**1. Introduction**

The violent turn of the Syrian revolution has often been described; the nonviolent activism, of more importance, at the beginning of it has been less described. A driving force during the early period were local committees (Perlman 2019), e.g., the Local Coordination Committees (Marei 2020). These committees created a new national community (cf. Ismail 2011) that may be compared to the new communities envisioned by Jawdat Sa " id (cf. below). Sa " id was an important thinker inspiring the nonviolent beginnings and local committees whose influence reached out well beyond Syria. Jawdat Sa " id and his recent role in the Arab and Islamic world have to be understood in the context of the Syrian Revolution1:

"The Syrian Revolution began nonviolently. The vast majority of participants maintained nonviolence as their path to pursue regime change and a democratic Syria, until an armed flank emerged in August 2011. Since then, the revolution has morphed. The original uprising began at the grassroots, and solidarity across lines of sect, religion, and ethnicity was strong among the grassroots population. However, from midsummer to autumn, 2011, armed resistance developed; political bodies formed to represent the revolution outside Syria; and political Islamists of various sorts entered the uprising scene. Since then, armed resistance has overshadowed nonviolent Syria. It should not be a surprise to find that nonviolent resistance diminishes after the emergence of an armed resistance. What is remarkable is that nonviolent resistance in Syria has continued, despite being overshadowed by the raging battle between the regime and the militarized flank of the revolution, and despite being beleaguered by tensions with the armed resistance." (Kahf 2014, pp. 1–2)

To include the influence of Jawdat Sa " id on the early Syrian revolution in our considerations, we have to mention that in 1998, the town of Daraya in the countryside of Damascus took Sa " id's ideas about nonviolence as a starting point for their activities. However, in 2003, these young people were targeted by governmental persecution. The members of this group organized a series of multicultural seminars on nonviolence in the city of Homs. Their collective was not a religious one but spiritual–ethical and intersected with the circles of the followers of Sa " id (Kahf 2014, p. 1).

The nonviolent way of actions in this Syrian revolution was inspired—among other factors—by the ideas of Jawdat Sa " id. The opening sentence of the main page of this Syrian

**Citation:** Lohlker, Rüdiger. 2022. Jawdat Sa id and the Islamic " Theology and Practice of Peace. *Religions* 13: 160. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel13020160

Academic Editors: Ephraim Meir, Ed Noort, Louise du Toit and Wolfgang Palaver

Received: 29 December 2021 Accepted: 9 February 2022 Published: 11 February 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

thinker and author reads: "We live in a world in which four-fifths of its population live in frustration while the other fifth lives in fear."2 Thus, we may not talk about ideas but about a practical perception of the world based on the need to erase inequalities affecting our societies leading to violence.

There are few studies on this Syrian author and activist who has a unique position in contemporary Islam (Müller 2010; Kahf 2014; Lohlker 2016; Murtaza 2016; Ollivry-Dumairieh 2016; Rak 2016; Belhaj 2017; Zecca 2020). As an activist, he participated in the nonviolent opposition in Syria in 2011. In 2013, he had to migrate to Turkey. His writings, however, are still read in the Arab world (and sometimes beyond).

The corpus we are using for our analysis is the comprehensive set of original writings and videos at *jawdatsaid.net*. To give an overview, we may mention (a) several books, (b) many articles, (c) videos (e.g., lectures illustrated with background pictures), (d) audio files (most of them from 2007 and 2008), (e) other articles in journals, (f) interviews in journals, and g) contemporary Islamic issues. Some books in English and French are available, but the bulk of the material is written and produced in Arabic.

Methodologically speaking, this study of the ideas of Jawdat Sa " id performs a close reading of selected texts by Sa " id to explore his way of thinking. These texts are framed by the approach developed by Shahab Ahmed (cf. below). The style of this article is rhizomatic (cf. Lohlker 2021, p. 122), allowing for a precise presentation and reconstruction of the ideas of Sa " id using the quotations as points of intersection between the ideas presented. We are aware that may be not understandable to readers expecting conventional narratives, but this way of presenting Sa " id is well in line with advanced philosophical approaches and sampling as a method of artistic research (cf. Navas 2012).

