religions Article Arab Christian Confederations and Muhammad’s Believers: On the Origins of Jihad Marco Demichelis   Citation: Demichelis, Marco. 2021. Arab Christian Confederations and Muhammad’s Believers: On the Origins of Jihad. Religions 12: 710. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090710 Academic Editor: Brannon Wheeler Received: 31 May 2021 Accepted: 27 August 2021 Published: 1 September 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Centre for Interreligious Studies, Pontifical Gregorian University, 00187 Rome, Italy; m.demichelis@unigre.it Abstract: The meaning and elaboration of Jihad (just-sacred war) hold an important place in Islamic history and thought. On the far side of its spiritual meanings, the term has been historically and previously associated with the Arab Believers’ conquest of the 7th–8th centuries CE. However, the main idea of this contribution is to develop the “sacralization of war” as a relevant facet that was previously elaborated by the Arab Christian (pro-Byzantine) clans of the north of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant and secondarily by the Arab confederation of Muhammad’s believers. From the beginning of Muhammad’s hijra (622), the interconnection between the Medinan clans that supported the Prophet with those settled in the northwest of the Hijaz is particularly interesting in relation to a couple of aspects: their trade collaboration and the impact of the belligerent attitude of the pro-Byzantine Arab Christian forces in the framing of the early concept of a Jihad. This analysis aimed to clarify the possibility that the early “sacralization of war” in proto-Islamic narrative had a Christian Arab origin related to a previous refinement in the Christian milieu. Keywords: Jihad; Qital; Arab confederation; Ghassanids; Banu Kalb; Umayyad 1. Introduction. Why Is Research on the Canonization of Jihad Still Relevant Today? The 9/11 terrorist attack had a deep impact on the creative identification of Islam from a detrimental perspective, emphasizing this religion as having been violent, in particular against religious otherness, since the beginning of its history. The “Islamic conquests”, which started a few years after Muhammad’s death (d. 632) and that were to allow for a rapid “religious” supremacy in a huge geographical area, seem to “clearly” confirm more contemporary “Islamophobic” assumptions that were rooted in the perception of Islam as a violent faith. The above hypothesis spread extensively among ordinary people but also among more educated ones, slipping into the dialectical and cognitive line of secularism, anti- clericalism, new forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Thankfully, contemporary historical methodology in the last century emphasized the framing of a “transitional” view in a new “Global”—“Comparative” approach that can limit the ideological drifts deriving from racism and ignorance by using a more multi-disciplinary perspective 1 . It is in relation to this methodology that it would be impossible today to consider “Islam” as a new religion that was clearly differentiated from Christianity and Judaism only a few years after the end of the prophetic phase (in 632, Muhammad’s death highlights the end of the Prophetic phase) when the “Islamic conquests” would have easily allowed for gaining control of the entire Near East (Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt) within a decade. “Transitional history” needs to reckon, first of all, with the complexities of a historical phase and geography in the Late Antiquity Era between the previous holders of power, namely, the Byzantines and the Sassanids, with the new ones. The Confederate clans of the north of the Arabian Peninsula as the Germanic populations close to the Western Roman Empire’s borders before 476 were already known and enlisted in the imperial armies, as well as partially Romanized, Hellenized and Christianized. Religions 2021, 12, 710. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090710 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions