Abstract
Murad Idris’s complex and ambitious War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought takes aim at the ideal of peace. Idris argues that peace is never an unproblematic ideal set against its most obvious other—war—but is also implicated in the authorization of certain kinds of wars, and thus in the creation of moral hierarchies of human communities. Far from innocent, grand theorizations of peace tend to be characterized by three consistent discursive structures, which he calls the parasitical, the provincial, and the polemical.
By “parasitical” he means that peace is rarely spoken of alone. Rather, discussions of peace very quickly enlist adjacent concepts (“insinuates”) that implicate peace in other pursuits. “Peace rarely appears on its own; it appears alongside such ideas as friendship, order, security, law, development, human rights, toleration, mutual understanding, etc.” 1 Idris wants to show us that in the case of peace “each insinuate . . . makes possible various forms of violence; their conjoinment with peace sanitizes this violence, and perpetuates the myth that one can attain all good things without violence, or with a good conscience.” 2
By “provincial” he means that theories that aim at universalism quickly reveal their particular anxieties about concrete others. Idris wants to bring our attention here to how “idealizing ‘peace’ allows some to cast themselves as superior, advanced, cultured, or civilized. It justifies certain kinds of hostility and refuses others, but it does so in ways that often reveal particular interests, anxieties, and desires—ones that make the war-waging peace-lover the privileged referent of his frames. Even the idea that all people love or desire peace smuggles in a highly particular view of ‘humanity,’ a view built on inequalities and hierarchies of lives.” 3
Finally, by “polemical” Idris suggests that peace is a weapon of war. “Peace’s authorization of war against certain kinds of enemies is internal to its valorization; the multiple layers of its antagonism and hostility can intersect with peace’s provincial and parasitical structures. Its universalized idealization can construct some parts of the globe as more readily and naturally peaceful and others as warlike, conflict-prone, or in need of intervention . . . some enemies are described as being illegitimate, incomplete, inherently unjust, or against human history.” 4
While Idris’s study is motivated by the deployment of peace as a weapon of war in post-9/11 geopolitics, his method is not to focus closely on our contemporary moment or even on a relatively modern genealogy of the particular universalism under which we live and others die today. Rather, he leads us through a series of close, critical readings of ten canonical thinkers from the European and Islamic traditions: Plato, al-Fārābī, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. These chapters (in which thinkers are sometimes paired together) are enormously impressive. Often citing directly to original Greek, Latin, Arabic, and German sources, Idris also shows expansive scholarly familiarity with debates and controversies in the numerous secondary literatures.
These core chapters (1–6) are so dense with creative rereadings and unfamiliar angles of observation that they defy any concise summary beyond the theme of “war for the sake of peace” that they all have in common. Despite the book’s subtitle, these individual studies do not give us a genealogy of the idea of “war for peace” in the sense of tracing the contingent and submerged historical origins of this idea. Instead, they are most powerful as reconstructions of the internal intellectual logic of these theories in their own terms. Idris is interested in recurring, but mostly isolated, patterns of discursive structures of thought in his ten thinkers. For example, in his pairing of Kant and Quṭb, Idris brings our attention to some intriguing symmetries of thought and the way that Quṭb speaks back to Kant as a colonial subject, but also carefully avoids suggesting that Quṭb has Kant in mind or that his thought is conditioned by historically contingent patterns of discourse leading from Kant.
It is safe to say that no one will share Idris’s expertise in all of these ten very different thinkers. Readers with special interest in any of the thinkers Idris treats will have to judge how their own understanding of them is challenged, reinforced, or transformed. But at least in the case of one thinker that I have some familiarity with, Sayyid Quṭb, some of Idris’s interpretative and reconstructive moves raise some questions. Idris’s use of Quṭb is insightful and partly persuasive but also noteworthy for its silences, deflections, and erasures. Idris reads Quṭb primarily as an anticolonial and decolonial thinker—a kind of Arab-Muslim Fanon. This is not wrong, but it is a very partial, and curiously sanitized, vision of Quṭb’s views on war. For Idris, Quṭb’s enemy was modern imperialism and colonialism, and his solution was a kind of defensive “Islamic bloc”: The war authorized in Quṭb’s third step, where his bloc polices the globe against empires anywhere, seems to draw upon this global anticolonial ethos. The war exceeds the most common categories in both precolonial and postcolonial Islamic legal thought about legitimate warfare: it is not offensive jihād to convert others; not defensive jihād against an invader; not war against those who ban Islamic practices and proselytization; and not humanitarian jihād to rescue oppressed Muslim prisoners or minorities. . . . Instead, Quṭb’s global policing is an anticolonial humanitarian war, unconcerned with the faith, demographics, or location of the oppressed. . . . His plan—an Islamic state, a federation, and global policing against lawless aggression—defies easy categorization and opens to a postcolonial world.
