Religious Hatred

Prejudice, Islamophobia and Antisemitism in Global Context

Paul Hedges

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350162891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Why does religion inspire hatred? Why do people in one religion sometimes hate people of another religion, and also why do some religions inspire hatred from others? This book shows how scholarly studies of prejudice, identity formation, and genocide studies can shed light on global examples of religious hatred. The book is divided into four parts, focusing respectively on: theories of prejudice and violence; historical developments of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and race; contemporary Western antisemitism and Islamophobia; and, prejudices beyond the West in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Each part ends with a special focus section. Key features include:
- A compelling synthesis of theories of prejudice, identity, and hatred to explain Islamophobia and antisemitism.
- An innovative theory of human violence and genocide which explains the link to prejudice.
- Case studies of both Western antisemitism and Islamophobia in history and today, alongside global studies of Islamic antisemitism and Hindu and Buddhist Islamophobia
- Integrates discussion of race and racialisation as aspects of Islamophobic and antisemitic prejudice in relation to their framing in religious discourses.
- Accessible for general readers and students, it can be employed as a textbook for students or read with benefit by scholars for its novel synthesis and theories. The book focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia, both in the West and beyond, including examples of prejudices and hatred in the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, Paul Hedges points to common patterns, while identifying the specifics of local context.
Religious Hatred is an essential guide for understanding the historical origins of religious hatred, the manifestations of this hatred across diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the strategies employed by activists and peacemakers to overcome this hatred.

Introduction: Untheorizing and unpacking

Why this book?

Hatred arising from religious impulses, or directed towards a particular religion is not new. But, in our world today, forms of hostility and prejudice associated with religion or directed towards religion are seemingly on the rise.¹ More worryingly, these prejudices have often given rise to genocidal urges. Neither prejudice nor genocide has any particular link to those traditions we typically think of as religions. The former is a very normal way in which we think about, respond to, and react to those around us who, for whatever reason, we see as different. There are rational and irrational aspects to it, some healthy impulses may even lie behind it, but it often results in very unhealthy stigmatization and social vilification of those who have done little or nothing to ask for it. As humans, we often trust those we know and are suspicious of outsiders. This is normal: the unknown other may be hostile, may compete for resources with us, or may be benign. But, before we know which, being suspicious may be the best survival strategy. As a species, we would not have survived if we were not suspicious of potential enemies, rivals, and threats. However, this natural and healthy survival instinct can become a destructive force, even leading us to a desire to wipe out whole other groups of humans to ensure our own survival.

I am not discussing religion because I believe it is especially bad or the major cause of such hatred and enmity between people.² In recent decades, the voice of strong, so-called New Atheist, critics of religion has derided religion as inherently harmful and a bane on human societies. However, our religious traditions comprise only human beings, who behave as other human beings do in many situations. As such, when we explore religious hatred we see only another subset of human hatred. However, some may still argue that those parts of human culture we call religion are particularly potent sites of hatred, barbarity, and prejudice. There is some element of truth to this, but only some; it is a partial story. One key issue in this regard is, what do we mean by the term ‘religion’? I have used it quite a bit so far, and I dare say most readers have known what I meant. However, like so many words we use, it is not so simple. A Christian philosopher, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), once stated that time is a concept that we all know the meaning of, until we stop and think about it. Religion is a bit like that. While we all have a general sense of what it means, we find that we will all actually define it somewhat differently. I do not want to get bogged down by this before we start (see Interlude 1), but we need to keep in mind that ‘religion’ is not a simple or straightforward term. One more note on how we speak about ‘religion(s)’ herein may be useful. A religion is not something with agency, only religious actors are. So, for instance, Islam or Buddhism cannot be antisemitic, only individual Muslims or Buddhists may be. However, in title chapters, and some other places we will employ wording about Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on that may imply this. It is not to suggest that these traditions – which are always diverse and plural, and so we may speak of the many Christianities, Buddhisms, Hinduisms (which we must bear in mind as we continue) – have only one stance, or that something is inherent to them (they have no essential component beyond that found in the diverse practices of those within the traditions to which we apply these names). Rather, this usage suggests that certain things are embedded within mainstream, authoritative, and pervasive forms. Hence, we may speak of Christian antisemitism or Hindu Islamophobia for reasons which will become clear in the relevant chapters, for prejudices are embedded in substantial ways in these traditions; but we may equally meet Christians, and forms of Christianity, and Hindus, and forms of Hinduism, that are not, respectively, antisemitic or Islamophobic. Importantly, such prejudice is often (or, rather, always) contextually and socially based, rather than something that comes out of the tradition and its teachings as a natural outcome; this will become clear as we discuss what prejudice is and how it arises.³

My reasons for writing this book are both complex and simple, and can be broken into five. First, it is a topic that intersects with my research work, even if not my main area, and so has been something of a process of discovery for me. Some scholars take a very narrow focus and spend their whole career diving deeply into a single specialist area. My own trajectory has been somewhat different. In part, this is because my primary focus is interreligious relations, which I have come to realize cannot be understood in a narrow way. While some scholars take a dim view of those who write outside their own narrow disciplinary expertise (and, sometimes, into their territory!), it is part of making sense of interreligious relations as a whole. Second, in July 2019, I attended the ISGAP Summer Institute in St John’s College, Oxford, on ‘Critical Antisemitism’, which made me focus deeply on this issue.⁴ As I did so, I realized that both antisemitism and Islamophobia need to be understood together as phenomena linked to human identity creation. Third, although my training is in religious studies, especially historical and philosophical issues, I now work in a school of international relations and in a programme focused on contemporary interreligious relations with connections to research centres where religious violence, terrorism, and hatred are highlighted.⁵ This partly matches my own research trajectory and interests from more historical issues to more contemporary ones, and from more conceptual encounters to focusing on the social contexts, though the historical and conceptual still interest me and inform the way I approach issues. Fourth, and in connection with the previous three, there is the unfortunate fact that these issues are becoming so pertinent. For a long time after the Holocaust, antisemitism was not a socially acceptable form of prejudice in Europe.⁶ Again, prejudice against Muslims, while existing, was part of a generic racism that was not always particularly tied to religion per se. Recent years, as we will explore, have seen this change. As such, I found writing this book a pressing concern. Finally, I found books on Islamophobia, books on antisemitism, and books on prejudice (often focused on race or gender), but rarely were all three drawn together. As such, this book is partly written to fill a perceived hole in the literature. In this regard, I hope it will be useful for teaching, for interested readers who want to see the connections, and as a scholarly contribution to understanding religious hatred as prejudice and the violence it leads to.

I am by origin British but now work in Singapore and have lived in China. This book is written into our globalized world where many of us are mobile, which is part of the nature of religious hatred today. Having said that, I have imagined myself writing primarily for a Western reader because that is where we see both antisemitism and Islamophobia together most commonly. However, these hatreds are not limited to the West, and I hope my journey herein will illuminate people from many corners of our world.

Three further issues also need addressing. First, I have written what is an academic text. Nevertheless, given the pressing enormity of the issues it is one that I have felt compelled to write and must admit to being far from neutral on. However, in the academic study of religion, there is an assumption that scholarship and advocacy (or activism) are always separate. In other words, scholarship is neutral, impartial, and grounded only in secular, facts-based, and reasoned study. However, such a distinction can be challenged on many levels, with feminist, decolonial, and critical theory scholarship all disputing the notion of the detached, rational observer who sits above the fray. In noting reasons why I have written this book, I have already taken account of how autobiography plays into academic study.⁷ Nevertheless, I have tried to write a book...