2019_05_28_ICS_demichelis

framework Demichelis graduated in Political Science and International Office at the University of Turin (Italy), after which he completed a first Master's Degree in International Cooperation and development (Turin, Italy) and a second in programs of study Africans at Dalarna Hogskolan (Sweden). He holds a PhD in History of Islamic political thought from the University of Genoa (Italy). In 2017 he joined project 'Religion and Civil Society' of the Institute for Culture and Society University of Navarra thanks to a scholarship Marie Curie, the most competitive call of the European Commission. In her research, which ends in the academic year 2018-2019, she has studied the 'verses of war' of the Koran with the goal to analyze the evolution of violence in the framework of the Islamic message from a comparative perspective.

What are the most relevant conclusions of your project?
The main historical and Koranic findings are related. As for the former, it has to do with the first attempt to state the concept of "just war" and "holy war" in relation to the training in Islam of a just warrior with a solid ethical and moral basis. The methodological analysis reflects that for Islam as for any other religion we need time to reach a religious understanding that can play a meaningful role in a society, regardless of the society we are talking about. Thus, if we can consider a first attempt to develop the figure of a warrior just 150 years after the death of Muhammad, we need to look at a longer period of time to talk about a concept of the sanctity of war in Islam.

In the case of Islam, it covers a historical period between the Ancient Ages and what Western European historiography has called the 'Age average'. But we are in a different geography, the Middle East: the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and other geographical regions of this area. Thus, it cannot be said that Islam arose after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. We can begin to think of a historical, religious, theological and juridical canonization of Islam from the following century, parallel to the canonization of the writing of the Koran.

So the first conquests after the death of Muhammad could not be considered as "holy war"?
We cannot define as Islamic the conquest that began in 634 A.D., two years after the death of the prophet, because there was still no real Islamic community. In some of his publications, Fred Donner, Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago (USA), emphasizes that we must rather speak of a community of monotheistic believers in which the Bedouin and non-monotheistic Arab clans of the Arabian Peninsula who migrated at the same time to the north of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, Egypt, Palestine, played a significant role. Some of these were still maturing a monotheistic sensibility (Hanifiyya), with a clear influence of Arab Judaism and Christianity already present both in the north and throughout the Arabian Peninsula. It is easy to imagine that the creation of a Muslim righteous warrior image has a clear Arab Christian influence, considering the important role played by the confederations of foederati Arabs in the Byzantine and Sasanian empires in Late Antiquity (5th and 6th centuries A.D.).

When does the concept appear on the framework of the Islamic religion?
The conquest did not originally have a religious orientation; one has to wait a century or a century and a half to consider the early understanding of the concept of "just war" within a more dogmatic and structured idea of the Islamic religion and also of a just Muslim man.

The other relationship between these two aspects is reflected in a just-ascetic war that corresponds to an individual effort of self-improvement and that can also develop on a warlike level, to defend what could be considered the borders of the Islamic world from 725-730 A.D.: on the Byzantine border, on the border of Khorasan, on the border of Al Andalus, and so on. Thus, the first real canonization is reflected in a singular person who wanted to put on internship asceticism on the border of these geographical areas and who could be directly involved in the defense and attack of this border.

This has to do with the historical perspective. What about the perspective of the revelatory vision?
As far as the Koranic hermeneutic is concerned, we must consider that in the same historical period in which the frontier is created - the campaigns of conquest end in it, particularly in the Byzantine one - the Umayyad dynasty culminated the second attempt to conquer Constantinople, in 717-718 A.D., an attempt that failed. In a parallel way we have the juridical affirmation of the first text, of the first books, of the first Islamic tradition that tried to define what is a Muslim activity of subject war and who are the just warriors.

In this sense, we find juridical texts such as al-Muwatta by Imam Malik or al-Kitab al-Siyar by Shaybani, in which there is a section on what is generally called Kitab al-Jihad (Book of Jihad). Another example is the creation of a warrior and ethical narrative with the Maghazi (from the root ghazwa) description of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, which tells how early Islam was able to develop defensive and offensive warfare activity. While the Kitab al-Jihad and Siyar are juridical, and, therefore, what they include is a juridical approach to these aspects (one cannot kill women, children, old people; there are moral and ethical limits in this subject of actions); the Kitab al-Maghazi have a more narrative sense and relate events present in the Koran with a clear historical-political artificiality difficult to prove.

Are there other books that refer to "just war" with a more spiritual approach ?
Ibn-Al-Mubarak's Kitāb al-jihād reflects the inner spiritual striving of an ascetic warrior in a period of his life fighting the enemy on the borders of Dar al-Islam, the Islamic Empire in northern Syria. It presents a more ascetic and mystical approach , and reflects the early canonization of the "just war" in Islam. The same subject of approach is also present in the Qur'an: some verses speak of a much more active and defensive war activity. And in some verses war is reflected, Qital, which means fighting, but also killing from the ancient and contemporary point of view; and the meaning of Jihad, which can be spiritual and military at the same time in a mixture that must be analyzed hermeneutically in the text itself. Although Qital is very present in the last suras - the chapters of the Qur'an - in relation to its historical chronology, Jihad appears only 35-37 times in the Qur'an, and only in a small part of them does it have an authentic war meaning.

In the process of research to arrive at these conclusions, what did your stays at the universities of Bamberg (Germany) and the Catholic University of Lyon bring you? How did they enrich your perspective?
At the University of Bamberg (Germany), I was able to work together with Professor Patrick Franke, who suggested to me to confront various aspects of this research at the historical and Koranic levels. At the Catholic University of Lyon (France) I was able to discuss with various experts to decipher the interreligious instructions of this project through the reading of new sources and books such as Thomas Sizgorich's Violence and Beliefs in Late Antiquity, which suggests the possible influence of Christianity in the process of the canonization of the "just-holy war" in Islam.

To what extent did this influence occur?
There is an interesting approach that is also reflected in the sources and historical events: the fact that the first caliphate in Arab history, the Umayyad caliphate, with its capital in Damascus, was solidly supported by the Arab Christian clans that would later be defeated for supporting the Byzantines against this process of conquering migration by Arabs from the Peninsula. The Umayyad caliphate played a significant role in its defense, not only against the Byzantines, but also in the civil wars between the early monotheistic believers and the proto-Islamic Arab community. These Arab clans had been Christian for a century and had a military role in the Byzantine army fighting the Persians, among others.

In the Arab Christian clans in northern Syria-the famous Ghassanid confederacy or, much more specifically in this case, the important confederacy of the Banu Kalb-there was probably an internalization of the Christian "just-holy war." Possibly this had a significant influence on the early canonization of such a concept in the proto-Islamic period. This is a theoretical approach that is still being tested, but it reflects the historical evidence that the Islamic sources themselves speak about the important role played by Banu Kalb, for example. At the Catholic University of Lyon we have discussed this topic and have found some sources that are particularly interesting in this direction.

Some publications by framework Demichelis in the framework of the project

(2019). Jihad e Violenza Armata: la grande menzogna. In Capire l'Islam? Mito o Realtà (pp. 127-148). Brescia.

(2018). Religious Violence, Political Ends. Nationalism, Citizenship and Radicalizations in Middle East and Europe. OLMS.

(2019) Fasad, Hijra and Warlike Diaspora from the Geographic Boundaries of Early Islam to a New Dar al-Hikma: Europe.

(2019) The Dynamics of Islamic Radicalization in Europe and their Humanistic approach.