okay, so let's begin

so as an individual, how to I begin a jihad?

Short answer: I don't know.

Long answer: there are some promising places to start.

For the sake of reducing anxiety I'm going to run with the long answer for now. My first impluses towards jihad came a long time ago and were related to the disparity between the every day world I was walking through and the ideal of a moral world which didn't seem that far out of reach. Frankly from such a vague starting place you can go in a lot of directions... philosophical introspection into the nature of the world and morality, a birth of psychological analysis and behaviour modification, more broadly an urge to take part in activism and political action, and even more broadly still to change the nature of the economy and eliminate things like poverty which seemed connected to much of the suffering which everyone can see. Of course being a young'un and somewhat of a coward I took the easy route of retreating into myself and hoping that bigger and better people would come along and change the world for the better.

This is known as the Ostrich Approach. (for those who don't know, an ostrich is an oversized bird that is reputed to bury it's head in the sand at the first sign of danger, and to wait in this ridiculous position until the danger has passed. This is seldom a successful strategy.)

Long story short, it didn't work. So I started thinking about how best to do something worthwhile. And came up with a few basic ideas:

Jihad happens on several fronts:

1. the individual and themselves.
2. between the individual and other individuals
3. between a person and a group
4. between groups.
5. between individuals and the environment
6. between groups and the environment.

(there are more subtle variations, mostly to do with plurals of groups or persons, but that is the meat of it.)

The first one, a jihad within oneself is called the Greater Jihad. It's the greater part of the spiritual journey towards God, and is all about making you a better person. The other parts comprise what is known as the Lesser Jihad, or basically the struggle to come into a moral relationship with the world. It's the more overt but actually less important Jihad that gets all the advertising.

Jihad means 'Struggle'. It does not mean 'Holy War'.