CONCLUSION TO PART TWO

In 2005 Ayman al-Ẓawāhirī wrote a letter to the Jordanian Abū Muṣʿab al-Zarqāwī (d. 2006), the leader of al-Qāʿida in Mesopotamia.1 It seems to be authentic: there is no specific reason to think it a forgery,² and it fits well with Ẓawāhirī’s worldview as we know it from other sources, notably the book he wrote for a potentially wide Muslim audience sometime before the time of the collapse of the Ṭālibān in 2001.³ The letter is a valuable text inasmuch as it is a communication from one jihadi to another, not meant for public consumption. It reveals its author to be deeply worried. As we have seen, it was Ẓawāhirī’s hope that the geographically peripheral successes of the jihadis could serve as stepping-stones to the restoration of the caliphate in the core of the Muslim world.⁴ But there had always been a missing link: a successful jihadi insurrection in the core. In a country like Egypt, where the jihadis confronted an indigenous regime, there was just not the same polarizing clarity as in Afghanistan, where they confronted a foreign invader.5 Unexpectedly, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 had now provided a “rare and golden opportunity” for such resistance.⁶ As a result Zarqāwī was now in the privileged position of fighting an infidel invader in the heart of the Muslim world⁷—precisely the situation in which the masses would rally to the jihadi cause. This was vitally important: when it came to the expulsion of the Americans and the establishment of the jihadi emirate, the strongest weapon in the hands of the jihadis would be the support of the Muslim masses.⁸ Without it failure would be inevitable.⁹ But in Ẓawāhirī’s opinion Zarqāwī was courting failure and squandering the chance of a lifetime—though Ẓawāhirī was too fraternal to put it so harshly.¹⁰

Zarqāwī’s mistake was alienating the masses, and Ẓawāhirī makes it clear that he was doing it in several different ways. He was failing to involve the people in his movement.¹¹ He was making an issue of minor doctrinal differences that the masses do not understand, such as those between Ashʿarites, Māturīdites, and Salafīs (here Ẓawāhirī remarks that Mollā ʿUmar, may God protect him, is a Ḥanafī and a Māturīdite, yet his heart is in the right place).¹² He was making a public display of slaughtering hostages like animals.¹³ He was ignoring the resentment of the Iraqis toward the non-Iraqi leadership of the movement.¹⁴ And, not least, he was killing Shīʿites in large numbers.¹⁵

Ẓawāhirī has no quarrel with Zarqāwī’s aversion to Shīʿites.16 In his view they are indeed bad people: they cooperated with the Americans in both Afghanistan and Iraq, their beliefs are a danger to Islam, and any truly Islamic state must collide with them sooner or later.¹⁷ But for several prudential reasons, couldn’t it be later? The majority of Muslims don’t know how bad the Shīʿites are and will not understand attacks on them.¹⁸ In any case, doesn’t the current sectarian conflict make things easier for the Americans?¹⁹ Don’t we also have more than a hundred prisoners in the hands of the Iranians, and isn’t it important that we and the Iranians should avoid harming each other while the Americans have us both in their sights?²⁰ In addition to these counsels of prudence, Ẓawāhirī advances a moral objection: even if Zarqāwī has to kill the Shīʿite elite, why go after ordinary Shīʿites when they are forgiven for the error of their ways on account of their ignorance?²¹ But the balance of Ẓawāhirī’s argument is prudential, not moral.

As will be apparent from this summary, much of the substance of the letter could just as well have been penned by a sympathetic leftist critic of a floundering people’s war in the twentieth-century Third World. There are, of course, Islamic references in the letter, though they are relatively infrequent; for example, some rebels of the early Islamic period appear,²² and there are several mentions of the caliphate.²³ But with one exception there is a sustained absence of religious proof-texts. The exception is a familiar one: the Prophet’s remark to ʿUmar about the need to avoid the perception that he was killing his own Companions.²⁴ We should, Ẓawāhirī says, be guided by the concern expressed here. Significantly, he does not pause to tell the story that led Muḥammad to make this remark; he can take it for granted that a fellow jihadi will know what he is talking about.

