Introduction

One of the defining features of the vast majority of Muslim political thinkers and Islamist groups of the past fifty to one hundred years has been the willingness to countenance the use of force in order either to overthrow ‘religiously suspect’ regimes within the Muslim world itself or to counter what are perceived to be attacks on the ‘house of Islam’ from without. Be they uprisings or revolutions engineered in order to create what their architects believe to be ideal ‘Islamic societies’, or be they indiscriminate attacks on those outside the world of Islam who are as its enemies, the term jihād is never far from the lips of many of those who justify such actions and the majority of those who denounce them.

Despite its ubiquity in modern discourse, the term jihād remains mistreated and misunderstood. One of the peripheral objectives of this chapter is to explore some of the misperceptions regarding its connotations and to show that one of the main reasons for the term’s misuse is the lack of comprehension of the fact that conceptions of what jihād signifies have differed through history according to time and circumstance. The central objective, however, is to explore Said Nursi’s approach to the issue of the use of force in the name of Islam, be it to overthrow suspect Muslim regimes or to wage wars against external enemies. For it is precisely on this issue that one becomes aware of the fundamental difference that exists between Nursi’s position and that of his contemporaries. As we have seen in Chapter Seventeen, Nursi is distinguished not only by his aversion to politics and the politicization of Islam, but also by his unswerving opposition to the notion of rebellion or revolution in the name of Islam and for the sake of political power. And on no issue is the difference between Nursi and the majority of his contemporaries drawn more sharply than on the emotive and highly contentious issue of jihād. Before we look at Nursi’s teachings on the subject, however, it is necessary to address the misperceptions mentioned earlier by referring back to the main primary source of Muslim learning, the Quran.