The notion of violence looms large in the study of the history of ideas. The editors of Violence in Islamic Thought from the Mongols to European Imperialism have taken their cue from Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that violence can be justifiable by its ends, but it can never be legitimate. The volume brings together eleven articles topically organized in four parts. The first part of the volume focuses on the late medieval period under the Mongol and Timurid dynasties. Michal Biran's article qualifies the common perception of the Mongol invasions as an overwhelmingly violent act. Biran convincingly argues that the Mongols were strategic in exerting violence on conquered regions and populations, and that many individuals or groups survived the invasions unscathed either because they submitted to the Mongols proactively or they possessed certain skills that the Mongols found useful. According to Biran, the issue of the “legitimacy” of violent action was not at the core of contemporary debates, because both the Mongols and the Muslims of the Middle East explained the Mongol invasions as an expression of God's will. The next article, by Timothy May, expands on the same point, with a caveat on the legitimacy of the Mongol invasions, and presents a detailed overview of the ideas on the place of the Mongols in Muslim eschatology. Both Mongol and non-Mongol narratives agreed that the Mongol invasions were part of God's plan: hence they were justified, though not entirely legitimate. István Vásáry contrasts the Mongol yasa and the Islamic sharīʿa. He argues that the Mongol and Islamic views of law and violence are compatible with each other, except that they agree on the ultimate superiority of the Mongol or Islamic perspectives on politics respectively. Beatrice Manz discusses “unacceptable violence” in Mongol and Timurid Iran. She argues that contemporary historians highlighted the violence of the Mongols and the Timurids in order to present them as the scourge of God and bring them to the fold of an Islamic universalist outlook.

In the second part of the volume, Jon Hoover discusses Ibn Taymiyya's views on legitimate violence. Ibn Taymiyya argued that even unbelievers can eventually go to Heaven if they are adequately punished in this world. Marie Thérèse Urvoy introduces the notion of moral violence in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma. According to this text, non-Muslims living in places controlled by Muslims are protected under the law, so they cannot be subjected to “effective violence”, but they can be inflicted by “moral violence”, such as forcing Christians and Jews to wear distinctive clothes. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya blurs the distinction between a dhimmī and kāfir in the name of upholding the interests of the Muslim community. Robert Gleave's article is also a close reading of an early modern text, Jāmiʿ al-maqāṣid by the Safavid cleric ʿAlī al-Karakī. Gleave argues that al-Karakī was less concerned about the actual historical circumstances of his time than the conventions of legal scholarhip. He focuses on the problem of the imām’s endorsement of the jihād: if the imām is in occultation, would a jihād conducted without the imām’s endorsement be legitimate? Al-Karakī’s answer is negative, but he still considers the Safavid authority legitimate, because according to him the existence of a political authority is always preferable to anarchy.

In the penultimate part of the volume, Miklós Maróth discusses the concept of violence in the philosophical systems of al-Fārābī, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldūn. Maróth argues that violence was legitimate in the ideas of these three philosophers as long as it contributed to the development of the Muslim community. Vasileios Syros’ article is a cross-cultural examination of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Ibn al-Ṭiqṭaqā, and Machiavelli. Syros discusses how the link between ethics and politics weakened throughout the Middle Ages both in Europe and the Middle East, and finally snapped with Machiavelli. Therefore, for these authors the maintenance of good order was more important than the creation of an ideal society through politics.

In the final part, Iván Szántó traces the narrative and visual depictions of flaying as a punishment inflicted upon irreligious people, and argues that this was a performative act through which the victim becomes “a messenger of the power of law”. Colin Imber asks if the fatwās issued by Ottoman jurists against the ḳızılbaş of Anatolia were warrants of genocide, and his answer is negative. Not only did these fatwās not mean a blank cheque for killing all the ḳızılbaş – as, for instance, Ebūʾs-Suʿūd's famous fatwā allows for the execution of only the ḳızılbaş soldiers and their ringleaders – they were also mainly issued at a time of active military conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids. Imber argues that these fatwās were pieces of Ottoman propaganda against the Ottoman elite in the Ottoman Empire.

There is no doubt that each article contributes to its respective field. However, in edited volumes, rarely connecting the points of individual articles makes a straight line of argument, and this book is no exception. Terminological opacity is partially to be blamed for this. Robert Gleave in his introductory essay says that “there is no obvious term or notion” in the period covered by the volume. The issue of violence was most forcefully introduced to scholarship by Max Weber, but the term that Weber used in German, that is Gewalt, has a much broader spectrum of meanings than a single direct English translation such as “violence” would suggest. “Force” and “governance”, for example, are just as much part of the semantic spectrum of Gewalt as “violence”. I must respectfully disagree with the editors of the volume, as there is indeed a term that encapsulates most, if not all, of the issues discussed in this book, and that term is siyāsa. It is very well known that siyāsa refers to both public or formal violence and governance in the early modern period. It is also a pity that the book excludes two forms of violence that are fundamental to our understanding of the term in this context. The issue of fitna, or civil war, is not discussed in any significant detail: there are references to the issue in several chapters, but fitna as a philosophical, theological, and legal topic deserves to be discussed separately. The second form of violence which does not receive attention here is the Messianic violence in the period covered by the book. In this period only Messianic movements exerted “revolutionary” violence. They were sparks rather than movements in the post-Mongol period, and the successful ones evolved into a new form of law, or siyāsa, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the heuristic allure of these cases is unavoidable, and I believe they need to be studied in their own right in this context. Finally, the chronological and geographical coverage is very imbalanced. The late medieval period is unfairly privileged, and large chunks of geography are simply ignored, including post-Timurid Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and al-Andalus. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution to the history of ideas in the late medieval and early modern period, and the editors and the contributing authors are to be commended for this achievement.