Understanding Islam: The Verse of The Sword
Scott McKay
Author: Scott McKay
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: June 22, 2006
In the war on terror, lots of people claim to know what terrorists are thinking, but many of them are simply projecting the motivations and values that are familiar to Americans on to someone else. While this may be easy, it is rarely accurate. To help dispel confusion and myth, FSM’s newest Contributing Editor Scott McKay offers some historical insight into the theological basis terrorists cite for their behavior, explaining along the way that contemporary problems are not merely aberrations but the manifestation of a pronounced, historical strain within Islam.
Understanding Islam: The Verse of The Sword
Scott McKay
June 22, 2006
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the jizya (poor-due), then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
- Qu’ran, 9:5
If the above might look familiar, it’s known as Ayat al-Sayf, or the Verse of the Sword. And unfortunately, it’s quite a significant passage in governing the relationship between Muslims and the rest of the world.
Obviously, as is true with any passage from the Holy Books of the world’s great religions, this one is open to various interpretations. But for nearly 1400 years, it has provided a major impetus in fueling the imperialist zeal behind Islamic jihad in the military sense most of us understand that word to signify.
In fact, many prominent and mainstream Islamic scholars throughout the length of that 1400 years, including a prominent, active Saudi cleric named Sheikh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajid (whose pronouncements can be found at www.islam-qa.com), not only fail to denounce this rather noxious passage but claim that because it was laid down as part of the last chapters, or Suras, of the Qu’ran, it abrogates or negates some 124 other Qu’ranic passages seen as more tolerant and friendly to those of us who aren’t Muslims.
It would be easy – and comforting – to dismiss the rantings of people like al-Munajid as simply crackpot theology not informing any significant proportion of the Muslim world. More moderate Muslim elements say that the Verse of the Sword only really applied to pagans and polytheists who tooled around the Arabian deserts during Muhammad’s time in the 7th century. Other passages say that because Christians and Jews are “People of the Book” they shouldn’t be dealt with in such harsh terms.
But we dismiss this at our peril, for two main historical reasons.
First, we must remember that Islam has spread by the sword since its earliest days. Muslim armies, infused with the zeal of Qu’ranic verses like the one above, spread from Arabia in every direction until the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic community, stretched from Morocco and Spain in the Atlantic to Indonesia in the Pacific. And when those armies conquered a given territory and the usual three days of rape and pillae were finished, the survivors were given three choices, as loosely described in the Verse of the Sword – convert to Islam, pay the jizya, or face execution. In other words, this isn’t idle verse – it’s standard operating procedure. If it wasn’t, we might still call the place Constantinople and not Istanbul.
Second, once the forces of Islam had imposed their rule on a given territory and set about governing the population of that territory, the second option opened up the subjugated peoples to the wonderful world of what’s known as dhimmitude. A dhimmi, or “protected person,” is one who essentially accepts second-class citizenship. Paying the jizya, which is translated as a poll tax or poor-due and which is paid by non-Muslims to the Muslim governing authority, isn’t something you do with an American Express Card or a check. Those subject to the tax would under Islamic Sharia law have to physically appear to pay it on demand of the authority, and to submit to a particularly demeaning ceremony in accordance with Qu’ranic verse requiring that “they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Qu’ran 9:29)
And being treated worse than the IRS typically treats folks in a tax audit isn’t all. According to Islamic tradition, dhimmis are forced to wear hairstyles and clothing identifying them as non-Muslim, forbidden from building structures taller than Muslims build, forbidden from displaying crosses or other religious symbols on churches and synagogues, ride on saddles or own weapons, among other things.
Being treated in such a manner over time tends to have the effect of making it inconvenient – to say the least – to resist conversion to Islam in a newly-Islamic country. This largely explains how there was once a thriving Christian majority in most of what is now the Islamic world – North Africa, Egypt, what is now the Holy Land, Asia Minor and Central Asia, for example – and now there are scant few Christians or Jews in any of those areas.
Dhimmitude is largely a thing of the past, because Islamic rule has had a rather tough run over the past century or so – in particular since Kemal Ataturk led Turkey away from Sharia and toward a secular republic in 1924. But on the other hand you won’t see any Catholic churches in Riyadh or Tehran, and the occasional stories about interfaith relations coming out of places like Pakistan and Indonesia hardly inspire confidence that diversity and tolerance in Islamic societies is a major strength.
What’s the point of this little history and theology lesson? Specifically this – when you ask “What do these people want from us?” after seeing the standard soliloquies of Osama bin Laden or bombs going off in front of a church, a pizza parlor or a bus stop someplace, it’s nothing more than people acting on a verse they saw in the Qu’ran.
And unfortunately, the interpretations of that verse which create the atrocities we see aren’t extreme. Fundamentalist, maybe. But not extreme.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Scott McKay is a freelance writer on politics and sports based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Born and raised in New Orleans, Scott graduated from Louisiana State University in 1993. He has an extensive background in media and advertising and is the former publisher of Purple & Gold Magazine.
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