An interesting article, you need to be registered to access the web site. Anyway I am tired of people bashing Jihad, without knowing what it means. Excerpts pasted below
Reza Shah-Kazemi
The second in a two part series exploring Jihad, at the heart of which is a refusal to embrace barbarity
Islam was never considered the messianic fulfilment of Judaism, as was Christianity; it was put forward as a restoration of that primordial Abrahamic faith of which both Judaism and Christianity were alike expressions
he great tragedy of the current conflict in Palestine is that the Quranic spirit of tolerance, understanding and justice is being subverted by the obnoxious propaganda of the ‘ Jihadists’– by whom we mean those who justify, in Islamic terms, suicide missions aimed at civilians. Not only does this give ready ammunition to those who see Islam as an inherently intolerant and violent religion, as the source of terrorism and as the real enemy, it also contaminates all of those authentic means of expressing grievance, of redressing wrongs, of resisting oppression, that are available in the juridical system of Islam, means which express the spirit of the Islamic revelation. While there are atrocities being carried out on the Palestinian people, it is absolutely essential that we realise that at the heart of Jihad is a refusal to embrace barbarity, even when one is the victim of it.
In the recent past, this principle was perfectly exemplified in the conduct of the Emir Abd al-Qadir, leader of the Algerian Muslims in their heroic resistance to French colonial aggression between 1830 and 1847. The French were guilty of the most barbaric crimes in their ‘ mission civilisatrice’; the Emir responded not with bitter vengefulness and enraged fury but with dispassionate propriety and principled warfare. At a time when the French were indiscriminately massacring entire tribes, when they were offering their soldiers a ten-franc reward for every pair of Arab ears, and when severed Arab heads were regarded as trophies of war, the Emir showed his refusal to stoop to the level of his ‘civilised’ adversaries, by issuing the following edict:
Every Arab who captures alive a French soldier will receive as reward eight douros…Every Arab who has in his possession a Frenchman is bound to treat him well and to conduct him to either the Khalifa or the Emir himself, as soon as possible. In cases where the prisoner complains of ill treatment, the Arab will have no right to any reward.
When asked what the reward was for a severed French head, the Emir replied: twenty-five blows of the baton on the soles of the feet. When he was finally defeated and brought to France, before being exiled to Damascus, the Emir received hundreds of French admirers who had heard of his bravery and his nobility; the visitors by whom he was most deeply touched, though, were French officers who came to thank him for the treatment they received at his hands when they were his prisoners in Algeria.
The Emir was an embodiment of tolerance and compassion for all, irrespective of their faith. This is clear in the Emir’s famous defence of the Christians in Damascus in 1860. Now defeated and in exile, the Emir spent his time praying and teaching. When civil war broke out between the Druzes and the Christians in the Lebanon, the Emir heard that there were signs of an impending attack on the Christians of Damascus. He wrote letters to all the Druze shaykhs, requesting them not to “make offensive movements against a place with the inhabitants of which you have never before been at enmity”. The Emir’s letters proved to no avail. When the Druzes were approaching the Christian quarters of the city, the Emir confronted them, urging them to observe the rules of religion and human justice:
“What,” they shouted, “you, the great slayer of Christians, are you come out to prevent us from slaying them in our turn? Away!”
“If I slew the Christians,” he shouted in reply, “it was ever in accordance with our law — the Christians who had declared war against me, and were arrayed in arms against our faith.”
This had no effect upon the mob. In the end, the Emir and his small band of followers sought out the terrified Christians, giving them refuge, first in his own home, and then, as the numbers grew, in the citadel. It is estimated that the Emir saved no less than fifteen thousand Christians. It is difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than that between the Emir’s conduct and the present self-styled mujâhidîn, who indiscriminately portray the West as the enemy, and perpetrate correspondingly illegitimate acts against Westerners.
It was the honourable conduct of Muslim armies and this spirit of tolerance, that led to the spread of Islam. This is in contrast to the still prevalent misconception that Islam was spread by the sword. The military campaigns and conquests of the Muslim armies were on the whole carried out in such an exemplary manner that the conquered peoples became attracted by the religion which so impressively disciplined its armies, and whose adherents so scrupulously respected the principle of freedom of worship. Paradoxically, the very freedom and respect given by the Muslim conquerors to believers of different faith-communities intensified the process of conversion to Islam.
A telling mass conversion of Christians to Islam took place, as a direct result of the exercise of the cardinal Muslim virtue of compassion. A Christian monk, Odo of Deuil, has bequeathed to history a valuable record of the events, being openly antagonistic to the Islamic faith, his account is all the more reliable. After being defeated by the Turks in Phyrgia in 543/1147, the remnants of Louis VII’s army, together with a few thousand pilgrims, reached the port of Attalia. The sick, the wounded and the pilgrims had to be left behind by Louis, who gave his Greek allies 500 marks to take care of these people until reinforcements arrived. The Greeks stole away with the money, abandoning the pilgrims and the wounded to the ravages of starvation and disease, fully expecting those who survived to be finished off by the Turks. However, when the Turks arrived and saw the plight of the defenceless pilgrims, they took pity on them, fed and watered them, and tended to their needs. This act of compassion resulted in the wholesale conversion of the pilgrims to Islam. Odo comments:
Avoiding their co-religionists who had been so cruel to them, they went in safety among the infidels who had compassion upon them … Oh kindness more cruel than all treachery! They gave them bread but robbed them of their faith, though it is certain that, contented with the services they [the Muslims] performed, they compelled no one among them to renounce his religion.
The last point is crucial in respect of two key Islamic principles: that no one is ever to be forced into converting to Islam and that virtue must be exercised with no expectation of reward. On the one hand, There is no compulsion in religion (II: 256); and on the other, the righteous are those who feed, for love of Him, the needy, the orphan, the captive, [saying] we feed you only for the sake of God; we desire neither reward nor thanks from you. (LXXVI: 8-9)
So from one Pakistani discussion board on the 'net, you go to 100 million people in the entire Muslim world. i’ll have to give you credit for a creative imagination but that’s about all.