The saying is in fact well known in mainstream jihadi circles.25 A case in point is Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī, the Palestinian Salafī and jihadi ideologue who for many years wrote from prison in Jordan.²⁶ In a massive work intended to dampen down excessive zeal in declaring people to be unbelievers, he invokes the example (ʿibra) of the conduct of Muḥammad: he did not declare hypocrites to be unbelievers unless he had public proof of their infidelity, lest it be said that he was killing his own Companions, which in turn would have alienated people from him.²⁷ In the same vein he reminisces that during his time in Pakistan it became fashionable there to declare the leading Saudi cleric Ibn Bāz (d. 1999) and his likes to be infidels; when asked about this Maqdisī invoked the saying, refusing to wade into the question and considering it enough to warn youth against the pronouncements of such scholars on political matters.²⁸ As a result the zealots declared Maqdisī himself to be an unbeliever; they extended this to those who were accustomed to pray behind him on the ground that they in turn had failed to declare him an unbeliever, and then to those who failed to declare this latter group to be unbelievers, and so forth.²⁹

It is therefore no surprise to find Maqdisī using the saying in the same vein as Ẓawāhirī to criticize extremist jihadi groups he sees as out of control. A work of 2004 contains several relevant passages.³⁰ In one he quotes the saying and stresses its importance in the phases before the movement has achieved domination; he goes on to say that jihadis must accordingly choose targets that will not bring them into disrepute. Anyone who examines some of the operations carried out by those who are deficient in their understanding—either of reality or of the law or of both—will see that they fail to attend to this.31 As a result, alongside the edifying activities of al-Qāʿida, the Ṭālibān, the Chechens, and the Palestinians, we have to endure nitwits who shoot up a congregation in a mosque in the Sudan, or blow up a Shīʿite mosque in a Pakistani village, or bomb buses crammed full of ordinary people in the streets of Karachi and Lahore, or carry out bizarre operations that kill dozens of Iraqis in the streets of Baghdad.³² In another passage he has more to say about the Shīʿites. He has, of course, no love for them, and he expatiates on the viciousness of their treatment of the Sunnīs. But appearances matter: in public the Shīʿites talk about the Sunnīs as their brothers, with the result that in the eyes of the naïve and gullible it is the Sunnīs who look like the troublemakers.³³ In the face of this, we must call upon our jihadis to follow the wisdom of the Prophet as expressed in the saying; for whether the jihadis like it or not, the fact is that the world sees the Shīʿites as Muslims, just as the hypocrites were reckoned as Muslims in the time of the Prophet.³⁴ The jihadis should thus avoid calling for strife with the Shīʿites, and if such conflict is necessary it should be presented as defensive, lest it appear to others as an incitement to civil war.³⁵ Assassinating Shīʿite leaders is one thing, failing to distinguish between the leaders and the masses whom they lead astray is another.³⁶ A final passage is concerned with the conflict between the jihadis and the infidel rulers (ṭawāghīt) of the Muslim world. In this conflict the jihadis must not act in such a way as to alienate people and discredit themselves, appearing as the enemies of the weak and thereby giving the rulers the opportunity to pose as their champions against terrorism; whoever disregards these considerations has failed to understand the significance of the saying.³⁷

Other prominent jihadis who invoke the saying are Abū Bakr Nājī and Abū Baṣīr al-Ṭarṭūsī. Nājī seems to refer to Iraq when he remarks that the current scene is full of groups of nationalists, Baʿthists, and Islamists, the Islamist groups being small and not linked to any overall leadership; he complains that none of these are aware of the rule embodied in the saying.38 Ṭarṭūsī has a work on jihad and its politics that carries a dedication to Mullā Muḥammad ʿUmar and the jihadis of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, and elsewhere.³⁹ In the main body of the work, he warns that in jihad it is not enough to consider whether or not an action is permitted; one must also think about its consequences, in other words, the costs and benefits likely to accrue from it.⁴⁰ As an example he describes how the Prophet spared the arch-hypocrite (raʾs al-nifāq) Ibn Ubayy, briefly telling the story and quoting the saying. In the same way, if the killing of a known hypocrite would lead to internal dissension and cause people to say that the Muslims are killing their own kind, then it is better not to proceed.⁴¹ He repeats this message in an appendix devoted to jihad in Iraq, telling the story at greater length and again quoting the saying.⁴² To the views of these well-known figures we may add those of an anonymous jihadi critic of the Amman bombings of November 2005—the work of Zarqāwī’s group, al-Qāʿida in Mesopotamia. This critic has no quarrel with the view that Islam calls for the elimination of the current rulers of the Muslim world.⁴³ But he has serious reservations about such bombings. He holds that “martyrdom operations” (the quotation marks are his) should be very much the exception rather than the rule;⁴⁴ that the ordinary citizen will not be reassured by the fact that seventeen Palestinians who had no connection to the primary targets were killed in the bombings;⁴⁵ and that the “strategy of creative anarchy” is flawed—it can turn against the jihadis themselves.⁴⁶ We jihadis, he says, are not above reproach.⁴⁷ We accordingly need to practice self-criticism and think carefully about the consequences of our actions; it is here that he quotes the saying.48

As we would expect, the extremists are obliged to defend themselves against this line of attack. Thus, a hard-line jihadi who calls himself Abū Maryam writes to brush aside criticism of the bombing of a general security building in Riyadh that took place in April 2004.⁴⁹ It is clear from his argument that the saying had figured prominently in this criticism.⁵⁰ His concern is accordingly to show that no comparison can be made between the circumstances in which Muḥammad originally uttered the saying and those in which the jihadis of the present epoch confront the supporters of the infidel rulers.⁵¹ Thus, the hypocrites of Muḥammad’s time did at least outwardly submit to him, whereas the apostates today flaunt their unbelief.⁵² Moreover, those hypocrites were merely individuals, whereas today a whole sector of society fails to implement the Sharīʿa.⁵³ The significance of this distinction is obvious: such collective delinquency is far more damaging to Islam than the misbehavior of a few individuals.⁵⁴ Given the magnitude of this threat, it is frivolous to argue that preserving Islam is less important than preventing a handful of unbelievers from remarking that the Muslims, or the jihadis, kill their own companions⁵⁵ (the argument to which he is responding here being that jihadi actions of this kind inhibit conversion to Islam).⁵⁶ Indeed today’s massive apostasy, which includes the majority of so-called Muslims, is precisely the result of the failure to fight such backsliding.57 Would any sane person, then, say that in such circumstances as these we are not permitted to fight the apostates for fear that the unbelievers might say that the jihadis are killing their own companions?⁵⁸ Abū Maryam’s view that most of those who pass for Muslims today are in fact apostates—and not just the current rulers and those who support them—is, of course, typically extremist.

All this should not give the impression that the saying is monopolized by contemporary jihadis, though obviously it has particular relevance to their activities. The patriarchal figures of Islamism were naturally aware of it. Mawdūdī comes to the story at the appropriate point in his Koran commentary,⁵⁹ devoting a clear-headed footnote to its significance. Here he distinguishes the question whether someone like Ibn Ubayy deserves to be killed from the question whether it would in fact be wise to kill him; in a case in which the offender has a substantial political force behind him, it would be better not to kill him but rather to attend to the underlying political problem.⁶⁰ He makes it clear that he is setting out a principle that still applies today and not simply explaining why Muḥammad acted as he did. But so far as I know he does not take up the saying elsewhere, suggesting that in the end he did not attach great importance to it—though he is well aware that such qualities as prudence, insight, and the capacity to respond creatively to different situations are important and that good leadership depends on sound judgment.⁶¹ Quṭb likewise tells the story and quotes the saying in his commentary on the relevant passage of the Koran,⁶² commenting that the Prophet showed himself a wise and inspired leader in his handling of the incident.⁶³ But he does not raise the question of what we can learn from it today, and to my knowledge he does not discuss the saying in his other writings. Ḥawwā does bring up the story outside the context of a Koran commentary, adducing it in an account of Muḥammad’s skill in handling the unexpected difficulties (al-mashākil al-ṭāriʾa) that arose with such frequency among a people as fractious as the Arabs.64 But even Ḥawwā does nothing to highlight the aspect of the story that attracts Ẓawāhirī’s attention: the fact that killing people indiscriminately can carry costs because it is bad for one’s image.

