If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

“So what would you need in place to make a jihad legitimate?” I asked the Sheikh. “First, believers must make dawa—call people to Islam. Once they have done this properly, and have found a place where they can live as a community…” “Then they are allowed…?” “When they have a community—not a state, but a Muslim society,” he said, reluctant, as always, to graft modern political terms onto Islamic concepts. “If you have one, and there are people who are preventing you from preaching, or from worshipping—then Islam allows you to fight back.” Then and only then: one could wage jihad only if one was being prevented from worshipping freely. While Qutb and his ideological grandchildren had cast jihad as an offensive war, the Sheikh saw jihad solely as a matter of self-defense. “And then,” he continued, “there are two more conditions.” First, the Muslims need a safe place from which to launch the jihad. Second, Muslims needed enough troops and weapons so that victory looked likely. Today, Muslims had neither: “Muslims have no safe places in our time, so when they try to wage jihad, many of them are killed.” Contemporary Muslims lacked the causes or the conditions for armed struggle. “If you do things in the wrong order, it can never work,” said the Sheikh.