In recent decades, scholarly and public discourses about “Islamic violence” have shown no sign of slowing down; the two terms continue to be sutured together in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship and public discourse. In these discourses, jihad comes to name and culturalize a form of violence, one that pundits who sometimes present as scholars tend to either treat as exceptional or to generalize as a stand-in for “religious” violence. Thus Islam is constituted as exemplar of the wrong kind of violence. This construction of Islam and violence elides the sedimented histories and conceptual embankments of jihad, the genealogies of “religious violence” as a term and idea, the colonial disavowals and origins built into contemporary typologies of violence, and the full structure of discourses about violence by the very same militant Muslims often identified with “jihad.” This paper proceeds in two parts. In the first half, it sketches a genealogy of the discursive knotting of Islam and jihad in relation to these elisions. It draws attention to the racializing work performed by the word’s deployment in the writings of American philosophers (e.g. Michael Walzer, John Rawls). Such discussions and scholars, I argue, should be read as symptomatic vectors for—among others things—a structural refusal to locate a critical theorization of violence in the writings of Islamists, or to identify Islamists as theorists of ongoing violence around the globe rather than as either simple apologists/architects of “modern jihad” or mere taxonomers of old “Islamic” categories. The second (and larger) half of the paper then recovers this theorization. It turns to the weekly journal al-Da‘wa, focusing on the first three years of its publication. The journal was published by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and included among its regular contributors the famous thinker Sayyid Qutb. The paper foregrounds how violence, colonialism, and capitalism were thematized and theorized across the pages of the journal, in ways authorized by and yet exceeding its Islamist key. Indeed, the journal blended a variety of ideological and historical idioms together, which is what makes possible its outlook: an experimentation with multiple scales that span regional, transnational, and global contexts. Finally, the paper draws out the implications of shifting the location of theory along these lines, in which the Muslim is not the unthinking vector of an illiberal violence that needs to be overcome but the theorist of how geographies of violence are maintained through colonialism, capitalism, and Orientalism.