Understanding Jihad

Dr Joel Hodge, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, has written an extremely important book on the threat to the stability of the global human city posed by terror, violence and militant jihadism. The book is a masterly dissection of this complex and disconcerting topic: a deeply traumatising topic when encountered in the flesh. Part of the deep puzzle arises from our incapacity to begin to understand the inversion of values that redescribes the death of innocents as not only a good thing, but mandated and required to bring about some further maximally desirous end.

Hodge provides a lucid analysis of the core drivers that lead to terror, and offers carefully thought-out pathways in response; pathways that carry an illumination for the good of those who travel them. His book is ultimately about values and order in the sense of Eric Voegelin’s metaxis—the participatory realm of existence in which all humans share and which is subject to distortions and inversions.

Hodge introduces overlapping themes via theo­retical reflection to explore the core topic. He focuses on extremely religious adherents or practitioners engaging in new forms of normative violence to achieve supposedly desirable ends. He explores the character or inner form of the god in question, the god appealed to, and whether or not violence and terror are drivers emerging from that inner form (what St John in his foundational gospel text calls the bosom or depths of the Father). He also surveys with minute accuracy a number of advocates of terror-violence in the last hundred years.

There is much more than these three themes to Hodge’s masterly work, which is Volume 10 in the impressive series “Violence, Desire and the Sacred” edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming and Hodge. He comes equipped with a thoughtfully researched interpretive framework in the multi-disciplinary work of the late French Catholic intellectual René Girard. Hodge’s scoping of Girard’s schema (mimetic theory, mimetic rivalry, co-relational rivalrous desire, the scapegoating of the “other” as the cause of all problems, and even the murderous desire to remove one’s rival who stands between oneself and the object of desire) provides a powerful exploratory tool for the study of terror, and specifically religious terror.

If we are to have a grand narrative, we must get it right and be able to show why terror, no matter worked by whom, can have no part in it—despite those for whom it has become a legitimating passion.

Hodge gives the reader a synthetic response that draws on multiple sources, each of which is a demonstration of his commitment to scholarship and research. He exemplifies modern, informed Catholic scholarship at its best. His book opens doors all over the place and enables the reader to better track a deposit that began with the incarnational victim who was innocent, and who stands with the innocent victims of every age from Abel to the present. Hodge’s work helps all who seek to recover the Abrahamic heritage as the religion of the innocent victim and whose God is the God of forgiveness and self-giving grace, uniformly and unambiguously. He notes (specifically on pages 194-95) that this breakthrough insight in human civilisation does not emerge absolutely all at once and is often received and intuited developmentally, partially and over time.

The book also cautions against drives to the use of terror in the (mistaken) belief that this will create a utopian future, or that indiscriminate violence against the individual and against many can instantiate a kingdom of heaven. Such movements are not new and not confined to one tradition. Hodge discusses trends in the West that have seen such irruptions, and his discussion of historical trends from Napoleon to the present must be pondered. (In reading Hodge, I was reminded of Churchill in 1925, warning that the time was coming when a bomb the size of an orange could destroy a whole city block.)

To that end, Hodge’s discussion of the nation-state and nationalism, a term to which he is sensitive, is particularly useful to the wider study of terror and any dependence it may have on scapegoating the person or people defined as “not us”, the “other”. He uses it to account in part for the collapse into rivalrous conflict of an increasingly disastrous scale that plagued Europe from the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon and on to the conclusion of the Second World War. Perhaps it can be tracked to 1648 and the end of the Thirty Years War. Nineteenth-century French-German rivalry is a goldmine for further exploration of this view of national identity and conflict. Specifically, the work of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and admirer of Napoleon, is prominently in the background in Hodge’s notion that the pendulum of conflict swings to extremes as enmities are informed by leaps in the machinery and technology of killing. Hodge notes that this combines with Napoleon’s mobilisation of the whole French people as a national entity, a grand army in a morally justified crusade against others as yet unliberated and living in the delusions of the unreformed world.

