Hello there mkenani,
Welcome to the TSR Islamic Society!
I fully agree with what you said with regards to God, as I’m sure every other member of the society will agree. We worship and glorify the same one God, but as you said we call God by different names: Father, Yahweh, Allah and so forth. Of course there are fundamental differences in some aspects of creed and belief, but the concept of God being a single entity is celebrated in nearly all the world religions.
With regards Jihad, commonly mistranslated as “Holy War” there are two types of ‘Jihad’ – which is from the Arabic root
jahada which means to struggle or to make an effort (to do something). The two types are the lesser Jihad and the greater Jihad. The lesser being in a fighting sense and the greater Jihad being the Jihad to better one’s charcter, morals and manners. There is a report from the time of the Prophet Muhammad(pbuh) in which he was reported to have said “Jihad an Nafs, Jihad al Akbar!” , that the lesser Jihad (Jihad of the Nafs meaning struggling or making an effort to perfect a persons character, desires, thoughts, behaviour etc) is the greatest Jihad! It is the lesser Jihad, or the Jihad in a military sense which is often misunderstood and gets a lot of coverage, albeit very negative!!
A scholar by the name of Sami Al-Majid wrote an article on military Jihad
, Let There Be No Compulsion in Religion with the aim of clarifying some misconceptions about Jihad, which I highly recommend you read!
Islamic teachings about women and womens rights are often debated, criticised and attacked! This is such a vast topic, and with the very little that I know, I doubt that I’ll be able to provide you with full answers, for which reason I’d like to again, if you don’t mind, refer you to another site,
http://thetruereligion.org/modules/wfsection/ where there are some very good articles on this topic.
I hope you visit the sites and find them helpful. If you or anyone else for that matter have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to ask, as I’m sure everyone at the society will try to, God-willing, answer your questions.
Take care!
Abbasi