religion violence

Religion 35 (2005) 223e246

www.elsevier.com/locate/religion

Review article

Religion and violence*

Henry Munson

Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA

Abstract

Religion kills. Throughout human history, people have killed in the name of their gods. Emile Durkheimrightly stressed that religion serves to strengthen the bonds of solidarity among those who worship the samegod, in the same way. But the flip side of this solidarity is enmity towards those who worship other gods orworship the same god differently. Religious boundaries separate the pure and virtuous ‘us’ from the impureand evil ‘them’. We who worship our god our way are truly human. The Other, who worships other gods,or the same god differently, is less than human and thus killable. Yet while the hostility towards the Otherfound in most sacred scriptures has often had lethal consequences, one cannot assume that these texts dic-tate the actual behaviour of believers for all time. Scriptures are constantly being reinterpreted as historicalcircumstances change. And some conflicts in which sacred texts get invoked may infact have secular causes.� 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, a number of books have focused on thevarious ways in which religion has been used to legitimate violence. One of the most useful isthe Encyclopedia of Religion andWar, edited by Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez. It would be impossible

* J. Harold Ellens (Ed.), 2004. The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 4Vols. Greenwood Publishing, Westport, CT, xix þ 303 pp. (Vol. 1), xix þ 314 pp. (Vol. 2), xix þ 327 pp. (Vol. 3),

xix þ 265 pp. $300.00 ISBN 0 275 97958 X.Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez (Ed.), 2004. Encyclopedia of Religion and War. Routledge, New York and London,xvi þ 530 pp., $125.00/ £100.00 ISBN 0 415 94246 2.

Charles Selengut, 2003. Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, viii þ 267pp., $24.95/ £20.95 ISBN 0 7591 0361 3 (paperback).L. Weinberg, A. Pedahzur, 2003. Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism. London and Portland, OR,

Frank Cass, 2003, 178 pp., $28.95/£ 20.99 ISBN 0 7146 8394 9 (paperback).

E-mail address: [email protected]

0048-721X/$ - see front matter � 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.religion.2005.10.006

mailto:[email protected]

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224 H. Munson / Religion 35 (2005) 223e246

to discuss all the articles in this work and the others to be reviewed in this essay, so this essay willfocus only on those of particular theoretical interest.

Hinduism and violence

The articles on Hinduism and Buddhism in the Encyclopedia of Religion and War are of theo-retical interest because they serve as useful correctives to the conventional wisdom that onlymonotheistic religions can be violent. The Encyclopedia includes six articles dealing with Hindu-ism. In ‘Hinduism: Vedic Period’ Jarrod Whitaker notes that ‘conquest and martial prestige aredominant motifs in the ritual hymns of the Vedas’ (p. 171). Referring to the post-Vedic period,Whitaker writes that by 100e200 CE ‘the religious teachings of Manu (Manava-Dharmashastra)proclaim honorable warfare the eternal duty of warriors’ (p. 173). In ‘Hinduism, Classical’ Whi-taker describes the celebration of warfare in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Mahabhar-ata includes the Bhagavad Gita, the most famous defense of warfare to be found in any sacred text.David Lorenzen also focuses on the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in ‘Hinduism: EarlyMedieval Period’.

Timothy Lubin’s article on ‘Hinduism: Late Medieval Period’ should be required reading forthose inclined to equate Hinduism with Gandhi’s pacifism. Lubin describes the emergence of or-ganised groups (akhadas) of militant ascetics in the ‘late medieval period’ (1200e1765 CE). Mil-itant Shaiva groups, who were followers of the god Shiva, often fought Vaishnava groups, whowere followers of the god Vishnu. These groups sometimes also served rulers as mercenaries.

Lubin notes that militant Hindu ascetics sometimes attacked Jains and Buddhists as well as fel-low Hindus. Take for example, for example of the Virashaiva, the Shaivas of Karnataka: ‘ManyVirashaiva stories collected in the Basava-Purana approvingly depict Virashaiva ascetics killing‘‘evil’’ Jains and other non-Shaivas, as well as Brahmans’ (p. 168). According to Paul Dundas,many Hindu temples in Southern India include murals of a massacre in Madurai in which8000 Jains were impaled ‘for having taken Shiva’s name in vain’ (Dundas, 1992, p. 109). Similarly,Jonah Blank describes a mural in Madurai’s Meenakshi Temple that shows Shiva ‘impaling anarmy of gray-skinned, black-bearded Jain monks on vicious spikes’ (Blank, 1993, p. 249).

Lubin refers to the early seventeenth-century Telugu text the Rayavachakamu as one of the firstSouthern Indian histories to demonise Muslims. It condemns them ‘for being foreign and barbar-ian (mlechcha), (p. 168). The Sanskrit term mlechcha or mleccha originally referred to the ‘prim-itive barbarians’ subjugated by the Arya during the Vedic period (see Parasher, 1982e1983). Itcame to be used to refer to Muslims and later to Europeans. Kalki, the apocalyptic and finalavatar of Vishnu, will slaughter the mlecchas, along with thieves and ‘all whose minds are devotedto iniquity’ at the end of the current age, the Kali-yuga (Klostermaier, 1994, p. 127). The mlecchais the archetypal impure and killable Other of Hinduism (see Chaudhuri, 1979, p. 189; Keay, 2000,pp. 24, 43, 59, 143, 187e188, 233; Mahmood, 1993, pp. 730e731; Parasher, 1982e1983).

