Jihād al-Nafs: The Spiritual Struggle BT - Jihād: From Qur’ān to bin Laden

Abstract

‘What have the Arabs ever done for us?’, the British columnist Robert Kilroy-Silk asked in January 2004 in a misjudged article which resulted in a national furore.2 One answer may have been missed in the plethora of responses: a spiritual path. Many considerable specialists of the Muslim and Arab world in the classical period have had difficulty in accepting that it was capable of ‘real’ spirituality. Instead, it may be suggested that out of the nucleus of pious people around the Prophet there emerged a threefold relationship between Islām, īmān and ihṣān. Islām is the complete surrender of the faithful to God’s will. īmān, faith, constitutes the interior aspect of Islām. As for ihṣān, to do well or serve God constantly, to strive hard in God’s cause (itself a form of jihād), the Qur’ān itself asserts that mercy is ‘with those who practise’ it (Q.29:69).3 Drawing upon the traditions recorded by al-Bukhārī and Muslim, it may be contended that being a good Muslim is to practise ihṣān, which means worshipping God as if you see Him, in full awareness that even if you cannot see God, He oversees you all the time.4 The early Ṣufīs were careful to record the chain of narrators in the best traditions of the science of ḥadīth. By so doing, they attempted to prove that the early sacred traditions of Islām ‘demonstrate both the importance and the transmission of the Prophetic spiritual example’. What came to be known as Ṣūfīsm had ‘deep roots in early Muslim spirituality and the prophetic revelatory event itself’.5