Religious Opposition to Modern States - Assignment Example

Juergensmeyer’s Holy Orders: Opposition to Modern States: A Critique In the article of Mark Juergensmeyer (2004) entitled “Holy Orders: Opposition to Modern States”, he mentioned that religious warfare is difficult to address because, in almost every recent case of religious violence, concepts of cosmic war have been accompanied by claims of moral justification. Not so much that religion has become politicized; it is mainly that politics has become religionized. Through enduring absolutism, worldly struggles have been transformed into a sacred battle. In addition, Juergensmeyer claimed that enemies become “satanized”, and thus compromise and negotiation become difficult. The rewards for those who fight for the cause are trans-temporal, and the timelines of their struggles are vast. Most social and political struggles look for conclusions within the lifetimes of their participants, but religious struggles can take generations to succeed. Before the latest London mass transit incidents this year, Prime Minister Tony Blair had called for a united effort to rid the world of Islamic extremists who are preaching murderous hatred and open warfare against civilization as we know it. As Blair knows, this is what President Bush has been trying to do. But Bush and Blair, too, have been hiding some information of what goes around the fact that this really is a religious war, with the adherents of radical Islam as the enemy. Islamic fundamentalists have hijacked the Muslim religion and, with state sanction from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries, teach their brand of "holy war" to thousands if not millions of followers. Is it really about religion or is it just politics jacked up in the wrong place? Attacked by widespread international criticism and even condemnation for actions ranging from the Vietnam War to aid for Israel and support of globalization, the United States have gained the ire of religious extremists. The nation's superpower status and decadent image only intensifies the disapproval. In recent years, however, anti-U.S. sentiment often has turned violent. Several deadly terrorist attacks by radical Islamic fundamentalists have targeted American citizens and interests. But the hatred reached a new intensity with the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 5,000 people and demolishing global symbols of American economic might. Now, even as the United States and its allies seek to destroy Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, critics are questioning America's sensitivity to the concerns of the Islamic world and beyond. In his article, Juergensmeyer continued to cite about how politics have come to become inclined to subsume religious issues: Insofar as the US public and its leaders embraced the image of war following the September 11 attacks, the US view of the war was also prone to religionization. "God Bless America" became the country's unofficial national anthem. US President George Bush spoke of defending America's "righteous cause" and of the "absolute evil" of its enemies. However, the US military engagement in the months following September 11 was primarily a secular commitment to a definable goal and largely restricted to objectives in which civil liberties and moral rules of engagement still applied. In purely religious battles waged in divine time and with heavenly rewards, there is no need to compromise goals. There is also no need to contend with society's laws and limitations when one is obeying a higher authority. In spiritualizing violence, religion gives the act of violence remarkable power. In the end, the analysis of the September 11 attacks, the sound and fury of lives lost and the spate of terror signifies very little apart from the ignorance of those who produced it. This is not about what will succeed after the attacks as the popular media have scared the people, but the question of whether this is or is not a religious war. That question was asked against the backdrop of the Bush Administration's desire that the war not be characterized as a religious one. In the view of a possible religious war, Fish (2002) cited that we could draw out three bad consequences: First, key Islamic nations could not be persuaded to support, or at least to refrain from denouncing, U.S. military operations. Second, millions of U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith would become the large core of an antiwar coalition. And lastly, the United Nations would become polarized along religious lines, with the possible result that any U.S. attack would be censured. In the context of these and related anxieties, the official party line emerged almost immediately: Although Al Qaeda said that its warriors did what they have to do in the service of Allah, theirs was a perverted version of the Islamic faith, and therefore their claim to be acting in its name was false and illegitimate; they simply did not represent Islam and had misread its sacred texts. If you think about it for a moment, this is an amazing line of argument that begs the questions contained in its assertions. Who is it that is authorized to determine which version of Islam is the true one? What religions faith has ever looked outside the articles of its creed for guidance and correction? What is the difference between the confident pronouncements that the Al Qaeda brand of Islam is a deviant one and the excommunications and counter-excommunications of Catholics and