Discourse on Just War in Islam and Jihad

Islam has a long history of discussion on the morally legitimate use military force. This paper is to study just war tradition in Islam and its historical application ranging from jihad to the events of 9.11. Alia Brahimi has defined that the just war tradition requires that the following seven criteria to be justified: just cause, right authority, right intention, the goal of peace, overall proportionality of good over evil, last resort, and reasonable hope of success (Brahimi 2010:22). Similarly we can find reliable passages from the Quran to define just war as self-defence. According to Islamic world view,the world is categorized by "territory of Islam" within which Islam is the dominant political reality and "territory of war" which is not governed by Islam. In the territory of Islam, the ruler is a Muslim and the system of government is organized to serve the expansion of Islam. In this sense, war is means to the political end of establishing an Islamic state. However, resort to war requires an order from a legitimate authority. It is also requires a just cause and righteous intention, whose conditions are similar to western criteria for just war. In the matter of Jihad, in the west, the notions of Jihad and Sharia are no longer unfamiliar to people. Most Muslim scholars teach that Jihad in Islam means only peaceful self-defence and that the inference of radical Muslims has nothing to do with "true"Islam. Despite this unfortunate state of scholarship, this paper widely introduces different ideas and re-interpretations raised by Muslim scholars, but tries to dismiss the over simplifications presented by both Islamophobic and Islamophillic approaches. Jihad in Islam is not equivalent to terrorism, but rather a type of honorable combat which is subjected to strict rules of fighting, including the limiting of military targets