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Is
Islam a Religion of Peace?
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Originally published under the title "Here's Where the
Phrase 'Islam Is A Religion of Peace' Came From. Politicians Should Stop
Using It."
Days after the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino,
President Obama's address to the nation concerning the threat of ISIS
missed the mark. In fact, President Obama seemed at times to be more
concerned with Americans ostracizing Muslim communities through
"suspicion and hate" than he was with protecting innocent
American civilians from murder in the name of radical Islam.
It is high time for Western political leaders to stop responding to
terrorism by naming Islam as "the religion of peace." It is
time to have a hard conversation about Islam.
The West is in the throes of acute cognitive dissonance over Islam,
whose brands are at war with each other. On the one hand we are told that
Islam is the religion of peace. On the other hand we are confronted with
an unending sequence of acts of terror committed in the name of the
faith.
There is a depressing connection between the two brands: the louder
one brand becomes, the more the volume is turned up on the other.
The slogan "religion of peace" has been steadily promoted by
Western leaders in response to terrorism: George W. Bush and Jacques
Chirac after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7, David Cameron after drummer Lee
Riby was beheaded and after British tourists were slaughtered in Tunisia,
and François Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo killings. After the
beheading of 21 Copts on a Libyan beach Barack Obama called upon the
world to "continue to lift up the voices of Muslim clerics and
scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of Islam."
The claim that Islam is a
'religion of peace' first appeared in the 20th century.
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One may well ask how "the religion of peace" became a brand
of Islam, for the phrase cannot be found in the Qur'an, nor in the
teachings of Muhammad.
Islam was first called the "religion of peace" as late as
1930, in the title of a book published in India by Ishtiaq Husain
Qureshi. The phrase was slow to take off, but by the 1970s it was
appearing more and more frequently in the writings of Muslims for Western
audiences.
What does "religion of peace" actually mean?
Words for "peace" in European languages imply the absence of
war, and freedom from disturbance. It is no coincidence that the German
words Friede (peace) and frei (free) sound similar, because
they come from the same root.
While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often
translated "peace," and Islam, the real connection is found in
the idea of safety.
The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama
(surrender) its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama)
through surrender. In its original meaning, a Muslim was someone who
surrendered in warfare.
Thus, Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its
intended outcomes: surrender leading to the "safety" of
captivity. It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim
taslam, "surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be
safe."
The religion of peace slogan has not gone uncontested. It has been
rejected by many, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melanie Phillips writing for The Times, who
called it "pure myth." Even among Muslims the phrase has not
only been challenged by radical clerics such as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the
leader of the Islamic State, but also by mainstream Muslim leaders.
Western leaders invariably respond
to Muslim terrorism with pronouncements about Islam's peacefulness.
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Sheikh Ramadan Al-Buti of Syria was one of the most widely respected
traditionalist Sunni scholars before he was killed in 2013 by a suicide
bomber. The year before he had been listed as number 27 in The Muslim 500,
an annual inventory of the most influential Muslims in the world.
According to Al-Buti, the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion was a
"falsehood" imposed upon Muslims by Westerners to render Islam
weak. He argued in The Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography
that when non-Muslims fear Islamic jihad, their initial inclination is to
accuse the religion of being violent. However they then change tack and
craftily feed to Muslims the idea that Islam is peaceful, in order to
make it so. He laments the gullibility of "simple-minded
Muslims" who
readily accept this 'defense' as valid
and begin bringing forth one piece of evidence after another to demonstrate
that Islam is, indeed, a peaceable, conciliatory religion which has no
reason to interfere in others' affairs. ... The aim ... is to erase the
notion of jihad from the minds of all Muslims.
There does seem to be something to Al-Buti's theory, for it has
invariably been after acts of violence done in the name of Islam that
Western leaders have seen fit to make theological pronouncements about
Islam's peacefulness. Who are they trying to convince?
In the long run this cannot be a fruitful strategy. It invites
mockery, such as Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada's riposte to George Bush's
declaration that "Islam is peace." Abu Qatada asked: "Is
he some kind of Islamic scholar?"
We do need to have a difficult conversation about Islam. This is only
just beginning, and it will take a long time. The process will not be
helped by the knee-jerk tendency of Western leaders to pop up after every
tragedy trying to have the last word on Islam. This strategy has failed,
and it is time to go deeper.
Mark Durie is the pastor of an
Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and
Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.
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