What is intended
The text states that fighting in the Qur’an is not an end in itself, but rather has three specific goals: to exalt God’s word, meaning freedom, justice, and equality; to preserve the earth from corruption; and to protect God’s houses from destruction. These goals regulate the meaning of fighting and prevent it from turning into absolute violence.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: legislative
- Argument movement: it confines fighting to three purposes that prevent its transformation into open-ended violence.
- Key terms: fighting, exalting God’s word, preserving the earth, God’s houses.
- Degree of centrality: central.
This atom sets normative limits on fighting through specific purposes, making it a regulated means rather than an independent end, and linking it to justice, freedom, and the protection of civilization and worship from corruption.
Reading aids
- Muhammad Shahrur: Drying Up the Springs of Terrorism
- Jihad, Fighting, and the Critique of Violence
- Fighting
- Qur’anic verses of fighting and the Muhammadan narrative do not legitimize absolute violence
Basis
- Supporting text: “It states that fighting has three Qur’anic goals: exalting God’s word in freedom, justice, and equality, preserving the earth from corruption, and protecting God’s houses from destruction.”
Basis in the book
- Book: Drying Up the Springs of Terrorism.
- Location: in the first section of the book within the explanation of the general aims of Qur’anic fighting.
- Type of basis: close witness.
- Marker that helps verification: exalting God’s word
- Reading note: This passage is suitable as evidence because it confines fighting to specific goals with a value dimension, and it is close to the atom.
Documentation degree
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom relies on an explicit witness that is close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the formulation above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted word for word.
Its function in the book
Its function here is definitional; it sets a meaning or conceptual distinction on which Shahrur relies in building the idea.
Related to
Editorial note
The atom moves fighting from a logic of absoluteness to a logic of bounded purpose.