AnupMukherjee does not discuss the concept of themleccha in his entry on ‘Hinduism,Modern’.His approach is apologetic rather than scholarly. He contends that ‘as imperialism developed, theimperial masters created a division between Hindus andMuslims’ (p. 170). This common assertionignores the kinds of precolonial conflicts discussed by Lubin in his article on ‘Hinduism: Late Me-dieval Period’. Mukherjee asserts that the ‘general tenor of modern Hinduism remains that of

225H. Munson / Religion 35 (2005) 223e246

nonviolence combined with a pluralistic outlook’ (p. 170). This common assertion is rather difficultto reconcile with the central political role played by militant Hindu nationalists in the late twentiethand early twentieth centuries. Among the Hindu nationalists’ favorite slogans are: ‘for Muslims,there are only two places, Pakistan or the grave’Halliday, 1995, p. 47;Kumar, 2005, p. 55) and ‘Hin-dustan [India] for the Hindus, the graveyard for Muslims’ (Pratap, 2001, p. 187).

Noor-Aiman I. Khan presents a brief overview of Hindu nationalism in his article on ‘Hindu-Muslim Violence in India’ in the Encyclopedia of Religion and War. The Hindu nationalists’ de-struction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, was followed by riots in whichabout 2200 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Almost ten years later, in February 2002, a Mus-lim attack on Hindu nationalists returning from Ayodhya was followed by riots in which about2000, mostly Muslims, were killed (see Anand, 2005, p. 210). In both of these cases, as well as inmany others, government officials belonging to Hindu nationalist groups were complicit in whatcan be called anti-Muslim pogroms (see Anand, 2005; Brass, 2003; Human Rights Watch, 2002;Kumar, 2005; Varadarajan, 2002). These incidents bear scant resemblance to Gandhian pacifism.This is not to suggest that Hinduism, or any other religion, is inherently and immutably xenopho-bic and violent but that, like most other religions, it can take on these attributes.

From the nonviolence of the Buddha to Buddhist holy war

The Encyclopedia of Religion and War has ten entries on Buddhism, including four on Zen. LikeHinduism, Buddhism is often thought of as an inherently and immutably pacifist religion, and it iscertainly true that the first precept of Buddhism bans killing. But Buddhists, like the followers ofmost other religions, have in fact killed throughout their history. In ‘Buddhism: India’ ToddLewis notes that even Ashoka, the archetypal just ruler of Buddhism, did not disband his army(see p. 44). Lewis cites the famous story of the righteous Buddhist King Dutugamunu (‘Gamunuthe Wrathful’), as told in the Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicle the Mahavamsa, in which Dutuga-munu is described as waging war against the largely Hindu Damilas (Tamils) with a relic ofthe Buddha attached to his spear and accompanied by five hundred Buddhist monks. Broodingon the terrace of his palace, ‘magnificent with nymphs in the guise of dancing-girls’, Dutugamunuis tormented by the fact that his victories over the Damilas have involved the death of ‘millions’ ofhuman beings. Upon hearing of the righteous King’s torment, eight enlightened monks (arahants)come to his palace to comfort him. The King asks them, ‘How shall there be any comfort for me,O venerable sirs, since by me was caused the slaughter of a great host numbering millions?’ Theenlightened monks reply:

From this deed arises no hindrance in thy way to heaven. Only one and a half human beingshave been slain here by thee, O lord of men. The one had come unto the (three) refuges, theother had taken on himself the five precepts [of Buddhism]. Unbelievers and men of evillife were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts. But as for thee, thou wilt bring gloryto the doctrine of the Buddha in manifold ways; therefore cast away care from thy heart,O ruler of men! (p. 44)1

1 Mahanama (1912).


One can hardly imagine a more graphic example of the view that the Other is less than humanand thus killable. Yet this statement occurs in a Buddhist chronicleda chronicle that has becomethe mythic charter of Sinhalese nationalism in modern Sri Lanka (see Kemper, 1991).

In his entry on ‘Buddhism: China’ Richard McBride describes a series of violent millennial Bud-dhist revolts involvingmonks. In ‘Buddhism: Tibet’ Philippe Foret challenges the conventional viewofTibetanBuddhism,which has been influenced by theDalai LamaandhisWestern admirers. Foretwrites that ‘internal warfare has filled the history of Tibet’ since at least 1207 (p. 57). In his bookPris-oners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West Donald Lopez, Jr, writes: ‘Tibetan armiesfought against Ladakh in 1681, against the Dzungar Mongols in 1720, in numerous incursionsinto Bhutan during the eighteenth century, against invading Nepali forces from 1788 to 1792 andagain in 1854, against Dogra forces invading Ladakh fromKashmir in 1842, and against the Britishin 1904’ (Lopez, 1998, pp. 8e9). In the 1950s Buddhist monks and monasteries participated in theTibetan resistance to the Chinese occupation (see Dunham, 2004).

One can’t of course, argue that most of these Tibetan wars were defensive in nature. This is how-ever, not, the case of the conflicts described in BrianDaizenVictoria’s excellent articles onZen in theEncyclopedia of Religion and War. Victoria demonstrates how even a religion normally associatedwith meditation and enlightenment can become nationalistic and bellicose. He notes that in 1896D.T. Suzuki, who presented Zen to the West as an irenic way of life that transcended all ideologies,published a book in which he wrote that ‘religion should, first of all, seek to preserve the existence ofthe state’. Religion, declared Suzuki, shared this burdenwith the (Japanese)military, whichwas alsocharged with making sure that Japan was not ‘encroached upon by unruly heathens’ (jama gedo)(p. 459). ‘Unruly heathens’ is not a term usually associated with Zen Buddhism.

Suzuki’s Rinzai Zen master Shaku Soen served as a Buddhist chaplain in the Japanese armyduring the Russo-Japanese War of 1904e1905. Given that the first precept of Buddhism forbidskilling, the very notion of a Buddhist chaplain in an army might seem to violate the Buddhistethos. But Zen master Soen does not appear to have been troubled by his post and declaredthat he sought to inspire ‘our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so asto enable them to die on the battlefield with the confidence that the task in which they are engagedis great and noble’ (p. 459). Another prominent Zen master, Harada Sogaku, wrote an article in1944 in which he declared: ‘If you see the enemy you must kill him; you must destroy the false andestablish the truedthese are the cardinal points of Zen’ (p. 461). In 1976 the Rinzai master Ya-mada Mumon, chief abbot of Myoshin-ji, the largest Rinzai sect, released a statement in which hewrote that, ‘Japan destroyed itself in order to grandly give the countries of Asia their indepen-dence. I think this is truly an accomplishment worthy of the name ‘‘holy war’’’ (p. 463). EvenZen Buddhists speak of holy war!

Victoria’s excellent articles demonstrate how lethal the combination of religion with national-ism can be, even when the basic sacred texts of the religion in question focus on extinguishing de-sire and attaining enlightenment. The lethal consequences of the fusion of religion withnationalism are also illustrated by the way that Buddhism has been used to justify violence inmodern Sri Lanka. Mark Whitaker provides a good overview of recent Sri Lankan history inhis entry on ‘Sri Lanka’ in the Encyclopedia of Religion and War. But he does not discuss or an-alyse the well-documented role that Sinhalese Buddhist monks have played in advocating and le-gitimating the slaughter of the predominantly Hindu Tamils (see Amunugama, 1991; Berkwitz,2003; Juergensmeyer, 1990; Tambiah, 1992; Bartholomeusz, 2002).


The Zeal of Phinehas, the Bible and the Legitimation of Violence

J. Harold Ellens, the editor of the four-volume work The Destructive Power of Religion: Vio-lence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is a retired Presbyterian theologian and minister. Inone of the eleven chapters that he wrote himself, Ellens informs us that he is ‘a retired U.S.Army colonel, an internationally known scholar, a noted lecturer, and a rather nice guy’ (vol.2, p. 85). He has written books with titles like God’s Grace and Human Health and Psychotheology:Key Issues. For fifteen years he was the ‘Executive Director of the Christian Association for Psy-chological Studies’. Most of the chapters in The Destructive Power of Religion are by ministers,psychologists and others who appear to share Ellen’s interest in Christian ‘psychotheology’.They are of little interest to anyone who does not. But this generally disappointing collectiondoes include a few excellent chapters that should be read by anyone seeking to understand therole of violence in the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. This is notably true ofJohn J. Collins’ ‘The Zeal of Phinehas, the Bible, and the Legitimation of Violence’, which wasoriginally published in the Journal of Biblical Literature (see Collins, 2003). Much of what Collinssays will not be new to scholars familiar with the literature on violence in the Bible, but his over-view is nonetheless lucid and insightful. Still, he does fail to discuss the violence legitimated by theanti-Jewish animus that pervades the New Testament. This is a serious omission.

