Fact of the day: On Holy War

There is nothing in Islam called Holy War, and no, Holy War is not synonymous or interchangeable with Jihad. In fact, it was Pope Urban II who first used the term "Holy War" to ignite the bloodbath we now call the crusades.

In her Book ‘Decipering the signs of God: a phenomenological approach to Islam’ the late scholar and Harvard Professor Annemarie Schimmel notes "The translation of Jihad as 'holy war', as is now current even among Muslims, cannot be justified on philological grounds; the term 'Holy War' was first coined in medieval Europe for the undertakings of the Crusaders."

The Encyclopedia of Christianity reads "From Urban II in 1095 to Innocent XI in 1684, pope after pope wrote or authorized the dispatch of letters, including many general ones, in which the faithful were summoned to crusade, offered spiritual privileges if they responded and threatened with divine judgment if they did not… From the fourth century to the sixteenth most Christian thinkers believed that God or Christ could and would authorize the use of force, either personally or through an intermediary… Until the nineteenth century, moreover, the majority opinion was that acts of violence were not in themselves evil, but were morally neutral."