Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
many Sunnah authorities, and their reliability is in turn determined by different schools of
Islamic jurisprudence.
Sharia'a law has come to be associated with extreme forms of punishment meted out to
transgressors in some Arab countries: amputation of limbs for repeat-offending thieves,
flogging of those caught committing adultery, public beheading for murderers. These pun-
ishments, associated mostly with the austere Hanbali school of jurisprudence in Saudi Ar-
abia, are intended as a deterrent first and foremost and are only rarely enforced.
In some instances the Sharia'a is quite specific, such as in the areas of inheritance law
and the punishments for certain offences. In many other cases it provides only guidelines.
A scholar or judge learned in Sharia'a law has to determine the proper 'Islamic' position or approach to a
problem using his own discretion. This partly explains the wide divergence in Muslim opinion on some
issues - such as with regard to jihad today.
Jihad
If there is one term that is more misunderstood than Sharia'a by people in the West, it is
the term 'jihad'. This has come to be seen as the rallying cry-to-arms of so-called Muslim
fundamentalists against Western regimes and is assumed to apologise for acts of terrorism.
It is true that for some fundamentalists jihad represents a violent struggle to preserve the
Islamic faith from the encroachment of a different set of moral values (or, as they would
see it, a lack of moral values). For these people, it also represents a struggle against what
they consider to be the bullying of countries whose political and economic dominance im-
pinges upon the rights and freedoms of Islamic peoples - in Palestine and Iraq in particu-
lar.
The interpretation of jihad as being solely about waging war on alternative ways of
governance and of living, however, is a very narrow definition that most Islamic people
wholeheartedly reject. Indeed, violent behaviour runs counter to Islamic teaching regard-
ing justice, tolerance and peace. In fact, the word jihad means 'striving' or 'struggle' and
has much broader connotations than the translation usually ascribed to it by the Western
media. Far from 'holy war', it more often means 'striving in the way of the faith' - strug-
gling against one's own bad intentions, or rooting out evil, 'indecency' or oppression in
society. Islam dictates that this struggle should occur through peaceful, just means so that
wisdom prevails, not through anger and aggression.
Jihad in a political context, as the 'struggle to defend the faith', has been the subject of
intense debate among Muslim scholars for the last 1400 years. In as much as it refers to
the right of a nation to defend itself against oppression, there isn't a nation on earth that
