ABSTRACT
What does religion have to do with the virtually global rise of religious violence? In one sense, very little. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida network, for example, is a small group at the extreme end of a subculture of dissatisfied Muslims who are in turn a small minority within the world of Islam. Osama bin Laden is no more representative of Islam than Timothy McVeigh is of Christianity, or Japan’s Shoko Asahara is of Buddhism. Still, it cannot be denied that the ideals and ideas of these activists are
permeated by religion. The authority of religion has granted bin Laden’s cadres moral legitimacy in their use of violence to assault the symbol of global economic power. It has also provided the metaphor of cosmic war, an image of spiritual struggle that every religion has within its repository of symbols-the conflict between good and evil, truth and falsehood. In was in this sense, then, that the attack on the World Trade Center was religious. It was meant to be catastrophic, an act of scriptural proportions. What is striking about the World Trade Center assault and many other recent
acts of religious terrorism is that they had no obvious military goal. These are acts meant for television. They are a kind of perverse performance of power meant to ennoble the perpetrators’ view of the world and to draw us in to their notion of cosmic war. The attacks in New York and Washington, DC, although unusual in scale, are
remarkably similar to many other acts of religious terrorism around the world. In all of these cases, concepts of cosmic war are accompanied by strong claims of moral justification and an enduring absolutism that transforms worldly struggles into sacred battles. It is not so much that religion has become politicized: rather, politics have become ‘religionized’. Worldly struggles have been lifted into the high proscenium of sacred battle. This is what makes religious terrorism so difficult to combat. Its enemies have
become ‘satanized’ and cannot easily be negotiated or compromised with. The rewards for those who fight for the cause are transtemporal, and the time lines of their struggles are vast. Most social and political struggles seek conclusions within the lifetimes of their participants, but religious struggles can take generations to succeed. It was once put to Dr Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, the political head and successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as leader of the Hamas movement in Palestine, that Israel’s military force was such that a Palestinian military effort could never succeed. ‘Palestine was occupied before, for two hundred years’, Rantisi replied. He went on to explain that he and his Palestinian comrades could
‘wait again-at least that long’, for the struggles of God can endure for eons. Ultimately, however, they knew that they would succeed. In such battles, waged in divine time and with heaven’s rewards, there is no
need to compromise one’s goals. No need, either, to contend with society’s laws and limitations when one is obeying a higher authority. In spiritualizing violence, therefore, religion gives terrorism a remarkable power. Ironically, the reverse is also true: terrorism can give religion power as well.
Although sporadic acts of terrorism do not lead to the establishment of new religious states, they make the political potency of religious ideology impossible to ignore. Terrorism not only gives individuals the illusion of empowerment, it also gives religious organizations and ideas a public attention and importance that they have not enjoyed for many years. In modern America and Europe, it has given religion a prominence in public life that it has not held since before the Enlightenment more than two centuries ago.
