We have until now been preoccupied with the description and analysis of salient Muslim advocates for nonviolence in what one might call a long twentieth century. We have followed them from the 1880s to the 2010s and from West Africa to South Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Yet all of these remarkable figures have now passed away. Some have done so recently, such as Jawdat Said and Wahiduddin Khan in 2022 and 2021, respectively. The present chapter is dedicated not to these but to the now-living generation which succeeds them. In several cases they do so directly: as friends, students, and protégés. The following reflections are drawn from a series of interviews in English and Arabic held with living proponents, practitioners, and theorists of nonviolent Islam during 2021 and 2022. They come from a range of cultural, educational, and professional backgrounds, and each approaches the understanding and practice of Islamic nonviolence in their own way. Every one is nevertheless a committed and informed voice of Islamic nonviolence with decades of experience, and each enjoys considerable national and international respect. Their continuities – both conscious and otherwise – with their predecessors are moreover considerable. This not least in their shared concern for personal moral improvement and the careful avoidance of schismatic separatism.

Though each speaker was interviewed individually, the same broad questions were raised with each in turn. All explored these from their own vantage point, and each is quoted as extensively as possible so as to give the clearest expression to their views. Their perspectives are presented concurrently rather than as a succession of disparate conversations, however. We thereby illustrate both points of overlapping consensus and of divergence among them. The themes explored concern each interlocutor’s understandings of ‘Peace’ as a concept; their views on the moral status of war and violent self-defence; the connection (if any) between peace and justice; the nature of nonviolence in civil, familial, and interpersonal contexts; and the implications of nonviolence towards nature and non-human animals. These same general concerns – informed by ongoing discussions among moral philosophers concerned with pacifism and nonviolence [see Introduction] – have of course also guided previous chapters’ investigation of earlier thinkers and activists. As such, bringing together these informed voices offers us the opportunity not only to relate them to one another but also to those Muslim pacifists who came before them. This wider conversation is returned to systematically in the concluding chapter of this book and itself brought into dialogue with the secular scholarship on pacifism and nonviolence, which has until now neglected Muslim perspectives.

Before any such general reflection, however, it behoves us to introduce the five experts on Islamic pacifism and nonviolence who inform the present chapter:

• - Amina (or Amneh) Khoulani is a Syrian educator, activist, and student of the late Jawdat Said. Involved in nonviolent activism for the past two decades, she has lost friends and siblings to political crackdowns by the Syrian state – particularly following the so-called Arab Spring. She has played leading roles in nonviolent and humanitarian organisations from the subul al-salām [Paths of Peace] centre in the Damascene suburb of Dārayyā to today’s ʿā’ilāt min ajl al-ḥurriyyah [Families for Freedom] which advocates for the rights of Syrian political detainees: work for which she was in 2020 awarded the United States’ International Woman of Courage award.

• - Chaiwat Satha-Anand, also known as Qader Muheideen, is a professor of political science at Thammasat University in Bangkok, founder of the Thai Peace Information Centre, and chair of the Thai Strategic Nonviolence Commission. He was a founding figure in the academic study of Islamic nonviolence even before his attendance of the seminal Bali Conference in Indonesia, and has worked with pre-eminent scholars in the field including Gene Sharp.

• - Haytham Alhamwi is a Syrian doctor now living in the United Kingdom, having fled the Syrian civil war. Like Amina Khoulani, he is a past student and avowed admirer of the late Jawdat Said. Also like Amina Khoulani, he was involved in nonviolent activism in Syria, where he similarly underwent politically motivated imprisonment and violent mistreatment by state authorities as a result.

• - John Muhammad Butt is often described as the first Englishman to have graduated from the prestigious and conservative Dar al-Ulum Islamic college in Deoband. While there, he read and befriended Wahiduddin Khan – who remains a major inspiration for his own advocacy of nonviolence. Proudly describing himself as a ‘Pashtun Englishman’ (including in the title of his recent memoire [Butt, Reference Butt2021b]), he has lived in Afghanistan’s Swat Valley since 1970 and became a household name among Afghans through his work as a journalist and broadcaster.

• - Rabia Terri Harris is an American writer, public speaker, and peace activist. She founded the Muslim Peace Fellowship in 1994 and has worked extensively with the (largely Christian) Fellowship of Reconciliation among other groups promoting nonviolence and ecumenism. She also works as a chaplain and organises the work of the Muslim Chaplains’ Association.

What Is Peace?

All five contributors were initially asked to give an account of what the notion of ‘Peace’ means to them, as an ideal they each seek to attain, to practice, and to protect. It has already, in this book’s Introduction, been acknowledged that this is a far knottier question than one might initially imagine. Each interviewee naturally approached it from a different angle, some direct and some oblique. But all were circumspect in trying to recognise both its entanglement with other ideas and practices and to respect the fact that fellow Muslims will justifiably differ from their own positions. Amina was perhaps the most direct, asserting in unequivocally universalistic terms that:

John Muhammad offered a similarly encompassing account of peace, stressing like Amina the importance of private and familial relationships as well as those more public questions of politics and state policy with which the concept of pacifism in particular is often equated. He then went further to place the main focus on closer relationships with those close to one and with one’s own drives and feelings:

When quizzed on the matter of limits to such a peaceable approach, John Muhammad expressed the view that God does permit limited violence in self-defence – but that even then there are always better options. In doing so he furthermore presents an argument concerning proportionate double-effect we encountered in earlier chapters [see Chapters 5 and 6] and which is discussed again further in this chapter:

While the initial accounts offered by Amina and John Muhammad contain a roughly equal admixture of political and psychological elements, those of Haytham and Rabia differ markedly on precisely these points. Each focused particularly on one or the other aspect. For Haytham, the political and interpersonal aspect predominated – reflecting the especially close association he draws between peace with justice. Peace and nonviolence were for him first and foremost to be understood in terms of duty and of dignity:

This appreciation for the importance of human dignity is one which Haytham himself relates directly to the experience of the so-called Arab Spring. The concept was after all a mainstay of revolutionary rhetoric from Syrian chants of ḥurriyyah wa karāmah wa thawrah [‘freedom and dignity and revolution’] to calls of ʿaysh, ḥurriyyah, karāmah insāniyyah’ [idiomatically ‘bread, freedom, human dignity’] in Egypt’s now-iconic Taḥrīr Square demonstrations. Haytham, however, expressed his own belief in the centrality of dignity by recounting not public demonstrations but personal experience:

Where Haytham, Amina, and John Muhammad frequently related their understanding of nonviolence to their experience of Syrian and Afghan conflicts, Rabia was more comfortable in communicating her understanding of ‘Peace’ in cosmological and spiritual terms than in the often combative language of politics. She did so while consciously avoiding its reduction to any specific and fleeting political contest or circumstance. Instead, she maintained that

Application must furthermore change according to time and place – a view she attributed explicitly to the same Islamic jurisprudential maxim on contextuality introduced in the Introduction. Yet the underlying principle of peace, she maintains, remains constant once it has been disentangled:

Notwithstanding their differences of style and of focus, each of these seasoned civil society advocates for Islamic nonviolence engaged directly with the question of what ‘Peace’ peace’ means to them. The scholarly Professor Satha-Anand, by contrast, initially approached the question in more tentative and circumspect terms. He spoke first of the reality of religiously motivated violence and explicitly recognised that some Muslims do hold such views. This, he points out, is equally true of adherents of faiths less linked to violence in the Western popular imagination, citing Trevor Ling’s Buddhism, Imperialism and War by way of example. Not only do some Muslims hold such views, he added, but their grounds for doing so can be respectable even when he disagrees profoundly with them. ‘I will never chastise those who use violence to pursue the cause of justice – because in Islam the justification for that is so clear in the Quranic verses as well as the Ḥadīth: fight oppression wherever you find it’ [Satha-Anand, interview, 2022]. His goal, he explained, was more to understand than to command: ‘I parse religion as a variable in understanding human violence’ [Satha-Anand, interview, 2022]. Indeed, ‘[m]y work Islam and Violence [1986] was my attempt to understand the ways in which Islam has been used to justify violence in pursuit of a cause the users believe is just’ [Satha-Anand, 2022]. In contradistinction to the approach taken by Rabia, his concern was less with ontological generality than with empirical specificity. Indeed, he famously prefers to describe his work as ‘Muslim studies’ rather than ‘Islamic studies’, favouring the practical and historical over the transcendental. His first interest is in the immediate consequences manifested in this act of violence or that nonviolent practice, particularly in the South-East Asian context. This is a practical and contextual approach he directly credits to his conversations with the great secular writer on nonviolence Gene Sharp [d. 2018]. Nevertheless, he did not confine himself to empirical examples alone but also appealed to Islamic principles to frame nonviolence as the only workable course now available to humankind:

This is a broadly consequentialist argument which Chaiwat initially developed at the height of the Cold War, with its looming prospect of humankind’s thermonuclear extinction. We saw other versions of this in earlier chapters [see Chapters 5 and 6] – as well as from John Muhammad earlier in this chapter. For her part, Rabia explicitly cites and attributes it to Chaiwat during her own interview when asked about the morality of war. It is, however, open to the objection that it might be understood as permitting other forms of suitably targeted killing – such as those advanced by defenders of drone warfare or even a hypothetical regime of targeted assassination or ‘pacifism with death squads’. When this was put to Chaiwat directly, he replied that

Chaiwat then explicitly invokes Jawdat Said’s discussion of Cain and Abel in expanding upon this more thoroughly theological case for peace:

Throughout these initial discussions, several themes have already become apparent. In Chaiwat’s case in particular, one recognises an awareness on the part of these advocates for Islamic nonviolence that the moral and normative positions they support are not shared by all of their co-religionists. Yet along with this goes a marked disinclination to separate oneself too absolutely from those others. Interviewees are often at great pains neither to condemn other Muslims who remain uncommitted to nonviolence nor to question their good faith. The same apparent desire to maintain a sense of (real or imagined) community with those against whose understanding of the faith one argues runs throughout these conversations. It also parallels observations made about several pacifists to be found in previous chapters (perhaps most particularly Shaykh Amadou Bamba [see Chapter 1]).

All interviewees furthermore agree that the ultimate warrant for a nonviolent ethics must come from God, and expresses itself as mankind’s duty owed not only to itself but to God. Recourse to the central Islamic scriptures of the Quran and Hadith litter these conversations – for all that they also mention and pay respect to faiths other than Islam. More than one speaks not only in the language of rights but more pointedly of obligations: of obligations to oneself and to one’s fellow human beings, which ultimately reflect one’s obligations to the Creator. This last point is one which we have seen repeatedly in earlier chapters, and perhaps most saliently in the thought of Jawdat Said [Chapter 6]. This is no coincidence, and we repeatedly find Said explicitly invoked in this chapter both by his students and by those who had no direct contact with him.

The sense that peace, and by extension nonviolence, reflects the fundamental order of Creation also appears repeatedly. It betokens a theocentric perspective where the world is understood as a manifestation of God’s Will. The world is even seen, particularly in the panentheistic Sufi tradition explicitly invoked by Rabia, as expressing His very nature, outpouring in a flood [fayḍ] of Being through His Divine Names and into Creation. Inferring from the lexicographical observation made by John Muhammad (that ‘Peace’ and ‘Islam’ share the same root letters) to a pacifist essence of Islam may be a questionable move – not least as root letters are sometimes shared by Arabic words with opposing or completely unrelated meanings [e.g. taʿdhīb and ʿudhūbah for ‘torture’ and ‘sweetness’; or mismār and musāmarah for ‘nail or rivet’ and ‘soirée’]. Yet the fact of which Rabia reminds us, that ‘Peace’ [al-salām] is an Islamic epithet of God, is unambiguously Quranic [e.g. Quran 59:23].

Even within this small cohort of avowed adherents to nonviolence, moreover, one sees not only close parallels but also divergent paths. Whereas Rabia concentrates on metaphysical discussion, Chaiwat looks first to normative ethics and practical consequences. Where John Muhammad’s focus is on domesticating those elements of human nature which might lead to interpersonal rancour and disharmony, Amina and Haytham set their sights also on more institutional and systemic questions of mass human organisation. Where Haytham spoke of duty and of dignity, Rabia also repeatedly referred to beauty and to harmony. Where John Muhammad’s thoughts turned first to household dynamics, Chaiwat contemplated geopolitics. Yet perhaps the most pertinent point of distinction among these voices, particularly for those readers who are more interested in normative and political ethics than in theology and metaphysics, revolves around the relationship between the concepts of ‘Peace’ and ‘Justice’.