The LORD is a man of war

Collins focuses primarily on ‘holy war’ as described in the Hebrew Bible, or is what Christiansrefer to as the Old Testament. Like everyone else who discusses war in the Bible, Collins cites thephrase ‘The Lord is a warrior’ in Exodus 15:3 to illustrate the bellicose character of YHWH in theearliest texts of the Bible. This verse is translated as ‘The LORD is a man of war’ in the KingJames Version (KJV) and in Robert Alter’s (2004) valuable translation of the Torah entitledThe Five Books of Moses.2 The ‘man of war’ (ish milhama) verse is embedded in the ‘Song ofthe Sea’, which describes how YHWH slaughtered the Egyptians when they pursued the Israelites:

The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath hecast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea. The depths have cov-ered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone. Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glo-rious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. And in thegreatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sent-est forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble. And with the blast of thy nostrils the

2 I shall use the King James Version (KJV) unless another translation is indicated. As Robert Alter and Frank Ker-

mode have observed, despite its philological deficiencies and occasionally misleading archaism, the King James Version‘is still arguably the version that best preserves the literary effects of the original languages’ (Alter and Kermode, 1987,p. 7). For example, where the KJV translates the beginning of Deuteronomy 20:17 as ‘But thou shalt utterly destroy

[herem] them’, the Jewish Publication Society’s 1985 translation of the Tanakh has ‘No, you must proscribe them’. Rob-ert Alter’s translation of the Torah, (2004), which is among the best, has ‘But you shall surely put them under the ban’.The KJV captures the meaning and the resonance of the Hebrew verb herem far more effectively and poetically than dothe two more modern translations. That said, the notes to Alter’s translation are invaluable.


waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were con-gealed in the heart of the sea. (Exodus 15:3e8)

This is not a distant god to whom one prays for victory. This is a god who slays the enemy byhis own right hand and by the blast of his nostrils. This god is also a national god, leading hisnation in war against other nations with other gods:

Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fear-ful in praises, doing wonders? Thou stretchedst out thy right hand, the earth swallowedthem. Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guidedthem in thy strength unto thy holy habitation. The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrowshall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina. Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; themighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaanshall melt away. Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of thine arm they shallbe as still as a stone. (Exodus 15:11e16)

In the ancient Near East, wars between nations were also wars between their gods. Nationalwars were also holy wars. National and religious identity tended to be intertwined, as remainstrue in much of the world today. Thus when Ruth the Moabite insists on following the Israelitemother of her late husband, she declares, ‘Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’(Ruth 1:16). (For insightful commentaries on this famous verse, see Goldenberg, 1998, p.16;Schwartz, 1997, pp. 90e91.)

Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth

Collins defines the biblical notion of the herem, or ‘ ban’, as ‘the practice whereby the defeatedenemy was devoted to destruction’ (p. 13). Susan Niditch has stressed the sacrificial character ofthe herem, that is, the idea that the slaughtered victims were sacrificial offerings to God (see ‘Ju-daism: Biblical World’, Encyclopedia of Religion and War). But this idea is by no means obvious inthe most famous passages of Deuteronomy that describe how the Israelites should treat the peo-ples they conquer. According to Deuteronomy:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, andhath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites,and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and theHivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greaterandmightier than thou;Andwhen theLORDthyGod shall deliver thembefore thee; thou shaltsmite them, andutterly destroy [herem] them; thou shaltmake no covenantwith them, nor shewmercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt notgive unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thyson from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kin-dled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. (Deuteronomy 7:1e4)

There is no reference to sacrifice here. The ban on intermarriage focuses on the idea that thesekinds of marriages could induce Israelites to worship other gods. This theme is explicitly invokeda few verses later: ‘And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver


thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will bea snare unto thee’ (Deuteronomy 7:16).

Deuteronomy contains the most precise summary of the rules of war in the Hebrew Bible:

When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shallbe, if itmake thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that isfound therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make nopeace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when theLORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof withthe edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in thecity, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thineenemies, which the LORD thyGod hath given thee. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities whichare very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of thesepeople, which the LORD thyGod doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive noth-ing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, theHittites, and the Amorites,the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hathcommanded thee: That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they havedone unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20:10e18)

Once again, the slaughter of the peoples inhabiting the Land of Israel is justified as preventingthe Israelites from engaging in idolatry, or the worship of the gods of the peoples inhabiting theland that God has promised to the Israelites. Elsewhere the Bible justifies the elimination of thenative population by either expulsion or slaughter in more practical terms: ‘But if ye will not driveout the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye letremain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the landwherein ye dwell’ (Numbers 33:55). God justifies the slaughter of the Amalekites as punishment: ‘Iremember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came upfrom Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy [herem] all that they have, and sparethem not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’ (1Samuel 15:2e3).

The fact that one can find verses in the Bible in which God commands that entire peoples beutterly destroyed does not mean that all Jews and Christians believe that these commands remainrelevant in modern times. The whole idea of waging war in the name of God had no practical rel-evance throughout most of Jewish history, when Jews had neither a state nor an army of theirown. Moshe Greenberg writes that ‘the moral sensibility of postbiblical Judaism cancelled the in-discriminate, inevitable application of the herem (which is the plain sense of Scripture)’ (Green-berg, 1995, pp. 469e470). In the twelfth century Maimonides interpreted the command toutterly destroy the seven Canaanite nations and the Amalekites as symbolizing the need to destroy‘idolatry and associated immorality’ (see Reuven Firestone’s, ‘Judaism: Medieval Period’, Ency-clopedia of Religion and War). There are other medieval and modern interpretations of Amalek as‘the evil instinct’ (see Sagi, 1994, pp. 334e336). Thus God’s commandment to ‘blot out the re-membrance of Amalek from under heaven’ (Deuteronomy 25:19) becomes a commandment to ex-tirpate evil. And of course, one can always argue that the Canaanites and Amalekites havevanished, so that the herem commandments are no longer even applicable.


