Peace and conflict
Islamic Studies · GCSE · The School
When fighting is permitted, and its limits
The Quran permits fighting in self-defence and against oppression, and sets a hard boundary in the same breath. Abdel Haleem renders 2:190: "do not overstep the limits", and the verse goes on to say that God does not love those who do. Classical law drew the limits tightly — non-combatants, women, children, the elderly and clergy are not to be harmed; crops and trees are not to be destroyed; treaties are binding; and 8:61 instructs that if the enemy inclines to peace, incline to it too. A war fought outside those limits is not made lawful by its cause.
The two jihads
JIHAD means struggle, and it carries two senses. One is the struggle against one's own selfishness and wrongdoing — the daily one. Many Muslims, especially in Sufi (mystical) circles, call this the greater jihad. The name comes from a hadith, a report passed down about the Prophet ﷺ, that some scholars grade as weak. Al-Bayhaqi, who recorded it, called its chain of narrators weak, and Ibn Taymiyya said it has no foundation. The other sense is armed struggle, which the same hadith calls the lesser. It is hedged by the conditions above and, in classical law, is declared by legitimate authority, not by individuals. Groups that claim the word for attacks on civilians are rejected by mainstream scholarship precisely because they break every limit listed above.
The range of Muslim views
Most Muslims hold that force is justified only defensively and within those limits. Some argue the conditions are so rarely met that the practical position is close to pacifism, pointing to the Quran's repeated preference for pardon (42:40) and to the Prophet's ﷺ amnesty at Makkah. Others emphasise a duty to resist oppression actively. An exam answer that gives only one of these has not described Muslims; it has described one Muslim.
Here is an imagined case with invented details. A group sets off a bomb in a market and kills 12 shoppers. The country is at peace. Nobody had attacked the group, and nobody was being persecuted. The group says its act is jihad. Test that claim in two steps, using Hassan Shibly's paper for the Yaqeen Institute. Step one is cause. Shibly reads the Quran and the Prophet's ﷺ example as allowing war only in response to aggression and persecution. He notes that some jurists took a wider view, so this is one reading. On his reading, this case has no such cause, so the cause fails. Step two is who was hit. Shibly says civilians cannot be targeted unless they take part in the fighting, and he reads 2:190, which speaks of fighting those who fight you, the same way. The shoppers fought no one, so the target fails too. By Shibly's tests, the claim of jihad fails. Tahir ul-Qadri, a scholar from Pakistan, also spoke on this. In London in 2010 he issued a fatwa, a formal ruling, against terrorism and suicide bombing. He said suicide bombers' acts are never to be considered jihad.