In January 2002, roughly 130 scholars from Europe, Africa, the Far East, and the Middle East gathered in Beirut, at the famous Commodore Hotel, for the Conference of the Scholars of Islam. At that gathering—historically significant because it took place just a few months after September 11, 2001, at a time when the pressure to recoil from the rhetoric of violent jihad had reached a high point—prominent representatives of Hamas and Hizbullah agreed that Muslim scholars should actively promote boycotts of Israel and the United States as a means of supporting peacefully the Palestinian resistance.Footnote ¹

A few months later, in April 2002, Muslim scholars from fifty countries visited Cairo for a second conference, at al-Azhar University, where they held intense discussions about the implications of the terrorist attacks for Muslims worldwide. They condemned the attacks, of course, while entertaining doubts about the religious identity of the perpetrators. Talk by Americans of a cultural war and of the clash of civilizations worried them. They resented the pressure to reform Islamic institutions and to enact a “liberal Islam.” September 11 had set in motion a wave of “sedition by the people against their religion,” and that kind of strife (fitna), they argued, echoing Qurʾan 2:217, posed a great danger to Muslims. As a result, they called for a defensive jihad against the United States, which they considered an oppressive power because it abetted the occupation of Palestine by aiding the state of Israel. So they encouraged Muslims to boycott “all of the products and goods” of Israeli and American companies; and they warned, more wistfully than ominously, that Muslim rulers might also deploy the ultimate boycotting weapon: an oil embargo.Footnote ²

The scholars who attended these conferences, together with other experts on Islamic law, then unleashed a torrent of boycott fatwas across the World Wide Web.Footnote ³ These fatwas appeared on their own personal websites; on other, highly trafficked websites, including IslamOnline.net, Muslm.net, and Sahab.net; and on specialized boycotting websites with mysterious domain names such as www.mqataa.com and www.kate3.com.Footnote ⁴ They urged Muslim consumers to boycott the products of the United States, Israel, and, beginning in 2006, Denmark. They also targeted, albeit sporadically, British, Dutch, and Chinese goods. They made the case that consumer boycotts are highly effective, if not the most effective, weapons that Muslims might use, as nonstate actors, in their economic jihad against foreign enemies.

Relatively little scholarship exists on Muslim boycotts of the first decade of the millennium. Because these boycotts had some effect on trade, they captured the attention of international business researchers, who dedicated articles to consumer behavior (the social psychology of boycotters) and cross-cultural marketing (the strategic responses by multinational corporations).Footnote ⁵ But they paid no serious attention to the theological–juridical discourse with which this article is concerned.

Most scholarship on Middle Eastern boycotts dates from the 1970s, when legal and diplomatic historians, as well as political scientists, wrote extensively about a regional policy of economic coercion. They addressed the 1973 oil embargo and the Arab League's official boycott of Israel and of companies and businesses that contributed directly or indirectly to that country's military and economic development.Footnote ⁶ They referred to an “Arab” rather than to a “Muslim” boycott in part because those who defended this political instrument as lawful, by international legal standards, did so using secular, nationalist language. In 1975, for example, the commissioner general of the Central Boycott Office proclaimed that the institution had neither a racial nor a religious nature.Footnote ⁷ Such language remained in force during the Palestinian intifada of 1987, when an Arab Christian, Hanna Siniora, famously called for a boycott of “Zionist” goods (cigarettes and soft drinks), asking all Palestinians to join a nonviolent movement of civil disobedience spearheaded by a young generation that “believes strongly in a secular state and a secular ideology.”Footnote ⁸ Echoes of this secular discourse could still be heard years later, during the decade preceding the wave of protests that began in 2010, within newspaper editorials, diplomatic statements, and even, faintly, religious decrees. The authors of these decrees, however, also turned to Pan-Islamic rhetoric. With the forceful language of Islamic law, they made an effort to persuade Muslim consumers throughout the world to punish the corporations of targeted nations as a way of expressing communal religious grievances.

Boycott fatwas represent a significant development in the Muslim understanding of what it means to strive in God's path. This turn in the long history of jihad began a few months before September 11, when in a gesture of solidarity with the Palestinians during the al-Aqsa Intifada a handful of prominent religious scholars called on Muslims to boycott Israel and the United States economically. But in the aftermath of the historic attacks, as suggested by the 2002 conferences in Beirut and Cairo, religious scholars joined the boycotting caravan en masse. Seeking a popular alternative to terrorism, they espoused consumer boycotts with great urgency. While justifying passive consumer resistance as a way for noncombatants to fight in the path of God, they contributed to an unwieldy and rapidly expanding body of theory known as “economic jihad.” Since September 11, experts on jihadist strategic thought have paid significant attention to parts of this corpus, turning in particular to schemes for financing terrorist groups and to blueprints for targeting the capitalist infrastructure of enemy states.Footnote ⁹ Yet, while focusing on the ideological roots of violence, Western academics have shown little or no awareness of the fact that Muslim scholars also count consumer boycotts—acts of passive resistance—as part and parcel of economic jihad.

This defense of boycotts as jihadi acts appears surprising in view of the standard understanding of the doctrine of jihad. Textbooks typically explain that Muslims subscribe to one of two very different interpretations of the duty: jihad as a violent, armed struggle to spread Islamic rule into infidel realms and jihad as a spiritual, mystical quest to conquer the demons of the heart.Footnote ¹⁰ But with consumer boycotts, we confront an economic ethic that does not fit neatly into one or the other category. Muslim scholars usually categorize this modern struggle under the technical term jihād bi-l-māl, which can be defined roughly as striving for Islam by expending capital.

By turning to boycott fatwas, I will show that this understanding of jihad, as a duty that all individuals can accomplish through nonmilitary action, spread widely among the ʿulamaʾ between October 2000, following Ariel Sharon's symbolic assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and April 2006, when the boycott of Danish goods began to wind down. The September 11 attacks, which happened between these events, played some role in the growth of the genre, for it was only in 2002, when the drumbeat preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq had already begun, that muftis started to issue a multiplicity of fatwas calling on Muslims to forgo American goods. Mainstream muftis, eager as ever to engage religion and politics, espoused the temperate view that jihad could be fulfilled without violence, through boycotts. Yet they were far from the only ones to hold this position. Surprisingly, the most extreme ideologues, though infamous for their justifications of religious violence, also stood as key proponents of jihadi boycotts, arguing for them both before and after September 11.

