Violence and Islam

Violence is a commonly misunderstood phenomenon. It is rarely discussed in communities or societies .Other than the fact that it is occurring on a daily basis as seen in the news. Possibly many people have become de-sensitized to it because it has become an integral part of existence.

The violence that we observe in nature is often imitated by humans in their own lives. On a domestic level, siblings compete for attention from their parents, they yearn for love and affection and covet each other. This often leads to violence between siblings but is not considered out of the norm and often referred to as sibling rivalry. On a global level, the dominant view today in world politics is that might is right. The nation with the most money and the biggest army is seen as a superpower.

Williams states in his article, Legitimate and Illegitimate Uses of Violence, that “Human affairs are marked by frequent violent encounters. Some violence is condemned by common consent; in other instances violence is socially condoned, approved or regarded as obligatory.”

In society there are complex layers and undertones at work which all contribute to some form of violence or another. The system of governing, the institutions in place and the laws that have developed over time contribute to the marginalization or impoverishment of minorities. The cultural traditions and customs prohibit some groups from active and positive participation in the society and can lead to emotional, psychological or spiritual violence.

Of course, the culmination of a number of factors may result in collective violence against another race or nation or sometimes within nations. This form of violence, normally known as war, is legitimized in the eyes of the law and the people.
What in times of peace would be deemed as murder in times of war is legitimized and sometimes glorified. This is because the killing was for a cause. The rhetoric of presidents and leaders of states often project the message that they are protecting people’s freedoms. Often we justify war on the basis of self-defence, pre-emptive strikes, self-preservation or territoriality. It can also be a religious cause such as in the Crusades of medieval Europe which used Christendom’s claim to the holy lands of Jerusalem and the Levant as an excuse for war with the Near East and the Muslim Arabs.

Violence, it appears, has been with us since the dawn of humankind. Through biblical texts we learn that in Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition that the first religious community of humans, through the acts of Cain and Abel were based on violence. In pagan mythology there are countless legends of violent heroics and tests of courage that are based on violence. Much of this mythology has been handed down to Western societies through the ancient Greeks and Romans; the Bacchic rituals, the legends of Oedipus and Electra, the cruelty of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon as well as the wonderful tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.

Wars and large scale violence is not limited to any particular period in history or to a specific cultural or political group. Williams says, “large scale conflicts must be considered normal in the sense of high incidence and prevalence throughout history, in all parts of the world, among peoples of all major cultures.”

Between 1484 and 1970 there were a total of 315 major wars and war connected deaths from World Wars I and II were close to 90 million. From 1480 to 1941 the number of major battles fought among European powers alone were over 4700 or about 10.5 battles per year over the centuries. From 500 BC to 1925 the histories of Greece, Rome, Austria, Germany, England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Russia exhibit a total of 967 major interstate wars.

The earliest modern formulation of the inter-relationship between human nature, war and the constitution of society was put forward by Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan published in 1651. In brief, Hobbes argued that the nature of man was the source of a general societal condition of war (or propensity to war) that gave rise to the need for an overarching state form of government in order to guarantee the peace, and that such government was achievable by the application of reason. While the condition whereby, “every man is enemy to every man” was initially posited by Hobbes on the basis of logical deduction of ethnographic tribes.

Violence is a universal phenomenon. No religion, no culture or civilisation owns violence, no one is immune from it and it has been so much a part of human existence that we have forgotten just how we acquired it. Violence in society, as Girard asserts, is found in the origin of ritual and sacrifice.

Ritualistic practices have strong propensities towards violence based on this notion of sacrifice. Pagan mythology was full of stories about the Gods and humans appeasing them. Through the legitimization of cultural rites and practices violence has been substituted with a surrogate victim or avenue of venting the aggression that builds up in a community. The sacrifice of Jesus, for Christians, is the surrogate victim who pays for our sins. The killing of Osama Bin Laden serves as penitence required for the USA for September 11 attacks.

“Islam’s early struggle, within a century of the Prophet’s death, saw it become one of the largest empires ever known, stretching from North Africa to India.”
This great achievement still bewilders many scholars today. There are many who use this point to illustrate that Islam is a violent religion and that jihad is based on offensive battles of expansion.

