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AHR Conversation: Religious Identities and Violence
PARTICIPANTS:
Philip Benedict, Nora Berend, Stephen Ellis, Jeffrey Kaplan, Ussama Makdisi, and Jack Miles
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There are few topics that challenge the analytical capabilities
of historians more than religion and violence. When the two
subjects are combined, the challenge is only increased. How
do historians, whether secular-minded or believers, discuss
the often extreme, obscure, or alien manifestations of religious
belief? How do we understand violence in its many forms without
lapsing into explanations that merely evoke the irrational?
And how should we explain religiously motivated violence—or
violence that seems to be inspired by religious beliefs or
authorities?
These and other questions are at the heart of this
AHR Conversation on "Religious Identities and Violence."
Although the discussion, for obvious reasons, often turned
to the contemporary situation in the Middle East, the participants
were careful to draw from their knowledge of past historical
experience. Most insistently, they warned against taking either
religion or religious violence out of its historical context
and treating it like a timeless, isolated phenomenon. The
participants are Philip Benedict, an early modern European
historian who has written widely on Calvinism and the Wars
of Religion; Nora Berend, a medievalist who specializes in
the religious history of Hungary and Eastern Europe more generally;
Stephen Ellis, a historian of modern Africa who has written
on religion and politics; Jeffrey Kaplan, who has published
on religion and violence from a global perspective; Ussama
Makdisi, a scholar of Ottoman and Arab history who has also
written on American involvement in the Middle East; and Jack
Miles, a journalist and scholar with wide knowledge of religion
and religious affairs. The Conversation took place over the
summer and fall of 2007.
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AHR Editor: To discuss the connections between religion
and violence is to open up a very large territory for our consideration.
To start, it might be best to confront an issue that often arises
when the topic is discussed, especially in more public venues. This
is the assumption that religious violence is really not fundamentally
about religion—that other interests, claims, or identities
of an economic, ethnic, political, or even psychological nature
are at stake. What this assumption seems to imply is that religion
can be reduced or referred to something else, some other layer of
identity or interest. And yet in recent years, historians and social
scientists have clearly become more open to what we might call the
"irreducibility" of religion as an identity and affiliation. So
my first question relates precisely to this issue: How should we
think of religion in relationship to other social identities? How
"irreducible" is it?
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Philip Benedict: I certainly endorse the idea that
in most situations in medieval and early modern Europe, religious
violence is "really" about religion. This may be less true of more
recent times. I wonder, however, how consistently useful it is to
think of religion as a social identity in medieval and early modern
Europe. Situations certainly existed in which people assigned religious
labels to one another and/or thought of themselves as part of a
religious group, most obviously in religious borderlands or in regions
where multiple religious groups lived alongside one another. But
the insight first provided by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and subsequently
refined by a number of historians, namely that it was only over
the course of the late Middle Ages, and especially in the wake of
the Reformation, that the concept of "religion" took on something
approaching its modern sense of an organized set of beliefs and
practices about the divine rather than an attitude of piety toward
the gods, is an important one to keep in mind.
1
And while it is certainly true that many forms of religious violence
in late medieval or early modern Europe were directed against neighbors
assigned some fixed label such as "Jews," "Huguenots," or "Papists,"
incidents of religious violence may have been especially likely
to occur at moments when new beliefs were spreading into an area
and the religious situation was far too fluid to be neatly defined.
So when public scenes of disrespect to the consecrated host sparked
violent Catholic retaliation in France around 1560, the violence
was motivated by outrage against those so depraved as to attack
God's body, but the clash cannot be usefully analyzed as one between
two groups with fixed social identities. The violence was all about
rival beliefs and their public manifestation and defense—a
clear matter of "religion" as a symbolic system. To go from there
to speaking of religion as an irreducible identity is a linguistic
step it probably isn't useful to take.
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Stephen Ellis: Religion varies from one society to
another, so something that we consider today as belonging to the
sphere of religion may not have been thought of that way by our
ancestors. However, one thing that seems to be common to religion
in every historical time and place is the perception of an invisible
world that exists alongside the visible one. Sometimes the invisible
world is even thought to suffuse the visible world. A person brought
up in such an intellectual environment is likely to develop a distinctive
view of the world in which events or trends that have an obvious
material explanation—a road accident, say, caused by a vehicle
with faulty brakes—may be considered also to have a cause
in the invisible world. When it comes to trends that affect an entire
society, such as a war, a plague, or a famine, people typically
develop a rather dense explanation that includes political, economic,
and religious elements. Hence the perception by intelligent people,
quite capable of sophisticated analysis, that a plague not only
might be caused by germs, but might have a religious explanation
as well. In this sense, historians are well advised to take the
religious thought of other times and places seriously. That does
not exclude being fully aware of political operations, for example
by holders of political power who may deliberately invoke religious
arguments or religious institutions in the service of a policy aimed
at controlling material resources. Perhaps this provides us with
a way to think about religious identity as well. The concept of
a religious identity is clearly one that has a connection to politics,
in the sense of the manipulation of control over resources. In today's
world, it is generally possible to distinguish the religious and
political aspects of conflicts in which religious identity appears
to play a key role. It may well be that in certain societies in
the past, however, such a distinction between religion and politics
was less easily thinkable.
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Nora Berend: I agree that it is unhelpful to talk
about "irreducible" religious identity. This is not the same as
saying that religious identity is necessarily a cover for other
interests or motives. Just as religion is part of society, so is
religious identity part of social identity.
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It is interrelated with other aspects of identity rather than being
a discrete entity. Religion as a phenomenon as well as particular
religions changed over time. For example, as Christianity spread
with the conversion of whole societies, it also adapted to the societies
it penetrated. Scholars even talk about the Germanization of early
medieval Christianity to highlight the scale of the changes linked
to the adaptation of Christianity to new populations.
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What was accepted and what was not (therefore what was "Christian")
was continuously redefined. Examples include but are not restricted
to dietary regulations, the emergence of new tenets and practices
such as the cult of saints, and new organizational structures such
as centralization under the papacy.
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Christianity also split into a number of competing branches (Catholicism
and so-called "heresies," then Protestantism and so on), each laying
claim to be the "true" Christianity. So the content of religious
identity correlates with the social context: social customs, which
differ radically in different periods, are part of religious identity.
An early medieval monk could utter ritual curses and beat the relics
of a saint to remind the saint of his duty to protect the community
that looked after the relic; in the fourteenth century, a controversy
developed over whether it is heretical to claim that Christ lived
in complete poverty.
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The Christian identity of many earlier people has often been called
into question by modern Christians whose criteria are so different;
yet both identified themselves as Christians. Religion therefore
is always part of a whole society, and religious identity is inseparable
from the social context.
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I also agree that historically types of group identity changed,
but I would like to take issue with the idea that it may not be
useful to think of religion as a social identity in the Middle Ages.
The meaning of "religion" certainly changed over time, since modifications
in religion reflect social transformation, but socially constructed
religious identity existed in the Middle Ages just as much as, say,
in the nineteenth century, even if in different forms. Religious
identity may dominate or be more or less important compared to other
social identities, but there is no single model even within one
period or society. Medieval society was not uniformly religious;
the "Christian Middle Ages" is a modern concept.
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For example, wars in medieval Iberia started out as opportunistic
warfare not just between Christians and Muslims, but also between
adherents of either religion. Over the course of the late eleventh
and twelfth centuries, this warfare was redefined as a religious
war, the Reconquista. Even though realities continued to
be more complex and both war and alliances cut across the religious
divide, the rhetoric increasingly focused on a just war against
the enemies of the faith.
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Complex social institutions such as military orders were established
around this idea; a member of such an order had a religious identity,
but I do not think one could argue that this was not a social identity.
Any formulation of religious identity was also open to competing
interpretations. For example, in the thirteenth century, popes and
kings both subscribed to the idea that kings were defenders of Christendom,
but they had rather different ideas about what this meant.
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Jack Miles: The cover photograph in today's Los
Angeles Times [June 15, 2007] shows a Hamas jihadi in the familiar
black stocking mask, holding a gun in one hand and a Qurˀan
in the other, standing atop a desk in the Gaza headquarters of the
Preventive Security Service, one of four security agencies run by
Fatah. There can be little doubt that this man believes his fight
is about Islam, but do we?
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I sense that those at this electronic table do not share this view.
Philip Benedict endorses the idea "that in most situations in medieval
and early modern Europe, religious violence is `really' about religion."
He adds the qualification "This may be less true of more recent
times." Can we agree, though, that if it was true once, it is possible
in principle and may be true again in a given situation?
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While writing on the Balkans for the Los Angeles Times in
the 1990s, I was struck by one way in which this conflict differed
from that in Northern Ireland, with which at the time a good many
commentators compared it. I had some familiarity with the Northern
Ireland conflict through members of my extended family who live
there. (A third cousin of mine was interned by the British.) What
struck me was that in virtually every case of a Serb attack on a
Muslim town in Bosnia, the first two acts of the invaders were to
burn down the mosque, and if there was a library or archive, to
burn that down as well. By contrast, the Protestants and Catholics
in Northern Ireland never burned down each other's churches, schools,
or libraries. Pubs were the more usual target. Closer to that conflict,
moreover, one only sometimes heard the terms "Catholic" and "Protestant"
used as prime designators. More often, one heard of Unionists (or
Loyalists) and Nationalists (or Republicans). This may surprise
inasmuch as this conflict at least to some extent has continued
the early modern wars of religion that Philip Benedict alludes to.
Perhaps by the time of the Act of Union, colonialist wealth mattered
rather more than religion, but religion surely mattered to Cromwell
in an earlier stage of the conflict. In any case, by the late twentieth
century, we were dealing with irredentist nationalism vs. residual
colonialism rather than with religion, and the identities of the
combatants were only secondarily established by their religious
affiliation.
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So, then, sometimes yes and sometimes no. Hamas, with its operative
standing on the Gaza desk, is engaged in genuine religious warfare.
Sunnis and Shiˁas in Iraq, who bomb each other's mosques
and funerals, would seem to be engaged in genuine religious warfare
as well. And how do we determine the difference? Just what is it
that we encounter when we encounter religion in a form that cannot
be reduced to some more tangible consideration such as territory?
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I submit that there are two elements: one lateral or social, the
other vertical or transcendent. As to the social element, what we
now call religion is what the Western world first called church.
The church was a social novelty in that it functioned rather as
an ethnic group (the New Israel) but had a creedal rather than genealogical
criterion for membership. One had to join it as one did not have
to join either Greco-Roman international polytheism or any of the
empire's national blends of ethnicity and myth. This social construct,
though "religion" was not the word for it at its creation, remains
close to what is meant by "a" religion not just in the West but
wherever Western influence has been strongly felt. It is the combination
of this social construct with transcendence—the intractable
"invisibility" factor to which Stephen Ellis alludes—that
creates the matrix for religious violence. Without the transcendence,
martyrdom would never seem worth it. Without the social construct,
martyrdom would be as unthreatening and inconsequential as private
suicide.
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Ussama Makdisi: To suggest that religion is an "irreducible"
identity strikes me as a blunt response to the relatively recent
call to take religion or religious thought "seriously." I think
we all agree that religious identities are complex and have changed
enormously over time, and that it is unhelpful to think of religion
in essentialist terms. In other words, the problem we seem to be
facing is not so much to analyze religious identity as a dynamic
manifestation of a specific context (which we in this group appear
to encourage). Rather, the problem seems to be whether we should
attempt to bridge the gap that exists between those who believe
in one religiously exclusivist way of viewing the world and those
who believe in a secular view of the world, and also between those
who espouse narrow orthodoxies and those who embrace a wider ecumenism.
As to the point that was made by Philip Benedict, that religious
violence in the medieval world was—perhaps—more about
religion than the "more recent times," I am not sure. Religious
violence in the modern world does, of course, depend on the context
as much today as it did in medieval history. But to suggest, as
does Jack Miles, that Hamas is "engaged in genuine religious warfare"
is, I think, to the miss the point about Hamas completely: they
are engaged in political warfare, in a struggle for power and a
form of liberation, in which religion, or religious idiom, is but
one of several important strands that constitute Pales-tinian Islamist
identity. My point is that they are as aware of this as we are.
Certainly, we cannot and should not ignore religion. But the Qurˀan
held aloft by the Hamas fighter to which Jack refers is simply one
picture, illustrative more of the choice of an American newspaper
editor than of the situation on the ground in Gaza. The picture
was probably chosen because the fighter was holding a Qurˀan,
whereas the vast majority of images of Hamas fighters conveyed in
the Arab media that I am following here in Beirut do not have them
holding up Qurˀans. This brings up a more general point:
Why is it that when we are talking about the Middle East, and the
Islamic world more generally, we privilege the "religious" over
the far more (or at least equally) obvious and plausible secular
factors and explanations? Why do we ignore the fact that what is
at stake in Gaza, for example, has virtually nothing to do with
"religion" or "Islam" in any abstract or textual sense, and far
more to do with nationalism, colonialism, occupation, racism, and
corruption? Why, in other words, do we see the "medieval" when it
comes to the Middle East, and ascribe to it an unbroken continuity
with its medieval past, whereas we don't when it comes to the West?
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Jeffrey Kaplan: Some years ago, I taught at the University
of Helsinki. Wonderful place!! I took with me the assumption, drilled
into me as orthodoxy in the course of my education, that by the
eighteenth century, a watershed had occurred in the human psyche.
The world had been gradually "demagicalized" to the extent that
secularity was at least an option—that causation could be
accepted as accidental and that events might conceivably be random
and unrelated. At this time, I envisioned something along the lines
of the first edition of Norman Cohn's description of bewildered
urban migrants in his Pursuit of the Millennium, men who
would literally be unable to function if their religion-centered
zeitgeist were significantly disturbed.
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In Helsinki, though, I came to know a fellow University of Chicago
alum, an Assyriologist by trade, who was engaged in a project of
translating and digitizing existing fragments of Assyrian texts.
He took the opposite view, holding that given sufficient time to
adapt to technological change, an Assyrian could probably successfully
make the transition from his own time to the modern world. As proof,
my colleague offered an impressive number of letters, each at the
beginning of the text invoking the gods with great piety, but many
revealing the same streaks of cynicism, indifference, or doubt that
would be familiar to each of us in our own everyday lives. It took
many evenings and untold liters of beer for me to come around to
his view, but my faith in the academic apprehensions of the religious
certainties of others was never quite the same again. Especially
if those others were in distant historical epochs or cultural milieus.
Religion, as Jack Miles notes, is certainly a motive force in history,
but is certainly seen in quite different ways by co-religionists,
or even by members of seemingly tightly knit radical or combatant
groups. Their actions are, in the view of the actors, certainly
categorized as "religious" (although the Islamic doctrine of "tawhid"
rather rounds the circle by sacralizing all aspects of life—political,
economic, social, etc.). And from the perspective of the outside
observer, it would be hard to argue with this contention. It is
all "religion," after all. It has textual sources, and its dreams
and visions are shaped by the hermeneutical legerdemain of religious
authorities freely chosen by each believer. Of course, the texts
may be retrieved quite selectively, and the formal religious training
of those doing the retrieval may be—in the eyes of more orthodox/conservative/moderate/co-opted
or simply Westoxicated Muslims (to borrow from Jalal Al-e Ahmad)—quite
wanting.
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But in all cases, what we are seeing is ineluctably and authentically
religious production and is understood as such by the faithful of
all ideological hues.
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We are, of course, speaking at a very high level of generality.
What I find of greater fascination than whether the wave of violence
we are experiencing is perceived by its perpetrators as religious
is how the precise tone and content of the religious vision appears
to the individual actor. From the textual complexities of the eschatological
visions written of by religious scholars on one end of the spectrum,
to the simple vision of sweet-breasted huris among flowing springs
and scented gardens on the other end of the spectrum, to the vast
and highly individualized "stuff of dreams" in between these two
extremes—both visions are authentically religious, but beyond
this observation, they can hardly be said to greatly resemble each
other.