Protestants, and within Protestantism of Baptists, Anglicans, Lutherans, not to mention Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Mormons? Merely to pose these questions is to realize that the specification of what a religion is and the identification of the actions that may or may not be taken in its name are entirely internal matters. This is, after all, the point of a religion: to follow a vision the source of which is revelation, ecclesiastical authority, a sacred book, a revered person. One who adheres to that vision does not accept descriptions or evaluations of it from non-adherents citing other revelations, authorities, and texts; and the fact that non-adherents regard some of the convictions at the heart of the vision as bizarre, and regard the actions generated by those convictions as inadvisable or even evil, is merely confirmation, again from the inside, of the extent to which these poor lost souls are in the grip of error and too blind to see. What this means is that in matters of religion there is no public space, complete with definitions, standards, norms or criteria to which one can have recourse in order to separate out the true from the false, the revolutionary from the criminal. And what that means is that there is no common ground that would allow someone or some body to render an independent judgment on the legitimacy of the declarations that issue from Bin Laden and his followers about the religious bases of their terrorist actions. Indeed, only if there were such a public space or common ground could the question "Is this a religious war?" be a real question, as opposed to a tendentious thesis pretending to be a question, which it is. That is to say, the question "Is this a religious war?" is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war. For the question makes assumptions A1 Qaeda members are bound to reject and indeed are warring against: that it is possible to distinguish between religious and non-religious acts from a perspective uninflected by any religion or ideology; or, to put it another way, that there is a perspective detached from and above all religions, from the vantage point of which objective judgments about what is and is not properly religious could be handed down; or that it is possible to distinguish between the obligations one takes on as a person of faith and the obligations one takes on in one's capacity as a citizen; i.e., that it is possible to go out into the world and perform actions that are not related, either positively or negatively, to your religious convictions. And these assumptions make sense only in the context of another: that religion is essentially a private transaction between you and your God and therefore is, at least in principle, independent of your actions in the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow might be political, economic, philanthropic, environmental--imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by persons independently of their religious convictions or of their lack of religious convictions. Indeed, Juergensmeyer emphasized that secular governments have been the objects of terrorism in virtually every religious tradition--not just Islam. He enumerated that a Christian terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995. A Jewish activist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Israel's Prime Minister Yitzbak Rabin. A Buddhist follower, Shoko Asahara, orchestrated the nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subways near the Japanese parliament buildings. Hindu and Sikh militants have targeted government offices and political leaders in India. In addition to government offices and leaders, symbols of decadent secular life have also been targets of religious terror. In August 2003, the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, frequented by Westerners and Westernized Indonesians, was struck by a car bomb. The event resembled the December 2002 attacks on Bali nightclubs, whose main patrons were college-age Australians. In the United States, abortion clinics and gay bars have been targeted. The 2003 bombings in Morocco were aimed at clubs popular with tourists from Spain, Belgium, and Israel. Thus, Juergensmeyer has two questions regarding this spate of vicious religious assaults on secular government and secular life around the world: Why is religion the basis for opposition to the state? And why is this happening now? As we all know, religious activists have been puzzling anomalies in the secular world. Most religious people and their organizations either firmly support the secular state or quite tolerate it. Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, like most of the new religious activist groups, is a small group at the extreme end of a hostile subculture that is itself a small minority within the larger Muslim world. Bin Laden is no more representative of Islam than McVeigh is of Christianity or Asahara of Buddhism. Juergensmeyer further expounds that: Still, it is undeniable that the ideals of activists like bin Laden are authentically and thoroughly religious. Moreover, even though their network consists of only a few thousand members, they have enjoyed an increase in popularity in the Muslim world after September 11, 2001, especially after the US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The authority of religion has given bin Laden's cadres the moral legitimacy to employ violence in assaulting symbols of global economic and political power. Religion has also provided