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'.

motivations

"they (the US soldiers) held her down, a 14 year old girl, and raped her one by one while her mother, father, and five year old brother were locked in the next room, hearing her scream, and banging on the door for them to stop. Finally the noise bothered one of the soldiers so much he went next door and killed each of them, starting with the little boy. Then he came back, took his turn in raping her, and they shot her to kill her once he was done. They poured petrol over her still moving body and set it alight, and tried to hide the bodies of the family. They left the house, changed out of their black clothes and burned them. They were back at camp in less than half an hour."

The murder of Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi (and her family)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeer_Qassim_Hamza

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1926954,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/03/AR2006070301206.html

It is my strong personal belief that this shouldn't happen to anyone in this day and age. This alone is enough to make me want to fight for a better world, a more moral place, where children are free from such terrors. I want a peaceful just world, where no one can ever do this sort of thing to another.