WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A little learning, it is said, can be a bad thing. At this very moment, a controversy is bubbling in Washington to prove that a lot of learning can be even worse. Daniel Pipes, one of the most learned of Middle Eastern scholars, is at the center of the controversy, and it is his vast and recondite learning that has entoiled him in controversy. Pipes knows about the complexity and nuance of ancient religions and long historical evolutions. His knowledge has left him prey to those who insist on simpleminded exegeses of complicated matters -- for instance, the 1400-year-history of Islam.
Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, has been nominated by the president to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a foreign policy think tank funded by government and focused on how peace is forged in the world. It is all very academic, and that the Bush administration would nominate a man of Pipes' scholarliness to such a think tank heaves yet another stone at the Democrats' canard that the Bush administration is philistine or cowboy or oblivious to ideas. Yet certain very partisan Islamic organizations want his nomination rescinded because Pipes' writings do not hew their party line.
As a scholar, he has said things that defeat simple sloganeering. Just the other day, he said that simply characterizing Islam as a "peaceful" religion is inadequate. Well, of course, he is correct. Islam has had a long life, and its stance, for instance, on bellicosity has changed through the centuries. As Professor Bernard Lewis, perhaps the West's pre-eminent authority on Islam, writes in his new book, "The Crisis of Islam," "one of the basic tasks bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet is jihad," which comes from an Arabic root that has the "basic meaning of striving or effort." In classic Islamic texts, jihad has the "related meaning of struggle, and hence also of fight."
In the Prophet's early period, when he lived in Mecca and was part of a minority struggling against the pagan majority, he used jihad frequently in the sense of "moral striving," and so it appears in the early chapters of the Koran. This is the sense of the word that modernist Islamic exegetists often use to explain jihad.
Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. In the last chapters of the Koran, after the Prophet had become the head of a government and of an army, jihad took on the military meaning that Islamic fundamentalists employ today with such violent consequences.