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The Editor's question, in sum, should remind us of the necessity
of approaching the topic of religious violence with great sensitivity
to the insider/outsider dimensions of the issue. I hope that our
discussion will, to the best of our ability, highlight both—bringing
to bear our own scholarly approaches, but with a sensitivity to
the authenticity of the lived experience of those whose lives we
wish to better apprehend through our interchange.
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AHR Editor: Several different positions have already
been staked out in this conversation, and I would like to keep them
in play while moving on. My own formulation regarding religion as
an "irreducible" identity has been contested by several of you.
The question was meant to suggest the specificity or even singularity
of religious identity, which I believe most of us recognize, although
most of us would be quick to qualify this assertion by noting, as
several of you have, the interrelatedness of all identities.
Stephen Ellis, however, has reminded us of the otherworldly aspect
of religion for many throughout history, suggesting a distinctiveness
that cannot easily be compared or related to other experiences.
Nora Berend has queried Philip Benedict's claim that religion as
an identity was an early modern phenomenon, pointing to "socially
constructed religious identity ... in the Middle Ages." Jack Miles,
for his part, wonders about Philip's skeptical aside regarding the
link between religion and violence in more recent times. Ussama
Makdisi's comment challenges Jack's assumption that religion is
at the heart of even "jihadist" militancy. Finally, Jeffrey Kaplan
implicitly challenges us all to think about the subjective, interior
aspect of religious experience (where, I might add, the "irreducible"
might be relevant as a self-description).
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A common theme in most of these comments is the historicity of religion.
Indeed, Jeffrey's comment introduces, only to dismiss, the notion
of the Enlightenment as an instrument of secularization, which still
leaves us with the question of how religion has changed and can
change according to context, period, and culture. How do we understand
the ebb and flow, the changing strength of religion as having a
more or less fundamental purchase on people's identity across time?
Ussama's comment should force us to examine our oft-voiced privileging
of the "religious," as opposed to other interests and identities,
when thinking about the Middle East or Islam. Do we likewise too
easily do the same when thinking about the more distant past? And
what might this imply about our analytical capacity to deal with
"religion"?
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Jack Miles: Let me begin by conceding the broad legitimacy
of the question but then proceed to challenge the validity of what
it assumes about the present moment. The late Wilfred Cantwell Smith
once wrote, "Believers talk about God. Unbelievers talk about religion."
Historians are, by this definition, all unbelievers. The grounds
for their unbelief are methodological and surely familiar to the
participants in this conversation. Though some believe that they
need be unbelievers only when functioning as historians, even then
they may often look on the past as "another country" where—just
as in some actual, contemporary other countries—God or the
gods are invoked as they never are by Western historians themselves.
Moreover, the resort to religion as an explanatory hypothesis in
these temporally or culturally remote locations might seem, in principle,
to come more readily to hand than it does when explaining more proximate
locations. I think here of the old archaeologist's advice that when
you can't figure out what a building is for, call it a temple.
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That said, I do not believe that, in fact, when dealing with the
contemporary Middle East or with the ummah as a whole, Western historians,
journalists, or policymakers have readier recourse to Islam as an
explanation than they have, say, to Christianity when dealing with
Europe or the United States. In fact, I believe the opposite to
be the case. What we see is a refusal to honor as authentic the
invocations of God or religion offered in these locations as the
grounds for action, and an insistence on looking past such invocations
to the "real" grounds that the benighted actors themselves fail
to grasp.
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Let me offer a rather humble illustration. The September–October
2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review includes a review
essay by Bill Berkeley entitled "Know Thine Enemy: A Rash of New
Books by Persian Writers Offer the West a Chance to Re-Imagine Iran."
Berkeley has no pronounced thesis. His goal is to introduce complexity
rather than eliminate it. But here are the "pull quotes"—words
lifted from the text of the article and printed in red block letters
by the editor to give the gist and attract the reader: (1) "Are
the ruling mullahs truly religious, or do they merely use religion
for power?" (2) "To understand Iranian politics, the book to read
is not the Koran but Machiavelli." (3) "For all its bluster, most
experts on Iran insist, the Iranian leadership is not irrational."
The import of the essay is, ultimately, to eliminate Islam as even
one explanatory factor among many and to seek explanation without
remainder in considerations of money and power. I submit that Berkeley's
procedure is typical of contemporary journalism about Islam and
consonant with much "normal history," in which religion—far
from being privileged—is marginalized. The marginalization
typically comes about by the translation of religious motivations
into nonreligious ones.
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What is true of journalism is true as well of political policy.
Early in the Iraq War, Attorney-General John Ashcroft said, "This
is not a religious war. This is a freedom war." President George
W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were relentless in
invoking the antinomies of freedom/oppression and democracy/tyranny
rather than ever employing the language of religion/irreligion,
much less of Christian/heathen. The factors they considered when
forming policy were, like those in Berkeley's review essay, resolutely
secular. They never expected that in administering occupied Iraq,
they would find themselves forced to defer to the judgment of an
Ayatollah Ali Sistani when scheduling Iraq's first post-invasion
elections. To extend such deference in the United States to any
American Christian leader would be unthinkable. (Recall the easy
indifference of the administration to declared opposition to the
invasion by all Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant leadership,
including that of the Methodist and Episcopal denominations to which
the president and his wife owe nominal allegiance.) At the level
of policy formation, this "methodological atheism," this refusal
as a matter of policy to regard Iraq as the scene of past and possibly
of future religious strife, this determination to conceive that
country ("this young democracy") as and only as the scene of past
tyranny and future freedom—all this has cost the world dearly.
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And it does not seem to be changing under the impact of impending
defeat. Who can forget Jeff Stein's op-ed in the New York Times,
"Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?"
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In the very recent past, the word "theology" was popular slang for
inconsequential quibbling or meaningless theorizing. I submit that
that attitude, rather than any privileging of religion in general
or Islam in particular, continues to define the discourse of our
day. Perhaps at the deepest level, the bias—shared by historians,
journalists, and policymakers—is toward material explanation
over ideological. To be sure, cui bono is a consideration
always worth raising. The study of classical antiquity has been
invigorated by a determination to look for self-interested, material
explanations for, e.g., the spread of Christianity around the Roman
Empire. Carried to an extreme, however, the hermeneutic of suspicion
toward all invocations of an ideal, not just religious invocations,
can end in a culturally induced blindness to the sometimes very
material consequences of adherence to an ideal. To speak more plainly,
sometimes people really mean it; and when they do, it pays to take
them seriously.
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Nora Berend: It is true that there is a fairly pervasive
trend to depict people in past societies as more at the mercy of
the environment and having less control over their lives and therefore
being more religious than men and women in the present. Although
it is easy to pick holes in this claim, it is not entirely without
merit, but I think it would be more useful to shift the line of
argument. Rather than asking if people in the past were more religious
(or more sincere in their religiosity), we should focus on the loss
of power for religious institutions created by the rise of mass
secularization. Such secularization is indeed a fairly recent phenomenon
in the history of society. In analyzing the ebb and flow of the
strength of religion in determining people's identities, instead
of referring to more religiosity in the past, less in the present,
we should introduce some distinctions, most crucially between the
issues of the sincerity of personal beliefs, on the one hand, and
the political-institutional context, on the other hand. In other
words, we should distinguish between personal beliefs, which in
any period may be sincere or insincere, and the vested interest
of religious institutions. The latter will obviously be a much stronger
determinant of at least outward conformity in states based on institutional
religious power than in secular states.
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I agree with Jack that "sometimes people really mean it," but in
that case we still need to analyze why they do. Do they "mean it"
more in societies governed by religious institutions? To complicate
the picture, I do not think that strong personal religiosity necessarily
corresponds to the strong power of religious institutions in a society.
It is very helpful to have recourse to analytical categories from
sociology and social scientists here, whether we think of religion
as an answer to death or more generally as a system of compensators.
As Stark and Bainbridge pointed out, as long as people are unable
to get all the rewards they want, religion will continue; while
secularization erodes the power of established denominations, it
opens the way for sects and cults, and I think in part this also
explains fundamentalist resurgence.
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A person's religious beliefs or lack of them is surely the result
of a complex web of factors: socialization, fashion, conformity
to or on the contrary rebellion against the norm (whether that norm
is religious or secular in a given society), rebellion against the
previous generation's standards, social and peer pressure, religious
or secular prescriptions and their enforcement by a state or political
power. The domination of religious institutions, tied to political
and economic interests, is an interrelated but distinct matter.
Such domination may lead people sincerely to believe the religious
tenets propagated by these religious institutions and specialists,
but there are historical moments when we can clearly distinguish
how the interests of the institutions determined social conformity.
For example, the conversion of central and northern Europe in the
tenth and eleventh centuries proceeded mainly from above. Rulers,
together with ecclesiastics, made sure of the conformity of the
population to Christian regulations. Laws were issued to this effect,
which focused on behavior: for example, people had to go to mass
on Sundays and listen without murmuring, because otherwise they
were flogged.
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The emphasis was not on the sincerity of belief, but on conformity,
and of course this conformity can be a powerful means of making
societies "religious." Here is a final example that brings together
these lines of analysis and demonstrates the potential complexity
of analyzing "religion." A Christian woman in medieval Spain swore
that she would rather become a Muslim than marry the man she was
promised to. The case went all the way to the papal court, because
her words were taken to constitute a binding oath, which would have
led to her apostasy. How "religious" was this woman? Did she "mean
it," or was she simply very angry? The Catholic Church, the religious
institution that provided a basic framework for society at the time,
took her words at face value as concerning her willingness to leave
the Christian religion. This set the institutional machinery in
motion. In a secular society, the same words might have been treated
as a joke, while the woman's religious beliefs might have been just
as sincere or insincere in either type of society.
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Philip Benedict: Big questions! Rather than responding
directly to all of the Editor's three questions, I'd like to try
to nudge the conversation in another direction. A common theme in
the first round of comments, as mentioned, was the historicity of
religion. What this means to me is that as we try to understand
violence in the name of religion, or conflicts where religious identities
are one of the sets of labels to distinguish friend from foe that
are in play between the contending sides—and I assume that
the purpose of this conversation is to advance that enterprise—we
should try to avoid talking about "religion" as a thing. We need
to talk about different specific religions at different specific
moments in time, and more precisely yet about the beliefs and currents
within these religions at any given moment. Religious violence does
not ebb and flow because religion en bloc has more or less
hold on people. It ebbs and flows in relation to the degree of credence
and legitimacy accorded specific religious beliefs that justify
force to defend something considered sacred, and in relation to
the frequency with which situations arise in which believers feel
that they are compelled to fight for these beliefs. As I have written
in a recent essay, "to understand the motivations of religious conflict,
it is necessary to unpack the black box we label `religion' and
identify the specific beliefs or attitudes that particularly encouraged
or discouraged people to act in ways that provoked conflict."
14
It is equally important to understand the circumstances in which
religious conflicts are particularly likely to arise. This is the
approach adopted by Norman Housley, for instance, in his excellent
Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536, which seeks
to identify, first, the situations in this period in which religious
warfare was particularly likely to arise (in the borderlands between
Christianity and Islam; in the conflicts touched off by the Hussite
movement in Bohemia), and then the beliefs, tropes, and practices
that accompanied and legitimated it (crusading bulls and symbols,
sectarian apocalypticism, national messianism, the conviction that
defending doctrinal truth against external assault was one of the
fundamental ends of secular government).
15
The Reformation, in turn, would bring new situations where religious
violence was particularly likely to erupt, notably those moments
when Protestant ideas first began to spread widely within communities,
especially communities that defined themselves to a significant
degree as sacral communities. At the same time, it led, for complex
reasons, to the gradual abandonment of other practices that once
widely justified religious violence, most surprisingly the issuing
of crusading bulls for conflicts against Christian heretics, which
rarely accompanied sixteenth-century wars between Catholics and
Protestants and disappeared for good after 1600.
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I have the feeling from our first round that all the participants
in this discussion would pretty much agree with this analytical
approach. (Dissent, of course, is welcome!) If I'm right, then it
seems to me that our conversation can best advance by identifying
specific beliefs that have justified violence in the name of defending
the sacred within different eras and religions and tracing how and
why they either gained or lost persuasive power over time. It might
also help to identify the situations in which religious violence
tended/tends to arise within different civilizations and parts of
the globe and what might account for changes in the frequency with
which such situations present themselves across the centuries. Of
course, to do this, we also need to have some useful working definition
of what does and doesn't constitute a religious war or religious
riot. On that last, I found Jack Miles's comparative observation
about the Northern Irish and Bosnian situation—namely that
in the former region places of worship were rarely objects of attack,
while in the latter they were often the first places attacked—most
illuminating, and perhaps also illustrative of a broader analytical
point worth making. One helpful approach to labeling something as
religious violence is phenomenological: to look at the character
of the violence and the people and objects singled out for attack.
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In early modern European religious violence, churches were often
targets of the violence. They might be attacked in several ways.
One recurring pattern involves the attempted destruction of entire
churches, whether by fire or by sack. In seventeenth-century France,
this was often done in triumph when the Protestants lost their rights
to worship in a given community, or else, earlier in the century,
as a warning that a Protestant temple was not wanted in a predominantly
Catholic community or that a Catholic religious order was not wanted
in a predominantly Protestant community. The message here was: you
are not a legitimate part of our community. Another rite of violence
was the attack on specific features of church decoration or furnishing:
altar rails in the English Revolution, images of saints within and
without churches at the initial moment of the Reformation or during
conflicts like the French Wars of Religion. The message here was:
these specific objects are contrary to the pure worship of God and
must be purged from our churches. The attacks on churches or mosques
in Bosnia would seem clearly to be sending the first message, the
much-publicized Taliban destruction of the Bamiyan statues of the
Buddha in Afghanistan perhaps the second. In the internal conflicts
in Palestine right now, are places of worship, religious symbols,
or clerics being attacked with any regularity? If not, then Ussama
Makdisi's point that publishing a photo of a Hamas fighter holding
up a Qurˀan tells us more about the choices of American editors
than Hamas militants is spot on. But that is not to say that the
same point could be made if an American newspaper showed a member
of a Sunni or Shiˁite militia unit in Iraq holding up a Qurˀan.
There shrines are obviously one prime target of attack. Why? In
what ways are they attacked, and what does that tell us about this
conflict?
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My initial suggestion that conflicts often classified as religious
in medieval and early modern times may more often really have been
about religion than those of more modern times was a talking point
that I threw out on the basis of a little reading that I did about
the Northern Irish and Balkan conflicts a few years ago when I offered
a seminar on religious wars. I was more struck then by the differences
between these conflicts and the French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth
century than by the similarities. Obviously this is the kind of
broad hypothesis that needs to be tested and refined by the careful
investigation of specific cases, and I'm delighted to see others
challenging and refining it. Perhaps we can keep on refining it
in a comparative manner by asking about the contemporary Middle
East as well: How often in different conflicts are religious buildings
or holy places the objects of attack? What are the means of attack
and the specific features of the places that are targeted? Asking
specific questions like these might be one useful way of continuing
the conversation across religious and chronological borders without
getting tied up in self-reflexive knots about why the Middle East
or the Middle Ages are so often figured as religious.
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AHR Editor: I'd like to push back a bit on Philip's
laudable attempt to "nudge" the conversation forward into the topic
of religious violence per se—which in fact I planned to be
the focus of our next round. But before we confront this matter
directly, I wanted to give us all a chance to comment on what I
still believe—pace Philip—to be a legitimate
analytical concern. That is, the question regarding the persistence
or waning of "religion" in various societies across time and cultures.
I'm assuming that we largely reject what we might call a modernization
view of this dynamic, whereby it is posited that religion will recede
as modernity progresses. But do we then, as seems to be implied
by Philip's impatience with my formulation, entirely dismiss notions
of development, tradition, or culture as possible bearers of (or
obstacles to) religious commitment? This may be to force some of
you to a level of generalization that induces intellectual discomfort.
And I certainly would agree that we should be careful about resorting
to facile generalities that cannot possibly be tested. But I think
the issue is legitimate, in part because it informs, often unthinkingly,
the approach of many, including many historians. More particularly,
it seems relevant when trying to puzzle out one of the most glaring
contradictions in the contemporary world with regard to the uneven
geographical distribution of religious commitment—that is,
its low level in Europe and other industrialized nations and its
robustness in the United States.
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Ussama Makdisi: At the risk of offending Philip's
desire not to have us get tied up in "self-reflexive knots," I feel
that the larger point I raised about how certain cultures and parts
of the world are perceived to be more religious than others, which
the Editor reiterated, still needs to be addressed more precisely.
I simply do not believe that it is true that, as Jack Miles asserts,
"Western historians, journalists, or policymakers" have not overemphasized
Islam; the great champion of the Iraq War, the most ardent defender
of a "clash of civilizations" ("Islam" against the "Judeo-Christian
West"), and one of the most recognized and celebrated (in the U.S.)
authorities on Islam (and the modern Middle East, of course!) is
none other than Bernard Lewis. His work over the past few decades
has been built on a polemic against what he considers to be the
inability of the "Muslim" world to face modernity and in a sense
to be enraged by it. In Lewis's influential work, he places a great
deal of emphasis on the medieval Islamic world to explain current
Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the West. He also minimizes the
role of Western colonialism in shaping our contemporary world. He
does not do this by chance, nor does he do what Philip and Nora
Berend argue passionately and in my view correctly for, contextualizing
religious violence or even religion more broadly. Is it a coincidence
that Lewis, whose academic specialization was the premodern Muslim
world, has become the, or at any rate a, leading authority on the
contemporary Middle East? What does this mean? I don't think we
would accept for a minute, and certainly not celebrate in the manner
that Lewis has been, an expert on medieval Christendom, or even
early modern Europe, who started publishing polemics about the ills
of modern America on the basis of his knowledge of medieval Christendom
or early modern Europe.
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My point is that Lewis can do what he does in large part because
of a general perception, evident among historians as well
as among most journalists and pundits, and certainly among policymakers,
that the West as we understand it has decisively broken with its
premodern past, whereas the Islamic world has not. When we analyze
figures such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or even George W.
Bush, we do not go around, at least not in mainstream academic journals,
quoting verses from the Bible to help us decipher contemporary positions.
Nor do we pretend that the medieval Christian world has any immediate
or direct bearing on contemporary Christian fundamentalist politics.
We are far more careful, nuanced, and contextualized when it comes
to analyzing Christian fundamentalist movements than we are Islamic
ones.
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To be clear, I am all for letting the "actors" speak for themselves,
but I find Jack's argument about Iraq even less compelling than
his argument about Hamas (and to answer Philip's specific question,
no, places of worship were not specifically attacked in this last
round of fighting—my point is that it would be impossible
to analyze this "internal" Palestinian fighting, and the rise of
an Islamic movement within Palestinian politics, without including
in the analysis the profound implication of the Israeli occupation,
to say nothing of the role of various competing Arab regimes, the
corruption of Fatah, as well as religious inclinations and
beliefs). Since when did the American occupation forces in Iraq
"defer" to Sistani on any of the crucial issues that have defined
U.S. interests in Iraq and the region (like, say, oil, which Bush
has also not really mentioned, although this does not mean it is
not important for the U.S. in Iraq)? From the outset, the U.S. language
of occupation in Iraq has been replete with religious simplification:
terms such as the so-called "Sunni triangle," Saddam as a "Sunni"
dictator, the dissolution of a secular Iraqi identity by championing
a Lebanese model of sectarian politics, and today endless discussion
(which rarely includes Iraqis themselves) of the "historic" Sunni-Shiˁa
divide, as if the U.S. occupation were not a major exacerbating
factor. More to the point, when Bush and Blair talk about good vs.
evil, the "moral" thing to do, the liberation of women, and spreading
freedom, they are very much building on assumptions that they—and
their respective constituencies in America and Britain—believe
to be the essence of a Christian West that is endangered by Islamic
fundamentalism, which—again, this is important—most
people cannot dissociate from their notions of "Islam." The operative
contrast is not, therefore, Christian/heathen but Christian/Muslim.
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Again, to be clear, I am not suggesting that religion is not important—it
is—but for me the real difficulty is how to introduce religion
and religiosity into a discussion of the Middle East and elsewhere
while also letting actors speak and to the greatest extent possible
represent themselves. When it comes to Islam, the Middle East, and/or
the Arab world, we are still far from that ideal. Unquestionably,
a lot of writing on Islam and the Middle East is still generated
out of fear, ignorance, and hostility—we have only to go to
any U.S. bookstore to verify this for ourselves.
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Jack Miles: Professor Margaret C. Jacob of UCLA recently
drew my attention to Religion and History, a lively theme
issue of the journal History and Theory.
16
The issue is perhaps most noteworthy for a remarkable coincidentia
oppositorum. The concluding contribution, by Brad S. Gregory,
is entitled "The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in
the Study of Religion." In it, Gregory identifies the moment in
Durkheim's Elementary Forms when the postulate that the miraculous
does not occur and the transcendent does not exist hardens into
a dogma to that effect. Durkheim's dogma, he further argues, has
now so pervaded history as a discipline, going far beyond the status
of mere methodological postulate, that we must regard history as
a species of religion whose adherents and practitioners, true to
their own unproven and unprovable faith, misapprehend and distort
the religious beliefs and practices of others. The remarkable coincidence
that I note above is that between Gregory's view—transparently
an indictment—and the view of Constantin Fasolt in his contribution
to this same theme issue. In "History and Religion in the Modern
Age," Fasolt steps forward as an unapologetic adherent to something
very like the faith that Gregory describes. In a kind of confession,
Fasolt concludes that history is, yes, a new species of religion,
but he is bold to declare it an improvement on its predecessors.
To quote the last sentence of his opening abstract, "History does
not conflict with the historical religions merely because it reveals
them to have been founded on beliefs that cannot be supported by
the evidence. History conflicts with the historical religions because
it is a rival religion."
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Stephen Ellis: I am glad someone has used the word
"methodological." It seems to me that we urgently need to consider
some questions of method if we are to go any more deeply into the
matters we are discussing. Ussama Makdisi has asked why so many
commentators emphasize the religious aspect of violent struggles
in the Middle East, and even in the Islamic world more generally,
rather than lending their attention to the political, economic,
or social aspects of these same struggles. Jack Miles, on the other
hand, suggests that the religious element might actually be understated
by many commentators and politicians. Both Ussama and Jack are referring
to contemporary conflicts, but historians have to consider precisely
the same point in regard to contests that took place in the past,
that is, to decide what is properly considered religious and what
is not. We cannot do this unless we have at least an approximate
understanding of what religion is—in the context of those
particular societies that we, as historians, are seeking to understand,
but also in our own time. In other words, we must have at least
a working definition of religion. This is no easy matter. I think
it has already become clear in our conversation that the nature
of religion varies over time. In the seventeenth century, for example,
European travelers to Africa quite often wrote that the societies
they found there had no religion at all, yet those same travelers
described all manner of rituals intended to communicate with an
invisible world. The reason so many Europeans reacted this way was
generally that they could not identify in African societies any
sacred book, any body of dogma, or any class of priests that in
their own view added up to a religion. So we need to decide what
constitutes "religion" and what does not. Religion changes over
time, and yet we don't have much difficulty talking about ancient
Greek or Roman religion. This implies that, in spite of all the
changes, there is some element in most or even all human societies
that corresponds to the word "religion." We need to study the nature
and the role of this element in particular contexts.
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A further issue of method that has already arisen in our conversation
concerns the matter of taking religious thought seriously. There
is no contradiction between doing this and yet maintaining a secular
stance as a historian. In terms of method, it means that two stages
are necessary. The first step is to understand the religious thought
of the society we are investigating in its own terms, to the best
of our ability. The second stage is to interpret what we find, which
we do in our own terms. This is pretty much how historians proceed
habitually. I don't think it poses any more problem in principle
in regard to religion than in regard to other aspects of historical
thought or practice. Finally, even if we were to identify a violent
struggle as being motivated largely by religious ideology, we still
need to ask basic questions about why the struggle turns violent
at a particular time and place. Here, political and other issues
are almost certain to be on the agenda. If we apply this principle
to Palestine, for example, we may ask why a previously political
struggle adopts a religious rhetoric at a certain moment.
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Nora has raised a couple more important points of method. The first
of these concerns the matter of sincerity. It is difficult, if not
impossible, to determine what someone "really" believes. (In many
circumstances, I am not always sure what I "really" believe myself!)
In researching matters of religion, in societies past and present,
what we can do is to investigate religious practices, which are
visible and may therefore be studied empirically, and religious
ideas, inasmuch as the latter are discussed and may be recorded.
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Another issue concerns the rise of mass secularization. It is increasingly
apparent that many of the utopian ideas of the twentieth century
were in fact based on a secularized reading of history as having
a meaning, which is a distinctly Christian way of thinking about
the passage of time. This was pointed out by Eric Voegelin in regard
to Nazism more than fifty years ago, and is a point of view one
hears with increasing frequency these days. I am thinking of recent
books by Michael Burleigh and John Gray.
17
In some senses, even in western Europe, where people go to church
less than they did a couple of generations ago, religious ideas
and even religious practices remain current, but in a secular guise.
This means that we must tread carefully when interpreting fundamentalism
in our own time, especially in the former developing world. To some
extent, academics are noticing religion where they used to ignore
it—it never really went away.
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Jeffrey Kaplan: The question of "ebb and flow" when
applied to the embrace of religious identity speaks to the heart
of my body of research, which involves millenarian/messianic violence.
This, as participants in this discussion will probably agree, is
the rarest form of religious violence, but it is at the same time
the most intractable, for it is religious in the eschatological
sense—which is in the deepest recesses of the religious consciousness.
It is the level at which the question of whether religion is the
"real" reason for violent action with which we began this discussion—and
which runs as a persistent undercurrent in contemporary policy discussion
and in most press accounts—becomes irrelevant. This is a battle
that is joined for chiliastic goals which no terrestrial "powers
or principalities" have the power to meet, even if they so wished,
and without God's direct intercession in history, even the victorious
revolutionaries themselves would be unable to institute the perfected
"government of God" which the faithful expect them to, in short
order, enact.
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This line of discussion naturally leads to a crisis model, and crises
in which faith communities see themselves as sorely tested—as
"righteous remnants" holding out in the face of overwhelming power—are
timeless. David Rapoport in his early work identified the first
religious terrorist movement in the fully modern sense, the Sicarri,
to have emerged in the time of Christ (roughly the first century
C.E.
).
18
The history of the Peoples of the Book—the three Western faiths
of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are rife with such movements,
and in the American context Michael Barkun wrote a rather good book
on this process some years ago.
19
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This is not to suggest that perceived crisis invariably leads to
a religious response, nor that even the most religious of responses
necessarily eventuates in violence. Indeed, violence of the millennial
sort is relatively rare. Once catalyzed, however, it is remarkably
like a wildfire. It burns all in its path, and the flame, meant
to purify in the mind of the believer, horrifies audiences of the
unengaged, often frightens and disgusts the pool of potential adherents,
and alarms states into acting against movements not yet ready to
stand against such an opponent. Thus a crisis few movements historically
survive.
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To work further with the crisis model in the context of the "ebb
and flow" of the "changing strength of the fundamental purchase
of religion on people's identity across time," one might well be
able to make a rather convincing case for a man or woman choosing
to take the road to Martyrs' Square (a case that was undreamed of
during the first wave of the Intifada, was intensely difficult to
make for a time during the early stages of the al-Aqsa Intifada,
but today, for a number of fascinating reasons, is almost normative
in Palestine and lauded throughout many sectors of the Arab world).
20
Yet no such defense of the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan
Buddhas was made, nor can such a case be expected. The degree of
the crisis does not rule out proportionality; nor does it annul
rationality.
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What I am suggesting, however, is simply a surface-level analysis.
"Religion" is a big tent, while crises, as they deepen, divide people
into smaller and smaller camps. Relative safety for much of the
world is ultimately found in ties that are far more primordial than
the generalized concepts of "Muslim," "Christian," or "Jew" could
hope to describe. Ties of family, faith, sect, clan, tribe, and
region all blend together, and what may be thought of by outsiders
as a particularly stubborn or premodern form of xenophobia or religious
fanaticism, from the inside in the Islamic world is understood as
an organic, beautifully wrought form of "tawhid" or unity.
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I think Jack may be right that historians are all by nature unbelievers—but
only until they spend significant amounts of time in the Middle
East. There, historians too talk about God, for God, not religion
in the Western academic analytical sense, is imbued into the language
and the tradition. More important, the historian is soon humbled
by the weight of what he does not, cannot, and will never know.
I always tell my students on the first day of term that the Middle
East is such a fascinating place because it functions on a number
of simultaneous levels. At the surface is what you see and hear.
Believe none of that. Then there is something deeper— unknown
but knowable. And then something below that and again something
below that. Ultimately, there is the truth (not a
truth, as we would be satisfied to have it here). But it is known
only to God. The broad acceptance in Middle Eastern societies of
the existence of a single underlying truth known ultimately only
to God, yet perhaps accessible to man, is the essence of religion
in all revealed faiths, is it not? Therein lies our essential commonality.
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But then there is the question of violence, in the pursuit of that
truth or in the perception that there are particular religious authorities
or autodidacts who are in possession of that truth, and things change
again.
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AHR Editor: So far we have been discussing religion,
with all the complexity and ambiguity which that capacious term
invites; and in particular we have been trying to deal with the
vexed issue of the place of religion in the hierarchy of commitments
in different periods and cultures. Along the way, a number of insights
and concepts have been introduced, some contested. Some frustration
has been expressed with the lack of precision in how we readily
assume or imagine religious commitment or a level of religious motivation
for different peoples and periods, and not for others. Clearly it
would be preferable always to contextualize religion, to specify
precisely what we mean when we invoke "religion," to isolate what
other competing interests and motivations are at play, and to analyze
the forces—institutional, cultural, or ideological—that
legitimize, promote, or otherwise canalize religious sentiments
and commitments. Might I suggest that part of what we are seeing
in this conversation has to do with the difficulties historians
and others encounter once they step out of their zones of intellectual
comfort where this level of precise analysis can be managed and
try to discuss these issues in a venue where it is really very difficult?
How, then, do we talk about "religion" across the chronological,
cultural, subdisciplinary, and historiographical divides that our
different scholarly orientations have created? With difficulty,
obviously. But I would suggest that the difficulties generated by
our exchanges are themselves interesting and worthy of exploration.
Like comparative history, these exchanges should help us both refine
our vocabulary for talking about these big issues and identify what
is essential in our own analyses.
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But another way to promote a discussion where the issues are genuinely
joined is to move beyond "religion" and into the specific realm
of religious violence. Philip Benedict has already helped us think
about violence as an indicator of religious commitment when he cited
examples of the targeting of religious buildings, structures, or
other signs of religious identity. Subsequent comments picked up
on this insight. Is it useful to approach religious violence in
terms of, shall we say, an inventory of targets, and thus open the
door for the kind of cross-cultural and even cross-period comparisons
that historical sociology promotes? More than a generation ago,
early modern historians began to approach religious violence in
an anthropological sense, as "rites of violence," seeing it not
as irrational, utterly inarticulate mass behavior but rather as
meaningful, purposeful, even didactic forms of collective action.
How do you "read" religious violence? Are there aspects of this
kind of behavior that make it categorically different from other
forms of violent collective action? How precisely can we infer crucial
aspects of religious identity or commitment—or passion, for
that matter—from the phenomenology of religious violence?
