Certain kinds of violence are born of religious impulses; how are the perpetrators different from other believers?
Is religious terrorism religious?
We get asked that question regularly, now that suicide bombings explode onto the headlines beyond Iraq, Israel and other hot spots and into the news in Western Europe and the British Isles – not forgetting 9/11 in the United States.
The question is aimed at scores of religious experts, including me and R. Scott Appleby, who contributed to the six-year, five-volume study of militant religious fundamentalisms that Appleby and I conducted between 1988 and 1993.
Reporting to our host, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, I called attention to American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1995, in which editor John E. Rielly noted that only “a third of the public and slightly more of the leaders (39 percent) believe that the possible expansion of Islamic fundamentalism could represent a critical threat.”
It is hard to recall that pre-9-11 world.
My report to the American Philosophical Society in 1996 warned: “Combine these fundamentalisms with religious ethno-nationalism and one finds some of the most perplexing, confusing, puzzling and bemusing forces. They are hard to anticipate, locate or define. They do not fit the conventions of diplomacy, since such movements “take no prisoners,’ make no compromises,” and – could we have foreseen the devastation ahead? – “they may resort to forms of terrorism that transcend boundaries or subvert conventions of warfare.”
The description remains accurate except for the one word “may.” Now they do resort to terrorism.
Terrorism need not be and is not always religious. The Oklahoma City bombings and white supremacist violence in the United States have vague if any direct relations to religion.
Yet so consistent are the religious themes in the diaries of suicide bombers, who in the radical Islamist case give all to Allah, that they demand monitoring and call forth attempts to understand.
In the West, where religious people, for all their contention with one another and their new role in American politics – consider abortion or homosexuality or school prayer – tend to live in relative peace with one another and where they picture religion as a zone of solace, we work hard to understand the religious motivations elsewhere.
Sometimes we pick explanations that suit our fantasies, as when reporters overstress the fact that the reward for “martyrs” in the Muslim case includes available women in paradise.
When serious, we have to probe deeper.
In our Fundamentalism Project, we paid attention to those who tried to reduce religious violence to psychological factors. Participants, it had been said, were “nothing but” people of a certain psychological cast who needed absolute certainty and hungered for a cause. Yet not all people of such a cast turned to religion and terrorism.
We studied those who reduced the violence to sociopolitical factors: Partisans were “nothing but” the poor, the marginalized. Yet al-Qaida and leadership groups everywhere include wealthy, elite, educated and often rather worldly people. They go to cricket games or resorts before they destroy the innocent.
After allowing for all the “nothing but-ery,” we could not get away from the fact that such violence was born of impulses that any prober would consider religious.
They start with belief in God or gods (I am thinking of the Hindu case, among others), resort to religious texts and follow the rites of the faiths from which they spring.
They consistently obscure the nonviolent, reconciling themes in those texts and traditions. They progressively cut themselves off from moderates and reconcilers and feed on what they consider the political and military implications of their faith.
This means expelling or destroying the infidels, the strangers, the ones they regard as intruders and profaners. They pray, and then they destroy.
In 2005, just as in 1995-96, we still ask about futures. Now that the “global war on terrorism” has failed, the administration in Washington has come up with a better phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.”
Pentagon phrase-makers are more specific and thus more helpful when they focus on particulars, as in “extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends.” That verb exploit is important.
“We” – usually Jews and Christians – have texts in our Scriptures that legitimate terror in the name of the Lord. They are eminently “exploitable.” Bringing forth the moderating texts and themes that urge reconciliation among “them” and “us” is the urgent agenda.
As for futures: It is almost impossible to de-convert a religious terrorist. He has burned all bridges back to civil society, bonded with fellow killers, lost touch with reality and reinforced his decision with prayer.
The best that one can hope for is not to engage in actions that help him recruit converts from the vast populaces in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and all the rest who have not been lured to kill. One of the reasons that some of us opposed the Iraq war was that it would serve, as indeed it does serve, as a recruiting instrument for religious terrorists.
As for further futures: At the very least, U.S. citizens of all faiths and non-faiths must do better than they have in recent years at speaking well of “the other,” where such speaking is possible.
Every gesture of hospitality and cooperation across the bounds of separate religions and ideologies, which means not embarking on mini-jihads of our own, contributes to the strength we need to engage positively in the “global struggle against violent (religious!) extremism.”
Martin E. Marty co-directed the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago, where he is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service professor emeritus. His most recent book is “When Faiths Collide” (Blackwell). He wrote this for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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