When is violence justified?  Should the law allow us to carry out acts of violence if it serves the greater good? For example, should a parent be allowed to hit their children to discipline them? If someone breaks into my house, can I hit them over the head with a cricket bat to protect myself?  If I know that a person is going to commit a violent crime, can I beat him with a club to stop him?  If someone knows something which will save the lives of millions of people, can I hold a gun to her head and threaten to pull the trigger unless she tells me?  Can I give her an electric shock to make her reveal this secret?  Could I threaten to shoot her child unless she told me? Could I actually shoot her child if she didn’t? Can a country at war with another kill the innocent citizens of its enemy?

These are moral dilemmas which philosophers and politicians have pondered for centuries – and they are questions which Muslim thinkers have also argued over.  And unsurprisingly Muslim thinkers have arrived at a variety of answers, just like everyone else.  Most of the debates in the Muslim religious tradition have revolved around whether this or that action is “lawful”.  Theoretically speaking, the religion of Islam has a “law” which each individual Muslim should follow and which is not necessarily the same law as the one given by the state and enforced by the police in the country where the Muslim happens to live.  This law is the personal religious, moral and political code that a Muslim should live his or her live by.  It is called the Shari’a, which is “God’s law” or the “law of Allah”.  It is, in Muslim belief, what God wants the individual Muslim to do.  So, when a Muslim thinker discusses these questions like “when is violence justified?”, what they are often asking is “when is it legal?” – not in terms of what a judge in the court might say is allowed or not – but rather, “is it in accordance with the Shari’a?”

The big challenge for Muslims is how to find out what the Shari’a says on any particular issue - what does God want them to do?  Since no one has a hotline to God, Muslim thinkers have had to look at the history of God’s interaction with the world in order to try and find out what it is he might want us to do.  For Muslims, the place to begin is the Qur’an. The Qur’an is a book revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century and which Muslims consider to be a perfect preservation of God’s message to humanity.  But the Qur’an is a short book – it does not have all the answers, and it does not always give us answers in a clear way.  So Muslims then look towards the life of the Prophet Muhammad – he died in 632, but we have records of what he said and did - and these help Muslims decide what the Prophet Muhammad might have done if he was faced with the same situation.  The Qur’an and the Prophet’s example are the main sources of guidance for Muslims in these moral and legal questions, and from these Muslims can try and work out what the Shari’a might say about when violence is permitted (or perhaps even when it is necessary for a greater good).  It is important to remember though that these sources are only indicators of the Shari’a, interpreting them is the task of human beings, so we may never know exactly what it is God wants us to do – all we have is our best effort at understanding the sources God has given to us.

So what does Islam say about violence?  Well, it is clear that the Muslim legal and moral tradition is not a pacifist one.  Violence is justified in certain circumstances: the Qur’an talks of fighting the enemies of God and the Prophet and his followers all fought in battles.  But at the same time, violence generally, and warfare specifically is controlled – violence has a moral space in which it can operate, but it has boundaries which it cannot overstep.  For example, Muslim thinkers have allowed parents to discipline their children, but they have resisted the idea that non-combatants can be deliberately harmed for some greater good.  But these are general principles – the legal theorists developed mechanisms whereby such principles can be set aside if the result of their application is considered harmful.  It is through studying these internal Muslim debates we can determine what options are available for a new Muslim ethic of violence.

Rob Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies, University of Exeter and is a Global Uncertainties Fellow investigating “Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought”.