Where There are No Ethics: Kitab al-Jihād and the Spoils of War

The ethical frameworks derived from classical Islamic sources such as the ḥadīth may not always exhibit a consistent resource for ethical guidance. One example of such inconsistency can be observed by the examination of early texts like the Kitāb al-Jihād (Chapter on Jihād) extracted from an eighth century ḥadīth collection called Musannaf of ‘Abd al-Razzāq al-Sanʿānī (d.827). Notably, the pragmatism demonstrated by ḥadīth transmitters concerned with the spoils of war complicates the ethical assumptions associated with the ḥadīth corpus. This essay proceeds in three parts: First, I focus on five sections of the chapter titled Kitāb al-Jihād. Second, I reconstruct the way early Muslims perceived war. Third, I underscore the textual problems faced by scholars in recovering ethical arguments of war from classical Islamic sources like the ḥadīths of Kitab al-Jihād.