Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 38

come for all humans
to choose which side
of history they will
live or die on. The
Arab mujahideen
of Afghanistan, the
founders of al-Qaida, have shown the
way. In the 1980s,
there were two global
superpowers. One, the
Soviet Union, which
was foolish enough
to invade Muslim
(Image courtesy of The Gorka Briefing)
land when it deS.K. Malik, a general officer in the
ployed its troops into
Pakistan army, wrote The Quranic Concept of War in 1979. The
Afghanistan. This led
book has become one of the most
to the “best Muslims”
influential treatises on why jihad is
deciding to fight in
necessary and how it must be fought.
a holy war against
The preface was written by Gen. Zia
ul-Haq, a former military dictator
the kuffar invaders.
over Pakistan, who deemed holy
Despite being outwar and spread of Islam by force an
numbered and outobligation for all Muslim believers.
gunned, the jihadists
won, a feat only possible because they were fighting for
Allah and Allah made their victory possible.
Not only did the mujahideen defeat the Soviet Union
in Afghanistan, two years later their enemy imploded
when the USSR disbanded itself on Christmas Day 1991.
Now at the dawn of a new century there is only one
infidel superpower left standing, the United States, and
it too will fall to the sword of Allah’s Army.
The final message of Knights under the Prophets
Banner was very simple: God is on the side of the jihadists. Their eventual victory over all disbelief, including
the destruction of America, is inevitable.1 The members
of the human race have one simple choice to make: join
the “Caravan of Jihad” or be destroyed.

General Malik: War Against the
Soul of the Infidel
However, the ideological and strategic thinker of
greatest importance to the global jihadi movement
today is the one most people, and even members of the
American intelligence community, have never heard of.
In 1979, just as the seminal events mentioned
above were unfolding in Tehran, Mecca, and Kabul,
36

an astonishing book was published in Pakistan by
Malik under the title of The Quranic Concept of War.
The book is remarkable not only in its direct connection to later events like 9/11, and its rationalization
of such heinous acts, but also in the category-negating nature of its content. For The Quranic Concept
of War is unlike any strategic tome in the canon of
western military thought.
In it, the former general officer destroys the central
tenets of Western military thought, most especially the
seminal theories of Clausewitz. Since the earth-shattering campaigns of Napoleon, which were analyzed
and explained by Clausewitz, western military academies and war colleges have taught as holy writ the
Prussian’s dictum that war is an instrument of the nation-state, a violent tool to be used in the furtherance
of the national interest when all other tools fail. We
teach that war is just an extension of policy, that war is
politics with a gun, or as the great Prussian originally
put it: “the continuation of politics with an admixture
of different means.”
Yet Malik reverses centuries of understanding of
warfare with his book by stating that war has nothing
to do with the nation-state—which is in any case an
heretical construct of the infidel West—or with serving
the nation, or earthbound politics aims. Instead war is
understood by Malik to only ever serve one purpose:
the realization of Allah’s sovereignty here on Earth.
According to the Pakistani general, all war must only
serve the objective of recreating the Caliphate, the
theocratic empire of Islam, so that Allah’s writ may
once again reign supreme.
Secondly, again in a denial of Western strategic
thought, Malik rejects the way the infidel goes to
war. When American or Allied forces ready themselves for war they perform what is called intelligence
preparation of the battlefield.2 This analysis serves in
part to identify what are termed “key vulnerabilities,”
or “centers of gravity” within the enemy’s forces and
infrastructure, to locate those most valuable targets,
which if destroyed will incapacitate the enemy or
force his surrender. Malik states that the infidel’s
concept of multiple centers-of-gravity or key vulnerabilities in war is just as fallacious as the idea
that war serves political purposes. According to the
Pakistani general, there is only one target of import
in war and that target is not even physical. In war,
May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW