violence as worship VIOLENCE AS WORSHIP Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization Hans G. Kippenberg Translated by Brian McNeil stanford university press stanford, california Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Violence as Worship was originally published in German under the title Gewalt als Gottesdienst. Religionskriege im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. © Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich 2008. The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kippenberg, Hans G. (Hans Gerhard) [Gewalt als Gottesdienst. English] Violence as worship : religious wars in the age of globalization / Hans G. Kippenberg ; translated by Brian McNeil. p. cm. “Originally published in German under the title Gewalt als Gottesdienst.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8047-6872-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-6873-3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Violence—Religious aspects—Islam. 2. Violence—Religious aspects— Christianity. 3. Violence—Religious aspects—Judaism. 4. War—Religious aspects—Islam. 5. War—Religious aspects—Christianity. 6. War—Religious aspects—Judaism. 7. Globalization—Religious aspects. I. McNeil, Brian. II. Title. BL65.V55K5613 2010 201'.7273—dc22 2010018099 Contents Preface vii 1 Introduction: Violence as Communal Religious Action 1 2 The Growth of Religious Communities in the Age of Globalization 19 3 Conflicts with Alternative Religious Communities in the United States in 1978 and 1993 40 4 Every Day ‘Ashura, Every Tomb Karbalā: Iran, 1977–1981 56 5 “The Party of God” Intervenes in the War: Lebanon, 1975–2000 76 6 Israel’s Wars of Redemption 94 7 Fighting for Palestine as Waqf 117 8 American Evangelicals Prepare the Eschatological Battlefield in Palestine 141 9 September 11, 2001: A Raid on the Path of God 158 10 The U.S. War on Terror: War Without Limits or Borders 182 11 Concluding Remarks: Wars of Religion in the Age of Globalization 197 Notes 213 Select Bibliography 245 Preface This book seeks to establish a new paradigm for research in a field that is both highly relevant and much disputed. More than half of all Ger- mans incline, for example, to the view that religions generate conflicts and are therefore intolerant. This opinion is confirmed by a flood of publica- tions that link monotheism with intolerance. On the other hand, we find the no-less-justified view that none of the world religions can allow itself systematically to issue a summons to violence, and that the main tone sounded by all religions is nonviolence. Against the background of this dispute, the present book offers a close examination of some cases that point to a close connection between religion and violence. The examina- tion of eight cases will show which traditions from the ample stock of reli- gious lore have been chosen to justify violence, and in what situations this has occurred. These cases are well known from the newspapers and televi- sion; but the reports often omit any reference to genuine religion, or else they conceal this under a different vocabulary. Unlike such presentations in the media, the research in this book plunges into a deep religious cur- rent of contemporary politics. It would have been impossible to carry out this comprehensive pro- gram without dialogue with my academic colleagues, and my position as a Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies afforded excellent opportunities for this. First of all, I should like to thank the doctoral and postdoctoral students and the Fellows: their competence in the disciplines of jurisprudence, history, philosophy, economics, and so- ciology has influenced my project in ways that I can no longer reconstruct. Without their suggestions and criticisms, I could not have developed the conceptual and methodological instruments that I have employed in the investigation of this subject. The stimulating climate created at the center by Dean Hans Joas was ideal for my work. I should also like to thank Ur- Preface sula Birtel-Koltes and the staff at the University Library in Erfurt, who got hold of books that were hard to find. Mrs. Birtel-Koltes has also helped with the work of text processing. It was originally agreed that the German publisher would receive the manuscript of this book in 2003, but my research took longer than anticipated. The subject matter presented itself in shifting forms and with an ever-new vitality that resisted attempts to “tame” it academically. Nev- ertheless, Ernst-Peter Wieckenberg and Ulrich Nolte never lost interest in this project, and they have accompanied its realization at various phases with helpful suggestions. The eight cases I have investigated have involved wide reading over a period of many years. Since I am not equally at home in every field, I have asked colleagues with proven academic qualifications to read through what I have written. Manfred Brocker read the chapter on American Prot- estantism, Ulrike Brunotte the introductory section, Alexander Flores my remarks about the Palestinians, Kurt Greussing the section on Iran, Stephan Rosiny the chapter about the Shi‘ites in Lebanon, and Zwi Wer- blowsky in Jerusalem the section on Israel. I wish to express my profound gratitude to them all; naturally, any mistakes remain my own. I have delivered parts of this book as lectures on various occasions: at academic meetings in Erfurt and Augsburg, at the Evangelical Academies in Loccum and Bonn-Bad Godesberg, at the Ecumenical Church Con- gress in Berlin in 2003, at the Catholic Church Congress in Saarbrücken in 2005, and in a research group of the FEST. I also spoke at a seminar in Dhaka in Bangladesh, where my remarks about the Islamic justification for 9/11 provoked such a storm of indignation in the press—“Arrest Profes- sor Hans!”—that the German embassy was afraid that I might not make it safely out of the country. Patrick Wöhrle, a doctoral student at the Max Weber Center, helped me with the final version of the German book. Except where otherwise mentioned, all translations from German texts in the present book are by Brian McNeil. chapter 1 Introduction: Violence as Communal Religious Action The intellectual, political, and military response of Western coun- tries to the attacks of September 11, 2001, displayed a helplessness that itself conjures up new dangers. Let me mention only one example. On Septem- ber 15, 2001, the auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Hamburg, Hans- Jochen Jaschke, expressed his indignation that the group responsible for the attacks had invoked God: “Thereby they dishonor the holy name of God. They misuse it for their perverse state of mind. We must not al- low criminals to justify their actions in the name of God, to issue a sum- mons to a holy war, and to promise a reward from God to those whom they have blinded. For God’s sake, NO!” What we must do now, the title of Jaschke’s newspaper article declares, is to raise on high God’s holy name: “In view of 9/11, I believe that the emergency situation exists in which ap- propriate, limited, legitimized violence may be used. It can create the pre- conditions for a rational unity among human beings. A worldwide civili- zation of love is possible only when it is not threatened by terror.”1 Today, we know that the military salvaging of God’s honor did not create the preconditions for love, but merely added further impetus to the escalation of violence. It is therefore high time to examine the efficacy of the therapy applied and to offer a new diagnosis of the phenomenon of contemporary religious violence. 2 Introduction Ought We Seek to Understand Religious Violence? Academic disciplines are kept on their toes by unexpected leaps on the part of the objects they investigate. Scholars of religion have been sur- prised in this way by occurrences of religious violence. In 1978, when the conflict between an American faith community and the U.S. authorities in Jonestown, Guyana, ended with the murder of an American congressman and members of his entourage and the subsequent mass suicide of the com- munity, scholars of religion were confronted by a phenomenon for which they were not prepared—and this was only the beginning. Since then, reli- gious violence has broken out in many different places in the world: other cult wars in the United States, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the civil war in Lebanon, the transformation of the Middle East conflict from one between states to one between faith communities, the attacks on the United States by jihadists on September 11, 2001, and the “War on Terror.” All these are studied in the present book. One could easily extend the list of cases (to in- clude, for instance, the Serb wars against Muslims in Bosnia and in Kosovo, the Hindu riot in Ayodhya that led to the destruction of the Babri Mosque, or the conflict in Chechnya). However, I limit myself to the eight cases mentioned here, because a close analysis of a few select instances increases our chances of developing an ideal model for other cases as well. This also makes it possible to look more precisely at each individual arena of violence, at the actors involved, and at the sequence of events.