ABSTRACT
AS THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER SUGGESTS, RELIGIOUS TERRORISM, just like secular terrorism, has political ends. Secular terrorists are motivated by political ideologies (e.g., neo-Nazi groups by Hitler’s racist white supremacist views; leftwing groups like the Red Army Faction and Red Brigades of the past by Marxist ideas) or widely accepted principles, such as the right to self-determination or to equality. Religious terrorists are motivated by their strong desire to live according to their religion’s teachings and follow God’s will, but they also have political grievances and goals. Thus, whether they are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, members of other religions, or devoted to self-declared religious sects (e.g., the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo), extremists commit violence for both religious and political ends. Mark Sedgwick has pointed out,
Just as religious terrorism turns out to have important political elements, “secular” terrorism also has important religious elements. Many nationalists have spoken of their cause as “sacred,” and it is not hard to conceive of a leftist speaking of the cause of the opposed masses.” A Russian terrorist of the first wave [of terrorism] wrote of terrorism as “uniting the two sublimities of human nature, the martyr and the hero.”1
But although secular terrorists may invoke religious rhetoric and imagery, they are solidly grounded in worldly justifications. Religious or pseudoreligious terrorists share the belief that their deeds are what God wants them to do, even what God commands them to do. According to Magnus Ranstorp, “Despite having vastly different origins, doctrines, institutions, and practices, these religious extremists are united in their justification for employing sacred violence either in efforts to defend, extend or revenge their own communities or for millenarian or messianic reasons.”2