More recently, the saying has had an obvious attraction for those who feel that the Muslim world would be a better place without much of the current jihadi violence. It can thus figure in the pronouncements of Islamists who from a Western point of view might be described as moderates and from a jihadi vantage point as neo-Murjiʾites, in other words, quietists.⁶⁵ An example would be the Syrian Munīr Muḥammad al-Ghaḍbān, a Muslim Brother and the author of a work on the implications of the life of the Prophet for the Islamic movement today.⁶⁶ Though he is devoted to the memory of Sayyid Quṭb,⁶⁷ he is by no means a radical; thus, when impetuous and over-zealous youth denounce the wise and deliberate leadership of the movement, his sympathies are entirely with the latter.⁶⁸ With regard to the saying, he remarks how much the troops of the Islamic movement (al-junūd fī ʾl-ṣaff) need to understand Muḥammad’s position regarding the killing of Ibn Ubayy,⁶⁹ and he stresses that Muḥammad’s purpose was to deny the enemy an opportunity to pillory the Islamic movement in front of those who were neutral in the conflict.⁷⁰ In a similar vein a more recent author describes Muḥammad’s restraint as a most advantageous political decision (min anfaʿ al-siyāsāt)71 and goes on to complain that it is not understood by “zealous Muslim youth” (al-shabāb al-Muslim al-mutaḥammis).⁷²

Anyone who engages in political action to realize a set of values needs some measure of prudence, even if the values in question are so uncompromising as to preclude it. In this context it is a significant feature of the Islamic tradition that the heritage itself furnishes resources for the nurturing of political prudence. In the instance considered here, the decision taken by Muḥammad in the matter of Ibn Ubayy provides a vivid dramatization of the point that killing people considered to be Muslims, even when justified, can become a public relations disaster. Whether that has caused jihadis to kill fewer people than they would otherwise have done is hard to say. But it has powerfully shaped the arguments that have arisen from their activities. There is mileage for Islamists in having a prophet who regularly confronted hard political choices in a way that the Buddha and Jesus did not.

___________

¹ Letter from Ẓawāhirī to Zarqāwī, translated in Mansfield, His own words, 250–79. I am much indebted to William McCants for supplying me with a copy of the Arabic original and have checked my references against it. The letter is now available on the website of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Mansfield gives the date of the letter as October 11, 2005 (250), but this is in fact the date when it was released by the American authorities; the date that appears at the end of the letter itself is July 9, 2005. However, the end of the letter may not belong to it: while the letter opens by naming its addressee as Abū Muṣʿab, i.e., Zarqāwī (250), the end of the letter clearly refers to a plurality of addressees and speaks of Zarqāwī in the third person (277–78). For background to this letter, see V. Brown et al., Cracks, 19–21; for a brief biography of Zarqāwī, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 310–12.

² Two features of the letter were adduced as reasons to judge it a forgery in the discussion following its release. One was the inclusion of the family (āl) of the Prophet in the initial benediction (al-ṣalātu waʾl-salāmu ʿalā rasūli ʾllāhi wa-ālihi wa-ṣaḥbihi wa-man wālāhu), which was taken to indicate a Shīʿite forgery. However, Ẓawāhirī uses such language elsewhere in his writings (see ʿAlī, Ḥilf al-irhāb, 3: 96.12, 110.21, 162.21, 190.44), and he has excellent precedent in the works of Ḥasan al-Bannā (Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 6.3, 34.3, 164.2, 203.2, 302.2, 414.4, 498.12) and elsewhere. The other feature was a reference to Ḥusayn ibn Alī (d. 680) with the title imam (Mansfield, His own words, 255). Here again, it is not hard to find parallels in Sunnī sources. Thus, an Egyptian Mālikī who died in 1815 speaks of al-imām al-Ḥusayn (Dasūqī, Ḥāshiya, 4: 298.29 of the main text), while a Damascene Ḥanafī who died in 1708 refers to him as al-imām al-Ḥusayn al-sibṭ raḍiya ʾllāhu ʿanhu, with a typically Sunnī blessing (Ibn Ḥamza al-Ḥusaynī al-Dimashqī, al-Bayān waʾl-taʿrīf, 2: 256.9). A more recent example is an anti-Shīʿite article on the website of the Saudi cleric Salmān al-ʿAwda in which Ḥusayn is referred to as al-imām al-Ḥusayn raḍiya ʾllāhu ʿanhu (“Sharṭ ṣidq al-Shīʿa fī ʾl-ḥuzn ʿalā ʾl-imām al-Ḥusayn raḍiya ʾllāhu ʿanhu”); other examples can easily be found by conducting an Internet search for this or similar phrases.

³ For a translation of his Knights under the Prophet’s banner, see Mansfield, His own words, 19–225; cf. above, 233.

⁴ See 233n121.

⁵ Cf. Ẓawāhirī’s comment on the clarity of the Afghan situation in Mansfield, His own words, 37. Abū Muṣʿab al-Sūrī makes a similar point more generally (Lia, Architect of global jihad, 375).

⁶ The phrase is Bin Laden’s (Lawrence, Messages, 272).

⁷ Mansfield, His own words, 252, 253.

⁸ Ibid., 257.

⁹ Ibid., 258.

¹⁰ Contrast the less patient tone of a letter from a senior al-Qāʿida leader to Zarqāwī dating from December 2005 (V. Brown et al., Cracks, 20–21, and the summary at 68–69). By this time Zarqāwī’s misdeeds included the Amman bombings of 2005, to which the letter refers. For the text of this letter, see above, 213n278. The critical attitude of the leaders of al-Qāʿida to the impolitic activities of other jihadis is by now a familiar theme.

¹¹ Mansfield, His own words, 261–62, and see 263.

¹² Ibid., 263–66, especially 263–64 (the overall theme of this section of the letter is that it is unwise to disparage the scholars to the general public). This problem was not confined to Iraq: some jihadis regarded the Ṭālibān as unbelievers (Lahoud, Jihadis’ path to self-destruction, 225, and cf. 197).

¹³ Mansfield, His own words, 271–72.

¹⁴ Ibid., 274.

¹⁵ For Zarqāwī’s explanation of his anti-Shīʿite strategy, see Haykel, “Al-Qa’ida and Shiism,” 193–94 (and see also Zarqāwī, Hal atāka ḥadīth al-Rāfiḍa?!; I owe my copy of this tract to William McCants). For more on jihadi disagreements with Zarqāwī regarding the Shīʿites, see Gerges, Far enemy, 256f, 261-3; Haykel, “Al-Qa’ida and Shiism,” 194-6.

¹⁶ For the background to Ẓawāhirī’s attitude to Shīʿites, see Haykel, “Al-Qa’ida and Shiism,” 186–90, and for his criticism of Zarqāwī, see 195–96.

¹⁷ Mansfield, His own words, 267–68.

¹⁸ Ibid., 268.

¹⁹ Ibid., 269.

²⁰ Ibid., 269–70.

²¹ Ibid., 269. For the question whether one can distinguish in this way between the elite and the masses among the Shīʿites, see Haykel, “Al-Qa’ida and Shiism,” 195, and cf. 192, 200n16, 201n20; also Hafez, “Takfir and violence,” 34.

