Islām and war

The Prophet Muhammad ascending to Heaven

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has an article available online (they keep them online for a few weeks) by Malise Ruthven, How to Understand Islam 11/08/07 issue. It has some worthwhile thoughts on the Islāmic religious doctrines on war. It also has several quotes from Hans Küng's excellent book Islam: Past, Present and Future, one of the volumes he's reviewing. (Küng is my own favorite contemporary theologian.)

But there are some definitely problematic things about Ruthven's argument, too.

On the useful side, he gives the following description of the concept of sharia, or Islāmic law.

The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad — independent reasoning — in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As [John] Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

Ruthven's focus is not on Islāmic law as such, but his article is valuable background not only on the way Muslims think about just war issues as well as on sharia more generally. Sharia is not a single body of jurisprudence in the Anglo-American or European Continental sense. There are four major schools of Sunni sharia, called the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbalite schools.

There are also two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs, compared to the Sunni schools of sharia. (I posted on sharia at more length in Varieties of Islāmic law 03/19/06).

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

(For more on the that trio Mawlānā Abu'l-A‛la Mawdūdī, Hasan al-Bannā and Sayyid Qutb see my posts Sayyid Qutb 09/06/04 and Intellectual godfathers of jihadism 03/22/05.)

On the negative side, Ruthven argues - or rather implies fairly disingenuously - that the 9/11, London and Madrid bombings were somehow a direct application of Islāmic principles:

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle - his "just war" - against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics - will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" - their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. (my emphasis)

But the argument he makes doesn't begin to carry the weight of such a charge. Most people in the world recognize some form of the just war, and at least a lot of us apply some kind of religious viewpoint to making judgments on whether a war is just. The question of whether the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" has been a basic part of the Christian doctrine of the Just War for centuries, at least since the days of St. Augustine, i.e., since the end of the Roman Empire.

That's in itself isn't necessarily a persuasive argument of its value, given the bloody history of the Christian world. But you have to be a person like say, Dick Cheney to not try to make some kind of judgment whether "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good", especially when you're talking about war and killing.

I'm not making any judgment on whether Sheikh al-Azhar's statement against terrorism is totally satisfactory. I'm just saying that Ruthven's argument is exceptionally weak. More specifically, he makes a very broad generalization about "official Islamic authorities" that he doesn't really support in his article.

This has been a big failing on the part of Western critics and scholars, especially the neoconservatives, is that they denounce Islāmic religious leaders for not speaking out enough against terrorism. And then when they do speak out against it in the name of Islām, there's just dissed, as Ruthven does in that paragraph.

I also notice that these mostly unidentified "official Islamic authorities" fail in Ruthven's eyes because they "usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy". Just what does that mean? That they see Al Qa'ida as a legitimate political authority? To say that is a stretch would be to understate how off the charts it is. Whatever the problems within the Islmaic religion, the "official Islamic authorities" conferring political legitimacy on Al Qa'ida is not one of them.

In making this argument, he smoothes over the degree of radical departure from Sunni Islām by thinkers like Qutb. Qutb is a strong influence over jihadist thought. His brother, who shared much of his outlook, was actually one of Osama bin Laden's teachers in the university. The other fundamentalist founding fathers that he mentions, Mawdūdī and Hasan al-Bannā did not go nearly so far as Qutb. (All of those three were Sunnis.)

One of the key elements of Qutb's contribution to the jihadist ideology practiced by violent Salafist groups like Al Qa'ida was the notion that even Sunni Muslims who didn't share the particular, eccentric brand of Islam are not real Muslims and therefore they can be regarded as legitimate targets for killing.

Ruthven cites Muhammad's struggles with the pagan Quraysh tribe dominant in Mecca, which is certainly important to examine in this context, because Muhammad and his four immediate successors as caliph (they are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided caliphs") are taken as especially important models for right practice and interpreting the Qu'ran, including on matters of war.

But Muhammad sought to convert the Quraysh in Mecca, not to kill them. The Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh of Medina did have battles. But in the end, Muhammad negotiated a peace with the Quaraysh. When Muhammad's fighters took Mecca, it was through a peace agreement, not by fighting their way into the city or laying seige to it. How blowing up commuters in Madrid is any kind of obvious application of the lessons of the Prophet's dealings with the Quraysh escapes me.

As Karen Armstrong describes in Islam (2000), the peace treaty that the Prophet made with the Quraysh of Mecca was unpopular among both the Meccans and the umma (the Muslim people, the followers of the Prophet). "Many of the Muslims were eager for action," she writes, "and that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammand was determined to achieve victory by peaceful means."

It's worth noting the intellectual figures of the 19th century that Ruthven cites as hopeful directions in Islamic theology:

The intellectual groundwork for change has been laid in the works of modernist reformers who have been revisiting the sources of Islam for more than a century. They include Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) and Syed Ameer Ali (1848–1928) in India and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), the influential chief jurist of Egypt. The problems do not lie in the realm of theology, where Muslim intellectuals have charted retreats from the received certainties of the medieval paradigm that are just as ingenious and (for true believers) just as plausible as the efforts of Western theologians. The obstacle lies rather in the absence, in the majority traditions, of structures of leadership through which reformist ideas can be effected at the popular level.

But why he couldn't have given more emphasis there to some contemporary examples of reformist Islāmic theologians like Adkolkarim Soroush or Mohammed Arkoun, I don't know. He does mention Arkoun in connction with Hans Küng's comments on historical-critical analysis of the Qu'ran.

A strange article, all things considered.

Tags: hasan al-banna, islam, islamic law, mawdudi, sayyid qutb, sharia