Paper Abstracts

(abstracts will be posted as soon as they are available)

The Divided Mind, Religion, and Democractic Culture
Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

This lecture will give a genealogical diagnosis of a certain form of disenchantment within which to understand a certain kind of conservative religiosity and then give an account of it's implications for our democratic culture.

Jihadi Networks of Cyber-Authority
Gary R. Bunt, University of Wales-Lampeter

A broad spectrum of Islamic hyper textual approaches and understandings can be located in cyberspace, created by Muslims seeking to present dimensions of their religious, spiritual and/or political lives online. This paper highlights how certain perspectives associated with jihadi-oriented groups generate strategic and ideological content (including audio visual materials) via the web. The explicit appearance of jihadi activities in cyberspace represents an intersection or interface between virtual and real conflict.  This has taken many forms, the most prominent being the application of internet technology by 'al-Qaeda' and affiliates.  Varied jihadi applications of the internet utilised in the name of Islam may combine websites, multimedia, chat rooms, email listings, and/or various degrees of interactivity. They can create online notions of Muslim identity and authority that echo similar notions in the ‘real world’ – but they can also nurture new networks of understandings in cyberspace, themes that are explored within this paper. As jihadi site developers utilized the latest Web 2.0 software applications, their activities highlighted the symbiotic relationship between hardware/software developers and jihadi activists. A variety of examples will illustrate how jihadi networks of cyber-authority have interacted and evolved, drawing upon concepts associated with notions of religious justification for their activities, and demonstrating the central role of the internet as a strategic and ideological tool.

Ideologies and Practices of Buddhist Extremism
Bradley S. Clough, The American University in Cairo

To begin our investigation, it would be appropriate to define what we mean by religious extremism. To my mind religious extremism must involve some form of harm to the other, such as be preventing another from living his or her chosen way of life, committing acts of violence against another, or trying to forcibly convert another to one’s religion. Furthermore, that which directly inspired a person to commit an act of harm must be any ideology that comes from an identifiably religious source, such as contents from a sacred text or the teachings of a religious leader. By this definition, one group that I will mention in this chapter, Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are extremists, because of their violent terrorist activities but they are not religious extremists, because they do not justify their violence based on the teachings from any religious text or figure. By contrast, another Sri Lankan movement that will be focused on in this chapter, that of Sinhala Buddhist nationalists, have many groups that have justified oppressive or violent activities based on ideological concepts taken from revered texts of their religion.

In this chapter I will present two case studies of religious extremism in Buddhism, in the hopes that we can derive some larger conclusions about the nature of religious extremism. The first case is that of the aforementioned Sinhala Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, many of whom have led movements to take oppressive and sometimes violent  measures against the country’s Tamil Hindu and Muslim population. These measures have been inspired by ideas about who Sinhala Buddhists and Tamils are, ideas that are taken from the mytho-historical chronicle tradition of Sinhala Buddhism and influential Buddhist leaders such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala, and the mid-twentieth century figure, Walpola Rahula, a leader of Sri Lanka’s so-called “political monks.” The second case is of a movement within the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist tradition known as the Soka Gakkai, which for a part of its history used rather ruthless tactics in their efforts to convert others to their religion.  Members of this religion took their inspiration from a major Mahayana Buddhist scripture, the Lotus Sutra, writings from the radical thirteenth century reformer, Nichiren Daishonin, and instructions from mid-twentieth century leaders of their religion.

It should be noted at the outset that throughout their histories, Buddhists have very rarely formulated ideologies or carried out acts of religious extremism. Nevertheless, our two case studies are instructive to us about the causes of religious extremism.

Irony and Ideology in Islamic Extremism: Pseudo-Repetition, Mimesis and the Cosmic Shari’a in Sayyid Qutb’s Ma’alim fi al-Tariq
Vincent J. Cornell, Emory University

In his 1962 book Introduction to Modernity, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) observed that the greatest irony of the success of Marxism as a system of thought was that a radical critique that was meant to prepare the way for the end of ideology, transformed itself into an ideology that was saturated with religiosity.  Conversely, as Marxist ideology became quasi-religious, religion itself became less spiritual and more political.  “If Marxism has compromised itself by becoming a pseudo-religious ideology,” said Lefebvre, “religion has compromised itself by becoming a political ideology and a pseudo-religion as well.”  Lefebvre called this ironic process, which he saw as a hallmark of modernity, pseudo-repetition.  To a certain extent, this notion can be seen as a Marxist critique of René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire.  Both concepts are important to the study of religious extremism because they provide a theoretical framework for the study of ironic parallelisms in extremist doctrines.  In Lefebvre’s model of pseudo-repetition, the radical critique of one tradition by another causes ideologies not only to ransack the past of their own tradition to find answers to these challenges, but also to ransack other traditions for tropes and metaphors that can be used in the construction of new models of identity.

