The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought (By Malik Mufti)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought by Malik Mufti Cyrus Ali Contractor (bio) The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought Malik Mufti Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019. 217 Pages. This work is a look at the state of the state in the Muslim world. The Art of Jihad is replete with theoretical argumentation and highly recommended for an audience familiar with the philosophies of Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldun, among others. It is an important contribution to the development of more pragmatic Muslim polities and states in the contemporary world. In the face of an ever increasing militant revolutionary idealism and a modernist agenda aimed at defanging Islam, the author argues for a "Rushdian revival," involving a "third alternative for Islamic polities – a realist political tradition, as indigenous as can be, that can help them navigate through the current upheaval because it has already anticipated some of the most critical challenges of the emergent culture" (p. xiv). In this context, The Art of Jihad offers an appropriate theoretical discussion that breaks away from the tired dichotomy of "extremism" versus "modernity." While popular debates and discussions and American policymakers have been trite in their discourse, Mufti's contribution is refreshing, and if nothing else, provides a rebuttal to so-called conventional wisdom. We are briefly introduced to realism in the Western tradition, with all the familiar theorists (Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Clausewitz of the earliest brand, and Morgenthau, Gilpin and Waltz of the neo-variations) and assumptions about the state of nature, the necessity of a restraining force to curtail avarice and bellicosity, and the grasp for power as the means to both attack and defend against potential and real enemies. Although anarchy is not explicitly mentioned, it is present between the lines. Mufti, almost sardonically, mocks the embracing of liberalism, and by extension subsumes the "compelling communal commitments under an overarching valorization of the liberated and autonomous self" (p. xvii). With the realist-liberal debate fresh in our minds, The Art of Jihad is then divided into five chapters, some of which are reworkings of previous publications by the author. Mufti initiates the discussion with a look at what he terms "competing visions of jihad." The familiar dichotomy of militants versus modernists is presented as two competing idealist approaches. Using Sayid Qutb's rationale, the former group argues for, and in some instances carries out, an uncompromising offensive jihad with the aim of ordaining Islam as the one and only regime in the world. Mufti elucidates, that militant and revolutionary ideologues wage this offensive and defensive jihad because war is the norm while peace is fleeting. [End Page 100] Modernists, on the other hand, "assert full compatibility between Islam's teachings and contemporary norms of international relations, including the imperative of striving for permanent peace" (p. xix). Accordingly, similar to (neo)liberal institutionalists in the realm of international relations, Islamic modernists espouse the belief in the use of force only to restore normative peace. Students studying international relations, even at the undergraduate level, will recognize the concepts of balancing, iterated interaction, confidence building, and institutions with moral and ethical obligations to one another as important factors in maintaining peace. While militants and modernists seem diametrically opposed, they are both hampered by their idealism, and lack the necessary pragmatism to navigate today's world. In fact, the unbending revolutionary stance of the militant leads to a crisis between what is legally binding (per Qur'an and Sunnah) and what is realistically necessary. This, in and of itself, is a crisis of leadership. As Mufti delineates, because these militant revolutionary groups do not form strong leadership cadres, they are often jumping from skirmish to skirmish rather than focusing on what the militant writer Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi argues for: the formation of a state on a contiguous body of land. Al-Maqdisi himself criticized the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for his indiscriminate and wanton use of violence. Similarly, al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda, no strangers to the use of brutal violence, would ultimately condemn ISIS as being excessive in the violence they meted out. The irony here...