Lessons from History

The Jews were the People of the Book, but in the later period of their history they completely forgot their duty and discarded the concept of being witnesses. They replaced it with the concept of Jewish supremacism. Exactly the same has happened with the Muslims. They now think in terms of Muslim supremacism. The Muslim thought that developed in the later period of Muslim history all stemmed from this notion of Muslim supremacism. It can be summed up as: Nahnu khulafa Allah fil arz (We are the vicegerents of God on earth). The present-day Muslim militants have adopted a selfstyled concept of jihad, that is, to establish divine rule in the world, and have chosen to give their militancy religious justification by calling it jihad. Muslim literature of later days, directly or indirectly, projects this concept in a major way. And it is a concept which has been revived in modern times with even greater emphasis by two Muslim thinkers, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966) in the Arab world and the Pakistani Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (1903 – 1979) in the non-Arab world. It is this concept, popularized in the present century, which has ultimately led to terrorism in the name of jihad. ‘Jihad’ literally means ‘utmost struggle’. The true interpretation of this word is ‘a peaceful struggle for the dissemination of the message of God to mankind’.