Love has all the Jihadi ingredients, including the power to conquer self and eagerness to share, may be even to abandon material things to get a feel of what is real love. As in love, so in Jihad, we get pleasure in making sacrifices.
Abdul Qadir | Clarion India
THE foot soldiers as well as the leaders of the saffron brigade may neither understand love nor Jihad. But perhaps unwittingly the wholesalers as well as retailers of hate have acknowledged love as Jihad. Love, in fact, is nothing but Jihad – Jihad in its pure and non violent form.
One of the several misconceptions about Islam pertains to the term Jihad and the ‘tang nazar waez’ (narrow-minded preacher) has not only allowed the Jihad to get only its military interpretation and ignored its humane connotations. Historians too have not helped things much by failing to distinguish between Jihad and Crusade. Jihad is much more than war, holy or otherwise.
Jihad is an internal struggle, more so the struggle against the impish creature living in our bodies, and the greatest of all Jihad is the internal fight between the spirits of the beautiful and the ugly. Real Jihad is not violent as well on account of its conceptual contours.
By that logic, love has all the Jihadi ingredients, including the power to conquer self and urge to share, may be even to abandon material things to get a feel of what is real love. As in love, so in Jihad, we get pleasure in making sacrifices. In fact, ‘sacrifice’ may also be regarded as the synonym for Jihad.
By definition, Jihad is something associated with goodness and love that way is the embodiment of all that is good. Real Jihad is not done to conquer people, acquire territory, or to make forcible conversions. Its only objective, of course, has something to do with conversion – conversion of an ordinary man of bone and flesh into a human being with a tender and throbbing heart.
Love may sometimes come on its own and sometimes you may have to win it after a fight, which, almost invariably, is a non violent fight with only winners and no losers and in many cases the apparent loser is the real winner.
Lovers down the ages had to perform Jihad as temporal authority has always been opposed to love as hate, and not love, suits it more. If Mughal e Azam is to be remembered for one thing, it is the rebellious melody of ‘Jab pyar kiya to darna kya…’ and ‘Parda nahin jab koi khuda se, bandon se parda karna kya…’
Love has survived so many wars and always triumphed over hate. This time too, the victory stands forbidden for the protagonists of hate. Those waging fake ‘Jihad’ against love must know that by doing so, they are failing Krishna, Shiv and Ram as well – the epitomes of love, pure and simple love.
In recent times, even a former Union Minister had to pass through the ordeal that accompanies love and the former minister conquered as well. He too, must have waged his own Jihad to bag the prize of love. Such people and their mentors, who, in the former minister’s case, happens to be a Sadhvi deserve a big salute.
Long live love! Long live the war to establish the supremacy of love!
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Abdul Qadir is a senior journalist based in Gaya, Bihar. He writes on contemporary politics with an occasional pinch of pun and satire. The views expressed here are author’s personal
