Jihad

All my life I lived with this word even in my sleep. Nightmares were made of this in my dreams. Time to wake up.

As one always seeks in the matter of knowledge these enlightened days, I went to wikipedia first. This is the intro of the subject. ( comment: Now when you read wikipedia you have to understand that it is a bit biased towords the Zionist, not because the wiki body itself is controlled by the Zionist block, but more Zionists are involved in objections to any facts brought forword.) 

Jihad is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word jihād translates as a noun meaning "struggle". Jihad appears 41 times in the Quran and frequently in the idiomatic expression "striving in the way of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)".A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; the plural is mujahideen. Jihad is an important religious duty for Muslims. A minority among the Sunni scholars sometimes refer to this duty as the sixth pillar of Islam, though it occupies no such official status. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, however, Jihad is one of the 10 Practices of the Religion.

Again we have to dig a bit deeper and arrive in BBC website. Yep came out in Google.

The literal meaning of Jihad is struggle or effort, and it means much more than holy war.

Muslims use the word Jihad to describe three different kinds of struggle:

•A believer's internal struggle to live out the Muslim faith as well as possible
•The struggle to build a good Muslim society
•Holy war: the struggle to defend Islam, with force if necessary

Many modern writers claim that the main meaning of Jihad is the internal spiritual struggle, and this is accepted by many Muslims.

However there are so many references to Jihad as a military struggle in Islamic writings that it is incorrect to claim that the interpretation of Jihad as holy war is wrong.

When I read the article further on I seems to understand this ....ooops...in a basic way. Prophet Mohamed - may he lie in peace - said there is jihad which means the struggle within yourself to live with others according to the faith. But after he went to war he corrected it to mean the struggle to defend Islam and your kith and kin. i do understand the problem for the late writers of Islam about this duality. If I am an enlightened person I do not have to go to war. My question here is: why the war?

Then again I find this in the wiki page about the origin in Palestine.

Possibly formed in early 1983 and reportedly led by Imad Mughniyah, a former Lebanese Shiite member of Palestinian Fatah’s Force 17, the IJO was not a militia but rather a typical underground urban guerrilla organization. Based at Baalbek in the Beqaa valley, the group aligned 200 Lebanese Shiite militants financed by Iran and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ contingent previously sent by Ayatollah Khomeini to fight the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Whether this Islamic Jihad was a nom de guerre used by Hezbollah or a separate organization, is disputed.

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