Elisabeth Kendall and Ewan Stein, Twenty-First Century Jihad: Law, Society and Military Action. (London: I.B. Tauris and Company, 2015), 358.
Asad Ullah Khan
The book Twenty-First Century Jihad: Law, Society and Military Actionis a compilation of 19 research articlesby different authors edited by Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Pembroke College, Oxford University and Ewan Stein who is Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.
The book raises the new debate about the future of jihad and relates it to the Arab Spring. The book comprises 18 chapters. While all the chapters view the title from historical, political and methodological perspectives, all the chapters deal with Jihad in the contemporary context and are interconnected. The book challenges a number of assumptions that have been used by eminent scholars and policy makers including the most accepted one by Western scholars, that jihad animates Muslim thought, its association with violence and war, and its legitimacy to wage war against non-Muslims. This book makes an attempt to conceptualise jihad in its true context which is a significant contribution to the existing literature on the subject. Moreover, the writers emphasises that jihad in 21st century cannot be seen in isolation from the 14th century of competing interpretations of the term that preceded it. The book is divided into three major parts.