them the metaphor of cosmic war, an image of spiritual struggle that every religion contains within its repository of symbols, seen as the fight between good and bad, truth and evil. In this sense, attacks such as those on the World Trade Center and UN headquarters in Baghdad were very religions. They were meant to be catastrophic acts of biblical proportions. Moreover, Juergensmeyer also elaborated in his article on how globalisation crippled secular nationalism and the nation state. He writes: Globalization has crippled secular nationalism and the nation-state in several ways. It has weakened them economically, not only through the global reach of transnational businesses, but also by the transnational nature of their labor supply, currency, and financial instruments. Globalization has eroded their sense of national identity and unity through the expansion of media and communications, technology, and popular culture, and through the unchallenged military power of the United States. Some of the most intense movements for ethnic and religious nationalism have arisen in states where local leaders have felt exploited by the global economy, unable to gain military leverage against what they regard as corrupt leaders promoted by the United States, and invaded by images of US popular culture on television, the Internet, and motion pictures. Indeed, television images of provocative American entertainers like teenage diva Britney Spears are widely viewed as offensive in strict Islamic countries, where women must cover all parts of their bodies and are forbidden from even speaking to male strangers in public. Freedom of speech prevents the government from blocking the global dissemination of aspects of American culture — such as certain types of movies, television programs and music — that some Muslims find so distasteful (Cooper, 2001). Besides, censoring the entertainment industry probably wouldn't work anyway, says Daniel L. Byman, research director at the Rand Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy, commented that “I don't think the Islamists can win the war on American culture because their people want it. It's not like we're forcing U.S. movies down the throats of the Pakistanis. They want them. Even if the government were to put restrictions on Hollywood, someone would just make black-market videos. So I don't think there's much we can or should do on that front.” Thus, there is an international image of a sinister US that creates a new world order of globalization. The culture of hatred is sowed and some US residents also feared the consequences of this hatred. Within the United States, for example, the Christian Identity movement and Christian militia organizations have been alarmed over what they imagine to be a massive global conspiracy of liberal US politicians and the United Nations to control the world. Juergensmeyer cited the example of Timothy McVeigh, his favorite book is The Turner Diaries, which is based on the premise that the United States has already unwittingly succumbed to a conspiracy of global control from which it needs to be liberated through terrorist actions and guerilla bands. Also in Japan, a similar conspiracy theory motivated leaders of the Aura Shinrikyo religious movement to predict a catastrophic World War III, and attempted to simulate Armageddon with their 1995 nerve gas attack in a Tokyo subway train. In the spate of a "new world order" of global control, there is some truth to the notion that the integration of societies and the globalization of culture have brought the world closer together. Not similar to a cartel of malicious schemers designed this global trend, the effect of globalization on local societies and national identities has nonetheless been profound. Openly, it has undermined the modern idea of the state by providing non-national and transnational forms of economic, social, and cultural interaction. Juergensmeyer viewed that the global economic and social ties of the inhabitants of contemporary global cities are intertwined in a way that supercedes the idea of a national social contract. Living in a global world, it is difficult to determine where particular regions begin and end. For that matter, in multicultural societies, it is hard to say how the "people" of a particular nation should be defined. With the popularized context of Western modernism, the notion that indigenous culture can provide the basis for new political institutions, including resuscitated forms of the nation-state, would definitely do good in uniting the frames of minds of world leaders. Juergensmeyer commented that the movements that support ethno- religious nationalism are therefore often confrontational and sometimes violent. These often reject the intervention of outsiders and their ideologies and, at the risk of being intolerant, pander to their indigenous cultural bases and enforce traditional social boundaries. In the final analysis, there is an immediate need to re-evaluate our thoughts, including world leaders to separate religious issues apart from political and cultural norms. Simply put, politics and religion should never mix. Works Cited Cooper, M.H. Hating America. The CQ Researcher Online, (2001, November 23). Retrieved September 19, 2005, http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2001112300 Fish, S. Postmodern Warfare. Harper's Magazine, Vol. 305, No. 1826. July, 2002 Juergensmeyer, M., Holy Orders: Religious Opposition to Modern States. Harvard International Review, Vol. 25, 2004 Read More