RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE

Abstract

In his book, Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer writes: 'Perhaps the first question that came to mind when televisions around the world displayed the extraordinary aerial assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th 2001, was why anyone would do such a thing. When it became clear that the perpetrators' motivations were couched in religious terms, the shock turned to anger. How could religion be related to such vicious acts?' 1 That question'How could (or can) religion be related to vicious acts and indeed to acts of terrorism?' is the question I want to address in this essay. More precisely, the essay is motivated by my puzzlement that so few of the many people who have written on this topic in recent years that is, in the years since 9/11 and 7 n take seriously the possibility that when terrorists say they are acting for religious reasons, they mean exactly that. There is, it seems to me, deep resistance to, or neglect of, this possibility in the modern literature on terrorism, and I think that that fact is significant both for our understanding of recent terrorist attacks on western liberal societies and for our understanding of the values of liberalism itself. In short, my hunch is that modern liberals do not have an accurate understanding of religiously motivated acts of violence and that that very fact makes them (us) more vulnerable to religiously motivated terrorist attacks. To make the problem slightly more vivid, let me begin with two recent, and very influential, discussions of terrorism. In his book, The Lesser Evil, Michael Ignatieff discusses religiously-motivated terrorism under the general heading 'The Temptations of Nihilism', and he suggests that where terrorists attempt to justify their actions by reference to religion, they are 'hi-jacking' scriptural tradition. He writes 'The devil can always quote scripture to his use, and there is never a shortage in any faith of texts justifying the use of force. Equally, all religions contain sacred texts urging believers to treat human beings decently