To account for the rising popularity of boycott fatwas, I will highlight the role of mustaftis, or fatwa seekers, and, more broadly, of fatwa consumers. In the last few years, historians and anthropologists of law and society have analyzed the role of new media in facilitating interactions between producers and consumers of religious knowledge.Footnote ¹¹ Building on this scholarship, I will argue that the supply of boycott fatwas on the Internet can only be understood by taking into account popular demand. Muftis, to be sure, expressed the ethic and spirit of Muslim boycotts, and they displayed their authority, learning, and creativity in their rulings. To a large degree, however, they followed rather than led the boycotting movement. Appeals for consumer action originated with fatwa seekers, and they spread online because devout fatwa readers, ordinary women and men, wanted formal religious sanction for their way of participating in the jihad: combating external enemies in the marketplace without risking life and limb.Footnote ¹²

THE AWAKENING IN 2000–2003: GOVERNMENTAL INACTION, ECONOMIC EFFECTS

The emergence of a Muslim boycotting movement in the 21st century comes in some ways as a surprise, for in the 1990s most Middle Eastern states concentrated on lifting, rather than maintaining, trade barriers. The Arab League's institution for economic sanctions, the Central Office for the Boycott of Israel, made few headlines in the closing decade of the century. It held no meetings for eight years until it showed a sign of life in October 2001, when many Arab League members vowed to revive the moribund institution—without agreeing on any concrete, practical steps to do so. Even then, Arab states keen on foreign trade and investment remained committed to policies of economic liberalization. In countries that had established trade and diplomatic relations with Israel and in countries eager to sign trade agreements with the United States as part of a broader effort to gain accession to the World Trade Organization, officials paid lip service to the boycott but with little conviction.Footnote ¹³ These governments’ lack of support for a policy of economic coercion, combined with sporadic enforcement of boycott regulations elsewhere, led the U.S. government to conclude that “the boycott is no longer a significant issue in most Arab League countries.” This turn of affairs pleased the U.S. trade representative, Robert Zoellick, an early and influential proponent of the notion that the United States should combat terrorism with free trade.Footnote ¹⁴

What the future president of the World Bank failed to appreciate was that, due largely to the efforts of nonstate actors, the boycott of Israel and the United States had already become, once again, a significant political and economic issue in the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁵ Beginning in the year 2000, but with renewed vigor after the United States launched its “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, religious councils, labor unions, student organizations, and opposition parties started clamoring for voluntary and official boycotts. In Egypt, days after September 11, a nongovernmental committee renewed its plea for boycotts to commemorate the first anniversary of the Second Palestinian Intifada.Footnote ¹⁶ Demonstrations against the invasion of Afghanistan, in which protesters also campaigned for boycotts, took place in diverse countries in South and Southeast Asia in October 2001. But in the Middle East, the American military operations represented not so much a turning point in the boycotting movement as a reason for intensifying the struggle.

Politicians in power reacted in various ways. While in Saudi Arabia the defense minister suggested that Arabs think about boycotting foreign companies that conduct business with Israel, in Jordan the interior minister warned that boycotting American goods would harm the national economy.Footnote ¹⁷ In Morocco, a wary government did little to encourage or discourage boycotting campaigns led by representatives of the opposition from the Justice and Development Party. Meanwhile in the Sudan, a day after doctors and nurses urged the nation to boycott American goods, tremendous crowds gathered, with government support, to express their solidarity with the Palestinians.Footnote ¹⁸ Continued pressure from this transnational grassroots movement, tempered by internal dissension, led the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to declare toothlessly that member nations ought to “respect the Islamic boycott against Israel” and to consider implementing the Arab League's boycotting rules.Footnote ¹⁹

Both before and after September 11, the popular boycott had an economic impact on the sale of consumer goods, particularly of brands associated with American transgressions into other cultures. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, targeted fast-food franchises registered a 10 to 30 percent plunge in sales, with their fortunes tied closely to the rhythm of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Operation Defensive Shield produced a powerful wave of anti-American boycotting in Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, as well as in countries such as Morocco and Jordan whose governments had already signed, or begun negotiations toward signing, free trade agreements with the United States.Footnote ²⁰ In the last quarter of 2001 and in the first two quarters of 2002, American exports to the Middle East and North Africa fell sharply. Although a strong U.S. dollar, combined with increased competition from Asian manufacturers, largely accounts for the plunge, there is no doubt that the boycott also contributed.Footnote ²¹ Most corporations, wary of putting wind in the sails of consumer activists, refused to disclose their financial burdens. Yet the economic effect of the boycott was palpable. While sales of Coca-Cola declined across the Middle East in 2002 and 2003, protest brands such as Mecca-Cola and Zam Zam Cola captured the spotlight—and a share of the market.Footnote ²² The boycott, to be sure, had a negligible impact on the economies of targeted countries. Yet it did affect the fortunes of corporations that came to stand as emblems of boycotted nations.

BOYCOTTING AND JIHAD FROM THE TOBACCO PROTEST TO BIN LADEN'S DECLARATION

Secular as well as religious groups participated in the boycotting campaigns that took place between 2000 and 2006. Nevertheless, by issuing fatwas forbidding the consumption of American and Israeli products, Muslim scholars played a public role, granting religious legitimacy to the movement. Their discourse, which is the focus of this article, differs significantly from the secular, diplomatic discourse used by officials of the Arab League. Adopting the language of political Islam and referring to the imperatives of Islamic law, muftis used new media, particularly the Internet, to appeal to Muslims to join a global boycott of offending nations and corporations. In the process, they elaborated a modern, and rather surprising, understanding of jihad.

The historical roots of this online discourse lie not in official Pan-Arab appeals for boycotting Israel but in earlier, Pan-Islamic efforts to resist imperial hegemony and Zionism through boycotts or embargoes. Fatwas seeking to restrict commerce with the imperial enemy have a long history, stretching back to an 1891 decree attributed to Ayatollah Mirza Hasan Shirazi that warned Iranians that consuming tobacco, in a concession to British commercial dominance, was “tantamount to war against the Imam of the Age.”Footnote ²³ Early in the 20th century, resistance movements established a strong association between boycotting and jihad. In Iran in 1911, during the Constitutional Revolution, protests against Russian and British goods accompanied calls for jihad.Footnote ²⁴ In 1921, in an act of resistance to British imperial rule, Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind issued a fatwa, signed by well over 100 scholars, forbidding trade with “the enemies of Islam.” The organization banned not only “the sale of arms” but also any commercial exchange by which the British Empire “may acquire strength.”Footnote ²⁵ In 1935, a few years after persuading the General Islamic Congress to support a resolution against the purchase of Zionist products, the mufti of Jerusalem issued a “grave fatwa” condemning the sale of Palestinian land to the Jews.Footnote ²⁶ In Egypt in 1946, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood summoned Egyptians to a jihad while calling on the nation to boycott England economically, culturally, and socially. The popular riots that ensued devolved, in this case, into violent attacks on foreign property.Footnote ²⁷

Of all the nonstate actors to espouse consumer boycotts before the year 2000, none is more notorious than Osama bin Laden. According to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior leader of al-Qaʿida, Bin Laden began to preach in favor of consumer boycotts of American goods as early as 1987, in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada.Footnote ²⁸ Despite a few reservations stated just weeks after the September 11 attacks, when he admitted that boycotts would be effective only if “the Muslim fraternity” becomes “fully awakened and organized” and Muslim industry advances to the point of self-sufficiency, producing “goods equal to the products of Western companies,” he continued to advocate boycotts over the years—as recently as 2006.Footnote ²⁹ Yet Bin Laden's most influential statement on the topic appeared ten years earlier, in 1996, embedded in “The Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries.” This document constitutes a significant precedent to the third-millennium boycott fatwas.Footnote ³⁰

Speaking from a “secure base” (qāʿida āmina) perched on the Hindu Kush mountain range, Bin Laden addressed different audiences in discrete segments. “My Muslim brothers in every place, but particularly in the Arabian peninsula,” beware, for “the money that you spend to buy American commodities is transformed into bullets in the chests of our brothers in Palestine.”Footnote ³¹ The Zionist–Crusader axis, he cautioned, would direct the profits from those sales toward warfare against the sons of Arabia. Buying American goods weakens the local economy while providing the enemy with “capital possessions, which are the pillar of war and the lifeline of armies.”

