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Reflections on Islam and Pacifism Australasian Journal of Human Security, Vol 2, No 1, 2006 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Southern Queensland ePrints Reflections on Islam and pacifism MALCOLM BROWN1 Abstract This paper contends that the discourses that assume or assert that Islam and pacifism are incompatible are mistaken. They are premised on a homogenising discourse of Islam and of pacifism, inattention to Islam as an extant (rather than abstract) phenomenon, logical inconsistencies, and a limited Qur’anic hermeneutic. In contrast, I argue that Islam and pacifism are compatible, because pacifism has different meanings, because of de facto pacifism in Islam, because the logic of Islam, in certain cases, points towards pacifism, because pacifism can be discerned in the Qur’an and Hadith, because there is a concept of the secular within Islam that allows for pacifism, and because it is the image of Muslim violence that is primarily responsible for the belief that Islam and pacifism are incompatible. INTRODUCTION That Islam and pacifism are incompatible is a common assertion or assumption. This discourse of incompatibility takes different forms, which we can group into three types. Firstly, pacifism is represented as incompatible with the core Islamic tradition. This tradition provides an example of the Prophet as warrior, and an entirely understandable suggestion that all Muslims should seek to follow his example. The Qur’an explicitly sanctions the use of force in self-defence, to resist injustice, and to ensure that Islam can be practised freely. Thus, jihad can take the form of military struggle, and, in the appropriate circumstances, is a duty for all Muslims. Because pacifism holds that military force can never be justified, this line of argument goes, Islam and pacifism are incompatible. Secondly, there are various conflicts around the world that include people who participate, in some sense, in the name of Islam. In Samuel Huntington’s words: ‘Islam has bloody borders’ (Huntington 1993: 35) – with Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Western capitalism and nation states, secularism, Buddhism, and more. This is represented as indicative of an essential bellicosity in Islam – whether in the religion, culture, or Muslim psyche - that is manifestly incompatible with pacifism. Thirdly, pacifism depends on a separation of the sphere of religion from the (secular) sphere of society, and because no such separation is possible in Islam, Islam is logically incompatible with pacifism. This argument was made by David Martin in his 1 I would like to thank Dr Rebecca Hazleden, Dr Charles Kurzman, Professor Robert Miles and Dr Nigel Pleasants, as well as staff and postgraduates in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland, for comments on earlier (written and oral) versions of this paper. 5 AJHS-Vol02-01-2nd.indd 5 4/27/06 1:50:58 PM 6 Brown classic text on pacifism: Islam is ‘a lay religion which frowns upon religious orders’ (Martin 1965: 21), and it is such orders that have the potential to formulate the sort of otherworldly perfectionism that makes pacifism possible. It is my contention, which I expound in this paper, that these discourses are all mistaken. They are premised on a homogenising discourse of Islam and of pacifism, inattention to Islam as an extant (rather than abstract) phenomenon, logical inconsistencies, and a limited Qur’anic hermeneutic. In contrast, I argue that Islam and pacifism are compatible, for reasons that are here grouped into six sections: the meaning of pacifism; de facto pacifism in Islam; the logic of Islam (which, in certain cases, points towards pacifism); the core tradition (that is, pacifism in the Qur’an and Hadith); the concept of the secular (I argue, against Martin, that there is a concept of the secular in Islam, and so, even if the separation of the religious and secular spheres is a necessary precondition for pacifism, pacifism is still logically possible); and the image of Muslim violence (which image, I contend, is primarily responsible for the belief that Islam and pacifism are incompatible). I will discuss these points, in turn, shortly. Before doing so, it seems appropriate to consider the question of what right a ‘non- Muslim’ (like myself) has to write about such issues. This is particularly important because this paper includes discussion of the ‘logic of Islam’ and the ‘core tradition’; in other words, I permit myself to interpret the core texts and principles of Islam, and to draw conclusions about their meaning. Some people would (and do) argue that I have no right to do so, because I am not a Muslim – at least not in the conventionally understood sense of the word – and, as such, I have not committed myself to the Qur’an as divine