But in the late twentieth century, after the re-emergence of a Jewish state following roughly twomillennia of dispersion, some extremist Orthodox Jews have invoked the biblical herem texts tojustify the slaughter of a people they deem modern Amalekites. An Israeli settler told SamanthaShapiro that ‘the Torah says we should kill all the Arabs’ (Shapiro, 2003). In 1980 Rabbi IsraelHess published an essay entitled ‘Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah’ in the official studentnewspaper of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, Israel’s Modern Orthodox university (Sprinzak, 1991,p. 123). Hess’ argument, which outraged most Israelis, was based on the idea that the PalestinianArabs were the descendants, both literally and figuratively, of Amalek, the archetypal enemy ofthe Jews. The notion that the Palestinians are the modern avatars of the Amalekites is a commontheme in the literature of militant Israeli religious and nationalist groups that advocate the remov-al of all Arabs from the Land of Israel (see Lustick, 1988, pp. 131e132).

In ‘The Zeal of Phinehas, the Bible, and the Legitimation of Violence’, Collins notes, that Chris-tians have often invoked the herem passages of the Bible to invoke the subjugation and dispossessionof native peoples. The Puritans invoked the biblical rules of war against the Canaanites and Ama-lekites to justify the slaughter ofNativeAmericans. In 1689 CottonMather urged the European col-onists of ‘New England’ to fight ‘Amalek annoying this Israel in the wilderness’. Collins writes that‘similar rhetoric persisted in American Puritanism through the eighteenth century’ (p. 20).

More recently, conservative Evangelicals have endorsed the view that Israel should treat thePalestinians much as God commanded the Israelites to treat the Canaanites. In October 2002 Or-thodox Rabbi Benny Elon, a former minister of tourism in the Government of Ariel Sharon, ad-dressed the convention of the Christian Coalition in Washington, DC. He noted that God hadcommanded the Israelites to ‘drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you’ (Numbers33:52) and that Israel was therefore obliged to expel all Arabs from the Land of Israel. As he putit, ‘Let’s turn to the Bible, which says very clearly . we have to resettle them, to relocate them,and to have a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean’. The Christian Evan-gelical audience cheered enthusiastically. None of the other speakers at the conference, includingPat Robertson and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, criticised Elon. In her introductory re-marks at the conference, Roberta Combs, President of the Christian Coalition, declared, that‘We will call on America to safeguard our institutions by returning to the true teachings of theBible’ (Nir, 2002). Ms Combs believes the Bible to be the inerrant word of God. Thus she presum-ably believes that its ‘true teachings’ include the commandment that ‘of the cities of these people,which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing thatbreatheth’ (Deuteronomy 20:16).

Echoing the arguments of scholars like Edward Said (1986) and Regina Schwartz (1997), Col-lins observes that many of the biblical exhortations to eliminate the native populations of theLand of Israel are embedded in the Exodus story, which has often served as a model of liberationin Western history. The liberation of the Israelites entailed the subjugation and dispersion of theCanaanites, not to mention the slaughter of all first-born Egyptian sons. Collins observes thateven many prominent biblical scholars have had no qualms about God’s commands to ‘utterlydestroy’ (herem) the native peoples in the land promised to the Israelites. William Foxwell Al-bright wrote in 1957 that ‘From the impartial standpoint of a philosopher of history, it oftenseems necessary that a people of markedly inferior type should vanish before a people of superiorpotentialities’ (Albright, 1957, pp. 280e281). Collins points out, as have most scholars discussingthe rules of war in the Hebrew Bible in recent years, that archaeological research suggests that the


slaughter of the native peoples prescribed in Deuteronomy and described in the Book of Joshuadid not in fact occur (see Finkelstein and Silberman, 2001). But as Collins observes, the sacredscriptures of Judaism and Christianity still endorse slaughter and portray it as having been com-manded by God. Similarly, there is no historical evidence that a Jewish crowd ever actually toldPontius Pilate, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Matthew 27:25). But these words havenevertheless shaped the Christian imagination, and therefore Jewish history, for two millennia.

The scriptural denigration of the threatening evil other

Just as the biblical accounts of the utter destruction of the Canaanites and other ‘heathen’ shouldnot be read as accurate history, although the traditional believer could not read them any other way,so the modern reader should not read the biblical descriptions of the Canaanites and Philistines asaccurate ethnography. The portrayal of the threatening ‘nations’ in the Hebrew Bible is as mucha caricature as the portrayal of Jews in the Christian Bible. Jon Levenson has described both as hav-ing been ‘born in the white heat of polemic’ (Levenson, 1985, p. 255). TheHebrewBible portrays theCanaanites and the other peoples in the landof Israel asmorally depraved, in part at least, as awayoflegitimating their subjugation, dispossession and indeed destruction (see Cohn, 1994). If they weregood people, such acts would be indefensible.Moreover, theHebrewBible constantly warns against‘lusting after’ the women and the gods of ‘the nations’ precisely because many of the Israelites weredoing so. Had this ‘lusting’ been allowed to continue, the Israelites would have ceased to exist. TheNew Testament portrays the Jews as morally depraved because they refuse to accept Jesus as theMessiah.Had this refusal prevailed,Christianitywould never have beenmore than a fleeting chapterof Jewish history, like Sabbatianism in the seventeenth century and Lubavitcher messianism in thelate twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The threatening Other must be portrayed as evil.

