contemporary religious terrorism

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Much of contemporary terrorism departs inat least one very significant way from itsimmediate precursor in European anar-

chist or revolutionary terrorism. In what is clearly a trend overthe past two decades, its nature is predominantly religious,giving violence more the character of a sacramental act or reli-gious duty than that of a means to a strategic political objec-tive. Osama bin Laden’s declaration in 1988 (quoted in PeterBergen’s Holy War, Inc., 2002) illustrates this trend: “All thosecrimes and calamities are an explicit declaration by theAmericans of war on Allah, His Prophet, and Muslims. . . .Based upon this and in order to obey the Almighty, we herebygive Muslims the following judgment: the judgment to kill andfight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military,is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in anycountry.”

Aside from the important juridical question of whether binLaden has the religious authority to declare such an obliga-tion, his declaration raises at least two questions. What is therelation between religion and this kind of violence? And why isit so prevalent today?

THE RELATION BETWEEN RELIGIONAND VIOLENCETwo responses are readily available, but both, I think, are mis-taken. One denies any real connection between religion, vio-lence, and war; the other dismisses the connection through theuse of various psychological categories. The first response—call it the “denial-of-religion view”—is made clear in a recentstudy titled “God and War: An Audit and an Exploration,” com-missioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation for its pro-gram What the World Thinks of God. The study begins by cit-ing some remarks I made in the introduction to the Encyclo-pedia of Religion and War. “There is a view,” the study’s

authors write, “that the ‘number of groups involved in conflictswith significant religious dimensions’ has increased dramati-cally in the more than half-century since the end of World WarII: from 26 between 1945 and 1949 to 70 in the 1990s, with thegreatest increase in the 1960s and 1970s. The author of thatview postulated that ‘by the 1980s militant religious sectsaccounted for one quarter of all armed rebellions.’ He citedMartin van Creveld: ‘There appears every prospect that reli-gious attitudes, beliefs, and fanaticism will play a larger role

in the motivation of armed conflict than they have, in the Westat any rate, for the past three hundred years.” The study con-cludes that “at a philosophical level, the main religious tradi-tions have little truck with war or violence. All advocate peaceas the norm and see genuine spirituality as involving a dis-avowal of violence.”

I agree that the main religious traditions advocate peace,and I say as much near the end of my introduction to theEncyclopedia. But it is factually not the case that genuinespirituality involves a disavowal of violence or that religionhas no truck with violence. Examples abound. “Perhaps themost troubling war ideology in the Hebrew Bible is that of theban, or herem, a term rooted in the sacrificial meaning ‘devote

Contemporary Religious

Terrorism

Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez

“I agree that the main religious traditions advocate peace. . . . But it is factually not the

case that genuine spirituality involves a disavowal of violence or that religion has

no truck with violence.”

Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez is a professor and the directorof The Dr. James Dale Ethics Center at Youngstown StateUniversity in Ohio. This article is based on a paper pre-sented at the Committee for the Scientific Examination ofReligion’s inaugural conference.

FI Aug-Sept 2006 Pages 6/30/06 9:07 AM Page 27

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to destruction,’” Encyclopedia of Religion and War contrib-utor Susan Niditch writes. Such wars are “imagined to be com-manded by God and require that all human enemy and some-times also their animals be slaughtered [as] a whole burntoffering to God.” Deuteronomy 7:2 reads: “and when the Lordyour God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then youmust utterly destroy them.” The ancient Hindu code, the Lawof Manu, reads: “Those kings who, seeking to slay each other,fight with the utmost exertion and do not turn back, go to heav-en.” “The Lord said: Look to your law and do not waver, forthere is nothing more salutary for a baron than a war that islawful. It is an open door to heaven, happily happened upon;

and blessed are the warriors, Partha, who find a war likethat. . . . Therefore rise up . . . resolved upon battle!” reads theBhagavad Gita. D. T. Suzuki, one of the most important mod-ern apologists for Japanese Buddhism, wrote: “A good fighteris generally an ascetic, or stoic, which means he has an ironwill. This, when needed, Zen can supply.” And Harada Sogaku,a Zen master, wrote, “It is necessary for all one hundred mil-lion subjects [of the emperor] to be prepared to die with honor. . . if you see the enemy you must kill him, you must destroythe false and establish the true—these are the cardinal pointsof Zen. It is said that if you kill someone it is fitting that yousee his blood. It is further said that if you are riding a power-ful horse nothing is beyond your reach. Isn’t the purpose of the[Zen] meditation we have done in the past to be of assistancein an emergency like this?”

