Excerpt taken from Searching for a King: Muslim Nonviolence and the Future of Islam by Jeffry R. Halverson

Chapter 5: Shaykh Jawdat Saeed The Philosopher

Every social movement, nonviolent or otherwise, needs an intellectual to express the ideas behind it. Someone has to systematically present those views in a defensible manner. For every César Chávez, there must be a Martin Luther King Jr. In the case of Islamic nonviolence, that intellectual is likely Shaykh Jawdat Saeed, who has written numerous books, given countless lectures, and appeared on media outlets such as al-Jazeera Arabic satellite television. Now approaching eighty years of age, Saeed remains intellectually and physically active on his small farm in southern Syria and works from his home. On his official website, a surprising thing in itself, Saeed is shown sitting in his modest office with photographs of Gandhi, Martin CLuther King Jr., and Abdul Ghaffar Khan beside him on his bookshelf. If there is a philosopher of Islamic nonviolence today, Jawdat Saeed is the one.

The Early Years

Saeed was born on February 9, 1931, in the small Circassian village of Bir Ajam, in the rich farmlands of the Golan Heights of Syria. His family was Sunni Muslim and adhered to the Hanafi school of law, which has long been common among the Circassians. Saeed’s father, Muhammad, sent his son to study at a school in Quneitra, an Ottoman-era city that was later destroyed during the Arab-Israeli wars. Upon completing his studies, Saeed traveled to Cairo and attended the prestigious Islamic seminary there, al-Azhar University. Cairo was the center of the Arab-Islamic renaissance (al-nahda) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when scholars such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida achieved international renown. The city remained a cultural and intellectual hotbed of new religious and sociopolitical ideas. In 1952 , the year of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anticolonial revolution, Saeed graduated from al-Azhar with a degree in Arabic studies and literature, as well as a diploma in education. It was the beginning of a long and accomplished intellectual life.

In 1950s Cairo Saeed was introduced to the work of Malik Bennabi , an Algerian scholar educated in Paris. Bennabi settled in Cairo in 1954, when the Algerian armed resistance against French colonial rule began, returning to Algeria in 1962 after independence. He produced over two dozen books, including Les Conditions de la Renaissance and Le Problème des Idées dans le Monde Musulman , until his death in 1973. “What Bennabi was saying was very different from what we used to hear from [Jamal al-Din] al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and even [Sir Muhammad] Iqbal,” Saeed recalled in a 1998 interview. “It was such a jolt to me when he refrained from blaming the enemies, the colonizer, the imperialist, the crusader, the Zionist, the freemason, and all the other foes.”

Bennabi’s many writings tackled the subjects of culture, intellectual dynamism, and the means of development in Arab and Muslim society. He argued that modern Muslim backwardness must be understood in terms of ideas, not in terms of the acquisition of “objects” such as weapons and technologies, because social development should increasingly be understood through intellectual criteria. “The morbid adoration in the Muslim world for physical force has hindered its appreciation of knowledge and the power of ideas,” Bennabi argued, “that ideas are the real resource of the people.” He also criticized the Muslim tendency to resort to apologetics and to rely on past accomplishments of Islamic civilization rather than look to future goals and achievements. In addition to the ideas of Bennabi, Saeed also took great interest in the works of Sir Muhammad Iqbal.

Muhammad Iqbal was a Punjabi philosopher, Sufi mystic, and poet educated in England and Germany, who emphasized the need to spiritually and politically revitalize modern Islam, most notably in a book of collected lectures titled The Reconstruction of Islamic Thought. Saeed credited Iqbal with awakening Muslims to the idea that even though “the Qur’an and Islam emerged before the age of science, it was the Qur’an which heralded the age of science” and that the Qur’an demonstrates “the importance of the facts of the real world and human experience.” These insights from Iqbal led Saeed to embrace the idea that “the truth” is discernable by looking at the sort of human being that a doctrine, philosophy, or belief produces. He cites Iqbal’s teaching that “Allah’s sharia [i.e., law] is realized when justice is realized; whatever comes closer to justice is closer to Allah’s sharia.” This idea enabled Saeed to see beyond the restrictive parameters that were set in the past and reenvision Islam in the present. Muslims, according to Saeed, must be completely free to go beyond the “dogmatic mind.” The “dogmatic mind,” Saeed explains , “is the mind of a person who, when the objective circumstances call for a change in attitude, fails to make that change.”

