Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence in Transcultural Perspectives

Bettina Koch

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781614519775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Intolérance religieuse, persécution et conflits

This volume explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. It examines the ways in which Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, in particular how violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. This research focuses on premodern as well as contemporary discourses in the Middle East and Latin America, identifying patterns frequently used to justify the deployment of violence in both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic discourses. In addition, it explores how premodern arguments and authorities are utilized and transformed in order to legitimize contemporary violence as well as the ways in which the use of religion as a means to justify violence alters the nature of conflicts that are not otherwise explicitly religious. It argues that most past and present conflicts, even if the discourses about them are conducted in religious terms, have origins other than religion and/or blend religion with other causes, namely socio-economic and political injustice and inequality. Understanding the use and abuse of religion to justify violence is a prerequisite to discerning the nature of a conflict and might thus contribute to conflict resolution.

1 Introduction: Legitimacy, Religion, and Violence

Religions, by whatever names they are called, all resemble each other. No agreement and no reconciliation are possible between these religions and philosophy. Religion imposes on man its faith and its belief, whereas philosophy frees him in totally or in part.¹

This book is about politics. It explores theoretical discourses in which religion is used to legitimize political violence. Its main concern is how Christianity and Islam are utilized for political ends, particularly those in which violence is used (or abused) as an expedient to justify political action. To clarify what is meant by “religious” and “political,” this study follows H. A. Drake’s definition of intolerance as a religious problem and coercion as a political one.² Consequently, violence as a means of coercion is primarily a political, not a religious, problem. For the purpose of this book, (violent) political action is understood as all (violent) actions that occur outside the private realm.

This book is also a response to the predominantly one-sided public and scholarly debate that focuses almost exclusively on fundamentalist or extremist movements in Islam or islams, which is overshadowed by the perception of Islam as a religion prone to violence. This judgment is closely related to the problem of international (Islamic?) terrorism and ignores the fact that national violence is much more prevalent than what is commonly labeled as “international terrorism” or other forms of transnational violence.³ Neither of these problems is a prerogative of Islam. The religious legitimation of violence remains an integral part of the history of most if not all religions.

Although this study is not the first to utilize a comparative approach to politics in Christian and Islamic cultural settings, it nonetheless fills a gap. Most of the existing studies with a transcultural approach compare religious fundamentalism in the United States and the Islamic world, often indirectly (and accidentally) deepening the rift between the U.S. and the Islamic world.⁴ This study follows a different path. First, it explores the premodern traditions in both religious cultures in predominantly Christian Europe and the Muslim world of the time. Second, it compares the modern theoretical discourses on legitimizing violence in the Islamic (primarily Middle Eastern⁵) world with those in Latin America, which shares a similar colonial past; in many respects, both regions are still not part of the industrialized world. Moreover, these regions remain of geopolitical concern for hegemonic powers. In both geographic regions and religious-cultural contexts, state power and its legitimacy are tied to religion, albeit in dissimilar ways. With the dominance of the Catholic Church in Latin America, a focus on the Catholic tradition can be also justified by means of a rather likely continuation from the premodern discourses. Consequently, the number of theoretical texts and treatises aiming to legitimize violence and counter-violence is significant. In addition, in these two geographic regions, premodern texts and authorities have been utilized to legitimize hegemonic and anti-hegemonic violence. Thus, contemporary discourse on violence can only be fully understood if their premodern precursors are not ignored. Essentially, what is framed as hegemonic and anti-hegemonic here relates to the problem of inclusion and exclusion.

At first glance, it might appear counter-intuitive to move from an investigation of religious foundations and premodern discourses on violence directly to the twentieth century. Because of the enormous impact of premodern authorities on the formulation of contemporary justifications of violence, this approach includes a large number of relevant cases. In the Islamic world, the impact of traditional Islamic schools on modern interpretations of Islamic law is considerable. A number of scholars from the premodern period still enjoy almost undisputed authority. In the Latin American context, movements such as the Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) consider medieval Christendom the ideal realization and fulfillment of Christian civilization.⁶ In numerous instances, members of TFP have been linked with military regimes. Some of their opponents, closely connected with theologies of liberation, rely heavily on neo-Thomism. In addition, for both regions, it has been claimed and disputed that these hegemonic and anti-hegemonic movements are anti-modern in nature. ⁷ Consequently, without considering the medieval or premodern past, an analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century conflicts must remain fragmented.

