“Let not your hatred of other men turn you away from justice. Be just…that is closer to piety.” Qur'an 5:7

“Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God…” James 1:19

The word jihad has been much abused by a tiny, but spectacularly successful minority of angry Muslims. Their success has been to pervert a good and holy word into a bad word, one that is associated in the non-Muslim world with Muslims killing people in God’s name. Jihad and violence are now widely viewed in the public mind as synonymous with Islam. Such thinking fuels western Islamophobia which, in turn, encourages various forms of aggression—verbal and otherwise—that lends credence to the jihadist argument that the West hates Islam and wants to destroy it. And that is their most potent recruiting tool.

This sense of threat to Muslims’ religious identity can best be understood among secular people if we think of Islam representing what flag and home represent to us. Defending and dying for one’s flag is considered patriotism, and for many Muslims, Islam is flag and home. For those Muslims who have not yet been secularized—faith is a primary source of identity, much as it is for a Trappist monk or Mennonite. But when they fight, especially in a violent manner, Westerners call it fanaticism.

The body politic of the Muslim world has indeed been infected by a poison which is now running riot within it; but it is also receiving, from without, violent assaults which are further weakening the body in its effort to eliminate the poison. What Muslims need to do is to diagnose the poison and show that the tendency to resort to terrorism is a poison afflicting Islam; it is not a product of the essence of Islam. To make such a diagnosis is part of the battle against terrorism‚ indeed, the real ‚“war on terror‚” is being fought on this field, between Muslims themselves. The greatest warriors in this battle are those who fight intellectually to reclaim Islam, to revive its deepest and most noble ideals, in whose light the extent of the deviation currently being paraded as “Islamic” can be clearly seen...

One of the truly great mujahideen in the war against the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud, fell victim to a treacherous attack by two fellow Muslims, in what was evidently the first stage of the operation that destroyed the World Trade Center. It was a strategic imperative for the planners of the operation to rid the land of its most charismatic leader: a hero who could credibly be used by the West as a figurehead for the revenge attack on Afghanistan that was provoked, anticipated, and hoped for, by the terrorists. But, politics aside, the reason why Massoud was so popular was precisely his fidelity to the values of noble warfare in Islam; and it was this very fidelity to that tradition that made him a dangerous enemy of the terrorists‚ more dangerous, it may be said, than that more abstract enemy, the West. To present the indiscriminate murder of western civilians as jihad, the values of true jihad needed to be dead and buried.

The murder of Massoud was thus doubly symbolic: he embodied the traditional spirit of jihad that needed to be destroyed by those who wished to assume its ruptured mantle; and it was only through suicide—subverting one’s own soul—that this destruction, or rather, this apparent destruction, could be perpetrated. The destruction is only apparent in that, on the one hand, They destroy [but] themselves, they who would ready a pit of fire fiercely burning [for all who have attained to faith]. And on the other hand: Say not of those who are slain in the path of God: They are dead. Nay, they are alive, though ye perceive not.

Let it also be noted that, while it is indeed true that the martyr (ash-shahid) is promised Paradise, the true shahid is one whose death bears witness (shahada) to the truth of God. It is consciousness of the truth that must animate the spirit of one who‚“fights in the Path of God”.Fighting for any cause other than the truth cannot be called a ‚“jihad,” just as one who dies fighting in such a cause cannot be called a “martyr.” Only he is a martyr who can say with utter sincerity, Truly my prayer and my sacrifice, my living and my dying are for God, Lord of all creation...”(6:162).

In this vain it can be concluded that majority of the terror acts been carried out within and outside the shores of the country by some muslims cannot be referred to as Jihad. They are done out of the context for the purpose of Jihad. This acts however are blamed on muslims generally by other religious sects which is as biased as it is unfair. It would be wrong for example to blame the generality of christians for the acts of some erring christians.