Religion and Violence
by A. J. Chien
December 23, 2006

ZNet, MA
Dec 23 2006

When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor
attributing to Mohammed a command "to spread by the sword the faith
he preached," Muslim and non-Muslim critics alike were quick to point
out that the implied criticism of Islam applied equally to
Christianity. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand out as obvious
examples. It was appropriate to mention the Pope’s own faith, but
one could also cite, say, the murderous violence against Muslims by
Hindu nationalists in Guajarat, the terrorism of the Stern Gang and
other Jewish extremists inspired by visions of the biblical Israel,
or Zen Buddhist complicity in twentieth-century Japanese war crimes.
>>From a bird’s-eye level of history at least, it’s easy to undermine
the notion that there is any link between Islam and violence that
isn’t shared by other major religions.

But it’s not as easy to say just what that link is. Consider two
opposing stands. In his bestseller The End of Faith, Sam Harris
argues that religion systematically leads to violence because it
demands the suspension of reason: for "if history reveals any
categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence
regularly brings out the worst in us." Further, much text held to be
sacred explicitly sanctions violence, e.g. many passages in the Old
Testament in which God demands the complete extermination of
populations or the stoning to death of various sinners. The Bible
also endorses slavery, collective punishment, and mass infanticide.
True, most adherents of the major faiths are not violent and do not
read their all their scripture literally. But Harris argues that
these moderates provide a shield for violent fundamentalists, the
real true believers, by insisting on "tolerance." Tolerance does not
allow one to point out the underlying problem – "to say, for
instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of
life-destroying gibberish.~T Richard Dawkins’ recent book is in a
similar spirit.

On the other hand, it’s been well-argued that people tend to adapt
religious belief to whatever nature they already have. On this view,
religion is not the real driver even of violent fundamentalists. As
Bertrand Russell commented: "Men tend to have the beliefs that suit
their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their
belief to exercise cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God,
and they would be kindly in any case." And William James: "The
baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning
of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and
the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal
human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges,
and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and
non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of
the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is
tribal instinct." "Tribal" may sound anachronistic. But the fact
that religions cluster geographically – so that we have e.g.
Christian countries and regions rather than Christians distributed
randomly – makes it clear that what usually determines one’s religion
is conformity to the community (as Russell elsewhere observed).

When examples are viewed more closely than from bird’s-eye, both
these opposing stands can find support. Take the Crusades. It had
long been thought that the zeal for crusading was motivated by a
desire for land and wealth among Europeans in a rapidly growing
society. But according to Eamon Duffy, more recent scholarship shows
that the costs of crusading were immense, often requiring financial
backing from one’s family and mortgaging land. That makes it more
plausible that many of those who responded to Pope Urban’s call to
"exterminate this vile race" of Muslim infidels from Asia Minor and
Jerusalem really were motivated by religion. But there are other
aspects such as the Fourth Crusade, which was first intended as an
invasion of Egypt but ended in the pillage of Byzantium, i.e. a
conquest by Western Christians of Eastern Christians. The former had
long been resentful of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the
civilization in which it thrived. (The word "byzantine," meaning
hopelessly complex and obscure, reflects the historical perception of
Byzantium by a more ignorant culture.) So here it seems "tribal
instinct" more than scripture is at work.

But in general, violent behavior is like anything else in having
multiple causes. Let~Rs turn to the relation between Islam and
contemporary terrorism, the mainstream concern underlying Pope
Benedict’s remarks. Maybe we can agree with Louise Richardson that
"religion is never the sole cause of terrorism; rather religious
motivations are interwoven with economic and political factors" and
generally the "three R’s": revenge, renown, and reaction. Picking
out one from among multiple causes reflects subjective interest
rather than objective reality. As philosopher N. R. Hanson once
commented, "There are as many causes of x as there are explanations
of x. Consider how the cause of death might have been set out by a
physician as ‘multiple hemorrhage’, by the barrister as ‘negligence
on the part of the driver’, by a carriage builder as ‘a defect in the
brakeblock construction’, by the civic planner as ‘the presence of
tall shrubbery at that turning’."

So rather than continuing to pursue the religion factor, we might
consider a different issue: which causes of terrorism should we in
the United States take most interest in?