This paper will explore examples of pseudo-repetition and mimesis in Sayyid Qutb’s (d. 1966) now classic Islamist manifesto, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Signs along the Road).  The totalitarian vision of this work depends on the notion of the Cosmic Shari’a, in which Qutb equates the Islamic Shari’a with the Law of Nature and the Law of the Universe.  For Qutb, allegiance to the Shari’a is more important even than allegiance to the religion of Islam.  The Cosmic Shari’a is the foundational premise for the Islamic System (al-nizam al-Islami), which provides the structure for a just society.  The irony of this notion is that it seems to be based on two historical antecedents that lie outside of Islamism’s epistemological realm of Truth.  The first antecedent is St. Augustine’s City of God, written in the 4th century CE, in which God’s Cosmic Law is the connection between the City of God and the City of Man under Christian rule.  The second antecedent can be found in the Epistles (Rasa’il) of the Brethren of Purity, a 10th-century CE secret society of likely Ismaili origin that was influenced by Neo-Platonic philosophy.  Whereas the Cosmic Law of Augustine’s City of God may merely be an antecedent to Qutb’s notion of the Cosmic Shari’a, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity appears to provide a true precedent for Qutb’s ideological construct.  In the Epistles, the Divine Shari’a (al-Shari’a al-Ilahiyya) is the basis of a universal and all-comprehensive system (manhaj), which provides the foundation for a utopian society called the Spiritual City (madina ruhaniyya).  This terminology is strongly reminiscent of the terminology used by Sayyid Qutb in Ma’alim fi al-Tariq.  Also in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, the Spiritual City is governed by the Establisher of the Law (wadi’ al-shari’a), who interprets the Divine Shari’a and the legislative decisions of the Prophets and Imams.  Qutb’s portrayal of his own career is strikingly similar to the career path laid out in the Epistles for the Establisher of the Law.  The paper will conclude with a discussion of the importance of the pseudo-repetition of Platonic models in the construction of totalitarian religious ideologies in Islam.

The General Will, Charisma, Prophecy and the Politics of the Avant-Garde: Yehuda Etzion and the Theology of the Jewish Settler's Underground
Shlomo Fischer, Tel Aviv University

In this lecture, I argue that radical religious Zionism, the religious stream which  initiated and led the settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza in the years 1968-2005 and especially its revolutionary violent wing has a modernist character. This position is in contrast to much contemporary scholarship on contemporary resurgent and political religion which regards these movements as "fundamentalist," that is concerned with the defense of traditional religion against the onslaught of secular modernity.

I will build my argument in several stages. First, the overall patterned configuration of radical religious Zionist thought is, using Charles Taylor's term, "expressivist." That is, it resembles the pattern characteristic of the thought of European Romantic and Idealist thinkers of the early nineteenth century. Secondly, in accordance with this, its central theological-political ideas are 1) the Rousseauvian idea of the general will and 2) the Hegelian idea of the divine state.

Since the end of the 1970's, the policy of the state of Israel has  been to reach peace agreements with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states which involve withdrawal from the Greater Land of Israel. Among the radical religious Zionists this engendered a modern politics of the general will, in the center of which was the question "Does the general will refer to the empirical will of the people at a given time or does it refer to an objective truth which is the "real" inner will of the people?" Such a question, of course, was at the center of politics in the French revolution and in subsequent revolutionary movements.

The latter part of the paper focuses upon the extreme revolutionary wing of radical religious Zionism which crystallized in the attempt to blow up The Dome of the Rock on Haram el-Sharif (Temple Mount) in the early 1980's. One of the leading thinkers of this wing was Yehuda Etzion. He elaborated an avant-gardist politics in which a revolutionary elite possesses the general will due to its engagé activism. In formulating this ideology, Etzion combined expressivist religious Zionist ideology with the Weberian and Nietzschian ideas of charisma. Eztion had extensive personal and intellectual contact with the Jewish pre-state anti-colonial revolutionary movement LeHi, which had connections with European fascism and Leninsm. Thus in the heart of an extremist violent religious ideology we find some of the most central ideas of the modern European political tradition.