Marcionite myopia

Collin title, ‘The Zeal of Phinehas, the Bible, and the Legitimation of Violence’, is misleading.He spends very little time discussing ‘the zeal of Phinehas’ and, except for a brief reference to thepredictions of Jesus’ apocalyptic slaughter of non-Christians in the Book of Revelation, focusesentirely on the legitimation of violence in the Hebrew Bible. He ignores altogether the legitimationof anti-Jewish violence in the New Testament despite the fact that this subject has been the subjectof much impassioned debate (see Ruether, 1974; Kuper, 1990; Wills, 2000; Carroll, 2001; Bern-stein, 2002; Goldhagen, 2002; Rychlak, 2003).

One can argue that the most notoriously anti-Jewish verses of the New Testament do not ex-plicitly legitimate violence the way the Deuteronomy commands the destruction of all thatbreathes. Yet when looked at in the context of what Christians have actually done to Jews fortwo millennia, the lethal consequences of the New Testament’s anti-Jewish animus are obvious.One thinks of verses like ‘Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye willdo’ (John 8:44) and ‘For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaeaare in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as theyhave of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted


us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men’ (1 Thessalonians 2:14e15). The NewTestament passage most frequently cited in discussions of the ‘Christ-killer’ theme is:

Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all sayunto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? Butthey cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. When Pilate saw that he could prevailnothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before themultitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answeredall the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children (Matthew 27:22e25).

The phrase ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ is an admission of guilt that reflects a Chris-tian rather than a Jewish perspective. As many modern Christian scholars have acknowledged, thisstatement reflects later tensions between Judaism and Christianity rather than the actual views ofJews living during Jesus’ lifetime (see Goldhagen, 2002, pp. 264e265). Nevertheless, it has servedas the classic expression of the deicide charge that Christians have used to persecute Jews.

To write an essay about the legitimation of violence in the Bible without reference to howChristians have used the New Testament to legitimate violence against the Jew is inexcusable. Col-lins is rightly respected as one of the world’s leading authorities on early Jewish apocalypticism.Yet the only explanation one can think of for his failure to discuss the New Testament’s legitima-tion of violence against the Jew is that he suffers from the Marcionite myopia that has tradition-ally afflicted the Christian view of the Bible.

In the second century of the Christian era Marcion emphasised the radical contrast between thecruel God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New Testament. He eventually rejectedthe Old Testament entirely as well as much of the New (see Moynahan, 2002, pp. 112e113). Al-though Marcion himself was excommunicated in 144, his perception of the contrast between thebellicose God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New has continued to shape Chris-tian perceptions of the Bible. Very often, when one raises the issue of violence in the Bible withtraditional Christians, one hears statements like ‘Well, yes, in the Old Testament, of course?’These Christians appear to think the New Testament consists of nothing but the Sermon onthe Mount. They tend to ignore how Jesus is portrayed in the Book of Revelation. Chapternine of this text at the end of the Christian Bible describes an army on horses exhaling fire, smokeand brimstone that will kill one third of all humanity (see Revelation 9:15e18). Chapter nineteendescribes Jesus riding a white horse and waging war on all the wicked unbelievers:

His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written,that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and hisname is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him uponwhite horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword,thatwith it he should smite thenations: andhe shall rule themwith a rodof iron: andhe treadeththe winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God (Revelation 19:11e15).

This is not the gentle (and gentile) Jesus one normally sees in films. Apart from the slaughter ofall non-Christians that the New Testament says will occur in ‘the end times’, most modern Chris-tians also tend to ignore the lethal consequences of verses like ‘His blood be on us, and on ourchildren’ (Matthew 27:25) and ‘Ye are of your father the devil’ (John 8:44). What is self-evident


to any Jewish reader of the New Testament is simply not seen by most Christians. Same text, dif-ferent meaning.

There is, of course, a profound difference between the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis and theNew Testament’s condemnation of Jews who did not accept Jesus as the son of God. Jesus andmost of the early Christians were themselves Jewish by birth. For the better part of two millennia,Jews could avoid being killed by Christians by being baptised, whereas baptism could not saveJews from Auschwitz. It is nonetheless true that the line between religious and racial anti-Semi-tism has often been a porous one and that the Nazis exploited traditional Christian hostility to-wards the Jew (see Kuper, 1990, pp. 366e372). Many Christians have acknowledged this point.For example, Rosemary Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism(1974), Garry Wills’ Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) and James Carroll’s Constantine’sSword: The Church and the Jews, a History (2001). These books suggest that believers can criticisetheir own sacred texts and yet remain believers. But it is clearly hard to criticise what one believesto be the word of God. It is much easier to argue that traditional interpretations have been at faultrather than scripture itself. (Criticising other people’s scriptures is of course, easy.)

