Jihad vs Jihadism

Last week I had the opportunity to see M. Sani Umar, a professor at Northwestern University, from down the street in Evanston, talk at Loyola.   M. Sani Umar is the Director for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern.  The subject was “Jihad vs Jihadism: Trends in Contemporary Islamic Discourses”.  The room at Loyola that was chosen for Umar to speak at was not set up with any technology consideration, which was unfortunate.  He had prepared a powerpoint presentation, but could not use it and he was very hard to understand.  However, the information I did walk away with expressed  by Umar are new ideas which he claims are not 100% clear in his head.  What once were Taboo ideas are now brought up and debated globally.   Topics never talked about before include Islamic Law and gender, violence, religious authority, authority of the koran, authority of the Prophet.   Some of the issues are debated in newspapers and some are debated in court rooms, where the stakes are a lot higher.  Debates are raging globally with different platforms.  In explaining the debate about Jihad and Jihadism, Umar explains we need linguistic knowledge with realizing there are different ways to read the word.  There is the dictionary meaning and the meaning of sacrifice, then technique, and logic.  Now, he explains, one starts to find different meanings that get into legal definitions that include; what is Islamic Law, what are the rules.   I would like to report more, but unfortunately like I mentioned before, he was very hard to understand and in review of my notes I do not want to report any wrong information.  He did tie in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which we discussed in class, that helped in connecting information he presented.

The room was packed and Dr. Marcia Hermansen provided food.  Yum!