Fazlur Rahman Malik

"The Qur’ān calls upon believers to undertake jihād, which is to surrender “your properties and youselves in the path of Allāh”; the purpose of which in turn is to “establish prayer, give zakāt, command good and forbid evil”—i.e., to establish the socio-moral order. So long as the Muslims were a small, persecuted minority in Mecca, jihād 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 zakāt, that receives greater emphasis than jihād....Every 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 jihād of the early Community in purely defensive terms."