Tawhid and Jihad

In the weeks that British engineer Ken Bigley was held captive in Iraq, I prayed that the gang that held him would listen to the voice of their conscience, even if that voice had become just a whisper, and spare Bigley’s life. But my prayers weren’t answered.

I felt that sinking feeling in my stomach when I read the news of Bigley’s death. I was terribly sad—and I was angry. I was angry at the United States for wreaking enough havoc in Iraq to cause already-mad men to be provoked into mad acts of murder. But mostly, I was angry at the killers. First and foremost because they killed an innocent man. But also because the killers are Muslim, and I’m Muslim. And by committing their heinous act they fueled the belief that my religion, Islam, somehow encourages or condones such acts.

Islam does nothing of the sort. As a Muslim, I stand squarely against the actions of those killers.

Ironically, the gang’s own name—“Tawhid and Jihad”—defines Islamic concepts that de-legitimize their tactics. The media commonly translate “Tawhid and Jihad” as “Monotheism and Holy War,” but these are not the literal meanings of either word. Like the terrorists, the media have chosen two very simplistic and material interpretations to define two very complex and profound words.

On a literal level, “tawhid” means oneness, or unity. This does not only refer to the oneness of God; many Muslims also understand it as the oneness of humankind, the essential sameness of the souls of human beings, though bodies may differ because of race or gender, or minds may differ because of religious belief. While human beings prefer to divide themselves into religious, ethnic and national groups, a believer in tawhid has a more profound understanding of mankind. He looks past these divisions, recognizing that the soul in each body is of the same basic nature—it is human—and therefore, it is connected to other souls by this common attribute. Humans are brothers to each other. By extension, a belief in tawhid is a belief in social equality. One who believes that humans are brothers also must believe that humans are worthy of the same treatment. “Legal, class, social, political, racial, national, territorial, genetic or even economic contradictions” are not accepted by tawhid, says the 20th century Muslim philosopher Ali Shariati, “for it [tawhid] implies a mode of looking upon all being as a unity.” Thus, the killers were acting contrary to the spirit of tawhid by killing a man on the basis of his race and nationality.

Tawhid is also understood as the “oneness” of not only humanity, but of God. In Islam, there is only one God, and a person can be a slave of only one God. Hatred, jealousy, anger, infatuation—humans can also become enslaved to all of these passions, and thus these passions can become gods to men. Belief in tawhid negates the legitimacy of these false gods. And a true believer in tawhid is liberated from slavery to his passions. The act of slicing off a man’s head and then holding it up in front of a video camera, as Bigley’s killers did, requires a great amount of anger, hatred, perhaps pride and most likely a great deal of other emotions. In succumbing to their passions, Bigley’s killers made themselves slaves of these illegitimate gods and therefore violated the principle of tawhid.

The concept of jihad, too, would have kept the killers from committing their murder if they had understood it properly. Jihad literally means “struggle,” not holy war. Prophet Muhammed said that the most important (“greater”) jihad is an internal struggle for perfection, while the less important (“lesser”) jihad is the physical struggle against an enemy. This greater jihad is the struggle to conduct oneself in the way that God would want humans to conduct themselves. Achieving this requires waging a jihad against one’s baser tendencies, such as anger or prejudice. Thus, one who engages in jihad is one who believes in tawhid—he is one who strives to make himself the slave of only God, and not of his passions.

Because the baser tendency of self-centeredness is a trait to be overcome by the greater jihad, one who engages in this jihad is concerned not only with perfecting himself, but also with perfecting the world. Just as one must wage jihad to mold oneself into a form with which God would be pleased, one must also wage jihad to mold the world into such a form. Islamic scholar Mahmud Taleqani says that in religious texts, “the term jihad is always attached to the locution ‘fi sabil ilah,’ [in the way of God]. What is the way of God? …Is it toward the heavens…or toward Jerusalem? No. The way of God is the very path of the well-being and betterment of human society. It is the way of justice, truth, and human liberty.”

Few could argue that the terrorists acted in a godly manner when they killed Bigley. On the contrary, they acted in a way that God would not want them to act. They succumbed to their emotions, and they acted on their prejudices, and the result was that they committed a horrible crime and desecrated the very principles—tawhid and jihad—for which they claimed to be fighting.

Nura A. Hossainzadeh ’06, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Quincy House.