Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 165–169, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2006.00015.

Views of Jihad Throughout History

Asma Afsaruddin*
University of Notre Dame

Abstract
The Arabic term jihad has primarily come to mean “armed struggle/combat” and
is frequently translated into English as “holy war.” But a close scrutiny of the
occurrence of this term in the Qurwan and in early hadith literature demonstrates
that this exclusive understanding of the term cannot be supported for the earliest
period of Islam (roughly mid-seventh through the late eighth centuries). The essay
traces the transformations in the meanings of jihad – and the related concepts of
martyr and martyrdom – from the earliest period of Islam through the late medieval
period and down to our present time.

The basic and general meaning of the term jihad is “struggle,” “striving,”
“exertion.” In the Qurwan, the term is frequently conjoined to the phrase
“fi sabil Allah” (lit. “in the path of God”). Thus, the full locution, al-jihad fi
sabil Allah, means “struggling/striving for the sake of God.”This translation
points to the potentially different meanings that may be ascribed to jihad in
different contexts, since the phrase “in the path of/for the sake of God” allows
for human striving to be accomplished in multiple ways. The Qurwan often
refers to those who “strive with their wealth and their selves” (e.g., 8:72).

Contextualizing the Qurvan

Many of the Qurwanic pronouncements on jihad cannot be properly
understood without relating them to specific events in the life of the
prophet. A significant number of Qurwanic verses are traditionally understood
to have been revealed in connection with certain episodes in the prophet
Muhammad’s life. According to our sources, from the onset of the revelations
to Muhammad in ca. 610 CE until his emigration to Medina from Mecca
in 622 during the period known as the Meccan period, the Muslims were
not given permission by the Qurwan to physically retaliate against their
persecutors, the pagan Meccans. While recognizing the right to self-defense
for those who are wronged, the Qurwan maintains in this early period that
to bear patiently the wrong doing of others and to forgive those who cause
them harm is the superior course of action (42:40–43; cf. 29:59; 16:42).
Patience and forbearance (Ar. sabr) are thus important components of
jihad. The verses cited above underscore the non-violent dimension of jihad
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166 . Asma Afsaruddin

during the Meccan period which lasted thirteen years compared to the
Medinan period of ten years. The introduction of the military aspect of jihad
in the Medinan period can then be appropriately and better understood as
a “last resort” option, resorted to when attempts at negotiations and peaceful
proselytization among the Meccans had failed during the first thirteen years
of the propagation of Islam.
In 622 CE, which corresponds to the first year of the Islamic calendar,
the prophet received divine permission to emigrate to Medina, along with
his loyal followers. There he set up the first Muslim polity, combining the
functions of prophecy and temporal rule in one office. The Medinan verses,
accordingly, now have increasingly more to do with organization of the
polity, communitarian issues and ethics, and defense of the Muslims against
Meccan hostilities. A specific Qurwanic verse (22:39–40) permitting fighting
(Ar. qital) was revealed in Medina, although its precise date cannot be
determined. When both just cause and righteous intention exist, fighting
in self-defense against an intractable enemy may become obligatory
(2:216). The Qurwan further asserts that it is the duty of Muslims to defend
those who are oppressed and cry out to them for help (4:75), except against
a people with whom the Muslims have concluded a treaty (8:72).
Three major battles and a number of minor campaigns were fought
between 624 and 632 CE during the prophet’s lifetime. Some of the most
trenchant verses exhorting the Muslims to fight the unbelievers were revealed
on the occasions of these military campaigns (e.g., 9:5; 9:29). The Qurwan
in other verses (e.g., 2:93; 2:193; 8:61), however, makes it clear that should
hostile behavior on the part of the foes of Islam cease, then the reason for
engaging them in war also lapses.

Views of Jihad in the post-Prophetic Period

The scholarly literature from the first three centuries of Islam reveals that
there were competing definitions of how best to strive in the path of God,
engendered by the polyvalence of the term jihad. Recent rigorous research
has established that there was a clear divergence of opinion regarding the
nature of jihad and its imposition as a religious duty on the believer through
the first century of Islam and into the second half of the second century.1
Jurists from the Hijaz, like Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 778), were of the opinion
that jihad was primarily defensive, and that only the defensive jihad may be
considered obligatory on the individual. Other early Hijazi jurists tended
to place greater emphasis on religious practices such as prayer and mosque
attendance and did not consider jihad obligatory for all. On the other hand,
Syrian jurists like al-Awzawi (d. 773) held the view that even aggressive war
may be considered obligatory. No doubt this last group was influenced by
the fact that the Syrian Umayyads during his time were engaged in border
warfare with the Byzantines and there was a perceived need to justify these
hostilities on a theological and legal basis.
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 165–169, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2006.00015.x
 Views of Jihad Throughout History . 167