## **2. Biography**

Who is Jawdat Sa " id? The best short biography was written by Crow3:

"Jawdat Sa " id was born in 1931 in the Circassian village of Bi'r 'Ajam, south of Qunaytra in the Golan Heights. His family (named Tsai) was part of the wave of Circassian immigration from Russian territory into the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire in the late nineteenth century. At the age of fifteen he was sent to study in Cairo at the prestigious Al-Azhar University, graduating in 1957 with both a university degree in Arabic literature and a diploma in education. After returning to Syria he taught for over ten years, first in the Dar al-Mu'allimin (Teachers' College) in Damascus and then in high schools in and around Damascus, including teaching "morale" in military schools (e.g., in the city of Homs in central Syria). Increasingly, he found himself demoted to less prestigious schools. In 1968, Sa " id was dismissed from his government employment as a teacher, due to his advocacy of ideas on Islamic peace and their implications for radical social transformation, for his published views (his first book appeared in 1966), and for his activism through lecturing in mosques, civic centers, and within Syrian intellectual and social circles. In 1968 he was imprisoned by the Syrian authorities for a year and a half. He has been to prison under the Ba'th regime five times, usually for periods of several months, the last time being in 1973. During the early 1980s, when the Syrian Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brethren) were actively opposing President Asad's regime, he was often interrogated and watched, although he has never been a member of the Muslim Brethren. For well over a decade he chose to live in voluntary internal exile, working in Tolstoy-like fashion at his family's apiary in Bi'r 'Ajam. This exemplifies his conviction that intellectual freedom must be linked to gainful work. His withdrawal from active social engagement, coinciding with the clash between the Islamist opposition and the Syrian government, was motivated by his understanding of the Islamic requirement to avoid fitnah or civil discord and violence. Since the early 1990s, Sa " id has gradually become more active within Syria, cultivating contacts and engaging in dialogue with a wide spectrum of

religious, political, and social trends within the Sunni religious establishment [...], with Communists, Arab nationalists, and the Union of Arab Writers [ ...]. This reflects Sa " id's commitment to accepting other viewpoints, fostering a more secure sense of community and common purpose among Arab Muslims, and tolerating the pursuit of different directions in finding solutions." (Crow 2000, pp. 64–65)

His stay in Egypt from 1946 to 1958 was (cf. below) crucial for the intellectual development of Sa " id. Important writers influencing him were Abu A'la Mawdudi (d. 1979 CE), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897 CE), Muhammad 'Abduh (d. 1905 CE), Rashid Rida (d. 1935 CE), Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273 CE), Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350 CE), Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111 CE), Ibn Rushd (d. 1198 CE), and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406 CE), i.e., many of the important thinkers of Sunni Islam. More important were Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938 CE) and Malik Bennabi (d. 1973 CE), two of the most influential thinkers of the modern Islamic world.

After staying in Egypt, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and then the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria; then he traveled to Iraq, India, and Pakistan. Thus, he gained first-hand knowledge of many parts of the Islamic world. He also met the influential Islamic scholar Abul Hasan 'Ali Nadvi (d. 1999 CE) in India. Thus, we may sketch his influences before finally returning to Syria (cf. above).4

### **3. A Shahabian Approach**

We will situate the ideas and practice of Jawdat Sa " id in the Con-Text of revelation. Following Shahab Ahmed, this hermeneutical engagement is based on the previous hermeneutical engagement being present as Islam (cf. Ahmed 2016, p. 356). Ahmed writes:

