Arguing the Just War in Islam.

Zuhur, Sherifa

Arguing the Just War in Islam, by John Kelsay. Harvard University Press, 2007. 263 pages, including index, $24.95, hardcover.

In a review of Arguing the Just War in Islam, Irshad Manji praised what she considers to be John Kelsay's attack on Islam (New York Times, Jan. 6, 2008), and, while I found the sensationalist assertions of the review off-putting and Manji's knowledge of Islamic doctrine limited, one must admit that lines are being drawn in the sand. Some academics are jumping on the bandwagon for the neo-Orientalist proposition of a "good Islam." While there are advantages and ambiguities in Kelsay's approach to Islamic thought here, his opening statement--that Islam is a contested notion (p. 9)--properly sets the stage for his discussion.

Kelsay takes on several projects in this book. First, it is a well-written introduction to Islamic thought and certain current issues that will appeal to general readers interested in understanding the rules and context of arguments about jihad. The book also aims to explain the processes, though not the detailed methodology, of shariah thinking or reasoning, which is the basis of fiqh, or jurisprudence, the making of Islamic law. Another goal is to consider the possibilities for "Muslim democrats" (all of them residents of the United States, whom Kelsay identifies as Abdulaziz Sachedina of the University of Virginia; Abdullahi al-Na'im, a former Republican Brother and legal expert from the Sudan; and Khaled Aboul Fadl, an Egyptian legal expert). Kelsay highlights their divergence from militancy, including that of al-Qaeda. Overall, Kelsay's book presents a linear intellectual history of Islam, explaining the Muslim "understanding" of its legacy of war and presenting short portraits of particular figures who are crucial to the debates about Islam and politics, Islam and the West and the ideological bent of activists from the Prophet Muhammad to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Texts like Ahmadinejad's letter to President George W. Bush can be read in different ways, and my reading is not Kelsay's. But his approach is useful in expressing particular arguments about the role of religion in society. The posing of Muslim democrats against traditionalists or militants, or what many of us consider moderate Islamists, is the most ambitious and troubling theme in the book. I believe the idea of Muslim democratic "springs" is an ephemeral consideration, if not a flavor dujour from 2004-5, because U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy in the Muslim world has been headed by "Mr. Magoo" (as Chas. Freeman put it to the Washington Affairs Council in June 2007). American efforts have been criticized as arrogant, neocolonialist and poorly implemented by many Muslims outside of the West. Kelsay could probably have gone beyond these few American-based thinkers, for there is a long-standing discussion of democracy and Islam within and beyond the Arab world, for instance, by Abdolkarim Soroush and others. Perhaps he does not because that would muddy the distinction between "militants" and "democrats."

While Kelsay effectively draws ideas to map a course towards dissension over the proper form of the Islamic state, politics and jihad, the simplification of certain figures and their historical context--Ibn Hanbal, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, and even Abdullahi al-Naim--necessarily excludes many important counterdiscussions, caveats and nuances. Characterizing Hamas solely by discussion of its now-defunct charter is a mistake. It does not permit readers to see the evolution of that group's approach to resistance, jihad and democracy. Kelsay portrays Hamas as falling clearly into the militants' camp.

The core of this book is the three chapters on war, resistance and Islamic ethics, and political traditions. Kelsay has previously produced excellent work within this "just war" conceptual framework, and his coverage here traverses the same ground as that of some others: Majid Khadduri, Sohail Hashmi, Youssef Aboul-Enein and myself, and, on the ethical principle of the hisba, Michael Cook. He rather closely replicates R. Peter's Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam in his discussion of jihad in Abd al-Salam Farag's Forgotten Duty and Shaykh al-Azhar's defense of Sadat. Kelsay also covers the legal approach to renegades or sedition, as presented by Khaled Abou El Fadl, admitting that the doctrine does not quite fit the contemporary militants.

The most important window onto the jihad controversy that Kelsay offers is that the rules and arguments that should constrain it emanate from within the Islamic intellectual tradition. If the desired end is an Islamic state or society, then wanton attacks on civilians either are not justified by, or cannot achieve, this end. This is the most compelling argument against the violence of groups like al-Qaeda and the strongest one in current de-radicalization efforts in Saudi Arabia and in the recantations of jihad written by incarcerated leaders of the Egyptian extremist groups.

One debatable line of argument that Manji inflates in her review is this: "Kelsay points out that the thugs [who killed President Sadat] resorted to 'emergency reasoning.'" In other words, when jihad is an individual duty, as when Muslims and their faith are under direct attack, it is not as justified as jihad as a collective duty, which must be invoked and led by a designated Muslim authority. This is a fault line between Kelsay and Islamic clerics who see this defensive Islam as legitimately arising when a Muslim authority does not or cannot wage jihad. Then, individuals must do so instead of the authority, and Bin Ladin's 1998 fatwa evokes this principle. Rather than "emergency" reasoning, it is a longstanding principle and not unreasonable that war-fighting could be either expansionary or a Muslim response to invasion or state terror. Because jihad is a response to state terror in the Palestinian case, Shaykh Qaradawi--arguably one of the most popular figures in the Muslim world today--argues that this form of jihad in the Palestinian case is defensible, while he strongly condemned the attacks of 9/11. Kelsay leads the reader to disapprove of this longstanding justification for jihad. What is worse, he may bolster those who condemn both conditions for jihad, and the possibility of unjust rule.

Sherifa Zuhur, research professor, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College