Jihad, sovereignty and jurisdiction

Jihad is in the eye of the beholder! To a great extent this phrase reflects the current state of the attempts to answer the question of what is jihad as understood from the Islamic normative sources and/or as practised by Muslims throughout Islamic history. As an Islamic doctrine, jihad developed in the earliest Islamic formative periods with the aim of fulfilling certain objectives in specific contexts or, put differently, in response to certain contexts. Since jihad (literally struggle, exerting effort) must be fī sabīl Allah (in the path of God), namely to struggle to achieve an objective that is desirable to God, it has theological, legal and ethical aspects, not necessarily separated, but even generally intertwined. Achieving such objectives could be done spiritually/peacefully (al-jihād al-akbar, the greater jihad) or violently (al-jihād al-aṣghar, the lesser jihad), and individually or collectively. In the Qurʾan, derivatives of jihad occur 41 times both during the Meccan and Medinan periods and only 12 occurrences refer to fighting contexts. ¹ In the Meccan period, Muslims lived as a persecuted religious minority who were unable to practise their religion freely and were not permitted to use force as a means of self-defence. But after the Muslims’ hijra (flight) to Medina, jihad in the sense of an armed struggle was permitted to the persecuted Muslim community against their enemies and within a little over a decade of Prophet Muhammad’s life in Medina, the use of jihad as a defensive war helped the survival of the nascent Islamic state established by the Prophet in Medina. In a word, in this formative period, the Prophet’s lifetime, the incidents of jihad fī sabīl Allah in the sense of an armed struggle were used merely as a defensive war. However, this chapter argues that a core factor that lies in the heart of the Sunni classical and some modern Muslim jurists’ discussions of the doctrine of jihad during both the second formative period (the first four centuries of the Islamic era) and the post-colonial era is the implementation and application of Islamic law. Therefore, the overarching factor in the twofold or tripartite divisions of the world devised by the classical Muslim jurists and one of the main duties of the establishment of the institution of the caliphate is the application of Islamic law. This factor gives new parameters to the study of the Islamic tradition of war and indicates the significance of the contemporary calls for the establishment of the Islamic state/caliphate.