Dictionaries commonly define peace as the absence of war and disquiet. At first blush commonsensical, it is a characterization devoid of positive content. In this engaging, theoretically-sophisticated and well-researched book, Murad Idris aims to fill the void by looking at the idealizations of peace put forward by ten influential thinkers whose influence ranged across the trajectories of Western and Islamic political thought: Plato, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Qutb. According to Idris, the discourses on peace put forward by these thinkers, rather than exhibiting ahistorical universality, are parochial in as much as each is embedded in assumptions and demands that reflect the selfish interests and moral prejudices of its human agent. It is a paradox, writes Idris, that the hallowed enterprise of peace should also be the primary enabler of war, violence, and exclusion. And that is because, from ancient times to the present, across the West and the Islamic East, political agents have formulated peace agendas with certain enemies in view. Peace, Idris tells us, cannot be thought of outside the frame of domination and war. Modifying Clausewitz, Idris makes the strong point that peace (in place of politics) is “the continuation of war by other means.”
How are these politically conceived procedures of peace enacted? Here Idris employs the heuristic device of “insinuates,” which he defines as commonly-revered sentimental and moral categories, such as friendship, law, security, harmony, and prosperity, which braid into peace to provide it with political legitimacy and existential weight. Armed with particularistic values and subject-positions in the guise of the universal, theorizations of peace draw maps of the world that preserve or remake hierarchies, exposing in the process putative oppositions between states and hinterlands, zones of progress and underdevelopment, and between distinct peoples, such as Christians, Europeans, Muslims, and those who would challenge their God-given or providential right to prevail. According to Idris, these embedded insinuates belie peace's inherent provincialism in that they expose the “war-waging peace-lover” to be the “privileged referent” of his culturally specific frames (p. 4). They facilitate polemic by regarding those who ostensibly opposed peace as beyond the pale, as pirates, guileless nomads, infidels, or rogue states.
And so, Idris tells us, Plato constructed the virtuous polis against a vast and warlike Persian Empire. Al-Farabi, the Muslim Neoplatonist, and Aquinas, the Christian scholastic, applied just war theory to define the oppositions between peaceful “friends” and warlike “others,” while Erasmus showed the Ottoman empire to be the antithesis of Christian peace. In discourses that vindicated European colonial rule, Hobbes and Kant articulated peace as the corollary of the victory of developmentally advanced nations over uncivilized ones, the native turned “into a disposable other, eliminated or rendered productive by the settler” (p. 229). Ibn Khaldun takes a similar tact in the Muqaddima, the introduction to his universal history, in which he regards the pure nomad of the desert as the converse of law, order, and civilization, and the nomad's sedentarization as the entry point to peace and civilizational renewal.
And then there is Sayyid Qutb. Idris usefully reads Qutb's relatively neglected 1951 book Al-Salam al-ʿAlami wa al-Islam (Universal Peace and Islam), which he wrote two or three years following his turn to Islamism, as a riposte to the materialism and aggression of Western empire. Arguing for the formation of a countervailing bloc of Muslim states to police the world in the name of Islamic-inflected peace. For in Qutb's view, Islam is an emancipatory force requiring that Muslims struggle against oppressive powers; eventually, Qutb would add ostensible faux Muslims to the list of oppressors. Idris is right to regard Qutb not as a backward-looking nativist but as a postcolonial figure whose binary views were born of the steely logic of Cold War-era politics. At the same time, Idris is quiet about Qutb's vibrant religious imagination, which was also important in fashioning his Islamist views.
In fact, in none of the book's expositions does Idris devote much attention to the cultural formation of the theorists that he analyzes. This is by design, for his purpose is to decenter the discourses of peace, which are necessarily expressed in cultural terms, by finding equivalence among them. In the appreciable view of Idris, Islam does not stand objectively as a discrete civilizational entity separate from, or opposed to, a Christian or Enlightenment West. To construe Islam, or the West, in such a way is to engage in the politics of representation. Rather, Idris treats the various thinkers in the book as bound by similar, though not always identical, discursive structures. Here he consciously follows Roxanne Euben's lead “to remain attuned to the politics of translation, the genealogies of our frames and categories, and the discursive work of our frames and categories” (p. 13).
Is there any respite from the Foucauldian pessimism? Is genuine peace, bereft of agendas and implications, possible? Idris says that it is, and proffers substitutes, including the cold peace of the truce, “which promises no more than itself;” the “particular peace” that is “oriented toward details and particulars”; and the peace of separation, which is premised on a live-and-let-live attitude. These solutions may at first blush appear as let-downs, yet, as practical steps, they shy away from the chauvinism and sleight of hand of conventional ideas of peace. It is no mean feat to have analyzed with such precision and insight the complex ideas of so many disparate thinkers. The book is a major contribution to political theory and intellectual history.
