The Just War and Jihad: Violence in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

R. Joseph Hoffman, ed.
New York: Prometheus Books, 2006. 303 pages.

The fifteen chapters of this book bring together scholars from a variety of
fields to examine and analyze what they perceive to be a relationship
between religion and violence. Generating a feeling of déjà vu, they rehash
previously developed assumptions, arguments, and biases that tend to ignore
underlying causes related to the “existence of the sacred,” for reasons appar-
ently beyond the domain of secular comprehension. The articles reiterate
conventional secular arguments about the dangers of religious convictions
on “peace” and tend to vary in quality and consistency, which reflects on the
book’s overall merit.

Although it is not feasible to go into each chapter’s details, it is impor-
tant to underscore their basic thrust and common theme: the issue of legiti-
mation and what confers legitimacy on action, be it violent in nature, such as
in war or conflict, or simply legal and organizational. Hector Avalos (chap-
ter 6) puts it candidly. In the “relative” framework of “empirico-rationalism,”
he argues that religious violence is always “immoral,” positing that “life,” as
a manifestation of that which “exists,” is worth more than that which does not
exist (p. 113). However, this does not preclude war in the absolute. One
arrives at this conclusion after reading J. Harold Ellens’ “The Obscenity of
War” (chapter 2) as well as the  Committee for the Scientific Examination of
Religion’s (CSER) “Protocol on Religion, Warfare, and Violence” (chapter
15). 

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Ellens, who wrote the first article, has been a soldier for fifty years and
is a self-proclaimed hater of war who nevertheless supports American
aggression against Iraq (p. 34). His argument boils down to the illegitimacy
of war if carried out in the name of religion, but its legitimacy if launched in
the name of what he terms the “imperative evil expedience.” In other words,
war, as it were, is obscene if conducted in God’s name but justifiable if pur-
sued in the name of American interests. For this, he provides rather tenuous
and factually erroneous claims for the invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussain
supported al-Qaeda, which is simply not true even by the American leader-
ship’s own admission, and that this war was imposed on the United States
by 9/11, an attack with which the Iraqi regime had nothing to do. Of course
he does not forget to mention Saddam Hussain’s support of PLO “suicide”
bombings against Israel, never questioning whether this could be justified by
the same principle of “imperative evil expedience” (p. 45, footnote no. 3). If
war and violence can be justified by what he chooses to construct based on
faulty assumptions and manufactured “facts,” why can it not be justified by
reasons other than those of his own choice?

One gets the same impression from the CSER’s textual statement.
According to this proclamation, modern warfare calls for a new calculus to
be decided at the international level, having the status of international law
“without exemption” (p. 279). In other words, it is not the question of war
but of the laws governing it. Since existing international law is a largely
Eurocentric text, the CSER is, in effect, stating that wars can only be con-
ducted in accordance with “Eurocentric” values, justifications, and, for that
matter, permission. Thus, Palestinians must not violently (if at all) resist
Israeli occupation and Muslims are “advised” to subject Islam to the same
deconstructivist endeavors that revealed Judeo-Christian texts to be artifacts
of late Antiquity (pp. 279-80). In essence, Muslims are being told that you
have to be like us, a grandiloquent expression of Orientalist textual as well
as physical imperialism. Rejecting such offers can only be undertaken at
their peril. As the case of Iraq indicates, this is justified by what Judith Lich-
tenberg (chapter 1), quoting Michael Walzer, calls the “sliding scale,” accord-
ing to which the more superior one believes one’s “values” to be, the more
rules one can violate for the sake of their imposition (p. 23).

Factual errors, tenuous allegations, and imperial justifications do not
end there. In a brief chronology about the history of “religious” violence,
Hoffmann indicates that in 1032, 6,000 Jews were killed by Muslim troops
in Fez, Morocco, in a bid to reconquer Spain, and that in 1148 Spain’s Chris-
tians and Jews were forced to accept Islam or die (p. 8). Given the generally

Book Reviews 99



well documented history that Jews actually prospered in Muslim lands at the
time, Hoffmann does not explain the reasons behind the alleged killings of
Jews. Was it a matter of systematic religious persecution, or could the rea-
son perhaps be found in something that they may have done? After all, why
would Muslims feel obliged to kill Jews to reconquer Christian Spain? It is
also well acknowledged that as a matter of jus ad bellum (legitimate reasons
for making war), Muslims used to offer three, rather than just one, condi-
tions to their enemies: convert, pay jizyah (tax), or face war. Even if war
broke out after the refusal to pay jizyah, this is different from saying that
Jews and Christians were told to convert or be killed. A diffusion of mean-
ings seems to be at play here.

On another level, Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez’s article (chapter 13)
appears to be one of the few exceptions in this book. It offers interesting
insights and a measure of analytical sophistication. His main proposition is
that recent religious violence is largely motivated by ideological competition
between secular and religious claims to bases of legitimacy (p. 233). In this
sense, religion is not necessarily a cause of violence, even if in some cases
it may play a “constructive role” by providing an interpretive framework of
narrations and symbols justifying violent behavior (p. 243). For all intents
and purposes, the real causes of violence may lie elsewhere.

This collection of articles leads one to wonder whether claims about
religion being an “inevitable” source of extreme violence can, in fact, stand
their ground. After all, one can argue that the most violent human experi-
ences in history were, more or less, secular in nature. One is tempted to spec-
ulate as to what the fate of tens of millions of indigenous peoples living in
the “New World” would have been if Muslim armies had “discovered” it
rather than the forces of rationality and the Enlightenment.

Amr G. E. Sabet
Docent, Department of Political Science

University of Helsinki, Finland

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