Within the American lexicon, the Arabic word ‘jihad’ is often used in a negative context to mean ‘Islamic holy war.’ While the notion that jihad means holy war is absolutely correct, it is just one of many possible translations — including some that are quite positive.
That’s why Sam Spiegel of the band N.A.S.A has made a music video with esteemed rap legend KRS-One called Jihad Love Squad.
Spiegel’s music video features a woman in India who is strapped with what appears to be a colorful suicide vest. She hides it under a burka and proceeds to a school where a group of boys notice her. She then presses a button — making the viewer think she will set off a bomb — but instead a burst of color explodes into the sky and the group of boys joins her in a dance routine. The color is supposed to symbolize love and show that jihad doesn’t always have to be associated with death, according to Spiegel.
Spiegel’s goal here is to “change the story that the media and certain politicians have been telling us about Islam,” he told The Daily Beast. “I think the U.S. media has tendency to be Islamophobic and paint Muslims in a one-dimensional, negative light.”
A big part of this is how the word jihad is used here. Take a look at how the term is utilized by noted Islamophobes like Pamela Geller (who inserts the word jihad into her writing at every turn) and Michelle Bachmann (who accuses Obama of embracing the “agenda of Islamic jihad”). Such figures use the word jihad in a way to portray Islam and anything connected to it in a derogatory manner.
“I think that is part of the purpose of why people and western media use it,” Dr. Jonathan Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told ThinkProgress. “If you talk about jihad you have wild eyed, crazy people on religious missions and you don’t have to deal with them as human beings.”
Part of this negative connotation has come from groups like ISIS (also known as ISIL or the Islamic State) who claim that their brutal crimes against humanity are divine acts of jihad. In an ironic twist, Islamophobes adopted the definition utilized by violent Islamist groups.
“Yes, ISIS says what they are doing is jihad,” said Brown. “The vast majority of Muslims in the world totally disagree because they see ISIS as shedding the blood of [primarily] Muslim civilians and you can’t have jihad against Muslims.”
“I find it deeply ironic and problematic that much of common western journalist usage of jihad is in a sense taking a group like ISIS not only as belonging within the spectrum of Islam but arbiter and final authority — which is a profoundly problematic approach,” said Safi.
Of course, jihad also has many other meanings. “Depending on the circumstances in which one lives, it also can mean fighting injustice and oppression, spreading and defending Islam, and creating a just society through preaching, teaching, and, if necessary, armed struggle or holy war,” Dr. John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, wrote in the book What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam.
“In a greater sense it’s used in the Quran as a struggle and as God’s path, which would be anything done to serve god,” Brown said. “In Sufism and Islamic mystical tradition — which ends up being a big part of Islamic high religious tradition and popular religious tradition — the greater jihad is the battle with your own lower self, your own base self, and desires, so that’s an important part.”
“[There is] quite a popular distinction between small jihad and big jihad,” Dr. Omid Safi, Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center, told ThinkProgress. “External fighting out in the world is always lesser and the greater jihad is something referred to as selfish tendencies of one’s own self.”
As Dean Obeidallah points out in his Daily Beast article, he also knows a number of Muslims named Jihad. It may come as a surprise to some that this is also a fairly common name among Arab Christian men.
Scholars also compare the term jihad with how the word crusade is used.
“I often end up comparing a term like jihad, with something like crusade,” Safi said. “Crusade can be used as in the medieval external battle against another civilization or against drugs or poverty or saving souls.”
“Just war in the western Catholic tradition very much overlaps, except the Islamic law of war is much more prohibitive of killing civilians,” said Brown.
Update:
The original article incorrectly listed Dr. Safi’s first name as Omar.