Osama bin Laden: Global Jihād as ‘Fifth-Generation’ Warfare

Abstract

Three Pakistani scholars — Iffat Malik, Farzana Noshab and Sadaf Abdullah — have argued that ‘the portrayal of jihād in Western and other media is quite removed from reality’. They contended that jihād had been ‘distorted with deliberate intent’ and claimed that ‘it is never, as popularly represented, a religiously-motivated aggressive war against “innocent” non-Muslims, with the aim of spreading Islām by force’. This was the conclusion they drew following the examination of the case studies of Afghanistan (1979–89),3 Kashmir (since 1989), Palestine (since the intifāḍah began on 8 December 1987), Chechnya (since 1994), and the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. Though the authors did concede that Muslims needed to curb the activities of extremists whose ‘hard-line activities and statements merely provide ammunition to those seeking to portray Islām and jihād in a negative light’, they contended that such extremists lacked any large following. They concluded that jihād was essentially defensive. ‘ Jihad in reality, wherever it is found, is a struggle for freedom, against aggression and oppression, and for human rights.’4