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But Idris mistakes this appealing and attractive aspect of his thought (let’s call it the “Fanonized Quṭb”) for the whole. Idris does not secularize Quṭb as such, nor does he neglect that Quṭb’s “peace plan” involved a return to Islamic laws and forms of government. Idris accurately notes Quṭb’s critiques of Western materialism and his calls for a restoration of spirituality, religion, and Islamic metaphysics as a foundation for justice and liberation. But for a book that is until this point entirely about exposing how theories of peace create distinct kinds of enemies and authorize very specific kinds of wars, Idris remains puzzlingly silent on these dimensions of Quṭb’s thought.
In fact, Quṭb makes no effort to hide or disguise the imperialist and corrective aspects of his own jihād doctrine. In the very text that Idris draws most from in this chapter, Universal Peace and Islam, Quṭb writes not only that colonized peoples must be free from domination, exploitation, and injustice but that “the only legitimate war authorized by Islam is ‘to make the word of God supreme’ . . . [which means that] people do not worship but one god and do not enact in their system of life other than what that One God has legislated.” 6 “Islam came to establish justice on the earth . . . in all its forms: socially, legally and internationally. Whoever disobeys and commits injustice has opposed the word of God, and it is the duty of Muslims to fight in order that the word of God prevail.” 7 These are not isolated statements but the core of Quṭb’s view on war, which authorizes “the divine system [to] move across barriers to liberate people from enslavement by others.” 8 It is perplexing that Idris would not see this exactly as fodder for his study of how peace is a warrant for war and an opportunity to put Quṭb into conversation with thinkers like Aquinas, al-Fārābī, Erasmus, and indeed Ibn Khaldūn (whose views on war for religion are neglected in this book). I wonder whether this partial and selective (and in my view, less interesting) reading of Quṭb is driven by Idris’s interest in staging a kind of parallel, mirror-image encounter between Kant and Quṭb, which allows him to see certain aspects of Quṭb but requires him to neglect or suppress (or unsee) others.
Yet if the studies of the thinkers from Plato to Quṭb do not amount to a genealogy, what do they collectively contribute to a political theory of the idea of peace? Idris’s basic move is to assert that there is some widespread, untroubled, unproblematized view that cannot survive an encounter with reality or with a close analysis of theoretical deployments of peace. The opening framing of the book is full of bold assertions that “peace remains untroubled” 9 and that “we” are not likely to “look at [peace] and the political work its idealization performs.” 10 But Idris gives much more evidence of thinkers who consider peace to be very much a troubled, ambivalent warrant for action than of those who hold the naïve, uncritical view he is supposedly troubling. Consider just a partial list of the thinkers that he enlists in support of his critical view of peace: Martin Heidegger, Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Michel Foucault, William Penn, John Adams, Weber, Carl Schmitt, Frantz Fanon, Michael Oakeshott, Jean Elshtain, Kwame Nkrumah, Gandhi, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and (even) Michael Walzer. In support of the claim that there is an “untroubled” view of peace, he mostly invokes the statements of heads of state actively prosecuting wars (George Bush and Barack Obama are mentioned).
The book would have been strengthened by more evidence—not just that people tend to be “pro-peace,” but that the same people are incapable of seeing through any invocation of it to its problematic or pernicious implications. Idris writes that “in formulas such as ‘peace through dialogue and mutual understanding,’ ‘peoples living together in peace and security,’ and ‘a war for the sake of peace,’ the very call for peace tends to immediately overshadow who is invested in it, to sanitize what such invocations enable, all while obscuring relations and histories of power.” 11 This is certainly true, but it doesn’t take much to uncover or see through this, especially when uttered by statesmen and wagers of peace-through-war.
Is there then a core philosophical, theoretical, critical, or ethical claim to the book? If so, it must consist in the claim that peace’s entanglement with war is a problem per se. Of course, war is always a problem, as are the dehumanizations that are its preconditions and outcomes. But what kind of intellectual problem is this? Idris regards the idea of peace-through-war as more than deceptive propaganda. He regards it as a paradox. 12 But he never argues for this conceit or explains why. The very word “peace” does not intrinsically imply something like “a nonviolent state of affairs that is self-generating and self-sustaining through purely nonviolent means.” Because Idris does not direct us to anyone who has ever thought this, it is not clear at all why “war-for-peace” is itself a paradox. Of course, specific wars, dehumanizations, hierarchies, exclusions, expulsions, etc., are all morally and politically problematic. But they are problematic because of their violence and human costs, not because they are intellectual or discursive paradoxes. And, of course, they might not be morally or intellectually problematic. I find Idris’s Quṭb, who authorizes wars of collective decolonial policing, quite appealing, but the actual Quṭb who authorizes wars solely to extirpate manmade law from the earth is obviously advancing a moral system I cannot endorse.
None of this is to detract from Idris’s Herculean scholarly accomplishments in his analysis of ten very different, very complex thinkers, and in mastering much of the literature around them. Nor am I asking Idris to be normative, to endorse this or that definition of “the human,” or to give his own account of just war and righteous peace. It is, however, fair to ask what the critical purchase of this study is. I share thoroughly Idris’s skepticism about the innocence of calls for peace but wish he had showed us who are the subjects that can’t yet see (or acknowledge) that the emperor is naked, and that he had examined his own assumptions about what counts as a paradox and what kind of problem he has revealed to us.