Understanding Religious Violence

Radicalism and Terrorism in Religion Explored via Six Case Studies

James Dingley, Marcello Mollica, James Dingley, Marcello Mollica

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783030002831
• eBook ISBN: 9783030002848
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the problem of religiously based conflict and violence via six case studies. It stresses particularly the structural and relational aspects of religion as providing a sense of order and a networked structure that enables people to pursue quite prosaic and earthly concerns. The book examines how such concerns link material and spiritual salvation into a holy alliance. As such, whilst the religions concerned may be different, they address the same problems and provide similar explanations for meaning, success, and failure in life. Each author has conducted their own field-work in the religiously based conflict regions they discuss, and together the collection offers perspectives from a variety of different national backgrounds and disciplines.

© The Author(s) 2018

James Dingley and Marcello Mollica (eds.)Understanding Religious Violencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00284-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

James Dingley¹   and Marcello Mollica²  

(1)

Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

(2)

University of Messina, Messina, Italy

 

 

James Dingley (Corresponding author)

 

Marcello Mollica

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Religion and associated religious violence has, especially since 2001, become an increasingly topical subject, both in the media and in the academia. However, to anyone who has seriously studied the topic there often appears to be a gross ignorance of the nature and role of religion and different religions in both the public and the political discourse, which is, perhaps, to be somewhat expected. More alarming is the often gross ignorance of the topic in academia, especially in the international relations and security studies area that primarily deals with the problem of religious violence. As an example, an American intern (Sean Hermann) working with James Dingley at Queen’s University Belfast in 2016 reviewed all the articles published in the top international security journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism on the topic of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism since 2001. We found 36 articles via using a keyword search: in only six of them did they define Islam, only two made any attempt to distinguish between any of the different branches of Islam and none of them defined either terrorism or radicalism.

For a top academic journal (albeit part of Rand Corporation) this does not augur well for serious intellectual understanding of a complex phenomenon that is supposedly posing a serious threat to Western society, even at one stage an existential threat.¹ It places understanding Islamic violence on the same level as trying to understand violence in Northern Ireland as simply between Christians, without understanding any of the significant differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics that have led to 500 years of religious wars within Christendom since the Reformation (1517). Unfortunately, this latter point is also too often the case.

There is also a general failure in the Western modern secular age to not only view everything solely from a Western perspective but also dismiss religion as unimportant or simply a lifestyle choice that should not enter politics or any other arena of public or political life. This overlooks the fact that most politics is an extension of religious belief and values, thus philosopher A.C. Grayling (2007; an avowed atheist) identifies the roots of liberal democracy in the Christian Reformation—similarly in our market economics, rooted very deeply in the New Light Presbyterian theology of Adam Smith and his teacher Francis Hutcheson² (Broadie 2007; Herman 2003). As such, when the West tries to export its ideas to the rest of the world, it fails to appreciate the extent to which it is exporting its religious values and structures (no matter how ‘successful’) into another religion’s structure, system of beliefs and values. This somewhat naturally leads to a conflict of religions, a cosmic conflict where one system does violence to another and violently offends its God(s).

This then brings one on to the entire question of violence and its central role in nearly all religions, even if purely at the symbolic level. Thus sacrifice, especially blood, is common to most religions, the Gods live on human sacrifices, the Gods are also above normal human constraints—they make and break their own laws. Religion utilises symbols and ceremonies to develop emotional and spiritual experiences, just like organised military forces (Dingley 2010). Nearly all the studies of religion have shown a clear relation between religion and violence that would run counter to the normal layman’s view of religion as pacific and all about love and peace.

It is the aim of this collection of studies and ethnographies to correct some of these misapprehensions so that the question of religious violence can be better understood in both a wider and deeper manner—also, by specifically placing greater emphasis on the Middle East and Islamic countries to alert the reader to a less Western-orientated perspective that does not assume the problem purely from a Western position. Indeed, we would go further and suggest the ignorance of much Western thinking on (Islamic) religion, violence, culture, society, religion and politics, as suggested in our reference to the above Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. And this may be part of the problem for the West.

The book is based on a series of papers presented at a conference in Milan (2016)³ and then rewritten and revised for this book. All the papers were selected on the basis of representing a cross section of different cultural and national perspectives (Italian, British, Kurdish, Turkish, Ukrainian) in a variety of different locations (Ukraine, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Syria, China, Lebanon, Turkey, Georgia). In addition, we include one theoretical chapter examining the history and role of religion in social science analysis so as to give the reader a general orientating perspective from which to understand the following chapters. This in turn has enabled us to identify key points in all the chapters of more general interest to an understanding of the role of religion and violence in the contemporary world.

