This volume is intended to bring some clarity to a crisis that confronts the entire world. It is more than a social, political, or economic crisis. It is a metaphysical crisis in which humanity is confronted with a pervasive and relentless evil. And it is an evil. In the postmodern intellectual world – where truth, meaning, and value have been so relativized as to become meaningless – there is a reluctance to use terms such as evil that may imply some higher absolute at work in our lives. A historian once told me, for example, that when speaking of the Holocaust, we must not use the word evil because of its “religious baggage.” If we refrain from using the term, however, we shall become blind to it and, in the end, overwhelmed by it.

Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stated that “our mission is one described most comprehensively by the term ‘Islamic,’” and that the “call to [Islam] cannot survive without Jihad.” Thus, we have the term Islamic Jihadism to name this evil. I use the expression to distinguish this insidious “-ism” from other outlooks in Islam, such as that espoused by two former heads of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo: Shaykh Mahmud Shaltut (1893–1963) and Shaykh Jad al-Haqq Ali Jad al-Haqq (d. 1996).