Modernity, Religion, and Extremism in the 21st Century
Bruce M. Knauft, Emory University

In recorded human history, the deadliest wars and man-made disasters have most frequently been associated with political rivalry or secular fanaticism rather than with religious extremism.  This general pattern intensified during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.  As nation-states became increasingly independent of religious rationale and organization, the death toll of major wars increased.  But the proportion of deaths associated with conflict that was primarily religious declined.  This general pattern informs current disparities in killing rates in those cases where religiously motivated violence is evident.  On September 11, 2001, less than 3,000 Americans died in jihadist suicide attacks.  By contrast, during the first three years of American military action, between 151,000 and 601,000 Iraqis were killed in the Iraq War.  Approximately 12,000 Afghanis have died in the Afghanistan war since 2003.  Combined, these death tolls are between 59 and 223 times larger than the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

The asymmetry of this pattern is related to a greater overall emphasis on religious extremism in the world during the past 35 years. This development can be understood against preceding trends.  During the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th century, commitment to secular modern progress increased under the banner of instrumental and rational improvement, especially as associated with scientific, technological, and national development.  Classic social theorists of late 19th and early 20th century such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, and their contemporaries, placed little stock in the continuing importance of religion. 

During the closing decades of the 20th century, however, religion began to gain greater political influence in several world areas, including the U.S., the Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America.  In selected parts of western, southern, and southeast Asia, the violence of nationalism, on one hand, and that of religious rebellion or revolution, on the other, have reinforced each other.  Since the turn of the 21st century, the U.S., as the world’s reigning military power, has become increasingly involved in these patterns of escalation.

This trajectory and their relation to modernity refract differently in different world religions, including in the U.S.  Among Abrahamic religious traditions, fundamentalist Christianity is reacting defensively in developed countries in an attempt to retain, preserve, and protect a threatened sense of pre-eminent modern morality.  By contrast, religious intensification in developing countries -- “southern” Christianity, ala Philip Jenkins -- attempts and aspires to assert modernity in the first place.  Islamic traditions, which have long claimed enlightenment and civilization, are especially concerned to revalidate their historical claims to being enlightened and modern. 

The spread and demographic growth of world relations suggest that both Islamic and “southern” Christian traditions will grow substantially in number of adherents during the 21st century -- and that they will compete with each other in fundamentalism, if not in extremism.  By contrast, Judaism, the third Abrahamic strand, is not likely to spread in global numbers or geographic concentration.  Given histories of anti-semitism across diverse world areas and in the contemporary Middle East, Orthodox Judaism is presently concerned to survive and maintain its modern viability -- notwithstanding the military dominance of Israel in its regional context. 

Violence associated with religious extremism, whether by Jews, Muslims, or Christians, is strongly influenced by political goals, objectives, and disparities of power.  In a range of world areas, including poor parts of the Middle East such as the West Bank and Gaza, promises of modern progress seem increasingly unrealistic and unattainable.  In this context, religious extremism offers a distinct ability to resist political domination or occupation, assert social honor, and validate a direct relationship with God.  

The relation of religious extremism to state-sponsored warfare, occupation, and killing is crucial to the ideological and political as well as religious dimensions of extremism. If extremist violence is to be reduced, this key relationship needs to be better understood.  To view war, occupation, religious extremism, and terrorism in isolation from one another, or to view extremism as narrowly religious apart from political domination and resistance, could be to fuel the seeds of their unfortunate escalation.

Is Suicide Bombing Inherently Evil?
Bruce Lawrence, Duke University

This paper is a meditation on, but also an expansion, and in part, a correction of, Baudrillard’s manifesto, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). For Baudrillard, not all suicide bombing is the same. The Palestinians are doomed to failure because theirs is “a useless sacrifice”, i.e., it does not terrorize its intended or actual victims, but rather results in their loss of life (as well as, of course, destruction of homes by Israelis in a counter response). What makes 9/11 suicide bombers so effective is their introduction of a new calculus of life vs. death and it is this calculus that excites Baudrillard. “Calling them ‘suicidal’ and ‘martyrs’ and therefore deeming their deaths to be inconsequential, of no lasting value”.., he observes, is a risky argument. It can be reversed, for “if the voluntary martyrdom of the suicide bombers proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims of the attack proves nothing either.” The crucial calculus, for Baudrillard, is the power of the image to merge with reality and to transform violence into a new value, one unimaginable, literally, before the Information Age. Above all, the terrorist violence of suicide bombing that produced 9/11 underscores the power of symbolic violence. “Only symbolic violence is generative of singularity,” argues Baudrillard. “And in this singular event, in this Manhattan disaster movie, the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism; the white light of the image and the black light of terrorism”.

Common Discourses of Islamic and Euro-American Extremism
George Michael, University of Virginia at Wise

This essay examines the cross-fertilization between radical Islamic and extreme right movements.  Although seemingly disparate, the two movements share several common characteristics.  For example, both have developed very similar critiques concerning American foreign policy in the Middle East, the American news media, the Palestinian issue, and globalization.  Furthermore, the endemic anti-Semitism of the extreme right in some ways parallels the anti-Zionism of militant Islam.  Although a significant operational alliance between the two movements has yet to be established, in the realm of propaganda there is potential for collaboration, most notably with so-called Holocaust revisionism.  Emblematic of this trend is the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has emerged as the one of the Middle East's most vociferous critic of Israel and the United States in large part through his comments on the Nazi Holocaust.  By linking the legacy of the Holocaust with the Palestinian issue, he has positioned himself as a focal Muslim leader that transcends the largely Persian and Shia nation of Iran.  Furthermore, his comments have endeared him to Holocaust deniers and right-wing extremists in the West, who have offered him rhetorical support.

How the Talmud Tamed the Bible Regarding Violence
David Novak, University of Toronto

There are several passages in the Torah that seem to mandate violent acts towards others. The two most prominent examples of such mandated violence are: (1) “Wound for wound, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; as one has maimed his fellow so shall he be maimed” (Lev. 24:20); (2) “Only from the cities of the peoples which the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall not let anybody live” (Deut. 20:16). Both of these laws seem to be unjust by mandating unjustifiable violence to another person. In the first case, how can one possibly rectify what might have been an accident by such gruesome mutilation? In the second case, how can one possibly justify the killing of innocent people for no other crime than being born into a particular people, i.e., for something they did not do?

The ancient Rabbis were certainly aware of the moral dilemma presented by these two laws. In the first case, they argued that monetary compensation is what the Torah is actually mandating, and the seeming mandate for mutilation is only a figure of speech. In the second case, they argued that the law was only a warning to the Canaanite nations were they not to accept peace terms from the Israelite invaders, and were they not to accept what Judaism considers to be universal moral law.

The philosophical questions raised by the rabbinic reinterpretation of these two morally troubling laws are: Did the Rabbis radically change the prima facie meaning of the biblical text? If so, did they do this by employing an external criterion of justice? But wouldn’t this admission undermine the moral authority of biblical revelation?

This paper will deal with these three questions. It will argue that these reinterpretations are examples of how the Rabbis resolved internal contradictions within the biblical text. Here the contradiction is between the general commands to administer law justly, which presupposes that one can only do that within a normative system that is itself inherently just, and specific norms that seem to mandate injustice. By resolving the logical problems raised by the three questions above (as best they could) by internal criteria, the Rabbis saved the moral authority of biblical revelation. Indeed, it could be said they did so in the same way Abraham saved the moral authority of God when he asked: “Shall the judge of all the earth not himself do justice?” (Gen. 18:25)

Postcolonial Ideologies of Sanskrit and Religious Extremism among Women: Some Portraits
Laurie L. Patton, Emory University

This paper will use a data base of 91 interviews with women Sanskritists over the course of the years 2000-2007, to explore the dimensions of religious extremism. With the liberalization of the Indian economy, the majority of Brahmin men, the traditional guardians of the language, have pursued into technology, medicine, and science in their career options. As a result, Hindu women have increasingly become, and have seen themselves as, caretakers of the Sanskritic tradition.
 
I will make several arguments: first, it is important to dispel the stereotype, prevalent within Western academia, that all women who take up Sanskrit must be Hindu “fundamentalists.” In fact, only a very small number of the women interviewed are committed extremists who belong to the Sangh Parivar, the VHP, or the RSS.

