This is an ambitious book on a topic that could not be more timely. South Asia is particularly important to the subject of jihad, not only because of the movements that are currently active within the region, but also because of the area's rich history of Islamic thought in relation to jihad, including, since the colonial period, the most significant schools of both modernist and Islamist thought anywhere. Numbers matter as well, as no area of the world holds more Muslims than this one.

In this volume, Ayesha Jalal demonstrates the qualities evident in her many earlier publications on the modern political and intellectual history of South Asian Muslims. She takes on challenging topics, draws on a wide range of secondary and primary sources in both Urdu and English, and writes in what is often a lively style. In this book, five chronological chapters deal successively with thought and action in relation to jihad in the precolonial period; the 1826–31 attempt at state building along what is now the Pakistan–Afghan border; jihad in the colonial period, including sections on an aborted uprising during World War I, as well as an extended treatment of modernist thought on jihad; and, finally, a chapter on “jihad as terrorism,” delineating the history of recent militancy in Pakistan. Jalal's conclusions are often provocative, whether in identifying the clay feet of historical figures who are idealized in nationalist ideology, in the (appropriate) inclusion of the excoriated Ahmadis in the context of Islamic modernism, or in her withering judgments about the desolate political culture of contemporary Pakistan. She turns not to Pakistani thinkers but to Indians—Maulana Wahiddudin (who broke with the Islamist Maududi's Jamaat-e-Islami) and an anonymous Ahl-i Hadith scholar (who denounced a terrorist organization of his fellow sectarians in Pakistan)—as rare contributors to contemporary ethical thought on jihad in South Asia.

In framing her discussion, Jalal returns to her earlier distinction (in Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 [New York: Routledge, 2000]) between “religion as faith” and “religion as a demarcator of difference” (pp. xi–xii). It is in the former that Jalal finds what she interprets as the true meaning of jihad, a meaning used as a yardstick for assessing the historical episodes of jihad that structure the presentation. For Jalal, jihad is nothing less than the ethical core of the Muslim faith, and any definition that understands jihad as mere “holy war,” she writes, is a distortion. She follows the distinguished Pakistani modernist Fazlur Rahman in arguing that from Umayyad times on, law and ritual externals triumphed over the ethical core of jihad. It is not, she argues, that jihad eschews all militancy in favor of the “greater” jihad of self-control and moral action. Rather, as properly understood, jihad is a matter of correct intention in disciplined action in the interest of heeding God's word (p. xiii). This kind of argument risks, of course, the conclusion that militancy stems from distorted Islamic teachings, the problem identified in Mahmood Mamdani's book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

In Jalal's judgment, every militant intervention she describes, whatever ethical thought preceded it, succumbs to the temporal and the expedient, the pattern set by the eighteenth-century thinker Shah Waliullah, continued by his heirs in the frontier jihad of the mid-nineteenth century, the self-interest of at least some of the actors in World War I, and most egregiously in the secularizing of religion, as she puts it, in Pakistan with the exploitation of jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan in the interests of pragmatic, worldly concerns such as nationalism. To make jihad as ethics versus jihad as expedient identity the measure inevitably skews Jalal's ability to see the actual projects of some of the actors (such as Shah Waliullah or Ahmad Sirhindi, for example, or, to jump to the contemporary period, Tablighis, for whom, she seems not to know, the discourse of jihad is pervasive).

Thus, in her judgments, Jalal thus runs an ahistorical thread through her presentation, and nowhere grapples with current scholarship on “religion,” not least the important work of Talal Asad and other theorists who eschew essentialist interpretations that isolate specific interpretations as alone authentic. Asad, in contrast, demonstrates that religious ideas, and cultural symbols generally, are inescapably caught up in a dialectal relation with the temporal and the worldly. (Among the many recent works of interest on the concept of religion, Religion, Language, and Power, edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee [New York: Routledge, 2008] may be of particular interest to Asianists.)

All this makes for a book marked by a kind of hybridity—a mixture of historical presentation and ahistoricist judgment. The latter allows Jalal to enter into today's dominant discourse about Islam and religion so that she can weigh in on the side of those insisting, in her concluding words, that Islam calls not for “violent struggle against infidels”—“bad” Islam—but for “respecting the rights and dignity of fellow human beings,” the “good” Islam she finds in core Islamic teachings (p. 314).