Addressing his compatriots, Bin Laden expressed amazement that “our country [Saudi Arabia] is the world's greatest buyer of weapons from America, just as it is its largest commercial partner in the region.” Meanwhile, he revealed, Americans help their Jewish brothers with the occupation of Palestine: killing and evicting Muslims by supplying to the Zionist enemy capital (māl), weapons, and men. He believed that it would be extremely helpful for the holy struggle if Saudis were to deny America the profits resulting from international trade. Through an economic boycott, Saudi importers, retailers, and consumers could express their anger toward and hatred of the United States and thereby contribute to the routing of Christian and Jewish forces from the sacred lands of Islam. Bin Laden expected the women of the Hijaz and of other regions, too, to play a unique role—as the shoppers of household goods—in this consumer jihad.

Although analysts and scholars have scrutinized Bin Laden's rhetoric of violence, they have paid little or no attention to his less sensational message inviting law-abiding, risk-averse Muslims to boycott American products in peace. Yet this summons to a consumer boycott is a crucial component of Bin Laden's theology. The “Declaration of Jihad” basically made the case that it is incumbent on all Muslims to strive against the presence of infidels—that is, American armed forces—in the land where God revealed the Qurʾan to his Prophet Muhammad. Following the juridical opinion of his influential spiritual mentor, the Palestinian scholar ʿAbdallah ʿAzzam, Bin Laden famously argued that, when the enemy corrupts religion by occupying sacred Muslim territory, jihad becomes an essential obligation, second only to the duty of belief. Yet this insistence on the importance of struggling collectively against the enemy presented a problem—or, from a different perspective, an opportunity—because not everyone wishing to defend Arabia from America can or will engage in guerrilla warfare.

The need therefore arose to find a role for noncombatants on the stage of jihad. “There is no doubt,” Bin Laden reflected, “that you crave to discharge this exigency.” Accordingly, he urged Muslims not directly involved in fighting to supply warriors with critical information, materials, and weapons. He exhorted them, further, to provide “assistance” (musāʿada) for the jihad through boycotting. If unleashed in conjunction with “military strikes by the warriors of jihad,” this economic punishment would weaken the United States. The boycott seemed a particularly effective weapon to Bin Laden because Muslims could use it freely and fearlessly. Whereas a state's policing and surveillance mechanisms might foil the best-laid plans for armed resistance, by deporting or imprisoning jihadists, “all of the systems of security and intelligence in the world cannot compel their citizens to buy the enemy's goods.” Hence boycotting became a weapon in the arsenal of al-Qaʿida's jihad.Footnote ³²

AL-QARADAWI, AL-AQSA INTIFADA, AND THE FATWAS OF 2000–2002

The most famous boycott fatwa, Yusuf al-Qaradawi's “The Boycott of Israeli and American Commodities,” reads like a studied response to “The Declaration of Jihad.” The cosmopolitan Egyptian mufti reached an audience of tens of millions through his program on the satellite television network al-Jazeera, “The Shariʿa and Life.” Like Bin Laden, he claimed that each piaster that Muslims spend to buy American commodities “becomes in the end a bullet fired into the chests of our brothers and sons in Palestine.” He argued as well that jihad had become “the duty of duties and the foremost of obligations upon the Muslim community in the East and the West” because the enemies of Islam had usurped sacred lands and driven Muslims from their homes—a powerful reference to verse 60:9 of the Qurʾan. Under the circumstances, “Muslims in every place” must help those who combat personally against the enemy, with boycotting counting as a vehicle for this “assistance” (muʿāwana). Like Bin Laden, too, al-Qaradawi viewed the boycott as “a weapon in the hands of the nation and the crowd,” since governments cannot oblige citizens to purchase goods from a given country. Al-Qaradawi also appealed specifically to female consumers:

This invocation of women's boycotting power stemmed in part from historical experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, in support of nationalist movements for economic independence, Egyptian and Palestinian women formed committees to boycott foreign goods.Footnote ³³ Perhaps inspired by this history, al-Qaradawi shared with Bin Laden a gendered construct of consumption, to which he added his perspective on a mother's domestic obligation toward the education of children.Footnote ³⁴

Yet the differences between the two pieces of writing are more significant than the similarities. The first one is a “declaration” devoted to multiple topics relevant to Bin Laden's doctrine of holy war; the second originated as a public exhortation, but it was quickly recast in the mold of a formal fatwa focusing on a single topic. As a mufti, al-Qaradawi could not simply rule that buying American is ḥarām. Obliged to consider various circumstances, he addressed in particular the case of Muslims residing in Israel or the United States. Out of consideration for them, he limited the ban on consumption to the enemy's dispensable goods and strictly prohibited the purchasing of necessities only when “alternative products from other states” were available. Bin Laden made some efforts to justify his views with the language of Islamic law. As a legal thinker, al-Qaradawi made greater efforts in that direction.

In Bin Laden's declaration, the boycott made an appearance as the tamest form of resistance, as the handmaiden to what mattered most, armed jihad. In al-Qaradawi's fatwa, by contrast, the boycott took center stage, with armed jihad relegated to a minor role. Al-Qaradawi described the consumer boycott “as a kind of passive resistance [muqāwama salbiyya] that adds to the balance of the active resistance that our brothers carry out in the land of prophecies, the land of the military outpost, and of holy war.” Boycotting became necessary and incumbent, in his view, whenever the aim of weakening the American economy and the Zionist state could be accomplished only through passive resistance. In a speech, al-Qaradawi urged that boycotting be accompanied not by violence but merely by “the sincere intention [that gives religious significance to] the military jihad” (niyyat al-jihād al-ʿaskarī).Footnote ³⁵

There is a difference, too, in the objectives of the resistance movement, whether active or passive. Both men focused on the liberation of Muslim territory. But Bin Laden's aim in the mid-1990s was to cleanse Arabia, the land of the two holiest mosques, from the presence of American troops. Al-Qaradawi focused instead on the Palestinian front, on the land of the “first qibla,” the direction toward which Muslims prayed before they began to face Mecca. In addition to the liberation of Palestine, al-Qaradawi advanced other grand and lofty goals for the consumer boycott. He saw the possibility of concerted economic action by “1.3 billion Muslims” as a way to unify and awaken the Islamic community worldwide. By exercising their power in a world economy, Muslim consumers could force the enemies of Islam to “realize that we are alive and that this community has not died nor, with God's permission, will it die.” Furthermore, an economic boycott of harmful foreign things, useless addictions, could help the global Muslim community to attain “independence from subservience to the tastes of others.”

