Olivier Roy, the leading French authority on Islam, notes that suicide bombings are a relatively recent phenomenon among Muslims, started after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. He asks, “Why should Muslims have discovered only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise?”16 Another relevant question is this: if the sexual rewards of heaven are such a draw for men, what explains women suicide bombers?

Conclusion

There is no question that the concept of jihad has a great hold on Muslims, though not in the way most Westerners think. Jihad motivates Muslims, principally for peaceful individual purposes, to ward off temptations and to do good. But jihad can also be a collective rallying cry against oppression and occupation, as proven in Afghanistan against the Soviets and as seen among segments of Palestinians and, lately, Iraqis.

Given its central place in the Muslim universe, jihad has been invoked throughout Muslim history by the rulers and the ruled, the caliphs and the colonialists, as well as the rebels, in times of war and peace. Both the British and the French obtained fatwas (religious rulings) decreeing that since they were the legal rulers of their colonies, jihad against them was not permitted.

The 1967 Arab war against Israel was described as a jihad. So were Anwar Sadat’s 1977 journey of peace to Jerusalem and the 1979 Camp David peace accord. So was his 1981 assassination (his killers rationalizing the murder as part of their jihad against Israel). So was Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait. Now bin Laden invokes jihad for his terrorism.

Not everything bad that Muslims do can be attributed to Islam, any more than Christianity is to be blamed for some of the Christian Phalangists who participated in the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Beirut in 1982 with illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts (as did the Christian Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s). As Huston Smith writes: “Jihad has been turned by outsiders into a rallying cry for hatred against Muslims.”17

The final word here goes to Bishop Desmond Tutu. In a conversation with me in 2002, he said:

Christians would resent it very, very deeply if they were
characterized by some of the weird fundamentalists in our
camp. They would resent it very deeply if it is said that we

are like the people in Northern Ireland who have been at
each other’s throats seemingly forever.

The Crusaders were Christians. Is that a justification for saying that Christianity is an aggressive religion?

Who was responsible for the Holocaust? Because some Christians did that, would we then say that Christianity is a violent religion?

Fascism — where did that come from? Europe.

Nazism? Europe.

Colonialism? Europe.

Does that justify our saying that all of that was due to Christianity?

Apartheid was supported by one of the major Christian churches in South Africa. Do you then say, “Ah, Christianity is responsible for all this racism?”

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