Violence in Islamic Thought from the Qur'an to the Mongols

Abstract

The topic of Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought (LIVIT) calls for an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical approach. This has been the underlying methodological assumption within the project which bore this name. Amongst the products of that three-year project is a series of collected studies by established and emerging scholars in the field, examining how Muslim thinkers have conceptualised violence and categorised (morally and legally) acts of violence. In this opening chapter, István Kristó-Nagy first explores how violence in Islamic thought can be set against a wider consideration of violence in human history. It is this comparative perspective which contextualises not only this volume, but also the two subsequent volumes in the LIVIT series. In the second half of this chapter, Robert Gleave explains how this volume is structured, addressing the different approaches used by the contributors, and examines the different ways in which violence can be categorised.