In the buildup to the military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by a US-led coalition of troops, the concept of “just war” was stridently invoked in academia and the media to justify it. This occurred even though the casus belli offered for the launching of the attack—Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and therefore posed a credible military threat—was a hoax (and later categorically proved to be so) and thousands of civilian lives perished during and after the invasion. Some would claim that this was a textbook case of the misappropriation and misuse of “just war” to justify mundane and ultimately unethical political objectives.

Murad Idris's thoughtful, provocative, and highly illuminating book in part explains how this cynical and, as some would say, criminal manipulation of the Western just war tradition could occur and why its perpetrators did literally get away with murder. The label “just war,” after all, is understood to provide justification for violence that is assumed to be carried out for a higher moral purpose. Its opposite is assumed by some in the West to be “jihad”—understood to represent unprincipled, illegitimate violence in contrast to the licit violence carried out by just warriors. Idris gives an example of Michael Walzer referencing “jihad” in this way, which for Walzer and others becomes a “shorthand and paradigm for Anglophone understandings of fanatical and illegitimate ‘religious violence’” (13).

The implication is clear: Westerners wage war in order to create peace while Muslims resort to their military jihad to inflict senseless violence and chaos. The concepts of war and peace as an ineluctable binary in the Western context have become freighted with layers of political meaning that frequently map onto an assumed civilizational clash between a reified “Islam” and an equally reified “West.” The former is warlike, the latter peaceful—this has become practically a mantra among a certain breed of Orientalists and Western pundits today.

Idris proceeds to deconstruct this binary with incisive rigor and formidable insight. He notes that when peace is touted as a peculiarly Western ideal, it forces others to craft a competing narrative “to now show that their ‘traditions’ too, cherish and idealize peace” (14). Idris's interrogation of the problematic of peace leads him to conclude that it functions in three primary ways: parasitically, provincially, and polemically. It functions parasitically because it is usually conjoined with other ideas, such as security, harmony, and law. Such ideas form a parasitical structure with peace and change its purview and discursive function; these conjoined ideas are what Idris calls “the insinuates of peace” (3), which can be internally contradictory and, therefore, ultimately subversive of peace.

Peace functions provincially because despite the universality that is attributed to it as a moral ideal, it functions as a demarcator of parochial allegiances and particularist self-interest. “Theorizations of peace draw maps of the universe” (4). Such theories identify zones of peace from the perspective of the theorizers (namely, zones that they themselves inhabit) and zones that need to be pacified (zones that other less “civilized” people occupy) that can then become the objects of legitimate warfare.

And, finally, peace is a polemical idea, injected into global discourses of polarization and political antagonisms, which leads to hostility. From this perspective the concept of peace requires readily identifiable enemies who refuse to capitulate to the peaceful hegemon and who must therefore be punished for their intransigence. This is the good war that must be waged for the sake of peace. This weaponization of peace, according to the author, is an inevitable consequence of its inherently polemical nature.

Idris seeks to demonstrate how “war for peace” operates by examining the thinking of ten key Western and Muslim political thinkers: Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb. Why these thinkers in particular? Because they make “visible the questions of power that are crucial for theorizing peace, and each takes up some version of the claim that ‘war is for the sake of peace’” (5). In the ensuing examination of the writings of these authors, several important points emerge.

All these thinkers subscribe to a version of the following view: “we” are civilized and “they” are barbarians. For “them” to become civilized, they must be persuaded to adopt “our” truths, which are universal and which conduce to true peace. Furthermore, staging aggression against the enemy requires intense moralizing and a careful sanitization of the violence that one may be forced to launch as the aggrieved party against a hopelessly unredeemable foe. One may grudgingly recognize noble qualities in the enemy whom one simultaneously demeans; Kant, for example, acknowledged the hospitality of the Arab whom he also declared to be devious. Qutb in his relentless critique of empire fails, however, to find any redeeming quality in the Western imperialist. Ultimately, all wish to transform the “other” so as to resemble oneself; refusal to acquiesce in this makeover project exposes the recalcitrant enemy to eradication.  Reading all these thinkers together allows the author “to question the grammars of just war, legible intentions, and devotion to peace, even as each configures these differently” (317). In this venture, Idris is patently successful.

He also rightly does not read the three Muslim thinkers—al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, and Sayyid Qutb—“as representatives of Islam or as its conduits” (317). As he himself recognizes, they are three quite different thinkers who participate in the distinctive discursive spaces of their own times in different ways. Therefore, it is only Qutb who specifically makes the case that “Islam is a religion of peace,” pushing back against twentieth-century Western polemics regarding Islam's assumed violent essence and apparent disregard for the rules of legitimate warfare. Although Idris implies that this is a postcolonial phenomenon, the genealogy of this defensive posture can be traced back to the period of European colonial occupation itself when certain Muslim authors, such as Chiragh Ali in the Indian subcontinent and Muhammad Abduh in Egypt, were eager to establish that they too have a historical tradition of peace that goes back to the origins of Islam.

This book should compel all who deal with issues of war and peace to rethink many of their entrenched assumptions about the relation between the two. Idris compellingly establishes that peace, as currently conceived, is highly problematic and when invoked as a universal ideal in order to justify parochial political ambition is more conducive to war than to a genuine cessation of hostilities among nations. Disturbing as this diagnosis is, Idris shows the inevitability of it in the current geopolitical configuration of the world. At the same time his penetrating analysis offers a ray of hope—after all, the proper diagnosis of a malady contains within it the promise of an effective remedy. Quite simply, this remarkably original and tightly argued book holds out just such a promise.