Exploring Religious Conflict
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Exploring Religious Conflict
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780833038043 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RAND Corporation |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2005 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.30(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Exploring Religious Conflict
By Gregory F. Treverton Heather S. Gregg Daniel Gibran Charles W. Yost
Rand Corporation
Copyright © 2005 RAND CorporationAll right reserved.
Chapter One
Introduction
The numbers support what September 11th indicated so graphically: Religious conflicts have escalated dramatically since the onset of the Cold War. According to one scholar's estimates, throughout the 1950-1996 period, religious conflicts constituted between 33 and 47 percent of all conflicts. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War, nonreligious conflicts have decreased more than religious conflicts. Increasingly, religion is both an identifiable source of violence around the world and simultaneously so deeply interwoven into other sources of violence - including economic, ideological, territorial, and ethnic sources - that it is difficult to isolate. While certainly not a new phenomenon, religiously motivated violence has become a pervasive element of modern conflicts. "Holy terror," killing in the name of God, constitutes a major driver of violent conflicts today. This is evident in the rise of Islamic insurgencies in places like Chechnya and Afghanistan and in terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia as well as in the West, including Spain and the United States.
To be sure, the rationale for religiously motivated violence exists in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and elsewhere. No major religious tradition has been or is a stranger to violence from its extremists. Some of that violencewill challenge American foreign policy, and all of it will challenge the understanding of the U.S. intelligence analysts.
That said, while the focus on militant Islam is marked and unsurprising after September 11th, it is also appropriate, because Islamic extremism is in a class by itself as a threat to the United States. It is an international, non-state movement with the opportunity to appeal to a billion and a half adherents. In that sense, it is without parallel in the contemporary world. It constitutes a one-member set. No movement with its origins in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion has disrupted international security to the extent that this movement has done and will continue to do.
However, while the focus needs to remain on Islamist terrorism, it is nonetheless illuminating to consider the psychology of Islamist terrorism in comparative context. The psychology of "cosmic war" is instructive across major religious borders. This psychology rewards comparative consideration. Similarly, while the roots of Islamic terror run deep in history, Islamist terrorism in important regards is a new development within world Islam and deserves comparative consideration alongside other new religious movements. Under what identifiable circumstances do these movements sometimes develop homicidal or suicidal tendencies?
For example, when religious extremists are convinced that their cause is sacred and ordained by God, they are capable of savage and relentless violence. And what is striking about "religious terrorism" is that "it is almost exclusively symbolic, performed in remarkably dramatic ways." This is not to say, of course, that this violence is not real but only that it is meaningful to its perpetrators in ways that defy entirely pragmatic explanation.
This report offers an introductory inquiry into the causes and motivations of religiously inspired violence and terrorism. It is distilled from a series of workshops on religious conflict sponsored by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence and the RAND Corporation. The goal of the project was to explore religiously motivated conflict in the presence of some of the best experts inside and outside of government.
The report is divided into five sections. After this introduction, Section 2 uses the concept of sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer's "cosmic war" as an entry point for examining some of the motivations of religiously inspired violence. Section 3 examines the role that states play in exacerbating religious violence and looks at possible avenues of mitigating the rise of religious bellicosity. Section 4 evaluates New Religious Movements (NRMs) and explores the conditions under which NRMs become violent. And Section 5 offers concluding remarks and the report's implications for policies aimed at mitigating religious violence.
Chapter Two
ASSESSING THE THREAT OF "COSMIC" WAR
Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer coined the phrase "cosmic war" to describe the worldview of religious adherents who have resorted to violence in defense of their faith. Specifically, Juergensmeyer defines cosmic war as "larger than life" confrontations in which divine battles between Good and Evil, commonly portrayed in the scriptures of most religions, are believed to be occurring in the here-and-now. Thus "cosmic war" refers to the metaphysical battle between Good and Evil that enlivens the religious imagination. Through symbol, myth, and ritual, religion proclaims the primacy of order over chaos in the universe or cosmos, and the ultimate victory of Good over Evil is won by cosmic war. For example, in Christianity, cosmic war is understood to mean the "great controversy" between Christ and Satan, between the forces of "good" and "evil" for the salvation of humankind.