²² Mansfield, His own words, 255.

²³ Ibid., 255, 257, 266, and cf. 252.

²⁴ Ibid., 259–60. In the original the quotation is found at 6.11, a little above the heading qaḍiyyat al-iʿdād li-mā baʿda khurūj al-Amrīkān. The wording of the saying as given by Ẓawāhirī (daʿhu lā yataḥaddathu ʾl-nāsu anna Muḥammadan yaqtulu aṣḥābahu) is identical with that given in Muslim’s version and two of Bukhārī’s (for references see above, 161n14).

²⁵ I am much indebted to William McCants for supplying me with a collection of some twenty-five texts from the jihadi website Minbar al-Tawḥīd waʾl-Jihād (http://www.tawhed.ws) that mention or discuss the saying; all references to texts on this website given in this and the following paragraphs derive from this collection. As might be expected, these materials indicate a degree of jihadi dependence on Ibn Taymiyya. For quotations or citations of relevant passages from his Ṣārim, see, for example, Maqdisī, Ishrāqa, 19 n14; Maqdisī, Kashf shubuhāt al-mujādilīn, 29 n8; Abū ʾl-Mundhir al-Sāʿidī, Khuṭūṭ ʿarīḍa, 94.6 (in the footnote); Dawsarī, al-Radd ʿalā bayān “al-Jabha al-Dākhiliyya,” 6.6, 27.10, 28.4, 29.1. Another relevant passage sometimes quoted is from Ibn Taymiyya’s account of forbidding wrong; see Ghunaymī, Marāḥil tashrīʿ al-jihād, 36.20; Ghunaymī, Ḥukm taghyīr al-munkar, 33.20; Ghunaymī, Muṣṭalaḥāt wa-mafāhīm, 64.7; Ḍawābiṭ istinbāṭ aḥkām al-daʿwa, 4.18. The original of this latter passage may be found in Ibn Taymiyya, al-Amr biʾl-maʿrūf, 22.11, and Ibn Taymiyya, Istiqāma, 2: 219.5.

²⁶ McCants, Militant ideology atlas, 333; Hegghammer and Lacroix, “Rejectionist Islamism,” 115–16; and see now Wagemakers, Quietist jihadi, chap. 1.

²⁷ Maqdisī, al-Risāla al-thalāthīniyya, 515.8.

²⁸ Maqdisī, Ishrāqa, 19.17.

²⁹ Ibid., 20.1. Cf. Abū Jandal al-Azdī, Nuṣūṣ al-fuqahāʾ, 30.9.

³⁰ Maqdisī, Waqafāt; and see Hafez, “Takfir and violence,” 41.

³¹ Maqdisī, Waqafāt, 10.4.

³² Ibid., 10.14, 11.16.

³³ Ibid., 86.9.

³⁴ Ibid., 87.4.

³⁵ Ibid., 87.10.

³⁶ Ibid., 87.18; and see Wagemakers, Quietist jihadi, 90.

³⁷ Maqdisī, Waqafāt, 151.11.

³⁸ Nājī, al-Khawana, 60.9. For more on this jihadi strategist, and the similarity of his thinking to that of Ẓawāhirī, see Brachman and McCants, “Stealing Al Qaeda’s playbook,” especially 310–12 and the authors’ comments at 312–13.

³⁹ Abū Baṣīr, Jihād, 2.1. For this jihadi ideologue, see McCants, Militant ideology atlas, 295–96.

⁴⁰ Abū Baṣīr, Jihād, 14.1.

⁴¹ Ibid., 14.9.

⁴² Ibid., 59.3, 59.11.

⁴³ Taʿqīb, 1.14.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 2.11.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 4.12.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 6.13, 6.24.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 3.9.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 3.13.

⁴⁹ Abū Maryam, Shubha.

⁵⁰ See, for example, ibid., 1.12—not to mention the title of the piece, in which the tradition is quoted.

⁵¹ Ibid., 7.9.

