Reason Versus Revelation:A Counter-Attack on Brigadier Malik’s Theology of Terror

Brigadier S. K. Malik’s The Quranic Concept of War is not a treatise on faith but a soldier’s field manual disguised as revelation. Written under the patronage of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and published in 1979, when Pakistan’s army was transforming religion into state ideology, the book fuses strategy with scripture. Zia’s own foreword—blessing it as both divine and doctrinal—betrays its purpose: a manifesto of militarized theology, not a meditation on piety.

Malik’s argument is stark and unapologetic. He claims the Qur’an offers a complete, timeless doctrine of war and asserts that “terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means; it is the end itself.” In that single line, fear becomes sacrament, terror becomes virtue, and psychological warfare becomes divine policy. Malik converts revelation into tactics and tactics back into revelation, producing an Islamist Clausewitz who sanctifies intimidation as holy warfare.

Yet his argument collapses under its own scripture. The Qur’an proclaims, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), but elsewhere commands, “When the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5). Malik depends on both verses being simultaneously immutable and malleable—eternal truth and situational order. To reconcile this contradiction, clerics invoke naskh, abrogation, claiming that later verses cancel earlier ones. But the instant a revelation revises itself, it ceases to be divine law and becomes legislative drift—the unmistakable mark of human authorship. Malik’s theology of terror thus rests on circular logic: perfection that corrects itself.

His reading of history fares no better. The early Islamic conquests were not miracles of faith but the spoils of collapsing empires. The Byzantines and Sasanians were exhausted by war and rebellion; cities fell not to angels but to treaties and defectors. Malik mistakes opportunism for omnipotence, mistaking geopolitical luck for divine design. The empiricist sees cause and consequence; Malik baptizes circumstance as revelation.

Behind the theology lies the politics. Malik’s book appeared at the height of Zia’s Islamization drive, when Pakistan’s military regime replaced law with shari‘a ordinances and classrooms with indoctrination. The Quranic Concept of War served as a theoretical foundation for fusing mosque and barracks. Its real mission was mobilization: to turn soldiers into missionaries, and war into worship.

Anwar Shaikh, once a believer and later one of Islam’s fiercest internal critics, exposed this deceit with merciless precision. In Faith and Deception he called religion, when merged with power, “the most efficient engine of falsehood ever invented.” Revelation, he argued, becomes the camouflage of ambition. Malik fits that description perfectly—a general in cleric’s clothing, constructing a world where obedience masquerades as faith and dissent is branded heresy.

The antidote to this fusion of faith and fear is reason itself. Faith cannot be tested; evidence can. Faith forbids doubt; evidence demands it. Faith offers paradise for obedience; evidence offers freedom through inquiry. Malik’s doctrine collapses when judged by the simplest empirical question: which civilization ever advanced by outlawing curiosity? Which regime built stability through terror? None. Fear produces silence, not knowledge; submission, not progress.

Blind faith ceases to be private when it becomes state doctrine. It is then the deadliest contagion in history—the same disease that throttled inquiry in medieval Europe and today turns blasphemy into a capital crime. Malik’s book is the pathology in print, translating unreason into policy and paralysis into holiness. To oppose it is not bigotry but self-defense.

The defense must be global. A theology that claims universal authority demands universal rebuttal. Atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, secular Europeans—all who defend conscience against command—share a common front. The answer is not counter-terror but counter-reason: public dossiers juxtaposing Malik’s quotations with Qur’anic contradictions, historical data, and the empirical failure of terror; open debates where scripture is read as literature, not law; civic insistence that any claim to divine policy face the same scrutiny as any political one—premises, consequences, and proof. When a dogma cannot answer, it forfeits its power to frighten.

The real victory will be intellectual. Malik’s authority depends on the aura of untouchability surrounding his source. Break that aura, and the theology collapses. The Qur’an must be treated as any other historical text—poetry, law, myth, exhortation, and politics born of its time. Once read as literature rather than lightning, its terror loses its divine mask. Demystification is liberation.

The danger Malik embodies is not unique to Islam. Every monotheism that fuses revelation with authority carries the seed of totalitarianism. When God becomes commander-in-chief, doubt becomes treason. That is why theological war is more enduring than fascist or communist war: it claims eternity and immunity to evidence. But the cure remains the same—reason, pluralism, and the courage to call an idol an idol. Malik’s manual belongs beside other relics of ideological absolutism, from Mein Kampf to the Little Red Book—documents that mistook obedience for virtue and violence for truth.

The contest between revelation and reason will not end at any border. It will end when humanity remembers that thought, not terror, is the real weapon. A mind that kneels cannot be free. A mind that questions cannot be conquered.

Citations

1. Brigadier S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Lahore: Wajid Ali’s Ltd., 1979), foreword by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
2. The Qur’an 2:256; 9:5 (standard translations).
3. Anwar Shaikh, Faith and Deception (Cardiff: Principality Publishers, 1996).
4. J. C. Myers, “The Quranic Concept of War,” Parameters (U.S. Army War College, 1981).