Arguing the Just War in Islam, John Kelsay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 263 pp., $25 cloth, $19 paper.
John Kelsay's book offers an overview of the question of just war in Islam, from the notion of muruwwa (meaning “bravery in battle”), the main moral value upon which the early tribal organization in the Arabic peninsula was founded, to the proper conception of the umma (the community of believers in Islam). The book pays great attention to the foundational narratives of Islam as a way of understanding the religious sources invoked in current calls for a restoration of the authenticity of the faith. In this, the book goes beyond a simple survey of the historical genealogy of these narratives to also analyze their theological and epistemological status, emphasizing how these traditional texts can be and have been submitted to critique within Islam itself. The analysis is helpfully accompanied by a semantic clarification of concepts such as shari‘a (the path), fatwa (opinions), or jihad (struggle), which unloads them of their usual controversial connotations.
Much of the value of the book lies in its efforts to trace the evolution of the debates on the morality of war under successive political arrangements in the Muslim world. For instance, Kelsay finds that the demise of the Ottoman caliphate—the last remaining symbol of the unity of the old territory of Islam—posed a legitimacy crisis in the Islamic community. Against the backdrop of this new political context, the question of the relationship between the theological and the political was revisited by scholars such as the Egyptian al-Raziq, whose controversial argument held that Muslims should not equate authority in religion with authority in politics, and therefore that Islam need not be committed to restoring the old caliphate. The book is instructive in showing how such long-standing debates resonate today within the wider debate on Islamic terrorism, and in how certain key just war notions have been ascribed a more militant meaning, including within Islam.