"Con-Text is thus the entire accumulated *lexicon of means and meanings of Islam* that has been historically generated and recorded up to any given moment: it is the full *historical vocabulary of Islam* at any given moment. When a Muslim seeks to make meaning in *terms of Islam*, he necessarily does so in engagement with and by use of the existing *terms of engagement*—that is, in engagement with and by use of the existing *vocabulary of Islam*. The vocabulary of Islam registers, denotes and makes available the meanings of previous hermeneutical engagement; the meanings of previous hermeneutical engagements are, in other words, discernibly embedded in the semantic units of this existing vocabulary of forms. Thus, in a given time or place, for the meaning of an act or utterance to be *recognizable in terms of Islam* it must be expressed in the vocabulary of Con-Text." (Ahmed 2016, p. 357)

Other important terms for the analysis of Ahmed are Pre-Text and Text. Pre-Text is not to be understood as chronologically prior to the Text of the revelation/the Qur " an; ¯ it is ontologically and alethically before it but encompasses "the Unseen Pre-Text of the Revelation" (Ahmed 2016, p. 347) as being continuously present in the world and in Islam. The hermeneutical engagement with the Text/the Qur " an takes place in the world of the ¯ Unseen of the Pre-Text and is made livable in the Con-Text. The Con-Text can be attributed and traced to the Text and Pre-Text and provides the web of meaning(s) by which Muslims live their hermeneutical engagement with Revelation (Ahmed 2016, pp. 358–59)

Taking up this framework, we may start to analyze the ideas and practice of Jawdat Sa " id as an example of hermeneutical engagement with the Revelation. In the context of modern Islamic thought in the Arab world, his position is specific but present until today, contrary to the impression that violent and fundamentalist ideas are dominating the field of discussion.

Returning to the problem of societal change addressed in the beginning, we may refer to Zecca, who wrote in her review of an anthology of translations of writings of Jawdat Sa " id in Italian that his ideas may be analyzed as a reaction to the conditions of the contemporary Arab world and its despotic regimes. Hence, change of this situation is a core idea of Sa " id:

"Sa " id defends the possibility of a pacific change which should establish democratic political systems based upon human rights. It is impossible, according to Sa " id, for war to be a vector of change, especially because he considers violence, as a mode of action, anachronistic in relation to the evolution of humanity within our time. It defines the man who resorts to violent action as someone who lives in an 'abrogated time'. He compares young men sent to war to the human sacrifices of ancient populations [ ... ] and, referring to the endless status of war of the Arab states, he underlines the stupidity of governments who continue to buy weapons from Occidental companies in order to fight one against the others [ . . . ]. Appealing to the unity of the Muslim world, Sa " id exhorts to the end of arms trade, also comparing weapons to fetishes of the Jahil¯ıyya (pre-Islamic or ignorance) period [ . . . ]." (Zecca 2020, p. 215)

These remarks hint at the subterranean linkages of the ideas of Jawdat Sa " id to the Arab revolutions after 2010, mentioned before. Hence, the impact of Jawdat Sa " id was the need to change the situation of Arab societies and the Islamic world. To develop this idea, he began to rethink shared notions of what being Islamic means.

During and after his stay in Cairo at the al-Azhar university, he was deeply involved in the contemporary discussion in the Arab and Islamic world. His main persons of reference were Muhammad Iqbal (Hillier and Koshul 2015; Majeed 2009) and Malik Bennabi (Seniguer 2014; Sherif 2018). Unlike the move of Syrian opposition toward a violent strategy in the 1960s, he published his first book in the year 1966 when Sayyid Qutb, famous for his book *Milestones*, a programmatic work of the first wave of modern violent Jihadism, was executed. Sa " id's book may be read as an answer to this text that was based on the experience of the repressive regime in Egypt (cf. below). A writer and activist in a likewise repressive context in Syria was able to create a theory of nonviolence understood as an integral part of Islam. This may be proof that the results of the hermeneutic engagement with the Qur'anic revelation may be even contradictory, as Shahab Ahmed wrote.
