I have always been a bit confused by the term Jihad, which I understand to mean “Holy War”. It is an oxymoron, you know… two words used in a phrase that are in direct contradiction with each other. When I hear holy war, I get a picture of hate filled men with weapons in their hands chanting death to someone or some group. I wonder why all the hate? Why would anything connected to the word holy promote killing people? I admittedly am not an expert on the religions of the world, so when I say I don’t understand, I truly don’t get it.
This an area I think we all can learn more about as it the most likely flash point in our world. So I starting with wikipedia and looked up the definition for Jihad. It says there are a wide range of opinions about the meaning of jihad. Muslims use the word in a religious context to refer to three types of struggles: 1) an internal struggle to maintain faith, 2) the struggle to improve the Muslim society, 3) or the struggle in a holy war. The differences of opinion are the result of different interpretation of the two most important sources in Islam, the Qur’an and the ahadith. In western societies the term jihad is often translated as “holy war”. Muslim authors tend to reject such an approach, stressing non-militant connotations of the word.
