5 facts about jihad in the Quran, the hadith and the jurists

The Arabic root j-h-d means to exert effort. In Quran 25:52 God tells the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) to strive against the deniers “with it”, meaning the Quran, “a great striving.” Surah 25 is Meccan, from years before fighting was permitted at all. A struggle waged with a book is a struggle of argument and steadfastness.^[1]

Quran 29:6 says that whoever strives, strives only for himself. In 29:8 and 31:15 the verb describes parents who press a child to join others with God, which is pressure and not battle.^[2] The hadith has the same range. A man asked the Prophet for leave to go out and fight, and was asked whether his parents were alive. On hearing that they were, the Prophet said: “Then strive in them.”^[3]

The critics are right about this much. Quran 4:95 says the believers who sit at home are not equal to those who strive with their wealth and their lives. The report in Sahih al-Bukhari says that a blind man, Ibn Umm Maktum, complained that he could not take part, and the clause excusing those with a disability was revealed.^[4] An exemption for the blind only makes sense if fighting is meant. Quran 9:20 pairs striving with wealth and lives in the same way.

The answer is a matter of degree. The word means fighting where the context says so, and the context there is a community at war. That does not turn every use into a call to arms, as the Meccan verses show. Even 4:95 adds that God has promised the best reward to those who stayed behind, and 9:122 says it is not for the believers to go out all together.^[5] The text itself does not treat the one who does not fight as outside the faith.

Sahih al-Bukhari reports that the Prophet was asked which deed is best and answered: faith in God and His Messenger, then jihad, then an accepted hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca).^[6] The same collection has Ibn Masud asking the same question and hearing: salah (the ritual prayer) at its proper time, then kindness to parents, then jihad.^[7] When Aisha asked whether women should join the fighting, the answer was that their best jihad is an accepted hajj.^[8] Ranked together, these reports do not put jihad first.

The strongest text for the critics is a report in which a man asks what equals jihad. The Prophet says that he cannot do it, and the comparison is with a person who fasts and prays without break while the fighter is out.^[9] It praises the fighter in the field and is not a ruling on the pillars. The lists of the pillars differ for a similar reason. The hadith of Ibn Umar names five, none of them jihad. The delegation of Abd al-Qays was given a list that adds a fifth of the spoils of war, because they were a tribe whose road ran through hostile land.^[10] Another report calls jihad the peak of the matter, and in the same sentence names salah its pillar.^[11]

Many Muslims quote a saying that the Prophet returned from a battle and told his companions they had come back from the lesser jihad to the greater one, the struggle against the self. Ibn Taymiyya said it has no basis as a hadith, and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani also rejected it as a report from the Prophet.^[12] A critic who says the saying is used to soften the word is right to ask for a better source, so this article does not rest on it.

Better-attested reports carry the same range. The Prophet said that the best jihad is a word of truth spoken before a tyrannical ruler, a report in Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah.^[13] Al-Tirmidhi also records him saying that the one who strives is the one who struggles against his own self in obedience to God.^[14] Ibn al-Qayyim, in his Zad al-Maad, set out stages of jihad that begin with the self and include the sword only as one among several.

It is true that the classical books of law and hadith have chapters titled Jihad that deal almost entirely with war. The jurists were writing about the one meaning that needed rules. For most of them fighting was a collective duty (farḍ kifāya), lifted from everyone once enough people carry it out, and it fell on each individual only when the land was attacked or a legitimate ruler called up the community.^[15] It came with limits: Abu Bakr’s instructions to his army forbade killing women, children and the old, and burning crops. See War, killing and execution in Islam: 5 facts for those rules and for the disagreement over wars of expansion.^[16]

This answers the claim that the true Muslim is a fighter. A collective duty cannot be a test of belief for every believer. The reward of the martyr is real (Quran 3:169), but the hadith extends the title to those who die of plague, by drowning, or in defence of their own property, so it was never confined to the battlefield.^[17]