists since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on September 11, 2001. This grisly compilation is if anything a conservative estimate of jihad-related carnage— murder and severe morbidity—because it doesn’t include combat-related statistics per se, or the death toll increases during the days or months after any given attack (as victims die from their injuries). As of September 11, 2014, this grim count is approaching 24,000.
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism ” (Prometheus, November, 2008)
You can contact Dr. Bostom at info[@]andrewbostom.org
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