Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought

by Asma Afsaruddin

In popular and academic literature, jihad is predominantly assumed to refer exclusively to armed combat, and martyrdom in the Islamic context is understood to be invariably of the military kind. This perspective, derived mainly from legal texts, has led to discussions of jihad and martyrdom as concepts with fixed, universal meanings divorced from the socio-political circumstances in which they have been deployed through the centuries. Asma Afsaruddin studies in a more holistic manner the range of significations that can be ascribed to the term jihad from the earliest period to the present and historically contextualizes the competing discourses that developed over time. Many assumptions about the military jihad and martyrdom in Islam are thereby challenged and deconstructed. A comprehensive interrogation of varied sources reveals early and multiple competing definitions of a word that in combination with the phrase fi sabil Allah translates literally to "striving in the path of
God."

Contemporary radical Islamists have appropriated this language to exhort their cadres to armed political opposition, which they legitimize under the rubric of jihad . Afsaruddin shows that the multivalent connotations of jihad and shahid recovered from the formative period lead us to question the assertions of those who maintain that belligerent and militant interpretations preserve the earliest and only authentic understanding of these two key terms. Retrieval of these multiple perspectives has important implications for our world today in which the concepts of jihad and martyrdom are still being fiercely debated.

Genres: Islam, Religion

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Rickey McKown · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Professor Afsaruddin has given us a very solid examination of the polyvalent meanings of "jihad" and "shahid" that were derived by early Muslim scholars in their interpretations of the Qur'an and ahadith, and how, in the Umayyad period (continuing into the Abbasid period) different elements within the Muslim community expounded differing interpretations - pietist elements in the Hijaz and Iraq favouring broad concepts of "jihad" as the struggle or striving of the human being to live a life in conformity with God's will as expressed in divine revelation and "shahid" as bearing witness to God's religion, especially in difficult circumstances, while militaristic elements in Syria promoted a narrow concept of combative "jihad" and a cult of "shahid" as the "military martyr". She traces the growth of the militaristic interpretations of these terms through the centuries of conflict with the Byzantines, Crusaders, and Mongols, but also the continued resonance of older non-militaristic interpretations, right into the present-day period, examining mediaeval and modern exegetes whose interpretations strive to valorise non-militaristic views and refute militaristic ones, building a strong case against the distorted portrait of Islam shared by both the violent extremists and the Islamophobes. A deep, scholarly, monograph that is well worth the effort that is required by a non-specialist (she makes considerable use of transliterated Arabic terminology, but does not use Arabic script).

[N Nightingale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, well researched, dense read.