The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

jāhiliyya

The word jāhiliyya is commonly translated as “age of ignorance” and applied to the century or so in west-central Arabian history prior to the mission of the Prophet Muhammad. The primary meaning of the root j-h-l (from which jāhiliyya is derived) at that time, however, was not usually mere ignorance but the tendency to go to extremes of behavior, whether in violence, revenge, boasting, drinking, or even generosity, and was sometimes considered a virtue. In the Qur’an, the root j-h-l may mean either excessive behavior or simple ignorance, and it is never a virtue. The word jāhiliyya appears four times in the Qur’an and involves opposition to God arising apparently from moral excess. In Qur’an 48:26, we read of the “fierce arrogance of jāhiliyya” in contrast to the “self-restraint (taqwā)” imposed on the Muslims and in 3:154 of people “wrongly suspicious of God with a jāhiliyya suspicion,” while 33:33 admonishes the wives of the Prophet not to “make a display of yourselves in the manner of the first jāhiliyya.” In 5:50, we read, “Do they seek a jāhiliyya judgment but who can give better judgment than God?” Here the reference appears to be a refusal to follow God’s commands.

These passages illustrate some of the main contrasts between the values of jāhiliyya and those of the Qur’an. Also, the jāhilī Arabs recognized Allah as a remote creator but usually turned to other deities closer at hand, something the Qur’an calls shirk, association of other beings with God, and treats as the worst of sins, since only God is to be obeyed and worshipped. The pagan Arabs were marked by a spirit of independence and self-sufficiency in relation both to gods and other humans, rejecting the idea of an afterlife and seeing themselves as subject only to a rather impersonal fate, while the Qur’an inculcates an attitude of submission to God and dependence on Him and promises a heavenly reward. The Qur’an calls for moderation and removes the excessive element from jāhilī values such as nobility, loyalty, courage, fortitude, revenge, and generosity, and it moderates discriminations relating to class and gender.

While the word jāhiliyya in the Qur’an refers primarily to a moral condition, it has come to refer to an epoch in history, probably because pagan Arab society soon ceased to exist although some of its traits persisted. In the hadith collection of Bukhari (d. 870), jāhiliyya is almost always a past epoch, as, for example, “The best people in the jāhiliyya are the best in Islam, if they have understanding.” Jāhiliyya has sometimes been extended to include the time before earlier prophets or the period between the lives of Jesus and Muhammad.

In spite of this, Muslims have always been aware that jāhiliyya characteristics can be found among them, even after the coming of Islam. Muhammad in a hadith says to one his followers, “Within you is jāhiliyya.” Even more forcefully in a Shi‘i hadith, he says, “Whosoever of my community dies and does not have an imam from among my successors, has died the death of the jāhiliyya.” Indeed, the early centuries of Islamic cultural history can be interpreted in terms of a struggle between the older jāhiliyya orientation, which did not disappear immediately, and the newer Islamic orientation.

In later times, Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) viewed, in effect, the pre-Islamic customs continuing among Muslims of his time as a kind of jāhiliyya. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) and his followers perceived many of their fellow Muslims as living in jāhiliyya.

In modern times, Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935) have compared aspects of their societies with aspects of jāhilī society. Commenting on Qur’an 5:50, they state that some nominal Muslims of their time are “more corrupt in their religion and morals than those concerning whom these verses were revealed.” A. Yusuf ‘Ali (d. 1953), whose English translation of the Qur’an is one of the best known, says in his commentary on the same verse in his translation of the Qur’an, “The Days of Ignorance were the days of tribalism, feuds, and selfish accentuation of differences in man. Those days are not really yet over. It is the mission of Islam to take us away from that false mental attitude.”

In a more forceful vein, Mawdudi (1903–79) in India and then Pakistan and Abul Hasan Nadwi (1914–99) in India have argued that jāhiliyya is found in the West and has infected Muslim societies, though without making them completely jāhilī. Mawdudi defined jāhiliyya as any conduct that goes against Islamic thinking, culture, or morality and claimed that Muslim society has long been a mixture of jāhiliyya and Islam.

Most radical has been the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) in some of his later writings. For him, a jāhilī society is any society that does not follow God’s guidance in all areas of its life. Such societies worship human beings instead of God and are inevitably unjust, inhumane, and uncivilized. Jāhiliyya is not just a moral stance but a dynamic and organic power always fighting against Islam, as strong in modern times as in Muhammad’s time, if not stronger. There is no room for compromise, and society cannot be partly jāhilī and partly Muslim. He considered all societies in the world at his time jāhilī, including all so-called Muslim societies. Given the violent nature of jāhiliyya and its all-encompassing hold on the world, it can only be replaced by revolutionary violence. These ideas contributed to his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966 and have inspired militants since his death, although for them the concept of takfīr (declaring someone an unbeliever and therefore liable to be killed) appears to have been more important than that of jāhiliyya.

In any case, Qutb and others have clearly updated the concept of jāhiliyya so that it now refers in the first instance less to the excessive behavior of the old pagan Arabs than to the materialism and secularism of modern societies.