No Compulsion in Religion: Jawdat Saʿīd (d. 2022) and the Jihād of the Prophets

Freedom of belief and of conscience is well attested in the Qurʾan by the many verses that exhort to tolerance towards “others”, among which Q. 2:256: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. In contemporary Islam, some intellectuals have endeavoured to reaffirm this principle as an essential goal: among them, the Sunni Syrian thinker Jawdat Saʿīd (d. 2022). In his works, Q. 2:256 is at the core of an anthropocentric and social hermeneutics which emphasises the centrality of non-compulsion, considered as the true jihad that Muslims should undertake. His position is in open polemic with a tendency within Islamic societies not to recognise the legitimacy of those opinions – religious or political – that deviate from the “official” discourse on the one hand, and to combat this discourse with violence on the other. This entails a renegotiation of other key doctrinal concepts, the case of nasḫ , “abrogation”, being a key example.