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Stephen Ellis: There is no such thing as meaningless
violence. And if we want to investigate the meaning of violence
carried out in the name of religion, I think we should adopt the
same approach as in regard to any other sort of violence. An obvious
starting point is to consider what the perpetrators—but also
the victims—have to say on the matter. Why do they say they
are doing these things, or suffering them? As with other forms of
violence, it is also useful for historians to look for antecedents
of the phenomenon they are studying, to see whether it fits into
a historical pattern. We have already discussed some interesting
cases where the perpetrators of violence send mixed messages, such
as Northern Ireland. There were many cases of people being attacked
simply because they were thought to be Catholic or Protestant, and
yet churches were not targeted. Random attacks of this sort—"sectarian
killings," they were called—corresponded to the fact that
many working-class areas in Northern Ireland were segregated, so
there was a high chance that a passerby in a particular neighborhood
would be someone of the religious identity that fitted the political
message that sectarian killers wanted to send. This should perhaps
alert us to the possibility that religious identity or religious
rhetoric can have a sociological character and can actually be enlisted
to serve political causes.
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In other words, violence that at first sight is religious in nature
or motivation may actually not be very religious. Again, we have
already had a spirited exchange on this matter with reference to
Palestine and the Middle East more generally. Invoking a religious
doctrine or symbol does not in itself make an act of violence religious
in motivation. I would say that in today's world, even violence
that makes use of religious symbolism is very likely to be political.
I may take the example of Sudan. For years, the war there was considered
by most international commentators to pit the Muslim North of the
country against Southerners who either were Christian or adhered
to traditional religious forms. This was always a simplistic analysis.
The fact that the war in Sudan is currently most violent among populations
that are overwhelmingly Muslim suggests that the underlying motivations
have all along been more political than religious in nature.
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Forgive me for repeating myself, but I do not think we can go very
far in this line of analysis without thinking what we mean by "religion."
I have learned from religious studies that people in the West nowadays
tend to consider religion as the location of ultimate meaning. But
there are, and have been, many societies in which religion does
not have much to do with meaning. In such cases, religion may play
an important part in an armed conflict not because the warring parties
are concerned with identities and meanings, but simply because they
believe that power can be derived from the invisible world, and
that religion can therefore be used to enhance military skills.
I am interested by the observation that has often been made that
European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stole
the clothes of religion, turning the traditional object of Christian
worship into a this-worldly entity such as the nation, or a this-worldly
principle such as socialist revolution. This is what writers were
referring to when they called Marxism a secular religion. We may
thus have violence that is essentially political in nature but is
suffused with religious language and symbolism. Think of Irish nationalism,
drawing on the symbolism of death and resurrection, with the Easter
Rising and the Good Friday agreement.
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Jack Miles: In principle, where definitions are known
to be in contention or to have varied over time, the sensible procedure
is simply to state the definition that will be operative in a given
discussion or program and then proceed. In practice, when American
historians, journalists, and policymakers use the word "religion"
without bothering with any opening definition of the term, their
use of it seems to me to stand—with one crucial qualification—not
far from anthropological functionalism as so influentially crystallized
by Clifford Geertz. His definition, in The Interpretation of
Cultures, was: "a religion is (1) a system of symbols which
acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods
and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general
order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such
an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely
realistic."
21
In a religiously pluralistic society, this definition has had great
appeal because it seems to apply to all religions equally, conceding
to all a potentially real and durable effect. It has had appeal
to academics, who work in a sector of American society where religious
belief is often rare and never to be taken for granted, because
it allows them to discuss religion without ever taking up the question
of whether there is any factuality behind the aura.
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The great limitation of this definition, and the source of the qualification
just mentioned, is that—surprisingly in the work of an anthropologist—it
applies as well to a lone man adhering to a secret symbol system
that he never speaks aloud as it does to the Roman Catholic Church.
To the extent that in common parlance "a religion" implies "organized
religion," as in the sentence "I don't belong to a religion,"
Geertz's definition assumes rather than includes (other than by
the use of the plural "men") the social dimension of religion. But
since this assumption seems so easily to be shared, accepting Geertz's
definition as a working definition for the purposes of this discussion
would mean being prepared to ask how a given general conception
of reality produces, if it does, moods and motivations tending significantly
toward violence.
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Doing that, we can easily enough do as Stephen suggests and engage,
say, nationalism as one instance of a general conception of existence
clothed with the aura of factuality and taken as the basis for violent
action. We need not confine ourselves to the commonsense instances
of religion. In the 1960s, in Italy, I saw a faded old Fascist slogan
painted on a Piedmont wall: Noi non discutiamo la frontera, la
difendiamo.
22
The slogan obviously calls a halt to reason and invokes an unquestioning
patriotism to rationalize its call to arms. Obviously, again, Italy
had real interests that could conflict with those of neighboring
France, and this invocation of a nationalist faith could coincide
with plenty of material motivations. There was nonetheless a distinct
and proper power in the nationalist faith, which, in a given case—as
in fighting on for a lost cause—could manifest its distinctness.
In Europe, the plausibility of this faith has suffered at least
as much in the twentieth century as Christianity did in the seventeenth.
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In the Muslim case now so much on everyone's mind, it will not do
to leap from the peak to the plain in a single bound, inferring
from verses in the Qurˀan or the Hadith general conceptions
of existence supposedly productive of violent moods and motivations
in all Muslims. Nor will it do to sweep away such basic differences
as that between Sunni and Shiˁa in a statement like the one
President Bush made in his 2007 State of the Union address: "The
Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian
threat. Whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent
they have the same wicked purposes." No, the differences are deeper
than slogans, and there must be a long, careful descent from the
peak to the plain. It is at incalculable cost that the Bush administration
has so cavalierly dismissed the Sunni/Shiˁa difference. At
the same time, when descending to those individual cases, if a definition
like Geertz's is the working definition, then credence will be given
to a statement like the following, from an interview in the Washington
Post with a former officer in Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen who
claims now to be the "'general coordinator' between al-Qaeda in
Iraq and the Omar Brigade, an insurgent group founded ... by Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi" and in that capacity to have killed more Shiˁites
than he can count: "I personally don't have a hatred of the American
people, and I respect American civilization. They have participated
in the progress of all the nations of the world. They invented computers.
Such people should be respected. But people who are crying over
someone who died 1,400 years ago"—referring to Shiˁites
and their veneration of a leader killed in the seventh century—"these
should be eliminated to clear the society of them, because they
are simply trash."
23
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This statement surely makes at least a prima facie conjunction between,
on the one hand, an appropriation of the Sunni tradition within
Islam and, on the other, an agenda of violence against Shiˁa
Muslims. Though one need not accept the statement uncritically,
the burden of proof would seem to be on those who would dismiss
it as merely a mask for other, unnamed, material considerations.
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Jeffrey Kaplan: The Editor's idea of the "rites of
violence" in the context of targeting does bring up a fascinating
area of investigation. We have known for a very long time that violence
targeting religious symbols is a great deal more effective in both
breadth and depth of effect on a variety of potential audiences
than simple violence against persons. Indeed, I would argue that
even mass casualty incidents, for all their shock and brutality,
do not leave as lasting an effect in terms of anger, bitterness,
and, in the final analysis, the ability to transform a struggle
between adherents of conflicting religions into religious violence
on the deepest imaginable level as do attacks on structures in which
religious communities have invested symbolic meaning.
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Think, for example, of the profound changes in Judaism wrought by
the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent diaspora.
Judaism—whose very survival seems miraculous at that point—was
transformed from a temple-based cult under the guidance of a priesthood
to a decentralized faith based on text and a scattered group of
teacher/interpreters (rabbis) whose knowledge of text and halacha
(Jewish law) held the faith, albeit utterly transformed, together.
Closer to our own day, the Indian government's attack on the Sikhs'
sacred precincts at Amritsar (Operation Blue Star) catalyzed the
extreme radicalization of elements of that faith—especially
in diaspora—that we see today and that resulted in the downing
of a Canadian passenger plane with great loss of life. The 2005
destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque resulted in communal riots, poisoning
the already tense relations between Hindus and Muslims in India,
which we can see in the level of confrontation in more distant reaches
such as Kashmir.
24
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Sacrality is more easily invested in structures—in great buildings
or in natural features of the environment—than in people,
for our lives are fleeting, and in many cultures, some degree of
predestination is an accepted fact of life (or death, as the case
may be). But structures, humble or magnificent, may serve as a means
of connecting the believer or the believing community to the sacred,
and are thus invested with great religious power. Americans tend
to be rather blasé about such things, frankly. The Constitution
and the Super Bowl would be a greater loss than, say, the National
Cathedral if terrorists were to strike effectively. But the West
is not the Islamic world, and if future historians were to point
to a single moment in time when the last tattered shreds of American
hopes that some sort of face-saving outcome in Iraq could be salvaged
were lost, I am convinced it would be the destruction of the Golden
Mosque in Samarra.
25
More than all the tit-for-tat atrocities that led up to that moment
between the various communities in post-Saddam Iraq, that was the
one that tipped the nation clearly and visibly into civil war and
made the already ongoing process of neighborhood-by-neighborhood
ethnic cleansing a seemingly unbreakable cycle.
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We target the sacred to most deeply wound our adversaries, but we
sacralize the formerly mundane when we ourselves are struck. One
has only to visit the Oklahoma City Memorial at the site of the
former Federal Building, with its biblical quotations, its religiously
inspired designs and biblical imagery, and the crosses that are
still laid at the gateways by members of the public.
26
The Oklahoma City bombing is fascinating in this regard: it was
not intended as an act of religious violence, but it called forth
a religious response and was widely perceived as being religiously
motivated. Fascinatingly, Eric Rudolph, the recently captured killer
and bomber of abortion clinics—the rescue movement was a small
but remarkably violent movement that was deeply religious in nature—also
professes no religious motivation for his crimes.
27
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Which makes me wonder whether Stephen Ellis's statement that "I
do not think we can go very far in this line of analysis without
thinking what we mean by `religion'" is of as much import as Stephen
appears to believe. First, there is the problem of who are "we"?
If "we" are outside observers, members of the academy or part of
the guild of religious scholars, I fear then we are fated to get
nowhere in any case, for we will probably never fully agree on what
we mean by "religion." It the "we" is extended to the actors themselves—perpetrators
and direct victims of religiously motivated violence—we may
well get much further. Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph saw their
actions as outside the boundaries of religion. Their audiences,
their tiny cadres of supporters and the legions who were appalled
by what they did alike, were quick to classify their actions as
examples of religious violence. I suspect that if "we" (the we who
are a party to this discussion) were ever to have the chance to
ask them, the Samarra bombers would classify what they did as a
religious act. Yet if we were to dig deeper, each would have his
own story—a set of very individual perceptions, experiences,
and events which brought him to the decision to take the action
and to the determination to carry out the bombing. The "pure case"
of religious violence would in this case become rather too muddled
for easy use in academic models, I fear.
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How, then, are we to read religious violence? My arguments seem
to constantly hark back to the individual, to the family, to the
clan, and to the tribal group—to the most basic units of human
organization. Analysis of questions with the complexity and importance
of those which the Editor poses simply seem to be more logically
approached from this level, building gradually to the level from
which Stephen Ellis begins his analysis: the complex and highly
variegated modernity of the Western world. But perhaps I could suggest
this for consideration: We can "read" violence that is religiously
motivated, and perhaps differentiate it from other forms of violence,
at base by how the forms which the acts of violence take address
in the eyes of perpetrator and victim alike deeply ingrained symbolic
understandings of the sacred, of the divine order, of theodicy,
of history, or of the prophetic import of inerrant text.
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Ussama Makdisi: The relationship between religious
violence and religious identity is, as Stephen, Jeffrey, and Jack
have already indicated, a complex one, and I am not willing to generalize
across cultures and time. I appreciate the Editor's call for us
to think beyond our intellectual comfort zones. On some questions
there is indeed merit in generalizing, but not on this one concerning
religious violence, at least not beyond a regional perspective.
What, after all, do we gain from a cross-cultural or cross-period
theoretical formulation regarding the relationship between religious
identity and violence, especially when it seems to me that so much
of the current interest and concern about religious violence stems
directly from events in and relating to the contemporary Middle
East? I think we tend to agree that there is no such thing as "purely"
religious violence, but if I understood the question correctly,
the problem arises when trying to infer larger meaning from specific
moments of religious violence.
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Are certain sets of religious identities (Hindu/Muslim, Christian/Muslim,
Christian/Jewish, Jewish/Muslim, Catholic/Protestant, Sunni/Shiˁa)
in such opposition that their antagonism is inevitable, and waiting
only for a specific set of events and/or conditions to become manifest?
Or is it the context that actually produces the imagination and
possibility of such antagonism? Is sectarianism in Iraq, India,
Ireland, and Lebanon produced, or is it primordial—and are
the religious passions and violence exhibited in these places an
endless repetition of the same, or something historically contingent,
and thus liable to change? Jack, for example, points to the Iraqi
Sunni leader speaking of the Shiˁa in the context of the
U.S. occupation, and Jeffrey underscores the importance of the bombing
of the mosque in Samarra, so the question here would be: Is this
Sunni-Shiˁa violence latent, an underlying condition which
the U.S. occupation brings to the surface, a malaise which perhaps
has been exacerbated by the Americans in Iraq, but which can be
analyzed independently of the U.S. occupation? Or is this violence
a condition, a phenomenon, that can only be analyzed and understood
as an integral part of the moment of U.S. occupation?
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I strongly suggest the latter, especially given that many of the
major bouts of religious or sectarian violence in the modern Middle
East—from Mount Lebanon in 1860, to Muslim-Jewish violence
in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, to Sunni-Shiˁa
violence in Iraq today—are undeniably connected to various
forms of blatant Western intervention. I concede, and Jack and I
have had a productive exchange in this regard, that there are factors
and discourses that long predate the U.S. occupation in Iraq, and
that must be included in an analysis of current violence in Iraq,
but these do not explain why it is that the Samarra mosque was bombed
at one point in time and not another. Anything short of constant
historicizing when it comes to the question of religious violence
leads us, I fear, to an intellectual dead end.
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Nora Berend: I agree with the previous respondents
that we must historicize religious violence, but at the same time
I think it is possible to come up with criteria that can then be
compared across cultures. Targets of religious violence, as the
Editor indicated, might be one such criterion. I would argue that
we can infer religious identity or commitment to some extent from
religious violence, but religious violence is not necessarily a
very precise indicator of such identity. Medieval religious violence
has also been interpreted using anthropological and sociological
approaches. Such analyses do demonstrate that in certain cases,
especially when it is recurring violence, we can indeed speak about
rituals rather than spontaneous mass violence.
28
In other cases, such as the massacre of the Jews during the first
crusade, the ecclesiastical message of fighting against Christ's
enemies was reinterpreted by the masses to mean the killing of Christ's
enemies nearer home. Clearly, different types of religious violence
exist.
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Going back to the question of targets, it seems to me that we should
perhaps distinguish between objects as targets, which I think do
allow us a view of religious identity, and people as targets, where
differences tend to blur. For example, we can ask whether specifically
religious objects (including buildings) are targeted, or objects
of symbolic value, or things that are interpreted in a negative
light by adherents of a religion, and so on, and in what way these
are targeted. Medieval Christian stories of Jewish desecration of
the host depicted physical attacks (drawing a parallel to torturing
Christ's body) or dishonoring the host (e.g., throwing it in a latrine).
29
In Spain, in areas that Christians conquered from Muslims, mosques
were transformed into churches: one can still see this in Cordoba's
cathedral, the "Mezquita." Obviously this is a different message
from destroying the building. Muslims had done the same, turning,
for example, the church in Constantinople into a mosque. It is a
taking over of religious space, turning places of religious worship
into a long-lasting visible sign of victory. Where Christians came
into contact with pagans, they destroyed holy trees, pagan sanctuaries,
statues. Sometimes they built churches over previously holy springs
or the cut-down stumps of holy trees.
30
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Whereas if we look at violence against people, the real or purported
motive behind the violence may be religious, but violence itself
aims at killing the "enemy," and often cannot be distinguished from
violence motivated by other things such as ethnic cleansing or nationalism.
Again, to cite medieval examples, during the course of one century
alone, medieval Hungarians massacred Germans because the nobility
objected to the influence of the German-born queen and her entourage;
Cumans (a pagan Turkic people) because they were seen as the spies
of the Mongols who were attacking Hungary; and Jews because they
were accused of having desecrated the host.
