Terror in the Name of God

Article 83 Terror in the Name of God MARK JUERGENSMEYER Perhaps the first question that came to mind on Septem- struggle that every religion has within its repository of sym- ber 11 when the horrific images of the aerial assaults on the bols: the fight between good and bad, truth and evil. In this World Trade Center and the Pentagon were conveyed sense, the attack on the World Trade Center was very reli- around the world was: Why would anyone want to do such gious. It was meant to be catastrophic, an act of biblical a thing? As the twin towers crumbled in clouds of dust and proportions. the identities and motives of the perpetrators began to What is striking about the World Trade Center assault emerge, a second question arose: Why would anyone want and many other recent acts of religious terrorism is that they to do such a thing in the name of God? have no obvious military goal. These are acts meant for These are the questions that have arisen frequently in the television. They are a kind of perverse performance of post–cold war world. Religion seems to be connected with power meant to ennoble the perpetrators’ views of the violence everywhere—from the World Trade Center bomb- world and to draw us into their notions of cosmic war. ings to suicide attacks in Israel and the Palestinian Author- The recent attacks in New York City and Washington, ity; assassinations in India, Israel, Egypt, and Algeria; nerve D.C.—although unusual in the scale of the assault—are re- gas in Tokyo subways; unending battles in Northern Ire- markably similar to many other acts of religious terrorism land; abortion-clinic killings in Florida; and the bombing of around the world. In my recent comparative study of reli- Oklahoma City’s federal building. gious terrorism, Terror in the Mind of God, I have found a strikingly familiar pattern. In each case, concepts of cosmic war are accompanied by strong claims of moral justifica- Osama bin Laden is no more tion and an enduring absolutism that transforms worldly struggles into sacred battles. It is not so much that religion representative of Islam than Timothy has become politicized but that politics has become reli- McVeigh is of Christianity gionized. Worldly struggles have been lifted onto the high proscenium of sacred battle. This is what makes religious terrorism so difficult to com- What does religion have to do with this virtually global bat. Its enemies have become satanized: one cannot nego- rise of religious violence? In one sense, very little. If the ac- tiate with them or easily compromise. The rewards for tivists involved in the World Trade Center bombing are as- those who fight for the cause are transtemporal, and the sociated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, they are a small time lines of their struggles are vast. Most social and politi- network at the extreme end of a subculture of dissatisfied cal struggles look for conclusions within the lifetimes of Muslims who are in turn a small minority within the world their participants, but religious struggles can take genera- of Islam. Osama bin Laden is no more representative of Is- tions to succeed. When I pointed out to political leaders of lam than Timothy McVeigh is of Christianity, or Japan’s the Hamas movement in the Palestinian Authority that Is- Shoko Asahara is of Buddhism. rael’s military force was such that a Palestinian military ef- Still, one cannot deny that the ideals and ideas of these fort could never succeed, I was told that “Palestine was vicious activists are permeated with religion. The authority occupied before, for two hundred years.” The Hamas offi- of religion has given bin Laden’s cadres what they believe cial assured me that he and his Palestinian comrades “can is the moral standing to employ violence in their assault on wait again—at least that long,” for the struggles of God can the very symbol of global economic power. It has also pro- endure for eons. Ultimately, however, Hamas members vided the metaphor of cosmic war, an imagee of spiritual “knew” they would succeed. 1 Article 83. Terror in the Name of God In such battles, waged in divine time and with heaven’s Osama bin Laden—imagine themselves defenders of an- rewards, there is no need to compromise one’s goals. No cient faiths. But in fact they have created new forms of reli- need, also, to contend with society’s laws and limitations giosity: like many present-day religious leaders they have when one is obeying a higher authority. In spiritualizing vi- used the language of traditional religion to build bulwarks olence, religion gives terrorism a remarkable power. around aspects of modernity that have threatened them, Ironically, the reverse is also true: terrorism can give re- and to suggest ways out of the mindless humiliation of ligion power as well. Although sporadic acts of terrorism do modern life. Vital to their image of religion, however, was not lead to the establishment of new religious states, they that it be perceived as ancient. make the political potency of religious ideology impossible The need for religion—a “hard” religion as Abouhalima to ignore. Terrorism not only gives individuals the illusion called it—was a response to the soft treachery they had ob- of empowerment, it also gives religious organizations and served in the new societies around them. The modern sec- ideas a public attention and importance that they have not ular world that Abouhalima and the others inhabited was a enjoyed for many years. In modern America and Europe it chaotic and violent sea for which religion offered an an- has given religion a prominence in public life that it has not chor in a harbor of calm. At some deep and almost tran- held since before the Enlightenment over two centuries scendent level of their consciousnesses, they sensed their ago. lives slipping out of control, and they felt both responsible for the disarray and a victim of it. To be abandoned by re- EMPOWERING RELIGION ligion in such a world would mean a loss of their own indi- vidual locations and identities. In fashioning a “traditional The radical religious movements that have emerged religion” of their own making, they exposed their concerns from cultures of violence around the world have three ele- not so much with their religious, ethnic, or national com- ments in common. First, they reject the compromises with munities, but with their own personal, perilous selves. liberal values and secular institutions that most mainstream religion has made, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, SSAULTS ON SECULARISM Sikh, or Buddhist. Second, radical religious movements A refuse to observe the boundaries that secular society has set These intimate concerns have been prompted by the around religion—keeping it private rather than allowing it perceived failures of public institutions. As the French soci- to intrude into public spaces. And third, these radical ologists Pierre Bourdieu has observed, social structures movements try to create a new form of religiosity that re- never have a disembodied reality; they are always negoti- jects what they regard as weak, modern substitutes for the ated by individuals in their own strategies for maintaining more vibrant and demanding forms of religion that they self-identity and success in life. Such institutions are legiti- imagine to be essential to their religion’s origins. mized by the “symbolic capital” they accrue through the One of the men accused of bombing the World Trade collective trust of many individuals. When that symbolic Center in 1993 told me in a prison interview that the critical capital is devalued, when political and religious institutions moment in his religious life came when he realized that he undergo what German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has could not compromise his Islamic integrity with the easy called a “crisis of legitimacy,” the devaluation of authority vices offered by modern society. The convicted terrorist, is experienced not only as a political problem but as an in- Mahmud Abouhalima, claimed that the early part of his life tensively personal one, as a loss of agency. was spent running away from himself. Although involved in This sense of a personal loss of power in the face of cha- radical Egyptian Islamic movements since his college years otic political and religious authorities is common, and I be- in Alexandria, he felt there was no place where he could lieve critical, to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group and settle down. He told me that the low point came when he most other movements for Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, was in Germany, trying to live the way that he imagined Eu- Buddhist, and Hindu nationalism around the world. The ropeans and Americans did: a life where the superficial syndrome begins with the perception that the public world comforts of sex and inebriates masked an internal empti- has gone awry, and the suspicion that behind this social ness and despair. Abouhalima said his return to Islam as the confusion lies a great spiritual and moral conflict, a cosmic center of his life carried with it a renewed sense of obliga- battle between the forces of order and chaos, good and evil. tion to make Islamic society truly Islamic—to “struggle Such a conflict is understandably violent, a violence that is against oppression and injustice” wherever it existed. What often felt by the victimized activist as powerlessness, either was now constant, Abouhalima said, was his family and his individually or in association with others of his gender, faith. Islam was both a “rock and a pillar of mercy.” But it race, or ethnicity.

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