JOURNAL OF POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ISLAM
Year:2017 | Volume:2 | Issue:10 |Papers Count:6

Before the Islamic revolution, theories of revolution for overthrowing the governments were focusing mostly on violent methods, while the Islamic revolution was base on unity of the people. The Islamic revolution of Iran as a civilizing revolution, besides introducing the cognition of Islam and its intellectual logics to natioans, was able to plan and introduce its roles and aims, considering features such as anti-colonialism, supporting the oppressed and self-reliance, against international peace. This revolution besides providing a meta-narrative and metadiscourse based on the ideas as justice, dependence and freedom which all rooted in ontological approach and Islamic beliefes and sprituality, was able to establish positive peace which infact means establishing a socio-human system. This system included the lack of use of force, individual liberty and social equality as three main features. The question arrises here is how can Islamic revolution expand positive peace? The hypothesis to be reviewd in this article is that the Islamic revolution due to its inherent characteristic, which will be reviewed later, would led to positive peace. Therefore by reviewing the main features of Islamic revolution and definition of positive peace the author is trying to prove the theory.

The signs of strengthening the roles of religion in international relations theory have become more clarified since the last decades of twentieth century. The reality of international relations has been affected by some agents with religious tendencies who are challenging the current situation; on the other hand in the theoretical aspect the mainstream of international relations are targeted by epistemological challenges which highlighting the weakness and inefficiency of rationalism, positivism and materialism in solving the issues of national relations. The relation between religion and international peace is one of the most important issues which must be studied in the theory of international relations. The main question of this article is what is the role of religion in creating international peace and security? And specifically how can Islamic norms help establishing international peace? As the answer the idea of using religion as factor for creating peace would be reviewed. In the end as a case study some of the peace-oriented norms will be pointed out. Theoretically this article is relying on a critical flow in international relations so it has critical views against positivism.

The twofold of war and peace has always been a practical and theoretical issue for human in different levels. Meanwhile religious teachings had recommendation for both beliefs. Based on this some insisted on Rahmani aspects of religion and some with dual divisionism such as right or wrong and insider or outsider, insisted on the usage of violence and war in order to reach their social and political goals. In this contemporary world radical Islamists believe in violence as an introduction of peace. In their beliefs the utopia in which Believers can gain happiness and also flourish their talents in peace and prosperity would become reachable based upon the destruction of whatever exist. And the introduction of this attractive utopia is violence and war. Therefore, removing all disruptive elements and dead-ends in the way of the realization of utopia by using violence and force are of their emphasis in their beliefs and practices. But the question is that how much of violence is allowed? How long do people tolerate the use of violence to reach peace? What is the guarantee that violence will not turn into the goal itself? In which stage of this process due to establishment of the ideal society, violence will subside? Harsh violence of the radical Islamists such as al-Qaida and Islamic State are good examples of the groups which want to reach peace using violence and war. In this article the author besides eviewing the influential Ideas in the spread of violence by these groups also review the paradoxical situation of “the introduction of the war” for peace.

Fundamentalism which creates violent extremism has become one of the phenomena threatening peace in the world. Like any other phenomenon in human societies, it is the result of various social, political, cultural and economic causes. The fundamentalism and extremism do not only exist in the Islamic World, they are visible in other religions as well. But specifically in today’s world, Islamic fundamentalists and Salafi extremists which are known for their violence and also as a threat to world peace in a way that reaching an ideal world free of violence seems impossible and unattainable. This article with historical-descriptive method, tries to show the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and Salafi extremism which do not belong only to Islamic World or even to Western World. As the result the author wants to prove that a combination of internal and external factors in different fields in contraction with each other led to these groups and as a result a world without global peace soon in the future.

Traditionally, fundamentalism can be defined as a defense against tradition. In this field fundamentalist groups strongly believe in the accuracy of their interpretations of religious teachings. Two factors worth notifying as reasons for formation of fundamentalist: internally, the changes in the Arab world such as imperfect democracies and also radical and shallow ideation of thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb could be noticed. Thinkers like him had always followed the fundamentals and Rejected any discretion and rationalism. And externally, the most important factor to be mentioned is Israel’s and western politics Led by America. The clear example of it is the invasion of Iraq and also a little earlier the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet Union. In the examples mentioned western countries by supporting the Jihadists and extremists tried to reach their goals in the region. Due to this the authors using descriptive-analytic method are trying to answer the question what factors underlie the creation and growth of extremists in the Islamic world and also what is the best way to stop these deviant groups? The results of processing hypothesis shows the role of the superset groups such as America and the superficiality of the Islamists view are of the most important reasons of creation and growth of these groups. And also military confrontation would led to a chaos; in fact the best policy is the unity of Islamic World and rethinking the ideas of radical Arab thinkers.

The topic of this article is the holly violence in the contemporary Islamic world and also its developments in formulation. What is really important in this research is to clarify the parts of Jihad and afterward clarifying the Takfiri beliefs and at last negation of Takfir. In other words the thinkers who have beliefs against modern and western countries and also believe in competing with them urge the Jihad. According to the time and acceptance of superiority of the “other” to uslims from this group of thinkers, specifically in military fields rather than Jihadi thoughts, the idea of holly violence was replaced by addressing the internal enemy (hypocritical, corrupt, apostate, secular, etc). Also it is important to know that the west is prepared to make use of this idea against Muslims as well. This process has put aside already and now it is the coexistence which let the “self” grow and become clear in today’s world. To analyze this issue the philosophical analysis approach is used by reviewing the two processes of holly violence: Jihad and Takfir gathered from the ideas of some of the great contemporary thinkers of Muslim Brotherhood Group (Ikhwan al muslimin).