My PhD has been accepted and passed!
The Abstract: In the Arabic
version of the account of Jesus’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,
Jesus engages in a struggle or jihād. This use by Christians of what
today is a highly controversial Islamic term that is usually associated with
terrorism appears incongruous. The Christian Arabic translator’s choice
of jihād to mean an inner spiritual struggle raises many questions
about the pre-Islamic Christian understandings of the concept especially
among Syrian ascetics. It also suggests a greater level of
Christian-Muslim interaction than often accepted. Given that jihād is
used here and in several other verses in the earliest ninth-century
Arabic Bibles and continuously till today, this indicates that the
historic breadth of meaning inherent in the word jihād is wider than
just an external expression, as is commonly understood in the media.
Muslims assert that this breadth existed from the earliest days of Islam
and that jihād in itself does not always mean external acts of violence
but encompasses inner spiritual struggle. In the case of Jesus,
Christian ascetics, and Sufis, the word more commonly denotes a
metaphorical inward spiritual struggle against temptation, rather than
outward violence.
The main focus of this thesis is a
comparative analysis of the inner struggle metaphors in mostly
pre-Islamic Syrian Christian ascetic authors, compared with early Sufi
writers. I investigate the wider range of terms associated with this
imagery such as fight, battle, sword, shield, race, fortress, wounds,
conquering, capturing, and guarding, and not just the term jihād or its
Syriac equivalent. I conduct a metaphor analysis of the idea and images
of spiritual struggle in seven Syrian Christian and two Muslim authors.
This shows that at the level of language and metaphor, and in relation
to anthropology and worldview, there is much correlation between
pre-Islamic Syrian Christian and Sufi conceptions of inner struggle.
This has major significance for how early Christian-Muslim relations
should be understood, and also should impact how Islam is interpreted
today.
My research clarifies the meaning of jihād as
understood in early Sufism through analysis of its metaphorical usage in
Arabic. I also compare this to the usage of equivalent Syriac words
which were used by Christians living in close proximity to early Islam
both chronologically and geographically. This fills an important gap in
the research on how spiritual struggle was understood in the social
context around the emergence of Islam. It also provides valuable
information for the debate on the nature of Islam, especially with
respect to the relative roles of spiritual struggle and violent warfare,
by identifying the original shared cultural framework for the use of
the spiritual struggle metaphor and the term jihād.
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