Let’s take Richardson’s first "R", revenge. This past September, a
man named Nabeel Jaoura was arrested in Jordan after opening fire on
a group of tourists, killing one. According to a senior Jordanian
security official, Jaoura was not an Islamist or a member of any
terrorist group. But two of his brothers had been killed in a
refugee camp in southern Lebanon during Israel’s 1982 invasion, and
he had intended to strike back ever since. With children at home to
care for, he desisted for many years up through an arrest in Israel
for overstaying his visa. Marwan Shehadeh, a specialist on Islamist
movements, suggested that Jaoura "probably came out ready to take
action. The US occupation of Iraq and Israel are generating anger in
every Muslim who has begun to think about revenge. This man could
not reach the US, so he targeted the closest thing he could get to."

The case shows, if it were not already obvious, that revenge can be
sufficient motivation with or without religious or other factors.
Also obviously, it demonstrates why US elites might be interested in
focusing on such other factors (including invented ones, such as
"hating our freedoms") rather than this one. Analyzing revenge means
revealing the events that prompted revenge. In this case, we have
the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed 20,000
civilians according to the Lebanese government. Following on
Shehadeh’s suggestion, the civilian toll of the US invasion and
occupation of Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands according to the
Lancet, with a declining but substantial portion (from a third to a
quarter over a three-year period) attributable directly to US
military strikes. Taking another known grievance, the US was the
aggressive and knowing driver of sanctions against Iraq which were a
major factor in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children
according to several studies. It’s not hard to imagine many people,
fundamentalist or not, having motives like Jaoura’s. On the Iraq
war~Rs motivation of terrorists, the latest US National Intelligence
Estimate agrees with Shehadeh.

Neutral onlookers might not brush such matters aside. Impressed by
the scale of the toll, they might even raise a different question
entirely: rather than "What motivates terrorists?", "What motivates
the US?" and not just taking the answer from US official statements
and accustomed assumptions. In the case of our occupation of Iraq
they might look, for example, at the Pentagon’s longstanding desire
to replace military bases in Saudi Arabia with a long-term forward
presence in Iraq, applying pressure on Syria and Iran; and the
postwar multibillion-dollar construction of massive US bases at
Balad, Asad, Tallil, and elsewhere in Iraq, with scant public
knowledge.

Nothing of course justifies Jaoura’s or any other terrorism. The
point rather is that we ought first to understand our own
transgressions because those we have responsibility for and can do
something about. That holds whether or not there is "moral
equivalence" between our transgressions and theirs. (I’ll discuss
the whether or not in a sequel.)

Criticizing ourselves in this way is difficult and unpopular.
Anywhere we can go for moral support? Why, yes. Harris’s point
about scripture is not that it is uniformly bad, but that you have to
cherry-pick the good bits. Let’s finish with a bit on which various
religions seem to agree:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you
pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the
measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s
eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can
you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye,"
when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the
log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the
speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

Likewise from Hinduism: "The vile are ever prone to detect the faults
of others, though they be as small as mustard seeds, and persistently
shut their eyes against their own, though they be as large as Vilva
fruit" (Garuda Purana 112). From Islam: "Happy is the person who
finds fault with himself instead of finding fault with others"
(Hadith). And from Buddhism: "Easily seen are others’ faults, hard
indeed to see are one’s own. Like chaff one winnows others’ faults,
but one’s own one hides, as a crafty fowler conceals himself by
camouflage. He who sees others’ faults is ever irritable–his
corruptions grow." (Dhammapada 252-53).

Sources:

Karen Armstrong, Holy War. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Eamon Duffy, The Holy Terror, New York Review of Books, October 19,
2006.
Hassan Fattah, New Scourge Attacking the West: Personal Anger Compels
Killers, New York Times, Sept. 6, 2006.
Joy Gordon, Cool War. Harper’s, November 2002 (and
).
Ch arles Hanley, Signs of a Long US Stay Ahead, Boston Globe, March
26, 2006
Sam Harris, The End of Faith, New York, W. W. Norton 2005
Al Seckel, ed., Bertrand Russell on God and Religion. Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern
Library, 1902.
Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want. New York: Random House,
2006.
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to
Four Key Bases in Iraq, New York Times, April 20, 2003.
Sabrina Tavernise and Douglas G. McNeil Jr., Iraqi Dead May Total
600,000, Study Says, New York Times, October 11, 2006.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress