I finally got around, over the weekend, to reading a book that’s been in my library (and on my reading list) for a number of years now. Here’s a passage from it with which, for what it’s worth, I wholeheartedly agree:
“Seen in this way, are these jihadists of today the direct heirs of the raiders and ghazis of the ‘Abbasid, Ottoman, and other premodern Islamic empires and states? For a number of reasons, the answer seems to be ‘no.’ To begin with, they do not follow the classical rules (ahkam) that prohibit, for instance, the deliberate killing of noncombatants, especially women and children — rules that the ghazis of old actually followed more often than not — and also outlaw suicide. Furthermore, in pre-modern Islam, while many military campaigns and expeditions were conducted solely for the purpose of depredation and destruction, the possibility of conquest was always present, even if only as an ideal. Today’s jihadists, by contrast, seem to have no program of conquest, or to put it in more acceptable terms for today, no viable, practical project of building a new state and a new society. Finally, the contemporary jihadists, like all fundamentalists, express little interest in what went on in the Islamic world under the ‘Abbasids or the Ottomans. Instead, they concentrate mainly on Muhammad’s Medina and on the period immediately afterward. For all these reasons, the link between the classical ghazis and the contemporary jihadists is problematic at best.”
Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 171-172
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