Fazlur Rahman Malik

"The Qur’aan calls upon believers to undertake jihaad, which is to surrender “your properties and youselves in the path of Allaah”; the purpose of which in turn is to “establish prayer, give zakaat, command good and forbid evil”—ie, to establish the socio-moral order So long as the Muslims were a small, persecuted minority in Mecca, jihaad as a positive organized thrust of the Islamic movement was unthinkable In Medina, however, the situation changed and henceforth there is hardly anything, with the possible exception of prayer and zakaat, that receives greater emphasis than jihaadEvery virile and expansive ideology has, at a stage, to ask itself the question as to what are its terms of co-existence, if any, with other systems, and how far it may employ methods of direct expansion In our own age, Communism, in its Russian and Chinese versions, is faced with the same problems and choices The most unacceptable on historical grounds, however, is the stand of those modern Muslim apologists who have tried to explain the jihaad of the early Community in purely defensive terms"