Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader

Rudolph Peters's Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, A Reader, published by Markus Wiener Publishers in 1996, is a scholarly reader collecting primary classical Islamic legal texts on jihad alongside modern texts and Peters's own analytical framing, tracing how the doctrine's legal and political meaning developed from medieval jurisprudence through twentieth century movements. Peters was a specialist in Islamic law. Its strength is that it presents primary sources directly, in translation, rather than only summarizing them, letting a reader see the classical legal reasoning itself alongside its later reinterpretation. Its limit is that a reader anthology selects and arranges texts according to its editor's own organizing argument, so a claim about the full range of classical juristic opinion on jihad should be checked against a broader survey of Islamic legal literature beyond the texts Peters chose to include.