The Greater Jihad - By Taylor McNeil

Tufts Journal: How did you come to write a book about jihad?

In my previous book, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850, I made an analytical distinction between religion as a demarcator of identity—an assertion of social difference with others—and religion as a matter of faith, something that is personal, ethical, about what you believe in, and that there is a difference between the two. The wars between Muslims and Hindus during the final decades of British rule, for example, were not necessarily driven by religious doctrine; they were political battles, battles of identity.

After I finished writing that book, I thought that I hadn’t really talked much about religion as faith. Pursuing it made me realize that the concept of jihad—which means effort, endeavor in the positive sense, against something negative—was intrinsic to faith. That’s when I realized that this much-abused and much-misused term needed a systematic historical study.

I’ve argued in Partisans of Allah that jihad is an ethical concept, insofar as its literal meaning is to strive to attain the high ethical ideals of Islam. It is often said that one is not born a Muslim; you become one through a constant struggle to be human.