This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: ‘The Sword of God’
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, Muhammad was at the height of his temporal and spiritual powers: master of Mecca and Medina, conqueror of the Hejaz and unifier of the Arab people under Allah.
He brought together a brotherhood of the Muhajirun, the Meccans who had migrated to Medina in the pilgrimage of Hijira in 622 CE, and the Ansar, their Muslim ‘helpers’ in Medina.
Both were now resolute in their devotion to Allah and the Prophet.
Converts to a new faith tend to be overzealous, perhaps to stamp out the psychological residue of their earlier belief and to make up the time they’d lost on the wrong path. Converts to Islam were no different. They were fiercely devout: ‘We are those who have given the pledge of allegiance to Muhammad to observe jihad as long as we remain alive,’ the Hadith records.
Jihad: the word is often translated as ‘striving’ for Islam. In classical Islamic theory (of the seventh and eighth centuries CE), jihad took two forms: the greater (al-jihad al-akbar), the inner spiritual struggle to achieve personal purity; and the lesser (al-jihad al-asghar), the military campaign to establish Islam as the one true faith on Earth.
All able-bodied Muslims were obliged to observe both.
In practice, then, jihad meant waging a holy war against the infidels in the name of Allah and the triumph of Islam.
Jihad was one of three ‘best deeds’ a Muslim could perform in his earthly life, Muhammad said (the others being pledging one’s soul to Allah and making the pilgrimage to Mecca).
There could be no doubting the violent nature and intent of jihad. Whether one defined jihad as ‘struggle’ or ‘striving’, the sacred texts agree that it meant a war to ‘defend’ the faith against unbelievers. Allah instructed all Muslims to ‘[f]ight them until there is no dissension and until the religion is God’s’.
Listen to what Muhammad said before the march on Mecca, as recorded in the Hadith: ‘So if you are called [by a Muslim ruler] for fighting, go forth immediately.’ And: ‘[W]hen you are called for jihad you should immediately respond to the call.’
Muhammad would ‘declare war against him who shows hostility to a pious worshipper of mine’.
Book 52 of the Hadith is devoted entirely to jihad, in all its interpretations, but the message is the same: go forth and conquer the world for Islam.
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When Muhammad arrived in Medina, he received a revelation from Allah permitting his disciples to fight anyone who forced Muslims from their homeland on account of their faith. At the time, Muhammad himself had been forced out of Mecca by his own tribe.
Allah thus authorised holy war against the infidels.
The Koran insists that this should be a defensive war: ‘Fight in the way of God against those who fight you, but do not be the aggressors – God does not love aggressors . . .’
At the same time, the Koran exhorts all Muslims to: ‘Kill [non-Muslims] wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is more serious than killing . . . If they do fight you, kill them – this is what such disbelievers deserve – but if they stop, then God is most forgiving and merciful. Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God.’
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The bloody consequences were swift.
The early battles were small but brutal. Muhammad’s victory at Badr in March 624 CE, during the month of Ramadan, was little more than a caravan raid, but it proved a pivotal moment in Islamic history.
For it showed that Muslims would unite and fight for Allah – and fight extremely well, with the fearless courage of those who cared nothing for their own lives and everything for their god.
A zeal for martyrdom drove Muhammad’s finest warriors: just 313 Muslims (with seventy camels and two horses) set out from Medina for the well of Badr, near the Red Sea coast, where they would ambush a 1000-strong Meccan caravan.
They fought with a fury that shocked and soundly defeated the Quraysh. Just fourteen Muslims died, against seventy of the enemy.
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At the Battle of Uhud, on 23 March 625 CE, the Prophet suffered a minor defeat – twenty-two Quraysh for sixty-five Muslims killed – but the dead included Muhammad’s paternal uncle, Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, a renowned fighter.
Hamza’s death offered a grisly sample of the ferocity on the battlefield. His slayer, a slave called Wahshi ibn Harb, speared him through the chest, slit open his stomach, tore out his liver and gave it to a woman called Hind bint Utba, whose father Hamza had killed at Badr.