The attention that al-Qaradawi devoted to al-Aqsa was no accident. His fatwa, together with several others, began to circulate on the Internet in April and May 2002, on the heels of the Israeli military operation in the West Bank.Footnote ³⁶ Yet boycott fatwas emerged online, as a distinct genre, earlier in the course of the Second Palestinian Intifada—in the wake of Ariel Sharon's visit to the sacred compound. Shortly thereafter, the mufti of Egypt at the time, Nasr Farid Wasil, began to advocate a popular—as opposed to an official governmental—boycott of Israel and the United States. Representing the boycott as a religious duty, he admonished consumers and businessmen that continued economic exchange with the enemies would be both sinful and treacherous.Footnote ³⁷ This genre would blossom over the next several years, growing in spurts to the tune of war; the invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave rise to numerous decrees, as did the controversy over Jyllands–Posten's publication of the cartoons of Muhammad.

A NONVIOLENT JIHAD FOR NONSTATE ACTORS

Multiple voices, besides that of al-Qaradawi, serve to chronicle the millennial turn to the rhetoric of nonviolence—a turn that represents not the forsaking of the armed jihad but the adoption of the consumer jihad. Take, for example, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, a prominent Lebanese Shiʿi cleric and a longtime foe of American incursions into the Middle East. In an interview in December 2002, he spoke about what led him to promote, through a fatwa, the boycotting of American goods. The immediate motivation behind such an action was to reject what is wrong (al-munkar), namely, “the American policy of despoiling the world of the weak, especially the Islamic world,” combined with the American endeavor “to transform this world into consumer markets for their goods.” Reflecting on the need for intellectuals to engage with the complexities of political life and on the emotional desires of Muslims, he found himself compelled “to furnish a religious, Islamic base” to guide the emotional desire of the Muslim “to punish the one who punishes him in a peaceful way [bi-ṭarīqa silmiyya], without any violence.” The “summons to prohibit strictly American commodities” stemmed from that reflection.Footnote ³⁸ This general commitment to passive resistance by religious leaders only intensified during the boycott of Danish goods. When crowds turned violent, burning down Denmark's embassy in Beirut, intellectuals such as the Egyptian columnist Fahmi Huwaydi encouraged civilians to carry out boycotts peacefully.Footnote ³⁹ Muftis chastized wayward protesters. Al-Qaradawi called on the masses to demonstrate an “intelligent rage” rather than senseless violence.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although in principle they did not renounce the possibility of violent jihad directed by a just leader, the authors of boycott fatwas frequently presented economic jihad by nongovernmental actors as the most effective way of resisting the enemy today. Writing before the September 11 attacks, Hamud bin ʿUqlaʾ al-Shuʿaybi, the Saudi scholar who would gain international fame for his contorted defense of those attacks, explained that, at present, a leadership gap existed that prevented the coordination of armed jihad. Lackadaisical Muslim rulers lacked zeal for war against “the states of the infidels,” with which they engaged in intimate liaisons. In such circumstances, popular boycotts of the commodities and companies of the enemy had become an important alternative way of striving in the path of God.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, al-Qaradawi remarked that “whenever” a Muslim “is incapable of striving against his enemies by the sword, at the very least it becomes his duty to strive against them by boycotting.”Footnote ⁴² He held that Muslims had the obligation to help their brothers in the holy land, but when “we are incapable of fortifying them [militarily], then it becomes incumbent on us to weaken the enemy” by other means.Footnote ⁴³ “We tell the politicians, ‘Break relations!’ but they do not listen to us. For this reason,” says al-Qaradawi, “we turn to the people, that they might boycott American and Israeli products.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Jihad is obligatory, but “we do not master now the jihad of arms, especially because barriers lie in our path. No weapon remains with us except for the boycott.” Economic, cultural, and political boycotting therefore became imperative.Footnote ⁴⁵

Rulers are obliged, according to classical jihad doctrine, either to lead or to delegate the authority to command military offensives against external enemies.Footnote ⁴⁶ The authors of the boycott fatwas circulating on the World Wide Web rarely envisioned rulers or state institutions playing a positive role in the consumer jihad. But an intriguing fatwa by Salih al-Fawzan, a member of Saudi Arabia's highest fatwa-issuing council, confronted the issue of leadership. In February 2006, an individual asked him, “If the ruler of a Muslim polity [walī al-amr] does not command us to boycott Danish commodities, nor prohibits us from doing so, may I personally boycott [the Danes], knowing that they will be harmed by the boycott in support of the Prophet?” In response, the mufti opined:

Like other official Saudi muftis, al-Fawzan offered a perspective that was highly deferential to state authority. He considered boycotting, in the absence of state leadership, as a purely voluntary matter.Footnote ⁴⁷ In taking this position, he differed from Bin ʿUqlaʾ al-Shuʿaybi and other radicalized Pan-Islamic Saudi activists who held that boycotting is incumbent on each and every Muslim. This division reflected a deeper split within the broad Salafi movement between militants, who despised the monarchy, and quietists.Footnote ⁴⁸

DOCTRINAL UNITY AND DIVISION

Significant divisions on the boycotting front emerged, pertaining to a range of issues from day-to-day tactics to ultimate goals. Scholars disagreed about such matters as when to suspend a policy of economic coercion and whether to target an offensive company or an entire nation. While some warned about the economic repercussions of new trade barriers, others waxed poetic about the long-term benefits to national industries. Divergence also existed about the status of boycotting vis-à-vis violent jihad: whereas extremists subordinated the consumer struggle to armed resistance, moderates promoted it to the highest rank.

Tensions ran high. At the 2002 conference in Cairo, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the grand imam of al-Azhar Mosque and the grand sheikh of al-Azhar University, challenged al-Qaradawi with the warning that “a man of religion” without expertise in all matters economic and political should let “specialists”—presumably economists and diplomats—decide what goods to place on a blacklist and how specifically to execute economic sanctions. Otherwise, the expert on religion might inadvertently bring harm to his countrymen and to humankind.Footnote ⁴⁹ This division between the two muftis, both graduates of al-Azhar, reflected a deeper split between an independent religious scholar who, as a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, sought an Islamic political awakening that would bypass an obstructive government and a state-appointed, government-salaried religious scholar whose responsibility it was to consider cautiously, rather than to sanction enthusiastically, proposals that indirectly challenged the legitimacy of the regime.Footnote ⁵⁰ But al-Qaradawi, despite his refusal to work in the service of the Egyptian state under president Husni Mubarak, approached the matter as a pragmatist seeking to represent the mainstream while providing religious guidance to civil society. This orientation placed him at odds with militant, sectarian Salafis.Footnote ⁵¹ In 2006, shortly after al-Qaradawi agreed to lift the boycott on a Scandinavian dairy company, Bin Laden fired off an audiotape to al-Jazeera, where he mocked “the mufti of the Americans” for compromising with Western powers.Footnote ⁵²

Despite such divisions, the muftis were unified in one respect. Faysal Mawlawi, secretary general of the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as deputy chairman of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, made this unity clear in the course of a “live fatwa” session. When a certain Wissam from Canada wondered whether Muslim scholars diverged on the need for boycotting, he replied that he had not heard of a single scholar issuing a fatwa against the boycotting of American and Israeli goods. That, to him, implied the existence of a “silent consensus” among scholars.Footnote ⁵³ This consensus, however, is better described as clamorous. Across the ideological spectrum, Sunni and Shiʿi scholars, of liberal and conservative tendencies, living in the Middle East and well beyond it, supported the very modern notion that Muslims should take up consumer boycotts as weapons of jihad. It was common, in fact, for multiple religious authorities to endorse boycott fatwas. In Sudan, for example, seventy scholars signed a boycott fatwa.Footnote ⁵⁴ In India, at least 500 scholars and jurists appended their signatures to a fatwa targeting British and American commodities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Spokesmen for Islam agreed that the shariʿa justified this political instrument, as did the law of nations.

