ABSTRACT
The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the brief reign of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the Middle East, the appearance of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, attacks by Buddhist extremists on minorities in Myanmar and Sri Lanka – these and many other acts of violence related to religion give the impression that the twenty-first century is the age of religious terrorism. Similar acts have appeared through the centuries and in every religious tradition, though have been seen with increasing frequency in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. In the recent rise of terrorism and other forms of violence associated with religious nationalism, the forces of globalization are critical. These forces undermine the worldwide supremacy of the idea of the secular nation-state and the notion of secular nationalism as its ideological basis, and offer religious nationalism and transnational politics as alternatives. Thus, acts of religious terrorism have to be seen in context as part of the larger pattern of the rise of religious nationalism and transnationalism in a postmodern global world.
