Pervez Musharraf may say:

These cowardly acts will not deter us from our fight against terror. Such dastardly acts are against the tenets and teachings of Islam …

But Andrew Bostom quotes Koranic verses, hadith, and other Islamic writings to illustrate that jihad (and I’m not talking about an inner struggle to overcome herpetophobia) is a central tenet of Islam as it has been practiced down through the centuries: The 9/11 Commission and Jihad.

While I see some limited evidence of progress in the 9/11 Commissioner’s understanding of the global jihad we are facing, ultimately their report resorted to the same tired and ahistorical canards that distort the mainstream tradition — indeed which are central to Islam — of jihad war. The report mentions the ad nauseatingly referenced Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328), who despite his Muslim orthodoxy, now serves as a convenient prop for those who contend, either deceitfully or in blissful ignorance, that jihad war is not a main tenet of traditional Islam. Once again a distorted historical nexus is made between Ibn Taymiyya, but not countless other seminal jurists and theologians who expressed identical opinions, throughout the history of Islamic civilization, and 20th century ideologues like Sayyid Qutb, and the Muslim Brotherhood movement. This flimsy construct, reiterated in the 9/11 Commission Report, is completely untenable.

Jihad wars have been waged continuously for well over a millennium, through the present, because jihad, which means “to strive in the path of Allah,” embodies an ideology and a jurisdiction. Both were formally conceived by Muslim jurisconsults and theologians from the 8th to 9th centuries onward, based on their interpretation of Qur’anic verses (for e.g., 9:5,6; 9:29; 4:76-79; 2: 214-15; 8:39-42), and long chapters in the Traditions (i.e., “hadith,” acts and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, especially those recorded by al-Bukhari [d. 869] and Muslim [d. 874]). The consensus on the nature of jihad from all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi’i) is clear:

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