Life of Ahmad — Page 759
759 CHAPTER 71 JIHAD A Pathan murdered two English persons in Peshawar in March or April 1900. Ahmad as felt very much pained and upset. The murder of any innocent person is a heinous crime and must be condemned by all civilised men. But what shocked Ahmad as was something more than that. He had come to serve Islam and the Muslims in general thought in those days that it was a religious duty of theirs to kill the infidels. The ignorant Pathans on the frontier brought disgrace upon Islam by acting according to this belief whenever they found an opportunity to do so or at least they stilled their conscience in the name of religion even when the motive of a murder was something different. The blame lay, in fact, with the mullahs who taught that Islam was in a state of perpetual war with the unbelievers. It was certainly not right, said they, that the infidels should govern the Muslims, even though the latter had lost all political and temporal power. Worse than that was their invented doctrine of jihad according to which it is the duty of every true Muslim