Download PDF | Robert Gleave, István Kristó-Nagy - Violence in Islamic Thought from the Qur’an to the Mongols-Oxford University Press (2015).
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INTRODUCTION
The topic of Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought (LIVIT) calls for an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical approach. This has been the underlying methodological assumption within the project which bore this name. Amongst the products of that three-year project is a series of collected studies by established and emerging scholars in the field, examining how Muslim thinkers have conceptualised violence and categorised (morally and legally) acts of violence. In this opening chapter, Istvan Krist6-Nagy first explores how violence in Islamic thought can be set against a wider consideration of violence in human history. It is this comparative perspective which contextualises not only this volume, but also the two subsequent volumes in the LIVIT series. In the second half of this chapter, Robert Gleave explains how this volume is structured, addressing the different approaches used by the contributors, and examines the different ways in which violence can be categorised.
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I: VIOLENCE, OUR INHERENT HERITAGE
Before exploring our social, religious, intellectual or moral history, understanding our biological history is essential. Medieval philosophy, both Muslim and Christian, generally accepted an idea derived from Aristotle? and illustrated on the ‘Porphyrian tree’:? man is a rational animal.t We might, indeed, prefer to think that we are primarily spiritual, rational and moral beings. Our behaviour, however, does not always correspond to such an angelic ideal. If we misapprehend our essential nature, we can hardly control it. Understanding how we are, and reasoning about how we want to be, can get us closer to the latter.
This introductory study is intended neither to offer a survey of the immense scholarly literature on violence, nor to represent a set of ideas agreed to by all the contributors to this series. It is a summary of my highly personal and by-nomeans definitive thoughts. The first section is composed of two parts, in which I argue that all our violence is rooted in our common genetic heritage. The second section of this study is composed of five parts, in which, with a focus on violence, I discuss how our cultures, including religion in general and Islam in particular, developed in interaction with our biological heritage and our social and civilisational evolution.
OUR BIOLOGICAL HERITAGE
Violence in the Living World
While providing an absolute definition to a concept such as violence is impossible, striving for a working definition can help our comprehension. For our purposes, it might be useful to restrict the use of the term to living beings, thus our working definition for violence can be any detrimental act performed by a living being against a living being. As non-living beings do not have feelings, violence is probably not the right term to apply to their harm or destruction, except when living beings are also touched. When a stone is shattered by another stone, it is just movement and change.
The distinction between what belongs to the realm of living or non-living beings can, however, be uneasy: for instance, one is inclined to term as violence the mutilation of dead bodies, demolition of monuments or oppression of thoughts. All beings, including living ones, are systems, which are composed of smaller systems and constitute bigger ones. In fact, the borders of an individual living being are as impossible to define as the borders of any other physical body. A living being can do violence to itself, parts of it can do violence against the whole and against each other, while the whole can do violence against its parts as well; suffice to mention the complex intra-individual struggles in cases of autoimmune diseases or cancer.
Neither is it clear whether an action against a living being means one against its interests or intentions. An action might serve one’s interests even if it is performed against one’s intentions. The problem of sacrifice and self-sacrifice is also related to that of interests and intentions, for in such cases the violence is committed with the intention of avoiding major harm and/or achieving a major benefit. Insisting on the intentionality of the action would pose other questions. Can we label a virus attack on a host cell as intentional? Can we describe as unintentional a man’s action of walking on a rainy night and inadvertently killing snails when he knew that snails proliferate on such nights? The concept of violence escapes clear definition. Nonetheless, we can perhaps conclude that violence is a biological phenomenon, rooted in the constant change which runs the world.
Without trying to elaborate on the infinite complexity of interactions between living beings, it is obvious that competition and predation involve violence. Eating usually harms the eaten, though there are many exceptions, such as scavenging, consumption of ripe fruits and drinking one’s mother’s milk. Life is replete with violence. All living beings, even plants, apply it in a direct or indirect way and it is likewise applied against all of them.
