The Religion of Peace

The Religion of Peace Instead, the proper, scholarly way is to take the Quran and the proven teachings of the Traditions or the practice of the Prophet as the source of Islamic ideology and to gauge the actions of Muslims in the light of these sources. Those actions of theirs that are not in consonance with the Islamic notion of jihad can be safely discarded as not being legitimate from the Islamic standpoint. The second cause for the misunderstanding of Islam as being a violent religion relates to some Quranic verses that are related to defense. There are more than 6000 verses in the Quran. Of these, hardly 40 are related to jihad in the sense of qital. That is to say, less than 1 per cent. The Quran was revealed in installments over a period of 23 years. God revealed different parts of the Quran in accordance with conditions as they emerged. This period of 23 years can be divided into two parts. The first covered a period of 20 years, and the second lasted three years. In the 20-year period, the Quranic commandments that were revealed related to faith, sincerity, purity, worship, ethics, justice, reform, and so on. In the threeyear period, certain commandments related to war were also revealed—this was a time when the opponents of the Prophet of Islam had launched a one-sided aggression, which had raised for the followers of Islam the issue of defense. This indicates that in the Quran, the status of verses about jihad in the sense of war or qital is that of an exception, while the status of the other verses is that of a general rule. This difference between an exception and a rule is found universally. For example, the Gita, holy book of the Hindus, contains much wisdom. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna to be ready to fight. However, if one studies the Gita as a whole, one will discover that the status of war in the Gita is that of an exception. If the exceptional verses in the Gita that are about war are alone looked at, to the exclusion of the rest of the text, and one then makes a sweeping generalization about the Gita on the basis of these verses and claims that this represents the overall teachings