31
Just based on the violence alone, it would be impossible to tell
which of these was motivated by religion.
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Philip Benedict: Reading over the extremely interesting
comments made since I last spoke up, it seems to me that there is
a fair amount of agreement among us about at least four things:
(1) there is no such thing as meaningless violence; (2) episodes
of violence need to be read by paying close attention to the specific
targets of the violence, the actions of the aggressors during the
violence, and what they and the spokesmen they honor say that justifies
or encourages their actions; (3) the most illuminating analyses
of situations of religious violence find a middle ground that contextualizes
the violence carefully within the precise historical context in
which it occurred while recognizing that attention needs to be paid
to the larger context of shared beliefs that justify and at least
partially motivate the violence; and (4) it is necessary to be fairly
clear what definition of religion is being used any time one speaks
of religious violence. Now if only journalists, political commentators,
and above all political actors could absorb these points and put
them into practice ...
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The last few comments from Ussama Makdisi and Nora Berend suggest
that there may be some difference of opinion about the possibility
of constructing useful large generalizations across space and time.
I agree with the former that we need to be careful about making
cross-regional or cross-cultural comparisons about this issue, but
I agree with the latter that we should not entirely abandon the
effort. One of the essential public roles of our guild is to inform
the public about just the kinds of large questions of present relevance
that are at issue in our conversation. How can we do it helpfully
and responsibly?
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One observation in the last round of comments that struck me was
Stephen Ellis's observation that there are many societies in which
religion does not have much to do with meaning, and that in such
cases religion may play an important part in armed conflict because
the warring parties think that power can be derived from the invisible
world and be used to enhance military skills. The interest for a
historian of Christian Europe of a remark like that from somebody
coming from a very different field of specialization is that it
suddenly makes one think, "Is there anything like that going on
in the society I know?" I wonder what Nora Berend would say about
the applicability of this observation to early medieval Europe and
conversion from paganism to Christianity. In early modern Europe
there was undoubtedly a conviction that power can be derived from
righteousness, and thus that armies must be purged of sins such
as blasphemy and prostitution if they are to be successful—never
an easy thing to do, of course. It also appears that rulers and
their theologico-political advisers were tempted at times to think,
"We are the righteous, therefore God will aid us in our battles
to defend His cause and His honor." This belief thus served to encourage
military action at times when pure calculations of political prudence
might have argued against it, although the caveat should immediately
be added that this was just one of several competing ways of thinking
about the question, and rarely the most powerful. The analogies
I'm offering here may not be exact ones, but I think this attempted
comparison suggests that one benefit of cross-cultural or cross-temporal
comparison may simply be to call one's attention to phenomena or
methods of approach that might not otherwise be observed or applied
in a given context.
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We could also build on Ussama's interesting observation that many
major bouts of Sunni-Shiˁa violence in the modern Middle
East have come in situations where Western intervention has destabilized
the local political situation. As he wisely warns, this shows the
importance of historicizing moments of religious conflict. But as
he also admits at the same time, the fact that such conflicts have
recurrently erupted in such moments of destabilizing outside intervention
reveals the presence and the force within the region of enduring
antipathies and discourses that can be reactivated in such situations.
If one makes a comparison with Protestant-Catholic differences in
Europe, it is clear that in the early modern centuries, these differences
also generated such powerful mutual suspicions, and the presence
of the other party within the polity was seen as so illegitimate
or dangerous, that a similar underlying potential for violence existed
that could be activated at moments of destabilizing outside intervention,
or in a number of other recurring situations that we could identify
and list. By the nineteenth century, for all the continuing suspicion
that marked Catholic-Protestant relations in many parts of Europe,
the frequency and intensity of such conflicts had diminished. By
the late twentieth century, this particular opposition had ceased
to generate conflict in all but the exceptional case of Ireland,
where it had blended with very modern questions of nationalism,
anti-colonialism, and civil rights, and where the rituals and targets
of the violence had become quite different from those typical of
other parts of Europe in earlier periods. One way of approaching
a comparative history of religion and violence over the longue
durée would be to explore the features of both the religion(s)
of different regions that justified or even encouraged violence
in certain situations, the characteristic forms of violence to which
they gave rise, and the situations in which this was particularly
likely to erupt. Obviously, this would have to be done for starters
on a faith-by-faith and region-by-region basis, recognizing that
religious traditions are not permanently fixed entities but change
over time. As I said in my last comment, it can only be done by
identifying the specific beliefs within each tradition that have
justified violence in the name of defending the sacred and by tracing
how and why they either gained or lost persuasive power over time.
In the case of religions of a book, attention would need to be paid
to the text of the holy book, and to the changing exegesis of key
passages pertinent to the theme. But in the construction of such
a history, those working on each particular religious tradition
could surely learn from comparing the texts and the contexts they
know best with those of other traditions. If the end result were
a comparative history of several different religious traditions—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam?—over a span of several millennia,
it would be a fascinating history of considerable potential contemporary
utility.
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Obviously we can't ourselves construct such a long and vast history
in a conversation like this. Whatever dream team of scholars might
be assembled with the courage to take this on would first have to
do a lot of reading and a lot of collaborative teaching of ambitious
comparative courses. But how this might be done, and whether or
not it makes any sense to think about doing it, seems worth talking
about.
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Nora Berend: In answer to Philip's question, deriving
power from the supernatural was certainly a motivating factor for
conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages, in situations where
the Christian god was seen as more powerful than the local god(s).
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AHR Editor: Throughout this discussion we have tried,
I think, to find a way to talk about religion and violence from
a comparative perspective without lapsing into meaningless generalities.
There are clearly many variables in play which make this difficult,
and if anything I think we have erred, correctly so, on the side
of the particular, offering a warning to those who would glibly
make pronouncements without an awareness of the complexity of the
subject—without appreciating how difficult it is to compare
religious cultures across time and space. But there is one aspect
of this topic that we have only skirted around, an aspect which
has the virtue of both bringing us down to earth and offering the
possibility of a common denominator in looking at religious cultures.
Mention has been made of the importance of membership and "church"
in discussing religion. Obviously there have been many people whose
beliefs and commitments can dispense with these sorts of affiliations.
But by and large, the history of religion—and religious violence—has
entailed group affiliation and identification with a church, sect,
cult, or the like. I would like to ask you to explore one aspect
of this institutional or social side of religion, and that is the
role of an established and recognized leadership—let's call
it the clergy. Does examination of the importance, prestige, intellectual
orientation, traditions, and the like of the clergy in a particular
society shed light on either the propensity or the reluctance of
people to engage in religious violence? When a clerical elite eclipses
in prestige the established secular leadership, are we in a situation
ripe for sectarian religious violence? Clergymen can obviously play
a role in legitimating violence. How have they played a role as
pacifiers and mediators?
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Jeffrey Kaplan: The Editor's last question is acute.
The role of leadership—Weber's "religious virtuosi" (a term
I still love)—in catalyzing, slowing, or avoiding the onset
of religious violence. The classic example that comes to mind is
the most common, I suspect, but the least remarked. In the 1980s,
a radical sect that came to be known as the Jewish Underground (actually
a radical faction of the Gush Emunim settlement movement with a
few independent settlers thrown in for good measure) had decided
to move beyond vigilantism to true terrorism.
32
They accomplished a few signature operations, most notably planting
bombs that targeted various West Bank Palestinian mayors. At the
time they were rounded up by Shin Bet, they were cutting the brake
lines on Palestinian school buses, which apparently was to make
up for the failure of an earlier operation to leave a car bomb outside
an East Jerusalem girls' school. These were, however, minor-league
operations compared to "the dream": a bomb that would destroy the
al-Aqsa Mosque and make way for the rebuilding of the Third Temple,
which by Jewish law would have to be built on the spot where the
mosque stands today. Fortunately, since the time of Maimonides,
Jewish law has also forbidden Jews to set foot on the peak of the
hill on which the mosque stands and has decreed that no human hand
may contribute to the project of rebuilding the temple. Thus no
rabbinical authority, not even the most radical of the Gush rabbinical
personalities such as Moshe Levinger, would quite dare to sanction
the operation. It therefore did not take place, and a cataclysm
was thus avoided.
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Religious authority is more often used to block rather than to facilitate
violence, but there is a proviso to this rule, I believe (and a
set of interesting exceptions). When religious authority is used
in opposition to violent acts, one can reasonably expect that authority
to be wielded in the name of some institutional source of religious
charisma. A rabbinate in the modern world rather stretches this
rule given its diffuse lines of authority and the complications
introduced by the existence of the Israeli state, but it exists
nonetheless.
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Shiˁite Islam provides a more defined hierarchy, and a set
of teacher/student relationships and intra-familial client relationships
that can more or less be traced, and in any case is well known to
the faithful, if a bit mystifying to outside observers.
33
In periods when a marj al-taqlid (model for emulation or senior
scholar) exists, the ulama or religious leaders can be a conservative
force indeed. When the last publicly acknowledged marja, Ayatollah
Borujerdi, died in the early 1960s, Ayatollah Khomeini was at last
able to step forward and openly preach revolution. One of those
historically exceptional times had occurred, and the intuitional
leadership, or at least a radical minority of it, was able to move
in the direction of violence. Such men and such times, though, I
would argue, are exceptional in Shiˁism. More common, and
more interesting by far, are periods such as the present when there
is no publicly acknowledged marja (although there is an authority
in Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq who does seem to hold that position).
In such cases, public pronouncements enjoining peace and private
hints that the state should be an instrument of Shiˁite justice
again complicate the picture.
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Sunni Islam presents a different picture yet. There is today a major
undertaking by conservative scholars to seize back from the radicals
the momentum, or more precisely the perception of popular approval,
or contemporary legitimacy.
34
This has not been overly successful, but it is an interesting illustration
of the basic democracy of the tradition. The Sunni ulama have been
in eclipse (again a personal argument) for almost a millennium,
since the closing of the gates of ijtihad or interpretation of text
in the light of contemporary events was accomplished and the Sunni
men of religion became comfortable vassals of the state—"Court
akunds," in Ayatollah Khomeini's terminology; that indeed summed
up the situation well enough.
35
In Sunni Islam, where every man has the right to choose his own
authority, every man is in effect his own pope. One may follow the
best-educated products of the great institutions such as al-Azhar
in Cairo or the self-made men such as those who compose combatant
groups like al-Qaeda. One's fatwa carries no more intuitional weight
than another's, making the ulama or "clergy" in the sense of the
Editor's question a neutral force in terms of catalyzing or avoiding
violence. You follow whom you will, so every man in effect decides
for himself. Had that been the case in the world of the Jewish Underground,
the al-Aqsa Mosque would be as much a memory today as the Bamiyan
Buddhas in Afghanistan.
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The interaction of religious leaders and those who follow them constitutes
a complex push-pull relationship that bears much study, but that
remains little understood. In the War on Terror, for example, it
was thought that if only this or that leader could be eliminated,
his followers would be leaderless, and less effective. Perhaps they
would lose heart altogether. Of course, this did not and could not
happen.
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The last part of his question, on how religious leaders have played
the role of mediators, I leave to others in the discussion more
qualified to comment.
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Nora Berend: The example of medieval Europe after
about 1000 fits perfectly into the scheme suggested by the Editor.
The Catholic Church claimed the affiliation of all Christians at
the time, and actively persecuted dissidents. The clerical elite,
particularly the papacy, claimed spiritual superiority over secular
power (understood in divergent ways) during the central medieval
period. Nonetheless, the role of the clergy in religious violence,
either as instigators or as peacemakers, is a complex issue. First
of all, it is worth keeping in mind the connection between the level
of social development and the status and role of the clergy, a connection
that analyses of the history of religion often establish.
36
In that case social development itself, rather than the clergy,
would be ultimately the source of violence. Specifically in the
medieval context, ecclesiastics played a role both as instigators
of violence and as peacemakers. More interestingly, they were often
behind formulations of concepts and ideas that fed popular violence,
although that was not necessarily the intended aim of the ecclesiastics
themselves.
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Let me illustrate this with some examples. Christian attitudes to
Jews, the most widespread religious minority in medieval Europe,
were greatly influenced by the ecclesiastical elite, but popular
attitudes were not always in line with ecclesiastical ones, and
even within ecclesiastical circles there existed conflicting ideas.
Ecclesiastical views themselves changed over time, becoming increasingly
anti-Jewish. Nonetheless, if we look at papal and theological pronouncements,
these did not advocate physical violence against the Jews, but,
on the contrary, their protection. From the end of the eleventh
century onward, ecclesiastical ideas about Jews were sometimes interpreted
as grounds for religious violence. By the thirteenth century, especially,
this official ecclesiastical attitude itself, while stopping short
of violence, can be seen as preparing the ground for large-scale
anti-Jewish violence. Jews were to wear distinguishing marks; they
were not allowed to mingle with Christians (eat with them, have
sexual relations with them, etc.); they were held responsible for
the death of Christ; and their conversion to Christianity was encouraged.
At the same time, papal bulls insisted on protecting their lives
and property. But is it surprising that many people who lived in
a culture that held that Jews were inhuman, lacked reason, and killed
Christ concluded that Jews should be persecuted, even though the
official line maintained that this was not to be the case?
37
Already during the first crusade, some bands, mobilized by the preaching
of a popular crusade preacher, Peter the Hermit, interpreted the
message as authorizing the killing of Jews, Christ's enemies. What
started as spontaneous violence by relatively small groups of crusaders
became premeditated massacres in which not only crusaders but also
local burghers and villagers took part.
38
During the preaching of the second crusade in 1146, the situation
was even less clear-cut, as one Cistercian monk, Radulph, who preached
the crusade, incited Christians to murder Jews, while another Cistercian
monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, preached against such persecution. Bernard
left behind a large body of sophisticated writings, while the same
cannot be said of Radulph.
39
Nonetheless, intellectual sophistication within the clergy was not
the only criterion that determined their attitude to religious violence.
Eleventh- and twelfth-century Christian intellectuals created the
image of the inhuman, carnal Jew. Thirteenth-century mendicant friars
spread anti-Jewish views through their preaching. During the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, accusations of ritual murder and host
desecration emerged. Without Christian theology and ritual, such
accusations could not have been invented: for example, the new ecclesiastical
insistence on Christ's real presence in the consecrated Eucharist
meant that the host was a "living" body that could be harmed. Clerics
were sometimes active in the propagation of the cult of alleged
victims of Jewish ritual murder; for example, the canons of the
cathedral, the local bishop, and a monk all contributed to the cult
of William of Norwich in the twelfth century. Such blood libels
led to the murder of many Jews. Yet medieval popes did not canonize
such alleged martyrs and even issued bulls against the ritual murder
charge. Similarly, the expulsion of Jews from most of medieval western
Europe between the end of the thirteenth and the fifteenth century
is at least in part linked to ecclesiastical propaganda, yet Jews
were not expelled from the papal states.
40
So some ecclesiastics openly incited religious violence. Yet even
those who openly advocated the protection of Jews in fact contributed
to fomenting violence by creating such a negative image of the Jews.
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Already Pope Urban II's call for the first crusade contained the
idea that Christians should be freed from savage Muslim rule, painting
a particularly negative picture of life under such rule. He drew
on already existing ideas about holy war, and propagated religious
violence by Christians against Muslims. The clerical ideology of
religious violence was, at the same time, linked to the idea of
achieving internal peace among Christians. It was partly an attempt
to channel violence that existed (and that was condemned by ecclesiastics)
into what was defined as an acceptable and even holy undertaking
against enemies outside Europe. Later popes often tried to mediate
between Christian rulers or even threaten them to achieve peace
in order to enable the organization of a crusade. Thus the pope
and subsequent propagandists of the crusade created a particular
type of violence (against non-Christians), but did not create violence
as such; they lived in an already violent society. War as penitence
was a radically new idea; violent warfare was not new, but rather
part of everyday life.
41
According to one view, people did not even see crusading as distinctive;
for them, it was just one form of war in an already violent society.
