Bin Laden's idea of 'jihad' is out of bounds

Bin Laden's idea of 'jihad' is out of bounds,
Muslim Scholars say:

Saturday, September 22, 2001

By RICHARD N. OSTLING
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The concept of jihad has many shades of meaning, but the way Osama bin Laden has applied it to political violence has moved beyond the bounds of Islamic teaching on warfare, scholars say.

"Everybody who has war experience understands that sometimes civilians are going to be killed during legitimate military action," says John Kelsay, religion chairman at Florida State University and the author of "Islam and War." "But direct, intentional targeting of civilians is just off the charts."

While bin Laden, Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and other Muslims have used the term jihad to mean "holy war," Cambridge University scholar Akbar Ahmed writes that "in fact jihad means struggle and there are various forms of it; physical confrontation is just one."

The phrase "holy war" does not appear in the Quran, (also spelled Koran), the Muslim holy book, says Jamal Badawi of St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Badawi contends the phrase does not even make sense because Islam regards war as a necessary evil, not something that is holy in itself.

Muslims say the "greater jihad" is the personal "struggle with one's lower nature, the tendency to do wrong," while external struggles are merely the "lesser jihad," according to Jane I. Smith, co-director of the Islamic studies center at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The lesser jihad includes spreading the faith through persuasion and work for social justice, as well as warfare.

Islam has never been a pacifist creed. Unlike Jesus or Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad was at times a military leader.

But in the legal traditions of the Sunni branch, which dominates in most places except Iran, combat must be undertaken for the right reasons -- similar to those in Christianity's "just war" tradition -- ordered by competent authority and conducted through moral means.

On the means of warfare, one key text is the farewell instructions of Muhammad's immediate successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, as his army headed for Syria.

He forbade the killing of children, women, the aged and the clergy, which is understood to mean protection for all civilians.