JIHĀD BI-L-MĀL: BOYCOTTS AS WEAPONS OF JUST WAR

In a February 2001 fatwa entitled “The Boycott,” al-Shuʿaybi explained that “every epoch and age has its weapons, deployable in warfare and jihad against the enemies.” The first Muslims had employed sundry tactics—military as well as economic—in their pursuit of jihad. Modern Muslims could do the same. In circumstances where they lacked the power or capability to wage “armed jihad” (al-jihād al-musallaḥ) against the enemy, they could unleash an economic boycott against the enemy's companies and products. “Struggle against the infidels with your possessions, with your hands, and with your tongues” (jāhidū al-mushrikīn bi-amwālikum wa-aydīkum wa-alsinatikum), exhorted al-Shuʿaybi, quoting an oral tradition attributed to Anas ibn Malik (d. ca. 711).Footnote ⁵⁶ Together with many other scholars, al-Shuʿaybi justified consumer boycotts not just in general terms as Islamic acts, undertaken in compliance with the shariʿa, but also in specific terms as acts of jihad. He did this by evoking the classical doctrine of jihād bi-l-māl.

This technical term derives from the Qurʾan, which urges believers to “march on, light and heavy, and strive with your possessions and persons in the path of God.” In its original context, that exhortation was perhaps directed at Arab warriors, spurring them to fight for Islam with their own mounts and weapons—without fearing bodily harm and without worrying about the loss or destruction of their own personal property. Although it encouraged believers to strive with their possessions, the Qurʾan did not envision a group of wealthy patrons, safely ensconced at home, fulfilling the duty of jihad by funding a troop of destitute soldiers. A close association existed between believing, migrating, and striving—īmān, hijra, and jihād. In one verse, the Qurʾan groups together “those who believed [āmanū], and emigrated [hājarū], and strove in the path of God [jāhadū] with their possessions and persons.” In this instance, at least, the faithful migrants form a community whose members willingly placed their bodies and goods at risk, for the cause of God.Footnote ⁵⁷ Early on, however, jurists began to separate the Qurʾanic exhortation into two parts, implying that Muslims could fulfill the duty of jihad either by conducting in person armed operations against the enemies of Islam (jihād bi-l-nafs) or by providing material support (swords, camels, and dates) for that military endeavor (jihād bi-l-māl).Footnote ⁵⁸

This aspect of the struggle in God's path gained new significance in jihadist circles in the late 20th century. The new ideologues of global jihad grasped the critical role that the doctrine of jihad bi-l-māl could play in motivating civilians to support combatants financially. ʿAbdallah ʿAzzam considered the physical, military struggle as the religiously superior form of jihad. Nevertheless, he extolled the merits of patronizing holy warriors first in Afghanistan and later in Palestine. In Join the Caravan, he argued, “Jihad in person and with capital [bi-l-nafs wa-l-māl] is a religious duty incumbent on every individual [farḍ ʿayn].”Footnote ⁵⁹

Strategic thinkers for Hamas and for al-Qaʿida developed this doctrine further. Nawwaf Hayil Takruri, a Palestinian scholar based in Syria, dedicated an entire book to it. As one might expect, given his defense of suicide bombings as martyrdom operations, he exhorted Muslims to spend their wealth to fund military campaigns against states that oppress Muslims. Surprisingly, however, he explained that individuals could also fulfill this duty to strive financially in other ways: by donating money to hospitals, assisting orphans, and buying national rather than Zionist, American, and British commodities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, in Summons to the Worldwide Islamic Resistance, the most significant jihadist publication to emerge since the destruction of the World Trade Center, Abu Musʿab al-Suri expressed no doubt about the superiority in rank of armed jihad conducted in person. Yet he acknowledged, grudgingly, that the Qurʾan not only associates jihād bi-l-māl with jihād bi-l-nafs in the apposite formula on striving in God's path but also actually refers to possessions (amwāl) first and to persons (anfus) second. Reality made al-Suri reach a bitter conclusion: “Capital is the pillar of jihad and its foundation.”Footnote ⁶¹

When Western scholars speak of “economic jihad,” they often lump together military planning against economic targets and the financing of holy war. But the two activities must not be confused. They do overlap in certain respects: booty acquired in the course of war can serve as material provision for another fight. Doctrinally speaking, however, the military act belongs to the category of jihād bi-l-nafs— the funding of that act to the category of jihād bi-l-māl. What is genuinely perplexing is that Muslim scholars tend to categorize the consumer boycott as an act of jihād bi-l-māl, too, even though there is a world of difference between bankrolling a military operation and choosing not to buy a desirable Western good in Mecca Mall.Footnote ⁶²

Boycotting scholars themselves recognize the oddity that they give two very different meanings to the term jihād bi-l-māl. Dubai's chief mufti, Ahmad ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Haddad, explained that one may fulfill the obligation to strive by means of capital in one of two ways: spending money generously for the sake of holy warriors or boycotting the enemy economically.Footnote ⁶³ But not all members of the ʿulamaʾ agree with this standard typology. In an online article, “The Economic Boycott,” al-Shamrani, an expert on Islamic law at Mecca's Umm al-Qura University, classified consumer boycotts under the rubric of jihadi acts of the heart (al-jihād bi-l-qalb). In this sense, a Muslim nearly overcome by the desire to consume Zionist, American, or Danish goods needs to strive against that dark impulse until he or she experiences a kind of spiritual repugnance toward abominable things.Footnote ⁶⁴

Divergences on the classification of boycotting aside, the ranks of Muslim scholars clung to the metaphor of boycotts as weapons of war. This construal of boycotts as military instruments, analogous to catapults or swords, required some justification. Experts on Islamic law needed, first, to cite legal precedents and to reflect on moral usage. As just war theorists, they also needed to think about legitimate targets and collateral damage. To justify the adoption of these weapons, Muslim scholars frequently referred to their use by non-Muslims against Muslims. A favorite story concerns the boycott that the tribe of Quraysh imposed upon Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib, clans associated with the fledgling Muslim community. Between 617 and 619 the Quraysh, according to tradition, drove those two clans out of Mecca. They decreed a ban on marriage and on commerce with them, driving Muhammad and his allies to such dire hunger that they were forced to eat leaves off trees.Footnote ⁶⁵ That social and economic sanction is sometimes compared to the trade embargo that the United Nations Security Council imposed on Iraq between 1990 and 2003.Footnote ⁶⁶