42
Ecclesiastics also created the negative image of Muslims, although
different variations of this image existed (a total condemnation
of the enemy, or Muslims as pagans and therefore likely to convert,
etc.).
43
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Therefore in medieval Europe, the clergy was clearly in some way
a factor in the outbreak of religious violence. Yet even when they
were its direct cause, we cannot discount preexisting social factors
(a violent society). And at other times, their ideas prepared the
ground for violence that they themselves did not espouse.
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Stephen Ellis: Human beings are capable of great violence
and destructiveness as well as wonderful creativity. One way of
understanding religion is as an arrangement for the limitation of
violence—in other words, a very fundamental social mechanism.
I am guided by the work of René Girard on this matter.
44
In this respect, religion has a close resemblance to politics. Although
we now regard religion and politics as two different things, there
have been many societies known to history that have not made a clear
distinction between the two. In some parts of the world that were
colonized by Europe in the nineteenth century, there was previously
no word corresponding to the semantic fields of "religion" and "politics"
before they were subject to the colonial apparatus of control, which
included a separation of church and state as had become normal in
Europe itself.
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Jeffrey, Nora, and Philip have all offered erudite readings of how
religious authority may have served to either propagate or limit
violence in particular circumstances. I wonder if it is possible
to develop a method for cross-cultural comparison in this regard.
I think historians instinctively dislike generalizations of this
sort, but it might be worthwhile at least to give the matter some
thought. After all, it is in its institutional aspect that religion
is most amenable to analysis by the methods of sociology. If we
were to go further on this point, we might need a contribution from
some social scientists.
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Jack Miles: Religion makes people do things that make
no sense, and this constitutes both its worst weakness and its greatest
strength. Justice makes clear sense; and when religion sanctions
it—sanctions, for example, a living wage, truthful testimony,
or honest scales in the marketplace—its sanction can seem
superfluous. The self-sacrificial pursuit of justice for others
is to some extent another matter, but even then the collective goal
is one whose rationality remains evident. The same may be said of
valor in battle, including even valor in the suicidal/murderous
pursuit of justice as the religiously inspired killer understands
it. When a Huldrych Zwingli or a Joan of Arc dons armor and sallies
forth, a message is sent to the faithful that God smiles on such
conduct. But I repeat: The armed pursuit of justice usually makes
such natural sense that the supernatural smile is de trop.
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It is mercy—the forgoing of that to which one has a clear
right—that makes least sense and that, for this reason, is
so often taken as the core of religion. The Tanakh, the New Testament,
and the Qurˀan—perhaps precisely because they arose
in a culture of such fierce revenge—make mercy the quality
by which the deity most wishes to be known. Bismillah ar-rahman
ar-rahim—"In the name of God, the compassionate the merciful":
So begin all serious statements in Muslim cultures. "Yahweh, Yahweh,
God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful
love and constancy, maintaining his faithful love to thousands,
forgiving fault, crime and sin, yet letting nothing go unchecked,
and punishing the parent's fault in the children and in the grandchildren
to the third and fourth generation" (Exodus 34:6)—the quote
bespeaks a struggle, does it not? It opens celebrating mercy but
ends nostalgic for revenge. In the Talmud, Tractate Berachot 7a,
God is said to pray: "May it be my will that my mercy may suppress
my anger ... so that I may deal with my children in the attribute
of mercy and, on their behalf, stop short of the limit of strict
justice." And Jesus: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do" (Luke 23:33).
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Mercy entails the surrender of something to which one has a perfect
right; and so long as the focus remains on right and wrong, and
on the righting of wrongs, mercy plays no role. But that it plays
none does not mean that material equity is ever actually achieved.
On the contrary, if a truly equitable settlement is a rarity in
our divorce courts, it is an impossibility in the aftermath of major
armed conflict: Some always come out winners, and others losers.
Derek Evans, former deputy secretary-general of Amnesty International
for postwar mediation, compares the usual result of post-conflict
mediation to a divorce in which the parties are neither reconciled
nor separated, and so conflict always threatens to break out again.
True separation could be a solution, but separation is decreasingly
possible in our overcrowded world. What, then, are the resources
for reconciliation? If we judge as the jury for the Nobel Peace
Prize judges, one such resource would seem to be the religious leader
who enables the alienated to make religious virtue of their human
necessity by forgiving rather than avenging the wrong that they
have suffered. Among the leaders who have played some such role
are Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Mother Teresa, Desmond
M. Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José
Ramos-Horta, Kim Dae-jung, and Jimmy Carter. The Editor asks specifically
about clerical elites and their potential to foment or quell violence.
A few on this list are actual clergymen, but others are laymen,
even secular officeholders, who—like Kim Dae-jung—publicly
or privately invoke religion as their motive to seek peace.
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Mercy is supremely irrational and yet may be the price of peace.
Your children are living in my house. My children are freezing in
a refugee tent. But with my God I look down upon you and forgive
you because we are merciful, he and I. It may not be because religion
is the restatement of material interests in symbolic form that it
lives on but, paradoxically, because it offers, sometimes, an indispensable
path to the renunciation of material interest when nothing less
than renunciation will suffice. Justice must be pursued; but when
that pursuit has gone as far as it can go, mercy may close the remaining
gap.
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David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution,
Religion, and the Nature of Society, sees this kind of voluntary
renunciation as rooted in the genetic predisposition of the human
species, as a "dispersed organism," to organize into societies that
can function only by mutual dependence and a variety of renunciations
or, if you will, acts of mercy. In his most recent book, Evolution
for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think about
Our Lives, Wilson cites the anthropologist C. M. Turnbull, who
wrote in the 1960s of Mbuti master hunters who would share the catch
because to do otherwise would "displease the forest."
45
Advanced societies may achieve relative or temporary independence
from the human evolutionary heritage, but never absolute or permanent
independence. They, too, may need the equivalent of the Mbuti forest
to ground the renunciations without which they, too, may starve.
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Ussama Makdisi: In this conversation, we have indeed
run up again and again with our apparent need for generalization,
some rule of religious action or thought which we can apply across
space and time, and the job which I believe we all practice, which
is to constantly historicize. To have significant meaning, the answer
to the Editor's question therefore must be placed in a particular
historical context. I think it is imperative that we do study the
importance, prestige, and intellectual orientation, etc., of the
clergy in a particular society at a particular point in time to
help us make sense of particular episodes of religious violence,
but I am (again) not willing (or frankly able) to go beyond that.
As Nora has done for the case of medieval Europe, so must we do,
say, for "Islam"—whether we are talking about the Sunni or
Shiˁa Muslims. Without doubt, in the Ottoman Empire the "clergy"—Muslim,
Christian, and Jewish—played varying, often contradictory,
roles in different periods: at some points they actively encouraged
violence, at other times they mediated conflict, and on occasion
they did both, such as in the first bouts of modern sectarian conflict
in Ottoman Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century, during which the
Maronite clergy encouraged sectarian solidarity but simultaneously
also sought to contain uncontrolled popular sectarian mobilization.
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I see the point as well that Jeffrey is putting across, but I wonder
how useful it is to say that in Sunni Islam "every man is in effect
his own pope." This appears to treat religion textually and ideologically
and not historically, that is, to privilege what we distill as the
"essence" of this or that religion or religious tradition at the
expense of constant and vigilant historicization. An argument from
theology is not the same thing as a historical argument. If we actually
examine the historical record of the Ottoman Empire, there were
so many institutions and offices—from the shaykh al-Islam
in Istanbul to the provincial shariˁa courts—that it
was hardly the case that Sunni Muslim religion or religious sensibility
was ever articulated in individual or autonomous terms, let alone
that there was relatively equal weight given to various interpretations
of faith.
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Philip Benedict: Historians who are themselves practicing
Christians often are prone to revealing lapses when writing about
the situations in which certain forms of Christianity encouraged
and legitimized religious violence. They think that this really
shouldn't be happening. Thus, even in as good a book as Robert Sauzet's
recent Au grand siècle des âmes: Guerre sainte et paix
chrétienne en France au XVIIe siècle, the
topic sentence of a paragraph explaining why Catholic missionaries
in New France favored a violent solution to the "Iroquois problem"
is the remarkably ahistorical declaration "The Gospel is a message
of peace."
46
But one understands where such statements are coming from. Any fair-minded
reader would have to agree that the emphasis of Jesus's message
as conveyed in the four gospels is indeed upon forgiveness and nonviolence.
And very, very few late-twentieth-century Christian churches or
clergymen actively advocate violence against those who question
their tenets, mock or desecrate their sacred symbols, or impede
Christ's second coming. Very few can fairly be accused of legitimizing
such violence through their preaching even if they do not call openly
for such action. All major Christian churches have now rejected
the doctrines that once prevailed within many of them that legitimized
forms of religious violence in different times and places. In light
of that, we have to answer in the negative to the very large generalization
embedded in the question proposed to us: When a clerical elite eclipses
in prestige the established secular leadership, are we in a situation
ripe for sectarian religious violence? There are many Christian
sub-communities in America and elsewhere in the world today where
clergymen have greater moral prestige than the secular leadership,
yet few of these are situations ripe for religious violence. We
are in a situation ripe for religious violence only where the political
theology of such groups claims that their vision of proper worship
is the only acceptable one for the public face of religion, that
God demands that those who commit blasphemy against sacred tenets
be publicly punished, and that if the state fails properly to punish
them, private individuals can do so, that the elimination of certain
enemies can hasten the coming of the millennium, or some other such
argument legitimizing violence against individuals or groups.
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However much Christ's teachings as recorded in the gospels may have
been a message of peace, historically it is evident that the content
of what Christian theologians have understood to be "the Gospel"
has varied over time, and that the Bible is a complex assemblage
of texts from different eras whose total message lends itself to
multiple interpretations, including ones that bring a sword rather
than peace. The history of Christianity's relationship to violence
in the name of its defense is a long and complex story that a growing
number of historians are beginning to tell well.
47
There were many periods in that history when viewpoints and considerations
that could encourage violence stood in tension with those that encouraged
mercy and forgiveness. The sixteenth century in Europe, like the
years 1000–1500, is one such period.
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I would thus like to echo Nora Berend's analysis. Historians of
the French Wars of Religion have recently drawn attention to the
preaching and publications of a number of Catholic clergymen who
directly encouraged violence against the Huguenots in the 1560s,
appealing to longstanding traditions that linked the kingdom's prosperity
to its freedom from the taint of heresy, arguing that it was the
crown's sworn obligation to purge the land of heretics, and indicating
that if the king did not fulfill this duty, others had to do it
for him. On the Protestant side of the equation, a theologian such
as Calvin occupied a very complex position. He appealed repeatedly
to new converts not to express their displeasure at the false teachings
and practices that had previously held them captive by attacking
and removing the images or "idols" found in their local churches,
unless the magistrates authorized their removal. To this extent
he can be said to have directly opposed forms of religious violence.
At the same time, the force of his attack on such forms of Roman
idolatry contributed powerfully to legitimizing these kinds of acts
in the eyes of those who committed them, and thus he can be said
to have encouraged them indirectly. He also quickly embraced a series
of debatable legal arguments that the Protestants developed to advance
their cause and even was involved in raising arms for uprisings
so long as the appropriate legal requirements were met.
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How often did clergymen play a role as pacifiers and mediators as
France was coming apart religiously? In the nineteenth century,
legends grew up to the effect that certain bishops had intervened
to prevent the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre from spreading to
their town when instructions went out from Paris to kill all the
Huguenots. These legends were exposed as such when historians came
to realize that no letters ever ordered a general massacre and thus
that no causes had to be sought for certain cities remaining calm
in this season of violence. That these legends grew up suggests
that by the nineteenth century, French Catholicism had come to reject
"fanaticism" and to prize peacemaking more highly than it did in
the sixteenth century. A small number of individuals did work to
define a common ground that might reunite all Christians and restore
concord, but without much success. There may have been cases where
churchmen were involved in defining the terms of the local pacts
of friendship that the members of the rival confessions sometimes
jointly swore. To the best of my memory, instances of this, or instances
of clergymen intervening directly to stop an incident of violence
that was about to break out, haven't yet been identified. But this
may just reflect the historiography of the subject. Until very recently,
historians have been busier trying to understand the logic of religious
violence than cases where it was prevented. The key point that I
would stress once again is that in this period a variety of specific
attitudes and convictions within the religious outlook of both churches
encouraged or legitimized violence; other attitudes and convictions
encouraged and legitimized peace and nonviolence. Understanding
these specific convictions and their precise, shifting mix is essential
to making sense of both clerical attitudes and the wider influence
they could exercise.
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AHR Editor: Throughout this conversation we have been
pulled, sometimes tentatively, sometimes reluctantly, along several
axes. One is from the particular to the general, where several of
you have voiced discomfort with the intellectual compromises and
papering-over that this inevitably entails. Another is that which
moves from West to East. Here, Ussama, in particular, has warned
us against comparisons that are as invidious as they are historically
inaccurate. There is also a third, intersecting axis: from the remote
past to the contemporary present. As historians, I think most of
us usually operate without much concern for the present-day relevance
of what we research, write, and even teach—which in a sense
is how it should be. After all, the essential remoteness of the
past, its specificity in a time (and place) not our own,
is part of what makes the knowledge we generate important and unique.
But clearly we are also called—by our students, by an interested
public, by our own awareness and conscience—to reflect on
the relationship between what we know and study and what is happening
in our world that cries out for some move toward comparison. Sometimes,
as in our conversation, the really proper move is to insist that
the comparison is unwarranted, misleading, or even mischievous,
especially in the face of a public so hungry for simple analogies
disguised as explanations. But surely we can conceive of legitimate
responses that go beyond this cautionary, essentially negative reaction.
Readers of this conversation will come to it alert to the contemporary
relevance of this topic. Indeed, I would be less than honest if
I did not admit—no surprise—that it was conceived with
the contemporary world in mind. My sense is, however, that professional
historians are somewhat reluctant to confront and discuss out loud
how they think about the past they write about and the present they
live, for fear that it would compromise the disinterested stance
they cultivate. The question, then, is to ask you to reflect on
how you respond—and with our topic in mind—as a professional
student of the past to the pull of the present.
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Stephen Ellis: I think most writers on historiography
or on the philosophy of history would agree that reconstructing
the past always involves our current situation. We cannot dissociate
ourselves from who we are. Even if we are investigating a very distant
period, the questions we ask and the judgments we inevitably bring
to bear are related to our point of view now. Moreover, the task
of reconstructing the past in its full complexity is quite impossible,
even if we had unlimited primary sources of information, and it
therefore involves making choices. In view of this, any claim that
historical research does not in some way reflect our present preoccupations
would not be convincing.
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We are being invited to reflect on what is sometimes called contemporary
history. The latter could be described as the history of processes
that are operative today. The methodology of researching contemporary
history therefore involves, first, considering what are the most
salient or interesting processes at work now, and second, determining
in what period and in what circumstances they were formed or became
operative. There is no doubt that this is a particularly hazardous
undertaking. Perhaps rashly, it is something that I have striven
to do for quite a few years. Originally I became committed to contemporary
history not out of choice, but simply because after I had done my
Ph.D. I had a couple of jobs outside the academy that required me
to analyze contemporary events. I found my historian's training
very useful, and since then, contemporary history is something I
have become engaged in on my own initiative.
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Even more than in other branches of our profession, contemporary
history carries a risk of teleology. If we adopt the technique of
identifying current patterns and then following them backward to
see where and when they started and how they have changed over time,
there is an obvious danger of losing sight of other factors and
of producing a highly determinist form of history writing. I think
this is probably the single biggest risk involved in the whole enterprise.
But it can be countered by cultivating an awareness of ideas or
events that seemed very important in the past but that hardly speak
to us any longer because they do not appear to have had lasting
consequences. This is something like what A. J. P. Taylor meant
when he referred to turning points at which history failed to turn.
