Dave Andrews

In the light of the Bismillah, Abdul Ghaffar Khan says, we need to remember that if we do have conflict with one another, the ‘weapon of the Prophet’ we should use is ’sabr’ or ‘patience’. ‘If you exercise patience, victory will be yours. No power on earth can stand against it.’ He says we need to be mindful that the Qur’an says, ‘there is no compulsion in religion’; ‘forgive and be indulgent’; ‘render not vain your almsgiving by injury;’ ‘whoso-ever kills one – for other than manslaughter – it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.’

In his classic book Reconstructing Jihad Amid Competing International Norms, Halim Rane argues we need to wrest the concept of jihad from the control of the extremists and deconstruct and reconstruct our interpretation of jihad in the light of the Qur’an.

Rane says if we are to interpret the Qur’an correctly, each verse needs to be interpreted in terms of the text, the language, the meaning it had for the people at the time it was written, and the meaning it has for people reading it in today’s world, in the light of the Bismillah, in the context of the ‘maqasid’ or ‘overall general objective’ of Islam.

Quoting Kamali, Rane says the ‘maqasid’ or ‘overall general objective’ of Islam is based ‘in textual injunctions of the Qur’an and the Sunnah’ which, quoting Raysuni, he says, are focused on ‘wisdom, mercy, justice and equity’ and directed to ‘the benefit of mankind’, which, quoting Qaradawi, he says, includes ‘welfare, freedom, dignity and fraternity’.

Dave Andrews p100 The Jihad Of Jesus http://bit.ly/1CedNDX