⁵² Ibid., 1.14, 5.10, 6.8.

⁵³ Cf. ibid., 1.11.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 3.25.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 4.1, 4.18, 4.21. Of the consequent loss of potential converts he remarks that a bird in the hand is worth ten in the bush (5.1).

⁵⁶ For an example of this argument, see Fatḥ Allāh, Lā yataḥaddath, 4.1, urging the avoidance of actions that might bring about aversion from the call of Islam (sadd dharāʾiʿ al-nufūr ʿan daʿwat al-Islām). The principle of sadd al-dharāʾiʿ rests on the observation that, as vernacular English has it, one thing leads to another; hence, actions that lead to prohibited actions are themselves probibited. There is good medieval authority for viewing our saying as an instance of this principle (see, for example, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Iʿlām al-muwaqqiʿīn, 3: 138.19, in a section on sadd al-dharāʾiʿ; Shāṭibī, Muwāfaqāt, 3: 75.11, and cf. 5: 180.13). Fatḥ Allāh explains that any purported act of jihad that leads to such aversion, or alienates Muslims, goes against the purpose of jihad (Lā yataḥaddath, 4.2), and that the Sharīʿa forbids an action that has such an effect, even if it is legal in itself; this is why Muḥammad did not kill any of the hypocrites—and here he quotes the saying with reference to Ibn Ubayy (4.12). If people come to see the Muslims as given to slaughtering each other, what chance can there be that they will listen to the call of Islam, let alone accept it (4.21)?

⁵⁷ Abū Maryam, Shubha, 4.5.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 4.23, 6.16.

⁵⁹ For his Urdu translation of the saying, see Mawdūdī, Tafhīm, 5: 513.17, to Q63.

⁶⁰ Mawdūdī, Tafhīm, 5: 514–15n1. I am much indebted to Qasim Zaman for identifying and translating this footnote for me.

⁶¹ Mawdudi, Islamic movement, 95–96. For this work, first published in 1945, see Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 40 no. 129.

⁶² Quṭb, Ẓilāl, 3575.19, 3576.1, to Q63:5–8.

⁶³ Ibid., 3578.16.

⁶⁴ Ḥawwā, Rasūl, 1: 218.1, 218.13, 219.16, 220.9. Ḥawwā presents Muḥammad’s treatment of the hypocrites as the second of five examples of his political skill (218–30); he offers no commentary beyond placing the story within this framework. Though it is not clear from the context, the Arabs to whose political refractoriness he refers would seem to be those of pre-Islamic Arabia rather than his own contemporaries (compare ibid., 2: 198.17, 199.1). In his Koran commentary the saying appears twice in accounts of the incident that he quotes (Ḥawwā, al-Asās fī ʾl-tafsīr, 5922.4, 5923.15), but he does not take it up either in his comments on Q63:8 (5933.15) or in his account of the lessons of the Sūra (5937–38).

⁶⁵ Cf. Haykel, “Salafi thought and action,” 54 no. 30.

⁶⁶ Ghaḍbān, Manhaj.

⁶⁷ See ibid., 7.17, and the rest of the introduction.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 270.7, and cf. 271.3, 271.12.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 270.3, quoting the saying (as he has already done in quoting a long account of the story, 260.18, and does again at 268.23, 271.2).

⁷⁰ Ibid., 270.26 (quoting the saying). Ghaḍbān also has a briefer treatment of the saying in his Fiqh al-sīra, see 614.16, 617.3. Another author praises the political skill displayed by the Prophet in this incident as something his community should imitate (Ṣallābī, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, 2: 235.16, and see 233.6, 233.9, 234.17).

⁷¹ Abda, Ṭarīq, 106.20 (the saying is quoted at 105.5).

⁷² Ibid., 107.2. As might be expected, this author likewise stresses the role of Muslim youth in the disastrous decision that led to the defeat of Muḥammad’s forces at the battle of Uḥud in 625 (96.3; cf. above, 219).