Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know

Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author and editor of eight books, including Contemporary Issues in Islam (2015); the award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (2013); and The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008). She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 and inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019.

• Acknowledgment Introduction Chapter One: Jihad in the Quran and Commentary Literature Chapter Two: Jihad in the Hadith Literature Chapter Three: Jihad in the Legal Literature Chapter Four: Jihad in Morally Edifying, Ethical, and Mystical Literature Chapter Five: Jihad as Conceived by Modern Revolutionaries and Militants Chapter Six: Jihad in the Thought of Modern and Contemporary Mainstream Scholars Chapter Seven: Jihad as Non-Violent Struggle and Peacemaking Chapter Eight: Jihad and Its Perceptions in the West Bibliography Glossary Index

Asma Afsaruddin's exciting, cogent and lucid exploration of the many spiritual meanings of 'jihad' for Muslim traditions should force a radical rethinking of this concept among journalists, officials, and thinking people in the North Atlantic world, where it has been misused and demonized in the service of a bigoted Islamophobia.