Religion professor asks: How Just Is Islam's Just-War Tradition?
Last year, John Kelsay went to Oman to talk about war. The first night there, speaking at the Grand Mosque in Muscat, he faced a large audience of students studying religion. Discussing the attacks of September 11, 2001, Kelsay argued that the perpetrators had violated the noble tradition of jihad, which is based on legal judgments about the ethics of armed struggle that stretch back to Islam's formative years. Calling on his listeners to challenge the self-styled "jihadis" who claimed that flying airplanes into the World Trade Center's twin towers and other acts of private warfare, vengeance, and terrorism were justified by traditional texts, Kelsay urged the students to consider how the concept of jihad has evolved and why it has become such a hotly contested topic.
A professor of religion at Florida State University, Kelsay is one of a small but growing group of scholars, mostly in the West, who compare Western and Islamic traditions on the morality of warfare. That has drawn them into a debate over the meaning of jihad — a debate, they say, that has major consequences for the future of democracy in the Middle East.
In his recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Harvard University Press), Kelsay explains that, in earlier centuries, radical claims were kept in check by recognized scholars who provided authoritative interpretations of Shariah, or Islamic law. Today, however, the postcolonial Muslim world is racked by a crisis of political and religious legitimacy. Into the void has stepped a literate, professional class of devout Muslims — most prominently Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — who reject the precedents of generations of elite Muslim jurists.
The contemporary jihadi movement is, in effect, attempting to claim the mantle of the Islamic just-war tradition, Kelsay says. Because the jihadists draw on such deep roots within Islam, their arguments are not easy to dismiss. "That is why it is not sufficient to say that they hijacked Islam or that they exist outside an Islamic framework. It is more complex than that," Kelsay says.
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
A professor of religion at Florida State University, Kelsay is one of a small but growing group of scholars, mostly in the West, who compare Western and Islamic traditions on the morality of warfare. That has drawn them into a debate over the meaning of jihad — a debate, they say, that has major consequences for the future of democracy in the Middle East.
In his recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Harvard University Press), Kelsay explains that, in earlier centuries, radical claims were kept in check by recognized scholars who provided authoritative interpretations of Shariah, or Islamic law. Today, however, the postcolonial Muslim world is racked by a crisis of political and religious legitimacy. Into the void has stepped a literate, professional class of devout Muslims — most prominently Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — who reject the precedents of generations of elite Muslim jurists.
The contemporary jihadi movement is, in effect, attempting to claim the mantle of the Islamic just-war tradition, Kelsay says. Because the jihadists draw on such deep roots within Islam, their arguments are not easy to dismiss. "That is why it is not sufficient to say that they hijacked Islam or that they exist outside an Islamic framework. It is more complex than that," Kelsay says.