How is this not trucking with war and violence? In whatsense is Hebrew sacrifice and Zen meditation not “genuinespirituality”?

I do think the authors of this study are correct when theystate that there have been “few genuinely religious wars,” if bythat they mean wars or other forms of political violence thatoccurred solely on account of religion or of a particular reli-gion, that is, that would otherwise not have occurred. The roleof religion in war and political violence is, I think, secondorder. Religion does not itself generate war but comes insteadto justify and sanctify war subsequent to material causes andlifts them to a transmaterial level in which killing in war oftentakes the form of a religious duty.

Religion has a constructive, though not necessarily causal,role in the generation of violence. It provides an interpretiveframework through a system of narratives and symbols thatmake possible extreme violence. Such a framework is not par-ticular to Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Japanese Zen, orancient Manichaeanism. Killing in the name of God as sacrificeand worship, as an act expressive of religious devotion, is oneof the most enduring and universal features of religion. Nearthe core of religion lies a grand, cosmic battle between order—equated with all that is righteous and good—and chaos—equated with all that is evil, sinful, and bad—along with all theheroes, martyrs, and holy warriors who maim, kill, and diefighting the foes of the cherished divinities and receive vastand eternal rewards.

The second response—call it the “dismissal-of-religion”view—has its greatest currency in popular and mediaaccounts of religious violence, but scholars are hardly resis-tant to its appeal. It is evident in accounts and analyses ofextraordinary events, such as the mass suicide-murder of 914Americans in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 and of seventy-fourwomen, children, and men in April 1993 in the compoundcalled Mount Carmel outside Waco, Texas. Much of the inter-pretive framework brought to bear upon both events dis-missed them as genuine religious phenomena. Waco was “aplace where . . . powerless individuals, broken of their will,were subjected to the whims of a megalomaniac who orches-trated their deaths in a ‘mass suicide’ that was really an elab-orate murder,” wrote commentator John R. Hall. Media, popu-

“The role of religion in war and political violence is, I think, second order. Religion

does not itself generate war but comes instead to justify and sanctify war. . . .”

A photo released by the FBI showing an aerial view of the Davidian Compoundin Waco, Texas, while it burned. The government came under fire for not allow-ing the members an escape route, which is why, many theorized, so many per-ished in the flames. The FBI photo shows several exits through the sides of thecompound to demonstrate there were ample escape routes, had anyone beeninterested in using them (1993).

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lar, and even many scholarly accounts of Waco reflected thenarratives of Jonestown and its leader, Jim Jones, who wasdescribed as, among other things, “a self-proclaimed messi-ah,” “a man who played god,” “full of hokum . . . and carnivalstuff,” “one who mesmerized,” “fanatical,” “a foul paranoid,”“one vulnerable to forces in his own mind,” “gifted with astrange power,” and “victim of darker forces.” Jonestown andWaco, Jim Jones and David Koresh, they are always other—bizarre, nightmarish, lustful—belonging, as Foucault ob-serves, in the prison or the asylum. Either way, they neverbelong among us. Ultimately, such narratives are employed asa political strategy meant to reinforce the normative bound-aries of the dominant culture, in much the same way as RenéGirard argues in his book Violence and the Sacred that sacri-ficial violence preserves or restores social order.

Yet this kind of violence as a religious phenomenon is notnew. “We all wish to die in the old faith,” declared members ofthe Russian Orthodox church known as the Old Believers, in aformal petition of September 15, 1667. This language ex-pressed not only resistance to liturgical changes that, by theiraccount, would deprive Old Believers of their traditional ritu-als, but it was also declaratory of their intent to self-imposemartyrdom. Rather than die a less than fully human death,they would commit mass suicide. In 1665 and the followingyear, small groups of the Old Believers burned themselves todeath. In 1687, some 2,700 followers seized a monastery,locked themselves inside, and set the building on fire. By theearly eighteenth century, nearly twenty thousand OldBelievers had died in mass suicides.

The strategy of dismissal is most evident today in many dis-cussions on suicide bombers. “Those who would commit sui-cide in their assaults on the free world are not rational and arenot deterred by rational concepts,” Senator John Warner saidto The Washington Post. “Terrorists are extreme maniacs,”claims a publication by the Unitarian Universalist Associationof Congregations. Two leading experts on the psychologicalprofiles of suicide bombers characterize them as single men intheir late teens who come from broken families and are social-ly marginal, drawn to terrorist violence because they aredrawn to violence itself. Like the followers of Jim Jones orDavid Koresh, suicide bombers are weak-willed individualswho fall under the power of a charismatic fanatic who distortsand hijacks religion, leading them to beliefs and actions thatno sane, rational person would even contemplate.

