What is jihad? Language still hinders terror fight

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - It was just days after the September 11 attacks in 2001 that President George W. Bush spoke of a "crusade" against terrorism -- a phrase which, for Muslims, evoked barbarous campaigns by medieval Christians against Islam.

Bush has long since dropped the expression but the choice of language in his "war on terror" -- itself a highly controversial label -- remains as heated and divisive an issue as ever.

At a major conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, for example, debate on how to tackle al Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms "jihad" and "jihadist".

Frequently used by al Qaeda itself and by counter-terrorism specialists and in the media to denote "holy war" against the West, the word jihad signifies for most Muslims a spiritual struggle.

"You can struggle for elimination of poverty, you can struggle for education ... you can struggle for something very, very positive in life," said General Ehsan Ul Haq, former chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff.

"Now to call jihadists as terrorists is either reflective of ...lack of understanding of Islam, or it is I must say an intended misuse, which again is unfortunate," he added. "It might have been somewhat excusable in the trauma post-9/11 but I don't think it is any more."

Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali, an Iraqi scholar, told delegates at the annual conference of the EastWest Institute think-tank: "Jihad is the struggle against all evil things in your soul...There is no jihadi terrorism in Islam."

But Nasra Hassan, a Muslim woman from Pakistan who heads the United Nations information service in Vienna, spoke freely of "jihadist" groups, and Russian counter-terrorism official Anatoly Safonov talked about the need to combat two types of jihad, "jihad with the sword and jihad with the word".