Yet, this book is not particularly concerned with the question of whether religions in general, or monotheistic religions in particular, are prone to violence. These discourses (which are hotly debated among scholars of religious studies and related disciplines, particularly with respect to the question of monotheistic religions) inform this study as far as they enrich the epistemological interest of the political scientist, but they are not its main concern.⁸

As Hans G. Kippenberg notes, a “link between religion and violence is neither impossible nor necessary.”⁹ More importantly, Kippenberg highlights that even if a conflict is not caused by religion, this does not mean that religious interpretations of a conflict are avoided. A religious interpretation alters the conflict’s nature.¹⁰ This alteration of a conflict’s nature has at least two implications. First, as suggested by numerous other scholars, it implies that conflicts in which religious interpretations appear to dominate the discourse have (in most, if not all, instances) roots in socio-economic or political injustices and inequalities.¹¹ Second, if the true nature of a conflict is concealed by religious rhetoric, prospects for resolving the conflict are at least hampered, if not made impossible. Although most conflicts in which religious interpretation plays a significant role have other causes, the interaction between religion and politics deserves serious consideration. Based on convincing empirical evidence, Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke have shown that any political restriction on religion, whether by supporting one religion over others and forming an alliance with the favored one or by actively restricting religious freedom, results in an increase of violence independently of the religions in question, although this occurs to a greater degree in predominantly Muslim countries.¹²

If we ignore religion for a moment and focus on other underlying reasons for conflict and violence, such as socio-economic and political injustices and inequalities, then we are faced with one of the core problems of politics: political legitimation and legitimacy. As Wilfried Hinsch notes, legitimacy belongs “primarily in the domain of the political and relates to the exercise of coercive state power. [L]egitimacy is taken to be a necessary condition of any justifiable use of state power.”¹³ Excessive use of violence, whether in resistance movements against the legal government or in excessive and violent government actions against the people, is usually an indicator that legal state power is no longer perceived as legitimate—or, in other words, that the acceptance of the existing power structure is jeopardized.

Despite some significant overlaps, discourses on legitimacy play out differently in the modern liberal constitutional state. Therefore, it is useful to outline, at least briefly and by no means exhaustively, some particular concerns within the modern Western predominantly liberal discourses on legitimacy. Although framing non-Western discourses within a Western theoretical context may provoke accusations of hegemonic Eurocentrism or Orientalism, for this study, this is a necessary approach. First, this study is a contribution to discourses within political science. Because most concepts within the discipline have been shaped in the Western tradition, in order to speak to the discipline, relating the discourse to the discipline’s concepts is of utmost necessity. Second, a Eurocentric perspective is not automatically a devaluation of other cultures, at least not if it is used and understood primarily as a tool to assist transcultural translation and to relate discourses outside Western political science tradition to the discipline. This study does not engage in the currently popular concept of transcultural dialogue as promoted by Fred Dallmayr.¹⁴ The aim of this study is much smaller and perhaps more realistic: it engages in “translation” into academic discourses without aimaing expliclicitly at a transcultural diologue. This study assumes, with Norbert Elias, that “[o]ne can translate knowledge from one language into another. This seems to indicate an existence of knowledge in separation from that of language. […] Up to a point the same message can be conveyed by different sets of sound-symbols.”¹⁵

However, we must emphasize “up to a point.” Anyone who has been engaged in language translation or has read the same text in two different languages knows that some nuances may be lost in translation, and this untranslated five percent or so makes a difference. As long as not all people have fluency or nearnative knowledge in all languages and cultures, translation cannot be avoided, and, thus, one must accept at least some ambiguity. This situation applies not only to languages, but also (and perhaps even more so) to the transcultural translation of concepts and ideas.

Concepts, ideas, and knowledge are subject to frequent cultural transitions and exchanges. For instance, the translation movement between the eighth and tenth centuries in which originally Greek texts in philosophy and sciences were translated into and adopted by the Arabic culture subsequently¹⁶ affected science, philosophy, and political thinking in Western Europe in the Latin translations of these texts. Therefore, the rhetoric of “us” versus “them” becomes blurred. Although scholars in comparative political theory allege that thoughts and ideas from other cultures are frequently mistranslated and misunderstood in Western cultures,¹⁷ this is not a prerogative of the so-called West. Whether these “mistranslations” are an expression of hegemonic imperialism that imply a devaluation of other cultures, as suggested in over-politicized colonial and postcolonial academic discourses, is more than doubtful, although it is a topic in itself. To emphasize that the cultural borrowing practice is by no means a one-way street, the example of Marx, who affected colonial and postcolonial discourses in both the Middle East and Latin America, may be sufficient. As is well known, Marx had some knowledge of Ibn Khaldun. Although this knowledge was second-hand or third-hand through William Mac Guckin de Sane and Friedrich Engels, the careful reader of Ibn Khaldun will find numerous ideas in the fourteenth-century thinker that are echoed in Marx.¹⁸ Instead of reading Marxist ideas as alien to Middle Eastern or Islamic cultures, one can read Marx as an author who promoted ideas that were reconveyed to their cultural origin through the reception of Marx in the Middle East.

Another disputed question is whether the use of Western languages and related disciplinary terminology that does not have exact correspondences in different cultures signifies a hegemonic discourse. The problem, however, is far more complex; it is not simply a problem of more and less dominant language cultures. Similar problems apply in scholarly approaches to past cultures, although there these issues are less politicized. The politicization of scholarly approaches to non-Western political theory has led to some excesses. Following Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Weiß lists four “vices...