Jihad and Crusade

There's a long debate about the meaning of the Arabic word "jihad". Most of us know it as "holy war" although there are many other meanings.

Some have criticized those who want to put emphasis on the more nuanced, modernist, or Sufic meanings of the word. This is legitimate, but there are other meanings, and sometimes they can be more valid. I remember something Bernard Lewis wrote about an old Orientalist joke that all Arabic words have at least 5 meanings: a dictionary meaning, its opposite, a meaning to do with horses, a meaning to do with camels, and (what did the other meaning have to do with? sex maybe? - serves me right for trying to tell an old Orientalist joke on a blog. Never mind, sorry, let's just get back to my point.)

Anyway, the inherent vagueness of Arabic vocabulary, which makes the language so excellent for poetry, is a problem here. Arabic speakers are often expert at using deliberate ambiguity, and in fact that is easy to do in the language. What did any particular Arabic speaker mean by "jihad"? Perhaps they themselves weren't sure.

Another example would be the Qur'anic justification for jihad, the phrase "fitnah ashaddan min al-qatl" or "Fitna is worse than slaughter." What is fitnah? Some define it as dissent, and Muslim rulers have used this to justify capital punishment for dissidents. Other define it as oppression, and use it as a justification for social revolution. Others define it as intolerance, and combine it with the other Qur'anic phrase, "la ikrah fi'ddiin" (no compulsion in religion) as a call to religious tolerance. It may be damning with faint praise to call Islam one of the most tolerant religions of the Middle Ages, but it is still a historical fact that it was tolerant.

There are even Muslim pacifists who define fitna as nothing. I'm not a Muslim so I'm not going to tell them they are heretics. I do know enough Arabic to know that the problems inherent in semantics are doubly problematic in that language. It ain't easy learning Arabic, although I wish I had time to learn more these days.

A good parallel in English to the problem of defining "jihad" in Arabic would be the word "crusade". Historically, as with the historic meaning of the word "jihad", it meant "holy war", specifically a war called by the Pope to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. Today it has a wider range of meanings, including calls for moral reform. The similar evolution of the word "jihad" should be apparent to anyone.

But this is not meant just to exonerate Muslims from their using a deliberate, sometimes disingenuous, ambiguity. It means they must themselves give understanding if they expect to get it. When President Bush stood on the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York and called for a crusade against terror, Muslims and others jumped on him for insensitivity. Maybe so, and I certainly wouldn't want this interpreted as support of Bush, or even his faux pas, but if Muslims demand that others respect their ambiguity when they use the word "jihad" they must be prepared to extend a similar respect to the similar ambiguities in the word "crusade".

After all, Thomas Aquinas's theory of "just war" actually owed a lot to Muslim philosophers' theories of jihad. We all have more in common than many of us are inclined to believe, much less respect.