Within that group, however, there are some fascinating dimensions of women scholars who support extremist causes. First, there is a sense that the Sanskrit tradition offers a kind of “existential totality” within which to view the larger fight for Hindu identity. Second, there is a sense that Sanskrit literature and culture is uniform and singular, and in its singularity, uniquely salvational.  Third, Sanskrit language needs to be integrated into daily domestic life as a language that transcends all other languages, and a language which can remind Hindus in India of the ancient female archetypes which should inspire them. Fourth, and perhaps most remarkably, there is the use of Sanskrit to battle the influence of “the Western woman” who might replace the traditional strengths of “the Hindu woman.”  In my study, the “Western woman” was often referred to as Sonia Gandhi, or someone like her.

This data has unique theoretical implications: it suggests something I have come to call “linguistic extremism” -- a sense that one’s language must become as pure and “unsullied” as one’s religion and politics. It understands language not simply as a nationalist attribute or adornment, but as a means by which one can achieve one’s political ends.  In addition, such linguistic extremism, like the other extremisms it accompanies, is usually in sympathy with the liberalized economy, and not opposed to it, as earlier theories have suggested.

Judeo-Christian Roots of Islamic Martyrdom Discourses
David Powers, Cornell University

When the Islamic martyrdom discourse emerged in the 7th and 8th centuries CE, its Judeo-Christian counterparts were fully developed even if they had not yet reached their final form. The Muslims who developed the Islamic understanding of martyrdom produced what is arguably a variant of the earlier discourses. The Islamic doctrine and its accompanying narratives are simultaneously connected to and distinct from their Judeo-Christian antecedents. Like the voluntary Jewish or Christian martyr, the Muslim martyr actively seeks out death for the sake of religion and ends his life by affirming his identity as a Muslim. But whereas the Jewish or Christian martyr typically responds to persecution by a powerful external force, the Muslim martyr is a soldier who actively seeks death for the sake of God and His religion. These differences notwithstanding, the Islamic martyrdom narratives draw upon many of the structures, themes, and language found in the martyrdom narratives produced by rabbinic Jews and Christians. In my presentation, I shall draw attention to parallels between the narrative account of the martyrdom of Zayd b. Haritha ­- who until his repudiation in 5 AH had been Muhammad's adopted son -- and midrashic elaborations of the story of the binding of Isaac in Gen. 22.

Wrathful God / Gracious God: Theological Models of Violence and its Overcoming
Kurt Anders Richardson, McMaster University

Christian theology, as in other monotheistic traditions, attempts by various models to cope with violence and its implications for understanding God as origin and destiny of the human. This paper explores Christian understandings of divine and human action with respect to violence and formulations by which it is minimized, reconciled, overturned, and eschatologically eliminated and perpetuated. A nexus of terms emerges including theodicy, sacrifice, scapegoating, homicide, warfare, and along with metaphors that depict God as a participant or co-agent in the activities indicative of these terms. In contrast, models of redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, grace, mercy and ultimately love, while not eliminating violence by any means suggest its overcoming by greater means and outcomes. The question arises as to how these models of God serve as examples for human intention and action.

Revenge of the Diaspora: The Land of Israel and the Problem of Jewish Male Violence
Warren Rosenberg, Wabash College

The conflicted history of Jewish identity, and Jewish masculinity in particular, has been shaped over time by the problematic relationship between people and place. From the Biblical injunction to violently take Palestine as their own, through the Diasporic longing for “next year in Jerusalem,” to the apparent triumph of Zionism, to the continuing conflicts with the Palestinians, Judaism and Jewish “manhood” has been associated with the land of Israel. That link is currently being questioned. From Sander Gilman’s Jewish Frontiers to Caryn Aviv and David Shneer’s New Jews, a re-centering of Jewish identity is in process, fueled, in part, by a resistance to Jewish “extremists” who see the land and the people as inextricably linked.  Through a close examination of two American films, Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) and Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), that represent opposing Jewish American views of Israel, I offer cultural evidence for this shift from seeing Israel as the place where the Biblical vision of the Jewish warrior is still alive, to seeing the violence apparently necessary to maintain the State as a betrayal of what it means to be Jewish. While this shift can be seen in selected American cultural productions, in actual political terms, neo-conservative Jews, along with their Evangelical Christian allies in the current American administration, continue to follow the older Exodus script, with 9/11 replacing the Holocaust as their prime motivation and justification for pursuing “extremist” military solutions to continuing regional conflicts.