Jihād has become the archetype of Muslim violence in much contemporary commentary; recent scholarship has done much to bring a more precise description of the concept and to set current debates in context. Nevertheless, the technical nature of the fiqh discussions of jihād inevitably leave them open to selective citation, and hence distortion. My approach here is to try to understand the complex of regulations around jihād in a late classical Imāmī fiqh text as an instance of legal discussion. I argue that the proper backdrop to understanding the discussion is not primarily the military activity contemporary with the work's composition, but rather greater theological and legal principles that are worked out in the tradition of scholarship, of which the work analysed in this chapter was just the latest instalment. This may make the legal handbook a less useful source of dynastic history, but it does, I argue, give us a fuller understanding of the intellectual framework in which justifications for military action, and the inevitable violence entailed by it, appear.

When reviewing the works of jurisprudence (fiqh), jihād invariably receives its own separate ‘chapter’ (Kitāb al-jihād), and the topic discussed is almost exclusively jihād as military action (fighting – qitāl – and the support for that activity). The fiqh writers were not unaware of the other notions of jihād (such as the so-called greater, ‘spiritual’ jihād of the believer against the lower self), but in a legal context, jihād is overwhelmingly used to refer to a struggle using military means in order to bring the physical realm more closely in tune with God's intended law. Given this legal context, when jihād is permitted (or recommended or obligatory), what actions are permitted within a jihād and the benefits accruing to the one who fights (mujāhid) become prime instances of justified violence in Islamic legal thinking. They are not the totality of such instances: punishment of offenders and disciplining one's children, wives and slaves provide other examples; however, jihād does constitute an important, and controversial, case that can illustrate how violence was processed in Islamic legal discourse.