Jurists needed to adduce authoritative precedents from their own history in order to justify economic boycotts as Islamic acts. Husayn Shahata, a professor of Islamic economics at al-Azhar University and one of the foremost theoreticians of the new jihad, wrote: “The boycott is not an [offensive] innovation [bidʿa] nor a modern invention, but a tradition from the traditions of God [sunna min sunan Allāh].”Footnote ⁶⁷ After paying homage to Gandhi's struggle and other movements “for freedom from colonialism,” al-Qaradawi enlisted one early Islamic tradition to defend economic sanctions as old and venerable acts. He brought up an obscure grain embargo that occurred during the first decade of the Islamic era. After the migration to Medina, Muhammad and his allies repeatedly raided Mecca's trading caravans. At one point during this period of warfare with polytheists, a new convert to Islam from eastern Arabia made a pilgrimage to the city of the enemy. When the Meccans asked him if he had turned into a member of the Sabian sect, Thumama ibn Uthal confessed, “No, I follow the best religion, the religion of Muhammad, and I swear by God that no seed shall reach you from al-Yamama until God's Messenger allows it.” A classical source for this anecdote refers specifically to a grain of wheat, and boycotters accordingly speak of a “wheat embargo” (ḥaẓr al-ḥinṭa) carried out in the Prophet's name.Footnote ⁶⁸

THE MORAL ECONOMY OF BOYCOTTING

Islamic law is an ethical discourse, deeply concerned with bringing about justice in human relations. Boycotts represent an instrument of justice—a means to right wrongs. Yet they also present a moral challenge insofar as they aim to punish a nation or corporation rather than an individual wrongdoer. The grand mufti of Oman, Shaykh Ahmad bin Hamad al-Khalili, recently addressed this problem in response to a couple of questions that I raised. Through the agency of a friend, I asked him:

Shaykh al-Khalili responded that Islam treats non-Muslims with justice and benevolence. A boycott of all things Danish was justified because Danes had stood behind the company that had mocked the Prophet's sacrosanctity. Their collective failure, as members of the same nation–state, to condemn and stop the iniquity directed against Islam turned them into accomplices, guilty by association. However, the boycott became more discriminating in its targets once the representatives of individual companies took it upon themselves to denounce and disown the newspaper that had published the offensive cartoons. At that point, it became morally necessary for Muslim consumers to suspend the general boycott.Footnote ⁶⁹

Boycotts are blunt weapons. To sort out just from unjust targets, as did the grand mufti of Oman, carries certain risks. Beset with doubts about the morality of boycotting this or that product, Muslims might hesitate before heeding a mufti's appeal to take action. In one of the first boycott fatwas published online, in November 2000, Shaykh Mawlawi tried to establish a system of priorities. It is more important, he reasoned, to boycott cars and tools made in the United States than commodities made in Muslim lands by American-owned multinational corporations. The consumption of one or the other kind of good is, however, strictly forbidden: the mufti spoke of a stronger and “a lighter prohibition” (ḥarām akhaff).Footnote ⁷⁰ Two years later, worried about the consequences of granting consumers the power of discretion, Mawlawi decided to simplify things. A man writing from Andorra, of all places, prompted him to address the issue in a live-fatwa session, by asking if Muslims should boycott the Coca-Cola company, “known for supporting Zionists,” but not Pepsi. Not wanting to encourage finicky boycotters, who might elaborate fine distinctions to justify consuming some things, Mawlawi held, as an axiom, that the boycott should encompass all American companies. Making an exception for Pepsi would only encourage people to begin debating the merits of Coke, and before long the boycott would lose its fizzle.Footnote ⁷¹

In the 2000 fatwa, Mawlawi made clear that the United States was not a permanent target of the resistance. He also sought to counter the impression, which the boycott might give, that Islam is inimical to commerce; he thus took pains to argue that the shariʿa generally favors foreign trade. “The vast majority of jurists agree,” he argued, “that it is permissible for Muslims to trade with the enemies.” They made only two exceptions. They prohibited, first, “trading in the things forbidden by the sacred law, such as pork, wine and other abominations” and, second, exporting weapons or military devices. Islamic law favors foreign trade, even with enemy countries, provided these two prohibitions are observed. The ban on consuming American products derives from the second prohibition: because the United States supports Israel with weapons and capital (māl), buying American goods is tantamount—so reasons Mawlawi—to arming the enemy. But this ban on trade is temporary and circumstantial. The moment the United States ceases to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the boycott ends.Footnote ⁷²

Muftis reflected frequently on the ethical dilemma of harming fellow Muslims—particularly workers—whose livelihood depended on foreign commerce with boycotted nations. In the course of the 2002 live-fatwa session, an Egyptian correspondent wanted Shaykh Mawlawi to explain why Muslims should boycott Coca-Cola, given that the company employs thousands of Muslim workers in Egypt. Readily acknowledging that they would lose their jobs, Mawlawi expressed a deep appreciation for their economic sacrifice. He sympathized with them, even admitting a collective responsibility for their welfare: “We feel obliged to find for them a different job.” In the long run, however, he saw no cause for worry. Shifting consumption patterns would take care of these unemployed laborers. Muslim consumers would seek alternative soft drinks. Facing an increase in demand, the companies that should make these products would employ the men and women who possessed specialized skills and knowledge, acquired by working for a foreign company.Footnote ⁷³

Along these lines, too, a Palestinian man wrote that those who hold back from using the boycotting weapon believed that it would cause economic losses (khasāʾir) to Arabs and Muslims: that it would paralyze factories, depress commerce, deter foreign assistance, and increase the national debt. In his response Husayn Shahata took a hard line. Recalling verse 9:28 of the Qurʾan, he evoked a boundary between “the pure believers” and unclean idolaters. When the Quraysh tribe drove Muhammad and his followers out of Mecca and imposed upon them a social and economic boycott, the first Muslims suffered great deprivation. Yet they vanquished their enemies and began to profit, with God's help, from commerce. Boycotting will indeed cause suffering for Muslims, but “there is no such thing as war without sacrifices.”Footnote ⁷⁴

KATE3.COM: NEW MEDIA AND THE CONSUMPTION OF BOYCOTT FATWAS

New media played a key role in disseminating the emotive information and shocking images that fueled the boycotting movement. Al-Jazeera, founded in 1996, provides a good early example of the connections between fatwas, new communication technologies, and boycotting. In late December 1998, the network's host Ahmad Mansur interviewed Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the subject of “The American Strike against Iraq,” prompted by Operation Desert Fox, which aimed at “degrading” Iraq's capability to make weapons of mass destruction. Mansur remarked that a pharmacists’ union from Egypt had called for a month-long boycott of American pharmaceutical companies. He mentioned how the audience wanted to receive from al-Qaradawi “a clear fatwa offering a legal judgment [ḥukm] on the use of American commodities.” On the spot, al-Qaradawi failed to offer a satisfying response. So Mansur pressed him further, mentioning that he had received many faxes concerning the situation in Iraq. After several exchanges a caller from Libya contacted the program to request a fatwa concerning the propriety of broadcasting vulgar films during the bombardment of Iraq. Moments later, still hungry for guidance from the religious leader, a caller from Oman requested a binding, comprehensive fatwa. There is nothing remarkable, in this instance, about al-Qaradawi's responses. It is worth noting, by contrast, the entreaties of his audience. These appeals provide us with a clear example of the degree to which viewers of the show pressured the mufti to provide them with the legal–ideological support that they desired in order to justify, and promote further, boycotting. Those who imagine that hundreds of thousands of Muslims boycotted American, Israeli, or Danish products simply because al-Qaradawi finally recommended that course of action on satellite television neglect to consider the agency of fatwa consumers.Footnote ⁷⁵

