Across the world — and increasingly in Bharat — the term jihad has been so thoroughly sanitised that it barely resembles the concept found in Islam’s foundational texts or in centuries of historical practice.

Today, there has been a tendency to project jihad as a “pious struggle", a synonym for personal resilience, a metaphor for charity, or even a tool to fight injustice, if not terrorism itself. This reinvention is not an honest evolution but the product of a sustained intellectual and political effort to reframe jihad in ways that make it more palatable to modern sensibilities and compatible with contemporary multicultural politics. So pervasive has been this tendency to humanise jihad that it threatens to blunt our ability to confront the very violence perpetrated explicitly in its name.

Consider two recent controversies. Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind chief Maulana Mahmood Madani declared that jihad has been unfairly given a “negative" meaning by the state and insisted it is merely a virtuous struggle against oppression. He went a step further, suggesting this version be taught in school textbooks. Soon after, a Samajwadi Party MP announced in the Lok Sabha that Muslims may need to “do jihad" against governmental injustice. Both men rely on the same linguistic playbook: colouring an intensely religious act with secular, liberal sensibilities.

This tactic, though familiar, is outright dangerous. When leaders deploy a religious term whose canonical meaning is overwhelmingly militant but claim it is harmless, they create a moral and analytical fog. In that fog, jihad becomes a potent tool available to terrorists, fundamentalists, activists and moderates alike — each free to use it the way they want to........

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