Public Scholars at
Hanover College
Inquiries
Volume Three, Number Two - Winter 2003
A Moment of Clarity
Under what circumstances is the waging of a war justified? That is a question that is much on our minds today as our government and its allies ponder the wisdom of military action (today's preferred term for warfare) against the government of Iraq. We are daily bombarded with arguments for and against such military action from different perspectives and from different points along the political spectrum. But whether we are listening to pundits or politicians, experts or partisans, they all seem to be talking past each other - using different criteria to answer different questions. We need to turn down the volume and ask ourselves what the question is. Are we asking whether military action will be effective, or are we asking whether or not we have the right to wage war? Are we asking if our government has the political authority to wage war or are we asking if it has the moral authority? In truth, of course, we are asking, and we want answers to, all of those questions and more; the problem is that we are asking them all at once and we are conflating the answers.
Recently, the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College hosted a symposium titled "Religion and Conflict in a Global Society." As we do twice a year, we brought together four participants with very different backgrounds: Evelyne Accad, Professor of French, Comparative Literature and African Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; Reuel Marc Gerecht, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and a former CIA Middle Eastern specialist; James T. Johnson, Professor of Religion at Rutgers University; and Ibrahim A. Karawan, Director of the Middle East Center and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their personal backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs were as diverse as their interests and the positions they hold, and their interaction with each other and with members of the greater Hanover College community sparked passionate debates that are still raging on our campus.
Our main goal was to explore the relationship between religion and conflict in a world growing ever smaller in the face of the remorseless forces of globalization - a goal that was destined to engender much impassioned debate. But it was when our discussions moved close to the question of war with Iraq that passions flared and the temperature within the room rose most dramatically. Near the end of the symposium, James Turner Johnson brought us a much needed moment of cool clarity in the form of a dispassionate, careful, scholarly look at the history of the answers that have been offered to the question of justifiable warfare in both the Western tradition and the tradition of Islam. In this issue of Inquiries, he provides us with an essay based on his lecture at the symposium, and it is our pleasure to share it with you.
Jeffrey Brautigam
Jeffrey Brautigam is the Director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, where he also teaches modern European history and the history of science.