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My appearance on GB News to defend teaching school children about Jihad
Summary
Posted 22 August 2025
On Wednesday 20 August 2025, I appeared on the Martin Daubney show on GB News.
A producer asked me via WhatsApp if I was willing to appear. The background was that a Welsh educational supplies company, Daydream Education, had produced a poster for use in classrooms “I am a Muslim” as part of a series of posters about religions.
The producer said to me:
“Parents have expressed outrage to us at how these posters describe jihad: ‘As well as following the Five Pillars of Islam, I must understand Jihad and strive to be a good Muslim. Greater Jihad is the personal struggle to live a life of obedience to God and not to give into temptation. Lesser jihad is the physical struggle to protect the Islamic faith in the world.’
Parents complain that 'jihad' is being justified and presented as positive - not taking into account that it has also led to violent extremism. They say this is the normalisation of jihad in British classrooms.”
I was informed that Dr Taj Hargey, Imam and President of the Oxford Institute for British Islam, would be appearing to criticise Jihad being mentioned in the poster.
You can watch his appearance and mine in the video below.
Wikipedia has a long article on Jihad. I have reviewed it quickly, and it is pretty consistent with my own understanding.
For extra background on what Islam has to say about military combat, I recommend reading my review of "Qur’anic Concepts of the Ethics of Warfare: Challenging the Claims of Islamic Aggressiveness" by Joel Hayward.
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The concept of Jihad has of course been abused by organisations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by many individual terrorists. The Wikipedia article covers this.
For greater detail, I recommend reading the book “Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea” by Shiraz Maher.
The final sentence in the Jihad section of the poster reads: “Lesser jihad is the physical struggle to protect the Islamic faith in the world.”
Apart from the inconsistent capitalisation and omission of the definite article, the problem with this sentence is that faiths deserve no protection. Anyone is free to criticise Islam as much as they wish.
What they are not free to do is to kill or physically injure Muslims simply because they are Muslims. This happened for example in the Bosnian genocide and has been done to Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
I would rewrite the final sentence as “The lesser Jihad is properly authorised defensive warfare to protect Muslims from military attack.” This would also create scope for classroom discussion of who can authorise Jihad since the Caliphate no longer exists.
While less significant than the “Five pillars of faith,” Jihad is a part of Islam. No Muslim needs to feel defensive about that.
Many non-Muslims have a seriously distorted understanding of the word due to the appalling conduct of ISIS and other terrorists. That needs Muslims to help correct that misunderstanding. However, no Muslim should be embarrassed about the word Jihad, which occurs in the Quran a number of times.
This reminds me of when a journalist once asked me "How do you feel about wearing a symbol so closely associated with the BNP?" (British National Party) He was referring to my Union Jack lapel pin. I responded that I refused to let the BNP hijack my country’s flag. See “Why I wear a Union Jack lapel pin.”
In the same way, I refuse to let terrorists hijack the word Jihad.
