L I TE RATU RE I N RE V I E W
and negotiation, and to a penitent, not pu-
nitive, view of judgment. As the chapter’s
author says, “there is much support for the
theory and method of Restorative Justice
in the Sikh tradition... In the pluralistic and
multicultural societies of the postmodern
world... Sikh ideals are thoroughly... conge-
nial to the developing values of society.” It’s
surely not coincidental that Canada, one of
the pioneers in the use of Restorative Justice,
has the largest percentage of Sikhs of any
country outside India.
Far more than Sikhism, Islam has been con-
sidered a militant faith, with perhaps the
harshest judicial system. This is especially
true in today’s “clash of civilizations,” during
which, the author agrees, “Islamic criminal
law has turned to its most punitive methods.”
Yet he can also maintain that “In actual fact,
the Qur’an is a message of mercy and for-
giveness.” A triad of forgiveness, compensa-
tion, and reconciliation, which includes vic-
tim, offender, and community, is a common
alternative to judicial punishment. Strikingly,
“there is great disagreement about whether
Islam views prisons as legal,” since they did
not exist in Mohammed’s time.
Unfortunately, the Islamic chapter does not
discuss Sulha, the pre-Islamic method of
resolving conflicts practiced in many Arab
countries, in which community leaders work
to assuage the victim or their family, and
heal the community by negotiation, non-
violent settlement, and public reconcilia-
tion. In many Conflict Resolution programs,
”Although Sikhism had to
adopt a militant posture
as a response to persecu-
tion, at its heart it remains
committed to conciliation
and negotiation, and to
a penitent, not punitive,
view of judgment.”
Sulha is included as an example of a historic
restorative process still in use today.
Finally we come to the perhaps artificial con-
cept of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Juda-
ism, as one might expect, plumbs the Torah
and the commentaries and finds them “too
diverse to be characterized unambiguously
as a restorative system.” After all, even the
Hebrew language contains paradox, since
a mitzvah can be both a “good deed” and a
“duty” or “commandment,” and the tzdk root
of “justice” is indistinguishable from the root
of tzedakah, or charity/mercy.
The Christian chapter is, by a small margin,
the longest of the faith-based ones, and the
most heavily annotated. It admits “It is per-
fectly clear that the persecuted church quick-
ly became the persecutor,” and works to dis-
tinguish the church’s adoption of the harshly
retributive Greco-Roman justice system
from the more spiritual tendencies of, say,
the Sermon on the Mount, which Gandhi
Continues on page 26
CSEE Connections
Winter 2019
Page 25