Pacifism in Islam – University of Manchester. Juan Cole’s remarks at their conference.
The Islamic Peace Studies Initiative
Juan Cole and Samer Ali have directed the Islamic Peace Studies Initiative at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies in the International Institute of the University of Michigan from 2016. The initiative sought to stimulate thinking and writing on the intersection of Peace Studies as an academic field with Islamic Studies, an intersection that our literature search suggested was all too rare. Other religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, were much better represented in the Peace Studies field. The Initiative led to two courses at the University of Michigan, two conferences, and two books — a monograph by Cole on the Prophet Muhammad and an edited book out of the conferences, edited by Cole. This paper will discuss the project and its major findings.
The Islamic Peace Studies Initiative: Juan Cole
Transcript of Juan Cole’s remarks, computer-generated at YouTube and cleaned up by ChatGPT. Caveat emptor.
Juan Cole: So — I’d like to talk a little bit about the Islamic Peace Studies Initiative at the University of Michigan.
This is an initiative that was begun by myself and Samer Ali at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies in 2016. The context of it, of course, had been the long years of the U.S. so-called War on Terror — the dramatic events of al-Qaeda, and then the rise of ISIL. Samer and I felt that Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies were being securitized in unfortunate ways.
Without wanting to deny that extremism exists — and has been a significant factor — we felt the emphasis on extremism was out of proportion to the reality. When one looks at the entirety of the Muslim world, other things have been going on — and have been going on for 1,400 years — which were being ignored.
So we proposed to our [University of Michigan] International Institute an Islamic Peace Studies Initiative to promote academic research on this subject — and to promote the professionalization and recognition of this subfield.
We did a literature search in Index Islamicus using the Boolean search terms “Islam” and “peace” — and we came up with about 77 articles. Index Islamicus tries to index everything written in European languages about Islam since 1500. There are thousands and thousands of entries — so even if the search was in some way inadequate, or there were other search terms that might have been more fruitful — we can see that this is a neglected subject in European-language research.
As far as I can tell, the International Journal of Peace Studies, which is the foremost journal in the field — at George Mason University — seems to have published few or no articles on Islam. Perhaps some articles set in Muslim societies — but not on Islam per se.
In contrast to this dearth of work on Islam and peace, peace studies itself — as an academic field — has become well established over the years. In some ways, it began in 1955, when Johan Galtung became the chair in peace studies at the University of Oslo. By now, there are 150 colleges and universities just in the United States that offer courses in the area of peace studies.
Peace studies is very broadly conceived and diverse — there’s political philosophy of peace, security studies, practical conflict resolution. The religious dimension of peace studies has been important — many peace studies programs are housed at denominational institutions. The Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at Notre Dame is one example. Haverford, and traditionally Mennonite and Quaker peace church institutions, often have peace studies as well. Secular institutions also participate.
There’s been a fair amount of work on peace and Christianity — peace and Buddhism — so religion as a dimension of this subject is well recognized. But again — not, on the whole, with regard to Islam.
We received funding from the International Institute — they were very kind — and we moved forward with our first “Peace in Islam, Islam in Peace” conference in Ann Arbor in March of 2017. I won’t read the whole program, but I’ll share the participants so that you can get an idea of the diversity of topics and people represented.
I should mention that I was concerned the subject should be treated in the context of the global Muslim world. Africa, for instance, has been an important site for peace studies within Islam — and it was well represented [Rudoph Ware, Lamin Sanneh, Abdullahi An-Naim.]
We did not want to make the mistake of essentializing — saying that Sufism is always about peace. Because of course, there has been militant Sufism — but we did include a paper on that. On the other hand, Sherman Jackson gave us a paper on the fundamentalist turn toward peace in Egypt after the 1990s. We also looked at Salafism and the early Salafis — we argued they should be read in this context.
We did receive some critiques — some nervousness was expressed by invitees. Some turned us down, unsure of what we were about. My guess is that the U.S. government’s CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) program — under Homeland Security — has gotten a bad name in the American Muslim community as being Islamophobic or a brainwashing operation. We had — and have — nothing to do with CVE. We’ve not taken money from the U.S. government.
Still, I suspect that nervousness around CVE made people a bit suspicious about why we were focusing on this subject.
Abdullahi An-Na’im, who gave the keynote at our first conference, also included some critiques — he worried it might become paternalistic — white people showing Muslims how to make peace, and so forth. I hope you can see from our invite list that this was not our intention — we wanted scholars of Muslim heritage to be prominently represented in this project. We aimed for a good mix of people — and as we conceived the project, it was an intellectual and academic program.
We certainly had no intention of trying to train peace negotiators or anything of that sort.
In spring of 2019, we held a second conference — this time, less sociological and more focused on the inner life of Islam and Muslims, looking at peace and serenity as values. Again, we aimed for a diverse set of respondents. Our keynote that year was Dr. Irfan Omar of Marquette University.
Ultimately, these two conferences — along with our other activities — culminated in the book Peace Movements in Islam, published in December 2021 by I.B. Tauris (Bloomsbury), who I believe may be represented at your conference.
The referees for the book — we received three long referee reports — were very enthusiastic. One said the book could be “potentially field-forming.”
I know there are other teams and scholars working on this subject throughout the world. Asma Afsaruddin at Indiana University Bloomington has been one — and she kindly contributed a chapter to our book. There are others as well. There have been a few other such anthologies — for example, one around 2010 by Douglas Johnston with the U.S. Institute of Peace. So it’s not unprecedented — I don’t want to make undue claims for our project.
But I do think it may be the first thoroughgoing project of this sort to result in a book that is theorizing the possibility of a subfield of Islamic peace studies.
Many of our contributors were of Muslim heritage, and we tried to address a wide range of phenomena — Senegal is there, Bosnia is there, India is there, and so on.
I included a paper of my own — looking at peace verses in the Qur’an. These verses are numerous — and I believe they’ve been under-theorized in the field. I used many of these in my own 2018 monograph, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires — but there I used them in writing the biography of the Prophet. In the paper for the book, I focused specifically on the Qur’an itself, trying to do a more analytical study.
As Abd al-Haqq rightly said — you can let the Qur’an comment on itself — and I tried to look at how the verses interplay with one another. I argue that peace, conciliation, and peacemaking are absolutely central to the Qur’an. Even in the Medinan period — where you have what I consider to be “just war” verses — the emphasis on ultimate conciliation continues in that period as well.
So — thank you for letting me give this little overview of our project and of the book that resulted.
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PS: The initiative ran 2016-2022.
PPS see also Juan Cole, “The Great Sufi Qushayri on “Responding to Evil with the Greatest Good”.
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