Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam. By Reuven Firestone. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 195 pp.

Firestone is Director of the Graduate School at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles. This book is a meticulously researched and elegantly organized discussion of an important, indeed controversial topic. Firestone points out both that the term "holy war" is a European invention (p 15), and that "there are many types of jihad, most of which have "nothing to do with warfare" (p 17). He refers to the traditional view that the best jihad is the struggle "on behalf of the good". He deliberately does not discuss later developments within Islamic legal theory but concentrates on the "earliest period of Islamic history" (p 5). Part one examines the social and political background, part two Qur'anic references, part three the hadith (acts and sayings of Muhammad) and the Sira (biographies). Throughout the book, he is interested in how Islam overrode kinship loyalties, replacing them with ideological commitment. The old motivation of war, family feuds, honor or pursuit of wealth, became unacceptable as non-ideological war yielded to ideological war. Indeed, "the decision to raid their own kinsfolk", taken at Madinah, would have been "unthinkable in pre-Islamic times" (p 131). Rather, Jihad means to "fight in the path of God" (p 17).

Firestone analyses all Qur'anic verses and many Hadith, examining both traditional Muslim exegesis and a possible alternative interpretation. Muslims divide verses into those that discouraged armed conflict (see Q 16: 25), those that permitted limited warfare (2: 190) and those (known as "sword verses") that call for unrestricted aggression until the whole world becomes Islamic (8: 39). In this stage, all the old strictures, for example, regarding truces during sacred months, were annulled. The choice of "Islam or the Sword", though, never applied to "Scriptuaries", that is, to Christians and Jews who had the option of paying a special tax (p 89 - 90). This progression reflects the evolving fortunes of Islam, from persecuted minority, to embryonic state, to imperial power. In this view, pacifist or anti-war verses are cancelled by supposedly later verses. Firestone critiques this, suggesting that the Qur'an as we have it may not represent a neat progression but contains differences of opinion on the issue of militarism. It is difficult to fault this careful and finely nuanced discussion. My one complaint is that Firestone chose not to look at later Islamic theory, since this would have given us a completer treatment of the topic. He alludes in passing to studies of the similarity between rules of war as they develop in Islam and European just war theory (see p 15 - 17 and footnote 18, p 137). These rules set out conditions that make unprovoked aggression illegal, permitting insetad only the righting of wrongs or defensive action. Firestone says that he did not want to enter debate about "the morality of war, religiously sanctioned or otherwise" (p 5). However, his conclusion, that not all early Muslims approved of war opens up the possibility for other Muslims today to elevate diplomacy and dialogue above militarism, while yet claiming the authority and sanction of their most sacred texts.

Clinton Bennett,

Baylor University, Waco, TX