From Nonviolence to Reconciliation: The Prophetic Political Ethics of War and Peace

This article re-examines Islamic ethics of war and peace by returning to the formative Meccan–Medinan trajectory of the Prophet Muḥammad’s life, where early Islamic moral reasoning developed amid persecution, migration, diplomacy, and armed conflict. Contemporary debates frequently portray Islam either as a tradition that sacralizes violence through jihad or as one that reduces peace to purely inward spirituality. Both perspectives obscure the historically grounded ethical discourse that emerged within the early Muslim community. This study argues that the Qurʾān—understood within the Islamic tradition as the authoritative source of ethical guidance—together with prophetic practice articulated a coherent moral framework governing the use of force, the pursuit of peace, and the restoration of social order after conflict. Drawing on Qurʾānic discourse, canonical ḥadīth, classical tafsīr and sīrah literature, and modern scholarship in Islamic studies, religious ethics, and conflict resolution theory, the article reconstructs how early Islamic sources represent the ethical regulation of violence. The analysis identifies a threefold trajectory in prophetic practice: a Meccan phase characterized by nonviolent endurance and moral witness under persecution; a Medinan phase marked by constitutional governance, plural coexistence, and tightly regulated defensive warfare; and a culminating ethic of negotiated peace and post-conflict reconciliation exemplified in the Treaty of Ḥudaybiyyah and the Conquest of Mecca. Taken together, these stages reveal an integrated moral vision in which force is neither celebrated nor treated as a default instrument of political expansion, but permitted only under strict ethical constraints shaped by justice (ʿadl), mercy (raḥma), proportionality, and the protection of communal life. By reconstructing this early prophetic framework, the article demonstrates that Islamic sources contain significant internal resources for limiting violence, regulating warfare, and prioritizing reconciliation. In doing so, it contributes to contemporary scholarship on Islamic ethics and situates the prophetic model within broader global debates on the moral regulation of war, peacebuilding, and post-conflict justice.