48
Since the Editor has revealed that the subject of our current conversation
was conceived with the contemporary world in mind, let me say that
I have often detected this tendency to teleology in official (and
sometimes also in academic) discourses on religious violence, by
people who trace certain patterns of violence backward in time in
such a way as to give the impression of an almost inevitable progression
from one state of affairs to the next, a straight line from the
past up to our own time. It seems important to be aware of the element
of human error and of coincidence in human history and the fact
that historical lines from A to B are rarely straight. In this respect,
historians would do well to maintain a certain skepticism in regard
to social science, which has had such a huge impact on history writing.
Although social science can help us a great deal, there are many
historical events and processes that cannot be understood by strictly
scientific techniques alone. Why did the First World War start in
1914, and not a couple of years earlier? Why did it happen at all?
Was it unavoidable? I don't think social science can answer these
questions fully, any more than it can predict the future.
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However, we are being asked to think not only about the roots of
the contemporary world, but also about deliberate comparisons. I
am sure the Editor is correct in thinking that historians instinctively
dislike comparisons for the obvious reason that one is never comparing
like with like. But I don't think it is very helpful for a historian
to protest indefinitely that his or her own preferred period of
study is unique and therefore not suitable material for comparison.
If we don't make the comparisons, someone else will, quite
likely a politician. This may cause us to think about what elements
are really consistent in the human condition or in society over
time, and how we can study them. Which brings us back to social
science. It seems that we can neither fully accept social science
nor fully reject it.
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Jeffrey Kaplan: The Editor's question raises a particularly
interesting set of issues for the historian in the current wave
of religious violence and religiously motivated terrorism. Of course,
the historian instinctively recoils from the public demand—and
even more so from the demand of policymakers or intelligence agencies—to
draw too close a parallel between the actions of contemporary actors
and the historic contexts in which the actions are rooted. The complexity,
however, is that religiously motivated groups are often explicit
in their adherence to "Golden Age" models, will often couch their
demands in the textually based language of the distant past, and
will even base their contemporary demands on the restoration of
conditions, legal systems, or the reconstitution of polities of
the distant past. If the actors themselves raise the specters of
past epochs, and if press and public demand of the historian to
be told in accessible terms "what it all means," and if states themselves
demand explanations of the seemingly arcane dreams of the "enemy"
so as to better "understand" and thus "defeat" them, the historian's
pleas that without vital historical context much of the meaning
of the actions and events is lost are in vain. The cost of absolute
fealty to this principle is irrelevance, and in the age in which
we live, that can be a high price indeed.
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The dynamic is not new, and examples abound, as do examples of the
costs of scholarly irrelevance. In the U.S., the event that best
illustrates the case is the disaster at Waco, Texas, in which the
Branch Davidians under the leadership of a self-styled messiah named
Vernon Howell (who dubbed himself David Koresh as a Davidian leader)
rather clearly spelled out his aspirations to an audience of scholars—particularly
historians of Christianity such as James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher.
49
For the FBI, however, Koresh was spouting "Bible babble," the warnings
of historians were ignored, and the result was a tragedy for all
concerned. The example is particularly apt, for in good historical
fashion, the event itself is in the past. Even scholars of new religious
movements, the most critical of our number about the actions of
state authorities, have in the last few years concluded their interviews
with surviving members of the community and come to a rough consensus
on the events. But here was an example, somewhat contra to the spirit
of the Editor's question, perhaps, where the distant (biblical)
past and the present came together in a way in which the historian
had a unique insight to offer the public and the authorities without
compromising, I believe, his or her integrity as a historian.
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Stephen's observation on the teleological nature of history is interesting
in this regard. In the view of religiously motivated terrorists,
and to a degree the most extreme of the communities that the media
lumps together under the convenient heading "fundamentalists," history
is not only teleological, but it runs in one continuous stream.
The distant past was just yesterday, the eschatological future is
tomorrow (or perhaps sooner), and all this has practical implications
for the movements themselves, and thus for the historian called
on to explain the movements to a perplexed public and their elected
representatives.
50
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Examples again? One of the best which comes to mind was Gush Emunim
in Israel. To make their intense focus on the Whole Land of Israel
as the marker of redemption work (i.e., 1 centimeter of the biblical
patrimony put back under the control of Israel = 1 centimeter further
in the messianic process of redemption for the Jewish people, and
through them for all the world's peoples), the laws, commands, examples,
and lessons derived from the Hebrew Bible as interpreted through
the rabbinical literature that flourished in the first two centuries
after the Exile must be seen as every bit as binding and relevant
in the world of today as it was in the ancient days that the texts
describe. The distant past was just yesterday. And by stringently
applying these laws and principles, and especially by repatriating
the Land to Jewish control, the messianic process is taken into
human hands, much like fulfilling a contract. With God's help, it
could happen tomorrow—or perhaps this very afternoon. Not
the stuff of the historical method, to be sure, but historians can
well understand the process, would know the precedents, and can
act in good conscience in the role of intermediary, translating
the historical background of the "Torah Babble" or "Mishna Babble"
of such groups into the realm of—as in the task that Jonathan
Z. Smith famously called on historians to undertake in the wake
of Jonestown—the "known and the knowable."
51
We have seen all this before.
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The public educational role in this sense for historians is perhaps
greatest in the Western world with regard to Islamist groups which
make specific reference to the reconstitution of the Caliphate (although
this is never done in very specific terms; the devil is always—as
Nasser and the generation of the Arab Nationalists before them learned
to their cost—in the details). Here, the appeal to history
is so strong, and the knowledge of even recent Islamic history so
utterly lacking among the Western public, that virtually any contribution
made by the historian—or at least in so polarized an arena,
the historian without an overriding personal or ideological agenda
à la Bernard Lewis of late—could and should make a positive
contribution to the public discourse without worrying overmuch about
compromising his or her integrity by the unavoidable omission of
contextual material.
52
For this, we have our classrooms, and at least in my own experience,
three-hour blocks of time per week are barely sufficient to scratch
the surface of what I would want my students to know in this field.
But for the public, the press, the makers of policy, so dire is
the image of Islam in many cases that what linkages we can make
in explaining the ideology, the demands, or the future dreams of
the movements which we study allow us to serve as bridge-builders.
Some will listen, and take pause. Most will not. But we try, and
that, I think, is what is important and unique about our topic.
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In contrast to many historical disciplines, the student of religiously
motivated violence or religious terrorism almost of necessity is
thrust into the role of public scholarship. I was trained by Martin
Marty at the University of Chicago, and in truth, despite my involvement
in the Fundamentalism Project and contra Professor Marty's teachings
and personal example, I was always, for many of the reasons outlined
in the Editor's message, rather ambivalent with regard to the role
of the public scholar. The misinformation and outright disinformation
that has been the common coin of the post-9/11 American media has
brought me, not for the first time and I'm sure not for the last,
to see that Marty was right all along. Historians do have at times
to, quoting the Editor, "compromise the disinterested stance they
cultivate."
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Nora Berend: I agree with Stephen on the impossibility
of dissociating ourselves from our own times, and would like to
challenge the notion, expressed by the Editor, that historians conduct
their research in an ivory tower, cut off from the present. The
rebuttal of such an idea was eloquently formulated by one of my
favorite historians, Marc Bloch. Writing about a visit with Henri
Pirenne to Stockholm, he reported that Pirenne wanted to visit the
most modern building first, and seeing Bloch's surprise, said: "If
I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for ancient things.
But I am a historian. That is why I like life."
53
Bloch maintained that it was vital to keep this link between historians
and the present, that the ability to understand the living was a
key to historical understanding. As with our judgments and questions,
referred to by Stephen, our choice of topics is often influenced
by the present. This choice is not the same as the manipulation
of the past to suit a present ideology or aim.
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Engagement with the present may even include direct partisanship
by historians, as Eric Hobsbawm discussed. Debunking myths and standing
up against the improper use of the past (such as "historical" claims
to territories) can be a crucial aspect of historical writing. Such
partisanship can be beneficial to history and academia as well as
to politics.
54
I agree with Jeffrey that historians should make their knowledge
available to the public in the hope that some may listen.
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Historical method is the other way in which we can bridge the gap
between the past and the present. As historians, we try to understand
the actions of human beings. This is good training for applying
the same analytical skills and critical thought to the present,
as Stephen has done.
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Thinking about religious violence, what I have found most helpful
from my study of medieval history is the understanding that religion
can be a real motivating factor, but that religion does not stand
on its own, and needs to be understood in the context of a given
society. That applies just as much to the present situation as it
does to the Middle Ages. Religious conviction can lead people to
incite violence through treatises and rhetoric, and to perpetrate
violence against adherents of other faiths, "heretics," etc., but
it does not always do so. Christianity existed for centuries before
the invention of the crusades and continued to exist after their
demise. Christianity in itself can be, but is not necessarily, a
trigger for religious violence. Therefore we need to understand
what conjunction of factors leads to religious violence. And that
can be applied to religious violence in the contemporary world as
well: the presence of religious ideas that can lead to violence,
but not without the existence of other motivating factors. Analyzing
rather than labeling religious fundamentalism, we can draw on our
knowledge of the past. For example, it would be possible to compare
medieval Christian fundamentalists (although of course they were
not known by that name) to modern Islamic fundamentalists, studying
the combination of religious beliefs and social context (which of
course in their specificities will differ in the two cases) that
created such fundamentalism. This would undermine any easy conclusions
about the inherent characteristics of one specific religion leading
inevitably to violence. Instead of facile analogies or comparisons
based on superficial similarities, we can bring the analytical and
critical method that we use for the study of the past to issues
of the present.
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Jack Miles: Let me respond as a consumer rather than
a producer of history—that is, not as a fellow historian but
as the opinion journalist that I have been and, intermittently,
still am. Journalism is proverbially history's first draft; and
because opinion journalists or pundits write the first draft of
historical interpretation, punditry no less than reportage is a
part of history's first draft. Increasingly, our leading pundits
have advanced degrees and even academic appointments. George Will,
Paul Krugman, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas L. Friedman are just four
who come quickly to mind. And yet, as producers of punditry or commentary,
they are, if only because they write on deadline, necessarily consumers
of published history. As such, it is they, more often than professional
historians themselves, who mediate the application of deep historical
knowledge to incoming reportage on contemporary life.
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My point is simply that when historical knowledge is sought for
application outside the classroom, it is usually the press rather
than the government doing the seeking. While working as an editorial
writer, I developed great respect for the best members of the professional
staffs of, especially, our best-educated and most experienced senior
senators. But at the same time, I learned to expect organized expertise
from these members of the permanent government mainly on a range
of complex technical questions. One could turn to them for help
on a topic like toxic waste disposal, but not for help with the
historical background on the Third Balkan War. One sensed that on
a topic like that one, they would be turning to journalism for help.
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Let me close this last contribution to a conversation in which I
am honored to have been included by taking up two more substantive
questions inspired in part by the crash course I had to give myself
on the history of the Balkans and in part by this very conversation.
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First, when was the last time before the Third Balkan War
(of the 1990s) that the West found itself threatened by a true religious
war? Don't the textbooks that some of you have co-authored say that
past the late seventeenth century, religious war generally faded
away in the West? With one of our group, I have privately raised
the question of whether Bismarck's Kulturkampf could be considered
the last gasp of substantial, conventionally religious conflict
before Slobodan Milošević. I set aside the rhetorical
inflation of Nazism and Stalinism into pagan religions. I set aside
the conflict in Northern Ireland as marginal, geographically contained,
and finally nationalist. If, in fact, the Third Balkan War marked
the first major recrudescence in more than a century of something
Europe had not expected to see ever again, should we ask "Why the
recrudescence?" or instead "Why the surprise?" The question matters.
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Second, is the secularization/modernization paradigm really in trouble
or not? The critique of it was familiar among social scientists
well before 9/11, but I find this paradigm, on the whole, operative
in much of the conversation I have just taken part in. Yes, 9/11
has forced the question of religiously motivated violence to the
fore, but must one, in the process of problematizating it, concede
anything serious to religion other than its intermittent capacity
to motivate violence? If one thinks not, then one tends naturally
to seek other-than-religious explanations for even violence of ostensibly
religious motivation. Thereby, I would maintain, one tends to reaffirm
or rehabilitate the secularization/modernization paradigm. The specifically
historical question—and for me, it truly is a question—is
one of contending scotoses: Are our historians, the ones the journalists
must turn to for help, seeing something as over when it isn't, or
not over when it is?
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Philip Benedict: In responding to the Editor's interesting
question, I first have to ask: Do professional historians as a group
really cultivate a disinterested stance anymore? Objectivity is
not neutrality, as Thomas Haskell stressed in a very important review
of Peter Novick's That Noble Dream.
55
Disinterestedness is probably something slightly different again,
on the far side of neutrality. All three terms, but chiefly "objectivity,"
may once have helped make up the dominant professional ideal. Now
all three too often get scrambled together and rejected en bloc
as an impossible delusion. Many historians make no bones about writing
from a distinctive subject position with more or less explicit political
goals. It has been twenty years since the AHA's Coordinating Committee
on Women in the Historical Profession resolved that historians have
a responsibility not to allow scholarship to be used against the
interests of their political cause. One need hardly add that in
carelessly rejecting the ideal of objectivity along with that of
neutrality while taking transparently political stands, those who
embrace and voice such positions undercut the real influence historians
can have on public discussions by making it easy for the nonacademic
public to dismiss historical knowledge as merely disguised special
pleading. So let's rephrase this question and speak about the stance
of objectivity and respect for the complexity of the evidence that
historians cultivate. Some historians.
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Surely most historians study the subjects they do in part because
they think these subjects echo with their own time, and in part
out of their sense as researchers that there are insights to be
had or discoveries to be made about them that haven't been made
before. The exact mix is probably different from case to case. As
I look back on the evolution of my own research interests, I can
clearly see that I chose the subject I did for my thesis because
it had interesting resonances with the upheavals of the 1960s. My
undergraduate professor had argued that the Catholic League, which
I intended to study, was the first "revolutionary party" in European
history. When I went to the archives, however, the sources didn't
permit me to continue working on the League as I had expected. I
altered the scope of my thesis, and since then my research has chiefly
engaged with what seemed to me to be the most interesting large
questions suggested by the friction between the archival documents
I encountered and the prior reading I had done, both in the secondary
literature of my field and in the social sciences more broadly.
I've followed the meanders of my own curiosity—in the rich
eighteenth-century meaning of that word—more than I have followed
the solicitations of the present. Often it has only been well after
getting deep into my research on a given topic that I have seen
whatever contemporary relevance it had. But when it suddenly happened
that one of my subjects, religious civil war, came to have a degree
of topicality it had lacked when I first worked on it, this provided
strong incentive to continue working on the subject. I've now made
it one of my goals to try to write the final product of my current
long-term research project on the critical years of the French Reformation
and the origins of the Wars of Religion in a manner accessible to
general readers. As of yet, however, I haven't let go of my ambition
to work through all the most important relevant sources before starting
to write, even if there are times when I think that the subject
is so timely that I really should get a book out on it soon, even
if this means cutting some research corners.
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I agree with the remarks of the others who have already said that
while historians will always resist overly facile comparisons between
past and present, they have an obligation to try to communicate
to a larger public what they know about the past that is relevant
to the present. This is not simply because if we don't try to explain
these things to the best of our capacity, others will do so, and
often less well. It's because providing as informed and balanced
a picture of those aspects of the past relevant to present debates
as we can is one of the most important social functions we historians
have. We owe it to the public in return for their support of our
research and the freedom they give us to follow our curiosity where
it leads us. That said, I have to add right away that I haven't
found it easy to live up to this obligation. It's hard to
boil down the complexities of what we know well into the short paragraphs
of journalistic prose. Some years ago I tried to write an op-ed
piece linked to the four-hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Nantes.
I wanted to suggest how the provisions of that successful edict
of pacification with regard to questions of memory and forgetting,
truth and reconciliation, differed from the practices for restoring
order and justice in the wake of civil wars that many human rights
activists advocate today. But I just couldn't write that kind of
prose any longer, even though long ago I did so as an undergraduate
working for what we then proudly called Ithaca's only morning daily.
