The Islamic Law of War and Peace and the International Legal Order: Convergence or Dissonance?

Sohail Hashmi introduces Part VI on non-Western perspectives on the justification of war and international order by engaging with Islamic discourses on war and peace: Muslim jurists working in the eighth through the fourteenth centuries developed a wide-ranging theory of world order (siyar) that elaborated laws of war (jihad) and peace. This theory was never fully implemented in state practice, but given the conservatism of Muslim jurisprudence in later centuries, it was neither revised nor renounced. Thus, this classical theory exists as a sort of parallel legal system to public international law today, confronting modern Muslims with questions of conflict or compatibility between the two. Three broad Muslim responses may be discerned: assimilation, accommodation, and rejection. The assimilationists treat the classical theory largely as a historical and now obsolete conception of world order. They accept the universality of international law and argue that most Muslims do so as well. The accommodationists claim that while international law appropriately governs the conduct of Muslim states in international society as a whole, Islamic law should have a role in the mutual relations of Muslim states. In other words, they see the potential for an Islamic international law alongside public international law. The rejectionists view international law as an alien code imposed on Muslims by Europeans. They affirm the superiority of Islamic law over international law and call for its application by Muslim states, not just in their mutual relations, but with non-Muslim states as well. Of these three positions, Muslim scholarship and practice overwhelmingly favour the assimilationist or accommodationist views. The rejectionist position is propounded by a limited number of the most conservative scholars and activists.