Before I lived in Turkey, I thought the word “jihad” was a word of hate and violence. I associated it with suicide bombers and crazed fanatics who flew airplanes into buildings.
But then I went to Turkey. And I started meeting people named Jihad!
I remember this one day in particular, when I met my first Jihad (actually, his name was “Cihat”, the Turkish spelling of “Jihad”).
My wife and I went to this beautiful tea garden. It was up on this high bluff with an incredible view of the Bosphorus Straits and the blue Marmara Sea stretching all the way to the horizon.
We met up with my wife’s cousin, his wife, and their kids. And this guy, this cousin, his name was Cihat!
But this guy with the radical, violent name, he was just a big teddy bear. I mean, you could see it in his eyes, in his face, in the way he looked at his wife and kids. You could even hear it in the way he talked to me. He was one the gentlest souls I had ever met.
When we parted ways that day, I was feeling a little confused, wondering, my god, how can this gentle teddy bear of a man have a crazy, violent, hateful name like Cihat? What on earth were his parents thinking? Did they even know what that word meant?
Turns out I was the one who didn’t know what that word meant.
Because in the months that followed, I met tons of Cihats in Turkey. It turns out Cihat is actually a pretty common guy’s name.
And I figured, the parents must know something I don’t. I mean, it doesn’t matter where in the world you are, parents love their children. No parents in the world are going to give their kid a hateful, violent name.
So I figured I would look into what this word meant, jihad. And here’s what I found…
The word “jihad” has multiple meanings. And yes, “violent war against an external infidel” is one of them. But an equally valid, equally accepted meaning of “jihad” is “war against the infidel within the self”. The phrase “I am conducting a jihad” means, “I am rooting out sin within MY OWN heart”!
Now, this is not some niche, alternative meaning bandied about by a few academic philosophers.
I didn’t go to some obscure, Middle East-loving, crazy peacenik source to find this definition. I just went to Wikipedia. I went to Wikipedia and typed in “jihad”. And then just to verify what I learned, I went to a couple other mainstream American websites like Yahoo, and Ask.com.
Turns out this other meaning, “purging your own heart of sin”, is a mainstream, widely-accepted meaning. In fact, it is the majority meaning of this word. Most of the people who use this word mean “purge the infidel within your own heart”.
Now, I’m not saying that suicide bombers are peace-loving, gentle souls. I am saying that for every crazed lunatic, there are a hundred gentle, loving souls who say jihad is about purifying your own heart. They are saying never mind the non-believers, our hands are full just living God’s words in our own hearts.
This theme is common to pretty much every religion around the world. For every Christian who thinks Christianity is about grabbing a sword and slaying the heathens in the name of the Lord, there are a hundred who think Christianity is about saying, “Never mind the heathens, my job is to purify my own heart.”
It means one of the primary meanings of Jihad is very similar to what Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. And Gandhi, he was a gentle Indian guy who walked around in a white robe talking about peace. Everybody loves Gandhi. And yet he was basically telling people, “Yeah man, let’s all do some jihad!”
So it turns out that our conventional-wisdom, popular understanding of the word “jihad” is ridiculously myopic. It means that when some crazy American woman goes off the deep end and moves to Pakistan, and we call her “Jihad Jane”, we’re just highlighting our own ignorance.
And if we’re myopic about that, what else are we myopic about?
When we meet someone else, someone from another religion, or another country, or another job or social class, it is our duty to humanity to remind ourselves that our understanding of that person is probably incorrect. And it is our duty to the world to try to overcome that incorrectness.
When we allow an incorrect understanding to drive our actions, those actions will be misguided. And even if we do reach our goal, we will probably find out, too late, that we have chosen the wrong one.
Matt Krause
Originally published at mattkrause.com on 18 june 2010
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