Fifteen Eighty Four

What makes ‘a religion of peace’? This rarely-explained and occasionally maligned phrase has become a commonplace in 21^st century speechcraft. Puzzlingly, it is rarely applied in a comparatively straightforward descriptive fashion – perhaps to distinguish the Mahāvratas of Jain monasticism or the idiosyncratic ethical doctrines of the Anabaptist Peace Churches. Rather, it finds its most frequent referent in the vast and various Islamic faith shared by some two billion inhabitants of every country and culture on the planet.

That mysterious expression is born not from academic religious studies, nor social science, nor moral philosophy. Its genesis lies squarely in the world of professional politics. In fact, it seems largely endemic to that world: politicians use the phrase a lot, but others relatively little. For all that al-salām (Peace) is a Quranic epithet of God [Quran 59:23], Islamicate intellectual tradition makes little obvious distinction between supposed ‘religions of peace’ and ‘religions of war’. For its own part, secular scholarship on Islam has usually preferred to concentrate instead on exploring violence enacted by Muslims in the name of their faith. It has to date done so quite exhaustively.

Scholarly preoccupation with ‘Muslim violence’ is not least at once a response to the perceived exigencies of contemporary history and a reflection of the fact that considerable textual resources are readily available to the prospective researcher. The latter include voluminous jurisprudential traditions, comparable in scope and content to Catholic Just War teachings. These are in turn rooted in the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad, before burgeoning under the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus and crystalising in the Baghdad Abbasid era through canonical compendia of ḥadīth and the consensus of great schools of legal philosophy [madhāhib]. Grist to the scholar’s mill equally includes the less discriminating exhortations to righteous bloodshed issued by modern polemicists from ʿAbd al-Salām Faraj [d.1982], to Bin Laden [d. 2011], to ISIS propaganda organs Dabiq or Rumiyah.

Writing on Muslims’ theological rejection of violence has by contrast received little academic attention, for all its ubiquity in the discourses of presidents and prime ministers. Prior to the publication of Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islamic Philosophy, scholarly work on Islamic nonviolence has tended to focus on the theoretical antipodes of very practical community peace work on the one hand and hagiographies of this or that sainted figure on the other. All the while, public attitudes – especially in Western societies – have polarised farther and farther into a widespread demonisation of Islam and Muslims co-existing (and sometimes co-extensive) with an official discourse which seeks to divide what Mahmood Mamdani famously described as ‘bad Muslims’ from ‘good Muslims’, ‘radicals’ from ‘moderates’. The latter, we are invited to understand by a confident succession of world leaders, are true adherents of a ‘religion of peace’.

It does not require any surfeit of cynicism to detect in some such leaders’ attestations to the essentially peaceful nature of ‘true Islam’ a sense that what they intend by peace might more accurately be termed quiescence. A politely private, benignly biddable and inoffensive Islamic ethic is thus envisaged less as a ‘religion of peace’ than as a ‘religion of peace and quiet’. The docility of one’s subjects is naturally congenial to rulers of any sort. This being the case, one is not astonished at seeing it endorsed by democrats and autocrats alike. The notion that Islamic pacifism might promise such devout quietism at a stroke renders it attractive to wielders of power and distasteful to those who might find cause to challenge them.

Nonviolence is not quietism, however, for all that some quietists might also espouse nonviolence. The rejection of violence relies crucially upon its identification. One must recognise what constitutes brutality before one may avoid its application, that is. A punch to the jaw is surely a violent act – but is an idea, a word, a custom, or an institution? Views predictably diverge on such matters, be it in the practice of activists or the analyses of ethicists. This is in no small part because of the degree to which each must rely on wider commitments to ideas about the content and perfectibility of human nature and community which we might hazard to summarise in the freighted term of ‘justice’. The common presumption that pacifists are uninterested in justice – a view shared by approving potentates and disdainful dissidents alike – is nonetheless fundamentally mistaken.

Nonviolence can only be meaningful in an actively moral context with meaningful practical consequences, for all that one might demur at either. Whether a sapling or a raindrop engages in violence or in nonviolence is after all usually regarded as somewhat moot. Instead, these are most clearly characteristic of human beings through their deliberate acts of commission and omission –  and most especially as these impact upon other human beings. Nonviolence is an inherently political phenomenon, and one defined by its inherently critical rejection of other practices – irrespective of whether or not one finds its means or its ends convincing. Indeed, it is no accident that those proponents of nonviolent ethics who loom largest in the Western imagination brought these to bear in explicitly political projects – be they Gandhi’s satyāgraha challenge to the British Raj or Dr Martin Luther King’s long march against the evils of racial subjugation. Yet those figures’ Muslim counterparts – even their very closest confederates, like Gandhi’s comrade and ‘Pride of the Afghans’ ʿAbd al-Ghaffār Khān [d. 1988] – tend to be left conspicuously out of this picture.

The newly published monograph Pacifism and Nonviolence in Contemporary Islamic Philosophy seeks among other things to remedy this persistent oversight. It explores and compares the lives and ideas of some dozen prominent proponents of Islamic forms of faith which demand nonviolence of their adherents. They include men and women, Sunni and Shia, educated and illiterate, living and dead – in settings as varied as America and Senegal, Syria and South Asia, Iran and Thailand. Each arises in their own historical and cultural context, and each experiences faith in their own fashion. Each offers distinct diagnoses of social and spiritual ills and each delivers their own particular religious and political prescriptions. These often diverge from one another to the point of being mutually exclusive: a fact which only becomes more clear when examining them through the increasingly intricate lenses of ongoing debates in secular moral philosophy.

Yet for all the difference and disagreement among proponents of Islamic nonviolence, several saliently recurring themes do emerge. The most pertinent of these to our purposes in the present article is how frequently these thinkers and activists establish themselves in dramatically politicised and distinctly dissident contexts. These range from anti-colonial uprisings against French and British empires to struggles against local powers from the Pahlavi Shah to the regime of Bashar al-Asad. Their campaigns have seen results ranging from dismal failure to dizzying revolution, and they have been beset by violent suppression and prolonged imprisonment by their opponents. While some of these champions of Islamic nonviolence do attempt to uncouple notions of peace and justice, the majority do quite the reverse. They seek actively to transform both the world and its inhabitants – sometimes in dramatic and fundamental fashions. Though these might perhaps be described as adherents of a ‘religion of peace’, that is, their devotion is emphatically not to ‘peace and quiet’.

Pacifism and Non-Violence in
Contemporary Islamic Philosophy
by Tom Woerner-Powell