April 13, 2006

By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 13, 2006

There is an old, dry pun on the query “When is a door not a door?”—the answer being, “When it is ajar”. But dry humor is clearly preferable to deluded and dangerous censorship of the lexicon which leads to this question, and requisite answer, “When is jihad not jihad?”—“When it is spiritual struggle”. Witness the latest European Union (EU) pronouncement which advocates an exclusive definition of jihad as “spiritual struggle” in the public discourse lest the tender sensibilities of Muslims be offended. According to the wise and courageous EU leadership, non-Muslim Dorothys and Scarecrows and Tin Men and most appropriately, Cowardly Lions, should simply ignore the jihadists fulminating behind their civilizational veil, endlessly invoking an authentic and uniquely Islamic institution—jihad war—which has shaped human history for over 13 centuries, through the present. And they will be rewarded for this polite obliviousness to such ceaseless calls for (and resultant acts aimed at) their destruction, by the massive efforts of otherwise marginalized moderate Muslims struggling—indeed “jihading”—so desperately, so “spiritually” (the evidence of their struggle is all around us—haven’t you noticed?) to expel the hijackers of Islam.

The EU apparatchiks are thus insisting that only a marginal Sufi notion of the so-called “greater” spiritual jihad be accepted in defining jihad. Unfortunately this much ballyhooed, but anesthetizing definition has a very flimsy theological foundation. Even the Islamophilic scholar Reuven Firestone (pp. 139-40, n. 19) has acknowledged the dubious nature of the oral tradition (i.e., hadith) upon which this potential interpretation of jihad rests: CONTINUE