By the time of the classical Muslim historian al-Tabari’s death in 923, jihad wars had expanded the Muslim empire from Portugal to India. Subsequent Muslim conquests continued in Asia, as well as on Christian eastern European lands. The Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in addition to parts of Poland and Hungary, were also conquered and Islamized.
When the Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, over a millennium of jihad had transpired.

However, the early expansion of the Muslim Arabs, was not an offensive imperialistic manouvre as historians like Lewis, Cook and commentators like Pipes have interpreted. The Arabs were compelled to protect themselves from threatening empires like Egypt, Persia and Byzantine. It was obligatory for Muslims to fight polytheists and to purge the Arabian peninsula of polytheism. The world was seeped in ignorance and practiced barbaric customs. It was incumbent on Muslims to free the oppressed people from the shackles of barbarism and allow people to develop in an environment of spiritual freedom. In the context of the time, this was seen as permissible.

Twentieth century Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb in his essay on jihad advocates that in order to obtain a just society one must be free to choose his faith and to attain such freedom, Islamic states were required to use force.

He says:
The very purpose of this movement (Islam) is to set human beings free from the yoke of human enslavement and make them serve the One and Only God.

It is true that the early Muslims embarked on a Just War in which it saw the liberation of certain areas as an obligation. This was not only to ensure the spread of Islam but to create a lasting and just peace.

Today, the world has changed, one would like to believe, for the better. Improvements in scientific research and education have allowed most societies to live with high moral and ethical standards. Although, Islamic societies today, are a far cry from the Golden Age of Islam.

Esposito and Donohue claim that “Muslim self-understanding is based upon the Qur’an and this early glorious history.”

In many ways this has also contributed to its present situation in which Muslims find themselves. However, unlike the Western liberal view: basic to Muslim identity was the belief that the divinely mandated vocation to realise God’s will in history was communal as well as individual. There was an organic holistic approach toward life in which religion was intertwined with politics, law and society.

Islamic societies flourished unhindered for almost five centuries until the first Crusade. This was a turning point in Muslim-Christian relations and the Mongol invasion put an end to the long period of prosperity under the Abbasids. The emergence, firstly, of the Seljuk Turks then the Ottomans saw further expansion into Europe. For almost a millennium Islam dominated the region from Spain in the west to India in the east. Great advancements were made in science, medicine, technology, architecture and art. However, by the middle of the Seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was in decline whilst Europe was experiencing the Enlightenment.
Muslim scholars who were so active in the first millennium of Islam’s birth had closed the doors of intellectual reasoning and search for knowledge. One of the great ironies of the world’s history is that Muslim advancement suddenly halted and the wheels literally fell off.

Ozay Mehmet, in Islamic Identity and Development; Studies of the Periphery, attributes that sudden change to the ulema or Islamic scholarly class, closing the doors to ijtihad or intellectual reasoning;

The role of Muslim scholars and jurists, the ulema, is of special importance in the explanation of Islamic underdevelopment. In the tenth century, at the height of Islamic civilisation, they declared that the Gate of ijtihad (independent analysis) was closed, that is, that all possible questions had been answered and henceforth only learning by imitation would be permissible.

This, Mehmet believes had irreversible repercussions for the global Islamic community, far more damaging than the interference from outside.

Violence is no more intrinsic to Islam as it is in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism.

Violence in the Middle East, is usually depicted in the media as a militant Islamic struggle against the West and its puppet regimes. It is a struggle between the haves and the have-nots, the controlled and the controllers. The media cite jealousy and hatred as the motives behind such struggles. Of course the Israeli-Arab conflict(s) have been used as the central grievance for the instability and violence in the region.

Lawrence, in Shattering the Myth states:

If violence pervades Muslim public life throughout this century, it is because violence pervades the world order, old and new.

The complex nature of European developments of violence was inevitably exported to Islamic societies in the early 20th century. Berman in his book Terror and Liberalism espouses the view that Europe’s secularization led to a violent pathway. The advent of Liberalism meant total freedom that resulted in murder and suicide. In citing Tariq Ramadan and Albert Camus, he states there are fundamental clashes in view between European and Islamic approaches to violence through totalitarianism:

Tariq Ramadan observes that in looking for the roots of totalitarianism in mythology and literature, Camus confined himself to the myths and literary classics of the West. Civilisation to Camus meant Western culture and did not mean Islam.

However, both philosophers, he claims, “recognized that totalitarianism and terrorism are one and the same. If only we could discover the roots of totalitarianism, we would have discovered the roots of terror.”
The Promethean view of life that is prevalent in Western society is based on the rebellious attitude of man. Ramadan explains that the basic difference between Muslim thought and Christian is that “In Islam there is no tendency to rebel. Submission is the road to social justice, to a contented soul, and to harmony with the world.”

Islam’s greatest model of submission is exemplified in the compliance of Abraham the father of Islam. There was no rebellion, no questioning, strictly submission to the will of God:

Camus invoked the myth of Prometheus the Titan, who goes further than Abraham and in a spirit of radical action, takes that final step into full scale rebellion. Prometheus steals Zeus’ fire and gives it to man. He is punished horribly for his transgression – and yet the Titan’s transgression is man’s benefit.

The development of Europe towards the separation of religion from the affairs of the state was the turning point in which Islam and Christian Europe diverged. “That was the new twisted impulse in Europe- the rebellion that begins with freedom and ends with crime.”

Berman believes that once Liberalism took root on the continent great leaps in progress occurred in the West. It “was due to one all-powering principle. It was the recognition that all of life is not governed by one single all-knowing and all-powerful authority – by a divine force.”

Modern day Islamic nations have inherited a libertarian view towards violence:
Then again during its first 500 years of world domination Europe did export innumerable customs and ideas to every corner of the globe; and having exported everything else, why should Europe have been unable to export its spirit of self destruction, too?

In the Twentieth century many European ideologies spread to Islamic societies; Marxism, socialism, fascism and in particular nationalism in the form of pan-Arabism. Whilst many of these ideologies never really made lasting impacts on these societies, modernity’s pressures and the shrinking world placed pressures on the systems that these nations were to operate under. The socialist movements of the early Twentieth century influenced Arab politics for the most part of their existence after independence from colonial rule but a concurrent movement which Berman refers to as Islamist was also developing with greater emphasis on social welfare and religious quality. They remained for the most part apolitical although their influence was great.

Great modern thinkers such as Al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Hasan Al Banna were the pioneers of religious and political reform. Their “Islamism” led to great changes in thinking and in adapting the way Islam dealt with the challenges of modernity. These scholars tried to revive the passion in the hearts of the people and to urge them not to abandon their Islamic principles and practices and not to fall for the temptations of the materialistic and decadent West.

In Egypt the Islamist movement was founded in 1928 as a strictly religious society called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood was devoted to charitable works and the encouragement of an Islamic lifestyle, and did not present itself as any kind of political organization at all, fascist or otherwise.

Sayyid Qutb who was born in 1906 was one of Egypt’s leading thinkers in the Muslim Brotherhood. He wrote In the Shade of the Quran: Qutb explains that a proper understanding of the Quran can only be achieved in an atmosphere of serious struggle and only in a ferocious campaign for Islam not by someone at ease in his chair.

He thought that man’s inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating, “suffering from affliction, distress, nervous and psychological diseases, perversion, idiocy, insanity and crime”.

Man was roving “without destination”: killing his monotony and weariness by such means as exhaust the soul, body and nerves; adopting narcotics, alcohol, and the like perverted dark ideas, desperate and elusive doctrines such as existentialism and its disastrous analogous ideologies.

In this sense Islam was the panacea for man’s woes. He truly believed that Islam, if correctly followed, possessed the answer. Qutb described Islam as:
a religion that does not deny man any of his natural tendencies or instincts, or pretend to achieve human purity by suppressing or destroying man’s basic human needs. Rather Islam disciplines, guides and fosters these desires and needs in a manner that reinforces man’s humanity and invigorates his consciousness of, and relationship with God. It further seeks to blend physical and sensual tendencies with human and religious
emotions, thus bringing together the transient pleasures and the immutable values of human life into one harmonious and congruent system that will render man worthy of being God’s representative on Earth.

The only way to achieve this heightened state of consciousness was through a movement which if need be, had to resort to force in order to succeed. He was very critical of the West and Christianity, especially in their dominance of Islamic societies and their resources.

