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Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall on
the true concept of Jihad
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An explanation of the meaning of Jihad in Islam given by
Marmaduke Pickthall is reproduced below, quoted from his biography
Loyal Enemy by Anne Fremantle. His view of jihad is
almost the same as the interpretation given by the Ahmadiyya Movement.
It is, therefore, highly unjust that we should be accused by the
anti-Ahmadiyya ulama of rejecting the Islamic teaching of
jihad.
Pickthall’s view is recorded as follows:
“The error with regard to the common view regarding Islam arises
from misapprehension of the meaning of the word ‘Jihad’, a word
which in the hands of the C.I.D. reporters has caused much groundless
fear to the British in India.
In English ‘Jihad’ is commonly translated ‘holy war’, with a
meaning like crusade. It properly denotes the whole effort, individual
and collective, of the true believer against evil, beginning with
the conquest of a man’s own passions and ending possibly, but
not necessarily, in persecution and exile or upon the battlefield.
Every prophet made Jihad in his own way. That of Moses took the
form of emigration to escape from evil. That of Jesus was of a
non-violent and passive kind. That of Muhammad shows three stages:
first a non-violent endurance of hostility and persecution while
fulfilling his own mission, like that of Jesus; second, when the
persecution threatened to exterminate his people, emigration,
the Jihad of Moses; and third, when he and his followers formed
an independent State, however small and weak, and when the persecutors
still persisted in attacking them, then and not till then he was
enjoined to fight.
The term ‘Jihad’ applies to all those stages, but in the minds
of Europeans it is restricted to the third. That is the reason
for the whole mistake. The sort of Jihad prescribed for peoples
in a subject state differs from that prescribed for the same people
in a state of independence. And the Jihad for subject peoples
who are persecuted is the Jihad of Jesus, which was followed by
Muhammad during thirteen years at Mecca.”
— Loyal Enemy by Anne Fremantle, published by Hutchinson
& Co. Ltd., London 1938, pages 323, 324.
The jihad indicated in the closing words, “the Jihad for
subject peoples who are persecuted is the Jihad of Jesus, which was
followed by Muhammad during thirteen years at Mecca”, is exactly the
kind of jihad that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad urged Muslims
under British rule in India to undertake, for which purpose he created
his Movement. |
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