aziz says:
actually i very much endorse Razib’s formulation. “Muslims killing people for political ends” is accurate, as opposed to what the jafis assert (”Muslims killing people for religious ends”)
as the years have gone by i’d really just gotten skeptical of the whole idea that there are monocausal religious motivations. religion is just part of culture, and so one major element in a cognitive and social toolkit. during the 1970s leftist nationalism was very vibrant, so palestinian terrorism was naturally labeled as such (since the PFLP had many members from christian backgrounds, it would have been dumb to label them ‘islamic terrorists’). now leftist nationalism is not so vibrant, and even secular palestinian organizations tend on to take religious nationalist trappings to “compete.” now you have explicit islamic terrorists such as hamas and islamic jihad.
but is the ultimate motivation really that different? to non-religious people the individual returns on faith are less relevant (because they aren’t personally religious) than the fact that religion is used as a means toward particular ends. religion doesn’t entail any specific social configuration, but, it is very good at serving as a cement for a movement (e.g., temperance, civil rights, anti-abortion, etc.). the same could be said for nationalist movements like the IRA, ETA and the tamil tigers who have been influenced by marxism. rather far from a post-national anarchic utopia of the workers, aren’t we?
is there a point in prefixing terrorists at all? probably some. i’d assume there is some bias on the nature of target between left, right and religious terrorists, though perhaps far less than one might assume (after all, most explicit muslim terrorists have ended up having a bigger body count for other muslims than anyone else).
aziz 1:35 pm on December 11, 2008 Permalink |
I am not sure if I disagree or agree, so I will disagree as an excercise. Religion can provide a monocausal motivation for a believer to engage in an act. The most obvious of this is mandated piety like pilgrimage or prayer, but also religious faith can provide motivation for self-improvement as well as the final push over the edge into insanity. There probably are terrorists who derive their entire motivation from purely religious concerns (though one oculd argue that the moment the start talking about Islam as a mere thing that needs to be defended, they have crossed the line into politics, not faith). But the problem here is that their interpretations are neither mainstream nor even correct, as evidenced by the overhwelming concensus of scholars and religious authorities, and the simple empirical fact that a billion muslims worldwide do not emulate those acts.
In another thread, Razib, you uncharacteristically invoked the “I’m not muslim therefore I am under threat of my life in a muslim ocuntry” which I think is an assumption of a monocausal religious motivation – you are contradicting yourself. FWIW given teh choice between a “Catholic” country (of which there rae none at present) and a “muslim country” (whose definition varies, but lets agree on “majority population self-identifies as muslim” then given historical evidence I’m sticking with the muslim country, even if its Saudi. You may have had in mind pre-2003 Afghanistan or some failed state in Africa, but on the whole you’d be choosing unwisely, empirically speaking.