“In this unfortunate fashion”, he said, “the schizophrenic aspect of Christian thought… spread into the realm of scientific knowledge. Everything that Islam knew to be one the Christian Church divided into two.” This is why secularism would not work in Islamic societies as they could not see the difference between politics and religion, they were inexorably one. Freedom in a liberal society seemed to Qutb no freedom at all:

Qutb considered that in a liberal society religion has been reduced to a set of rituals and private morality, as if the individual human heart were the final arbiter of moral behaviour. But the human heart is not the final arbiter. The final arbiter is God.

Violence is a commonly misunderstood phenomenon. It is rarely discussed in communities or societies other than the fact that it is occurring on a daily basis as seen in the news. Possibly many people have become de-sensitized to it because it has become an integral part of existence.

He says:
The very purpose of this movement (Islam) is to set human beings free from the yoke of human enslavement and make them serve the One and Only God.

Esposito and Donohue claim that “Muslim self-understanding is based upon the Qur’an and this early glorious history.”

This, Mehmet believes had irreversible repercussions for the global Islamic community, far more damaging than the interference from outside.

Violence is no more intrinsic to Islam as it is in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism.

Lawrence, in Shattering the Myth states:

If violence pervades Muslim public life throughout this century, it is because violence pervades the world order, old and new.

Islam’s greatest model of submission is exemplified in the compliance of Abraham the father of Islam. There was no rebellion, no questioning, strictly submission to the will of God:

In the Twentieth century many European ideologies spread to Islamic societies; Marxism,
socialism, fascism and in particular nationalism in the form of pan-Arabism. Whilst many of these ideologies never really made lasting impacts on these societies, modernity’s pressures and the shrinking world placed pressures on the systems that these nations were to operate under. The socialist movements of the early Twentieth century influenced Arab politics for the most part of their existence after independence from colonial rule but a concurrent movement which Berman refers to as Islamist was also developing with greater emphasis on social welfare and religious quality. They remained for the most part apolitical although their influence was great.

Sayyid Qutb who was born in 1906 was one of Egypt’s leading thinkers in the Muslim
Brotherhood. He wrote In the Shade of the Quran: Qutb explains that a proper understanding of the Quran can only be achieved in an atmosphere of serious struggle and only in a ferocious campaign for Islam not by someone at ease in his chair.

He says:
The very purpose of this movement (Islam) is to set human beings free from the yoke of human enslavement and make them serve the One and Only God.

Esposito and Donohue claim that “Muslim self-understanding is based upon the Qur’an and this early glorious history.”

This, Mehmet believes had irreversible repercussions for the global Islamic community, far more damaging than the interference from outside.

Violence is no more intrinsic to Islam as it is in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism.

Lawrence, in Shattering the Myth states:

If violence pervades Muslim public life throughout this century, it is because violence pervades the world order, old and new.

Islam’s greatest model of submission is exemplified in the compliance of Abraham the father of Islam. There was no rebellion, no questioning, strictly submission to the will of God:

In the Twentieth century many European ideologies spread to Islamic societies; Marxism,
socialism, fascism and in particular nationalism in the form of pan-Arabism. Whilst many of these ideologies never really made lasting impacts on these societies, modernity’s pressures and the shrinking world placed pressures on the systems that these nations were to operate under. The socialist movements of the early Twentieth century influenced Arab politics for the most part of their existence after independence from colonial rule but a concurrent movement which Berman refers to as Islamist was also developing with greater emphasis on social welfare and religious quality. They remained for the most part apolitical although their influence was great.

Sayyid Qutb who was born in 1906 was one of Egypt’s leading thinkers in the Muslim
Brotherhood. He wrote In the Shade of the Quran: Qutb explains that a proper understanding of the Quran can only be achieved in an atmosphere of serious struggle and only in a ferocious campaign for Islam not by someone at ease in his chair.

In this sense Islam was the panacea for man’s woes. He truly believed that Islam, if correctly followed, possessed the answer. Qutb described Islam as:
a religion that does not deny man any of his natural tendencies or instincts, or pretend to achieve human purity by suppressing or destroying man’s basic human needs. Rather Islam disciplines, guides and fosters these desires and needs in a manner that reinforcesman’s humanity and invigorates his consciousness of, and relationship with God. It further seeks to blend physical and sensual tendencies with human and religious
emotions, thus bringing together the transient pleasures and the immutable values of human life into one harmonious and congruent system that will render man worthy of being God’s representative on Earth.