��Fight in the Way of God 81jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively
translated as “war”; jihad is not one of them.
The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a
great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred
to as “the greater jihad”), it means the struggle of the soul to over-
come the sinful obstacles that keep a person from God. This is why
the word jihad is nearly always followed in the Quran by the phrase “in
the way of God.” However, because Islam considers this inward strug-
gle for holiness and submission to be inseparable from the outward
struggle for the welfare of humanity, jihad has more often been associ-
ated with its secondary connotation (“the lesser jihad”): that is, any
exertion—military or otherwise—against oppression and tyranny.
And while this definition of jihad has occasionally been manipulated
by militants and extremists to give religious sanction to what are in
actuality social and political agendas, that is not at all how Muham-
mad understood the term.
War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never
“holy.” Consequently, jihad is best defined as a primitive “just war the-
ory”: a theory born out of necessity and developed in the midst of
a bloody and often chaotic war that erupted in 624 C.E. between Mu-
hammad’s small but growing community and the all-powerful, ever-
present Quraysh.
STRANGELY, THE QURAYSH seemed at first to be completely
untroubled by the success of Muhammad’s community in Yathrib.
Certainly they were aware of what was taking place. The Quraysh
preserved their dominant position in Arabia by maintaining spies
throughout the Peninsula; nothing that could endanger their author-
ity or threaten their profits would have passed their notice. But while
they may have been concerned with the growing number of his fol-
lowers, as long they remained confined to Yathrib, Mecca was content
to forget all about Muhammad. Muhammad, however, was not willing
to forget about Mecca.
Perhaps the greatest transformation that occurred in Yathrib was
not in the traditional tribal system but in the Prophet himself. As the