Peace Movements in Islam: History, Religion, and Politics Edited by Juan Cole

Abstract

As the editor informs us in his Acknowledgements, most of the essays included in this collection stem from a pair of conferences held at the University of Michigan. The goal of these meetings, and thus of the volume, is to foster a dialogue between the study of Islam and the discipline of peace studies. I begin by noting that the title is somewhat misleading. While the collection does include essays that describe what might be called ‘peace movements’, several others are better described as conceptual—that is, the focus is on what the Qurʾān and other authoritative sources have to say about peace, or about the sorts of practices one might understand as important for building peace in particular settings. Thus, A. Rashied Omar’s contribution discusses the relationship between compassion and justice in the Qurʾān, and argues that a number of Muslim groups whose behaviour involves the use of violence are narrowly focused on justice; they seem to ignore the scriptural calls for compassion. Similarly, Juan Cole’s essay emphasizes texts that indicate that those who forego retaliation in favour of forgiveness choose a more excellent way. Other conceptual essays deal with Sufi discourse about the relations between interior peace and social activism, notions of salvation in the work of the early twentieth-century scholar Rashid Rida, and the virtue of ṣabr or patient forbearance in the history of Islam.