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