jihad

UK/d͡ʒɪˈhæd/US/d͡ʒɪˈhæd/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,308 of 15,258neutral

A jihad is a struggle undertaken as a religious duty in Islam. Declare a jihad, the greater jihad, the lesser jihad.

The Arabic word means striving, and a widely cited tradition distinguishes the greater jihad, the inner struggle against one's own failings, from the lesser jihad of armed defence. Western use has narrowed it to the second, which is not how most Muslims use it.

Definitions of jihad

1nounjihadA struggle undertaken as a religious duty in Islam.B2+
“In 1804, Usman dan Fodio led a jihad in West Africa that founded a powerful Islamic state.”

jihad is a struggle.

Where it comes from

Arabic
جِهَاد — struggle; effort
English, today
jihad

Borrowed from Arabic جِهَاد (“struggle; effort”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

jihad in the wild

Building upon the networks of Maktab Al-Khidamat, the founding members decided to create the organization to serve as a "vanguard" for jihad.
Al-Qaeda
Much of Muslim opinion considers inner jihad to have primacy over outer jihad.
Jihad
In the hadiths, jihad refers predominantly to warfare.
Jihad
A project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Jihad Watch is the most popular blog within the counter-jihad movement.
Jihad Watch
The term "jihadism" has been applied to various Islamic extremist and/or Islamist individuals and organizations with militant ideologies based on the classical Islamic notion of lesser jihad.
Jihadism

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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