Striving in the Path of God

Abstract

The term jihad is perhaps the most contentious Arabic word to enter the English language in recent decades. In public discourse it has become shorthand for “holy war” and synonymous with violent Muslim extremism. This scholarly examination of jihad and martyrdom by Asma Afsaruddin, a professor of Islamic studies at Indiana University, carefully disentangles their multivalent meanings within Islamic scholarship from early Muslim history up to the present day. It also challenges the assertions of those who focus only upon martial connotations. Instead, she argues that “conceptualizations of jihad as primarily armed combat and of shahada as primarily military martyrdom are relatively late and contested ones and deviate considerably from the Qur’anic significations of these terms” (p. 5). In this substantial, dense text, comprising nine chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion, she demonstrates an impressive command of materials by skillfully engaging a representative range of Qur’anic exegetical works, Prophetic sayings, and faḍā’il literature. The first chapter is prefaced with a detailed discussion of the first term’s etymological origin and semantic usage. Rooting her analysis in the Qur’an, she points out that its polyvalent nature cannot be reduced only to a combative ...