By the early Abbasid period, roughly mid-late second/eighth century,

the military aspect of jihad would receive greater emphasis in many circles,
and in the opinions of some jurists, was understood to override the other
spiritual and non-militant significations of this term. The jurist al-Shafivi (d.
820) is said to have been the first to permit jihad to be launched against
non-Muslims as offensive warfare, although he qualified non-Muslims as
referring only to pagan Arabs and not to non-Arab non-Muslims. He further
divided the world into dar al-islam (“the abode of Islam”) and dar al-harb
(“the abode of war,” referring to non-Muslim territories), while recognizing
a third possibility dar al-ahd (“the abode of treaty”) or dar al-sulh (“the abode
of reconciliation”), referring to non-Islamic states that may enter into a
peace treaty with the Islamic state by rendering an annual tribute.2 Al-Shafivi’s
perspectives on jihad were, in many ways, a marked departure from earlier
juristic thinking and reflects a further development of the Syrian school of
thought on this issue. This is quite evident when his views are compared
with those of jurists from the earlier Hanafi school of law, eponymously
founded by Abu Hanifa (d. 767). Hanafi jurists, for example, did not
subscribe to a third abode of treaty, as devised by al-Shafivi, but were of the
opinion that the inhabitants of a territory which had concluded a truce with
the Muslims and paid tribute to the latter became part of the abode of Islam
and entitled to the protection of the Islamic government.3 The Hanafis also
adhered to the position that non-believers could only be fought if they
resorted to armed conflict, and not simply on account of their disbelief.4
This remained a principle of contention between later Shafivi and Hanafi
jurists.
In juridical and administrative literature, jihad essentially became reduced
to qital or fighting by roughly the ninth century and the term is used
exclusively in this sense. However, many non-juridical sources, such as
hadith and ethical works, continue to preserve for us a much broader
spectrum of meanings assigned to the term jihad and the multiple
religio-social commitments and duties signified by it.5
It is worth emphasizing that the concepts of dar al-islam and dar al-harb
have no basis in the Qurwan nor in the sunna. The invention of these terms
and the resulting aggrandizement of the military aspect of jihad were based
rather on ad hoc juristic interpretations of particularly verses 9:5 and 9:29,
largely in deference to realpolitik in the Abbasid period. These legal
postulations are, therefore, not doctrinally binding in any way. And, in fact,
by the fourth century of Islam (tenth century of the CE), these terms began
to fall into disuse because they no longer accurately described contemporary
historical and political reality. Accordingly, juristic thinking in this period,
in accommodation of these changed realities, came to regard the caliph’s
“duty” of waging jihad, as theorized by an earlier generation, to have
essentially lapsed.
Over time the term dar al-islam also underwent significant changes, so
that by the twelfth century some jurists were of the opinion that non-Muslim
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 165–169, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2006.00015.x
168 . Asma Afsaruddin

territory in which Muslims were free to practice their religion could be

subsumed under the rubric of dar al-Islam.6 By the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, reform-minded scholars such as Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) and
later his student, Rashid Rida (d. 1935), would recognize that the bipolar
division of the world had been defunct for a while and explicitly affirm that
peaceful coexistence was the normal state of affairs between the Islamic and
non-Islamic worlds.7 Mahmud Shaltut (d. 1963), who like Abduh became
the rector of al-Azhar University, was of the opinion that only defensive
wars are permissible in response to external aggression.8
The terms dar al-islam and dar al-harb and the concept of an offensive jihad
have been revived, however, in the contemporary period by religious
militants to justify their political goals,9 predicated on an assumed basic
incompatibility between the Western and Islamic worlds.10

Short Biography
Dr. Afsaruddin received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in
1993 and is currently associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the
University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She previously taught at the Johns
Hopkins and Harvard universities. Her fields of specialization are the religious
and political thought of Islam, Qurwan and hadith studies, and Islamic
intellectual history. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Excellence and
Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 2002); the editor of Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiation of Female
“Public” Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard
University Press, 1999); and co-editor of Humanism, Culture, and Language
in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Winona Lake, Indiana:
Eisenbrauns, 1997). Her articles and reviews have been published in
numerous scholarly journals and she has lectured widely in this country and
abroad on various aspects of Islamic thought. Afsaruddin is the recipient of
a research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for 2003–
2004, and was named a Carnegie Scholar for 2005 by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. She is currently the co-editor of Religion Compass’
Islam section, along with Yousef Meri.

Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of Classics, 304 O’Shaughnessy Hall, University of Notre
Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
1 Roy Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid,“The Idea of the Jihad in Islam before the Crusades,”

in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, eds. Angeliki E. Laiou and
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,
2001).
2 Al-Shafivi, Kitab al-umm (Cairo, 1321), 4: 103 –4; Al-Shafivi, al-Risala, ed. Ahmad Shakir (n. pl.,

1891), 430–32.
3 See Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar, trans. and ed. Majid Khadduri

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 12–13; idem., War and Peace in the Law
of Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 145.
© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 165–169, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2006.00015.x
 Views of Jihad Throughout History . 169
4 As did the Hanafi jurist Ahmad al-Tahawi (d. 933) in his Kitab al-Mukhtasar, ed. Abu al-Wafa
al-Afghani (Cairo, 1950), 281.
5 See Asma Afsaruddin, “Competing Perspectives on Jihad and ‘Martyrdom’ in Early Islamic

Sources,” in Witnesses to Faith? Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate

Publishing, 2006).
6 Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim

Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries,” Islamic Law and
Society 1 (1994): 161.
7 Art. “Jihad,” Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. John Esposito (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995), 2: 369–73.

8 See Mahmud Shaltut, “Koran and Fighting,” in Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern

Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996), 60–101.

9 For examples of such rhetoric, see Osama Bin Laden, Messages to the World: The Statements of

Osama bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence and tr. James Howarth (London, 2005).
10 The “clash of civilizations” thesis resonates with both Christian and Muslim right-wing camps.

The polarizing religiously colored rhetoric emanating from both sides tend to be a mirror image
of the other; for this discussion, see Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after
September 11 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Bibliography
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© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Religion Compass 1/1 (2007): 165–169, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2006.00015.x