Abstract
This article explores the phenomena of violence and jihad in three parts: their emergence and trajectory in the Qur’anic text, their meanings, and their entanglement with the religious cause. The objective was to examine the interactions between violence and jihad, highlighting the variations in their usage and interpretation. Based on intensive literal interpretations of the jihad verses, radical Islamist movements have distorted their historical memory by sanctifying and reducing them to an argument of war (harb, qital) and combat, thus seeking a military solution to their political agendas. This article also aimed to address the issue of the transition of Islam from a meta-narrative of emancipation and rationality to one of violence by examining the question of war in Islam, as well as its definition and legitimisation. In this rather complex transition, we draw in some sections on Ibn Khaldun’s modelling to highlight the political component related to violence. The aim was to attempt to disentangle the threads of violence, politics, and power within the Islamic tradition. This study will allow assessment of the tension—in the context of the Qur’an—between order (islah) and disorder/injustice (fasad). The transition from one to the other implies a legitimisation of violence; its appropriateness must, therefore, be studied.
Highlights
In Arabic, the term jihad is based on the ideas of ‘effort’, ‘striving’, or ‘exerting oneself’.Out of 6236 verses in the Qur’an, approximately 41 mention jihad and its derivatives, accentuating its polysemy and multiple uses
The jurisprudential effort has been based on the conversion of so-called fighting verses (Qur’an, 9:5) into legal justifications for al-jihad, while political support has ensured that these jurisprudential choices have been transformed into legitimate violence to wage, far more often, intra-Muslim community wars on the grounds that their faith would not be in conformity with the pseudo-Islamic sharia
Reflecting on violence—its components, instruments, and faces—allows us to examine its evolution from illegitimate violence to legitimate power and authority
Summary
In Arabic, the term jihad is based on the ideas of ‘effort’, ‘striving’, or ‘exerting oneself’. A closer reading of the verses reveals jihad as a vision that structures the world into categories of human beings: believers—the followers of God—and non-believers—the enemies of The technical word used for fighting is qital3 This observation contradicts the spreading and popular conception of jihad in the West, where the term has crystallised to mean military offenses against ‘unbelievers’ and is almost exclusively identified as such. The warfare-related concept of jihad that has spread throughout the 20th century conflates political and religious issues, though the religious value of jihad is somewhat independent of its political weight (Mirbagheri 2012) These two, almost opposite, interpretations of jihad—the military approach and the self-building and discipline approach—are rooted in Islamic jurisprudential tradition. The myth of religious violence tends to construct the figure of the religious ‘other’ and to persistently contrast jihadism and the rational, peace-making subject (Cavanaugh 2009)
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