Jihād means literally “striving,” but it is the normal word for aggressive war on unbelievers in the Islamic legal tradition, hence the usual translation “holy war.” Shahīd means “witness,” but it is applied in the Islamic pious tradition, starting with hadith, to someone who dies in battle, evidently a calque on Greek mártys: “The main thesis of this study is that the conceptualizations of jihād as primarily armed combat and of shahāda as primarily military martyrdom are relatively late and contested ones, and deviate considerably from the Qurʾānic significations of these terms” (5). Afsaruddin reviews various passages in the Qurʾan, hadith reports, and treatises on jihād, looking for alternatives to the bellicose interpretations that, she argues, came wrongly to preponderate. She concludes with a survey of modern literature in Arabic for and against aggressive war. Excluded, here, is most of the juridical literature that Afsaruddin complains has been the basis of most previous writing. Among the modern authors she treats, the more famous (Bannā, Mawdūdī, Quṭb, Jumʿa) tend to sound the more bellicose, but some famous writers sound more pacific (Riḍā, Gülen), and the pacific writers she cites are sufficient to refute persistent assertions from nonspecialists that no significant Muslim authorities have condemned recent suicide bombings.

Annoyingly, Afsaruddin continually presses her case too hard. For example, she argues energetically that Q. 22:39 should be interpreted “Permission is given to those who are fought against/against whom fighting has been initiated (yuqātalūna) because they have been wronged/oppressed (ẓulimū).” The passive voice is important, she thinks, because it implies that this is about self-defence, not retribution, let alone aggressive war. She takes to task the most learned of early commentators: “Al-Ṭabarī avers—somewhat disingenuously—that there is very little difference in meaning between the passive form yuqātalūna and the active form yuqātilūna, for, he says, when someone fights another person, each is equally a ‘combatant’ (muqātil)” (37). She berates recent scholars as well:

Actually, there are seven universally accepted readings of the Qurʾan, of which a majority read yuqātilūna in the active. The one now most widely printed, on which Afsaruddin depends, is the reading of Ḥafṣ from ʿĀṣim, which reads yuqātalūna in the passive; however, there is disagreement over the preference of ʿĀṣim himself: the other most highly respected transmitter from him, Abū Bakr, reads yuqātilūna in the active. It does not seem disingenuous, rather sage of Ṭabarī to harmonize the two readings, which indeed (as usual with different readings) make little difference to the sense.

A troublesome qurʾanic passage is 9:29-31, “Fight from among the people who have been given the Scripture those who do not believe in God and the Last Day and who do not forbid that which God and His messenger have forbidden and who do not follow the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, having been humbled” (Jones transl.). Afsaruddin quotes what she takes to be the relatively tolerant exegesis of Muqātil ibn Sulaymān (d. 150/767-8): “These people are the Jews and Christians who, when they pay the jizya in person (ʿan anfusihim), willingly and humbly (madhlūl), are pardoned and exempted from [military] service, but if it has to be taken from them by force, then they are not to be given any concession, he asserts.” The edition available to me says mudhallūn rather than madhlūl, and the word in any case means that they are humiliated. Dignified humility such as Muslims are praised for cultivating is designated by other words (taḍarruʿ, tawāḍuʿ). I see no reference to military service in the Arabic. It says lam yuʾjarū in my edition, meaning ‘they are not hired’, which makes little sense (but certainly does not mean ‘they are not drafted into the armed forces’). If we correct to lam yuʾkhadhū, jīm and khāʾ being easily confused, likewise dāl and rāʾ, then the meaning becomes ‘they are not punished’ or ‘they are not enslaved’ (like the polytheists in Q. 9:5).

Eager to find pacific voices in the early period, Afsaruddin repeatedly states that the early Kufan jurist Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 161/777-8) considered only defensive war permissible. She cites only secondary sources for this one. The sources they cite in turn clearly report that al-Thawrī considered only defensive war obligatory (for an individual Muslim to take part in), something very different. (She later refers to the idea that defensive jihād is an individual duty for everyone, offensive jihād a communal obligation that someone must do, as “the later legal consensus . . . , particularly in the Ḥanbali school of law” [229]. On the contrary, it is clearly set out in the Umm of al-Shāfiʿī [d. 204/820] and a commonplace ever after.) She asserts that it is erroneous to call the jizya a poll tax (314, n. 49) but later calls it a head-tax herself (76—ʿalā al-ruʾūs is a common description in the legal literature). Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373) is alleged to have been the first to refer to Q. 9:5 as “the sword verse” (276). Actually, this comes up already from al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857-8) and Ibn Salāma (d. 410/1019), who says that it abrogated 124 pacific verses. Sayyid Quṭb is blamed for having implicitly “subverted the traditional hierarchy and made the lesser jihād in fact the greater one” (213-14). As Afsaruddin probably knows, the hadith report about turning from the lesser jihād (carnal warfare) to the greater (moral self-discipline) is not found until the mid-eleventh century in Sunni sources (I have also come across it in an early-tenth-century Shiʾi collection, nowhere earlier), and before this she has continually pointed to late development as a sign of spuriousness.

Altogether, I do not doubt that by charitable interpretation a universalistic, non-aggressive Islam can be inferred from the Qurʾan. Every specialist will agree with Afsaruddin that the Islamic tradition is very unmonolithic, historically characterized by vigorous debate, with sometimes a wider range of opinions entertained than is allowed in some Muslim-majority countries today. That there was more disagreement over fundamentals early on, a narrowing of opinion later, seems likely. Thus far, I count myself a sympathetic reader. On the other hand, a natural concern of an historian is what Islam has been like, of a theologian what Islam ought to be like. This book tries to enlist an historical survey in aid of a theological argument. Perhaps theologians will find it unusually scholarly. As an historian, I find it disappointingly unrigorous. What we have is not wholly but still too much another history of what Islam ought to have been like.