The Qur'anic Discourse

Any discussion of jihad must of course start with the Qur'an, the central sacred text of Islam which Muslims regard as divinely revealed scripture. Jihad is a broad term in the Qur'an and its basic meaning is ‘struggle', ‘striving' and ‘exertion'.

Muslim scholars divide the Qur'anic revelations into two main periods, corresponding to the two phases of the Prophet Muhammad's career. The first is the Meccan period, 610-22 ce, when Muhammad lived and preached in Mecca in the Arabian peninsula. The second is the Medinan period that began in 622 when Muhammad and his followers emigrated to Medina, a city to the north of Mecca about 200 miles away. This period lasted until the death of the Prophet in 632 ce. Islamic sources typically refer to the period before 610 as al- Jahiliyya, or ‘the Age of Ignorance', the implication being that those the Qur'an regards as ‘pagan Arabs' or ‘Arab polytheists' were ignorant of the one God (Allah) who had sent his revelations periodically through history to select prophets. The ‘Age of Ignorance' is characterised by Muslim historians as one that was marked by constant violent feuds among the various tribes that made up pre-Islamic Arabian societies. Extant pre-Islamic poetry and battle accounts corroborate this depiction. Pre-Islamic Arabs worshipped multiple deities and are said to have paid homage to as many as 360 idols housed in a cube-shaped shrine called the Ka‘ba in Mecca. A prominent Meccan tribe, the Quraysh, into which Muhammad was born, was in charge of the Ka‘ba and controlled the revenues that flowed in from the annual pilgrimage to it. Meccan hostility, and specifically Qurayshi hostility, to Muhammad's preaching of monotheism arose against this historical back­drop - not only did he rebuke the Meccans for their worship of idols, he also threatened to disrupt one of their principal sources of livelihood centred on the pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba.1