Islamic Studies on Human Rights and Democracy
Volume:1 Issue: 1, Winter and Spring 2017

This article first deals with the phenomenon of violence within the human history and refers to the sacred texts of the religions. It then studies the religious recommendations to avoid violence and to practice peace. Further, the article also addresses the reasons behind violence from different aspects in the modern world, and highlights the fact that every religious sect considers its beliefs as true: this has led to violence, whereas the dignity of human beings should be taken into account. The article provides that the promotion of friendship and kindness plays a great role in the elimination of violence. Finally, it concludes that peace and reconciliation should be the main criteria among nations in their interactions.

Violence is a primordial phenomenon dating back to the time when Adam and his sons resided on the Earth. As in all former eras, the twenty first century also is the eye witness of the bitter consequences of the dark side of mankind. So, globally, violence takes thousands of lives every year and the number is increasing annually due both to unequalled mixture of people of all faiths in many parts of the world and unprecedented level of free expression of either religious or secular perspectives on every aspects of life which naturally results in bare widespread violence. Various forms of violence have been recognized as violation of human rights embodied in international and regional treaties as well as in national laws and constitutions. In the present article, the diverse classifications of violence including spiritual violence are discussed, while religious violence, where religion is either the subject or object of violent behaviour, is analysed in more depth. In the concluding part of the article, while it is admitted that certain aspects of religions might be misused to support violence, it is asserted that a genuine interpretation of all Abrahamic religions' core elements would not authorize human violence and every main religion of the world has expressed kind of commitment to the value of peace: “Thou shalt not kill” is in the essence of all monotheism faiths, certainly the three based upon Abraham and God. The concluding remarks of the author in this article is that, as violence is nowadays resorted to in the name of religions and religious leaders, it should, in turn, be fought by religious leaders emphasizing on peace, forgiveness and compassion, as the key elements in all religions.

This is not an essay on the acts of violence, but on violence per se. The purpose is to expose violence for what it is in its essence, so as to renounce it, and thus make room for genuine peace. It is widely acknowledged that violence is the very opposite of peace, and thus obviously threatens it, but most discussions of violence remain at the level of acts of violence and rarely attempt to probe the essence lying beneath its outward manifestations. The same could be said of peace. This is understandable, as both concepts entail highly enigmatic subtleties that are difficult to pin down, and therefore require the work of arduous metaphysical analysis. Nonetheless, such work must be carried out, for if discussions of violence do not attempt to probe the inner depths of what it is in itself, we are apt to end up defining certain activities as non-violent, when in fact they are simply different forms of violence, masquerading as non-violence. This may lead to the further identification of peace with these deceptive definitions of non-violence, which ultimately amounts to calling violence peace, as, for instance, when so-called non-violent demonstrators, short of inflicting bodily harm upon the other, are nonetheless filled with passionate hatred, with no intention of transforming the other. To adequately understand that non-violence is not automatically to be equated with peace, it is first necessary to get at the core of what violence really is. René Girard and Mahatma Gandhi are two exemplary contemporary thinkers, coming from dissimilar academic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, who do explore the metaphysics of violence profoundly, and whose conclusions are stunningly commensurate. Though their approaches are quite different, they both conclude that violence is an invisible, ambiguously transcendent, disordered force that feeds upon itself by parasitically taking advantage of the whole range of immoral human desire. To renounce it is nothing short of renouncing all evil and immorality through a hyper-conscious decision to strive daily to know the truth and to do the good, precisely by loving the beautiful—the very place where the good and true meet—and that one sacred space where violence dares not show its hideous face.

The metaphysical essence of nihilism embodies a radical devaluing of reality and a depreciation of life in being ontologically fixated on non-being and at times appealing to positivistic scientism to flatten existence and grasp it simply as perishable. A materialistic take on worldly affairs could also potentially naturalize the concrete and pragmatic political and economic exercising of violence and actualize the unfolding of its will to power. Although religion posits its own variegated values in celebration of nature, life, and humanity as signs of divine creation, some of its interpretations of divinity and scripture could potentially downgrade the worthiness of our sensory and temporary being-in-the-world by only valuing a belief in the supra-sensible and otherworldly transcendence that underpins it. Such penchant in religiosity if left unmonitored spiritually and theologically might result in the praxis of bellicosity rather than contribute to pacifying or overcoming aggression. A revengeful resentment towards worldly existence could sacrifice the value of life in the name of the articles of faith. Taking these situational aspects into account, we reflect herein on the metaphysical conditions in which nihilism and violence become harboured not only in a materialist will to power but also within the folds of religious belief.