Violence exists within a species as well: intra-species predation (cannibalism) is rare, because species that eat their own kind risk dying out, but competition is ubiquitous. Nevertheless, intra- and inter-species cooperation is also omnipresent. The most obvious example is that individuals of many species need a mate to produce an offspring. Even the violence effected by individuals or groups of a species against those of another can be considered as collaboration between the two species, for the predators play a crucial role in the natural selection of the prey and keep their population healthy.
Intra- and inter-species collaboration has been always vital. Nevertheless, the level varies greatly from species to species, and even individuals or groups of the same species can behave differently depending on the circumstances. In general, collaboration becomes more and more flexible with the higher intellectual abilities of the participants. Intelligence allows greater adaptation to challenges during the lifetime of the individual, and if it is paired with communicative abilities, its results can be accumulated as culture. Primates are usually social animals. Reciprocity and fairness, empathy and compassion play an important role in their behaviour.> Fairness could be easily equated with egalitarianism, but hierarchy is deeply rooted in animal communities. In primate communities composed of many families, even a hierarchy between the families can exist: the phenomenon that a ‘highborn’ neonate has a higher social status than a ‘lowborn’ adult does not appear only in human societies. Breaking social norms is avenged in animal as well as in human societies.°
Revenge is a deep-rooted behaviour. It is an evident deterrent and its efficiency is enhanced by advertising and the ability of the potential offender to understand that causing harm to the offended will not be inconsequential. Innumerable invertebrate and vertebrate species display their real or pretended ability to harm those trying to harm them. Vengeance threatens to strike the offender even after the offence; it is an immediate or delayed riposte to an attack. To flee or fight when facing violence is often a choice to consider. Seeking vengeance might be also more harmful than useful. It is senseless to fight or seek vengeance against enemies and rivals that are too strong. Moreover, shared interests might be more important than revenge if the violence happens between individuals of the same species and this species is characterised by intensive social behaviour. Reactions to violence of individuals of such species, including primates, vary between flight or fight and seeking vengeance or reconciliation.’
Violence in Humans
Humans are social animals. We are characterised by low individual and high group aggression. Murder is atypical, but war is typical. Violence against personal enemies within a group is condemned, but against unknown members of another group is heroism.
Whilst humans, individually, are not the strongest animals physically, in a group, they form a fearsome force. The relative weakness of the individual shows the strength of the group, which is able to defend its members. The fact that women and their children can survive a long labour and the subsequent years while human babies are still highly dependent demonstrates the group’s capability to protect them against any predators.
We are social beings, highly dependent on one another, and this explains the low level of internal violence in a human group. But our violent behaviour against alien groups is also genetically coded. For most of its history, humanity lived in small groups of relatives. Human groups are flexible and can survive and flourish in different habitats. These habitats were nevertheless limited, thus human groups rivalled each other. Due to this group rivalry, group violence was biologically rewarded. When a more aggressive group chased away or massacred an adjacent group, they had the chance to acquire resources. Their descendants populated the lands of the defeated and their genes, including those responsible for their violent behaviour, thrived. Wars were carried out mainly by males, and they had the option to exterminate only the men of a rival group and appropriate their women. This behaviour resulted in the mixing of genes, but also in a faster populating of the conquered land.
We might not like to acknowledge it, but we are the descendants of those who massacred others, and we have the genetic print of foragers, warriors and rapists. Greek — or, indeed, any other — mythology and art unveils this dark side of our nature. Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women is one beautiful example, linked as it is to the myth of Rome’s foundation. Another is Homer’s joyous description of how Odysseus, a man of reason, indiscriminately massacres his wife’s suitors and hangs the twelve household maids who made love with them.
Islamicate? culture offers countless examples of a mixture of sophisticated art, humour and violence.
