The Origin, the Way and the Goal: Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim’s Typology of Conflict

One of the most commonly used definitions of conflict focuses on the goals of the conflicting parties and sees conflict as a relationship between parties with perceived incompatible goals. However, the scope of conflict and its roots may be broader than the goals of the parties. In his theory of conflict presented in The Unleashed Thunderbolts, the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyyai provided the basis for a typology of conflict that goes beyond the goals of the parties to include their references and the processes by which they achieve their goals. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim’s typology of conflict. It begins with an introduction to the concept of conflict and the duty of conflict transformation in the Islamic tradition; it then presents the conflict typology proposed by Imam Ibn Al-Qayyim, gives some examples of conflicts of different types in Muslim majority contexts, and elaborates on how to deal with each type.