Hind took a bite out of Hamza’s liver, spat it out, and then she and other Quraysh women mutilated his corpse, fashioning anklets, necklaces and pendants from his body parts.
To the disgust of their Bedouin allies, ‘they left the field sporting grisly bracelets, pendants, and collars’ made from the nose, ears and genitals of the slain Muslims.
The following year, when Muhammad’s armies returned and conquered Mecca, Hind submitted to Islam.
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The ghazu, or seasonal brawls between neighbouring Arab tribes over camels, cattle and slaves, were traditionally short and sharp, but in the late seventh century they had become sustained military campaigns in the name of Islam.
That was also because the chronic wars between the Persians and Byzantines had damaged trade and inflicted drought and famine on Arabia.
Holy war promised rich rewards, whether the warrior lived or died. He would be recompensed by Allah either with booty, if he survived, or with admission to Paradise as a martyr, if killed.
Muhammad himself declared that he ‘would love to be martyred’. And if he were ‘made alive’ – meaning resurrected – he would martyr himself again and again.
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Jihad soon spilled beyond the Arabian Peninsula. A series of spectacular conquests soon turned a rude desert people into the masters of an empire that would exceed in size any that had preceded it.
Surah 9.5 of the Koran justified the coming ‘Arab conquests’ in the minds of the faithful:
‘When the forbidden months are past [that is, after a truce between the Muslims and their enemies], fight and slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]; but if they repent and establish regular prayers and pay the alms tax [zakdt], then open the way for them, for God is oft-forgiving, most merciful.’
In other words, the infidels should not be slain wantonly, but should be offered a choice: to convert to Islam and live as Muslims, or continue in their faith and pay the tax.
Surah 9.29 reinforced the message:
‘Fight those who do not believe in God or the last day, . . . nor acknowledge the religion of truth from among the peoples of the book, until they pay the jizya [a kind of tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.’
First applied to Jews and Christians, this was later extended to cover other religious groups, who were allowed to practise their religion under Islamic rule ‘so long as they paid a poll tax and publicly recognized the hegemony and superiority of Islam’, as the scholar and rabbi Reuven Firestone writes.
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The Islamic empire of the early medieval era decided it was better to tax rather than bleed their enemies.
Coexistence, even a ‘two-state’ solution under Muslim rule, was possible, implied Surah 109:
‘Unbelievers . . . I shall never serve what you worship, nor will you ever serve what I worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine.’
Muhammad himself had encouraged his followers to respect the ‘People of the Book’, because their history and beliefs formed a continuum that led to Islam.
He had hoped that Muslims, Jews and Christians would peacefully coexist, an ideal he abandoned later in life.
In 632 CE, when Muhammad visited Mecca for the last time, he said that ‘every Muslim is a Muslim’s brother, and that the Muslims are brethren’, according to his first biographers.
Muslims should not fight one another, he declared, but they should fight the infidels, until the latter converted to Islam or paid the religious tax.
The Prophet himself said he would fight until all men confessed, ‘There is no god but God.’
This echoed the unrelenting message of the Koran: ‘Whenever We intend to destroy a society, We command its elite “to obey Allah”. If that society refused or rebelled, We destroy it utterly.’
Jihad would then have fulfilled the purpose for which Muslims believed God had sent his prophet: to make Islam supreme over all other religions on Earth.
After Muhammad died – in 632 CE, in the arms of his beloved Aisha, his third and youngest wife – the future of Islam was in doubt.
The Prophet had left no obvious heir. None among his comrades-in-arms was fit to replace the ‘Seal of the Prophets’, the last in the great chain that had started with Adam.
But they possessed something they had not felt before: Muhammad’s feat of unifying dozens of historically warring tribes had instilled a sense of ‘manifest destiny’ in a people who now, for the first time, identified themselves as Arab and Muslim.
Next Thursday, 22nd May 2025: ‘The Sword of God’
Selected sources and further reading:
Edgar, I.R. (2007) ‘The Inspirational Night Dream in the Motivation and Justification of Jihad’, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 11(2), pp. 59–76.
