Often heard today is that the Quran contains many verses authorizing, or justifying, violence, and therefore Islam is an inherently violent religion. This is both simplistic and wrong.
First, a hypothetical case often used in jurisprudence
courses (including my own at West Point).
President Reagan said that the one law everyone needs to follow is the
Ten Commandments (he did say this). One declares
“Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Mr.
Jones, a businessman, offered $10,000 to any of his married employees who obeyed
this law for at least ten years. After ten
years, three couples came to Mr. Jones to claim their reward.
The first couple told Mr. Jones that the wife had never had
relations with any other man after marriage, but the husband had had numerous
affairs. Nevertheless, the husband
stated that when this commandment was given to Moses, Talmudic law (indeed all law
throughout the Near East) held that adultery could only be committed by wives. Married men could have as many partners as
they desired without committing adultery [this is in fact correct]. Thus this commandment should be interpreted
as it was understood by everyone at the time it was revealed, and the couple
should receive the money since no adultery had been committed.
Should they?
(hint: US Supreme Court Justice
Scalia might say yes; laws are to be interpreted as they were understood when issued,
and if people don’t like the results, the laws should be changed through
democratic means, not by judicial interpretation. But Justice Breyer would probably say no, laws
are to be interpreted as they are understood by contemporary society).
The second couple told Mr. Jones that they both had many
affairs after their marriage, but it was an open marriage, there was no deceit,
and they loved each other and their children as much now as when they got
married. Since the purpose of the law
against adultery is to preserve and strengthen the family, this purpose was met,
and they should receive the money.
Should they?
(hint: some judges today do not
convict people for shoplifting if they exit a store without paying if they can
demonstrate that they honestly forgot that they had the item, since the purpose of the law is to deter
intentional theft, not punish innocent carelessness).
The final couple told Mr. Jones that neither of them had had
any partners other than their spouses since they married. The husband admitted, however, that he had
occasionally looked at other women and felt desire, though he had never acted
on that feeling.
Should they receive the money? (hint:
the Gospel of Matthew, Pope John Paul, and Jimmy Carter have all stated
that anyone who looks with lust on another person has committed adultery in
their heart).
Regardless of your own opinion in these cases, it should be evident that no law, however
“clear,” has only one single possible interpretation or “plain meaning.” Laws, like religious texts, need authorities
to interpret and apply them in various situations (e.g., judges and Supreme
Court Justices for U.S .law and the Constitution, the Pope for Roman Catholic
doctrine, and rabbis for Talmudic law).
These authorities apply many different methodologies to interpret texts. They also often change their interpretations
over time, and they often disagree among themselves. The process of interpreting texts (exegesis,
or more broadly hermeneutics) is complex and always evolving, but never simple.
This is no different when interpreting the Quran. The difficulty in Islam (more so for Sunnis
than for Shiites) is that there is no single person or group like a Pope or a
Supreme Court with authority to say what the current best interpretation of a
passage in the Quran or other text should be.
Thus some “cherry pick” verses; that is, they pluck them out of the text
and apply their own interpretations to justify their personal or political aims,
disregarding the entire corpus of hermeneutics that has developed around them
(this is called proof texting).
However, the majority of Muslims, both scholars and others, seek
a more authentic contextual interpretation of the Quran and other texts so as to
make them meaningful to their lives.
For example, the so-called “sword verse” (“so when the
sacred months have passed away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them”) is
sometimes cited to demonstrate that the Quran advocates violence. But according to virtually all scholarly
accounts, this verse was revealed late in the Prophet’s life when the small community
of Muslims at Medina was under attack by the Meccans (who worshipped the many idols
in the Kaaba, and were hence “idolaters”).
In the view of many who apply historical context and various other
interpretive methods to this passage, when that threat ended with the surrender
of the Meccans and other polytheists in the region, the non-historically
constrained principles of the Quran that command respect for the other
monotheistic faiths, and the exhortation that peace is better than fighting
except in self-defense, take precedence over this historically conditioned verse.
This is just one illustration of the obvious point that passages
extracted from the foundational texts of any legal system or religion can never
be understood as having a single “plain meaning.” Grammar, semantics, pragmatics, historicity,
and other linguistic and related considerations and approaches are all necessary
in interpreting the Quran, or for that matter any other foundational text. The Quran and other textual sources of Islam
have undergone centuries of study and interpretation by scholars (ulama) who sometimes, like the US
Supreme Court, disagree among themselves, and who have evolved different
understandings over time about the meaning of a given text.* It was this process that created the religious/legal
foundation of Muslim societies until relatively recently.
That foundation has now ruptured, with conflict, violence
and extremism in some parts of the Islamic world, with many historical, social,
political, and economic causes. But to
assert that Islam is an inherently violent religion because the Quran or the
Sunnah clearly (or “plainly”) state such and such about fighting and violence
(or any other matter) is inaccurate.
*To extract from the Quran
and other texts principles and rules of Islam and Islamic law, scholars have
traditionally applied numerous interpretive techniques, including al-dalalat (textual implications), naskh (abrogation), ijma (consensus), qiyas
(analogical reasoning), istihsan
(equity), istishab (presumption of
continuity), sadd al-dhara’i
(blocking the means), maslahaha
(public interest), and many others. There
is nothing simple or obvious about this process.
If Islam is not intrinsically violent (see above discussion on interpreting the Quran),
why is there now so much conflict in the Middle East (and in some other Islamic
areas and communities)? Obviously there
is no single answer, as history, politics, economics, and religion all play a
role. But an important factor, a broader
context in which these events are unfolding, is the current Islamic revolution.
In his two volume “Law and Revolution,” Harold Berman
described the modern West as the product of six great revolutions: the Papal
Revolution (1075-1122), the German Revolution(1517-1555) (also called the
Reformation), the English Revolution (1640-1685), the French and American
Revolutions of the late 18th century, and the (only partly
successful) Russian Revolution of the early 20th century. These were true revolutions in that each
ultimately affected every aspect of society (economically, politically,
legally, religiously, and culturally). Like
the process of scientific revolutions described by Thomas Kuhn in “The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions,” they erupted when existing societies could no
longer assimilate or constrain new economic, political, legal, religious and
cultural ideas and forces. They were
total revolutions as they created new forms of government, new structures of
economic, social, legal and state-church relations, new perspectives on history
and new sets of values and beliefs. Importantly
for this discussion, each revolution was marked by violence and war; each
sought legitimacy in a remote past; each took more than one generation to take
root; and each eventually reverted in part to its pre-revolutionary past but
also evolved in new ways thereafter. The
modern West is a product of these revolutions.
The Muslim world has undergone two such revolutions. The first was in the 7th century ce, when the Prophet Muhammad turned the
Arab world upside down. Islam required
equality instead of privilege, community instead of tribalism, monotheism
instead of polytheism, law instead of private vengeance. Like the western revolutions, this period was
marked by war and violence (during the Prophet’s lifetime and in the subsequent
Riddah wars), grounded itself on continuity with the past monotheistic
prophetic tradition of the Near East (Judaism and Christianity), took several
generations (roughly three centuries) to take root, and reverted in part to pre-Islamic
patterns of tribalism, kingship, privilege and local customs, all of which were
nevertheless transformed thereafter by the revolutionary ideas of Islam.
Most important, the religious/legal scholars (ulama), not the rulers, gained control
of the formulation and interpretation of Islamic law, which to a remarkable
degree (for the times) protected the people against the excesses of kings,
sultans, and other rulers, and forced those rulers, whose task was to enforce
rather than create the core religious law, to abide by that law and to restrain
their arbitrary power (or they would lose legitimacy and thus the source of
their power). The “golden age” of Islam in
science, literature, arts and commerce was made possible in large part by this
basic “rule of law.”
In the 19th and 20th centuries this
system collapsed. (Why the Muslim world,
unlike the West, did not experience other revolutions after the era of the
Prophet has many reasons; see Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong” and Timur
Kuran’s “The Long Divergence” for some of these reasons). Beginning around 1800, nearly all of the
Islamic world was colonized by European powers, especially by the British,
French, and Dutch. The Islamic law and its
morality was almost completely replaced by western law and colonial government,
partly because European colonialists desired a political and legal system more
favorable to their economic and imperial interests, and partly because many
Muslim reformers believed that European law was necessary for
modernization. The authority of the ulama and Islamic law disappeared, save
in a few areas such as family matters, and was replaced by western legal codes
and procedures, with rulers chosen or approved by the colonial powers.
The era of overt colonialism ended in the 20th
century, especially after World War II.
As the Europeans left, the void was filled by various political movements:
national socialists (e.g., Nasser in Egypt, the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria), modernists
(e.g., Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran), and others. These were authoritarian and dictatorial, but
unlike the classical era (and even under the Ottomans) there was no longer the ulama with their religious/legal authority
to restrain them. The rulers themselves now
“owned” the law, had almost absolute power, but with some exceptions failed to
deliver the kinds of societies most people expected.
The collapse of the old order, the effects of colonialism, the
failures of political leadership, and the imposition of modernity on
traditional societies led to societal pressures and fissures that, like each of
the western revolutions, finally erupted in the second Islamic Revolution,
beginning in 1979 in Iran and continuing throughout much of the Middle East and
North Africa today. Like the western
revolutions (especially the German one, leading many commentators like Robin Wright
and Reza Aslan to term the current revolution an “Islamic Reformation”), it is
accompanied by violence, and a search by some for a return to the remote
founding era of the Prophet (e.g., by the Salafists), or at least by many
others to the “traditional” mores and values of Islam (e.g., in dress and
religious observance).
Like the German and English Revolutions, when translations
and dissemination of the Bible broke the exclusive power of the Church to
interpret and proclaim its meaning, translations of the Quran and other Islamic
texts from the old Arabic which few could read (especially the vast majority of
Muslims who are not Arabs) into modern languages, and their spread through
modern media like the internet and TV, have enabled everyone to read, interpret,
and sometimes proclaim their own views of those texts. New figures have emerged to engage ordinary
Muslims with their faith in the modern world (such as popular Muslim
“televangelists” like Moez Masoud and Amr Khaled), or to claim leadership of
the revolution, ranging from modernists like the GΓΌlen movement to radical “puritans”
like Osama bin Laden.
History does not repeat itself, nor is it a predictor of
future events or outcomes. But like the great
western revolutions it is likely that the current Islamic revolution, already
characterized by violence and a reference to its remote past, will take more
than one generation to play out and take root, and will absorb existing traditions
and patterns, but will imprint those traditions and patterns with revolutionary
ideas. The results will take different forms
in different places, but the process will transform the Islamic world in every
respect.
Dr. Mark David Welton
Professor Emeritus
United States Military
Academy, West Point
Aside from the books and
authors mentioned above, all of whom are well worth reading, an excellent and
relatively short book on this subject is Noah Feldman’s “The Fall and Rise of
the Islamic State.”
