Jihad or Hiraba?

Documentary producer Anisa Mehdi had an interesting commentary on NPR the other day, called "Rethinking the Word 'Jihad'." Listen here. I believe this December 29 column is mostly the same. Like many Muslims and non-Muslims, Mehdi despairs at the corruption of the word Arabic jihad. Since jihad has been appropriated by islamist terrorists to elevate their suicidal slaughter to a form of religious expression, the original meaning--it is argued--has not only been corrupted, most Westerners have only encountered the word in the context of terrorism and thus don't distinguish jihad from terrorism. (See this google search for more background on the term.)

Mehdi writes:

For me growing up, "jihad" was a beautiful word. Jihad was the effort you made to do your best in school; your struggle to polish the talents God gave you; how you strived to live up to your parents' and your own highest expectations; to lead a life acceptable to the Almighty.

So, people flying planes into buildings, beheading hostages in Iraq and fomenting hatred against people of other religions -- that's not jihad!

Instead of merely complaining about that she is oppressed when non-Muslims misunderstand jihad, however, Mehdi tries to fight back in the language war.

According to the Qur'an, the holy text of Islam, the Almighty does not reward the murder of innocent people. Nor does the Creator condone suicide -- as in suicide bombings. Terrorism is sociopathic. In secular terms, it is criminal behavior. In religious terms, it is blasphemy to claim cold-blooded murder in the name of God. It is not jihad.

What's a journalist to do? The good news is we can call a spade a spade. There is an Arabic word for these crimes against individuals and crimes against humanity, and the word is "hiraba." War against society.

People who are following God or practicing jihad do not join war against society. Terrorists serve Satan, if anything. They are bad people, criminals in a secular sense and blasphemers in the sacred. Just because they think they're on God's side doesn't mean the American media and our government PR folks need concur! But by parroting their misuse of the word "jihad," that's just what we're doing.

Mehdi correctly understands how a religious concept can sacrilize a barbaric act, and how combating a dangerous idea requires fighting back with more coherent ideas:

So what happens if we call a spade a spade? Think of the disincentive to young, hungry, cynical Muslims -- angry at their own governments and angry at ours for bolstering theirs. If they heard "hiraba" instead of "jihad," if they heard "murder" instead of "martyr," if they heard they were bound for hell not heaven, they might not be so quick to sign up to kill themselves and a handful of so-called "infidels" along the way.

At the same time, it is not just Western media, documentary producers, and bloggers who need to comment on and disseminate the hiraba concept. It requires the religious authorities, who actually have some stature, to apply hiraba in Islamic cultures' internal conversation about jihad-as-terror that Osama bin Laden has started. This is a point Mehdi doesn't reach, but where her argument needs to extend.

Ultimately, Mehdi's strategy is to recode suicidal islamism so that its appeal to its core constituency of disaffected, self-loathing young men is diminished. As I wrote last August, and shamelessly quote here:

Osama bin Laden's islamofascism is at the point of assuming the status of the paradigm of masculinity to which young men look to measure themselves and create a comprehensible identity. This phonemonon (sic) occurs throughout cultures, but is merely represented differently -- i.e., it is coded differently.

. . .

Young men wanting to make sense to themselves and to the world are looking for an intelligible model by which to do so, which they then emulate. The affirmation of their assumed masculinity comes through acts-as-expression. Ultimately, the only way to deal with this is to fashion a way of making the code nonsensical; so that it doesn't cohere as a masculine ideal. Doing so requires that it be made irrelevant and unintelligible. How possible this is, what with the demographics and socio-economic geography that we're contending with, is open to doubt.

Hiraba (note: harabah seems to be a more common romanization), properly disseminated, may help play a role in challenging the intelligibility and legitimacy of bin Laden's ideology of ecstasy-through-slaughter. (Also see thisI don't know what role the American blogosphere, let alone the West's media sources, can legitimately play in that dissemination, but at the very least Muslims can start demanding that hiraba play a role in the fight rending Islam apart.

At any rate, for some background on the term, hiraba (or harabah), see this. Aziz Poonawalla in 2002 wrote this widely read piece on harabah. (LGF hilariously misreads Poonawalla in this April '03 post, sanctimoniously accusing him of justifying a suicide bombing while Poonawalla is calling for lanat (curse) on the bombers.)

I may update this post a bit more in the near future.