Are you an inadvertent jihadist? You might be!

Whenever the wound you feel (personally or vicariously for the suffering of others) causes you to forget to remember to feel your heart being bathed in the ocean of God’s unconditionally merciful love (rahmah), then the pain, the depression, or the anger will distort your perceptions and focus your attention on attempting to right some wrong that is wounding you or others.

The pain will attempt to direct your consciousness away from the greater jihad of receiving your Beloved’s all-encompassing, all-sustaining, healing and loving embrace, directing you into some lesser jihad in which you will strive first and foremost to a protect some innocent, whether it be your own wounded heart or body or those of others. Then, what should have been a lesser jihad in your world–governed and directed by the relative egolessness of the greater jihad of the grateful and loving remembrance of God–instead becomes, for all intents and purposes, a pseudo-greater jihad driven and fueled by your ego’s often unconscious need to avoid your suffering, coerced by your conditioned commanding self (al-nafs al-ammara).

In other words, for both the intentional or inadvertent jihadist, a shift in priorities occurs, the jihad in the world usurps the importance of the true greater jihad against one’s own egotism. Consequently, instead of love and wisdom guiding one’s lesser jihad in the world, for the jihadist one’s perceptions and actions are distorted and dictated by one’s ego in its outraged attempt to avoid its suffering. Hence, for the jihadist, striving against injustice in the world becomes the greater jihad, while the grateful remembrance of God takes a back seat, becoming a lesser jihad, if it is not totally forgotten.

In our world, there are many possible jihads to get swept up in, many ways to become a jihadist. There are religious jihads, ecological jihads, political jihads, gender jihads,, intellectual jihads, the list is endless. Wherever there are innocents who need protecting, there are jihads and jihadists driven by their own or vicarious suffering and their self-righteous anger.

The problem, however, is that such jihadists, driven by their pain and their outrage,will have a tendency to go overboard, inadvertently attack or lynch innocents who resemble oppressors or fight and struggle in a way that is dictated by their rage not by wisdom. Hence such jihadists become the cliche of the abused and oppressed who themselves become abusers and opprressors. It does not matter how high-minded, pious, righteous, or virtuous our cause is, a jihadist driven by her/his suffering is still a thug, whether she or he is a fundamentalist thug, progressive thug, atheistic thug, or intellectual thug.

The alternative I am advocating, however, is not to abandon attempts to create a just world, not to stop trying to identify and root out all forms of abuse, oppression, and injustice.

Rather, once we see that jihadists simply perpetuate the very horrors they attempt to eradicate–the only difference being that the identities of the victims and victimizers, powerless and powerful change–then we can begin to stop being bullied, abused, and coerced by our suffering into inadvertently acting unwisely or, in a worst case scenario, committing atrocities ourselves.

Once we start making our priority the need to face the suffering inside ourselves (whether it is personal or vicarious), taking it as our greater jihad, our greater form of effort, then we will be on the road to renouncing our inadvertent jihadism.

The more we make our priority our need to face and receive the suffering we feel, at each moment, receiving it with uncondtitional gratitude to God, our Beloved–who is embracing and sustaining us beneath the surface of our suffering–the more we will become a true lover of God, empassioned by love of the Real; and the more we will become someone who has sufficient wisdom and energy to effectively combat and end the injustices that are rampant in our world.

To be an inadvertent jihadist thug or a lover of God who is striving to serve any who are in need. The choice is ours to make.