We do seem to enjoy violence and have a penchant for mass murder, especially if the difference between our group and their group is obvious. The efficiency with which men perform genocide indicates, perhaps, that racism is in our very nature. Racism is not a perfectly fitting term, however, for our violence can be directed against any other group. Nevertheless, the bigger the difference, the easier the kill; thus, if our skin and face do not sufficiently distinguish us from our opponents, we do our best to make our appearance dissimilar to theirs and akin to our group. Our forefathers fighting their enemies in hand-to-hand combat wore distinct, bright colours and dehumanising images to frighten the other. Military uniforms are more uniform today, because all armies intend to imitate the strongest forces; and they are less spectacular, because modern guns kill from afar, and it is better to hide one’s troops from them.
Violence between communities of the same species characterises many animals living in groups. The common chimpanzee also expands its territory by launching lethal raids into the territory of an adjacent group.'° We do not know whether chimpanzees have moral concerns about such acts, but such concerns are well known in the case of humans. Why do we disapprove of this side of our deepest nature?
The next part is an attempt to sketch the technical, economic, social, religiousideological and moral evolution of humankind and its affects on our assessment of violence.
OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE
Collaboration and Civilisation
As we are social animals, we like collaboration with our associates. While we have a high level of group violence, we also have a high level of group solidarity.
Like the former, the latter has been genetically encoded. Working for ‘higher’ goals than our individual pleasure has also been biologically rewarded.'! Indeed, altruism can be the highest level of egoism. Individuals compete with one another within their group, but they can also sacrifice their interests and, indeed, their life, such as in war, for their community.
Human communities changed radically with the evolution of civilisation. When people started to produce their food instead of gathering or hunting for it, they began to transform their environment, selecting — more or less consciously — species they preferred and weeding out the undomesticated. At the same time, their own society changed. Where livestock breeding was possible, it allowed many more people to live on the same territory than hunting did; and where cultivation was possible, it was even more efficient in raising the population. As compared to the pace of biological evolution, this change occurred at a revolutionary speed, leaving our biology struggling to keep up with it.
The most important changes were the following: the size of human groups grew; they became less and less genetically and more and more culturally defined; and the evolution of civilisation was characterised by the division of labour, differentiation of roles and a steeper hierarchy. Our genes are mostly the same as that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but their way of life survives only in extremely remote territories and minute populations. Nomadic tribal societies based on livestock breeding were highly important actors for most of the historical period, but the majority of people already lived on those territories that allowed intensive agriculture, requiring highly hierarchical social structures.
Intensive agriculture allows and requires the collaboration of much larger groups that our brain is able, evolutionally, to cope with.'? The more efficient the modes of production became, the further we departed from the way of life that evolved together with our previous biological evolution. Biological challenges have not ceased to exist with the rise of civilisation, which itself brought new alimentary patterns and facilitated the transmission of diseases to humans from domesticated animals and between the human groups in densely populated areas. Nevertheless, the success of a group depended less and less on their genes and more and more on their culture.
Culture and Identity
It is the flexibility of our brain as a piece of hardware that allows different civilisational toolkits, including modes of productions and corresponding social structures, to run on it. The software is installed into the mind of the individuals forming their given society throughout their education and life. It lives in interaction between our brains and our societies. Individual and collective inventions produce the upgrades, which usually respond to new challenges. But, while the frequency of the updates to the different kinds of cultural software have been exponentially rising, changes in the biological hardware have remained relatively slow. Some of the crucial characteristics of this hardware have already been mentioned: outstanding intellectual abilities, an aptitude for collaboration, group solidarity and group violence. These characteristics have changed little for thousands of years; what has changed is the size and complexity of the groups.
We share our human body with other living beings, whose number is about ten times more than that of human cells. They constitute our microbiome. We inherit them from members of the community surrounding us, primarily our mothers, and some are absolutely necessary for our survival. For the sake of simplicity, the relationship between the human body and the cultures of microorganisms living within it can be described as symbiotic (when both the human body and the microorganisms benefit from it), commensal (when the microorganisms benefit, and the human body is unaffected) or pathogenic (when the microorganisms benefit, but the human body is negatively affected). In fact, this tripartite classification reflects more the structure of our logic!’ than the complex nature of these relationships. For instance, even a symbiotic relationship can turn pathogenic.'*
It is useful to compare the cultures of the microbiome inhabiting our body to the cultural elements inhabiting our mind. The latter are also inherited from our parents and are acquired both passively and actively from our environment.
They live with and within us, though we have also inherited and developed ways to communicate and record them using materials outside of our bodies. This is similar to the case of many microorganisms able to survive in the outside world before finding a new host. Their relationships with us are similarly complex. Some which are useful to us can also be harmful.
This applies, for instance, to those cultural elements that form our group identities. They are necessary, for we survive much better in groups; however, the super-individual structures that they help us to form and force us to comply with can oppress the individual. In fact, they serve and harm us even at the same time, and it is often not obvious whether the interest of the individual or the interests of the community prevail, or whether some cultural elements and the superstructure became parasitic, oppressing the individual and perhaps even acting against the interests of the community.
A superstructure that harms the individuals that constitute it is a similar malformation to cancer, when cells, elements of the organism, start harming it. And the case when cultural elements incite such parasitic behaviour of the superorganism is similar to when elements of our microbiome generate cancer. The infraorganisms that build us and superorganisms we form are in constant and multifaceted interaction with our biological and mental microbiome.
Collective identities are based on shared elements of culture. Thus, every element of culture is an identity-maker, and some only serve the purpose of strengthening collective identities. Such are, obviously, those elements which define groups, and their identities, including our knowledge about our relatives and the expectations and obligations linked to this status or to members of our community as compared to members of other ones.
Violence in Civilisation
When humans invented modes of production, such as breeding and agriculture, this also entailed fundamental changes to social organisation. And with a change in social organisation, new identities and ideologies appeared. These evolved in parallel with the new, bigger communities, which were based not only on kinship, but on economic cooperation, even between people not related to each other. Kinship can be based on common ancestry or a common future. The husband of my daughter will be the father of my grandchildren, so he is my kin.'> But the new groups grew too fast to allow for everyone joining them to be intermarried. Nevertheless, common interests, well-organised uses of coercion and identity-making ideologies helped their coalescence.
The new ideologies used the phraseology of ancestral kinship. At the union of tribes, new common ancestors were customarily found. Members of communities often call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ even today; leaders, including priests (and gods), are called ‘father’ (and ‘mother’) and they address their followers as ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’. The inherited biological pattern also survives in attitudes towards intra- and inter-group violence: while the new communities condemn killing within the group, violence continues at the border of the group, applied against others.
One of the most important identity-makers and ideologies is religion.
Religion
Religion is too general and multifaceted a phenomenon to be properly defined, but one of its main functions is identity-making. Others are to give an explanation for the universe and its order; sanctification to this order, including social norms; and hope. Pain, fear (including fear of death), as well as joy, desire, reason, compassion and conscience evolved as biological tools favouring survival, but they form an uneasy mixture. Our reason discovers some fundamental, rather unpleasant and absolutely unavoidable problems, which it can hardly resolve. They are primarily existential: why we suffer and why we die; and second, moral: why we make others suffer and kill them. We all suffer and die, and for our very existence we need to kill other living beings. Religion offers an intellectual and emotional reply to such disturbing questions. The solutions of Christianity and Islam are highly ego-, community- and anthropocentric: they are centred on the salvation of the individual, his religious community and — if liberally understood — men in general (including even women). The case of other living beings is treated tangentially.
As a heuristic distinction, the more a set of views is evidence-based, the more we can call it ‘scientific’; the more it is expectation-based, in terms of faith, doctrine, norms and hope, the more we can call it ‘religious’. The more ‘scientific’ thinking leaves us emotionally unsatisfied, the more we prefer ‘religious’ thinking. ‘Scientific’ thinking cannot provide absolute knowledge, understanding and security, but this is what we pine for, and this is what religious thinking promises.