Electronic mail, cellular phones, blogs, and social networking websites also served as media for boycott activism. According to an online report, activists forwarded the first Saudi fatwa on boycotting American goods, by ʿAbdallah bin Jabrin, by email. Together with the fatwa, they distributed electronically a blacklist naming forty American companies.Footnote ⁷⁶ That happened in November 2002, when electronic networks were still relatively small. A few years later, in 2006, a frenzy of electronic text messages combined with old and tried recruiting methods to produce a groundswell of support against Danish goods.Footnote ⁷⁷ Bloggers garnered support against Denmark by, for example, juxtaposing pictures of Muslims protesting in diverse places with pictures of empty shelves in grocery stores, indicating with signs where Danish dairy products used to be displayed.Footnote ⁷⁸ Activists on Facebook and Muslm.net formed virtual communities for causes big and small, where they organized protests and shared information under banners such as “60 New Ways to Boycott the Goods of America and Its Allies” and “The Movement to Boycott Chinese Goods to Help Our Muslim Brothers in Western China [the Uighurs of Xinjiang].”Footnote ⁷⁹ Through such networks, they disseminated crucial boycotting tips: how to use a barcode, for instance, to identify whether a product originated in Denmark. They also shared electronic fatwas. So it is easy to see how new media reinforced one another.

Fatwas, since the inception of the genre, have been sensitive to people's everyday concerns. When a mufti issues a fatwa in response to a question, as often happens, his legal advice is rarely an abstract dictation from above—it rather originates, in these instances, from below.Footnote ⁸⁰ Requests for fatwas propel the discussion forward. Thus, to take one example, after seventy Sudanese scholars jointly signed a fatwa calling for a boycott of American and Israeli goods, a reader complained to the thirty-second signatory that the fatwa was “really short.” He wanted a substantive, detailed exposition. As a result, the Sudanese shaykh Muhammad ʿAbd al-Karim, a spokesman for the Council of Muslim Scholars, issued a longer legal opinion, more technical and learned than the first.Footnote ⁸¹

Modern communication systems have allowed fatwa consumers to play a greater role than ever in the production and dissemination of new knowledge. By creating websites dedicated to the boycott, activists helped to propagate the legal discourse. This is a very recent turn of events, because Arabic speakers made limited use of the Internet in the last decade of the 20th century. Two of the most important boycotting websites in Arabic, whyusa.net and kate3.com, date from 2002. Kate3.com registered its domain name in May of that year, precisely one month after the conference of scholars at al-Azhar. As for whyusa.net, this website was originally controlled by a pair of patriotic American realtors. In an ironic twist, however, Arab boycotters took over the domain name, and by November 2002 they had it up and running as an Arabic forum dedicated to the resistance of American things.Footnote ⁸² In addition to fatwas, these websites presented news, cartoons, and flashy, multicolored displays of the logos of blacklisted merchandise. Fatwas gained exponentially more readers thanks to these attractive features.

The Boycott Committee of Professional Associations of Alexandria, an umbrella organization for the city's trade unions, created kate3.com as an information and propaganda resource. But the website, actively managed between 2002 and 2009, did not belong exclusively to the conglomerate of Alexandrian trade unions. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Middle East, strong ties existed between labor syndicates and religious organizations. They formed overlapping networks that converged on the boycott issue. The Muslim Brotherhood actually claimed kate3.com as one of its “specialized” websites.Footnote ⁸³ The unusual name, kate3, literally means “Boycott!” (The number 3, in the code of Arabic bloggers, stands for the letter ʿayn. In the IJMES system, the imperative would be transliterated as qāṭiʿ.) The first snapshot of the website archived by the Wayback Machine includes its distinctive icon: a star of David decorated with stars and stripes, in blue and red, chopped in half by an axe labeled, in Arabic, “Boycott!” The site's popularity on any given day depended mostly on political events. Traffic to this, as to other Arabic boycotting websites, peaked during the consumer boycott's heyday at the beginning of 2006. Nearly 300 websites included links to it. But who accessed Kate3.com before it became inactive in 2010? According to a company that analyzes Web traffic, most users of the website were men in their thirties and forties who attended college; they came primarily from Egypt but also, in significant numbers, from Algeria and the United Arab Emirates.Footnote ⁸⁴

Labor unions, together with student groups, formed the backbone of the boycotting movement. They constituted the active readership of boycotting websites; they disseminated fatwas online; they distributed lists of banned goods at demonstrations. Their activism stemmed in part from fear that they would lose their jobs as a result of globalization. The United States ranked as a great enemy not just because of its support of Israel or its military presence in the Middle East but also because of its increased commercial clout and the proliferation of American brand names in Middle Eastern malls. Free trade pacts signed between the United States and several Middle Eastern countries made labor activists especially anxious. It is no coincidence that pharmacists’ unions were especially active on the boycott front, given the legal protections that trade pacts brought to American pharmaceutical companies. Hence, labor activists had an economic interest in obtaining and spreading boycott fatwas. But their effect on the genre was more direct and substantive than that because muftis, knowing their audience, often appealed directly to workers. They sprinkled their boycotting fatwas with references to the activities of popular councils, trade unions, and anti-normalization committees.Footnote ⁸⁵ They also enjoined consumers to favor local Muslim-made products, an entreaty that nationalists found as appealing as did Islamists.

This link between labor activism and an assertive Islamism gave rise to a particular economic ethic. One remarkable fatwa suggests, in martial tones, that devotional practices can inspire industrial development. Fuʾad ʿAli Mukhaymar, a professor at al-Azhar and head of a Salafi missionary organization, al-Jamʿiyya al-Sharʿiyya in Cairo, delivered the opinion in the course of a live fatwa session. A man writing from Albania asked him whether Muslims ought to boycott only imports “made in the West” or also “American” goods whose manufacture required Egyptian labor. The mufti responded: “There is no doubt that, while the mind focuses on industry [ṣināʿa], the hands purified by the ritual of ablution are blessed hands.” In modern times, “it is incumbent on each Muslim to become better at his profession and more skillful in his work.” Muslims can triumph in their economic war against industrialized nations by favoring their own national products, wherever possible, and by putting fellow Muslims to work.Footnote ⁸⁶

Thanks to new media, fatwas have become more responsive than ever to popular demand. For centuries, muftis, standing at the crossroads between legal principles and everyday practices, have addressed the concerns of laypersons seeking their specialized knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁷ But today, thanks to digital communications, the genre has become wildly popular: the electronic fatwa does not appear at a lonely junction on the information highway, where one fatwa seeker can meet one mufti in isolation, for thousands of other fatwa seekers quickly converge at the same spot. In an instant the junction becomes very crowded—and the great number of fatwa consumers, arriving with pressing demands for more information, easily overwhelms the limited number of fatwa producers. Boycott fatwas actually present a very interesting example of demand far exceeding supply, as evidenced by the fact that fatwas are reposted and even recycled. In some cases, users requesting new fatwas in connection with a recent event receive an old fatwa—without the website operators ever disclosing the fact that the fatwa had been issued earlier, on a different occasion. This maddening practice makes it truly challenging to conduct historical research, but it has the obvious advantage of creating powerful virtual links between the legions of willing boycotters and the precious few mufti brigadiers who are expected, in a time of crisis, to issue religious directives.

THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF A RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE

For a variety of reasons, in the decade that preceded the revolutionary wave of protests known as “the Arab Spring,” Middle Eastern actors would have participated in popular boycotts with or without religious justification. Indeed, one of the leading proponents of economic coercion on Kate3.com—a mechanical engineer arrested by Jordan's Intelligence Agency after delivering, at a trade union event, a vitriolic presentation that indirectly challenged the Hashimite Kingdom's free trade policy—happens to be a Christian. Urging his audience to eat kebabs rather than hamburgers, ʿAli Hattar offered a secular, Pan-Arab rationale for boycotting American things.Footnote ⁸⁸ Arguably, this Jordanian engineer formed part of a variegated worldwide movement against corporate globalization, together with his French counterpart, José Bové, the farmer and syndicalist who has also railed famously at the McDonald's corporation.Footnote ⁸⁹ Nevertheless, whatever congruence existed between their consumer protests, it is clear that in the Middle East the ʿulamaʾ seasoned boycotting with their own blend of politics and religion. They did more for this movement than provide the rhetorical and ideological props demanded by labor activists and compunctious consumers. They deepened and extended popular participation by arguing that each and every Muslim—man, woman, or child—is bound by religion to shop discriminately.

In the process, Muslim scholars contributed significantly to the doctrine and theory of jihad. To appreciate this contribution, consider the fact that both before and after September 11 Western academics argued that Muslim interpreters of the shariʿa have by and large adhered to a violent, rather than a spiritual, sense of jihad.Footnote ⁹⁰ My analysis of boycott fatwas calls into question the standard taxonomy of jihad on which this argument is based. The muftis who issued these decrees advocated a form of economic resistance, typically classified as jihād bi-l-māl, that belongs neither to the category of “spiritual” nor to the category of “violent” jihad. Furthermore, these edicts made a powerful case for the fulfillment of jihad through nonviolent action. It is not that muftis abandoned the dream of a just war led by a righteous ruler at some point in the distant future. However, with state leaders espousing policies of economic liberalization and with multinational corporations of Western origin capturing more and more space in Muslim markets, they came to see civilian consumer boycotts as the best weapons of the day and age.

Preoccupied by the economic impact of this movement, multinational corporations rushed to advertise their local associations and to deny any entanglement with controversial foreign institutions. They also tried to appeal directly to pious and patriotic tastes. But they felt the need, first, to combat conspiracy theories that were doubtlessly concocted tongue in cheek. Procter & Gamble attempted to counter the impression that its stylized logo for Ariel detergent (an atom's path) represented the Star of David.Footnote ⁹¹ The world's largest coffeehouse chain, Starbucks, was forced to deny that it paid “any of its profits” to the Israeli army and to dismiss the rumor that its logo (a split-tailed mermaid) symbolized Queen Esther.Footnote ⁹² On a more serious note, Mcdonaldsarabia.com proclaimed in “The Story of McDonald's” that Middle Eastern entrepreneurs owned their businesses in their entirety and that these Arab and Muslim businessmen employed thousands of workers and favored “local and Arab” suppliers.Footnote ⁹³ To challenge the perception that it served Zionist interests, the Saudi franchise made donations to Palestinian hospitals. The Egyptian franchise began to offer McFalafel to its customers while further afield, in Jakarta, a poster proclaimed: “In the name of Allah, the merciful and the gracious, McDonald's Indonesia is owned by an indigenous Muslim Indonesian.” Facing a crippling boycott in Egypt, the British supermarket chain Sainsbury's also aimed to capture Muslim hearts, by broadcasting Qurʾanic recitations from its loudspeakers.Footnote ⁹⁴

All of this signaled the beginning of an intriguing chapter in international relations. The governments of boycotters and boycotted sat on the sidelines while religious organizations and multinational corporations played, without a rulebook, a new diplomatic game. This game unfolded publicly during the boycott of Denmark, when the large Swedish–Danish cooperative that sells dairy products in the Middle East decided to present its case directly to arbiters of the sacred law. Grasping at straws for several weeks, after suffering losses estimated at $85 million, Arla deflated the boycott against it first by appealing, in full-page advertisements in major Arab newspapers, directly to the values of Muslim consumers. Then, at a summit of sorts held in Bahrain in March 2006, the company's ambassadors courted the prominent religious leaders who had established the International Committee for the Defense of the Last of the Prophets. Persuaded by Arla's entreaties, the ʿulamaʾ solemnly declared that Muslims were now free to buy a cheese that they identified by its brand name, “The Three Cows.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The birth of boycott fatwas before September 11 can be attributed to the marriage of political Islam and Islamic economics in an age when computer networks facilitated communications among Muslims who wanted to support the Palestinian intifada while protesting neoliberal policies designed to increase trade with Israel's ally the United States. These fatwas continued to have currency online after the September 11 attacks, and it is clear that this world-historical event does not mark, on the theological-juridical plane, a radical rupture with the past.Footnote ⁹⁶ Fatwas written after this event resemble in many respects those written before it and they are all rooted, as we have seen, in an earlier anti-imperial rhetoric that coupled boycotting and jihad. Nevertheless, “the war on terror” that ensued after September 11 fueled the growth and development of the genre. The volleys of fatwas that burst upon the World Wide Web in reaction to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq provide evidence of this change. The conferences of scholars in Beirut and Cairo in 2002 and the foundation in the same year of websites dedicated to boycotting the United States also serve to chronicle a deepening commitment to the cause.

Boycotting fatwas gained a deeper historical significance as a result of the September 11 attacks because they offered Muslim activists an explicitly nonviolent vision of jihadi resistance. September 11 created a crisis of unity for Muslims worldwide. The violence and terror witnessed that day provoked serious reflections on the meaning of the duty to strive in the path of God. Advocates for peace seeking to defend Islam from the charge of terrorism vociferously rejected the rhetoric of armed jihad and offered instead a mystical, peaceful vision of their religion.Footnote ⁹⁷ Moderate religious leaders, sensing the change of mood but not willing to define jihad as an innocuous mystical quest, rallied behind an alternative, broadly agreeable path. Instead of renouncing the ideal of holy war, they espoused boycotts. Extremists did the same, advocating consumer renunciation for civilians while also defending suicide bombings by militias.Footnote ⁹⁸ Associated with Gandhi, boycotts seemed very attractive to the ʿulamaʾ, offering in their view a lawful, easily defensible, even honorable way of protesting Western dominance. An ideology of passive resistance promised, in addition, to reawaken the Muslim community politically, bringing it behind the boycotting banner, with a sense of communal unity and global power. In promoting this goal no one spoke more eloquently than Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who tried again and again to rally “1.3 billion Muslims” for a consumer jihad—first against America, then against Denmark. But if a fraction of this global audience heeded his words, it was because he preached to them what they wanted to hear: that they could fulfill the duty to wage jihad without taking up arms by simply shopping, wherever possible, for Muslim things.