A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Appendix A/10

by Moulavi Gerágh Ali

[Sidenote: When the word Jihád was diverted from its original signification to its figurative meaning of waging religious war?]

10. It is admitted by all lexicologists, commentators, and jurisconsults that Jihád in classical Arabic means to labour, strive earnestly, and that the change of its meaning or the technical signification occurred only in the post-classical period, i.e., long after the publication of the Koran. It is obviously improper, therefore, to apply the post-classical meaning of the word where it occurs in the Koran. This fact is further admitted by all the Mohammadan commentators and English translators of the Koran, who render the word in its original and literal meaning in all the Meccan and in the early Medinite Suras or Chapters of the Koran.^[1]

It is only in a few of the latest chapters of the Koran published at later dates at Medina, that they (the commentators and translators) deviate from the original meaning, and prefer the subsequent unclassical and technical signification of waging war or crusade.

Footnotes

1. In the treaty of Medina, which was made as early as the second year of the Hejira, the word Jihád is used, regarding which Sir W. Muir says:—"This word came subsequently to have exclusively the technical signification of Jihád or crusade or fighting for the Faith. If we give it this signification here, it would involve the clause in the suspicion of being a later addition; for as yet we have no distinct development of the intention of Mahomet to impose his religion on others by force: it would have been dangerous, in the present state of parties, to advance this principle. The word is sometimes used in the more general sense in the Coran; Sura XXIX, 5, 69; XX, 77, and a few other places."—Muir's Life of Mahomet, Vol. III, p. 32. Again he says with reference to Sura II, v. 215, which also contains the same word: "The word (Jihád) is the same as that subsequently used for a religious war, but it had not yet probably acquired its fixed application. It was applied in its general sense before the Hejira, and probably up to the battle of Badr."—Ibid, p. 74, footnote.