Firestone, R. (Spring 1996) ‘Conceptions of Holy War in Biblical and Qur’ānic Tradition’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 24(1), pp. 99–123.
Hadith: Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad from the Mishkat Al Masabih, Watsonville CA: The Book Foundation.
Heck, P.L. (Spring 2004) ‘“Jihad” Revisited’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 32(1), pp. 95–128.
Hoyland, R.G. (2015) In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Khaldun, I. and Rosenthal, F. (transl.) (2005) The Muqaddimah, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Martin, R.C. (ed.) (2003) Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, New York: Macmillan Reference USA.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Saad, M. and Bewley, A. (transl.) (2013) Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir (3 Vols.) (The Companions of Badr), London: Ta-Ha Publishers.
‘The Hadith of the Prophet Mohammad’, Sunnah.com.
Tyerman, C. (2006) God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, London: Penguin Books.
Dear Nadir,
Dear Nadir
Thank you for your constructive criticism of my recent post. I warmly welcome it. Not only have you given a contextual setting for the advent of holy war; you have delivered it in a beautifully compelling and readable way.
I accept that my short essays on Islam, as well as my earlier posts on Judaism and Christianity, are slices of a much bigger pie; and the additional context you provide is most appreciated.
As you point out, my posts are anchored in correct historical sources, and I agree with you that we should always try to expand our field of vision to fully grasp the meaning of historical events.
Thank you for your response. And thank you for subscribing to ‘Who made our minds?’
Regards
Paul
Dear Paul,
Thank you for your deep and historically grounded portrayal of early Islam. I truly appreciate your effort to engage with the roots of a civilization and faith that continues to shape lives across the world.
That said, I’d like to add a broader context that may help refine how we interpret jihad and early Islamic conquests. War was, unfortunately, a norm across civilizations in antiquity—whether we look at the Romans in Palestine, Genghis Khan, or the Crusaders. Military expansion, including religiously framed warfare, was not unique to Islam. Rather, it reflected a prevailing global structure of how empires formed, survived, and asserted authority.
Your citations from the Qur’an and Hadith are accurate in their textual source, but they lack reference to an essential concept in Qur’anic interpretation: Asbab al-Nuzul, or the "reasons for revelation." Verses often addressed specific historical situations and cannot be applied universally without understanding their original context. For example, phrases like “kill them wherever you find them” referred to a very particular conflict—not a blanket prescription for all time.
Moreover, there are other verses you did not reference which reflect Islam’s deeper ethos of restraint and coexistence:
“Do not kill the soul which God has made sacred—except by right.” (Qur’an 6:151)
“Persecution is worse than killing.” Hadith Saheh
“To you your religion, and to me mine.” (Qur’an 109:6)
Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) evolved complex frameworks to regulate warfare—what you referred to as “jihad.” Among the core principles agreed upon by respected scholars (from institutions like Al-Azhar in Egypt and the Council of Senior Scholars in Saudi Arabia) are:
Jihad-as-combat must be sanctioned by a legitimate authority (e.g. a ruler or state leader).
It cannot be launched by individuals or groups without state authorization—those who do are considered Khawarij (renegades or extremists).
It must meet conditions of justice, proportionality, and necessity, and it is bound by ethics outlined in Sharia.
You also missed two powerful interpretive frameworks that guide modern Islamic law:
Maslaha – Seeking the public interest (maximizing benefit and minimizing harm).
Maqasid al-Sharia – The higher objectives of Islamic law, including preservation of life, intellect, religion, lineage, and property.
Today, mainstream Muslim-majority governments—whether in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, or Indonesia—do not endorse warfare as religious duty. On the contrary, they actively disavow it and emphasize diplomacy, law, and civic engagement.
While your article presents a valid historical narrative, its interpretation of religious texts would benefit from more nuance. Islam, like other major religions, is not monolithic. It includes multiple schools of thought, layers of interpretation, and centuries of legal and ethical refinement.
Thank you again for opening the conversation. I hope we can continue to explore these complex histories and beliefs in good faith and with mutual curiosity.
Warm regards,
Nadir