This is a serialization of the book titled ‘Crisis in Islam’. The full book and its Endnotes may be accessed at:
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I ended the previous chapter by reaching an important conclusion proven by history, which is that, since the first year of the departure of the Prophet, Muslims have accepted killing a Muslim if he/she withholds from the Caliph a camel’s tethers.
Would the observer today be surprised seeing the culture of takfir (accusations of apostasy) and murder, being revived in this horrific way, having had its foundations set since the first year after the death of the Prophet?
This is an extremely serious issue because deeming so easy the killing of a Muslim cannot but lead to the belief and conviction, apparent or hidden, that killing non-Muslims must be still easier. That is how the culture of killing in Islam began growing gradually as we will see.
As soon as the ‘wars of apostasy’ were over, Muslims began looking for new wars outside the borders of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus began the new page of ‘Islamic Invasions’ that colored the history of Islam from that day until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century.
I have already demonstrated how Muslim history glorifies ‘invasions’, to the extent that it calls the wars in which the Prophet fought in defense of the Muslims ‘invasions’ (Ghazwat). This invasion is nothing but a word of rebuke in the Qur’an, where the Almighty uses the word ‘invade’ (Ghazu) only for the unbelievers. The word was not even once used to describe the Muslim believers. How then did historians and scholars permit themselves to use this word in the biography of the Prophet?
Muslim Historians and scholars went on and borrowed another beautiful Qur’anic word ‘fat’h’ (victory) to describe Islamic invasions, alleging that the invasion by Muslims of any land is a victory from Allah. They forget that there is no relationship between the verse: “Indeed, We have given you, [O Muhammad], a clear victory, that Allah may forgive for you what preceded of your sin and what will follow and complete His favour upon you and guide you to a straight path” (Al-Fat’h 48:1-2), and the material invasion of any land, because most of them did not realize the metaphysical dimension of creation and its causation. They considered it no more than eating, drinking and fornicating, since their lives and jurisprudence only revolved around these! If what I say angers anyone, let him bring forth a single epistle from one of the Imams of jurisprudence or sects arguing the cause of the creation of Heavens and Earth, in spite of His saying: “[Those] who remember Allah while standing or sitting or [lying] on their sides and give thought to the creation of the ‘, [saying], “Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly; exalted are You [above such a thing]; then protect us from the punishment of the Fire” (Aal-Imraan 3:191). When he fails to achieve that, I will point out to him hundreds of epistles from those scholars and Imams of sects discussing purity, menstruation and ablution nullifiers, and the difference between ‘bahirah’ and ‘sa’ibah’ and similar transient mundane issues. 1 It is enough to prove their ignorance in Islam that they did not differentiate in what they wrote between the ‘soul’ and the ‘spirit’ despite the clear distinction having been made in the Qur’an! 2
Islamic invasions do not differ from any invasions in human history: Every invador claimed a reason for invading others. The invador may be truthful to himself in his claim, and he may be lying. But the result is the same in that the invador imposes his will if and when he achieves victory.
We must pause here to ponder an important issue, namely that the invasion was done in the name of religion, as it seems that almost every religion has been used as a reason for invasion, superiority and hegemony. Let the Coptic, who is partial to Islam, not say that the brutal crusader invasions of Syria were not in the name of religion: One of them wrote, no doubt viewing things with one eye, the following few lines (keeping their grammatical structure as it is):
‘Many add the Crusades to the religious wars … But they do not fulfill the specifications of the religious wars (Type III), though they were holy wars in the eyes of its followers because, in the belief of the simple Christian of Europe, they were under the protection of God (Type I). They may carry political or economic marks too, but they were not codified by a law of Christianity, and was not originally aimed at spreading Christianity, but the restoration of Christian holy lands that fell under Muslim occupation from the seventh and eighth centuries AD. ‘ 3
So how is it not but blindness of those who say that the Crusades were to restore Christian holy land that fell under Muslim occupation? Does the British from North Britain have the right to claim Jerusalem? And when did he convert to Christianity to even demand that right? And how different is this from the Muslim claiming that it is his right to guide people by the sword? And what is this wordplay in distinguishing between ‘religious’ and ‘divine’ wars to negate aggression from the actions of the Crusades? Every invasion in history is an aggression that aims at subjugating others to the dominance of the invador. Any justification otherwise is mere nonsense! It may be appropriate to remind people that what the Crusaders did in Syria when they violated it is many times worse than what the Muslims did when they drove them out of it. This is without mentioning the crimes the Crusaders committed against Christians along their way from Europe to the Holy Land.
Were Muslims’ wars in Syria and Iraq aggressions or guidance? No one can overlook the seriousness of such a question because it touches the foundations of inherited Islamic history upon which a great deal was built.
The answer to this question has two parts: The first deals with whether Syria and Iraq are considered part of what the Prophet was charged with in warning Mecca and those around it. The second deals with whether the Prophet was obligated to impose Islam on the Arab Jews and Christians of Iraq and Syria.
I have argued earlier that Islam came to the Arabs and the Arabs alone, just like every nation has had its own religion and a warner “And We did not send any messenger except [speaking] in the language of his people to state clearly for them, and Allah sends astray [thereby] whom He wills and guides whom He wills. And He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise” (Ibrahim 14:4). Allah identified to His Prophet the limits He assigned him from among all the prophets “That you may warn a people whose forefathers were not warned, so they are unaware” (Yaseen 36:6), defining these people when He described them: “And thus We have revealed to you an Arabic Qur’an that you may warn the Mother of Cities and those around it and warn of the Day of Assembly, about which there is no doubt. A party will be in Paradise and a party in the Blaze” (Ash-Shura 42:7). This permits a Muslim to claim that fighting the Romans and the Persians was a defensive war because the aggression originally occurred in the invasion of the land of the Arabs by the Romans and the Persians. This statement is not an attempt to find excuses, but an historical fact as the existence of the Persians and the Romans in the land of the Arabs was an aggression, and responding to it can only be through war as the Almighty decreed: ”Fighting in the sacred month is for [aggression committed in] the sacred month, and for [all] violations is legal retribution. So whoever has assaulted you, then assault him in the same way that he has assaulted you. And fear Allah and know that Allah is with those who fear Him” (Al-Baqara 2:194). Thus sending the army to Syria and Iraq was in support of the Arabs of those lands and of the implementation of Allah’s verse: “That you may warn the Mother of Cities and those around it” (Ash-Shura 42:7), as long as Mecca is the Mother of Cities, Syria and Iraq are of those cities. This is what the Prophet did when he sent an army to aid the people of ‘Mau’ta’ in southern Syria and repel the Roman aggression. And before his death, the Prophet appointed Osama Ibn Zaid Ibn Hāritha to lead the army and repel the aggression again and avenge the death of his father Zaid Ibn Hāritha, Ja’far Ibn Abi Tālib, Abdullāh Ibn Rawāhah and other martyred believers before Khālid Ibn Al-Walid retreated with a defeated Muslim army! 4
However, the conclusion regarding the permissibility of fighting the Romans and the Persians in Syria and Iraq does not answer the second part, namely: Does fighting them lead to imposing Islam on the people of the Book in those two countries or simply to invite them to it? This question is inseparable from the question that has already been put regarding whether the Prophet had been assigned to impose Islam on Christians and Jews of the Arabian Peninsula who were in the Medina or Mecca or Yemen. I have previously answered this question by concluding that the Prophet did not call Jews or Christians in Arabia to Islam. When some of the Christians of Najrān converted, they did that voluntarily after arguing with the Prophet and not because of any invitation or call from Him or offer to them the three options as happened during Muslim invasions. Even if He were to call the Jews and the Christians of the Arabian Peninsula to Islam, he would have done so as his Lord ordered him to “Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good instruction, and argue with them in a way that is best. Indeed, your Lord is most knowing of who has strayed from His way, and He is most knowing of who is [rightly] guided” (An-Nahl 16:125), not by the sword!
Furthermore, the Muslim wars in Syria and Iraq were characterized by a principle unknown to Muslims during the time of the Prophet, which was to offer the three options of Islam, jizya or death. I am unable to accurately determine who instituted this military rule that has become the norm of all Muslim invasions since then. 5 I am not convinced that it was the Prophet who did so as there is not one single historical record of Him having imposed this rule or collected it from the Jews of Medina. This is not important for this work, but what is important is the legal ground on which the author of this rule relied, and how this rule was applied to the invaded land.
Any reader of history, not necessarily a scholar or a researcher, would stop to ask a very simple question: How can any people respond to the demand of an army standing on its borders, asking them to choose between a book whose language is unknown to them, or between paying a tax if they refused, or to be killed if they refused the previous two options? In other words, is it not equally ridiculous to expect people to accept that Muslims have given the others real options before fighting them, when they offered them to choose between similar options while their armies were standing on the borders of their towns and villages?
We must first consider the jizya (tribute) and its imposition. The first thing a reader of history would face is that the word jizya came only once in the Qur’an in the verse:
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Book – until they give the jizya willingly while they are humbled” (At-Tawba 9:29):
The tribute (jizya) is not a punishment, as some may believe, and it originates from the Arabic verb ‘Jazya’ to mean ‘reward’. It is a tax denoting a ‘personal tax’. Thus when the Holy Qur’an mentioned it in relation to non-Muslims that one time, Arab dictionaries inserted the new meaning to say that: ‘Jizya is what is collected from non-Muslims’; a new use that was not known before Islam. Thus it emerges that one of the meanings of jizya is the tax imposed on the People of the Book in contrast to zakāt which was imposed on Muslims.
If it were so, why didn’t the Prophet impose jizya on the Jews of Medina, if we consider only the Jews and not the Christians? The Prophet established his rule n Medina in the first year of hijra (migration) and Jews lived with Muslims for several years before they were evicted. Wouldn’t it have been expected of the Prophet to impose jizya on the Jews if it were a Divine Order, like those who came after the Prophet claimed it to be?
The only reason for the Prophet’s abstention from imposing jizya is his accurate reading of the verse on its imposition. For whoever looks closely would notice that the Almighty mentioned fighting People of the Book in certain instances identified by the verse, namely: “They do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day, and they do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful, and they do not adopt the religion of truth.” However, we cannot read this verse without being governed by the eternal prohibition of aggression in the verse: “Do not transgress. Allah does not like transgressors” (Al-Baqara 2:190). The conclusion from all this is that the Almighty addressed Muslims telling them that: You will be called to fight some of the People of the Book attacking you, and they will attack you because they do not believe in Allah or the Last Day. “They are not [all] the same; among the People of the Book is a community standing [in obedience], reciting the verses of Allah during periods of the night and prostrating [in prayer]“ (Aal-Imran 3:113). If they do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, they will assault you, and then you should fight them until they submit by paying the tax. This must be the reason why the Prophet did not impose the jizya on Medina’s Jews, because he did not find them fighting or disbelieving in Allah and the Last Day. Had he found that from them and not imposed jizya, he would have disobeyed his Lord, and that is utterly excluded, for he is the infallible!
It is clear from the above argument that the imposition of jizya on the People of the Book is neither normal nor automatically applicable to every non-Muslim not embracing Islam, but that conditions of the previous verse should be fulfilled before imposing jizya. If those conditions are not met, then jizya may not be imposed.
It also appears from the foregoing that the three options have nothing to do with religion at all; they are neither from the Qur’an nor from the Prophet’s legacy or Sunnah. It would not be proper for anyone to say that he had heard the Prophet calling for taking jizya from People of the Book, because a saying like this is not based on facts and is no more than artificial interpretation and may even be an invention. Had the Prophet wanted to impose jizya on all the People of the Book who did not convert to Islam, he would have done that in his lifetime. Not having done that does not give anyone after him the right to do that, and claim that it was Allah’s order. It may be understandable that a Muslim ruler finds it necessary to impose taxes on his non-Muslim subjects, but he should not say that it is from the code of Islam, which was brought by the Prophet and ordered by the Lord!
I know that more than one person will raise the question that many ask: How would Islam have spread if invasions of lands outside the Arabian Peninsula did not take place, starting from Syria and Iraq through Iran, Turkey, India and North Africa to Spain? The answer to this question has two approaches: Metaphysical and realistic. The metaphysical says that if Allah willed that Islam spreads, it would spread whether or not invasions took place. Judaism reached all corners of the world without many wars. Christianity had spread in an area wider than Islam with fewer religious wars. The realistic answer stands before our eyes, because the number of people, who converted to Islam without war, is larger than the number of those who converted with war. Muslims today outside the areas invaded by force is larger than the number of Muslims in the land occupied by the sword. Indonesia, for example, which is the largest Muslim country by population, converted to Islam and remained Muslim without a single Muslim soldier having invaded it. Although Muslims settled in Spain for eight hundred years, when they were forced out of it, not a single Muslim house remained, not even out of prudence! What remained were palaces and an architectural style.
Thus, we find that Muslim invasions outside the Arabian Peninsula were political acts, above all, which may have served political Islam, but it was neither the command of Allah nor guided by the legacy of His Prophet. If it is so, we must ask: were all of the People of the Book killed during the wars of Syria, Iraq and Spain among those whom Allah described as not believing in Allah and the Last Day, and who did not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful? How was that established before killing them?
The invasion of Syria and Iraq, and the invention of the options of Islam, jizya or death were not in themselves only serious and important, but their importance and seriousness increase when we realize that they have become the Law of Islam from that day to our time. The scholars gave themselves the authority of making them juristic rules, making it legal to kill non-Muslims, and legal to kill a Muslim apostate, and legal to exact tributes from the People of the Book. These prerogatives, like many others, which constituted Islamic Shari’a, lack any Qur’anic bases upon which they can rely. 6 However, the scholars interpreted them in many ways. Some of them argued on the basis of the biography of a companion, claiming it to be right since that companion must have been right. Others reverted to analogy (Qiyas), despite all the dangers of analogy, because the devil used analogy, and made a mistake and entered hell. 7 And some of them used independent judgement, which is subject to error. I have no objection to any of this, as I am not against being guided by the conduct of the companions, and I’m not against the analogy of the scholar, nor am I against independent judgement. But I am against those who claim that these are the laws of Allah and offer them to Muslims as such, because they are man-made and must be presented as such. They may conform to the laws of Allah, which only He knows, and may not conform. But we do not always know the essence of His laws, and we should not claim that of which we are ignorant!
I cannot recall how often I have found myself amazed hearing an educated Arab Muslim insisting that there is a verse in the Qur’an that orders the stoning of the old adulterer man and the old adulteress woman. 8 If the learned Arab believed in the practices invented by Muslims as the laws of Allah, despite being in contradiction with text of the Qur’an, without bothering to search the Qur’an in his hands, then what would a Muslim who cannot read or write do? How did these principles, instituted by scholars and historians as the Divine Law, affect the formulation of Islamic Thought for fourteen centuries?
I intend to show in the next chapter, and before moving on to the internationalization of the culture of killing outside the land of the Arabs, the role played by the invented Shari’a in the formation of Islamic thought.