polite_gandalf wrote on Sep 17
th, 2014 at 6:34pm:
Ah?
I mean, ah - the old linguistic switcheroo.
A similar cunning ruse occurred in Christianity. Until the Middle Ages, the idea of the devil as we understand him did not exist. Jesus never mentioned the devil, and the Torah uses different names to describe what Christians came to perceive as a horned red figure with a tail. Lucifer, Moloch, "the Beast"in the New Testament Book of Revelation - all were merged to become one personification of evil: Satan.
The ancients certainly believed in dark forces, but the idea of two universal forces, good and evil, pitted again each other since Creation did not exist until the first millennium. It is not a pagan idea, and it is certainly not a Jewish idea.
Nietzsche believed that evil was invented by the Jews - not as a theological construct, more a sense of resentment born from their history of enslavement. But the devil was a certainly a Medieval Christian creation, borrowed also by Islam.
As I understand it, it would make sense that the notion of jihad would have its origins in the idea of violent conflict. Muhammed’s audience lived through war. The cities they lived in and traded with were always swapping hands. Populations were constantly being enslaved or used as mercenaries. The sides they fought for switched rulers, and soldiers switched armies. The very purpose of Islam, if we are to believe its founder, was to bring peace to an ever-shifting world of violence and chaos.
Back then, the metaphor of war to describe the spiritual/ethical struggle would have made sense. The same idea was a constant theme in Shakespeare, and the theme of the Bhagavad Gita, the chapter in the Vedic Mahabharata where God works as the main character’s advisor in a war between two families.
Just as Shakespeare used a family feud as a metaphor for love in Romeo and Juliet, and the Bhagavad Gita uses war as a metaphor for overcoming your own desires, war was used by Muhammed to define the struggle of ethics - a struggle as much within yourself as outside yourself.
Many misunderstand this struggle because we labour under the bastardized Medieval yoke of personified good and evil. The ancients had quite a different idea of this struggle, and within the heart of the monotheistic religions, the source is still there to be found for those who choose to look.
Forgive me for not sticking with ah.