2 | reclaiming jihad
in the name of religion”.1 The Qur’an, seen as a Divine book by a fifth of the world’s population, has been the subject of extreme interpretations by some Muslims and non-Muslims whose research is based on ill-informed sources and, therefore, lacks due rigour and objectivity. Many Qur’anic verses are intentionally quoted out of their original contexts to suit the political and ideological agendas of individuals or groups whose objective is to disseminate fear and terror in our already troubled world.2 The Qur’an has come to be misperceived as a book from which so-called “Islamic terrorism” is originally derived, as a result of extreme interpretations by some Muslims.3 As a result, “Qur’anic exegesis has become an ideological weapon employed by various socio-political powers to maintain or to change the status quo, a conservative weapon to maintain and a revolutionary weapon to change.”4 This book therefore sets out to examine terrorism from a Qur’anic perspective. It attempts to elucidate how terrorism is defined, whether or not it is related to other concepts that are Qur’anic, such as jihad and deterrence, and whether or not the Qur’an offers punitive measures to combat it. The starting point of my research is the Qur’an itself,5 as interpreted by a careful selection of classical and modern exegetes. As a committed Muslim, my working premise in this book is to take as read the fundamental Muslim conviction that the Qur’an is the Word of God revealed through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad (d. 11/632).6 As the Qur’an is the central book in the lives of Muslims, it is (ab)used by some extremist Muslims to justify their acts by cloaking them in religion. Both Muslim and non-Muslim readers therefore need to know how this appropriation of the Qur’an by extremists and terrorists lacks objectivity. It is therefore essential to take a journey through a representative selection of the Qur’anic interpretive corpus to critique these biased explanations by extremists by setting them against the mainstream interpretative understanding. For reasons I shall elaborate below, of the various Qur’an exegetical genres, this study restricts itself to the thematic exegesis of terrorism. Eight select classical and modern exegeses constitute the main sources for this research. The period of the study, as far as
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