Peace, War, and Justice

Tensions between peace and justice form a nexus between numerous attempts both at justifying and at discrediting nonviolence. It is precisely to the establishment and maintenance of justice which those who support the institutions of war and state violence most often appeal in defending their use of force. This remains the case whether expressed in the language of the Ottoman Circle of Justice [dā’ire-i ʿadliye] or the post-Westphalian convention of the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence; in the words of Jean Bodin or Kınalızâde Fehmi Çelebi [both d. 1596], of Thomas Hobbes [d. 1679] or of Max Weber [d. 1920]. Exemplifying the distinction sometimes made among moral philosophers between narrow pacifism (as opposition to war) and broader nonviolence, and indeed parallels with the ideas of (initially Catholic and latterly secular) ‘just war’ theorists, one of our present group of nonviolent activists makes precisely this argument to justify war by a suitably constituted government:

We have already seen Chaiwat Satha-Anand refer directly to the difficulty of reconciling peace and justice as political ideals, even as in earlier chapters we have discovered various attempts at both uniting and decoupling them. When considering that relationship more deeply, Chaiwat renewed his critique of violence while at the same time recognising that the Islamic intentional motivations (or in his terms ‘imperatives’) which sometimes underlie violence may in fact be conducive to peace in their challenge to the structural brutality of injustice:

Where Wahiduddin Khan went furthest [see Chapter 5] in criticising what he saw as the counterproductive conflation of peace and justice, his friend and student John Muhammad Butt concentrated on resisting doing injustice oneself while actively avoiding those who are not so scrupulous. He cheerfully recounted eluding some more hostile elements of the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda, remarking with astonished irony that ‘I have never been persecuted for being a Muslim by a Jew, or by a Christian, or by a Hindu … But by Muslims!’ (Indeed, he has also suffered torture at the hands of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [Butt, Reference Butt2021b: 86, 90]). His conclusion is that it is best ‘[p]robably just to stay out of their way. You know you couldn’t say that to Gandhi, because he wanted to get rid of the British [Empire]. But if you do have the option, you stay out of the way … violence is always counterproductive’ [Butt, interview, 2021]. Strategic non-confrontation seems in his case to establish a distance between nonviolence and the desire to establish justice in its absence. ‘Wahiduddin Khan asked me once which of his books I liked best’, John Muhammad recounts by way of elucidation,

It is important to understand that the Sunni John Muhammad does not intend this as a sectarian intervention, in spite of the centrality of the Imām Ḥusayn’s martyrdom to that great divide in historical Islam. His concern is with the embrace or avoidance of violence, not with adjudicating ancient disputes between the Umayyads and the Party of ʿAlī. To avoid any such misunderstanding, he goes on to quip that in this sense ‘[t]he Sunnis [today] are even more Ḥusaynite than the Shias!’ [Butt, interview, 2021]. Rather, he is expressing a preference for conflict-avoidance and political quietism over fighting a righteous lost cause. (It may be notable here that another of our interviewees, Rabia Harris, elsewhere also uses the martyrdom of Ḥusayn as a positive example of Islamic nonviolence [as did Shariati in Chapter 4], comparing it with Gandhi’s notion of satyāgraha or ‘truth-force’ [Harris, Reference Harris and Smith-Christopher1998: 100].) It is furthermore notable that the theme of avoiding the censure of those who take a different path from oneself is again in evidence: while armed struggle is be to be avoided, those who engage in it must not automatically be condemned. John Muhammad expresses the same ambivalence when asked about organised violence taking place within a community rather than between rival groups. Rulers may for their part resort to prescribed forms of judicial violence ‘under certain conditions, as a deterrent … [for] the establishment of the rule of law’, he admits when pressed on what are regarded as severe crimes under Islamic law [ḥudūd], ‘but the ideal is not to’ [Butt, interview, 2021].

