Finally, one must determine the shift from nationalistic violence to fundamentalism, and use this to explain how fundamentalism has become the root of modern terroristic acts. To define terrorism is akin to attempting to define any human experience, if only in the fact that terrorism defines itself to each person differently.
If a hard and fast definition must be constructed, it should be simple and open to interpretation. We know the following: terrorist acts are violent or at least inherently dangerous , typically involve more than one target, and are perpetrated to initiate change whether societal, political, religious, or ideological.
Therefore, one may choose to define an incident as an act of terrorism if the violence or the threat of violence was used against more than one person in order to instigate change on a societal, political, religious, or ideological level.
Fundamentalism, however, is much easier to define. Though originally used to describe certain sects of Christianity, this strict adherence to theoretical doctrine has stretched to include all major world religions.
Whether through the original political split inside of Islam or the eventual Shiite-Sunni split that has led to numerous conflicts, Islam has been in almost constant turmoil since its appearance, with fundamentalism and radicalization inside of its doctrine becoming a mitigating factor in most of the terrorist acts completed within the 21 st century White, With these definitions in mind, examining the historical background of both terrorism and fundamentalism will provide a context in which to place the influence of religious terrorism on politics and society.
Eventually, nationalism became the main motivation behind acts of terrorism; however, a clear shift had already begun as religion came to the forefront of terroristic reasoning. As terrorist ideologies have become more religious, terroristic violence has become more indiscriminate and targets appear to be more geographically dispersed. Considering the shift that occurred, religious fundamentalism then came to been seen as an aggressive politicization of religion for the pursuit of nonreligious ends, being only a superficial form of terrorism or extremism; this definition fits more clearly with what fundamentalism has become in the late 20 th and early 21st centuries Tibi, When examining historical ties between terrorism and fundamentalism, one can look at the developed ideological and organizational requirements of modern fundamentalism from Emerson and Hartman , which closely resemble the process of radicalization and indoctrination of an individual into a terrorist organization described by White White describes the process of radicalization as involving an alienated young man, who upon meeting other alienated young men forms a group.
From there, the group gravitates towards religion, and attempt to outdo each other in their zeal for the cause. The religion then begins to be interpreted in militant terms- while most groups stop at this point, some continue development leading to a militant group that encounters a terrorist contact, and join the terrorists through a group decision White, Keeping in mind these ties of organization, the religio-political and socio-political discourses regarding fundamentalism and terrorism can now be examined.
Religio-Political and Socio-Political Discourse. First, one must note that while most think of Islam and politics as synonymous, terrorist attacks are driven by Islamic extremists and political Islam stands separate from that extremism, though they are just as disillusioned by with the Western World Ayoob, Specifically focusing on al Qaeda, some question the idea of the organization being fully religious, and instead define it as a violent political organization that attempts to hide behind Islam; while the doctrine of Islam is usually described as peaceful and tolerant by religious scholars, the basic mission of al Qaeda is to create a popular uprising that will destroy Western influence and reestablish the caliphate system Hart, , in White, After declaring war on the United States in , bin Laden had his religious council issue two religious fatwas in in order to validate his opposition of the Western world; since that time, al Qaeda has completed many terrorist attacks on the world stage, though its capabilities to do so have been slightly diminished Sageman, , in White, ; White, Additionally, though this argument is focused on rise of religious fundamentalism and its acceleration of terrorism, the possibility exists that religion might not be the primary cause of this acceleration.
In addition, economic and social tensions experienced by large numbers of people were not religious, and instead were issues of social identity and participation; however, these secular ideological expressions of rebellion were replaced by ideological formations that are religious Juergensmeyer, This replacement becomes evident through the shift from nationalism as the underpinnings of terrorism to religion as seen in modern times.
From Nationalism to Fundamentalism. This works to support the notion that nationalism has been replaced as the underpinnings of terrorism in recent times.
