A few comments...

Submitted by Richard Angus (United Kingdom), Mar 17, 2005 at 08:50

Jihad means "Striving" and for Muslims, this is striving in the name of God.

As such, this can be taken to mean a variety of different things as you have already pointed out, such as striving against the self, the percieved evils of society, or armed conflict. Jihad as conflict is meant to be a defensive mechanism to guard the faith of Islam.

Islam spread from the Arabian Gulf in response to the threats given by the Byzantine empire, and the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire in the West.

Jihad as an offensive idea was an interpretation put upon it by the Legists of the Abbasid regime that ruled the Islamic Empire from 750-945 AD, as justification to the Muslim people of their aggressive expansion into other territiories and power mongering.

One major Jihad was during the periods of the Crusades when Saladin saw the offensive actions of the Christian countries of Europe in Israel/Palestine as a threat to the Islamic religion, and called the Islamic people to Holy War against this threat.

In Islam there is recourse to fighting within their Holy Literature. The New Testament and the teachings of Jesus call for peace. And yet the war against terrorism, often seen interchangeably recently with Jihad, is often given the ideolgy of a Crusade by a Christian nation.

One is just as bad as the other.

There will undoubtedly continue to be Jihad until every member of the Islamic religion no longer feels that their faith is under threat.

Yet how can a call to 'modernise' Islam, by entities outside of their religion, be percieved as anything but a threat to their faith by many Muslims?

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