Now back to our earlier questions: Is the doctrine of jihad rooted firmly in the Koran? Would Muhammad approve of what the jihadists are doing? Would the God of the Koran approve?

The answer to the second question is “almost certainly not.” There is no hint anywhere—not in the Koran, not in the hadith—that Muhammad would countenance the killing of women or children, a favorite practice of modern-day jihadists.

The answer to the first question—and to the third—is also negative. The doctrine of jihad, the doctrine that modern-day jihadists cite, came into being after Muhammad’s death, and the Koran provides no firm foundation for it. Indeed, that the authors of the doctrine relied so heavily on sayings attributed to the Prophet—and that these attributions often showed up a suspiciously long time after he lived—is itself testament to how hard it would be to ground jihad in the Koran.

But there’s a larger question: Does the doctrine of jihad really matter much anyway? Though Osama bin Laden was an indirect heir of Sayyid Qutb, and though bin Laden emphasizes the “Sword verse,” which when read in isolation seems to justify offensive jihad, he doesn’t, in the end, deploy that doctrine. Bin Laden’s exhortations to fight America, as in his 1996 manifesto, involve a ritual recitation of America’s crimes against Islam; there is always some provocation other than merely being unbelievers. He always manages to cast the jihad in question as in some sense an act of defense.

And so it goes. When people feel like fighting, they are pretty good at coming up with reasons why the fighting is justified—reasons why God is on their side. A doctrine of offensive jihad might in theory save a person the time of formulating specific provocations, but in fact that time is going to be spent anyway. Human psychology is such that it’s vanishingly rare for attack to precede grievance, regardless of how much creativity the grievance’s creation requires.