A possible cause, at least in the context of Islamic fundamentalism, could be that religious authority can provide a ready-made replacement for secular authority, so the attempt becomes to challenge the legitimacy of the secular authority and gain support on the basis of religion Juergensmeyer, This religiously motivated political shift works to further the goals of the terrorist extremists.
When looking at how fundamentalism has accelerated terrorism, one must consider the effect fundamentalism has had on modern day terrorism. From a more historical perspective, the most basic reason for terrorism is to gain recognition or attention- the theatricality of modern terrorist attacks exemplifies this Crenshaw, As the level of violence works to spread the publicity of the event, this direct combination working with religious motivation provides yet another reason why terrorism has been accelerated by fundamentalism.
Though this assumption may or may not be correct, there have been events that could be perceived in this light. Terrorist groups build new mythologies to justify their actions, and these most often include self-sacrifice or death, leading members to seek martyrdom and terror as their way of life and very existence becomes threatened by peace; this in itself could lead to increased violence, as the member committing the act of terror has no fear of repercussion from authorities Stern, Subsequently, religion brings new aspects to conflicts in several ways- by personalizing the conflict, rewarding those engaged transcendently or otherwise , lack of mobilization directed only at social or political issues, organizational networks, a sense of moral justification for political encounters, and a justification of violence that challenges the state Juergensmeyer By looking at the definitions and historical ties of fundamentalism and terrorism, exploring the religio-political and socio-political discourse relating to Islamic fundamentalism, and examining the shift from nationalistic terrorism to religious terrorism, one can better understand the reasoning presented to argue that fundamentalism has, in fact, accelerated terrorism in the modern world.
As the severity of attacks increase, scholars will continue to examine the why of the situation in order to understand the motive behind the violence and attempt to determine if any actions could intercept or stop the violence.
However, there will always be conflict, especially with religion; historically, religious conflict has experienced its share of rise and fall through the centuries, and our current time is no different. The focus, then, shifts from understanding why religious terrorism has escalated and accelerated terrorism to figuring out how to properly prepare and respond to such attacks, as well as develop ways to prevent such attacks.
Unfortunately, the reality of the situation stands to reason that there will be no end to the conflict and violence, nor terrorism itself. Many countries are still vastly underprepared to deal with a terrorist attack of even moderate destruction.
Preparation and response must be the focus of both scholars and governments alike; once the proper precautions are in place, prevention may become the focal point of research. About the author: Cassandra Rausch , MS is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Louisville, Kentucky who focuses on bringing interdisciplinary perspectives into the discipline, particularly anthropological methods. While her main areas of research are policing and death investigation, she also examines issues regarding genocide, terrorism, and mass disasters.
Through domestic and international conference presentations and journal publications, she hopes to enrich the literature regarding these topics and provide recommendations for new directions in the field. Ayoob, M.
Political Islam: Image and reality. World Policy Journal , 21 3 , Ben-dor, G. The uniqueness of Islamic fundamentalism and the fourth wave of international terrorism. Veinberg Eds. Bergensen, A. International terrorism and the world-system. Sociological Theory , 22 1 , Bhatia, A.
The discourses of terrorism. Journal of Pragmatics , 41, Crenshaw, M. The causes of terrorism. Comparative Politics , 13 4 , Emerson, M. This is true even in those instances where there are issues of religion regularly invoked by the leaders of the campaigns of violence, and used to motivate their followers. There were, of course, religious elements since it could hardly have been otherwise in seventeenth-century Europe where the Christian faith was an aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects.
The empire's hundreds of small territories were cash poor. To fight, they assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages and triggered a ruinous inflation. Unpaid armies could be neither supplied nor disbanded. They thus remained in the field, nourished on plunder. There are, and have been, all sorts of different religions with a great many different practices, ethical commitments and changes over the course of their histories.
It may well be that some religions, or some versions of the same religion, are prone to spur their adherents towards violence where other religions or other versions of the same religion have no such tendency. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by detailed historical and sociological attention to the evidence. This is obvious enough to casual observation of Muslim citizens in various parts of the world, but evidence of it is available in the results of surveys such as the findings of a Gallup poll.
