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His subject looks urgent now: Islamic law on war and peace

John Kelsey

By Sibley Fleming

What might have appeared before Sept. 11 to be an obscure area of academic study-the Islamic law of war and peace-is now as relevant as the daily weather report.

John Kelsay, an FSU religion professor and chairman of the religion department, has devoted 15 years to the subject, and now he has major fellowships-a Guggenheim and a Rockefeller-to finish his book, "Religion and the Imperatives of Justice: The Islamic Law of War and Peace."

A Richard L. Rubenstein Professor of Religion, Kelsay will be on sabbatical only this year, though he expects to work on the book through 2004.

Contracted by Cambridge University Press three years ago as one of a series of books on Islamic law, it is slated for publication in late 2004 or early 2005.

Kelsay, a Presbyterian, said his initial interest in the second largest world religion was stirred by the Iranian revolution in 1978 and 1979. He was "impressed by the power Islam had to attract about 1 billion or so followers around the world."
In graduate school at the University of Virginia studying the history of Christian ethics, he decided to take a minor in Islam.
He said he is interested not just in the history of Islam, but even more in the Islamic tradition as a living thing.

One of the benefits of understanding Islam as it relates to Muslim militants and fundamentalists who justify terrorism, Kelsay said, "is to estimate to what extent their religious citations are true.

"We're in a time when the development of international rules governing the conduct of states on human rights requires that we pay attention to the diversity of international cultures as we try to carve out this norm, and attention to Islam is one piece of that."

Wide interest in the professor's research has switched on quickly since Sept. 11.

He was scheduled to deliver six lectures on "Islam and the Political Future" last September in Cleveland, Ohio.

Organizers told him to expect to attract no more than 50 to 75 people. At the first lecture he looked out to a crowd of 175 to 200 people.

"I thought it was just the aftermath (of Sept. 11)," he said. "They were just curious, and I thought it would drop off."
It didn't. His audiences grew to about 275 people.

And, just as his lecture class filled up last fall, so have bookstores all around the country. Books on Islam and related topics are no longer tucked away in the special-sections shelves but are prominently placed on display tables like the latest beach novels.

"A lot of books you're seeing are journalistic as opposed to scholarly," he said. They are "quickly put together, made for a popular audience." Kelsay said his current book will be of more interest to specialist scholars, though he plans to write another for a broader audience later.

He has also published "Islam and War" (Westminster/John Knox, 1993), "Human Rights and the Conflict of Cultures" (co-authored, University of South Carolina, 1988) and "Just War and Jihad" (co-edited, Greenwood Press, 1991).

The Guggenheim Fellowship was founded in 1925 to "promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding, and the appreciation of beauty, by aiding...scholars, scientists and artists...in the prosecution of their labors."

The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation was named in memory of the son of Senator Simon Guggenheim and wife, Olga Hirsch Guggenheim.

The Laurance S. Rockefeller fellowship is for outstanding scholars and teachers who spend a year at Princeton writing about ethics and human values and participating in some activities of the University Center for Human Values, which was founded in 1990 with a gift from Laurance Rockefeller.

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