On a general level several key questions emerge; first, just how accurate was Nietzsche in claiming that God was dead. In fact He appears to be remarkably alive and fighting in many parts of the world. Does this imply that it is Western secularism that has got it wrong? Perhaps the West needs to rediscover God and how active He is in the world, rather than simply dismissing ‘others’’ religion as we pursue our vested (secularised Christian) interests. In the West we generally defer to ‘science’ and the legacy of the Enlightenment (reason, rationality and objectivity) as our legitimating value system, yet how different or morally better is this than religion? In addition, we tend to forget how conflated science and religion originally were in Christendom: God revealed himself via two books, the Bible and the Book of Nature, and science was merely the correct reading of the latter to better understand God’s laws and so get closer to God’s will (Brooke 1991). Perhaps we have fatally forgotten this latter dimension in the West, which is why we can no longer comprehend a religious imperative.

Another problem that emerges lies in much of the contemporary discourse of post-modernism and post-colonialism and their critique of imposing universalising Western values. However, when it comes to human rights, or more specifically (for feminists) women’s rights, this is exactly what many post-modern and anti-colonialists do, assuming Western (Christian) values should represent a norm. Thus the rights of minority cultures and identities are vigorously defended against homogenising and universalising Western trends, whilst defending homogenising local identities that would deny individual universal human rights. Perhaps there may be universal values and standards that have an objective reality that make minority cultures redundant and these values lie in science—that is not so much Western as that an appreciation of them emerged first in the West, but the West may misapply (perhaps through forgetting its appreciation of God).

Finally, we would note for readers’ attention that the primary emphasis in this book is on the relational or structural aspects of religion, rather than on the values, beliefs and ideas contained within it. Two key reasons for this lie in the fact that this was what most of the papers presented in the original conference tended to emphasise whilst also referring to values. Second, given the current vogue for post-modern and/or critical theory, this structural dimension tends to be, in our opinion, grossly overlooked, especially given the etymology of religion (religio; Latin = bonds and relations). And if there is one thing we would emphasise, it is just this that it is the bonds and relations contained within a religious system which provide it with its political mobilisation potential (one reason so many nationalist movements formed around a religious tradition). And in this lie the seeds of conflict as opposing structures of relations, and the vested interests within them, clash.

We are not arguing that structure alone is important—merely emphasising it in this book. However, we are aware of the importance of other dimensions, for example, sacred values and beliefs that inspire men to specific acts of violence such as sacrifice (of self or others), but in the space and time permitted for this particular publication, there is not the room, but we do hope to fill this gap in a future volume.

Bibliography

1. Broadie, Alexander. 2007. The Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
2. Brooke, John. 1991. Science and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Dingley, James. 2010. Terrorism and the Politics of Social Change. Farnham: Ashgate.
4. Dingley, James, and Sean Hermann. 2017. Terrorism, Radicalisation and Moral Panics: Media and Academic Analysis and Reporting of 2016 and 2017 ‘Terrorism’. Small Wars and Insurgencies 28 (6): 996–1013.Crossref
5. Grayling, A.C. 2007. Towards the Light. London: Bloomsbury.
6. Herman, Arthur. 2003. The Scottish Enlightenment. London: Fourth Estate.

Footnotes

1

For an example see: http://​www.​understandingwar​.​org/​report/​al-qaeda-and-isis-existential-threats-us-and-europe.

 

2

Hutcheson taught Smith economics and was an ordained Presbyterian minister.

 

3

The 14th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference, University of Bicocca, Milan, July 2016.

 

© The Author(s) 2018

James Dingley and Marcello Mollica (eds.)Understanding Religious Violencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00284-8_2

Begin Abstract

2. Classical Social Theory and the Understanding of Contemporary Religious Terrorism

James Dingley¹

(1)

Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

James Dingley

Keywords

ReligionConflictClassical social theory

End Abstract

Introduction

Terrorism currently dominates the media headlines, often posed as an imminent threat which the West (primarily the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO]) feel obliged to fight a global war against. We are even told by some political leaders that it poses an existential threat, invariably left undefined, at least to our (Western) way of life.¹ Much of this threat ‘realisation’ followed the 2001 Twin Towers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Classical Social Theory and the Understanding of Contemporary Religious Terrorism
• 3. Religious Independence of Chinese Muslim East Turkestan “Uyghur”
• 4. Women’s Rights Between Civil and Religious Laws: The Lebanese Law on Protection of Women and Family Members from Domestic Violence and the Religious Authorities’ Opposition
• 5. Geopolitical Vector of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in the Context of National Security
• 6. The Case of Northern Ireland
• 7. Terror-Driven Ethno-Religious Waves: Mapping Determinants in Refugees’ Choices Escaping Iraq and Syria
• 8. Being Ezidi in the Middle East
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter