[On Jihad as a form of “good work” or divine charity undertaken in return for the blessings and favour of God- T]The deal between God and those who fight in his path is portrayed as a commercial transaction, either as a loan with interest (“Who is there who will make a fine loan to God, which God will then multiply many times over?”), or else as a profitable sale of the life of this world in return for the life of the next. How much one gains depends on what happens during the transaction: one obtains Paradise if slain in battle, or victory if one survives, either way a grand reward (ajran "aziman) and one of the two finest things (ihda al-husnayayni). Modern treatments of this commercial vocabulary in the Quran have commented, sometimes with an apologetic or patronizing tone, that Muhammad was, after all, a merchant and that commerce was second nature to the Meccans. What we stress here is that Quranic discourse includes, on the one hand, reciprocity and generosity, creating ever more solidarity among the community of believers in all their activities (in both war and peace), and on the other hand, an emphasis on reward and striving, giving the believers, as individuals, an unparalleled sense of confidence and entitlement. p.32
What emerges, from this and many other places in the hadith, is a central theme of the jihad, namely the propagation of the Faith through combat. Islam must be brought to the entire world, as when the Prophet says: “I have been sent to the human race in its entirety,” and “I have been commanded to fight the people (the unbelievers) until they testify: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.’ ” This fighting and spreading of the faith will continue until the end of the world as we know it now. p.49
The Islamic Tradition, specifically the hadith, makes this connection and spells out the doctrine with abundant detail. Here, as in the Christian doctrine of the martyr, shahid signifies a person who, through suffering and death, has achieved high reward in the hereafter. Descriptions of the martyrs in the Tradition include their ability to intercede for the faithful on the Day of Resurrection, otherwise a prerogative reserved for the Prophet Muhammad himself. Their souls have the shape of white birds, feeding on the fruits of Paradise; or alternatively, they are held in the craws of green birds that feed in Paradise and drink from its rivers. These birds also nestle in golden lamps suspended underneath the divine throne. These traits, setting the martyrs apart from the rank and of the blessed, also occur in early Christian descriptions of the martyrs, and again point to a close connection between the two traditions. Indeed, the Arabic word shahid may plausibly be thought to derive from the Christian Syriac for “witness” and “martyr,” sa¯hda¯. Nonetheless, the underlying idea is different. No longer do we have the Christian insistence on passivity and nonviolence. Instead of metaphorical soldiers of God, we have fighters who literally take up arms and use them. The Muslim texts of Tradition and Law repeatedly affirm that the martyrs (shuhada') are those who die while fighting for the faith. Their sins are forgiven, though not their debts. They go immediately to Paradise, skipping the long wait for Resurrection and the “tortures of the grave” that others must undergo. p.75
Throughout this time and afterward, the jihad remained closely connected to that part of the original Islamic message that we usually, and somewhat misleadingly, refer to as “charity.” In the Quran, and also in the early narrative texts of sira and maghazi, fighting in the wars is a matter of identity and belonging. It is not something for which one receives payment (here, as in pre-Islamic Arabia, the notions of payment for service and wage often cannot be distinguished from the notions of corruption and bribe.) Meanwhile, however, soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the victorious early Islamic state suddenly found itself inundated with all sorts of wealth. At the same time, it had to confront the large-scale problems that confront all great empires, including the recruiting, paying, and supplying of its armies. As the Umayyad and then the "Abbasid caliphal regimes tried various solutions to their fiscal and military problems, the juridical and theological doctrines of nascent Islam slowly emerged. The “school” (or perhaps merely the local trend) of Medina, in its relative isolation, continued, somewhat longer than the others, to construct solutions to these problems in more Quranic terms, that is to say, by thinking in terms of gifts to fighters rather than payments to soldiers. Elsewhere, however, other scholars began to think differently. Is military service a religious obligation incumbent on each individual? How can the central authority (in the jurists’ terms, the imam and his representatives) recruit large numbers of fighters and keep them supplied and equipped? [i.e., the success of jihad created problems that led to a need to temper its effects and appeal- T] p.168-9
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