Once Upon a Jihad. Alex Perry

      It was like this, steeped in his love for the brothers, and their love for him, and the way they looked, which was the way he looked, which was the same as Osama’s look, with bits from The Mummy and The Prince of Persia thrown in, that Ifthekar came to see himself as a soldier of faith and death, a mujahid, a jihadi, even, if Allah called him to it, a shahid – a martyr. If he was an example to others, he insisted it was not because he was anything special, but because he was guided through the darkness by the bright light of jannah, a word Ifthekar pronounced with a breathlessness because it was nothing less than another world, a perfect, everlasting paradise far away from Hudson Road and Portsmouth, far above Middle Earth and all the Muggles. “I’d love to meet all you brothers in jannah, man, just chilling, smoking some shisha,” he said. “Hey, imagine the cats you can have in jannah! Like massive tigers – or lions! – just walking with you…” This road to jannah was the “path”, and if you accepted your destiny and stayed on it, stayed true to the brothers, then Ifthekar said that was “being on it, man. On the deen, man”. That was the other reason for the tutorial. You had to share the knowledge and reinforce the Brotherhood and stay sure on the “path” – and if that meant a chance to dress up and look good on ustream, and have a few hundred people watch you, and tweet you, and maybe like you on Facebook, then that was cool, too. As Ifthekar said: “@me, @me.”

      Ifthekar Jaman recorded his tutorial on the night of 16 December 2012. One day less than a year later, on 15 December 2013, in the snowy ruins of an eastern Syrian town called Ghazwa al-Khair, Ifthekar was sent by one Islamist militia to fight another and died right there, in the first minutes of his first battle, his legs blown off by a tank, his guts splashed all around, his lustrous long black hair curled back over his head.

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      The meaning of Jihad

      One result of this diversity and inventiveness inside Islam is that jihad has meant different things at different times to different Muslims.

      The prophet Muhammad was born in 570 AD in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Though high-born, he was orphaned at six and as a boy Muhammad earned his keep helping his uncle, who was a traveling trader. This unusual upbringing, in which he experienced privilege and poverty, gave Muhammad a unique outlook. He was a social rebel, who married a much older woman for love and treated her as an equal. He was also a reformer who – guided by the divine visions he began receiving at 40 – fought against the inequality, immorality and tribal lawlessness of 7th century Arabia. After his death in 632 AD, his followers set about formalising his teachings in a canon of holy custom and law. That work is still ongoing but its central elements include the Qur’an, God’s collected revelations to Muhammad, the Hadith, sayings which describes sunna, Muhammad’s way of life, and sharia, which is Islam translated into law. It was in these scriptures that the term “jihad” first appeared.

      Most scholars agree jihad denotes lawful and justifiable war. It is founded on notions of sacred duty, righteousness and sacrifice. It applies most commonly to a war against oppression, especially one defending Muslims persecuted by unbelievers or apostates. It is that idea, coming to the aid of fellow Muslims, and the obligation and global Islamic brotherhood that implies, on which the concept of the itinerant foreign jihadi is based.

      Inside these broad parameters, however, there is room for considerable debate and interpretation. Just as there is a rainbow of sects from Catholic to Calvinist inside Christianity (and just as Judaism, Christianity and Islam are themselves all subsets of the same, monotheistic faith) so inside Islam there are Sunnis, Shias, Sufis, Salafis, Ismailis, Ibadis and many more. Like different Christian groups, each strand of Islam tends to insist on its own infallibility. Like Christians, too, they set out their competing arguments in the way humanity has always communicated and argued with itself: in story form, in this case a highly creative mix of fact, fable, metaphor and parable.

      One result of this diversity and inventiveness inside Islam is that jihad has meant different things at different times to different Muslims. In Islam’s first few centuries, Arab forces conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa, plus Portugal, most of Spain and even a small part of southern France. That empire is to what many Muslims are referring when they talk of the caliphate and in the context of this early Islamic imperialism, many scholars gave jihad