revelation, to the truth of Islam, or even to its relevance. Ijtihad, the struggle to interpret the requirements of Islam-as-practice, is properly an Islamic exercise. In contrast, so the argument runs, I am not committing myself to anything by writing this article; I am merely performing an academic exercise that seeks to impose commitments on others (but, to emphasise the point, not myself). It is not hard to be sympathetic with this argument, but it must be rejected, at least in its ‘hard’ form, for three reasons. Firstly, the argument presented in this article is permissive, not prescriptive. It argues that Islam and pacifism are compatible, certainly not that Islam, correctly understood, necessarily entails pacifism. Some parts of the argument contend that Islam logically entails pacifism, but I do not claim that there is no counter-argument. In fact, the purpose of this article, as I have conceived it, is primarily to undermine an idea of Islam as monolithic. This is a project that is central to the critique of Orientalism, many Muslims have commented on its necessity, and it is hard to see how it can be undertaken without interpreting the texts and principles of Islam itself. Secondly, Edward Said explicitly, and rightly, rejects ‘the limited proposition that only . a Muslim [can write] about Islam’ (Said 1995: 322; see also Said 1985: 27). A claim that Islam is necessarily opposed to pacifism is an attempt to impose a boundary around Islam, to exclude a group or groups of people from membership of that category. But these boundaries must be questioned, because such questioning is essential both to the social scientific understanding of Islam and to the critique of Orientalism. Therefore, a social scientist who is interested in Islam, or a critic of Orientalism, must be able to examine these boundaries. In any case, if only Muslims are capable of understanding Islam, then it must also be the case that only ‘non-Muslims’ are AJHS-Vol02-01-2nd.indd 6 4/27/06 1:50:58 PM Reflections on Islam and pacifism 7 capable of understanding ‘non-Muslim’ representations of Islam, and, since ‘non-Muslim’ representations of Islam are an essential part of my argument, I as a ‘non-Muslim’ am qualified to write this article in a way that Muslim writers are not. This is clearly untenable. Thirdly, it is necessary for other ‘non-Muslims’—including, I hope, some readers of this article—to understand that speaking (or writing) the words ‘Islam’ and ‘peace’ in the same sentence is not merely a part of the discourse of an anaemic ‘lowest-common-denominator’ civic religion, nor is it part of an attempt to provide ‘excuses’ for acts of terrorism or to mislead people about the ‘true’ nature of Islam. It would seem idealistic if I were to claim that such is the objective of this article, and it would be misleading, because my objectives are more straightforwardly academic. However, it does provide much of the inspiration for this article, and why I believe that the project of highlighting areas of compatibility between Islam and pacifism is a worthwhile project. THE MEANING OF PACIFISM The above discourses of incompatibility, particularly the first and third, suffer from a narrow conception of pacifism. The essential distinction is between absolute (or universal) pacifism on the one hand, and vocational pacifism on the other. The former denotes a form of pacifism that is held to be normative for a whole society and indeed for the whole of humanity. The latter denotes pacifism as a lifestyle for a group of people, such as a monastic order. It was only around the beginning of the twentieth century that universal pacifism became socially significant, and thus the term ‘pacifism’ was born (originally in French, but soon afterwards in English and other languages). What had existed beforehand, for the most part, was vocational pacifism. So religious virtuosi (to use Max Weber’s term), such as the monks and nuns of Catholicism and Buddhism, were expected to live as pacifists, but this was not held to be a normative principle for the State or for secular society. It was part of what set the religious virtuosi apart from that society. Where whole religious communities—such as the Quakers or Anabaptists—were pacifist, this was also a case of vocational pacifism. True, it was not just the leaders or virtuosi who would live as pacifists, but pacifism was a part of the vocation of the entire community, it was a function of their self-definition as ‘a peculiar people’, a religious community set apart from the world. In other words, pacifism was a part of what distinguished them from non-Quakers or non- Anabaptists, and it was essential to this rigid distinction between the faithful and the world that pacifism could not be a universal norm, valid for humanity as a whole.
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