Sublime

Though the word jihad literally means “struggle,” and the Quran at times uses it in a spiritual context, the primary use of the word has always implied a physical struggle for spiritual purposes.

“Holy war” was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as “war”; jihad is not one of them. The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes re

The bloody terror organization that Osama bin Laden ultimately founded, al-Qaeda, is but one manifestation of a much larger movement of militant Islamic puritanism commonly called Jihadism (jahadiyyah). What makes Jihadism unique—indeed, what gives the movement its name—is its radical reinterpretation of the concept of jihad. What has for centuries

But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those

The doctrine of jihad, as it slowly developed in the Quran, was specifically meant to differentiate between pre-Islamic and Islamic notions of warfare, and to infuse the latter with what Mustansir Mir calls an “ideological-cum-ethical dimension” that, until that point, did not exist in the Arabian Peninsula. At the heart of the doctrine of jihad wa

jihad is neither a universally recognized nor a unanimously defined concept in the Muslim world.

‘To fight [in a sacred month] is a grave matter;

jihad reflects the religion of Islam, whereas the Crusades do not reflect the Christian faith. There is a significant difference between the two.

Over the last century, however, and especially after the colonial experience gave birth to a new kind of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East, the classical doctrine of jihad has undergone a massive resurgence in the pulpits and classrooms of a few prominent Muslim intellectuals. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) relied on a militant inter