defence,
though suffering from persecutions, Mohammadan commentators and jurists
and Christian writers are unanimous in construing _Jihad_ in its natural
sense of exertion, effort, energy, and painstaking. Secondly, the verses
containing the same words occurring in the Medina Suras, which were
revealed or published when the Moslems had taken arms in their defence.
As regards this period, the words are considered to have an entirely new
and an altogether fortuitous meaning, _viz._, a religious war of
aggression. Even some verses of this period are rendered by Mohammadans
and Christians in the literal sense of the word.

[Sidenote: Conventional significations of _Jihad_.]

8. I fully admit that in the post-classical language of the
Arabs,--_i.e._, that in use subsequent to the time of Mohammad, when the
language was rapidly corrupted, the word "Jihad" was used to signify
"warfare" or fighting, but this was in a military sense. Since that
period the word has come to be used as meaning the waging of a war or a
crusade only in military tactics, and more recently it found its way in
the same sense into the Mohammadan law-books and lexicons of later
dates. But the subsequent corrupt or post-classical language cannot be
accepted as a final or even a satisfactory authority upon the point.

"It was decided by common consent," says Mr. Edward William Lane,
in his Arabic-English Lexicon (Preface, pp. viii and ix), "that no
poet, nor any other person, should be taken as an absolute and
unquestionable authority with respect to the words or their
significations, the grammar, or the prosody of the classical
language, unless he were one who had died before the promulgation
of El-Islam, or who had lived partly before and partly after that
event; or, as they term it, unless he were a 'Jahilee' or a
'Mukhadram,' or (as some pronounce it) 'Mukhadrim,' or 'Muhadram'
or 'Muhadrim.' A poet of the class next after the Mukhadrams is
termed an 'Islamee:' and as the corruption of the language had
become considerable in his time, even among those who aimed at
chasteness of speech, he is not cited as an authority absolutely
and unquestionably like the two preceding classes. A poet of the
next class, which is the last, is termed 'Muwelled;' he is
absolutely post-classical; and is cited as an unquestionable
authority with respect only to the rhetorical sciences. Th