The Qur'an and Violence

I had planned for this month's post to be on the Qur'an and Jesus, since he shows up repeatedly throughout the early parts that I am reading. And I may still get around to that before July, but since many people are arguing about it right now, it seems like an important moment to talk about the complex relationship between the Qur'an, Islam, and violence. As someone who is currently reading the Qur'an, and about the Qur'an from experts in its history and interpretation, I feel slightly more qualified than the average American to speak on this subject. This does not, by any means, make me an expert.

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The Qur'an is often held up as a book that advocates violence. Certainly, the Qur'an has a distinct relationship with violence from that of, say, the New Testament, since it does explicitly advocate violent action, which by and large the New Testament does not. 

Many in the West have seized upon this fact and declared Islam a violent religion. They deliberately conflate the religion of a billion and a half souls with the violence committed by a few. "Muslims are committing violence, the Qur'an advocates violence, therefore Islam is inherently violent." Arguments like this, and they are everywhere today, are simplistic, as well as both logically and morally wrong. 

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If Islam is a religion of violence, in which one is commanded to commit violence in order to forcibly convert others or punish them for their unbelief, then it seems to me that about 1.6 billion people are doing it wrong, while only a few thousand people are doing it right. Arguing that this small minority of extremist groups are the true face of Islam, rather than an aberration with its roots outside the religion, is akin to claiming that the KKK is the true face of Christianity. This is a simple point that I have never seen adequately addressed by Islam's skeptics and haters. 

"But," you may ask, "what about all those violent verses in the Qur'an? Aren't ISIS or Al-Qaeda Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram just taking them literally? Doesn't that make them the most serious, hardcore, real Muslims, and the rest of the Islamic world just fakers?" 

It does not. It makes them cherry pickers! These groups desire strongly to commit violence. For a variety of reasons--political, economic, social--they have come to see acts of violence as the best way to ensure a good life and a better world for themselves and, perhaps, for others. They cloak these motives in religious rhetoric and the most violent pieces of their religious tradition--they may even believe that Islam requires them to do what they do--but this requires vast and willful ignorance of the rest of their religion. 

The Qur'an itself, the many traditions about the Prophet, and the huge breadth and depth of Islamic interpretation and law surrounding both of these, all place limits on the use of violence, limits which terrorists and other extremist groups must willfully ignore in order to justify their actions. Here are some limits to violence just within the Qur'an:

• It is unlawful to kill except for murder or "working corruption on the earth" (5:32). 
• Waging aggressive warfare is not allowed--if your enemy wishes for peace, you must agree. (2:190, 4:90, 8:61).
• Compelling people to convert to Islam, by violence or any other means, is forbidden (2:256, 10:99-100).

It is, of course, possible to argue that these verses are abrogated by others that urge Muslims to commit violence, and no doubt some have done so. It remains telling that the vast majority of Muslims both now and in the past have not committed acts of terror and violence in the name of their religion. 

Again: If Islam is a religion of violence, why are 1.6 billion Muslims so terrible at it? I say: Islam is a religion in which violence is permitted but held in check, and Muslims on the whole are actually pretty good at that. 

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"Why are the verses there in the first place?" you may ask. It's a fair question. This is where it helps to know a little history. 

The Muslim community was, from the first, threatened by outside forces. Nearby people, especially practitioners of traditional Arab religions (which Muslims dismissed as idolatry) were unhappy about this new religion--they felt threatened by it, since it told them their traditions, which they relied upon for a sense of identity, safety, and community, were not just incorrect, but against the will of God. Unsurprisingly, the early Muslims were targets of harassment, persecution, and violence. The early Muslim community was forced to take a stance on whether it would use force to defend itself. And, to a limited but still substantial extent, it was decided that it would.*

Though as a Christian, I believe that killing, even in self-defense, is wrong and often counterproductive, I don't begrudge the early Muslim community for deciding to defend themselves rather than die. After all, if you believe that you're on earth to warn people to lead better lives and follow God's way, and that no one else is really going to be able to tell people to do that, I can see how self-defense might be a noble and just act. If you're all dead, who's going to tell people the news? In this context, one can see why it might be a righteous act to struggle against one's attackers. 

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I don't believe that Islam is inherently dangerous. As with any system of belief--religious, political, or otherwise--there are dangerous ideas within Islam. Unlike explicitly hateful or destructive systems of thought, however, the violent material in the Qur'an and elsewhere is typically balanced out by more positive and fruitful material about tolerance, compassion, and peace. The decision to follow the former and ignore the latter is a choice, and a bad one--not a necessary and natural result of accepting Islam. 

I encourage readers to push back against anyone who suggests otherwise, this week or in the future. Saying that Islam is inherently violent is not a neutral point of view. It is exactly this rhetoric that has been, is being, and will be used to justify targeted assassinations, violence against civilians, and entangling and futile foreign wars, not to mention denial of basic human decency and safety to people in our own country. The existence of Muslim extremist groups is primarily the result of tribalism, political instability, economic woes, and other extra-religious forces. To blame the actions of so few on the faith of many is to put the many in danger that they do not deserve. 

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*This is one point where I think a study in contrasts between Christianity and Islam is interesting--both faced violence and persecution in their very early histories, and had different responses to it. In contrast to Muhammed, Jesus explicitly forbade violence against oppressors and commanded his followers to love their enemies. But, just as the decision to use force was a survival tactic for early Muslims, this was a survival tactic for the early Christian community. Jesus had seen that violent uprisings against Rome only led to the death and scattering of Jewish people, and he was telling his followers not to participate in the next one. When a number of Jews rebelled in 70 AD, Christians did not join them, and were spared much of the brutality that followed, culminating in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The historical difference is that the early Christians were, by and large, protected by a powerful state, even though it also harassed and occasionally persecuted them--all they had to do to survive as a group was not join in mass rebellions and draw negative attention to the community. The early Muslim community had no such protections--their surrounding societies and governments were much more fragmented and tribal, and it seems to me that self-defense or, perhaps, exile were the only real options for survival. Given that exile could just as easily mean starvation and death in a desert region, I can see why Muhammad and the early Muslims chose to fight it out.

Bibliography:

Cole, Juan. "Top Ten Ways Islamic Law Forbids Terrorism." Informed Comment. April 13, 2013. Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/ten-ways-islamic-forbids-terrorism.html. 

Dagli, Caner K. "Conquest and Conversion, War and Peace in the Quran." In The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al, 1805-1817. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Dagli, Caner K. "The Phony Islam of ISIS." The Atlantic. February 27, 2015. Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-muslims-really-want-isis-atlantic/386156/.

Jihad and the Islamic Law of War. Jordan: The Royal AAL Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2009. 

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.