This poll investigated attitudes towards attacks upon non-combatants in various groups across the world. A crucial point that underlies these four considerations is that a primary factor in many outbreaks of violence is attachment to identity, and alarm at perceived threats to it.
Religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment and alarm, but so do a great range of other things. Identity is closely related to power, self-respect and perceived cultural positioning, so that religion will often be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant identities by those who have or want power, or are in need of group-based support. The relations between the sexes provide a case in point.
The fashioning of a male identity with often-dominant roles over against females has been a feature of history to which religion has certainly contributed, but it seems to be even more diverse and deeper sociologically than any religious influence. It is worth noting that the major religions, in terms of numbers of adherents, and many less popular religions contain a great deal of teaching about the importance of values like peace and charity.
Peace is a complex concept with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages. Augustine, for instance, places it at the heart of his Christo-centric ethical system, along with love.
It is true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians, he thought it compatible with the idea of a just war in certain circumstances, though other Christians have thought that it required pacifism. Certainly, there is room for peace-makers and activists to build upon doctrines of peace within many religions.
It may be argued against much of the above discussion that whatever success I might have in attenuating the idea that religious allegiance is inherently, uniquely or even merely commonly prone to producing violence, I have done nothing to dispel the accusation that on occasion religion may be the cause or the principal cause of particular outbreaks of terrorist acts or other acts of unjustified violence.
Nor have I significantly damaged the claim that some specific forms or interpretations of religion may be inherently prone to violence. I want now to examine these propositions. But although we can often find that leaders of groups such as al-Qaeda cite as reasons for their campaigns alleged offences of a palpably political nature against groups or regions they identify with, it cannot be denied that they also employ strong religious rhetoric and appeals to religious interests in denouncing their enemies and exhorting their own followers.
This much I have already conceded, but the pressing question is whether such rhetoric, along with other considerations, means that, in those circumstances, religion is the cause or primary cause of such terrorist acts.
Usually, the X in question covers much more than one factor, or, to put it differently, if X is a single factor then it will seldom trigger Y without being conjoined with several other factors or conditions. So the possibility exists that, aside from those many cases where religion plays no role at all in producing terrorist acts, the religious factor when significant remains nonetheless merely one element conjoined with several others, and ignoring those others is fraught with risk, both intellectual and practical.
That said, there seem to be clearly cases in which religion has played a very prominent part in bringing about some significant episodes of terrorism, such as the various Christian crusades that were waged against parts of the Muslim world in the Middle Ages. The ISIS terrorist attacks upon the Yazidi sect, for instance, seem a primary case for religiously-caused terrorism. But even here, one must not thereby ignore secular aspects of the attacks such as the quest for political domination of an area, or the gaining of slaves, including sexual slaves.
Another important claim about religion in a good deal of academic literature on terrorism is that, even if it is often too simplistic to claim a sole or critical role for some forms of religion in terrorist activity, the appeal to religion when it does occur serves to make for more sustained and vicious resort to terrorism than is the case with predominantly non-religious motivations.
Mark Juergensmeyer , for instance, seeking a middle path between the view that religion does cause terrorism and the view that it does not, argues that religion is at least a problematic factor in the mix of motivations because of the divine dimension it brings to conflict.
As he puts it:. Religion brings more to conflict than simply a repository of symbols and the aura of divine support.
It problematizes a conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification for violence, and its ultimate images of warfare that demonize opponents and cast the conflict in transhistorical terms. The first concerns the role of absolutism; the second the justification of violence; and the third is the demonisation of opponents.
I shall examine them in turn, but with an eye to the relations between them. What is often meant, though seldom explained, is something epistemological to the effect that the religious hold their beliefs with more certainty and conviction than the non-religious, and that they are wrong to do so.
Depending on the beliefs in question, this is, or ought to be, plainly false. Many atheists and agnostics have just as firm a conviction, as any religious, in their beliefs that rape is a great wrong to the victim, that democracy is preferable to tyranny, that slavery is evil, that friendship is a great good and much else — including, for some, that religion is dangerous and full of false beliefs.
