Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires

Juan Cole

The new world religion of Islam rose against the backdrop of seventh-century game of thrones between the Roman Empire and the Sasanian Empire of Iran that was fought with unparalleled savagery for nearly three decades. The imperial armies zigzagged bloodily across the Near East, the Fertile Crescent, Asia Minor, and the Balkans. Although the Qur’an makes it clear that this struggle between rival emperors, whom contemporaries called “the two eyes of the earth,” formed an essential context for the mission of the prophet Muhammad, historians have only recently attempted explorations of the latter’s life and thought with this framework in mind.

This book puts forward a reinterpretation of early Islam as a movement strongly inflected with values of peacemaking that was reacting against the slaughter of the decades-long war and attendant religious strife. From the Crusades to colonialism, conflicts between Christians and Muslims led to a concentration among writers of European heritage on war and Islam, leaving the dimension of peace and cooperation neglected. Both peace and war are present in the Qur’an, just as they are in the Bible, and both will be analyzed below, but the focus here is on peace.

This book studies the Qur’an in its historical context rather than trying to explain what Muslims believe about their scripture. The Qur’an insists on liberty of conscience and forbearance toward enemies, and it prohibits unprovoked, aggressive warfare. It promises salvation to all righteous monotheists and not just to followers of the prophet Muhammad..

The Qur’an insists that aggressive warfare is wrong and that if the enemy seeks an armistice, Muslims are bound to accept the entreaty. This disallowing of aggressive war and search for a resolution even in the midst of violent conflict justifies the title 'prophet of peace,' even if Muhammad was occasionally forced into a defensive campaign. The Qur’an contains a doctrine of just war but not of holy war and does not use the word jihad with that latter connotation...

Life in medieval feudal societies did not encourage pacific theologies, and Muslims in later empires lost touch with the realities of the early seventh century. What if we read Jesus’s life and thought only through the lens of Pope Urban II, who launched the sanguinary Crusades in the Holy Land with the cry, “God wills it!”?

Even today, many scholars of early Islam seem unduly deferential to later medieval interpreters. Others radically reject all information in those sources, treating Muslim histories differently from Byzantine or Carolingian chronicles, once again condemning non-Europeans to being a people without a history. The Qur’an tells us about that history if we will listen to it, and it tells us what is plausible in the later biographies of the Prophet.