5 reasons why Islam is the religion of peace

Islām means submission to God. It comes off the root s-l-m. So does salām, meaning peace, and so does as-salāmu ʿalaykum, the greeting one Muslim gives another, meaning peace be upon you.

Critics answer that submission is the primary sense and peace the derived one. They are right about that, philologically.

It does not get them anywhere. Nobody is claiming Islam translates as peace. The claim is that submission to God and the state of peace grow off the same stem in the language the revelation came in, and that the first produces the second.

The Quran uses the stem repeatedly in this sense. One of the names of God in 59:23 is al-Salām, the Peace. Verse 10:25 says that God calls to the Abode of Peace, and 5:16 says that He guides those who seek His pleasure to the ways of peace. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is reported to have told his Companions that they would not enter paradise until they believed and would not believe until they loved one another, and he named the way to that love: spread the greeting of salām among yourselves.^[1] A religion whose standard greeting is a prayer for the other person’s safety has built a wish for peace into every meeting.

Quran 5:32 says that whoever kills a soul, other than for a soul or for corruption in the land, it is as though he killed all of humanity, and whoever saves one has saved all of humanity.

Two things about that verse. It says a soul, without qualification, so the wording does not limit it to Muslims. And it follows the story of the two sons of Adam, Cain and Abel, the first killing in the human story, which gives the rule a root that predates any religious community. The verse says it was decreed for the Children of Israel, and the Quran states it here as a principle of general weight.

Then there is 2:190, which permits fighting against those who fight you and caps it immediately: do not transgress, for God does not love transgressors. The permission comes with its own ceiling attached. Classical jurists drew the conclusion that fighting is regulated by law, and they treated killing outside those limits as one of the gravest of sins.

“There is no compulsion in religion.” Quran 2:256, and probably the most quoted verse in the whole book after the opening.

What it settles is narrow and worth stating plainly. A profession of faith extracted at knifepoint produces a hostage. The verse goes on to distinguish guidance from error, which only makes sense if the mind doing the distinguishing is free.

Ismail al Faruqi and Lois Lamya al Faruqi, in The Cultural Atlas of Islam, draw the conditions of the Muslim call (daʿwa) from the same verse and its companions (18:29; 39:41). The hearer must be free of fear and pressure, since the judgement sought is his own, and “a forced judgment is a contradiction in terms”. If he is not convinced, the Muslim is to leave the matter with God, and when the Prophet’s eagerness went too far, the Quran reminded him that he could not compel people to believe (10:99).^[2] The Prophet himself, they note, let the Christians who were not persuaded by him keep their faith and return home.^[2] In Essential Writings he states the rule more strongly: “calling” is “certainly not coercing”, and coerced da’wah is, by the humanistic ethic, “a grave violation of the human person, second only to homicide, if not equal to it”.^[9]

And 60:8 extends it outward: God does not forbid you from dealing kindly and justly with those who have not fought you over religion or driven you out of your homes.

Now the objection. Someone will cite 9:5, the so-called sword verse, about fighting the polytheists wherever you find them.

Read 9:1 through 9:6 together. The passage deals with the ending of treaties with the polytheist tribes of Arabia, who had broken faith, and 9:4 exempts those who kept their agreements. It grants 4 months of safe passage before anything happens, and then instructs Muslims that if one of the enemy asks for protection, grant it and escort him somewhere safe. A verse that orders you to escort your enemy to safety is a strange foundation for a doctrine of universal war.

The classical tradition was not unanimous. Some early exegetes held that 9:5 cancelled the milder verses before it, and that view has been quoted by extremists ever since. Many other scholars rejected it and read the verse as bound to the hostile tribes of that moment, and the verses of restraint, such as 2:190 and 60:8, still stand in the text.

This is the part I find most persuasive, and it gets quoted least.

Abu Bakr’s instructions to the army leaving for Syria are preserved in the historical sources and in Malik ibn Anas’s early law book, the Muwaṭṭaʾ.^[3] Do not kill women, children, or the elderly. Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees. Do not destroy inhabited places. Do not slaughter livestock except for food. Do not burn palms. Leave the monks alone in their cells.

Put that next to 7th-century military practice, where sacking a defeated city was how you paid the troops.

The fruit trees are the detail that gets me. There is no tactical reason to spare an orchard you have just captured, and no public-relations reason either, since there was no public. It is a limit placed on power by something other than power.

The Prophet is reported to have forbidden killing women and children on campaign, and to have prohibited mutilating the dead.^[4] Same shape. Constraints that bind whoever won. Later jurists built these reports into the law of war, and they are the reason that the deliberate killing of civilians is classed as a crime in the tradition, whatever a given army did in practice.

Here is where the older version of this article stopped, and it is exactly where the sarcasm gets in.

Europol counts terrorist attacks across the EU every year. For 2024 it logged 58 attacks in 14 member states. 24 of those were jihadist, and they killed 5 people and injured 18.^[5]

Three things follow, and I want all 3 said.

The violence is real. 5 people are dead. Anyone who treats that count as a scoring opportunity in an argument has lost the plot before starting.

The scale is nothing like the impression. Under half the attacks, in a continent of roughly 450 million people, about 25 million of them Muslim. That arithmetic excuses nothing. It does describe the actual size of a thing the coverage presents as a civilisational condition.

And the people doing it are rejected by the scholarly tradition they claim. These groups declare other Muslims apostate and kill them in far larger numbers than they kill anyone else. Europol’s own report notes that jihadists count Shia Muslims and Sufis among their enemies.^[6] A movement whose main victims are Muslims makes a poor candidate for authentic Islam.

The tradition saw this pattern in its first generations. The Prophet warned that a man who calls his fellow Muslim an unbeliever risks having the charge fall back on himself,^[7] and he described a group that would emerge later, the Khawarij, who would leave the faith like an arrow through its target. Scholars have applied that description to those who declare other Muslims outside Islam in order to kill them.^[8]