Pushing Back, Not Wiping Out: The Limits of the Concept
Between pushing back, conflict and annihilation lie fine distinctions, and when they are lost the meaning of the law is lost with them. This article defines the term before the articles that follow carry it into the field.
Editorial board
The jailer who became a friend
In 1978 a nineteen-year-old Afrikaner named Christo Brand arrived on Robben Island, South Africa’s most heavily guarded prison. He had been raised to believe that the political prisoners there were dangerous “terrorists”, and one of them was a man of about sixty named Nelson Mandela.
Mandela did not meet his jailer with hostility. He asked him about his family and his studies, and encouraged him to finish his education. In time Brand was smuggling bread to him. In 1980 Winnie Mandela came to visit her husband with their infant granddaughter, and Brand broke the regulations to let the grandfather hold the baby for a few minutes. Decades later he said the penalty could have been years in prison.
When Mandela became president in May 1994 he invited his friend the jailer to parliament, and Brand went on to work in the office of the Constitutional Assembly that wrote the country’s new constitution. Their friendship lasted until Mandela’s death.
Mandela neither eliminated his opponent nor surrendered to him. He pushed him back in another way, until the one between whom and him there was enmity became as though a devoted friend.
Source: Christo Brand, “Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend” (2014); Nelson Mandela Foundation.
The Arabic root d-f-ʿ denotes pushing something aside, moving it away by force. One says “dafaʿahu ʿan al-shayʾ”: he pushed him away from the thing and kept him from it. In this original meaning there is an important feature that escapes many who use the term: pushing back is displacement, not annihilation. What is pushed back remains, but is prevented from going too far. That is where we begin.
Three neighbouring concepts
Conflict describes a state of opposition between two sides and says nothing about its outcome. Annihilation aims to remove the other side from existence. Pushing back is a conflict that ends in balance, in which each side keeps the other from monopolising the earth. The two verses in which “God’s repelling of people by means of others” appears give the pushing back a reason: to prevent two specific outcomes, the corruption of the earth in Al-Baqarah, and the destruction of places of worship in Al-Hajj:
﴿وَلَوْلَا دَفْعُ اللَّهِ النَّاسَ بَعْضَهُمْ بِبَعْضٍ لَهُدِّمَتْ صَوَامِعُ وَبِيَعٌ وَصَلَوَاتٌ وَمَسَاجِدُ يُذْكَرُ فِيهَا اسْمُ اللَّهِ كَثِيرًا﴾[الحج: 40]
“And were it not for God repelling some people by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques in which God’s name is much remembered would have been demolished.” (Al-Hajj 22:40)
Strikingly, the verse lists the houses of worship of all the faiths, not the mosques of Muslims alone. In its logic, pushing back protects plurality itself. Were its aim for a single group to have the earth to itself, there would be no point in naming monasteries, churches and synagogues.
Pushing back does not necessarily mean violence
The same root appears in another context that widens its meaning: “Repel evil with what is better, and the one between whom and you there was enmity will become as though a devoted friend” (Fussilat 41:34). Here the instrument of pushing back is kindness, and its result is turning an enemy into a friend. This means the law does not fix the instrument; it fixes the function: stopping evil from going further. The instrument may be a sword, an argument, a market, a ballot box or good character. We will see in the articles that follow that the highest forms of pushing back are those that achieve the function at the lowest cost in blood.
The descriptive law and the normative principle
To say that pushing back is a law does not mean that every victor is in the right. The law tells us that forces will push against one another, and that the absence of pushing back leads to corruption. It does not tell us that the winner of each round is the one with right on its side. Hence another verse: “And these days, We alternate them among the people” (Al ʿImran 3:140). Alternation means that dominance lasts for no one; it is not a certificate of righteousness for whoever prevails.
The standard comes from another principle: “Cooperate in righteousness and piety, and do not cooperate in sin and aggression” (Al-Maʾida 5:2). Pushing back describes how forces move; cooperation determines what they ought to gather around. One question remains open here, and we will return to it in future issues: are these two perpendicular planes that never meet, or does pushing back carry an implicit moral dimension in its very structure, given that the verse explains it by the prevention of corruption?
Three rules for reading
From this groundwork we take rules that we apply in every article. First, pushing back is measured by its outcome in balance: if it ends with one side alone holding the earth, it has left the meaning of pushing back for the meaning of annihilation. Second, the instrument varies while the function stays constant, so pushing back should not be reduced to war. Third, victory is not proof of right; judgment on the parties to a contention comes from outside the law, from the standard of justice.