Bill Buckley on Jihad
Bill Buckley mentioned Islam in his pieces in the National Review less than half a dozen times from the magazine’s founding in 1955 through 9-11; market demand for such discussions was lower back then. We find him today discussing the book, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror.
“The question of offensive jihad is … complex and controversial,” writes Habeck. “The most widely respected Islamic authorities … all assume that Muslims have a duty to spread the dominion of Islam, through military offensives, until it rules the world. By the ‘dominion of Islam’ these authorities did not mean that everyone in the world must convert to Islam, since they also affirmed that ‘there is no compulsion in religion,’ rather that every part of the Earth must come under Islamic governance and especially the rule of the sharia.
“Azzam’s definition of offensive jihad (Azzam is the principal modern theorist of militant Islam) follows this traditional understanding of jihad, noting that it is a duty for the leader of the Muslims ‘to assemble and send out an army unit into the land of war once or twice every year.’” The jihadist is obliged to perform with all available capabilities “until there remain only Muslims or people who submit to Islam.”
The author reminds us that Azzam’s explanation of offensive jihad is “a recounting of the interpretations of the most respected traditional Islamic authorities. To deny this fact would be to deny one of the main reasons that jihadis have gotten a hearing in so much of the Islamic world today.”
It is clearly wrong to assume that every Muslim is a jihadist. But it is also wrong to assume that every jihadist is heretical to his faith…
It’s not that Mr. Buckley has gotten an education about Jihad and Islamic fundamentalism in the last five years. (He wrote knowledgeably and with flair about the subject on August 9, 1993, some months after the first WTC bombing.) It is that the rest of us have spent the last five years catching up. We likely face a stark future; at least perhaps we shall come to face it together.