Ǧihād. Definizioni e riletture di un termine abusato.

Patrizia Manduchi;Nicola Melis

2019-01-01

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Abstract

In the last twenty years, especially since 11 September 2001, the term ğihād, at the center of the propaganda of contemporary Islamic extremism, has had a central role in public and academic discourses on Islam and the Islamic world, often used as a mere synonymous with terrorism and violence. An essentialist notion of Islam and Muslim practice, paradoxically shared both by the so-called "jihadists" and by the Eurocentric and often Islamophobic observers, who ended up focusing around the univocal reading of ğihād as "holy war", an expression that certainly does not exhaust, and often cannot even approach the extraordinary semantic range of the term. The present collective aims to analyze the different meanings of the term ğihād in its multiple dimensions: theoretical (exegetical, juridical, mystical, etc.), historical, symbolic, practical. The aim is to provide an analysis articulated on the classic concept and its current declinations to achieve a deeper and more critical understanding of the concept itself that can be used also by non-specialists.