And, as the philosopher G. Moore famously argued , there are a range of obvious truths evident, as he believed, to common sense on which nearly everyone is adamant, such as the facts that all my readers have each one, and only one, head, that none of us was born yesterday, that fire burns, that logical reasoning is mostly better than guesswork and so on.
These and many moral convictions are too commonplace to require much notice, but nonetheless, they are facts on which absolute conviction is necessary to ordinary life, and even more significantly to the very existence of reasonable doubt, since for doubt to be reasonable it must have a firm foundation. Baseless doubt is just neurotic. The influence of crude versions of ethical and factual relativism upon popular culture, often fostered by some postmodernist simplicities filtering down from the academy, can obscure these realities.
What is really possible to extract from the sloppy allegations of absolutism is a genuine worry about fanaticism. Fanaticism is an intellectual and moral vice, though there is some complexity in assessing its nature. It can be a mere term of abuse, the application of which tends to be more in the eye of the beholder than anchored to clear criteria.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Nonetheless, although we should be cautious in throwing the term around, there is a real phenomenon of fanaticism and it is a disturbing one. Is someone who shows uncommon enthusiasm for abolishing the practice of enslaving women for prostitution a fanatic? Unusual acts of singular dedication may make many of us who lead cosy and regular lives feel uncomfortable, but they are not thereby fanatical in this pejorative sense. British politicians thought Mahatma Gandhi a fanatic for his campaign of non-violent resistance to imperial rule in India, but that expresses their bias rather than an objective judgement of his cause and methods.
This is not to deny that religions, like many other outlooks, have been involved in fanaticism, but fanaticism is a common risk of the implementation of belief systems generally, as is evident in the zealous prosecution of their cause by many free-market enthusiasts in the recent history of capitalism, not to mention the even more dangerous fanaticisms sometimes involved in nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Some forms of fanaticism do not involve bad causes, but rather a distorted pursuit of good ones and here they are connected in complex ways with the phenomenon of moralism I have explored elsewhere — in particular, what I have labelled the moralism of misplaced emphasis. So, it may be that someone has grasped an important moral truth or non-moral value but proceeds to implement it with little or no regard for other truths or values that should be held in balance with it. Someone who is fanatical about physical fitness, for instance, may institute a regime of exercise for themselves, or more alarmingly for others, that pays no heed to such values as relaxation, convivial time spent with friends, or education.
Avoiding fanaticism does not involve a total retreat from conviction but holding the right convictions in the right way. Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise it is more akin to a sewer, taking in all things equally. But surely, it will be said, fanaticism is a more likely feature of outlooks that claim the authority of God for their beliefs and practices than those without such recourse?
Juergensmeyer relies upon this proposition for his claim about absolutism, but also for his insistence that religion uniquely imposes an image of cosmic war between those fighting a spiritual battle against mere worldly opponents. Even Louise Richardson , who is one of the more nuanced commentators on terrorism, and who argues that the picture of religion as the cause of terrorist acts is simplistic and mistaken — including the case of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism — nonetheless insists that the religious elements in some forms of terrorism produce certain distinctive features such as reluctance to compromise or negotiate.
So if people wrongly think God wants them to pursue some evil path they may do so with determined energy. But two considerations somewhat soften the force of this argument. First, utilising God in an unworthy cause is a form of blasphemy which should be condemned on religious grounds.
From within Christianity, to take one example, there is plenty of scope to caution against the invocation of God on behalf of our determined pursuit of objectives that cause unjustified harm to others. And indeed, this has often enough happened in the history of Christianity, as with the denunciations by many courageous Spanish theologians of the conquistadors who pillaged in the newly discovered Americas in the sixteenth century and of the theological reasons often used by the invaders and their political sponsors for the violent conquest.
The invaders claimed a right to violent conquests because the natives they sought to dispossess and plunder were pagans and hence had no political legitimacy to their land and its treasures.
0コメント