using drugs as Jihad

The essence of religion is an attempt to discover the truth through the veil of reality. Using certain tactics it can be done, the religious commandments are a set of such tactics. Reality presents the believer with difficulties, and the believer must fight against them and remove them in order to be able to fulfill his goal of a direct relationship with God. He imagines reality as an enemy and against it he wages war. This is how the idea of ​​jihad, the holy war, was born. This interpretation of religion is a mystical-gnostic interpretation. Within Islam this interpretation was used by the Sufi tradition. The Sufis called this struggle the “Great Jihad”, because in their opinion it is a much more difficult struggle than the physical war, the “Little Jihad”.

Within Islam, around the 11th century, a major crisis arose over the question, because some Sufis claimed that since they had reached the highest level of union with God, the commandments did not apply to them. The disdain for the commandments and the door it opened to an interpretation that was perceived as heretical, made the Sufis persecuted and some of them, like Al Khalaj, were executed. The internal Islamic struggle, which dealt with the question of the essence of Jihad, provoked the fundamentalist movement that insisted that Islam should be returned to the original and simple meaning of the term “Jihad”.

One of the things that the Sufis supposedly underestimated is Islam’s attitude to mind-altering substances. In the Quran it is written that it is forbidden to drink wine, but it is not written that it is forbidden to use mind-altering substances, and the question was very much alive in the tenth century, when on the one hand there were interpretations that followed the path of the “generalization” and forbade mind-altering substances as if wine were forbidden, and on the other hand there were those who said that since only wine was forbidden, Muslims were not allowed to prohibit what the Prophet did not expressly prohibited. The Sufis found in mind-altering substances a tool for the realization of Jihad. What all the permissives had in common, it turns out, is that they came from the eastern regions of the Muslim Empire, places where there was a historical Zoroastrian influence that was positive towards two minds. In those areas, it turns out, was also born the sect of Order of Assassins, which was said to have used mind-altering substances in order to carry out Jihad.

One of the prominent figures in Muslim theology is the figure of al-Khaḍir, a servant of God who is considered to be even more knowledgeable than Moses, and is considered to have succeeded in his great wisdom in finding justifications even for actions that common sense fails to describe as appropriate or just. al-Khaḍir is so holy that he is considered immortal. Some identify al-Khaḍir with Elijah the prophet, and because of this he is considered an example of a religious zealot, who is jealous of God and wages a stubborn struggle against those who violate his word. al-Khaḍir literally means “the green”, or “the plants” – a connotation for mind-altering stbstances.

As mentioned, in Islam there were two extremes in relation to the use of mind altering substances as a tool to implement jihad and reach a high spiritual level that fulfills God’s will, spiritual jihad and practical jihad. This explains why today’s fundamentalist movements specialize in the production and distribution of drugs – starting with the Taliban in the supply of opium, through Hezbollah in the supply of hashish, and ending with the Syrian government that is responsible for the new Bon-Ton, amphetamines called “Captagon” (Fenethylline). ISIS is already known for drugging their soldiers in the Assassins style before going on murderous operations. Now, it turns out that among the weapons of the Hamas terrorists were also found such Captagon pills that drugged them and helped them to obscure their empathy and to be uninhibited.

* Berserker, drugging soldiers before going into battle, was a well-known tactic among the Indo-Europeans (“Aryans”). Zarathustra supposedly founded his religion out of a protest reaction to the Persians’ obscene use of the “Haoma”. In Vedic mythology, Agni, the god of fire, was the twin of Indra, the god of war, and sometimes both are considered the same being with two faces. Both are considered patrons of the soma and those who liked to drink it.