Religion’s irrationality has deep reasons. Religious reasoning is often a more or less conscious attempt to overcome reason. For instance, there is nothing more contrasting to the evidence of the ubiquitous presence of suffering than the idea that this world is created by an absolutely omnipotent and absolutely good, unique God. If this idea has nonetheless been embraced by countless people, it is due to the very omnipresent evidence against it. The unsolvable problem of suffering and death calls for a ‘religious’ solution: belief in what we would like to exist, in order to help ourselves to bear what we experience. Credo quia absurdum. Our ‘scientific’ knowledge is relative and limited, thus we believe in what we do not know, but would like to be absolutely sure we know. As fideism is an easy object for rationalist criticism, it is rarely admitted. Human reason is very strong in (pseudo-) rationalising emotionally motivated actions and views. Faith is frequently rationalised and presented as superior knowledge, and religion as the ultimate science, while violence occurs again and again against those who dare to trouble the emotional security based on the absolute certainty of religious convictions.
Religion has been the conscience of most human societies. It has been highly efficient in appeasing conflicts and reducing violence within the group, which grew much larger than the ancestral biological one. Since our neighbours within the community with whom we share economic interests and cultural identity are considered our brothers in religion — even if we are not related biologically related to them — we are not supposed to kill them. On the other hand, religion has also been effective in fuelling violence by sanctifying it against members of other groups/communities, and of one’s own, if they dare to challenge the norms and interests of the community and its leaders. Killing in the name of the right religion, community and God (or Gods) is morally much more comfortable and can be even conceived as laudable. For some individuals, religion or philosophy can, however, enlarge the community they adhere to, thus expanding to include all humans or even all living beings. One can open one’s ego, dissolving its borders and embracing the universe, and although this phenomenon is rather rare, it appears in various religions and other thought systems.
Islam
Followers of a religion often conceive it as the absolute truth to believe in and the right way to follow. This truth and way are, however, different for each religion and, indeed, for each adherent and can change even during the life of the individual. As with all world religions, Islam is not one religion, but an infinity of changing religions. A religion exists in the people who adhere to it (and, to some extent, in all the people who have views about it), and the countless multitude of ways Muslims have been living Islam reflects the variety of their lives.
The communities of world religions include societies which have always been way too complex and composite to be covered by one general set of norms, yet all the differences existing in these societies had to find a way of expression within a given religious framework. Throughout most of human history, one’s religion was usually not a matter of choice, but a matter of birth. One could not choose one’s religion. It was given.
Different streams in any world religions cover most possible human attitudes to the world. This explains why we find highly similar trends in different religions and completely opposite ones within the ‘same’ religion. Every successful religion comprises many different currents, and very similar stances find their expression across different religions. Opposition in the interests and views of individuals as well as groups can lead to antagonisms within the ‘same’ religion. Diverging personal dispositions as well as adherence to different social, regional and ethnic identities were usually expressed in religious terms: mutual accusations of heresy, apostasy and excommunications. Hope and support for peaceful coexistence and fruitful collaboration was voiced through universalistic ideas.
