Striving in the Path of God

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.

Asma Afsaruddin is Class of 1950 Herman B Wells Endowed Professor and Professor of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author and editor of nine books, including Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP 2022), The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women (OUP 2023), and The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 and was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019.

Introduction Chapter 1: Striving "for," "in," and "in the path of" God: Qur'anic Imperatives in the Meccan Period Chapter 2: Fighting in the Path of God: A Religious and Moral Obligation Chapter 3: The Ethics of Fighting, Refraining from Fighting, and Peacemaking Chapter 4: Dying in the Path of God: Exegeses of Martyrdom Chapter 5: Jihad and Martyrdom Compared in Early and Later Hadith Literature Chapter 6: Jihad and Martyrdom in Early and Late Treatises on the Merits of Jihad Chapter 7: The Excellences of Patient Forbearance: Counter-Narratives on Striving in the Path of God Chapter 8: Modern and Contemporary Debates on Jihad and Martyrdom I: Political and Militant Perspectives Chapter 9: Modern and Contemporary Debates on Jihad and Martyrdom II: Privileging History, Context, and Polysemy Conclusion: Analysis of Texts: A Summation