They read the "jihad" passages of the Koran as allegorical, standing symbolically for the internal battle against evil temptation. Which is how many Christians consider the accounts of aggressive warfare and even genocide in the Old Testament; and how Gandhi nonviolently re-interpreted the Bhagavad Gita.
The fact that today's Christians (and for that matter, Jews) don't want to commit genocide against unbelievers, as the Israelites (e.g. Joshua and David) did against the Amalekites and other Canaanites, doesn't mean we aren't really Christians or Jews.
I’m aware of that interpretation, but it’s an exercise in absurdity; Mohammad himself spent most of his life slaughtering people en masse. An allegorical interpretation is grossly ahistorical and at direct odds with the life of their prophet.
There is no valid parallel to the OT; the Israelites did in fact kill off those people they were told to kill off, but those were one-shot deals for a very specific time and place. In mohammadeanism, it’s an eternal and perpetual command with no expiration date.
There is simply no way to make mohammadeanism peaceful, as Mo was one of the most violent and savage individuals to ever walk the planet and his creed was constructed specifically to justify his mass murders, slave-taking, rapes, deceptions, and basically anything else he felt like doing.
Even his own child-slave wife is quoted in the Hadiths as noting how Mo’s “revelations” kept conveniently commanding him to do what he had wanted to do beforehand anyway.
Ahmadis are irrelevant because only 1% (or so) of Muslims are Ahmadis. They are silly frauds who only consider the peaceful Koran passages from when Mo’ was preaching to no avail in Mecca.
Later verses of the Koran have superior status and greater Koranic authority than the earlier ones. And the later verses from when Mo lived in Medina are from when he became a killer and warlord.
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Statistical analysis of the Bukhari hadith (considered by Muslims to be the most authentic of the hadith collections) show that Muhammad repeatedly speaks of jihad. In Bukhari, 97% of the jihad references are about war, and 3% are about the inner struggle. So the statistical answer is that jihad is 97% war and 3% inner struggle.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/11/jihad-is-misunderstood-spiritual-struggle-muslim-scholar-tells-oprah