Jihad is a much
wider concept. The religious connotation of the word is strife or struggle.
Jihad is multi-faceted. At the very basic level, it means struggling against
instincts within oneself that militate against the following of basic tenants of
Islam. Secondly, it directs Muslims to enjoin the good and forbid the evil. In
fact, this is a universal message for everybody and even the Quran directs its
followers to respect Christians and Jews as they are followers of holy books.
Thirdly, Jihad also means struggle against aggression and oppression. Wherever
there is oppression, injustice, denial of rights or of the freedom to practice
religion, struggle against these is also jihad. The tools employed against Jihad
are no different than those employed by western powers against the weaker
powers; however they are given the name of sanctions. The tools such as
diplomacy, politics, economic pressures, etc. so often used by the west are also
the tools used against jihad. Jihad is waged against the aggressor and the
oppressor. Killing of innocent people including children, women, the sick and
the elderly in the name of jihad is simply not permitted by the Muslim religion.
Jihad encompasses much more than the ëwaging of holy warsí as resorting to the
same is limited and very well defined in Islam. Islam propagates harmony and
peace, contrary to popular western belief, and is not a religion of war.
-- Bassam
Javed
By Bassam Javed
Today, the Muslim world faces a
dilemma removing misconceptions about Islam. The process is becoming more and
more difficult as the western media continues to hype non-events and minor
incidents and concoct conspiracies to malign Islam and the Muslims. The
stereotypes in the western media that implicate Islam and the Muslims in every
act of terror around the world expose their deep rooted prejudice and ignorance
about the Muslims and the religion of Islam. Their linking of Muslims to every
act of terror and dubbing them as extremists or terrorists misleads their masses
and widens the gap between societies and religions.
The biggest misconception that
the western media spreads relates to is Jihad, which literally means the
struggle in the path of Godí. The word has on many occasions been taken out of
context to propagate negative views on Islam. After subduing communism, the guns
have now been trained on Islam and the phenomenon of Jihad. Jihad is being
projected in a distorted manner and the Muslims as fanatics and terrorists. It
is that the way Jihad is being perceived and portrayed in the western world as
references are made from contemporary journalistic material. In the present-day
world around us, we can observe a strange phenomenon wherein one country strives
for ascendancy over another through exploitation of the religions and their
manifestations. The analyses of trends of negativity being projected about Islam
and the Muslims by the western media provide credentials to the theory that
there is dire need for the west to get educated on the religion of Islam and its
contents and manifestations. Today, wherever conflicts are taking place wherein
one party is Muslim, the conflict depicts the regional power struggle or the
overtones of religious conflict between Islam and the other religions. To name a
few conflict-stricken areas, Kashmir, Palestine, Kosovo, Chechnya and a few
others may be cited, where one party is always Muslim. In the endeavour to
preserve the sanctity of Islam, the conflicts turn into resolute struggles and
acquire the characters of Jihad (holy struggle).
Jihad is a much wider concept.
The religious connotation of the word is strife or struggle. Jihad is
multi-faceted. At the very basic level, it means struggling against instincts
within oneself that militate against the following of basic tenants of Islam.
Secondly, it directs Muslims to enjoin the good and forbid the evil. In fact,
this is a universal message for everybody and even the Quran directs its
followers to respect Christians and Jews as they are followers of holy books.
Thirdly, Jihad also means struggle against aggression and oppression. Wherever
there is oppression, injustice, denial of rights or of the freedom to practice
religion, struggle against these is also jihad. The tools employed against Jihad
are no different than those employed by western powers against the weaker
powers; however they are given the name of sanctions. The tools such as
diplomacy, politics, economic pressures, etc. so often used by the west are also
the tools used against jihad. Jihad is waged against the aggressor and the
oppressor. Killing of innocent people including children, women, the sick and
the elderly in the name of jihad is simply not permitted by the Muslim religion.
Jihad encompasses much more than the ëwaging of holy warsí as resorting to the
same is limited and very well defined in Islam. Islam propagates harmony and
peace, contrary to popular western belief, and is not a religion of
war.
If we examine recent history,
the areas of conflict wherein the armed forces or the people took to jihad, like
Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, a number of common factors emerge from these
conflicts. The first factor is aggression or oppression against Muslims. In each
of these conflicts, be it Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir or Palestine, the
Muslim communities were forced to take up arms against aggression. They were
either invaded without provocation or subjected to brutal oppression that forced
them to fight back. In some of the cases even genocide was carried out. Had they
not been obliged to take up arms to defend themselves, their rights and freedom
would have been usurped. Indian State terrorism against the people of Kashmir
with frequent rapes of their women, Israeli intransigence in refusing
Palestinian rights, Russian repression against the Chechens, and so on, are some
of the black incidents wherein those at the receiving end had to fight for
defence of their religion.
Seeing the resolute belief in
Jihad of the followers of Islam, some foreign elements have started exploiting
its spirit for their own nefarious designs. Jihad is also at times exploited by
militant groups independently of their respective countriesí official policies.
Jihad can be declared only by an Islamic state and not by religious or militant
groups. What is jihad carried out for? It is for freedom, for an end to
occupation, and for response to aggression. Islamic history tells us that jihad
never seeks to occupy othersí territories or to employ force to spread Islam.
The image of armed jihad is very
different to the one that is often portrayed in the western media. With the
clock ticking away, the gap between the reality and the image is being
constantly being widened, courtesy the western press. Sometimes, the distortion
of the same is so obvious and deliberate to portray jihad as ëIslamic
fundamentalism. The mantra of the terminology draws sympathy from international
community as a threat to global security. When it comes to Islam the masses
forget that every religion has fundamentalists. Some of the radical states like
Israel and India have been successful in enlisting global support for the
conflicts that they are engaged in and the ones that are essentially of their
own making. In their respective cases it is Kashmir and Palestine. They
successfully exploit the western media for publishing their version of the
conflict whereas the version of the ones that are striving through jihad to
resist the dominance of the aggressors, dose not find a place in any of the
international publishing house. The exploitation by the western media with its
distorted reporting has done a great harm to the image of Islam and the concept
of Jihad especially through routine stereotyping of the Muslims as being bad
guys. In the Bosnian conflict it was commonly reported that ëthe Bosnians are
being killed by Serbiansí but never reported as ëthe Muslims are being killed by
Christiansí. This is the dangerous path the west has embarked upon to malign
Islamic tenets that may one day create havoc when these conflicts would turn
into major wars fought on religion basis. Let us all hope and pray that time
remains a mirage.
Source: The News,
Pakistan
11:41 PM
Sultan Shahin
0 comments:
Post a Comment