Holy Wars of the Philosophers: Jihad and Justice

• In Event: Navigating Language and Power: Insights into Translation in Political Theory

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of translation surrounding the word and idea of jihad. From its competing translations as “holy war,” “Islamic violence,” “armed struggle,” “spiritual struggle,” “struggle for justice,” or simply “struggle,” among others, translations of the term reflect competing understandings of Islam, Muslims, and the range of legitimate or illegitimate political action. The first part of this paper examines the translation of jihad into violence, including how Anglo-American philosophers discuss jihad. First, it offers a brief history of the translation of jihad as “holy war,” including examples of how colonial officials concerned with “fanaticism” in India, Libya, Egypt, and Syria diagnosed violence by Muslims. It then examines the discursive significance of seemingly minor references to Islam, jihad, and Islamic violence for the larger categories that three philosophers offer: Michael Walzer on unjust war, John Rawls’s fictional Muslim state “Kazanistan,” and Leo Strauss on persecution and secret teachings. This first part of the paper concludes with a historical survey of the terms mujahideen and jihadiyin, or the untranslated mujahideen and the translated jihadist. These, I argue, correspond not to the categories “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim,” but good jihad and bad jihad. They reflect the selective treatment of violence that appeals to jihad either as absolutely foreign but useful (mujahideen) or as absolutely alien and purely driven by fanatic ideology (jihadi). These conceptual and linguistic translations are at the core of how Islamic violence is structured and apprehended as an idea.

Author

• Murad Idris, University of Michigan