This article seeks to take a broadly human rights-based perspective to the question of the role that religion can play in building peace, preventing violence and reaching reconciliation in post-conflict situations. It takes as a fundamental position the notion that religions contain within themselves the potential for peaceful co-existence and preventing violence in all its forms. However, it also recognizes that there are numerous cases in which religion has served as the vehicle for expressing violent views and even as the pretext for violent acts. In taking a human rights perspective, it is necessary to ensure protection for religions and religious belief in order to foster this peace-building capacity of religions and to mitigate the possibility for them to be exploited towards violent ends. It is important to concentrate on the values that underpin building a culture of peace, including those taught us by the world’s major religions and supported by the secular values of human rights. This notion of peace comprises important elements allow people to enjoy a sense of security in their lives which, in turn, allows them to develop and take an attitude of tolerance towards others.

The problem of the relation between violence and economic affairs has been a topic for political science since ancient Greece. Aristotle says that the Graces, minor deities of the Greek pantheon, have a role to play in inspiring citizens to be kind and generous towards each other in exchanges (Nic. Ethics 1133a2-4), for if they are not, and instead the powerful exploit the weak, citizens will “seek to return evil for evil” and turn towards civil strife and violence (1132b33). The Greeks, explains Aristotle, established sanctuaries to the Graces to encourage reciprocal giving among their citizens. Aristotle proposes a theory of value and of exchange by which we can measure economic well-being in terms of whether citizens are practicing reciprocal beneficence or exploiting each other. The one produces civil harmony, the other evokes violence. This article, through algebraic formulas, mainly focuses on the role of humanly factors such as kindness and grace in preventing violence and exploitation by citizens.

This essay examines the common identification of violence by taking Walter Benjamin’s critique as a keystone to understanding how it is used as a device for abstracting its casual nexus of social and political indignities. From the modern Muslim perspectives of Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Mutahhari, an attempt at uncoupling mythic from divine violence is made where the later, without the guarantees and protection of the totalizing juridical systems of the former, is experienced as a politics of tribulation. At today’s critical historical juncture of self-declared caliphates, mythic excesses point to a breaking out of the abstraction spell and a return to the “scalar” qualities of Islam. When effective, divine violence inheres with a potent quality of orientation that can be an effective mode in resisting the ideological edifices that sustain state repression, including those proclaimed as being Islamic.

As the title of paper “Inner Peace as the ʽRight Wayʼ (›irāt al-mustaqīm) to Outer Peace” indicates what I intend to clarify is that, although religions can help us to establish world peace, the primary peace upon which all real peace depends is inner peace: it is peace with God and His whole creation (khalq). Thus, within the Islamic context, to discuss the political and legal realities of peace and war, we first need to understand how Islam views these concepts in a general sense: namely, both the inner and outer peace. Once the general Islamic sense of the two terms is clear, we can turn to the specific issue of how traditional and normative Islam would strive to establish peace in today's world.

Religion is a kind of relationship that links the human to the divine. Philosophically speaking, it is the manifestation of the human quest of happiness, where the latter is eternal and certain only when linked to some being beyond all the finiteness of this world. In this context, violence appears to be a distortion where the human strive for being more becomes a selfish taking attitude, where being more is understood as being all. This selfishness takes the form of rejecting otherness as a whole, which becomes a rejection of the feminine value in a world supposed to be governed by the masculine power. But complementarity between men and women is a fact to be emphasized in all aspects of life, and since religion is the human quest for perfection, where life is found abundantly, it cannot but take into consideration both aspects of humanity in relationship with the divine. After all, humans were created as men and women, and any tentative to disturb that order in creation by undervaluing an aspect of humanity would end up in violence. A common aspect of violent patterns is the marginalization of women’s role in decision making and in social development, not to mention the scandalizing marginalization of women in religious leadership. Here the distribution of roles between men and women becomes a very important field for research. The paper shows the importance of the feminine role in religion, while focusing on the feminine role in avoiding violence, mostly in the monotheistic religions. The feminine role is to be explored on the anthropological level as well as the psychological and metaphysical levels. The feminine is an essential aspect of our humanity, and we can only get in touch with it through the active role of women. The paper draws our attention to the confusion between the symbolic aspect of receptivity, associated to the feminine, and the passivity imposed on women by some misunderstanding of religious passages, which minimizes the role of women. Women have an important role in protecting and nurturing humanity, making sure the religious path develops into an environment where empathy and forgiveness are promoted, which is a religious message that prevents violence, and helps religion fulfill its purpose.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between religion and violence. The idea is that religion, as a collection of texts, is single, but various kinds of actions have been taken under its name. The reason lies in the fact that religion, as a textual entity, is prone to various interpretations. Each of the interpretations indeed, in its turn, embodies a particular approach to the religion. It is in fact the approach and its resulting interpretation that lead to actions on the part of the believers. Some of the approaches to religion may amount to violence and they have indeed amounted to such a phenomenon. We will conclude that the spiritual approach, as compared with the jurisprudential and theological ones, is less likely to give rise to violence.