Islam and Peace: A Preliminary Survey on the Sources of Peace in the Islamic Tradition
Prof. Dr. İbrahim Kalın
Source: İslam Araştırmaları Dergisi, Issue 11, 2004, pp. 1-37
Is Religion a Source of Violence?
This question haunts the minds of many people concerned about religion in one way or another. For the critics of religion, the answer is usually in the affirmative, and it is easy to cite examples from history. From Rene Girard’s depiction of ritual sacrifices as violent proclivities in religion1 to the exclusivist claims of different faith traditions, one can easily conclude that religions produce violence at both social and theological levels. As often done, one may take the Crusades or the inquisition in medieval Europe or jihad movements in Islamic history and describe the respective histories of these traditions as nothing more than a history of war, conflict, violence, schism, persecution. The premeditated conclusion is unequivocal: the more religious people are, the more violent they tend to be. The solution therefore lies in the de-sacralization of the world. Religions, and some among them in particular, need to be secularized and modernized to rid themselves of their violent essence and violent legacy.2
At the other end of the spectrum is the believer who sees religious violence as an oxymoron at best and the mutilation of his/her religious faith at worst. Religions do not call for violence. Religious teachings are peaceful at their base, meant to re-establish the primordial harmony between heaven and earth, between the Creator and the created. But specific religious teachings and feelings are manipulated to instigate violence for political gains. Violence is committed in the name of religion but not condoned by it. The only valid criticism the secularist can raise against religion is that religions have not developed effective ways of protecting themselves from such manipulations and abuses. As Juergensmeyer has shown in his extensive survey of religious violence in the modern period, violence does not recognize religious and cultural boundaries and can easily find a home in the most sublime and innocuous teachings of world religions. At any rate, religions are vulnerable when they fail to find ways of preventing the use of force in their names. This becomes especially acute when they fall short of inculcating a consciousness of peace and non-violence in the minds and hearts of their followers. In short, religions per se cannot be seen as a source of violence. Only some of its bad practitioners can be held accountable.
Both views have strong cases and make important points about religion and violence. Both, however, are equally mistaken in resorting to a fixed definition of religion. And both views reduce the immense variety of religious practices to a particular tradition and, furthermore, to a particular faction or historic moment in that tradition. In speaking of Islam and violence or Hinduism and war, the usual method is to look at the sacred scriptures and compare and contrast them with historical realities that flow from their practice, or lack thereof. We highlight those moments where there are discrepancies between text and history as the breaking points in the history of that religion, viz., moments when the community has not lived up to the standards of the religion as demanded by the text.
Although there is some benefit to be gained from this approach, it fails to see the ways in which religious texts are interpreted and made part of the day-to-day experience of particular religious communities. Instead of looking at how religiously binding texts are read, revealed and enriched within the concrete experiences of the community, we separate text from history and somehow assume historical immunity for the text and/or textual basis for all history.
This is not to deny the centrality of the scripture. In the case of Islam, the Qur’an, together with the Sunnah of the Prophet of Islam, is and remains the main source of the Islamic Weltanschauung. After all, the numerous interpretations that we may talk about are interpretations of the Qur’an, the one text that is the subject of variant readings from the Sufis and Hanbalis to the Wahhabis and the modernists. The fact that the Prophetic sunnah is part of the Islamic worldview and religious life, without which we cannot understand a good part of the Qur’an, can be seen as con- firming the significance of reading the scripture within the concrete experiences of the Muslim community. This was in fact how first Muslims, who became the spiritual and moral examples of later generations, learnt about the Qur’an under the guidance and tutorship of the Prophet.
In this sense, Islamic history is not alien to the idea of reading religiously binding texts primarily within the con- text of a living and ‘evolving’ tradition. This is why the Sun- nah was part of the Islamic law from the outset and this is how the tradition of transmitted sciences (al-‘ulum al- naqliyyah), dealing primarily with ‘religious sciences’, came about viz, by looking at how previous generations of Muslims understood the Qur’an and the hadith. Taken out of this context, Qur’anic verses become abstruse, and impenetrable for the non-Muslim, or for anyone, who is indifferent to this tradition and, by virtue of this, may be misled into thinking that a good part of Islamic history has come about in spite of the Qur’an, not because of it.
I deemed it necessary to insert these few words of caution and ‘methodology’ here for the following reasons. Much of the current debate about Islam and violence is beset by the kind of problems that we see in the secularist and apologetic readings of the scriptural sources of Islam. Those who consider Islam as a religion that essentially condones violence for its theological beliefs and political aims pick certain verses from the Qur’an, link them to cases of communal and political violence in Islamic history, and conclude that Qur’anic teachings provide justification for unjust use of violence. While the same can be done practically about any religion, Islam has enjoyed much more fanfare than any other religion for the last thousand years or so. The apologist makes the same mistake but in a different way when he rejects all history as misguided, failing to see the ways in which the Qur’an, or the Bible or the Rig-Vedas, can easily, if not legitimately, be read to resort to violence for intra- and inter- religious violence. This is where the hermeneutics of the text (in the sense of both tafsir and ta’wil) becomes absolutely necessary: it is not that the text itself is violent but that it lends itself to multiple readings, some of which are bound to be peaceful and some violent.