More recent studies strongly suggest the opposite.Researcher Scott Atran has noted that “suicide bombersexhibit no socially dysfunctional attributes . . . or suicidalsymptoms.” As Robert E. Pape notes, we now know that sui-cide bombers range in age from the late teens to mid-forties;that many have attained professional degrees; that while someare unemployed and poor, others are middle class; that a sig-nificant number are women; and that over 40 percent of all sui-cide bombings between 1980 and 2001—or 86 out of 188—hadno ties to any religious organization. Indeed, the leading orga-nization in fomenting suicide bombings is the LiberationTigers of Tamil Eelam, whose ideology is secular and nation-alistic with little, if any, explicitly religious ideas.

BUT WHY NOW?One historically accurate response is that the connectionbetween religion and terrorism is not new. They share a longhistory. There were the Zealots and Sacarii of first-centuryJudea. The latter were named for the type of dagger they used,often in daylight, against Jewish officials who collaboratedwith Roman occupation authorities. There are the IslamicFedayeen of the Shi’a Ismaili sect of the eleventh and twelfthcentury, commonly known as the Assassins, who opposedChristian crusaders and Sunni rulers of the Abbasid dynasty.The most noteworthy group is the ancient Hindu Thugees, per-haps the ideal type of religious terrorist, insofar as their act ofkilling had no discernible political purpose. Over their thou-sand-year history, the Thugees may have killed, at least by oneestimate, some one million individuals. After traveling a long

Fedosia Morozova, an “Old Believer,” hauled off to a convent. Vasily Surikov.

“Religion has a constructive, though not necessarily causal, role in

the generation of violence.”


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distance with their victims, they would kill them, plunder theirpossessions, and then bury their corpses. Killing for theThugees was a religious duty that was always done in rigidlyprescribed rites, the Thugees offering a portion of the loot totheir cherished divinity, Kali, the goddess of destruction andrecipient of blood sacrifices. Kali is usually represented, asR.C. Zaehner notes, as “a beautiful dancer, surrounded byskulls, corpses and jackals, her tongue dripping with blood, agarland of human heads hanging on her neck and on her waista girdle of human hands.” The following quotation illustratesthe kind of devotion that was inspired by Kali:

Ever art thou dancing in battle, Mother. Never was beauty likethine, as, with thy hair flowing about thee, thou dost everdance, a naked warrior on the breast of Shiva.

Heads of thy sons, daily freshly killed, hang as a garlandaround thy neck. How is thy waist adorned with human hands!Little children are thy ear-rings. Faultless are thy lovely lips;thy teeth are as fair as the jasmine in full bloom. Thy face isbright as the lotus-flower, and terrible is its constant smiling.Beautiful as the rain-clouds is thy form; all blood-stained arethy feet.

This historical connection between religion and terrorismhas led a number of writers, following David Rapoport’s semi-nal 1984 study, to argue that prior to the nineteenth century,religion provided the only justification for terrorism. Secularpolitical terrorism emerged with the anarchist movementsthroughout Europe and the United States, followed in theimmediate postcolonial period by revolutionary, separatist,and nationalist violence. So, religious terrorism is nothingnew. Still, why now?

Since the Iranian Revolution, so much has been writtenabout Islam and violence that old stereotypes have been rein-forced, rather than dispelled, by close, scholarly work. “Theimage of Muslim armies converting as they advance,” G.H.Jansen wrote some twenty-five years ago, “has sunk so deeplyinto the Western mind that no amount of repetition of the truthis likely to dislodge it.” Accordingly, many have looked to Islamfor an explanation of violence and not to the particular charac-teristics of the evolution, or the conditions, of Muslim societies.

Islam has provided the ideological framework for socialand cultural developments with significant political and eco-nomic dimensions throughout the Middle East and otherparts of the world. Yet these have been passed over by theold stereotype, and the focus has largely been on the violentmeans of a militant fringe. Such emphasis of focus has ledseveral authors to argue that Islamic terrorism is a symptomof a failed civilization. Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad, AlQaeda, and so on have been kindled by the realization thatIslamic culture has failed and Muslims are consequentlymotivated by a desire to destroy the successful civilizationsof the West by producing an Armageddon-type war betweenthe two. For example, Ralph Peters writes, “A religio-socialsociety that restricts the flow of information, prefers myth toreality, oppresses women, makes family, clan, or ethnic iden-tity the basis for social and economic relations, subverts therule of secular law, undervalues scientific and liberal educa-tion, discourages independent thought, and believes thatancient religious law should govern all human relations hasno hope whatsoever of competing with America and thevibrant, creative states of the West and the Pacific Rim. Weare succeeding, the Islamic world is failing, and they hate usfor it.”

James Klurfield, in very similar language, writes that theattacks of September 11, 2001, “came from a religious sectlashing out at modernity and the leading exponent of moder-nity, the United States. Osama bin Laden is the product of afailure—a failed culture that is being left behind by the rest ofthe world. He and his followers are lashing out because theycannot cope with the modern world. . . . Bin Ladenism andother forms of Islamic fundamentalism are attempts to dealwith the Arab world’s inability to cope with modernity.”

If this view were true, we should explore what is particularto the Arabic experience to identify the conditions that pro-duce this type of violence—for example, widespread poverty,social and political breakdown, tyrannical governments,inequality of women, high illiteracy, and decrepit infrastruc-tures. But the view fails to convince for two reasons: first,many if not all of those conditions obtain in many parts of thenon-Arab world—Thailand, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Guate-mala, Haiti, Appalachia—and, second, contemporary religiousterrorism is not limited to Arabs or Muslims. Instead, we findit in the bombing of an abortion clinic in Atlanta, Georgia; inthe neo-Nazi Christian Identity group the Covenant, Sword,and Arm of the Lord in Mountain Home, Arkansas, wherenearly one hundred women, children, and men were stockpil-ing weapons, including cyanide, in preparation for a war that

“Contemporary religious terrorism knows no denominational or geographic

boundaries, no demographic or class differences, no distinction between

advanced and developing nations. It is global and endemic to our time.”


would usher in God’s rule; in the bombing of the MurrahFederal Building in Oklahoma City; and in a Tokyo subway sta-tion, among so many other places. Contemporary religious ter-rorism knows no denominational or geographic boundaries,no demographic or class differences, no distinction betweenadvanced and developing nations. It is global and endemic toour time.

There might, however, be a core of truth in the argumentadvanced by Ralph Peters, James Klurfield, and others—thatthere is a failed project or at least one that is being challenged.I suggest that it is the modern project of the secular nationstate. The challenge was perhaps first announced by theethno-political conflicts that began to emerge after World WarII among peoples under colonial rule in West Africa, India, theMiddle East, and Sri Lanka, for example. They foretold theincreasing erosion of the secular state as the protector of goodorder and the purveyor of a common identity of a people. Therevival of religion as a public, political force and the resur-gence of religiously motivated violence suggest that whatJurgen Habermas and others have called “the project ofmodernity” may have come to a close; that the secular state nolonger holds a monopoly over violence; and that its ideology nolonger entices loyalty and those other deep commitments fromwhich we draw a sense of identity.

A clear trend is, I think, discernable here: the displacementof secular forms of social control by a religiosity that assertsitself as the only legitimate basis for social order. Nation statesare artificial creations—a kind of fiction, like the corpora-tion—and are also a modern invention. In the West, they havebeen the dominant international actor for some three cen-turies. Much of the non-Western world did not know them untilthe colonial and postcolonial period of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. In both, the emergence of the state wasthe product of particular historical forces.

Other forces now come into play, challenging the old order.Ultimately, those new forces might prevail, eroding and per-haps dissolving the secular nation state as other forms of polit-ical association establish themselves. The new forms are like-ly to have some resemblance to the old: for example, a cen-tralized bureaucracy, a reasonably defined territory, and ahigh degree of political sovereignty. They could be much likethe nation states of today. But their ideology, their foundingideas, and the sense of identity they create for their citizensmight have little, if anything, in common with the old—think ofa Christian America, an Islamic Iran, or a Buddhist Sri Lanka.

It is, of course, enormously difficult to predict what willoccur, what new forms of order will emerge. But I suggest that,to understand religiously motivated violence by Christians,Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others, we look notonly to the violence that is endemic to religion but also to thatother social institution that has for a few centuries enjoyed atleast a de jure monopoly of violence, the secular nation state.My very strong hunch is that the cause of religious violence wesee today emerges from a competition between two kinds oforder, secular and religious—a competition not only for landand other material resources but for our souls as well.


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