A similarly subterranean engagement with justice might be sensed in Rabia’s deliberately apolitical discussion of mankind’s obligation to meet the needs and respect the rights of all created beings. This will strike many as implying one common conception of justice: one which is founded on the principle of equity. But again, had she wished to make such an argument explicitly she would likely have done so. She instead chose not to. When pressed on the matter, she both reiterated the importance of a divinely established harmonious order and gave voice to some misgivings about the materially and spiritually destructive potential of the rhetorical appeal to justice:

Amina and Haytham, who share profound personal experiences of violent oppression – including torture and bereavement – were in contradistinction the most insistent in connecting peace and justice. Indeed, for Haytham, justice appeared to be the overarching principle to which nonviolence was subsumed, rather than the other way around: ‘[w]e used to think about peaceful ways more than what is peace. If I want to define peace … maybe I’d just say justice. The usual chant about no peace no justice is the right thing to say. The ultimate peace is when there is justice’ [Alhamwi, interview, 2022]. One might perhaps infer a sense of priorities or precedence from Haytham’s (perhaps unconscious) reversal of the traditional order of a famous slogan among African American civil rights activists: from no justice no peace to no peace no justice. Yet the implication that both are indissolubly linked is unmistakable. Amina, meanwhile, quite emphatically agreed that peace and justice are mutually constitutive, while also underlining that nonviolence is the best path to both:

Amina then went on to elaborate on her view that it was a mistake to understand nonviolence in instrumental terms as a means to an end. Rather, its importance lay in shaping a particular kind of personality and sort of civic culture. The inherent justice of such a culture, rather than the justice administered by a court or commander, is that which she connects with the concept of peace. Hers is in other words what some theorists call a ‘positive peace’. Demonstrating that the unhelpful presumption that justice must be punitive is not limited to the English-speaking world, Arabophone Amina echoed Rabia’s comments above:

Personal and Interpersonal Nonviolence

We have already seen several activists relate their understanding of Islamic nonviolence to cultural and interpersonal practices, habits, and dispositions. Where John Muhammad spoke of the importance of harmonious relations with one’s spouse, Amina also draws upon her experience as a mother: ‘When I raise my children, I also do it in the same spirit of nonviolence. Whether one’s young or old, on any subject, there needs to be nonviolence, discussion, and consultation in the family before a decision is reached’ [Khoulani, interview, 2022]. At the same time, Amina recognised that even the most idealistic family must exist within a wider society. The attitudes and mores of that wider context must be taken into account, accommodated, and challenged. She particularly identified obstacles to nonviolent culture in the form of media narratives on the one hand and the material conditions of working life on the other. In both cases she highlights the crucial role played by gender roles as they impact upon both male and female persons:

These socially constructed gender roles are not only the products of narrative and storytelling, she adds, but also arise from the forms of labour people are expected to practice:

Considerations not only of normative ethics but of emotional states and responses, of dispositions and intention, arose unprompted in all of these conversations. When then asked what might be the ideal attitude to take towards those whom one opposes, Haytham was particularly frank in rejecting a commonplace of both secular and religious discourse on nonviolence:

Rather than some abstractly affective interpretation of the Biblical injunction to ‘love thine enemy’, Haytham argued that one loves one’s opponent by engaging critically with them. One does not accept their mistakes but seeks to correct them without resorting to coercion through the practice of naṣīḥah [giving moral advice]:

A similar liberalism was evidenced in Amina’s response to the same set of questions. In her case, however, she drew a line between magnanimity towards those with whom one disagrees in good faith and those who place themselves entirely outside the bounds of decency through their crimes against humanity. In the former case:

Of the latter group, ‘those with whom one differs in the basis of fundamental values [bil-qīmah]’; however, it is unreasonable to expect a human being to cultivate an attitude of love. She listed a number of notorious war-criminals (whose names need not be reproduced here) by way of example, before declaring that such people

Rabia echoed this final point explicitly, just as we have seen John Muhammad foreshadow it in the distinction he draws between his understanding of Hindu and Muslim approaches to the respective elimination or control of anger. Nonviolence cannot be realised if it demands emotional feats from its practitioners of which they are by nature incapable, each argues: it must begin from the reality of their condition and situation. Rabia then presented an alternative which depends neither upon love for nor enmity towards another human being. Rather, mercy and humility should be our guides:

This mercy, what is more, is not only a matter of recognising one’s common humanity, in all its frailty. Rather, it is also an eschatological matter of one’s obligations to and final judgement before God:

Nonviolence and the Non-human World

Rabia’s argument concerning one’s duties to God as they result in obligations towards His creations is clearly intended first and foremost to concern human beings: those with whom one can be said to have a ‘dispute’ (as opposed to non-human threats such as viruses or earthquakes). That being said, it might also be extended to non-human animals or even to the natural world at large (‘the overall creation’). These are equally the creations of God from a theistic perspective, and it is not uncommon for discussions of nonviolence to extend also to these. Such moves have been made on grounds both religious (such as the typically Jain concept of ahiṃsā famously adopted by Gandhi) and secular (such as variations on Peter Singer’s notion of The Expanding Circle of altruism [Reference Singer2011]). When this was put to her, Rabia was quick to agree:

One might be tempted to infer from such an unequivocal assertion of the need to respect and care for the natural world that the deliberate killing of animals is not to be permitted. One could, however, be mistaken in doing so – and not least because animal husbandry often involves killing performed by conscientious farmers who genuinely believe themselves to have the animals’ interests at heart. In an echo of the broader discussions with which this chapter opened, we find Rabia – and indeed several other interviewees – take a deliberately equivocal position with respect to the lives of non-human animals and the human violence which so often ends them. In Rabia’s case, this ambivalence results not only from a refusal to prohibit acts which scripture has apparently permitted but also from a naturalistic appeal to her understanding of the innate order of the natural world:

This final naturalistic argument for the desirability of some form of meat-eating is not uncommon among prominent American Muslims of Sufi inclination, it should be noted – though we have also seen America’s great exponent of cosmic spirituality Bawa Muhaiyaddeen reject it [see Chapter 3]. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has, for instance, written that ‘ritual killing of animals that can be eaten and whose flesh then becomes halal or permissible is of profound import in creating a spiritual bond with the natural world’ [Nasr, Reference Nasr and Sajoo2010: 83].

For his part, Chaiwat was reluctant to take any specific position on the question of whether nonviolence entails responsibilities towards non-human creation: ‘[t]he focus that I chose is human life’ [Satha-Anand, interview, 2022]. He was, however, happy to explore some potential answers by way of reference to some of his academic writing:

Haytham exemplifies the last of these themes by identifying practical purpose (and specifically nutrition) as the decisive criterion in deciding whether violence against the non-human world is permissible. ‘We are allowed to kill animals to eat them. But we will be punished by Allāh if we kill the same animal just for fun. So, Spanish bullfighting is forbidden, because you are killing animals for fun. We are allowed to cut [down] a tree to benefit [practically] from that, but to cut [down] a tree just for fun: that is not permissible’ [Alhamwi, interview, 2022].

For Amina, by contrast, the key consideration was less one of utility and the rationality of means and ends than of the vices and virtues which the treatment of an animal might manifest in the human actor. Cruelty and sadism are to be avoided, while understanding and gentleness are to be encouraged: the intentions and dispositions of the human actor are central. Concomitantly, she notes one’s care for nature more broadly for its positive effects on the human being’s affective development:

John Muhammad is something of an outlier in this group as an avowed vegetarian of many decades. But his initial response to questions concerning the relationship between nonviolence and the non-human world resembles that of Amina in giving primary consideration to the effects one’s actions have upon the actor rather than the object of one’s actions. Avoiding harm to animals inclines one to avoid doing harm more broadly, he argues, while harming them inclines one towards violence – even if meat-eating is religiously licit:

We may recall that John Muhammad’s friend and teacher Wahiduddin Khan was also a lifelong vegetarian who explicitly connected that diet with his nonviolence [see Chapter 5]. John Muhammad brought up this very fact. It is notable that he explained both his and Wahiduddin Khan’s vegetarianism in cultural and affective aesthetic terms rather than by recourse to a dogma or theology which might conflict with mainstream Islamic law:

