The term jihad is perhaps the most contentious Arabic word to enter the English
language in recent decades. In public discourse it has become shorthand
for “holy war” and synonymous with violent Muslim extremism. This scholarly
examination of jihad and martyrdom by Asma Afsaruddin, a professor
of Islamic studies at Indiana University, carefully disentangles their multivalent
meanings within Islamic scholarship from early Muslim history up to
the present day. It also challenges the assertions of those who focus only upon
martial connotations. Instead, she argues that “conceptualizations of jihad as
primarily armed combat and of shahada as primarily military martyrdom
are relatively late and contested ones and deviate considerably from the
Qur’anic significations of these terms” (p. 5).
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences