No God But God

In addition to the general requirement to live in preparation for Judgment Day, Islam imposes five specific duties, known as the pillars of the faith, of which acceptance of God and the Prophet through the profession of faith is the first. The second is to pray five times a day. The third is to pay the zakat, or charity tax. The fourth is to fast during daylight hours in Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. And the fifth, the only spiritual force more powerful than Ramadan, is the pilgrimage to Mecca. Every Muslim who is physically able is required to make at least one pilgrimage to the birthplace of Muhammad, of Islam, and—in Muslim belief—of monotheism itself.

THE MEANING OF jIHAD

From time to time, Muslim scholars and political activists have asserted that there is, or should be, a sixth pillar of the faith: jihad, the so-called neglected duty. The word means "striving" or "struggle" on behalf of the faith. It does not necessarily or even usually mean armed conflict; when it does, those who fight are known as mujahideen, or jihad fighters. In the news media, the word jihad is usually translated as "holy war," but it is a much more complicated concept. The word has taken on a note of menace because nowadays every bomb-throwing extremist and two-bit dissident in the Muslim world issues a call to jihad as a way to foment violence. Traditionally, however, jihad meant simply a great effort by an individual or a group to spread or promote the faith. The Koran calls for armed conflict against unbelievers only if Islam is under attack: "Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. Allah does not love the aggressors" (Sura 2, v. 190). In modern times, the best-known example of armed jihad against unbelievers was the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The most extreme advocates of jihad have urged that Muslims take up arms against non-Muslims and force them to convert, but such a position has never been in the mainstream of the faith. It is at odds with history because the vast majority of those who have accepted Islam have done so willingly. At the time of Muhammad's death in A.D. 632, there was no unitary state on the Arabian Peninsula; there were only fractious tribes. The Byzantine and Persian empires to the north and east were exhausted relics of themselves, waiting to collapse. Arabia was a society looking for political definition, and Muhammad's new community of believers provided it. "Arabia was a political vacuum," Maxime Rodinson wrote in his biography of the Prophet. "Aspirations to peace among the tribes, to a strong state which should guarantee the safety of persons and property and allow free and profitable trading—these aspirations...had no alternative goal on which to set their sights than an Arab state with an Arab ideology." The new community of Muslims provided that state and ideology—despite internal disputes that divided the allegiance of the faithful and persist today in the split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims—and soon spread across Arabia as one tribe after another gave its allegiance.

Within a century after Muhammad's death, Arab armies were masters of a vast territory from southern France to the Indus River, and the people of those new territories were rapidly embracing the new religion learned from their conquerors—not because they were forced to do so but because they chose to do so. Those who came under Arab dominion but elected to remain Christians or Jews were generally tolerated as "people of the book," second-class citizens required to pay a special tax but not persecuted.

With the Prophet's death came a leadership vacuum. Muhammad left no male heir, and no one could claim his moral authority over the believers; some tribal leaders who had signed pacts with him declared those pacts void upon his death; and a power struggle developed among his closest followers, who took up arms against one another. Never again would the world's Muslims achieve the ideal of brotherhood that the Prophet envisioned, not even at the apogee of Ottoman Turkish power in the 16th century. Unhappily for Islam, the solidarity that enwraps the white-clad pilgrims of each year's pilgrimage dissipates when they return to their home communities, which are often in conflict with each other. Islam aspires to peace but has historically failed to achieve it.