Alternative spellings

• jehad

Noun

Singular jihad

Plural jihads

jihad (plural jihads)

Wikiquote

1. (Islam) A holy war undertaken by Muslims.

   The men, all devout Muslims, now face ... life imprisonment for entering into an agreement to wage violent jihad on Australian soil.

2. An aggressive campaign for an idea.
3. (theology) a personal spiritual struggle for self-improvement and against evil

Jihad (pronounced /dʒɪˈhɑːd/; Arabic: جهاد‎ [dʒiˈhæːd]), an Islamic term, is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word jihād is a noun meaning "struggle." Jihad appears frequently in the Qur'an and common usage as the idiomatic expression "striving in the way of Allah (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)". A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; the plural is mujahideen. Jihad is an important religious duty for Muslims. A minority among the Sunni scholars sometimes refer to this duty as the sixth pillar of Islam, though it occupies no such official status. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, however, Jihad is one of the 10 Practices of the Religion.

A wide range of opinions exist about the exact meaning of jihad. Muslims use the word in a religious context to refer to three types of struggles: an internal struggle to maintain faith, the struggle to improve the Muslim society, 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 (singular: hadith). For example, the prominent orientalist Bernard Lewis argues that, in the Qur'an and the ahadith jihad implies warfare in the large majority of cases. In a commentary of the hadith Sahih Muslim, entitled al-Minhaj, the medieval Islamic scholar Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi stated that "one of the collective duties of the community as a whole (fard kifaya) is to lodge a valid protest, to solve problems of religion, to have knowledge of Divine Law, to command what is right and forbid wrong conduct".

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. In technical literature, the term "holy war" is often used to describe jihad. However, scholars of islamic studies often stress that both words are not synonymous.

Jihad means inner spriritual striving to avoid sin in Islam (internal jihad) and the struggle of a holy war (external jihad).

Some of the following hadith sources (i.e. Bukhari and Muslim) are the six major Hadith collections used by Sunni Muslims. The best known hadith collection of Shia Muslims are the The Four Books.

Contents

• 1 Haddith quotes about Jihad
• 2 Qur’an Verses about Jihad
• 3 Islamic Figures quotes about Jihad
• 4 See also
• 5 External links
  • 5.1 Video clips