ABSTRACT
This so-called sword verse taken from the Qur’an, as well as the various proclamations with a similar purport, consolidate the existing and functionally important image of Islam in the West. This, mostly negative picture of Islam finds its roots in the crusades.2 It was
reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when European powers colonized Muslim societies, projecting their ideals and concepts upon foreign cultures.3 Thereby they reduced the diverse and heterogeneous Islamic world to a religiously monolithic, in itself anti-modern, world that would not define itself through rational thinking. Besides, the Orient was regarded to be a fearsome and terror-spreading hemisphere; consequently the oriental world was excluded from any world-historical development.4 Thus excluded from historicity, the processes there receive practically a pathological character and violence is perceived to be the essence of Islam. Christian polemic against Islam added certain elements to this specific image. It regarded Islam to be anunfaithful religion, a warrior’s religion conflicting with peaceful Christianity. Acts of violence in the Islamic world are often associated with the idea of
holy war, not least because radical Muslims often connect their militant actions to the symbol of the Holy War (jihad), which reinforces an aggressive image of the Islamic world. However, in doing so, barely any reference is made to the specific cultural and socio-political context of violence; the complexity of Muslim cultures is programmatically left out. Instead, the dogmatic self-definition of early Islam is regarded to be the nature of Islam, and to be the base for all further developments, while any continuing historical processes are veiled in ignorance. Synonymously, in reality existing Islam is generally considered to be equivalent to Islamism or Islamic radicalism. How then has the phenomenon of violence and non-aggression or nonviolence developed in the Islamic theology and Muslim policy?
