The reason for the triumph of the creed of lesser jehad is simple. At least since the Crusades, Muslims have felt besieged by a hostile world, by alien powers like Christianity and the West, bent on curbing its influence. Since Islam has, despite its glory and extraordinary reach as a world religion, been on the wrong side of history, Muslims have internalised a sense of always being persecuted that renders the scholastic and spiritual distinctions in the meaning of jehad irrelevant. Although it takes varied forms, this sense of persecution is widespread and shared and makes Muslims yearn more for a Saladin, an agent who will redeem them in history, rather than a healer of spiritual angst. Or so Akbar argues.
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In South Asia on the other hand, though Islam came with the sword, it has been predominantly a religion of Sufi love. Most Muslim rulers in India settled into an appreciative and pragmatic accommodation with the religions they found here. If Babar’s memoirs are any guide, he seems less exercised by the fact that India is inhabited by alien gods than by the feeling that some Indian sculptures cross the threshold of decency. How did this Sufi religion of love come to be transformed into a potent political force? Akbar argues that the end of the Mughal empire left South Asian Muslims without a political patron. The indignity at the hands of colonialism and possible fears about Hindu majoritarianism gave Islam a new political opening. Muslims for the first time came to experience themselves as a minority. But even the product of this politicisation was not fundamentalism, but the unlikely figure of Jinnah, someone who, in many ways, would have been an exemplary liberal Muslim. But Pakistan came into being and fell into the clutches of generals, who, in order to shore up their power, used a potent combination of religion and cia money to gradually produce the conditions where the Talibanisation of Islam became possible.
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If this narrative sounds too simple a rendition of Islam’s complex history and its career in South Asia, it is meant to. The Shade of Swords is a rather strange book. Although it engagingly recounts the potent and recurring power associated with jehad at various times in Muslim history, it does not expand the theme. The preface promises to "explain the origins and nature of the battle and the battlefield" in the aftermath of 9/11. The book does neither, unless one’s convinced that just recounting the hold jehad has over the Muslim imagination explains ten centuries of geopolitics.
Akbar’s literary skills and mordant wit are at their best in recounting the myriad manifestations of jehad, its mythology, in history, literature and culture since the fall of Jerusalem in AD 637 to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2002. That jehad has been a widespread motif in Islamic thinking about its own fate in history and has exerted such motivational force is beyond doubt. But whether that motif explains anything is more debatable. Although there may often be solidarity in Muslim sentiment, Muslim states have acted as political entities just like any other and they have fought other Muslim states as often as they have fought other enemies. Pan-Arabism was a dismal failure, and for all of the Muslim world’s solidarity with the Palestinians, the Arab states have left them in the lurch as much as anyone else. Akbar makes almost no meaningful reference to the character of the diverse societies and states in which the jehad doctrine supposedly flourishes; it simply runs on auto-pilot, as it were. Akbar’s explanation of the radicalisation of Islam inside Pakistan is more anecdote than analysis and inspires more questions than it answers. When Akbar discusses Islam in India, his political allegiances are a little clearer, but for much of the book "Akbar" himself is non-existent. This may be a device to narrate history objectively, but it also makes the book less probing. What one thinks of jehad depends on whether one thinks the Muslim sense of being persecuted is justified or not. But Akbar is reluctant to address such questions. This is a book written by a journalist with an acute sense of politics and history, writing in an apolitical mood.
Regardless, it’s stimulating reading.
