Many Muslim reform thinkers are frustrated with the classical tradition. The arcane and rather obscure discussions of past scholars are often viewed as at best irrelevant, focusing on hypothetical and unreal cases, or being overly theoretical and impractical. At worst, these discussions are pointless distractions, sapping the intellectual talent of the Muslim community, making Islam dangerously out of touch with the needs of the modern age. At best, they are frivolous intellectual games. To be fair, this is not a purely modern critique. The frustration with tradition expressed by many modern reform intellectuals echoes that of numerous past Muslim thinkers. There is, then, a long tradition of rejecting tradition in Islamic thought. Dissatisfaction with pre-modern (‘classical’) intellectual forms of thought is also expressed occasionally in the secondary literature on modern Islam. This sometimes extends to academics who focus on the pre-modern period, viewed as unreconstructed Orientalists. They are, in the view of some, as bad as the hidebound classical ʿulamāʾ; they too cannot come to terms with the new paradigms of knowledge which modernity brings. There is then an oft-cited assessment that the classical tradition is unable to withstand the challenges brought by the modern world.

The discussions and debates of modern Shiʿi scholars, working primarily in the seminaries (ḥawzas) of Iran and Iraq, are counterexamples to this. These scholars, generally speaking, have a strong sense of the continuity between their activities today (teaching, writing, debating) and those of their fellow ʿulamāʾ of the past generations. They perceive an ongoing need to maintain the longstanding position of the current intellectual structures of Shiʿism. These include the marjaʿiyya system (in which the leading scholars – the marājiʿ – are recognised as the ultimate authorities in law), the evergrowing stratum of Ayatollahs (particularly in Iran, where their number has increased significantly since the Revolution), the ḥawza study method and the seminary curricula. These structures also preserve the primacy of Najaf and Qum as the powerhouses of Shiʿi theological, legal and philosophical development. This position is sustained through the promotion of the institutions’ history and an intimate connection with its past achievements. There is, to be sure, an emerging dissatisfaction with the current ʿulamāʾ leadership from within the ḥawza, but this rarely expresses itself in a rejection of the classical tradition.

The implication of Hannah Arendt's well-known distinction is that legitimate action must claim to conform to a pre-existent normative code; justification, on the other hand, is based on the action's results, seen as serving some higher aim or objective. Her wider argument is, of co urse, that the consequentialist calculus that may justify individual acts of violence can never obliterate their fundamental moral deficiency. For Arendt, carrying out the lesser or necessary evil is never legitimate (i.e., it never conforms to her implied notion of a pre-existence, fundamental normative code), because for her, a truly rational moral code could never describe violence as something good or just. It may be justified (or, more circumspectly justifiable), but this categorisation is always short term and results driven; it sets no precedent and it has no ‘appeal to the past’ for validation. Even in the face of a great moral evil, an act of violence can, for Arendt, never be purely good. Arendt's contribution is a recent instalment in a longer history of the ethical evaluation of violence. In European thought, these divisions, in part at least, created the twin disciplines of law and politics. The distinctions she draws between justifiable contraventions of a moral code and allowable exceptions to the law would, however, be quite familiar to the ethical discussions of medieval Muslim authors. They are mirrored, to an extent, in the difference between shar’ (divine law) and siyāsa (pragmatic requirements of governance) in medieval Muslim discourse, where the term siyāsa brackets extra-legal (non-shar’) actions, justified primarily on consequentialist grounds. That is, they bring benefits to the community, and these must sometimes overrule the (apparent) requirements of the shar‘. It is important to remember, in contrast to Arendt's framework, violent acts can be found in both shar’ and siyāsa categories, and hence they may be (using her terms) legitimate or justifiable (or indeed both).

This book consists of a series of studies about violent acts in Muslim contexts, whether they were carried out by Muslims or by others, whether they are postulated or actual, whether they have happened, are happening currently or they may take place in the future.

Jihād has become the archetype of Muslim violence in much contemporary commentary; recent scholarship has done much to bring a more precise description of the concept and to set current debates in context. Nevertheless, the technical nature of the fiqh discussions of jihād inevitably leave them open to selective citation, and hence distortion. My approach here is to try to understand the complex of regulations around jihād in a late classical Imāmī fiqh text as an instance of legal discussion. I argue that the proper backdrop to understanding the discussion is not primarily the military activity contemporary with the work's composition, but rather greater theological and legal principles that are worked out in the tradition of scholarship, of which the work analysed in this chapter was just the latest instalment. This may make the legal handbook a less useful source of dynastic history, but it does, I argue, give us a fuller understanding of the intellectual framework in which justifications for military action, and the inevitable violence entailed by it, appear.

When reviewing the works of jurisprudence (fiqh), jihād invariably receives its own separate ‘chapter’ (Kitāb al-jihād), and the topic discussed is almost exclusively jihād as military action (fighting – qitāl – and the support for that activity). The fiqh writers were not unaware of the other notions of jihād (such as the so-called greater, ‘spiritual’ jihād of the believer against the lower self), but in a legal context, jihād is overwhelmingly used to refer to a struggle using military means in order to bring the physical realm more closely in tune with God's intended law. Given this legal context, when jihād is permitted (or recommended or obligatory), what actions are permitted within a jihād and the benefits accruing to the one who fights (mujāhid) become prime instances of justified violence in Islamic legal thinking. They are not the totality of such instances: punishment of offenders and disciplining one's children, wives and slaves provide other examples; however, jihād does constitute an important, and controversial, case that can illustrate how violence was processed in Islamic legal discourse.