Introduction

It was especially against the increasing challenges coming from jihadism that many Western thinkers started to defend the modern separation between politics and religion by referring to the so-called European Religious Wars as a very dangerous threat in the past that was only overcome by the establishment of the secular nation state and its neutrality in regard to religion. In Eric O. Hanson’s book Religion and Politics in the International System Today we nd a good example how a reference to the European religious wars is used to distinguish between the West and the Islamic world: ‘e West chose secularism in response to religious war within the society. Islam did not have a irty Years War’.2 Similarly, Monica Duy To, an American international relations scholar, makes the point that ‘because Islam had no irty Years War, the Islamic world did not inherit the West’s now instinctive rejection of the idea that violence in the name of religion enhances one’s religious credibility […], and church and

1 Mark Juergensmeyer, e New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Cononts the Secular State (Berkeley, 1993); David C. Rapoport, ‘Some General Observations on Religion and Violence’, in Terrorism and Political Violence 3 (1991): 118-39; Je Haynes (ed.), Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Aica (London, 2010); Niels Kastfeld (ed.), Religion and Aican Civil Wars (London, 2005).