Striving or Fighting? Jihād in the Qur’an

In contemporary and premodern discourse alike, the concept of striving (jihād) has frequently been reduced to fighting (qitāl), producing a persistent semantic and normative conflation. This study argues that such an identification constitutes a categorical mistake that obscures the Qur’anic conceptual architecture. Through a text-centered, semantic, and context-sensitive analysis, it shows that striving (jihād) is constructed in the Qur’an as a comprehensive normative framework of moral, intellectual, and social struggle, whereas fighting (qitāl) is presented as a conditional and strictly limited act, permitted only under specific circumstances and regulated by explicit ethical constraints. The Qur’anic usage of both terms is examined through their distinct semantic fields and discursive functions, demonstrating that the former cannot be collapsed into the latter without distorting the text’s normative priorities. Classical Islamic thinkers such as Ghazali and Ibn Rushd are engaged as part of a critical dialogue, not as decisive authorities, to illuminate how ethical intention, proportionality, and moral agency were historically conceptualized. It is concluded that reducing striving (jihād) to fighting (qitāl) impoverishes the Qur’anic moral horizon and reverses the intended relationship between ethical ends and contingent means, and that conceptual clarity requires reaffirming the Qur’an’s distinction between normative struggle and conditional warfare.