The fact that universalism exists also in Islam demonstrates why it would be a mistake to equate Islam with its foundational text. While most Muslims claim and believe that the core source of Islam is the Qur°an, for an outsider Islam is, or rather Islams are, Muslims’ interpretations of the Qur°an and its supplementations (such as the Hadith and the further sources of the shari‘a) — and the consecutive layers of later interpretations and supplementations of the former interpretations and supplementations — which have been always fashioned by their worldviews and ways of life. In the Qur°4n there is little doubt about God’s ultimate violence against those who fail to follow His way.!® This is in spite of the fact that the text makes clear that it is God who decides who will and will not want to follow his way. The text has to answer why not everyone obeys God’s order, maintaining God’s omnipotence and omniscience and keeping the door open for conversion to Islam in the hope for salvation. The swinging between threat and promise, divine omnipotence and human responsibility is one of the most persuasive emotional devices of the text.!7
The text also oscillates concerning the question whether the believers should take action against the kGfirs'® or whether they should leave that to God. Allah first orders self-restraint to His powerless prophet frustrated by the ungratefulness of the rich Meccans, who, according to the logic of his message, should have been the most grateful to God, but who, according to the logic of the status quo benefitting the establishment, were not receptive to this message:
The strong poetic formulation, including the timbre of the consonants used in the Arabic in these verses, is in perfect harmony with the content. Its rendering in most available recitations contrasts, however, with this meaning. The sense seems to be tempered by the tradition of performing interpretation, but while the soft melody can dissolve the violence of the text for some listeners, it can also further sacralise it for others. The combination of harsh words and tender melodies corresponds to the contemplative and fighting states of mind, whose complementarity often characterises warriors of various communities.
Once the Muslim community had grown in strength and was facing its enemies in open armed conflict, then Allah enjoined the Muslims to kill the ‘kGfirs’ (unbelievers) and ‘mushriks’ (polytheists) unless they converted.”° Tolerance towards ‘the people of the book’ also fluctuates in the text. Muslim attitudes towards tolerance or violence changed depending on the circumstances, in Muhammad’s lifetime, and since.
After the violent conquests, the political hegemony and numerical minority of the Arab Muslims favoured tolerance towards the submitted masses. Leaving one’s paternal community and replacing one’s ‘identity kit’ with another is difficult, but for pressing economic, social and psychological reasons, it was in the interests of the vanquished to convert and join the victorious community of the conquerors. As the Muslims conquered immense and rich lands, and their efforts to conquer neighbouring territories within reach produced less profit than loss, the conquests slowed down and were replaced by internal struggles for a bigger share and consolidation. Meanwhile, the majority of people living in Islamdom?! became Muslims.
The importance of biologically dictated patterns is reflected in their socioreligious imprint. The fight to obtain and maintain power is often a rather risky business, but it grants important rewards. The powerful have better access to resources and potentially longer lives. Dominant males also acquire a greater number of females and this permits a higher rate of reproduction. This used to apply also to humans,” not only at the level of individuals, but also that of communities. While Muslim men are legally entitled to marry non-Muslim women and were also allowed to possess them as concubines, non-Muslim men have been prohibited from marrying Muslim women, and Muslims, men or women, could not be enslaved or be taken as concubines by non-Muslims. This policy certainly contributed to the Islamisation of Islamdom.
The distaste of the different religious communities towards the idea of conceding their women to men of a rival community was more-or-less similar. Subject communities also needed, however, to take advantage of cases when women belonging to them were married (or taken as concubines) into the dominant communities. Even submissive marriage is a symbol of acceptance. The character of the recognised interfaith sexual relationships demonstrates the nature of the rapport between the groups involved. Total rejection can be expressed by indiscriminate massacre (including of women); humiliation by rape; submission through unilateral marriage (of women belonging to the dominated group by the men of the dominant one); alliance or even union of equals by mutual marriages.” Interactions and their expressions range, however, over a fluctuating continuum.
The relatively tolerant attitude of many Muslims towards other religious communities (including Muslim sects) living within or at the border of Islamdom was severely affected by crises. The triumphant identity of Muslim community was substantially shaken by the conquests launched by Western Christians in the Iberian Peninsula and the Levant and by the Mongols in all the eastern lands of Islamdom. Fear and frustration often results in aggression. Subject religious communities living in Islamdom — as anywhere else — were often objects of violence caused by crises troubling the establishment in any historical period, even well before the arrival of the Mongols.
The conversion to Islam of the Mongol and Turkic conquerors restored the self-confidence of the Muslim communities they joined. Islamdom expanded further in the East and was in offensive in the West, where defence against the attacks of the Ottoman empire was the main reason for the construction of the Catholic empire of the Habsburgs.”
