The Arabic word jihad also means the everyday struggle to survive
Evidence
Mohamed was locked in the cracks of that earth before he was born. He could not see the world beyond his young brown eyes and those earthly crevices that confined him. Mohamed’s crusade was a simple one: to remain alive. It was a struggle that began and ended with avoiding that fall into those gaps carved deep in the earth below his feet—cracks that had swallowed so many others before him. This daily jihad, an everyday struggle, was an ungodly one for a radiant boy with a holy name. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 90
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Uses the literal meaning of jihad as ‘everyday struggle’ to reframe the term away from holy war onto survival itself.
- SEED: Elevator pitch for a short essay or sermon: the Western obsession with jihad-as-holy-war occludes the primary Quranic sense being literal mundane endurance — a boy’s fight merely to stay alive.
Related
- For many Muslim children, survival itself is an everyday crusade (similarity 0.86)
- The word jihad has been severed from its formal meaning of struggle. (similarity 0.81)
- Jihad spans warfare, inner struggle, defending the oppressed, and serving parents (similarity 0.79)