Recently, Muslims in the West have been engaged in an ingenious, albeit disingenuous, effort to rehabilitate the Arabic word jihad. they are doing this with a campaign of public relations called my jihad. in this campaign, Muslim groups or individuals take up significant social challenges and strive to create effective solutions for persons suffering from these social adversities; things like illiteracy, childhood obesity, and the like. They identify the problem then initiate a program to ameliorate the problem and the effort to do so they term it as jihad. Jihad is a concept that is being used today in various forms, and with various implications for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

A primary objective of my jihad movement is to get western non-Muslims to see jihad as a distinctively Islamic positive social contribution. Obviously, the word jihad has a degree of flexibility or fluidity in its use, it is etymologically, based on the Arabic root word-ji ha da. Which simply means to strive or exert effort however like most words, jihad has both dentation and connotation, or more specifically it has a denotative meaning linguistically, but also has a connotative meaning in Islamic jurisprudence and history. The latter is a martial= military term that is inherently violent. Some contemporary Muslim scholars and propagandists try to play down the historical connotation of violent jihad. But in Quran, the hadith, and the sira literature as well as in the political contexts of Islamdom jihad has been a word for violent conflict against non-Muslims or non-conforming Muslims.

Campaigns like my jihad public relations campaign we fear will not put a stop to acts of violent jihad like the murders of the Charlie Hebdo magazine office personnel or the jihadi attack at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the jihadi attack of a Sufi mosque in Egypt. Jihad is one tool that violent Muslims have used for 14 centuries against non-Muslims those Muslims believe the jihad provides a divine justification for their acts of religious violence public relations stunts like my jihad movement well likely just confuse the ill-informed and do not create any reform in Muslim doctrine or praxis. reform on the level needed will have to address the holy texts of Islam and the model of their prophet and his closest followers. This deep reform will likely have to happen among Muslims in the Western nations because where Islam rules, such an effort will be met with jihad and or government sanction from self-proclaimed Muslim governments if Muslims wish should teach that Islam is a religion of peace, the first pupils must be Muslim communities.