Hindustan Times
From Jadd-o-jehed to Jihad
Our journeys as separate nations — India and Pakistan — are seeded in the subtlest of ironies. Our founding father Mahatma Gandhi was the most devout of Hindus and yet he dreamt of a secular India. Pakistan’s Mohammed Ali Jinnah, while being a non-practising Muslim who loved his ham and wine, came to found a non-secular religious State.
Religion-based political foundations are not the same as homespun religiosity and Pakistan’s non-secular political founding, I believe, is responsible for transforming it to a fountainhead of what we so often call global jihad.
What is jihad? From an India-Pakistan perspective, few people can answer this question better than Pakistani-American writer and Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University, Ayesha Jalal.
Her book last year, Partisans of Allah: Meanings of Jihad in South Asia (2008), puts this core concept of Islam in perspective for the subcontinental audience.
Jalal toured India last year with a talk on the subject at New Delhi’s India International Centre. This doubled up as her first book launch ever despite authoring as many as seven books. “Historians don’t need book launches,” she told me, “politicians do.”
Diminutive and small-framed, but with good-looking angular features typical of Lahore women, Jalal hardly looks like one who can ruffle feathers. But you have to know who she is. Her ancestry is legendary: she is the grandniece of well-known Urdu writer Sadaat Hasan Manto. Her qualifications are thoroughbred: a BA from Wellesley; and PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge.
Jalal’s credentials earned her a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship worth $265,000. Many people found it strange that a Pakistani was teaching Indian history on a global platform.
History may be cast in stone, but historians are all about posturing. Jalal enraged her countrymen when she stated that Jinnah had “feet of clay” and that he never actually wanted a separate Muslim state.
Then another torrid saga played out. Jalal shocked the US academia when she sued Columbia University alleging bias after her tenure as professor there was discontinued. She alleged that a lobby of faculty members from India objected to a Pakistani woman teaching Indian history and had “blocked her tenure application”.
Jalal opposed Columbia’s decision to accept a windfall grant from the Hinduja group to set up an institute for India studies. A federal judge in New York’s Southern District dismissed her case because the evidence of bias was, though “suggestive”, rather “thin”.
As a historian, Jalal is a rarity out of Pakistan. In the West, most subcontinental historians focus on India instead and along with Gardiner professor of history at Harvard, Sugata Bose, Jalal forms a formidable duo whose works have thrown bright flashes of light on the cultures of India and Pakistan. Now, we have a historical chance to know Jalal’s partisans of Allah, with her as their chief interpreter.
“Muslims have distorted the normative concept of jihad. The concept of jihad has changed throughout history, from being a spiritual exercise to a temporal one,” she told me during a brief interview. As an original concept, it was meant to be a philosophical jadd-o-jehed or literally a struggle to live an ethical life.
“You are never born a Muslim. You struggle to become one,” she says.
As an armed struggle, jihad could have been called only by the state, upon the advice of the clergy and it could only be fought when Muslims were prevented from practising their religion. “And even then,” Jalal says, “it was meant to be taken up only if there was a reasonable degree of success assured.”
Jalal enters jihad from South Asia rather than from the Arab world. And how. The battle of Balakot, she says, was one prominent example. Syed Ahmad Shaheed of Rai Bareilly in UP fought the Sikhs, who — as allies of the British — had taken the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Jalal uses instances from undivided India to show how the concept of jihad changed.
Now, “non-state actors” had entered the stage of jihad. It began to be fought for territorial purposes and would soon turn into a political weapon to wage war against perceived enemies of Islam. Finally, we would have self-styled jihadis. (Bin Laden?)
But then the two prominent figures who also took it up were Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a member of the Congress, and Maulana Mawdudi, the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami. Even Mawdudi, considered a fountainhead of mujahideen-like organisations of today, maintained that jihad was duty of the state, and not any private individual or organisation. (al-Qaida?)
Today’s jihad may be about the mujahideen and their bomb blasts, but this may change too. “As a historian, I cannot predict how,” she says and “it really depends on what actions we take today, which will determine the future.”
It is not for nothing that she says this. “What actions we take today” will indeed determine the future jihad. And future jihad may not be about mujahideen. Why should I revolt at the idea that jihad may indeed clock back into its normative concept of jadd-o-jehed.
Empires get built and razed. Sartorial trends fade out but spring back into fashion. Cold Wars melt. Hot air cools. As this “ball of earth rolls its eternal round”, history changes.
(This is an updated adaptation of an article the author originally wrote in the print edition of the Hindustan Times.)
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anonymous Reply:
June 1st, 2009 at 5:08 pm
@SAM
Its not about predicting what jihad is or who follows it…….
As author quotes, “What actions we take today” will indeed determine the future jihad. And future jihad may not be about mujahideen. ”
She has basically evolved the meaning of jihad as the time passes by. And she stands by the view that there is a constant change in psychologies of human minds generation by generation
["Empires get built and razed. Sartorial trends fade out but spring back into fashion. Cold Wars melt. Hot air cools. As this “ball of earth rolls its eternal round”, history changes."]
[Reply]
Sam Reply:
June 12th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Please define what is the ORIGINAL meaning or Jihad.
Please define what is the historic meaning or Jihad.
How as it used in 7th century, 8, 9, 12, 15, 20, 21 century(i am just picking some numbers).
Show it with examples.
Convey that in an easy way for the reader to understand.
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