Maybe the problem was just that I only worked on the essay late
at night—a sign of how low a priority these kinds of initiatives
have in comparison with the classroom, administrative, and research
obligations that press in upon us.
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While we're in confessional mode, let me add that the question of
how we should respond to contemporary concerns in our teaching is
worth attention as well. Joining in this conversation has reawakened
the sense of guilt I've felt ever since I let drop an idea I had
in the wake of 9/11 to mobilize colleagues in religious studies
who were specialists in the history of Islam and Judaism to create
with me a comparative course on war and violence in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. Such a course seemed to me an essential service to the
university and its students when I returned to the States in 2002
after a year of research leave abroad. Alas, nothing whatsoever
came of those good intentions. The specialist in Islam was on leave
the year I returned from leave. Far from there being active university
support for organizing new supra-departmental team-taught courses,
attempting to do so meant overcoming all sorts of resistance from
deans and chairs alike. The investment in preparation time required
for such a course was daunting. I quickly took the measure of the
difficulties and let the idea drop. Joining in this discussion has
shown me how much I and a lot of students might have learned from
such a course and made me regret that so few universities have effective
means for nurturing the creation of such courses.
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So, yes, historians should not be so concerned about respecting
every nuance of what is particular about their subject that they
shun wider comparisons and questions suggested by present concerns,
even while they are right to resist overly facile comparisons and
questions framed in excessively loose categories. Informing a wider
public about unfamiliar aspects of the past while showing their
contemporary relevance isn't easy to do, and we should honor those
of our colleagues who can do it well more than we do. We should
also reflect about why so few academic historians do it as well
as nonacademic journalists and historians, and what features of
current American academia, both institutional and intellectual,
account for this.
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Ussama Makdisi: This last question is, for me, perhaps
the easiest to answer. Most scholars who specialize in the Middle
East are immersed, whether they like it or not, and whether they
acknowledge it or not, in the politics of the present. Not all,
of course, choose to respond directly to contemporary affairs. Nevertheless,
in a manner inconceivable, I believe, for a French medievalist or
an American antebellum historian, a historian of medieval Islam
or nineteenth-century Ottoman history is often asked, at any rate
often expected, to speak about current affairs. In other words,
I don't think the field of Middle East history is nearly as insulated
from the "pull of the present" as are many other fields of history.
What also separates the field of Middle Eastern history from, say
American or French history is the enormous mass of hostility, ignorance,
and orientalism toward the Middle East in the public sphere. This
is more akin to the "burden of the present" than any pull. This
is something that Jeffrey has already raised in his reference to
the "dire" image of Islam here. This hostility/ignorance is readily
apparent in mainstream American politics, on the airwaves, and in
the print media, which together have consolidated a belligerent
attitude toward a diverse region of the world. My own students are
not only deeply aware of, but quite steeped in, the pervasive discourse
about a fanatical Islam. Moreover, those of us in Middle Eastern
studies face today an unrelenting assault by organizations such
as Campus Watch which are intent on muzzling academic freedom. Even
now, tenure decisions are being subjected to brazen nonacademic
considerations relating directly to the Arab-Israeli conflict. These
are issues, I believe, which affect the integrity of the entire
academy, but which are most acutely felt by those of us who work
in Middle Eastern history.
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The way to respond to this assault, or more generally to what the
Editor has described as the "pull of the present," is to try to
get students to think historically about present-day problems, rather
than think politically about history. The distinction, for me, is
crucial because it separates those of us who historicize from those
of us who simply politicize the past. I would agree here, obviously,
with the point raised by Stephen that we should impress upon our
students an awareness, as he puts it, of ideas and events that were
deeply relevant in the past but are no longer compelling, and also,
by extension, of the contingency of ideas that seem so timely today—on
this note I cannot help but ask why we always frame the problem
of 9/11 as a question of "religious violence" as opposed to simply
"political violence"—as if contemporary Islamic fundamentalism/fanaticism/radicalism
(whatever one chooses to call it) can be and must be analytically
separated from American policies and violence in the region, or
from repressive Arab and Israeli state policies. By framing the
problem as "religious violence," we seem to be encouraging comparisons
to "Christian" or "Jewish" violence, even medieval episodes of such
violence, as suggested by Nora. In any case, rather than start from
today and think backward, which is what I believe most students
are inclined to do when they enter our classrooms, it is imperative
that we reverse this way of thinking and illustrate how and why
the contemporary political positions which seem so entrenched, so
fixed, so natural, were constructed and have changed over time.
As Jeffrey admits, we may not have much of an effect, we may ultimately
educate only a small percentage of our students, but that should
not stop us from trying.
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The more difficult assignment is raised by Philip and Jack, namely
how to insert ourselves effectively into the public arena, where
our knowledge is not necessarily a comparative advantage—perhaps
it is even a disadvantage. Journalists are trained to compress,
and have less difficulty and inhibition about generalizing than
we historians do. The problem, as I reflect on what is out there
in terms of accessible histories about the Middle East, is not so
much our willingness to engage in the public arena, but our ability
to change an entrenched discourse even when we do enter this arena.
Philip seems to indicate that if we don't, others will; my fear,
given how the Middle East is still being represented (despite the
efforts of a generation of scholars from all backgrounds who took
seriously books such as Orientalism), is that even if we
seek to make ourselves "relevant," it takes far more than historians
to change public perceptions.
56
Despite the sincere attempts to recover silenced voices of the past,
from slaves in the United States to the subaltern in colonial India,
here we are in 2007 with Guantanamo, and not much we can do about
it. My fear is that we are only able to make an impact after the
fact, when, as it is said, the question is merely academic.
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AHR Editor: This has been a wide-ranging, stimulating,
and long conversation. Just as it has prompted several of you to
reflect upon these matters in different ways—especially in
terms of comparisons across time and religious cultures—so
I hope readers will come away from this discussion with a renewed
appreciation of the advantages of sharpening our knowledge against
the grain of others' expertise. Ussama's final, rather pessimistic
comment about the dubious impact of historians beyond the academy
is, I fear, well-placed. But if we truly believe that—beyond
any specific ideological positions or policy prescriptions—the
most important lesson we as historians have to impart to a wider
public ultimately rests on the conviction that ignoring historical
context and the specificity of historical experience can only produce
error and ignorance, then our job is clear: to keep doing what we
do best but try to do it in a way that does not exclude all but
scholars. This is, indeed, one of the impulses behind this very
Conversation.
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Philip Benedict currently
directs the Université de Genève's Institut d'Histoire
de la Réformation, after teaching for twenty-six years
at Brown University. He is currently working on a history of
the critical years of the French Reformation and the origins
of the Wars of Religion, 1555–1563. His most recent books
are Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles
of Tortorel and Perrissin (Droz, 2007); La Réforme
en France et Italie: Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes
(Publications de l'Ecole Française de Rome, 2007), co-edited
with Silvana Seidel Menchi and Alain Tallon; and Early Modern
Europe: From Crisis to Stability (University of Delaware
Press, 2005), a festschrift for Theodore K. Rabb co-edited with
Myron P. Gutmann.
Nora Berend is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of History,
University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St Catharine's College.
She has published numerous articles and is the author of At
the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and "Pagans" in Medieval
Hungary, c. 1000–c. 1300 (Cambridge University Press,
2001), co-editor with David Abulafia of Medieval Frontiers:
Concepts and Practices (Ashgate, 2002), and editor of Christianization
and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe
and Rus', c. 900–1200 (Cambridge University Press,
2007).
Stephen Ellis is a senior researcher at the African Studies
Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands. He worked as a researcher in
the International Secretariat of Amnesty International from
1982 to 1986, and later as editor of the newsletter Africa
Confidential. He has also been director of the Africa Program
of the International Crisis Group. His most recent book (co-authored
with Gerrie ter Haar) is Worlds of Power: Religious Thought
and Political Practice in Africa (Oxford University Press,
2004).
Jeffrey Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Religion
at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the Director of the
UW Oshkosh Institute for the Study of Religion, Violence and
Memory. He has published nine books and anthologies, the most
recent of which are Millennial Violence: Past, Present and
Future (Cass, 2002), The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional
Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Alta Mira Press,
2002), and, with Bron Taylor, the two-volume Encyclopedia
of Religion and Nature (Continuum, 2005). In addition, he
has authored numerous articles for a diverse selection of academic
journals. His work in progress, Terrorist Groups and the
New Tribalism: Terrorism's Fifth Wave, is under contract
with Routledge.
Ussama Makdisi is an Associate Professor in the Department
of History at Rice University and is the first holder of the
Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies.
He is the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community,
History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon
(University of California Press, 2000). He has co-edited with
Paul Silverstein Memory and Violence in the Middle East
(Indiana University Press, 2006). His new book, Artillery
of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of
the Middle East, will be published by Cornell University
Press in January 2008.
Jack Miles is Professor of English and Religious Studies
at the University of California, Irvine; Senior Fellow for Religious
Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy; and
general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Religions
(forthcoming). His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer
Prize. He is currently a MacArthur Fellow.
Notes
1 Wilfred Cantwell
Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the
Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York, 1963); Peter Biller,
"Words and the Medieval Notion of `Religion,'" Journal of Ecclesiastical
History 36 (1985): 351–369.
2 See, e.g., Peter
L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory
of Religion (1968; repr., New York, 1990).
3 James C. Russell,
The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical
Approach to Religious Transformation (New York, 1994).
4 Robert Markus, The
End of Ancient Christianity (1990; repr., Cambridge, 1997);
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity,
AD 200–1000 (Malden, Mass., 1997).
5 Lester K. Little,
Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque
France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993); Patrick Geary, "Humiliation of
Saints," in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies
in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (1983; repr.,
Cambridge, 1987), 123–140; Patrick Nold, Pope John XXII
and His Franciscan Cardinal: Bertrand de la Tour and the Apostolic
Poverty Controversy (Oxford, 2003).
6 Jean-Claude Schmitt,
"Religion, Folklore and Society in the Medieval West," in Lester
K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds., Debating the Middle
Ages: Issues and Readings (Malden, Mass., 1998), 376–387.
7 The chronology of
the "invention" of the Reconquista and its equation with
crusading is debated; see, e.g., Peter Linehan, History and
the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), chap. 4;
Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
(Philadelphia, Pa. 2003).
8 Nora Berend, "Défense
de la Chrétienté et naissance d'une identité: Hongrie,
Pologne et péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Âge," Annales
HSS 5 (September–October 2003): 1009–1027.
9 Norman Cohn, The
Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical
Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. and expanded ed. (London,
1970).
10 Jalal Al-e Ahmad,
Gharbzadegi [Weststruckness] (Costa Mesa, Calif.,
1997).
11 Jeff Stein, "Can
You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?" New York Times, October
17, 2006.
12 Rodney Stark
and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1996).
13 Nora Berend,
ed., Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia,
Central Europe and Rus', c. 900–1200 (Cambridge, 2007).
14 Philip Benedict,
"Religion and Politics in the European Struggle for Stability,
1500–1700," in Philip Benedict and Myron Gutmann, eds.,
Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark,
Del., 2005), 128.
15 Norman Housley,
Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (Oxford, 2002).
16History and
Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 45, no. 4 (December
2006).
17 Michael Burleigh,
Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French
Revolution to the Great War (London, 2006); John Gray, Black
Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London,
2007).
18 David Rapoport,
"Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions,"
American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984): 658–677.
19 Michael Barkun,
Disaster and the Millennium (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986).
20 Anne Marie Oliver
and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey
into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York, 2005).
21 Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York,
1973), 90.
22 "We don't discuss
the frontier, we defend it."
23 "Sunni Insurgent
Leader Paints Iran as `Real Enemy,'" Washington Post, July
14, 2007.
24 A good one-stop
source for these comparative histories would be the five-volume
Fundamentalism Project, especially the first volume, Martin E.
Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed
(Chicago, 1991).
25 For a good insider
view of the Iraqi occupation from the perspective of an Arab-American
officer, see Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning
the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn., 2007).
26 Edward T. Linenthal,
The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory
(Oxford, 2001).
27 Jeffrey Kaplan,
"Absolute Rescue: Absolutism, Defensive Action and the Resort
to Force," Terrorism and Political Violence 7, no. 3 (1995):
128–163.
28 David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle
Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
29 Miri Rubin, Gentile
Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven,
Conn., 1999).
30 Berend, Christianization,
27–28, 124, 187, 383.
31 Nora Berend,
"Immigrants and Locals in Medieval Hungary: 11th–13th Centuries,"
in Klaus Herbers and Nikolas Jaspert, eds., Grenzräume
und Grenzüberschreitungen im Vergleich: Der Osten und der
Westen das mittelalterlichen Lateineuropa (Berlin, 2007),
205–217.
32 By far the best
early work on Gush Emunim is Gideon Aran, "Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism:
The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim)," in Marty and
Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, 265–344. For later
developments, see Ehud Sprinzak, Brother against Brother: Violence
and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination
(New York, 1999).
33 A good primer
on this arcane world is Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shiˁi
Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiˁism
(New Haven, Conn., 1985). For the less committed, a much more
enjoyable read would be Roy P. Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the
Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York, 1986). A
new OneWorld edition of the latter was reprinted in 2004.
34 Angel Rabasa,
Building Moderate Muslim Networks (Santa Monica, Calif.,
2007).
35 For Khomeini's
views on this and much more, see the indispensable Ruhollah Khomeini,
Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations, trans.
Hamid Algar (New York, 2002).
36 E.g., R. N. Bellah,
"Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 29
(1964): 358–374.
37 See, e.g., Anna
Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational
Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West, c. 1000–1150
(Aldershot, 1998); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross:
Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
38 Robert Chazan,
European Jewry and the First Crusade (1987; repr., Berkeley,
Calif., 1996).
39 David Berger,
"The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews," Proceedings
of the American Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972): 89–108.
40 Dominique Iogna-Prat,
Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne
face à l'hérésie, au judaïfisme et à
l'islam, 1000–1150 (Paris, 1998); Gavin I. Langmuir,
Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (1990; repr., Berkeley,
Calif., 1996); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution
of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); Robert Chazan,
Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley,
Calif., 1997).
41 Jonathan Riley-Smith,
The Crusades: A Short History (1987; repr., London, 1996),
is an excellent introduction.
42 C. J. Tyerman,
"Were There Any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?" English Historical
Review 110, no. 437 (1995): 553–577.
43 John V. Tolan,
Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New
York, 2002).
44 René Girard,
La violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972).
45 David Sloan Wilson,
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of
Society (Chicago, 2002); Wilson, Evolution for Everyone:
How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think about Our Lives
(New York, 2007), 56.
46 Robert Sauzet,
Au grand siècle des âmes: Guerre sainte et paix chrétienne
en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 2007), 137.
47 I especially
recommend Jean Flori, Guerre sainte, jihad, croisade: Violence
et religion dans le christianisme et l'islam (Paris, 2002).
48 A. J. P. Taylor,
The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of
Germany since 1815 (London, 1945), 68.
49 On Waco and the
religious freedom questions it raised, see James D. Tabor and
Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious
Freedom in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1995). For a much wider-ranging
consideration of the interactions of scholars, governments, and
intelligence agencies, including primary source documents, see
Jeffrey Kaplan, ed., Millennial Violence: Past, Present, and
Future (London, 2002).
50 How this works
in the lives of adherents of radical movements is fascinating.
For a number of fieldwork-based examples, see Jeffrey Kaplan,
Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the
Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, N.Y., 1997).
51 Jonathan Z. Smith,
"The Devil in Mr. Jones," in Smith, Imagining Religion: From
Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago, 1982), 111–112.
52 For example,
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern
Response (Oxford, 2002).
53 Marc Bloch, Apologie
pour l'histoire; ou, Métier d'historien (Paris, 1993),
95–96.
54 Eric Hobsbawm,
On History (London, 1998), 164–185.
55 Thomas L. Haskell,
"Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric versus Practice in Peter
Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory 29
(1990): 129–157; reprinted in Haskell, Objectivity Is
Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore,
Md., 1998).
56 Edward Said,
Orientalism (New York, 1978).
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