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Jihad in Premodern Sufi Writings By Harry S. Neale

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jis/ety042

1471-6917

Asma Afsaruddin,

Education and Islamic Studies

The basic premise of this book is that Sufis in the pre-modern period engaged in warfare, contrary to the image they are supposed to have as essentially peace-loving people who eschewed violence. The author Harry S. Neale presents this premise as if it were thoroughly original—he is of course oversimplifying the depiction of Sufis in modern, particularly Western, scholarship. For example, all historical accounts of the rise of the Safawiyya, the Sufi group that founded the Safavid dynasty in Persia in 906/1601, have to discuss their military activities in their quest for political power. Proceeding from that premise, Neale attempts to link this assumed oversight on the part of certain scholars—he singles out Syed Hossein Nasr, John Renard, and Carl Ernst among others—to their perceived bias when it comes to depicting jihād, especially as practiced by Sufis. He holds that since jihād in the foundational texts of Islam must be understood as military in nature, one should always mention this ‘fact’, even when one is describing the non-combative, mystical practices of the Sufis. To fail to do so lays one open to the charge of sanitizing Islamic thought and history. In adopting this position, Neale is clearly influenced by the views of David Cook, who has made similar misleading claims in his publications (Cook provides a laudatory blurb for Neale’s book). If, however, Neale had consulted this reviewer’s 2013 book Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (OUP, 2013; a title that does not appear in Neale’s bibliography), he would have been disabused of such notions. The term jihād clearly occurs in the Qurʾān in both non-combative and combative senses. Examples of the former are found, for example, in Q. 22:78; 29:69; and 25:52, and these verses were understood in the non-combative sense by many scholars in the pre-modern period. For example, Q. 22:78 is said to have been understood by the early authority Ibn al-Mubārak (d. 181/797) as referring to the human struggle against one’s lower self and Q. 29:69 was understood by the well-known exegetes al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) and al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273) to refer similarly to this internal, spiritual struggle. Q. 25:52 is practically unanimously understood by pre-modern exegetes to refer to the discursive enterprise of refuting falsehood with the truth of the Qurʾān. (For full discussion of the exegesis of these verses, see Striving in the Path of God, 16–25).