No Justice, No Peace

Arvind Dilawar reviews Qamar-ul Huda’s “Reenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam.”

By Arvind DilawarJuly 26, 2024

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

AFTER THE END of the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan in 2021, the international community sought to preserve local advances, especially in women’s rights. The United States continued to press the recently restored Taliban government, officially known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, using economic coercion instead of military might. Norway attempted to salvage its own projects in Afghanistan too, including women’s access to education, but through diplomatic relations. As a result of these different approaches, the new Afghani government quietly permitted Norwegian all-girls schools, even while closing similar organizations connected to American institutions.

Qamar-ul Huda opens the first chapter of his new book Reenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam with the differing American and Norwegian approaches to Afghanistan, illustrating how international efforts to end wars and support peace in Muslim countries can be successful, especially when conducted on Islamic terms.

To orient readers with the realities of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, Huda, a professor of international affairs at the United States Naval Academy, first identifies the religious character of international organizations. As he writes, “one of the key problems with the field of religious peacebuilding, a subset in conflict resolution, is that it is dominated by Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other Christian scholars,” whose approaches have been “streamlined, systematized, and normalized […] while occasionally including Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, Sikh, and other traditions to appear inclusive.”

Although Huda does not call out any such organization by name, they range from the American Friends Service Committee to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have Christian roots but are entrusted to perform their duties in essentially secular ways. So too, Huda argues, should Muslim organizations be entrusted, especially in Muslim contexts.

To that end, Huda explores significant schools of Islam as they relate to war and peace. The first point of reference for all Muslims is the Qur’an, meaning all Muslim sects should incorporate its emphasis on peace, which Huda describes as fundamental to both Islamic thought and practice: “For Muslim theologians, the world is a mixture of opposing forces that may conflict or harmonize depending on the situation. Its relative peace is to be increased or achieved; this can be done only by bringing it closer to the Absolute Peace of God.”

Nevertheless, different strands of Islamic thought and practice have emerged. Deobandi Sunnism, for example, originated in Northern India but was cultivated by Pakistan’s military leadership for use against their political rivals, especially in Afghanistan, where it was adopted by the Taliban. Sufism, in contrast, embraces a more mystical perspective oriented around inner enlightenment, sometimes compared to traditions like Buddhism. In these two contexts, a word like “jihad” could be understood as an armed struggle against occupation—or a personal struggle to become closer to God. In the context of the Qur’an, “jihad” may even specifically denote the struggle toward peace, as embodied in the oneness of God, or unity of all creation, “tawhid.” Huda explains: “As a revelation to humankind, the Qur’an commands its believers to work toward establishing a life of tawhid, and to establish this realization, it describes it as a human struggle or an effort in a struggle—jihad.” He continues: “Usually mistaken as a ‘holy war against non-Muslims,’ jihad is used repeatedly in the Qu’ran […] in the sense of a striving toward a life of God-consciousness, which often means resisting the attractions of ungodly things.”

Such distinctions are essential to appreciating the role that peacebuilding efforts can play in Muslim societies, as Huda illustrates. Following the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi by domestic and international forces in 2011, Libya descended into civil war, allowing militant groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State to recruit widely. The United Nations Development Programme responded with peace education programs that focused on conflict resolution, mediation, and other peacebuilding subjects. Surveys of students and instructors revealed that they appreciated the programs but were dissatisfied with the lack of continuing support, in terms of both further coursework and funding.

Despite such examples, the greatest shortcoming of Reenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam is its lack of greater international context. Huda briefly mentions foreign interventions in the Muslim world, but readers unfamiliar with the United States’ support for militant Islam as a counterweight to communism, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya, would hardly appreciate the irony—much less the unlikelihood—of the United States ending the wars it helped start. While Huda’s book is in essence an appeal to Western donors and others to support Islamic peacebuilding efforts, it realistically needs to be paired with an equal, if not more urgent, appeal to end Western support for wars in the Muslim world.

This shortcoming is especially glaring given current events. Outside of the introduction and epilogue, which were tacked on after October 7, 2023, the book makes no mention of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, a conflict that has resided both geographically and ideologically at the heart of the Muslim world for nearly a century. Only in the epilogue does Huda approach the other side of the equation, moving from explanations about how Muslims can achieve peace to an acknowledgment that the Western world helps make these wars. As Huda concludes, a new model of conflict resolution is necessary—to which his book is an important, albeit incomplete, contribution.

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Featured image: Plan of an Encampment, Afghanistan ca. 1800. Made available under and subject to CC BY-NC 4.0 CA by The Aga Khan Museum (AKM708), akhanmuseum.org. Accessed July 25, 2024.