On this view, two hundred years ago, Napoleon’s libido dominandi could be hidden behind a new moral imperative to go to war. In some ways, Hodge identifies here an early part-analogy for the later jihadist concern for the Islamic faithful as victim of “the national other” who need by force to be brought into the better total order of things and saved from the age of ignorance.

However we approach the European questions, the reader does well to add the study of the works of Elie Kedourie on nationalism to further open up the application of flawed Euro-American notions of nationalism and nationhood to the older existing power structure of the Middle East.

In this respect, Hodge is astutely correct when he notes the effects of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 as part of the detritus of the First World War and since the extended Turkish-Greek conflict. This powerful religious-political symbol of a meta-region or meta-nation is alive again today and has been claimed by those who take offence at what they see as the excesses of the secular or godless West and its obsession with money and wealth. It is a short step to symbolise a Western nation as Satan visible, to be opposed by all means. The caliphate remains as the symbol of authority prior to and different from pan-Arab nationalism considered as a mirror of the secular West.

Hodge usefully discusses the Egyptian “intellectual” Sayyid Qutb. I recommend close reading of Qutb in English as a tester to one’s Christian theology and to what one really thinks about God and how God might act in the world, and what God preferences, and what “I” might do to aid the cause. The challenge, as Hodge discerns, lies where a vanguard or exemplary community is created to act and must act, to make the total system of a faith active and visible in this life, even as the form of a reformed society. To put a Qutb-like question to a Christian, one might ask, “And what do you think might happen if you pray the Lord’s Prayer daily and wait for God to change the world?” The issue then arises of what a vanguard or exemplary community of Christians might engage in to make the Kingdom of God more real on earth—why acts of violence are excluded and supplanted by what were once called “works of corporal mercy”. Different models and exemplars have emerged at different times in the Christian domain, some with greater claims to success than others: and at times betrayals of these gospel insights have occurred, as Pope John Paul II attempted to acknowledge at the end of the second millennium.

This striving is different from the jihad of some of Qutb’s followers who embraced a martyrdom in works of terror as a newly legitimated vanguard activity against the “Satan” as enemy. This seemed to arise in part from a reading of the Koran that forbids anything to stand alongside the one true God or stand between God and the believer. “Secularity” can in some senses move into that sacred space and function as self-referencing. Some might begin to see this as hostile to the One God and to express a self-referencing, self-contained mindset. The enlightenment in the principal nations of the West can get drawn in here. These nations were encountered by the Islamic world through the ages of empire (Britain and France and Germany) and latterly through their heir in the United States. More comprehensively of course, one must study this encounter all the way back to the irruption of Islam, initially in the person of Mohammed, and then in the movement that spread with ecumenical intent—in the original meaning of that term.

One of Hodge’s most challenging insights lies in his apprehension that jihadists may have reverted to explicit notions of pre-Abrahamic human sacrifice in the domain of archaic religions where the loss of the human becomes a “good to bring about good” or avert the displeasure of the deity. (I add that in my opinion there are elements of human sacrifice in the Roman triumph following the Jewish War, as a close reading of Josephus’s The Jewish War unintentionally discloses.)

In all, this leads Hodge into the more explicit identification of the core Christian faith that reveals a God of mercy and love, even in and through the incarnation and death of the Son; which death is seen as sacrifice, or even mysteriously as the sacrifice that ends sacrifice and says to humanity, “We need have no more of this.” This victim rises from the dead, not to seek vengeance or even justice for the wrong done but to lead humanity as the first-born of many brothers and sisters who can hope for a syndoxa (co-participatory glory) that begins in this life and leads into a life to come that is freed from death and decay.

We are left to ponder more fully the core realities of the sacrifice of the Mass that now averts human bloodshed, eschews and turns from violence and leaves us with the call to love our (meta-national) human neighbours and enables us, who are not worthy, to offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and live in love and charity with our neighbours.

I think Joel Hodge’s book will be one of the best theological texts of 2020.

Violence in the Name of God: The Militant Jihadist Response to Modernity
by Joel Hodge
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 284 pages, $153

Ivan Head is the former Warden of St Paul’s College Sydney. His “Thoughts on Sayyid Qutb’s Jihad” appeared in the July-August 2019 issue.