Juergensmeyer identifies several characteristics of cosmic war, including the demonization of the enemy, the promise of divine rewards for earthly sacrifice, and the belief that the war cannot be lost but, at the same time, is unwinnable in this lifetime. Believers who demonize their enemy and justify the killing of "noncombatants" tend to do so by drawing sharp lines between the two worlds of the spiritual and the temporal, between the metaphysical and the mundane. Acts of terror are conceived as evocations of a larger spiritual confrontation, and immediate victory may not be the expectation or even the goal of such acts. The acts of violence unleashed by these believers are construed as symbolic, designed to make a statement rather than actually disable the enemy, which is often a secular state. Confrontations are likely to be characterized as cosmic war, according to Juergensmeyer, when the political struggle is perceived as a defense of basic identity and dignity, when losing the struggle would be unthinkable, and when the struggle cannot be won in real time or in real terms.
EXAMINING THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE
Juergensmeyer argues that all religious traditions feature depictions of divine wars in which Good battles Evil, particularly in a religion's scriptures. Divine conflicts are featured prominently in the apocalyptic theology of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, it is the final judgment and the realization of God's purpose for creation. In Islam, it is the spiritual Jihad, the struggle in a believer's life to overcome evil and to do good, to live according to Allah's will and defend the community of believers against all infidels. And in Hinduism, a pantheistic religion, it was not merely confined to the fierce physical struggles between Lord Rama and Rawana, the Evil One, but also included a struggle that linked the battlefield of Ayodhya to the daily lives of all Hindus. To investigate this claim of cosmic or divine war, Juergensmeyer interviewed members of religious groups ranging from Aum Shinrikyo to Hamas to the Christian Identity movement in the United States.
In all these movements, he found strong echoes of cosmic war. This philosophy provides a cosmic battlefield where forces for Good are called to fight some unspeakable Evil. These warrior believers fight for a holy cause, and all actions are taken in the name of God and justified. Moreover, cosmic war provides the "template of meaning" for these individuals and groups. Not only does it explain why things are as they are, but it also provides the foundation for doing something, for taking action. In other words, cosmic war bridges the spiritual world and real world. It provides a way to link individual cognition and the real world to divine notions of Good versus Evil. Cosmic war links real and often personal issues and problems to a broader community and shared worldview of great struggle in the spiritual and temporal world. Then it links this worldview back to real actions that individuals can perform, which also has symbolic meaning in the spiritual world.
Juergensmeyer further argues that terrorist acts stemming from cosmic war are not strategic in the sense that they aim to accomplish concrete purposes. Rather, they are symbolic, intended to demonstrate to the terrorists' supporters and potential supporters the reality of a war that the rest of the world neither sees nor comprehends. Juergensmeyer illustrates this point by describing an interview with Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the principal perpetrators in the World Trade Center attacks in 1993. When questioned about the attacks, Abouhalima responded: "There is a war going on and you don't realize it. It is the battle of Truth and Evil. After Oklahoma City, you knew it. Terrorism, even 9-11, is aimed as much at potential supporters as at us. It is for the watchers of Al Jazeera." And when the World Trade Center towers came down on September 11th, the perpetrators and al-Qaeda understood this as metaphor, "as choice signifiers of the confrontation between absolute good threatened with destruction by its absolute opposite." This dualistic, Manichean struggle between right and wrong, between the forces of Good and Evil, calls the chosen into a holy war with drastic consequences. If the holy warrior loses, God's creation is lost and chaos and evil will prevail.
The cosmic context animates war in several distinct ways. First, it not only links the divine with the temporal, it is also an exciting and ennobling venture in the cause of God. It provides the conceptual lens through which the cosmic battle between Good and Evil are perceived, and the ultimate justification for engaging in acts of violence. Moreover, cosmic war is long-term; it is God's war, and in the long run God never loses. Even if the battle today is not won, the overall war will succeed and Good will eventually prevail over Evil. This is God's design and it cannot fail. Moreover, cosmic warriors cannot accept the world as it is. Even though they know that they will kill innocent people by engaging in violence, they willingly accept this burden because of their compelling desire to do God's will, to do what He commands. They justify violence by convincing themselves that the rampant evil in, and injustices of, society far outweigh the amount of harm caused by their actions. In other words, violence becomes necessary to save society from cosmic evil.
