Does Terror have a Religion??

Does Terror have a religion??

Just a random thought with all the stereotypes doing the rounds post 9/11 – Does terror have a face and religion? Is it based on any ideology?
That got me reading on a whole load of stuff which, honestly took me quite sometime to digest and writing my thoughts down on this subject was the most difficult as this topic is closest to my heart and I feel so strongly on this subject.

Does the bomb have a religion? Does the blast discriminate among victims?
In the July 2011 serial blasts in Mumbai, a Muslim family lost a son who was in his early twenties and had gotten married just a couple of months ago. Is the pain of this family any less acute than that of many others who lost their loved ones but, belonging to a different religion or community? Terror has victims not a religion. The merchants of terror know no religion. 

How is it justified to give a religious tag to terror?
Had terror had a religious affiliation, then Muslims in Pakistan should not have lost their lives at the hands of various terror groups. In the last six years according to various available statistics more than 35,000 Pakistanis have been killed in incidents of terror. No doubt terrorism has found a safe haven in Pakistan, due to several political reasons, and this is a threat not only to the host country, but the entire region.

“Religious terrorism is terrorism by those whose motivations and aims have a predominant religious character or influence” This is a definition as provided by Wikipedia.


Bruce Hoffman has characterized modern religious terrorism as having three traits:
 The perpetrators must use religious scriptures to justify or explain their violent acts or to gain recruits.
 Clerical figures must be involved in leadership roles. 
 Apocalyptic images of destruction are seen by the perpetrators as a     necessity.

In the wake of recent terror attacks, Western society has jumped to an easy and, it might seem, obvious conclusion. Seeking to eradicate terrorism means discovering the motivations of the terrorists. Not a difficult task, many would say. The perpetrators of the attacks on Glasgow, London, Bali, Madrid, New York, Mumbai, Delhi and other places have all claimed inspiration from their religion. Osama bin Laden justified the World Trade Center attacks by quoting the Qur’an, while Jim Walker of NoBeliefs.com rejects all subtleties in declaring that “belief causes terrorism.” If religion is the cause, many argue, then surely eradicating all forms of belief would remove terror from our world. I wonder how much this statement will hold water when put to its acidic test.

“Terror was practised during the last century on a scale unequalled at any other time in history, but unlike the terror that is most feared today much of it was done in the service of secular hopes.” —John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. He further goes on to state that Saddam Hussein led an Iraqi nation that “was thoroughly secular, [ruled] by a western-style legal code,” according to Gray. Yet that did not prevent untold oppression and brutality. The Human Rights Watch estimates that Hussein’s government “murdered or ‘disappeared’ some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more.” 
The cause for terror and violence lies somewhere within our inner nature. The apostle James explained this in his epistle, the earliest of the apostolic letters: “Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way. . . . You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it” (James 4:1–2, The Message Bible).
In effect, blaming terror and violence on religion, as many today are too eager to do, is both dangerously reductive and shirks responsibility for the world. What many forget is that religion, as most of us know it, is a man-made construct, far divorced from the principles and values that God originally intended for humanity. Under this light, religion and atheism are both human designs and are therefore very similar in character. That both can act in aggressive and cruel ways is no surprise, as each emanates from the same source: religion, atheism and terrorism are all products of humanity’s primary and at times violent nature.

When we respond to attacks upon places of worship with the question "Is nothing sacred?” we misunderstand the connection between religion and violence. The point is that places of worship are attacked not in spite of their holy character but because of it. It is no accident that sacred buildings are seldom attacked when they are empty. The point is to attack and kill the worshippers in the very act of worship and in the place most sacred to their faith. This violation of the holy place as a refuge arouses terror, because it shows that the holy is attacked in the name of the holy. Terror acknowledges no sanctuary least of all that offered by the secret heart of that which is the object of its hatred. Other attacks are directed against symbolic centres of power, such as the World Trade Center, or against representative buildings such as embassies or against places which symbolise the crossroads or the nerve centres of modern society such as supermarkets, air terminals, railway stations and of course airplanes. These attacks are not utilitarian in the sense that they are intended to paralyse or disrupt; rather, they are symbolic in the sense that they are intended to reveal the essential vulnerability of secular power.

It is possible to observe some general features. Terrorists almost never act alone. They are seldom psychopaths or crazy individuals, twisted by hatred. The people who commit these actions are almost invariably members of movements dedicated to certain objectives. The terrorists themselves, and this includes the so-called suicide bombers in Israel, are often rational, articulate, well educated and pleasant enough as people. Indeed, we misunderstand these actions if we regard them as merely maniacal – they are not irrational but are the products of a rational view of the world – a view which is if anything exaggerated in its rationality to the point where the perfect coherence which rationality demands is no longer available. Terrorist actions represent the rational mind at the end of its tether, the desperation of the attempt to retain reason in a mad world. This is the point at which religion, the outstanding example of the human need for a complete world view, makes its contribution. The rationality of religion produces the irrationality of terror by setting desperation in a frame of cosmic meaning.

The shock of the 9/11 attacks was so great, and the personal losses so deep, that many people understandably sought simple answers for such overwhelming malevolence. What, they asked, would cause someone to hijack a plane of innocent civilians and fly it into a building? Since Osama bin Laden's holy warriors carried out the attacks, some decided that Islam was clearly to blame, case closed. Others  didn't stop at Islam and instead said that all religions are bad because they all inspire senseless violence. In the decade since 9/11, however, experts in religion and terrorism have elaborated more complex theories for the role religion plays in global violence.

Jessica Stern, author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," has come at it a different way. Stern argues that for many Muslim youths, the idea of terrorism under the guise of "jihad" became a "global fad" akin to gangsta rap. In short, it's less a religious phenomenon than "a cool way of expressing dissatisfaction with a power elite." "Jihad has become a millenarian movement with mass appeal, similar, in many ways, to earlier global movements such as the anarchists of the 19th century or even the peace movement of the 1960s and '70s," Stern wrote in 2006. "But today's radical youth are expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo by making war, not love." Viewing terrorists as a kind of inverted hippie or as a victim of "Prozac piety" might seem to some to be a distraction, but the research is less an intellectual exercise than an attempt to better understand the roots of faith-based terrorism in hopes of preventing it.

Mark Juergensmeyer an American scholar and writer best known for his studies of religious violence and global religion and also advises the Obama administration on fighting terrorism, echoes the prevailing consensus when he says that a military-only approach to counterterrorism only gives religious fanatics the martyrdom and affirmation they seek. More effective, he says, are "counter-radicalization" tactics that engage and thwart extremism before it metastasizes. Religion is not THE problem," agrees Mark Juergensmeyer, author of "Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence." "But it then becomes problematic because religion brings a whole host of absolutistic symbols and images and justifications" that act as an accelerant to terrorism.

Terrorism in India is primarily attributable to religious communities and Naxalite radical movements. In India one can safely say it is Politics that use religion to guide terror group’s right from Partition to now all acts of terror are communal though stoked by selfish Political agenda. Here I ask myself how justified is it to stoke the danger of Islamic terror in India and incite the majority Hindu population to make Muslims second class citizens?

After the July 2011 attacks Subramaniam Swamy, of the BJP, and an undeclared spokesperson of the Hindu rightist groups, wrote a piece in which he hurled accusations at the Muslim community for killing Hindus in “halal fashion” and asked Hindus to retaliate. In a time when people are getting increasingly frustrated and paranoid with continuous terror attacks in different parts of India, particularly Mumbai, Swamy is trying to exploit the raw sentiments of the people to create divisions in the society, in the name of religion. And by doing this Hindu Swamy and his patrons are pandering to the design of those so called Islamic forces who want to turn India’s diversity into divisiveness, who want to keep the country’s religious fault-lines wide open thereby attacking the very idea of India.

If Islamist militant groups abhor India’s cosmopolitanism, its socialism of religious traditions and existence, so do the Hindu rightist groups, who have for long been trying to turn the country into a theocratic state. Hindu rightists have been thriving by exploiting religion and by polarising democracy in the name of religion.

Narendra Modi a by-product of this kind of politics, violating his duties as chief minister of Gujarat, did as no other ruler in modern India had done before – he allegedly allowed the genocide against Muslims in 2002, thereby creating a deep wedge among the two faiths who have been coexisting together for ages. Then there were the alleged terror attacks perpetrated by the Hindutva brigades in the last few years -the terror attacks in Malegaon in Maharashtra (2006, 2008), the Samjhauta Express bombings (2007), a bomb blast at the Sufi shrine in Ajmer Sharif (2007), the Mecca Masjid bombing, and an attack in Modasa in Gujarat (2008).

It is to the credit of the Indian state that the fundamentalist groups do not get the kind of patronage they enjoy elsewhere. They have always been at the margin in India and people understand the design of the Hindu rightist groups. That’s the reason why a person like Narendra Modi is a persona non grata in some of the states in his own country; he is at the receiving end of an enquiry constituted by the country’s highest court and people like him are always exposed by the media and masses. People of India have understood the designs of internal and external terrorists. This is the reason that no matter how grave the provocation is, they stand up to the terrorists by remaining united; they know that this is an attack not on a particular religion but on the sovereignty of the country.
Again coming back to 9/11 - Globally, the understanding of terror, particularly Islamic terror, has undergone a massive change during the decade after 9/11. It’s increasingly clear now that the actors involved in terror activities may belong to a particular religion but they in no way represent the cause of the religion, neither are they authorised by anybody to do so.

A whopping percentage of respondents across religions in a CNN-IBN & CNBC-TV18 state of the nation survey believed terror had no religion and a terrorist can belong to any faith. However, between 2009 and 2011, there has been a slight dip in the number of people thinking that way. In 2009, 53 percent of respondents did not believe terror had any link with religion; the number was down to 47 percent in 2011. Interestingly, 52 percent of urban Hindus and 59 percent of all Muslim respondents did not believe religion and terror were closely linked. Only 30 percent of Hindus and 17 of Muslims believed there was a link. As the numbers suggest, a big majority of Muslims are not convinced that the terrorists had anything to with their religion.

Similarly in the US CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “the terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated.” Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes.  It has become axiomatic in some circles to chant: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims.” But perception is not reality.

There is no end to this debate except a hope that may wisdom prevail over the radicalists whichever side of the fence they are on and may there be peace all around.