Part 2
By Akbar Jamal
The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah is the strongest historical and Sharia-based evidence for this argument. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) agreed to a peace deal whose terms, on the surface, appeared to be a kind of “defeat and retreat.” Yet that very period of peace opened doors for the intellectual and numerical growth of Islam that years of fighting could not have opened. Only two years passed between the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah and the conquest of Makkah. But in that short period of peace, so many people accepted Islam that their number was far greater than the number who had embraced Islam during the previous eighteen years of effort.
From a fiqh perspective, an Islamic state also holds the independent right and shariah authority to enter into a non-interference agreement for the sake of the Ummah’s broader interests, economic stability, and preventing the enemy’s aggression. Such an agreement is not a negation of jihad. It redirects the course of jihad toward reconstruction, toward building an exemplary, just system. The existence of a stable, peaceful and self-sufficient Islamic state is, in truth, one of Islam’s greatest forms of soft power.
Looking at the IEA’s current position and the Doha Agreement through this lens, it becomes as clear as the sun that this period of peace, since August 2021, has produced outcomes that were never possible on the battlefield.
War is a fire that consumes a society’s finest and sharpest minds, without distinguishing between friend and foe. Those with the highest ability, the ones who in peacetime could make their nation unbreakable through the state’s administration, its economic policy, its scholarship and its shariah reasoning, are the ones who lose their lives in war.
And an enemy that opposes your intellectual, civilizational, cultural and worldly outlook makes it their first priority, in war, to eliminate your sharpest and most capable minds. Iraq stands before us as an example. It is also said that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have killed Pakistan’s own intellectuals and capable figures, or handed them over to America, or thrown them into their torture cells and subjected them to such brutal treatment that they either died there or lost their mental capacity forever.
Peace protects minds like these and gives them the chance to work toward building, reform and progress instead of destruction. When people see peace, justice and economic stability, they are naturally drawn toward that system. Today, many sincere Muslims across the world look at Afghanistan’s system as a role model and hope for such a system in their own countries, even though these same people, during the twenty-year war with America, kept their distance from supporting the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) out of fear of death and destruction.
The IEA’s success in implementing an interest-free (riba-free) Islamic economy has also broken the false belief of the world’s system that “an economy cannot function without interest.” This quiet, practical invitation carried out during peacetime can have far more impact than thousands of speeches and sermons. Had the IEA still been caught up in war, eliminating the interest-based system from Afghanistan would have been nearly impossible.
Allah’s great command to eliminate riba could only become a practical reality through the blessing of peace. The voice of the Quran and Sunnah once again found room to be heard freely. The system of mosques and madrasas came back to life, and the atmosphere of religious devotion began spreading once more. During America’s presence in Afghanistan, the use of loudspeakers in mosques was not permitted. Now, every prayer is called through loudspeakers, so that Muslims know the congregation for prayer is standing and leave whatever they are doing to head toward the mosque.
Because of peace, the institution of commanding good and forbidding evil has also become active. The hudud of Allah have been put into practice, and the meaning found in a hadith is that the enforcement of a single shariah hadd upon the earth brings more blessing to it than years of rain could ever bring. None of this could have been carried out during war. America’s war went so far as to criticize the Taliban for this very thing, asking: “Why do the Taliban carry out Islamic punishments?”
Islamic punishments are not the whole picture of Islam by themselves, of course. They are one requirement for protecting a healthy, peaceful society and restoring social security. Anyone who genuinely wants to understand Islam should not limit themselves to the hudud of Allah or Islamic punishments alone, but should study all of Islam’s teachings, its beliefs, its rulings and the wisdom behind them. It was also through the blessing of this same peace that diplomatic channels made it possible to release prisoners from Guantanamo whose release, during wartime, would either have been impossible or would have faced enormous obstacles.
In Islam, the sanctity of human life holds such a high place that even in a state of war, the safety of the enemy’s unarmed people, women and children has been commanded. So the peace that guarantees the life, property and honor of millions of Muslims stands closest to the will of Allah, insha’Allah.
From an economic and financial standpoint too, the Doha Agreement is a great achievement. Had the war continued, today the building of infrastructure, international trade and economic development projects in Afghanistan would still exist only on paper. The IEA agreed that Afghan soil would not be used against the United States. That same condition also tied the enemy’s hands, stripping them of the moral and political pretext for interference in Afghanistan they had used for decades to justify their own domination and meddling.
The commitment not to use Afghan soil against others is not, in any way, a weakness or a compromise on jihad. It is a calculated political and diplomatic approach that has made Islam’s peaceful and just face clear to the world. This agreement, and the IEA’s rise to power afterward, and everything it has done since, has made this reality clear to the world as well: that Islam truly is a system full of blessing, something that could never have been made clear in the same way under conditions of war.
The intellectual, economic and diplomatic work carried out during a time of peace reaches far beyond the gunpowder of the battlefield and produces lasting results. This is the period in which Islam can rise again, in its true greatness and glory, as a civilization that leads.
