Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought

Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought by Asma Afsaruddin


English | 2013 | ISBN: 0199730938 | 384 pages | PDF | 2 MB

In popular and academic literature, jihad is predominantly assumed to refer exclusively to armed combat, and martyrdom in the Islamic context is understood to be invariably of the military kind. This perspective, derived mainly from legal texts, has led to discussions of jihad and martyrdom as concepts with fixed, universal meanings divorced from the socio-political circumstances in which they have been deployed through the centuries. Asma Afsaruddin studies in a more holistic manner the range of significations that can be ascribed to the term jihad from the earliest period to the present and historically contextualizes the competing discourses that developed over time. Many assumptions about the military jihad and martyrdom in Islam are thereby challenged and deconstructed. A comprehensive interrogation of varied sources reveals early and multiple competing definitions of a word that in combination with the phrase fi sabil Allah translates literally to "striving in the path of God."




Contemporary radical Islamists have appropriated this language to exhort their cadres to armed political opposition, which they legitimize under the rubric of jihad. Afsaruddin shows that the multivalent connotations of jihad and shahid recovered from the formative period lead us to question the assertions of those who maintain that belligerent and militant interpretations preserve the earliest and only authentic understanding of these two key terms. Retrieval of these multiple perspectives has important implications for our world today in which the concepts of jihad and martyrdom are still being fiercely debated.

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The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955 by Lindsey R. Swindall


English | 2014 | ISBN: 081304992X | 256 pages | PDF | 1,4 MB

“A fresh and engaging study that illuminates the important, related, yet neglected histories of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs. Especially noteworthy is the perceptive treatment of the linkages between these related organizations’ domestic and international politics.”—Waldo E. Martin, coauthor of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents




“A welcome addition to the growing body of literature that examines the interplay between civil rights and international affairs.”—John Kirk, author of Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970




“Swindall puts the ‘long civil rights’ movement on a dynamic new world map. Her meticulous use of archival materials opens up new roots and routes for scholars of American race history.”—Bill Mullen, author of Afro-Orientalism




The Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs were two organizations created as part of the early civil rights efforts to address race and labor issues during the Great Depression. They fought within a leftist, Pan-African framework against disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism.




By situating the development of the SNYC and the Council on African Affairs within the scope of the long civil rights movement, Lindsey Swindall reveals how these groups conceptualized the U.S. South as being central to their vision of a global African diaspora. Both organizations illustrate well the progressive collaborations that maintained an international awareness during World War II. Cleavages from anti-radical repression in the postwar years are also evident in the dismantling of these groups when they became casualties of the early Cold War.




By highlighting the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists from the Popular Front to the 1960s, Swindall adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and anticolonial organizing.

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