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In the wake of the late-November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, attributed to the Pakistan-based outfit Lashkar-e Taiba, one could hardly read a more timely and important book than Ayesha Jalal's Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. Though not an easy read for those unschooled in South Asian history, Jalal's effort to historicize jihad and give nuanced specificity to a concept too often misconstrued is well worth the challenge. In six chapters, largely chronologically arranged, Partisans of Allah breaks down the facile characterizations of jihad that have obscured rather than clarified its meaning and, most crucially, its practice. By elucidating specific campaigns labeled as jihads and engaging the interlocutors who promoted or critiqued the application of the term, Jalal effectively dispels the idea that jihad in practice is always a fulfillment of the ethical obligation as set forth in the Qur,an. In addition, rather than marginalize jihad, as some have sought to do, or define it as solely a spiritual practice, Jalal places jihad at the center of Islam even as she rejects its use as a justification for violence: "Equating jihad with violence and terror makes a sheer travesty of a concept that, for all the distortions and misinterpretations, remains the core principle of Islamic ethics" (p. 304). Academics, journalists, apologists, and terrorists have all been guilty of erasing jihad's ethical core, and Jalal's effort here goes a long way to restoring the complexity and the integrity of the concept.
All too often jihad is explained as either a solely spiritual struggle against one's lower nature or as an unremitting, merciless war against nonbelievers. Thankfully, Jalal is a historian who abhors such imprecision. She argues, "Muslim exegetes, legists, theologians, and historians in different times and places have distorted the meaning of jihad in the Quran." In response to such distortions, Jalal contends that "jihad is best understood with reference to the historical evolution of the idea in response to the shifting requirements of the Muslim community, especially in the South Asian context" (p. 14).
Thus it is all the more surprising that Jalal does not always make the primary sources from which she draws sufficiently available to her readers. Beginning...