Juergensmeyer further contends that cosmic war requires demonizing or satanizing the enemy. The enemy is not merely humans fighting for material gains but cosmic foes bent on the destruction of Good. This satanization process, while ultimately creating a larger-than-life enemy, does not occur in a complete vacuum; it usually has its roots in the enemy's policies and actions. Al-Qaeda, for example, and bin-Laden in particular, has taken the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, which many Muslims oppose, and translated it into an event with cosmic implications. In other words, he sees America's occupation of Islam's holy places as a diabolical act by an infidel power that should therefore be fiercely resisted.
Crucially, Juergensmeyer stresses that cosmic war is always defensive. However, unlike other aspects or forms of defensive warfare, the "defensive" element of cosmic war is predicated on two necessary conditions, "imminence" and "human agency." The warriors in God's army must believe that the day of deliverance is near - imminent. And they must also think that their human action would lead or usher in the messianic era. For example, a believer who embraces the imminence of the messianic era thinks that he can "force the end" by resorting to violence. Cosmic war is also a response to victimization. For the believers, cosmic war can be empowering and the rewards intimate and personal. Moreover, rewards are not measured in earthly terms, but in divine promises of salvation and paradise. In Islam, for example, the personal benefits that await the warrior who was martyred in God's holy war transcend anything earthly. These benefits, found in hadiths, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, are said to include the forgiving of the martyr's sins, the redemption from the torments of the grave, security from the fear of hell, a crown of glory featuring a ruby of inestimable worth, marriage to 72 huris, or black-eyed virgins, and the ability to extend these heavenly privileges to 70 relatives.
Policies aimed at "undoing" cosmic war are difficult, precisely because responses to cosmic war, especially the use of military force, can so easily be turned to validate the claims of the cosmic warriors. For that reason, Juergensmeyer is skeptical of military responses. The more the conflict is militarized, the more the warriors will be validated in the righteousness of their own cause or struggle and in the eyes of all onlookers, and the more the United States will become the evil enemy. Indeed, as others point out, even the language of a "global war on terrorism" plays into Islamic jihadists' hands, as does the notion that "if you're not with us, you're against us." Al-Qaeda's religious extremists may pay careful attention to the language used by members of the U.S. Administration. They may listen not only for style and content but also for concepts that demonize them and their cause. These images play into the language and worldview of cosmic war.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the visions of cosmic war, however seemingly fantastic and farfetched, may appear to be imminent. September 11th did draw the United States into a protracted war, drive it deeper into debt, and weaken its standing among the world's Muslims. By these measures, it was a success.
Other cases suggest that a limited and localized response can help keep cosmic war from spreading. One example of such an approach is India's battles with Sikh political separatists and religious extremism. India has succeeded in containing the violence within one region, the Punjab. While the conflict in Northern Ireland was primarily political, the British government managed a proportional response, focusing instead on negotiating and not responding to terrorist acts from fringe groups. Over time, Britain has been able to "de-satanize" itself (as it also de-satanized its enemy). Inaction or doing nothing can be difficult though, particularly because of pressures from domestic constituencies to respond forcibly.
Juergensmeyer notes, however, that cosmic war sometimes collapses from within, from schisms or from the warriors scaring themselves or would-be supporters. An example of this is the Oklahoma City terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in April 1995. While Timothy McVeigh saw himself as a fundamentalist Christian and regarded himself as acting in defense of the faith, he ended up horrifying the people he intended to defend and they turned against him and his actions. McVeigh was a member of a violent Christian white supremacist group that is millenarian in outlook. Most, if not all, of these groups, such as the American Christian Patriot movement and Christian Identity, orient their members toward violence by appeals to arcane theological interpretations of scripture. And herein lies the cosmic dimension of their struggle.
Cosmic war, therefore, has psychological and socio-psychological roots. Much attention has been paid to the supposed psychological underpinnings and profiles of the 9-11 hijackers. Available evidence suggests that most of them came from backgrounds of relative comfort and were educated and savvy about the foreign environments in which they lived. Muhammad Atta, the leader, for example, was an urban planning specialist by training and came from a well-to-do Egyptian family. Almost all of them had higher university degrees, and all of them had a fervent dislike for the United States. However, these observations miss why some individuals who may be considered "failures" by Western standards become cosmic warriors and others do not. Moreover, it cannot be the case that all the Al-Qaeda recruits were failures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exploring Religious Conflict by Gregory F. Treverton Heather S. Gregg Daniel Gibran Charles W. Yost Copyright © 2005 by RAND Corporation. Excerpted by permission.
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