The European expansion of modern times presented an enormous challenge to all civilisations. It resulted in the nearly total extermination of the peoples and cultures of two continents: North America and Australia, creating what is commonly called the ‘West’. This was not possible, however, in the case of the other continents. Technological evolution — which has allowed virtually all lands supporting life to be used for agriculture — has been eroding all non-agriculture based cultures, even in South America and the ‘Old World’, including that of the mounted nomads. They have often constituted formidable military powers in the past, such as the Scythes, Huns, Magyars, Arabs, Mongols and Turks. Other cultures — based on intensive agriculture — have, however, been able to survive and even boom through ‘updates’ and the integration of Western elements. Of the latter, the most successfully invasive were those that proved to be the most adaptable to other cultural and ecological substrates.
The interaction between Western and other cultures and their human carriers has, for both sides, been at once fruitful and destructive, stimulating and frustrating. The intellectual and emotional effects of these interactions and the struggle for identity left their mark on mutual attitudes to violence: the more successful the integration, the less people belonging to the communities/cultures involved are inclined towards violence.”°
A generalised outline of the historical evolution of attitudes towards violence internal to the Muslim community can be also drafted. The overall tendency led from egalitarianism and activism to hierarchy and quietism, in accordance with the shift from tribal to imperial social organisation, but without the complete disappearance of activism (and tribalism) and with periods of revival.
As discussed above,” tribal organisations characterised those territories that do not allow intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture required a high division of labour, which necessitated the construction of hierarchal society. In tribal territories, such as deserts, high mountains, marshlands, etc., people have to rely on themselves and their relatively small group, which is less stratified and more egalitarian than that of the societies based on intensive agriculture. Based on the rule of self-help, tribal societies are also more activist.?’ Every single man has to be a warrior for himself and his group, whereas it is obviously not the ideal of the authorities of an empire that their peasants should have the mind and behaviour of a warrior.
Islam rose in tribal lands. Its call and coercing force, combined with the rewards of its expansion, forged together the Arab tribes, which, due to particular historical coincidences, were able to conquer vast, old imperial, as well as further tribal lands.
While tribalism survived in the latter (as well as in the homeland of Islam) and was also expressed in the forms of Islam prevailing there, it vanished in the rich agricultural lands, which continued to be ruled by imperial traditions. In these imperial lands, Sunnis, Shi°is and, to some extent, even Kharijis all had to abandon their activism and embrace quietist principles.”’ Consecutive civil wars demonstrated that the only result of activism and revolution was trouble, leading in the worst case to the destruction of the economy and very ecology of the land. This effectively returned land and society to nomadism, with reduced civilisation and population.
The leading elites of most Islamic societies were the military, often of tribal origin; the administration; and the urbanised mercantile and craft-producing groups, whom the ‘ulama’ mostly represented. Together, they ruled, organised and exploited the large subject masses of peasantry and had no interest in changing the framework of society.” The only alternative, tribalism, was sometimes nostalgically remembered, but rarely actually desired. In societies based on imperial economy, a revolution could bring a new ruler or dynasty — and the men in their service — to power, but the hierarchical structure changed little or was restored. Thus, upheavals were considered as bringing more pain than gain for most of the elites, as well as the common people.*?
CONCLUSION
In order to understand and contextualise attitudes towards violence in Islamic thought, I have aimed to outline first the biological roots of violence, followed by the historical evolution of human attitudes to it. I have focused on how social changes are reflected in religion in general and in Islam in particular. The various Islamic attitudes towards violence demonstrate the interplay between biological and cultural heritage, social and historical circumstances, communal identities and personal inclinations. When analysing such attitudes, all of these layers have to be considered. My generalisations in the above study also sought to debunk more generally accepted generalisations. Statements about Islam as a ‘religion of violence’ or as a ‘religion of peace’ are useful only for the study of the ideological stances of those who exhibit them. The goal of the Violence in Islamic Thought series is to give insights to a versatile, living legacy. ITKN Exeter, June 2014
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