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 IntroductionChapter One: Jihad in the Quran and Commentary LiteratureChapter Two: Jihad in the Hadith LiteratureChapter Three: Jihad in the Legal LiteratureChapter Four: Jihad in Morally Edifying, Ethical, and Mystical LiteratureChapter Five: Jihad as Conceived by Modern Revolutionaries and MilitantsChapter Six: Jihad in the Thought of Modern and Contemporary Mainstream ScholarsChapter Seven: Jihad as Non-Violent Struggle and PeacemakingChapter Eight: Jihad and Its Perceptions in the WestBibliographyGlossaryIndex

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.