Throughout the course of these discussions, one is struck both by fundamental points of agreement and by differences in style, focus, and normative prescriptions. One is also struck by a significant degree of awareness among interviewees of earlier generations of advocates for pacifism and nonviolence. Indeed, such consciousness suggests a growing mutual awareness among advocates of Islamic nonviolence when contrasted with the comparatively isolated accounts given by earlier figures in the preceding chapters. Where both generations more closely align is in their preoccupation with Islamic thought as opposed to the ideas of other traditions. The reader may be surprised by the paucity of reference to some of the most famous figures in this field’s non-Muslim religious history: Gandhi’s name occurs only occasionally and in passing, Martin Luther King, Jr’s still more rarely, while Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau do not appear at all. Academic theorists of nonviolence – notably Johan Galtung and Gene Sharp – do appear, but only in a single interview (though I can report from other interactions that the latter was being read in the circle of Jawdat Said). Reference to earlier Muslim thinkers and activists – and indeed to one another, as seen in Rabia’s praise for Chaiwat’s work – is far much more frequent in these conversations, to say nothing of their written works [e.g. Rabia’s quoting of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in Harris, Reference Harris and Smith-Christopher1998: 107]. The frequency with which Jawdat Said is recalled stands out most particularly, in spite of his persistent anonymity in the West, while both Ali Shariati and Wahiduddin Khan are repeatedly mentioned (particularly by Chaiwat, Amina, and John Muhammad). Amina goes so far as to offer what she considers to be her intellectual lineage in terms of nonviolence, while at the same time bemoaning its marginalisation by conservative clerical mainstreams whom (like Jawdat Said [see Appendix]) she regards as more interested in personal ambition than moral principles:

Dynamics and Developments

Before proceeding in the Conclusion to reflect upon the various continuities and discontinuities between the perspectives on Islamic nonviolence encountered throughout this book, and indeed their connections to ongoing debates in moral philosophy, a final note of caution is called for. That caution is not, however, without hope – indeed it is in a sense defined by it. It is the following: one might be mistaken in viewing either these conversations, or the more extensive accounts in earlier chapters, as constituting fixed and final ideological commitments. On the contrary, while the reader may regard these views as idiosyncratic, they are not dogmatic. Not only in our subjects’ repeatedly remarked-upon refusal automatically to condemn those who are not committed to nonviolence but also in their openness to recognising limits to their own understanding of it, one is struck not only by the depth of their convictions but their cultivation of humility. This humbleness is not only the epistemological caution of the conscientious scholar who knows too well the weakness of their own case and the strength of its opponents’ to pretend that they have an absolute answer. Rather, it relates very directly to their experience as religious believers in a God who by definition absolutely exceeds them in knowledge and in wisdom.

The scholars and activists who inform this chapter both continue traditions of those earlier thinkers who inspired them (notably in the cases of John Muhammad’s relationship with Wahiduddin Khan and those of Amina and Haytham with Jawdat Said), while in their own ways developing upon them. The relatively greater salience of environmentalist and broadly feminist concerns is a case in point and clearly reflects wider social and ecological developments over the past century. Yet all share with one another and with their precursors a sense that one’s obligation is to do and be one’s best, in full knowledge that one’s perspective is inescapably a limited one. All understand their nonviolence through a theocentric relation of All-Wise Creator and contingent human being. One’s infinitely unequal relationship with God occurs again and again as an articulation and a foundation for the sorts of moral growth understood by Muslim pacifists throughout this study to be an essential element of nonviolence. Even Amina, whose approach to Islam (like that of Jawdat Said, whom we saw was even accused of materialism [Chapter 6]) is arguably the closest to secular humanism among our exemplars in its special regard for reason and democratic liberalism, makes this point directly:

For Amina, as for others discussed in this text, belief in God is less a challenge to nonviolent ethics than a precondition for it. This may be a particularly valuable insight for those wedded to the presumption that religion in general, and perhaps Islam in particular, is defined by irrational and inflexible dogmatism. While for some of its forms some this may well be true, it is manifestly not the case for all. No better evidence for this could be expected than Chaiwat’s modestly open-ended summation of his decades of research and advocacy for nonviolent Islam: