Strategy and Statecraft – Quran & Sunnah as the Art of War

By Ebrahim Rasool

In preceding columns, I have teased out Strategy and Statecraft as manifested in the Muslim imagination and world. I have identified these as the missing middle that have led to all kinds of pathologies within the global Muslim community. I have described the impact on the current state of the Ummah and have at the hands of examples like the Arab Spring, the impasse in Sudan, as well as the challenges in Afghanistan, tried to show how binary thinking has overwhelmed strategic thinking.

What I want to do now is to show how the Scripts of Islam – the Quran and the Sunnah – may well constitute the original art of war: the application of strategy and statecraft under the leadership of the Prophet Mohammed (SAW). I want to do so by looking at how, when, where, and why Surah Rum (The Roman Empire) was revealed, and I want to contend that such revelation constituted breaking news at the time, precisely because it had strategic significance for an early Muslim community in the painful Meccan crucible.

Utilising a Strategic Window

This chapter of the Qur’an opens dramatically: “Rome has been defeated!” This was the “breaking news” for Prophet Muhammad (SAW) in the year 615 CE, seven years before the Hijra from Mecca to Medina. Why would it be necessary for the early Muslims to be informed of this defeat by the Romans at the hand of the Persian Empire? How would such news become the fulcrum around which would turn the fortunes of a nascent community? This news saddened the Muslim community. An Empire that too believed in the one God had been defeated by polytheism, the very antithesis of Islam. In contrast, the Qureish, the ruling tribe of Mecca, celebrated the victory of their fellow polytheists and political allies and intensified their campaign of persecution against Islam.

However, the Quran immediately followed up the breaking news with a prediction and an implicit strategic focus: within a few years Rome would be victorious again! “On that day shall the believers rejoice.” This hopeful outcome engendered strategic patience or resilience that would withstand the triumphalism and repression of the Qureish. This was the period of Sumayah’s martyrdom, Bilal’s torture, Abubakr’s financial decline because of the boycott of the Muslims, and the general torment of the believers (r). The breaking news placed finiteness to their suffering and prevented desperate and un-strategic responses to their situation. It focused them beyond the immediate difficulty towards a time when the situation would be fertile for the greater strategic goal they were the custodians of. But the Muslims also took out a strategic insurance by sending Ja’far and a group of Muslims to Abyssinia to ensure the survival of the Ummah.

Seven years later, the early Muslims, having been steeled by the most intense persecution, made a strategic retreat (the Hijra) from Mecca, and settled in Medina following a strategic alliance with the Medina tribes. Under conditions of relative safety and peace in Medina, the enlarged community was able to construct an enduring community of Muslims as part of a strategic consolidation with the People of the Book, and even the polytheists and hypocrites, that would soon, not only return triumphantly to Mecca, but would, through strategic expansion, be the dominant civilisation from Spain in the West to China in the East and from the Steppes in the North to the Sahel in the South.

Learning Strategy & Statecraft

The early Muslims had understood that in the breaking news of the defeat of the Roman Empire and the prediction of its victory again nine years later in 624 CE, history had opened a window of opportunity, a strategic pause, an interregnum. The two superpowers of the time (Rome and Persia) had exhausted each other in continuous wars for dominance. Everything else was subjected to this constant war footing. The interregnum following the defeat of Rome allowed the early Muslims to consolidate their worldview, establish the leadership of Muhammad (s), strengthen their faith, absorb persecution, explore alliances, cast Medina as a light to the world, and fortify the community of Medina so that eventually they would take the Islamic civilisation to the known corners of the world.

But they could only do this by utilising the interregnum created when the two superpowers of the time were financially depleted and had lost the appetite for war, and needed to return to their bases to recuperate, to re-arm, and replenish their resources. Nine years later, the Roman Empire indeed defeated the Persian Empire, and in that same year a small Muslim group at the battle of Badr defeated the large army of Qureish, and from that moment reaped the rewards of strategic patience, a strategic alliance, and a strategic use of the interregnum that presented itself.

A Contemporary Interregnum?

Is it possible that in this episode from the early Muslims there may just be a lesson today for the Muslim Ummah – the Global Community – that is certainly beleaguered from within and without? We need to weigh up the alternating experiences of inertia and nihilism that take turns to drive Muslim history, and that have cast Muslims in the eye of the storm for the last seven decades. We may need to grasp the opportunity of a contemporary interregnum, in which the United States may well find itself in its own transition. How do we use such an interregnum to re-ignite the Muslim yearning for a better reality? But we may first have to be honest about the fault lines within the global Muslim community and we must honestly engage each other in debate about the intellectual and theological foundations that will constitute healing, renewal, and reform for Muslims.

The Muslim experience may well warrant a similar moment of respite from both external and internal sources of aggression. Like the early Muslims, under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), needed a strategic pause, today’s global community needs to have sufficient peace, a heightened capacity to absorb hostility, but enough headroom to think its way out of the cul de sac of primarily binary, jurisprudence-based thinking. The time is now to follow the Art of War in the Qur’an and Sunnah.