The Sons of Adam

When he returned to his native Syria, Saeed completed mandatory military service and worked as a teacher in the historic capital of Damascus. Although details are lacking, Saeed maintained an association with the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) during this time, probably stemming from his time in Egypt — the birthplace of the Islamist movement — and his ideas earned him the ire of Syrian government authorities. The prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, encountered Saeed during those years in Damascus, later describing him as a very distinguished personality and an “active volcano.” Saeed, however , grew estranged from the militant current of the Islamist movement at that time, as well as the turbulent political scene of the region . By the 1960s Saeed was issuing a forceful rebuke of the militant Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb in the form of an Arabic treatise titled Madhhab Ibn Adam al-Awal (The Doctrine of the First Son of Adam). It was the first of his writings on Islamic nonviolence.

Saeed’s treatise, first published in 1965, is an exposition of Islamic nonviolence rooted in the story in the Qur’an of Adam’s two sons , Cain and Abel. This classic account (known in a prior form in the Bible) is related in the fifth chapter, which dates from the Medinan period after the hijra. Although it shares the core elements with the Genesis story in the Torah, the Qur’anic version contains some unique elements:

“Recite to them the story of the sons of Adam in truth. Behold! They each presented a sacrifice (to God). It was accepted from one, but not from the other. The latter said, “Surely I will kill you.” “Surely,” said the former, “God accepts the sacrifice of those who are righteous. If you stretch out your hand against me to kill me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against you, for I do fear God, the Lord of the Worlds. For me, I intend to let you draw on yourself my sin as well as yours, for you will be among the companions of the fire, and that is the reward of those who do wrong.” The selfish soul of the other led to the murder of his brother. He murdered him and became one of the lost ones.”

Abel’s refusal to respond with retaliatory violence, as related in the preceding verses, is the principal Qur’anic paradigm of nonviolence. It should be noted again that the Qur’an is not an account of Muhammad’s life story. Therefore, Badshah Khan’s emphasis on the Meccan period of Muhammad’s life is not at all in conflict with the fact that this passage is Medinan. In the Qur’an, Abel died as a righteous martyr rather than retaliating with violence and becoming a “selfish soul” who disobeyed God, as his brother Cain had done when he committed murder.

Another important story in the Qur’an relates an event that occurred prior to Abel’s murder. This is the story of the creation of humanity and the formation of Adam out of dust and water mixed into clay. It states that when the angels in heaven heard that God was planning to appoint his newest creation, Adam, and his descendents as his viceroy over the earth, the angels protested to God, saying, “Will Thou place in the earth one who will make mischief and shed blood?” The objection by the angels before God would prove to be prophetic, because as a result of the primordial murder committed by Cain, humanity would spring from the loins of a murderer, and subsequently all humans would “carry the virus of Adam’s corrupt first son” who faced his problems with violence. As such, “the doctrine represented by the attitude of Adam’s first son toward the first dispute which took place at the onset of humanity will be a crest [to be overcome] for humanity on its long march.” In Saeed’s view, human beings must follow God’s guidance and progress forward to find new, constructive ways of solving their problems in an atmosphere that is “free from any threat of bloodshed , revenge or spirit of retaliation and aggression.” For “violence is not a disease afflicting only youth,” Saeed writes. “The whole world suffers from this lethal disease.”

Saeed devotes great attention to the stories in the Qur’an about the prophets, such as Jesus and Moses. He notes that their mission to spread the call of God (dawa) and establish an Islamic way of life had two distinct stages. “Some were able to complete the two stages, such as Moses and Muhammad,” writes Saeed, “while others did not go further than the first stage, such as Christ.”

The first stage consists of calling people to God using proofs and righteous conduct, never imposing any beliefs upon society through coercion, and enduring the hostility and opposition of unbelievers with patience. When a society is undertaking the process of becoming a “true” Islamic society, Muslims cannot issue judgments, “especially in those matters related to the shedding of blood and personal rights.” 14 It is only when a society finally becomes a truly Islamic one, accepting the laws and norms of God’s religion (i.e., Islam), that the second stage begins and force to sustain the social order becomes necessary. This was the case in the city of Medina under the Prophet Muhammad (i.e., the Medinan period) and among the Israelites under Moses in the Sinai.

The second stage of the prophets’ mission, following the first stage of propagation, does not abrogate peaceful and nonviolent methods of reform and resistance, even though an Islamic society has been established. Nonviolence remains the ethical ideal, but Saeed concedes that force may be used as a last resort if preceded by the approval or consensus of society. It is not acceptable for an individual to perpetrate violence on his own accord. People must be free to declare and propagate their faith in “the One God” and suffer for that cause alone (not for engaging in criminal behavior), as the prophets were persecuted for no other reason than their simple declaration of monotheism. This view contradicts the idea of revolutionary violence against a “jahili society” (i.e., infidel society) carried out by an Islamic “vanguard” as articulated by Sayyid Qutb. In fact, Saeed considers Qutb’s ideology to be an inversion of the truth, which is that nonviolent propagation is the way to guide a deviant society, rather than by force, violence, or imposing laws on people.

“Jihad and applying the laws in Islam are not the means of spreading Islam,” Saeed writes. “Rather they are intended as tools to abolish oppression.” Achieving a true Islamic society, according to Saeed, can never be achieved by the use of force.

Saeed contends that the manipulation of the concept of jihad “has probably caused more harm to Muslims than any other malpractice.” Indeed, due to this affliction, those who use jihad as a violent tool for coercion and shedding blood “must be quelled with any possible means,” not only because they are terrorists, but because “they are also trying to distort and corrupt Islam.” The best form of jihad is courageously declaring the truth in the face of falsehood and tyranny, and accepting the repercussions for doing so with unwavering conviction. This was demonstrated by one of the first Muslims, Bilal, who was an Abyssinian companion of the Prophet and former slave who was tortured for his belief in the One God by his pagan master in Mecca.

The question of force inevitably the question of infidelity, or kufr, and the place of unbelievers within an Islamic society during the second stage. Saeed cites a well-known Medinan verse from the Qur’an: “Let there be no compulsion in religion; the Truth is henceforth clear from error.” 19 In keeping with the principles of orthodox Sunni theology, Saeed reminds his readers that “belief that is the result of compulsion is not belief, nor is disbelief.” Based on this important Qur’anic principle, the disbelievers, namely those who oppose the call and deny the existence of the One God, cannot be harmed so long as they themselves are not violating the same imperative. For, as noted, an Islamic society can defend itself against destruction. However, Saeed argues:

If we were to imagine or assume that Islam could never be accepted by others unless it was forced upon them, then we would be highly deceived and detached from the justice of Islam. It would be as if the human mind, created by God, could not be approached by logic.

Unbelievers have the right to exist peacefully in an Islamic society, enjoying the same rights as Muslims to debate and express their views. As Saeed states, the “right of protecting people’s thoughts and beliefs is to be applied to believers in the same way that it is to be applied to unbelievers,” and they “have the same right as believers do in calling people to their ideas , in a peaceful way , disputing in a gracious way.” Saeed’s assertion is a reference to the Qur’anic verse, “Call [others] to the path of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching and debate with them in ways that are best.” Most Islamists — perhaps even Muslims in general — would object to the idea of letting atheists or polytheists call people to their “blasphemous” ideas. For some, the idea is unthinkable.

“Not many Muslims at present tolerate granting to others the right to call to their ideas, in an equal degree as they (Muslims) believe they are privileged to have,” writes Saeed. “The reason is that they do not have enough confidence in the ideas, or in the religion they hold.” Ultimately, by letting this free and peaceful discourse take place, Saeed believes that the Truth (quoting the Qur’an) will settle down as “the scum disappears like froth cast out; while that which is for the good of humanity remains on the earth.”

To support his position, Saeed relates the famous tale of the caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib (Imam Ali) in the seventh century. During the disputed reign of this son-in-law of the Prophet , two Muslim armies faced one another at the plain of Siffin in 657 on the banks of the Euphrates River. The Muslim community , still in its relative infancy, was terribly divided politically. Seeking to avoid any further Muslim bloodshed, Ali agreed to arbitration with his opponent, Muawiyya, in hopes of peacefully resolving the conflict. But a group of Ali’s supporters disagreed with his decision, insisting that no such arbitration should take place and that the forces of Muawiyya were sinners who must be fought. Nevertheless , Ali went forward with the arbitration, which did not result favorably for him, and the dissenters rebelled against Ali, declaring him an apostate and proclaiming that the Qur’an alone had authority in such matters.

These rebels came to be known as al-khawarij (“ the outsiders”), or Kharijites. They are often described as the first heretics and extremists in Islam. The Kharijites subsequently carried out acts of violence against the followers of Ali and Muawiyya, all the while proclaiming their devotion to the Qur’an and Islam. The Kharijites are further synonymous with the doctrine of takfir, the accusation of apostasy or unbelief against Muslims who do not meet their rigid standards of observance (thus forfeiting life and property). For Saeed the Kharijites epitomize the way that Muslims have deviated from the way of the prophets.

“The Kharijites are people who were intent on establishing a society on the basis of compulsion,” he writes, and their error, regrettably, has never left the Muslim community. Saeed remarks, “Let the Kharijites be jubilant in their graves, seeing that the whole Muslim world has converted to their way; that the ‘conditions for lawful jihad’ of the other Muslims are no better than those of the Kharijites.”

Defending the Doctrine

Amid the pervasive violence in the modern Middle East, Saeed’s concept of nonviolence has been the target of criticism from many sides. One prominent criticism of nonviolence is the idea that it connotes being passive, weak, and impotent to do anything in the face of injustice. As Saeed states , “such people argue that the use of this approach should denote impotence and weakness, and that whoever adopts such a [nonviolent] approach is actually trying to disguise his own personal weakness by the promotion of such an approach .” This is a common critique against nonviolence in all cultures, including America’s.

Saeed responds by asserting that “these claims only prove that those who adopt them have failed to understand the [nonviolent] approach, and that the approach, in itself, is a mystery to them,” because nonviolent resistance is “the actual field of struggle [i.e., jihad] and positive action.” 29 Nonviolence, additionally, is “more reassuring to the conscience” and strategically superior, because “those who may be imprisoned for adopting this approach are never worried that the authorities will discover the other side to their actions, because their actions have neither other sides nor secrets.” Furthermore, he notes, those factions of society and world powers that oppose Islam under the pretext of opposing “terrorism” will “no longer be able to hide behind the screen of such accusations,” and they will be “absolutely revealed to all people.” 30 In other words, the justification for hostilities that is employed by the unbelievers will cease to exist, leaving their enmity and aggression unmasked for all to see. Saeed states, “If our aspiration is to deliver the Word of God, why do we help the enemies of our religion by provoking certain actions which give them the chance to carry out their plans?”

In 1972 Saeed published a new treatise titled Hatta Yughayyiru Ma Bi-Anfusihim (Until They Change What Is in Themselves), a title derived from a well-known verse in the Qur’an . The foreword to the book was written by the aforementioned scholar Malik Bennabi during a time when he resided in Tripoli, Lebanon. “Brother Jawdat Saeed knows, as a Muslim well versed in Islamic culture,” Bennabi wrote, “that change, throughout history, yields to the law of the self (al-nafs).” Saeed asserts that scholars and activists who have contemplated social issues, ills, and injustices, offering creative understandings and solutions, lack the underlying principle that lies at the heart of the matter, which is “the self.”

The Qur’an, Saeed argues, teaches humanity that all of their predicaments are the product of the self, so the problem “is not the injustice (al-zulum) that befalls humanity from the outside, but what descends upon humanity from itself (binafsihu).”

While rooted in the Qur’an, this argument is certainly aligned with Bennabi’s views, specifically his criticism of the Muslim world for its preoccupation with blaming its ills on the Other — the colonizer, the Zionist, and so forth. Saeed contends that people who fail to truly understand the creed (aqida) of Islam have tried to cure society of its ills by imposing laws or using force to change its conditions, even by waging war on an Other. He also criticizes those resigned to fatalistically accepting the problems of the world, awaiting the messianic Mahdi or the End Times to set things right. In a clearly activist stance, Saeed asserts that change must begin within the individual and proceed forth like the cells of a larger organism before God will change the conditions of a community or society as a whole. This argument directly undermines the narrative of violence, which invites audiences to see the harm or destruction of an outside Other as the path to change.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli War reclaimed a portion of the Golan Heights from Israeli occupation, and Saeed returned to Bir Ajam (which had been evacuated since the Six-Day War in 1967). He worked there as a farmer and wrote works of Islamic thought and philosophy, engaging the ideas of scholars such as Algerian intellectual Mohammed Arkoun and French Nietzschean Michel Foucault. Arkoun, a professor at the Sorbonne, incorporated the social scientific tradition of French poststructuralism into the field of Islamic studies, identifying theoretical tensions and formulating important questions about how to rethink Islam in the contemporary world. “Arkoun has the distinction of having freed himself of the tendency, so prevalent in the Muslim world,” Saeed remarks, “to take things to be either faultless or worthless.”

Arkoun became well known among scholars for his concept of the “un-thought” or “unthinkable” in Islamic thought, a concept that Saeed would incorporate into his own work. Saeed asks, “It is at this moment unthinkable that one refrains from killing if commanded to kill; how long will it take us to get out of our darkness?” He goes on to recall the stories of the Prophet’s companions Bilal, Amar, Sumayya, and Yasir, who suffered greatly for their faith. These early Muslims “succeeded in getting out of obeying the oppressor and doing what he dictated; they simply held their hand back, and that is the real kernel of belief in the One God: to get out of being enslaved to the taghoot [i.e., false idols, including rulers].” He concludes, “That is why I say: instead of seeing the young Islamists being imprisoned or put to death or tortured for attempting to kill someone, I would prefer that they are tortured, put to death, or imprisoned because they have refused to kill.” Nonviolence must be sprung from the prison of the “unthinkable” in Islamic thought, making people unafraid to challenge the violent militancy of Islamic extremists and appreciate the ideas of thinkers such as Gandhi and King. After all, for a Muslim to simply follow a ruler or cleric who commands Muslims to fight and kill is a form of polytheism, because “belief in the One God does not allow you to obey anyone when their command is contrary to God’s command.”

In his 1988 book Iqra wa Rabuk al-Akram (Read! And Your Lord Is Most Gracious), Saeed argued that scientific knowledge is essential to human progress and its neglect in the modern Muslim world is contrary to the Qur’anic message with its commands to “read!” and acquire knowledge throughout the earth. There is an element of Arkoun in such assertions. However, Saeed couches his message in scriptural hermeneutics, which is alien to Arkoun, who would actually rebuke such an approach. Saeed is, after all, the product of an Islamic seminary , and his project is fundamentally religious in nature, even Islamist (broadly construed). For example , he asserts in the introduction, “For [read] was the first word that was revealed of the last revelation [i.e ., the Qur’an], before any other word of the creed, belief, or practice [of Islam].” Saeed’s reading of the Qur’an puts human experience and the natural world at the forefront of knowledge. He devotes much of the third section of his book to the Qur’an’s call in the twenty -ninth chapter, “Travel throughout the earth and examine how creation began.” The era of prophethood came to a close with Muhammad. Humanity must therefore move forward using as a guide its God-given rational intellect and the knowledge it acquires. To renounce science and knowledge out of devotion to revelation is contrary to the message of the Qur’an itself, according to Saeed. This pursuit of knowledge, shared among Muslims and non-Muslims, is an important avenue to peace around the world.

Making Waves

It is noteworthy that Jawdat Saeed’s ideas have received attention in Islamist circles, and some of his views are evident in the writings of moderate Islamists such as the late Umar al-Tilmisani, the third supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Tilmisani , who could possibly have warranted a chapter in this book himself, assumed leadership in the wake of the disastrous impact that violence had on Egyptian Islamist circles. He rejected violence and terrorism, and encouraged civil and legal channels for protest against the Egyptian regime. 38 The Muslim Brotherhood has since emphasized the importance of dawa, the call to Islam — and not revolutionary violence to overthrow the government — as the means to create an Islamic society . In fact, the official website of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has featured an article (originally from another website) discussing Jawdat Saeed’s views on Islam and nonviolence. It would be a mistake and an overstatement to be too encouraged by this, though, and think that Saeed’s ideas have been fully adopted by moderate Islamists like Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood. That is not the case. Rather, it simply indicates the significance of Saeed’s views as part of an important and ongoing discourse in the Muslim world that has not been (or cannot be) simply dismissed.