The Devil and Mrs. Jihad

Concerning the hadith about the "greater jihad" which is supposedly an "interior" struggle, some at Jihad Watch have wondered what Muslims could possibly be struggling against inside their breasts; for while obviously as overwrought as crack addicts in their manic hatred and fanaticism, they seem otherwise to be perfectly untroubled by those negligible facets of the human soul we Westerners have come to know as doubt, questioning, and a conscience.

Actually, however, there is strong need for an interior spiritual struggle in Muslims -- the diametrical opposite from the traditional Western spiritual struggle. Contrary to the spin of that "weak" hadith, the Islamic interior struggle is not really against the nafs (an Arabic symbolism denoting "ego" in the pejorative sense, ostensibly equivalent to the "demon" of Christian psychology or the yetzer hara of Judaism) -- it is actually against the Good inside each Muslim which has obviously dwindled to a faint, nearly extinguished flicker of a mere ghost of a conscience (or perhaps to just barely glowing embers of the adust ashes of a former conscience) deep inside them (and that's being generous). For, you see, it takes a prodigious and protracted exertion of the will and spirit to deny one's own humanity and transform oneself into a being who is tantamount to an enemy of humanity -- in effect, an enemy of one's own very self and by extension of all Mankind.

To think otherwise is to underestimate the peculiar monstrosity of both Islam and Muslims. 

And along with this common underestimation of the psychology of Muslims, one would misunderstand the nature of this struggle to conceive of it as simplistically a nakedly nihilistic Satanism: It is, rather, in fact an ingenious inversion of Satanism into its mirror-image, looking in a distorted looking-glass to see -- in place of a grotesquely gnarly wart-bumpy demon with goat's hooves -- a lovely being of piety, a veritable angel of light, a Lucifer, if you will. And who more ingenious to come up with this way of seducing and recruiting a growing army of God's creatures, collectively the Umma (which, meaning "Mother" may be said to be the equivalent of the Church in Christianity as Christ's "Bride" -- Mrs. Jihad) to become slaves of Satan -- convinced all the while that they are serving God and fighting Satan -- than Ol' Scratch his own self! 

This grandly wicked stratagem of his is so... devilish... that it helps him forget, at least somewhat -- on one of those rare nights as his mood of denial waxes when in his scarlet silk smoking jacket he stalks the halls of his subchthonous caverns -- his original anguish he has tried to repress all these millennia deep down inside him (speaking of interior struggles), of already having lost Heaven long ago, doomed and utterly desperate, forever.

Further Reading:

Islam and the Psychology of Satan: The Tragicomedy of Hell on Earth

Satan and Islam:  another reverberation

Allah, the Evil Demiurge?