The second problem is the exclusive focus of the current literature on the legal and juristic aspects of peace and violence in Islam. Use of violence, conduct of war, treatment of combatants and prisoners of war, international law, etc. are discussed within a strictly legal context, and the classical Islamic literature on the subject is called upon to provide answers. Although this is an important and useful exercise, it falls short of addressing deeper philosophical and spiritual issues that must be included in any discussion of religion and peace. This is true especially in the case of Islam for mainly two reasons. First of all, the legal views of peace and violence in the classical period were articulated and applied in the light of the overall teachings and aims of Islamic law (maqasid al-shari’ah). The maqasid provided a context within which the strict legality of the law was blended into the necessities and realities of communal life. Political conflicts couched in the language of juridical edicts remained as political conflicts and were never extended to a war of religions between Islam or Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or African religions, which Muslims encountered throughout their history. It should come to us as no surprise that the fatwa of a jurist of a particular school of law allowing the use of force against a Christian ruler was not interpreted as an excuse for attacking one’s Christian or Jewish neighbor.
Secondly, the spiritual and ethical teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah underpin everything Islamic in principle, and this applies mutatis mutandis to the question of peace and violence. The legal injunctions (ahkam) of the Qur’an concerning peace and war are part of a larger set of spiritual and moral principles. The ultimate goal of Islam is to create a moral and just society in which individuals can pursue a spiritual life and the toll of living collectively, from economic exploitation and misuse of political authority to the suppression of other people, can be brought under control to the extent possible in any human society. Without taking into account this larger picture, we will fail to see how Islam advocates a positive concept of peace as opposed to a merely negative one and how its political and legal precepts, which are exploited so wildly and irrationally by both the secular and religious fundamentalists of our day, lead to the creation and sustaining of a just and ethical social order.
With these caveats in mind, this paper has two inter- related goals. The first is to analyze the ways in which the Islamic tradition can be said to advocate a positive concept of peace. This will be contrasted with ‘negative peace’ defined conventionally as absence of war and conflict. It will be argued that positive peace involves the presence of certain qualities and conditions that aim to make peace a principal state of harmony and equilibrium rather than a mere event of political settlement. This requires a close examination of the philosophical assumptions of the Islamic tradition which have shaped the experience of Muslim societies vis-à-vis the peoples of other faiths and cultures. These philosophical suppositions are naturally grounded in the ethical and spiritual teachings of Islam, and without considering their relevance for the cultural and political experience of Muslims with the ‘other’, we can neither do justice to the Islamic tradition, which spans through a vast area in both space and time, nor avoid the pitfalls of historical reductionism and essentialism, which is so rampant in the current discussions of the subject.
This brings us to the second goal of the paper. Here I will argue that an adequate analysis of peace and war in the Islamic tradition entails more than fixating the views of some Muslim jurists of the 9th and 10th centuries as the definitive position of ‘orthodox’ Islam and thus reducing the Islamic modus operandi of dealing with non-Muslims to a concept of ‘holy war’. With some exceptions3, the ever-growing literature of Islam and peace has been concerned predominantly with the legal aspects of declaring war (‘jihad’) against Muslim and/or non-Muslim states, treating the dhimmis under the Shari’ah, and expanding the territories of the Islamic state. This has obscured, to say the least, the larger context within which such legal opinions were discussed, interpreted and evolved from one century to the other and from one cultural-political era to the other.
Therefore, I propose to look at the concept of peace in the Islamic tradition in four interrelated contexts. The first is the metaphysical-spiritual context in which peace (salam) as one of the names of God is seen as an essential part of God’s creation and assigned a substantive value. The second is the philosophical-theological context within which the question of evil (shar) is addressed as a cosmic, ethical, and social problem. Discussions of theodicy among Muslim theologians and philosophers provide one of the most profound analyses of the question of evil, injustice, mishap, violence and their place in the ‘great chain of being’. I shall provide a brief summary to show how a proper understanding of peace in the Islamic tradition is bound to take us to the larger questions of good and evil. The third is the political-legal context, which is the proper locus of classical legal and juristic discussions of war, rebellion, oppression, and political (dis) order. This area has been the exclusive focus of the current literature on the subject and promises to be an engaging and long-standing debate in the Muslim world. The fourth is the socio-cultural context, which would reveal the parameters of the Muslim experience of religious and cultural diversity with communities of other faiths and cultural traditions.
As it will become clear in the following pages, all of these levels are interdependent and call for a larger context within which the questions of peace and violence have been articulated and negotiated by a multitude of scholars, philosophers, jurists, mystics, political leaders, and various Muslim communities. The Islamic tradition provides ample material for contemporary Muslim societies to deal with issues of peace, religious diversity and social justice, all of which, needless to say, require urgent attention. Furthermore, the present challenge of Muslim societies is not only to deal with these issues as internal affairs but also to contribute to the fostering of a global culture of peace and coexistence. Before turning to the Islamic tradition, however, a few words of definition are in order to clarify the meaning of positive peace.
References:
- , TDV İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, İstanbul; College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University, 1979).
- This is the gist of the attacks by Bernard Lewis on “Islamic fundamentalism” in a number of highly publicized essays including “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Anlantic Montly (Sept. 1990), 47-60 and “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” The Atlantic Montly (February 1993). Lewis considers “Islamic Fundamentalism,” which he equates occasionally with terrorism, as raising out of the overtly religious and intolerant traditions of Islam. I have dealt with Lewis’ arguments in my “Roots of Misconception: Euro-American Perceptions of Islam Before and After 9/11” in Islam, Fundamentalism and the Beyrayal of Tradition, ed. Joseph Lumbard (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004), 143-87.
- One such exception to the rule is Richard Martin’s essay “The Religious Foundations of War, Peace, and Statecraft in Islam” in Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perpectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions, ed. John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 91-117.