From the Sermon on the Mount to the Crusades

Among Jesus’ best-known teachings is the doctrine of non-violence preached in the Sermonon theMount: ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also’ (Matthew 5:39)and ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for themwhich despitefully use you, and persecute you’ (Matthew 5:44). These verses have traditionally beeninvoked by Christian pacifists and shaped the prevailing Christian view of war during the first threecenturies of the Christian era. But religions change. In the entry on ‘Christianity, Early: JesusMove-ment’ in the Encyclopedia of Religion and War Rick Axtell notes that Christian participation in theRoman army became increasingly common in the late second and third centuries (p. 77). WhenChristians did refuse to serve in the Roman armies, it was often because military service involvedoaths and sacrifices considered idolatrous rather because of the pacifism of Jesus (p. 78). Grant Sha-fermakes this same point in his chapter on ‘Hell,Martyrdom, andWar: Violence in Early Christian-ity’ in the third volume of The Destructive Power of Religion (pp. 220e224, 232e233).

After Constantine in 312 transformed Christianity from a persecuted sect into the dominantreligion of the Roman Empire, military service became more acceptable and indeed became a re-ligious duty. As Shafer observes, ‘It seems that once the Emperor Constantine espoused Christian-ity, Christian objections to military service evaporated, suggesting that they were situationalrather than principled’ (p. 236). Theologians like Ambrose (339e397) and above all Augustine(354e430) were soon invoking the holy wars of the Old Testament to defend ‘just war’.

By the time Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade in 1095, Christianity had its own doctrineof holy war. According to the early twelfth-century Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, Urban de-clared that Christians had a religious duty to expel the Muslims from Christian lands:

Concerning this affair, I, with suppliant prayerdnot I, but the Lorddexhort you, heralds ofChrist, to persuade all of whatever class, both knights and footmen, both rich and poor, innumerous edicts, to strive to help expel that wicked race from our Christian lands before it istoo late.


I speak to those present, I send word to those not here; moreover, Christ commands it. Re-mission of sins will be granted for those going thither, if they end a shackled life either onland or in crossing the sea, or in struggling against the heathen. I, being vested with thatgift from God, grant this to those who go. (Peters, 1998, p. 53)

Before attacking the Muslims in the Near East, the Crusaders who heeded Pope Urban’s call toChristian duty slaughtered thousands of Jews in Europe, especially in towns along the Rhine (seePeters, 1998, pp. 109e139; Cohen, 2004).

The Chronicle of Raymond d’Aguilers, a Crusader chaplain, describes the Crusaders’ conquestof Jerusalem on July 15, 1099:

now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen.Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shotthem with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by castingthem into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city.It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were smallmatters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon [actually al-Aqsa Mosque],a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell thetruth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, thatin the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with theblood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. (Peters, 1998,pp. 259e260).

In three days these Crusaders who fought in the name of Jesus slaughtered virtually all the non-Christians of Jerusalemdboth the Muslims and the Jews, the Jews being burned alive in their syn-agogue (see Peters, 1998, pp. 269, 273, 275). All of this bears little resemblance to the Sermon onthe Mount.

Jihad: beyond the Shibboleths

The Encyclopedia of Religion and War contains a number of good articles on the Islamic notionof jihad, which, despite frequent assertions to the contrary, can be translated as ‘holy war’.3 Thesubject of jihad has tended to generate two opposing polemical positions, both of which should berejected by serious scholars. The first is that Islam is inherently and immutably a violent religioncommitted to the slaughter of the infidel. This view is entrenched in the popular imagination of

3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, second ed, s.v. ‘Djihad’. Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, both identified with the ‘neocon-servative’ movement, have condemned Western Middle East specialists for downplaying the violent aspect of Islam andfor exaggerating the importance of the notion of the ‘greater jihad’ as a spiritual struggle against evil (see Kramer, 2002;

Pipes, 2002). Many Middle East specialists have responded by accusing Kramer and Pipes of deliberately perpetuatingOrientalist stereotypes about Islam (see Lockman, 2004). While I take issue with much of what Kramer and Pipes haveto say about the Middle East, they are right to say that many Western scholars of Islam have presented an apologeticview of jihad (see Munson, 2002).


the West as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, and countless acts of violence not beforeand since. This perspective assumes that the violence of Osama bin Laden is the logical and in-evitable consequence of Islamic doctrine as formulated in the Quran. The reality is that religionschange as the societies in which they are embedded do. What flesh-and-blood believers actually dodoes not necessarily correspond to what their sacred texts say they ought to do. The Crusaderswho slaughtered the Muslims and Jews of Jerusalem in 1099 were clearly not loving their enemiesor blessing those who cursed them. Moreover, different believers can and do interpret the sametext in radically different ways. Benny Elon and Pat Robertson may believe that God has com-manded Israel to expel all Arabs from the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean,but many Jews and Christians disagree. Osama bin Laden may believe that slaughtering thou-sands of people in the World Trade Center was an act of righteous zeal, but many Muslims dis-agree. Islam is no more inherently or immutably violent than Christianity or Buddhism isinherently and immutably pacifist.

The second polemical position that serious scholars should avoid is that jihad refers primarilyto the struggle against evil and only secondarily to warfare between believer and infidel. This in-terpretation of jihad, which is reminiscent of how the command to destroy utterly the Amalekiteshas sometimes been interpreted in Judaism, is found in the writings of many Muslims and Westernscholars who seek to undermine the popular stereotype of the inherently violent Muslim. Whilethe notion of the greater spiritual jihad against evil does exist, it has never been the dominantview (see Firestone, 1999; Peters, 1996; Pipes, 2002).

Undermining dangerous stereotypes is a laudable goal, but scholars are not free to rewrite his-tory as they wish it to have been. Islam is not inherently or immutably violent, but the classicalIslamic notion of jihad bears little resemblance to how it is interpreted by modern Muslims andothers who seek to portray Islam as inherently and immutably peaceful. Believers sometimeshave to engage in anachronistic reinterpretation to justify religious reform. But scholars, evenwhen they are believers, should not try to pretend that people of the past conformed to the valuesof the present. The world views enshrined in sacred history rarely correspond to the world viewenshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Recognition of this fact distinguishesthe scholar from the apologist.

Reuven Firestone’s article on jihad in the Encyclopedia of Religion and War is based on his bookJihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (1999). In the article Firestone notes that the word jihadderives from the root j-h-d meaning ‘to strive, exert oneself, or take extraordinary pains’ (p. 234).He cites the hadith that quotes the Prophet Muhammad as saying: ‘The greater jihad is the strug-gle against the self’ but rightly emphasises that Muslims have generally understood jihad to meanholy war between believer and infidel (p. 235).

The Quran distinguishes between ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitab) and polytheist idolaters(al-mushrikun). The original (and some would say the only) ‘people of the book’ are Jews andChristians. The term is derived from the Islamic belief that the Jewish and Christian scripturesare imperfect versions of divine revelations based on an eternal book in heaven. The Quran issaid to be the flawless text of God’s revelations derived from this eternal book. The people ofthe book, according to the Quran and classical Islamic doctrine, are superior to idolaters andare subject to different rules, although the Quran often criticises them severely. In much of theQuran the polytheist idolaters of Mecca are the principal evil Other with whom the virtuousMuslims must compete. But the Jew and the Christian also play this role. This is especially


true of the Jew in those verses believed to have been revealed after the Jewish clans of Madinarefused to accept Muhammad as God’s prophet. Nevertheless, there are, as Firestone observes,many Quranic verses that can be invoked to justify harmonious relations with Jews and Christiansand with infidels in general. For example:

Do not argue with the people of the book except in the better way and except for those whohave been unjust. Say: We believe in what has been revealed to us and in what has been re-vealed to you. Our God (ilahuna) and your God (ilahukum) are one, and it is to him that wesubmit. (29:46)4

There is no compulsion in religion. (2:256)

Oh you who do not believe. I do not worship what you worship. And you do not worshipwhat I worship. I will not worship what you worship. And you will not worship what I wor-ship. You have your religion and I have mine. (109:1e6)

Other verses, however, take a much more belligerent stance towards the infidel. Thus the ‘swordverse’ declares:

When the sacred months in which fighting is forbidden have past, slay the idolaters whereveryou find them. Seize them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them wherever they can be am-bushed. But if they repent and perform the prayer and give the alms, then let them go theirway. For God (Allah) is forgiving and compassionate. (9:5)

This verse gives idolaters (al-mushrikun) the choice between conversion to Islam and death bythe sword. The following verse, by contrast, refers specifically to fighting the people of the book,that is, Jews and Christians: ‘Fight those to whom the book has been revealed who do not be-lieve in God and the last day, who do not forbid what God and his messenger have forbidden,and who do not practice the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya tax by hand and thus ac-knowledge their lesser status’ (9:29). According to the Quran and classical Islamic law, Jews andChristians in Muslim lands were supposed to pay the jizya tax. This tax was a substitute for mil-itary service, but as the Quran makes clear, it was also a symbol of spiritual inferiority vis-a-visthe Muslim.

Firestone rightly observes that according to classical Islamic exegesis, the militant verses 9:5and 9:29 abrogated earlier verses that tended to take a less belligerent stance towards the in-fidel. As Soheil Hashmi observes in his entry on ‘Islam, Sunni’ in the Encyclopedia of Religionand War, the more bellicose Quranic verses reflect the later Madinan period of Muhammad’slife, when the Muslims were at war with the polytheists in Mecca. Many of the less bellicoseverses are believed to have been revealed during the earlier Meccan period, when fightingthe idolaters was not a realistic possibility. Modern Muslims who advocate a tolerant formof Islam naturally tend to favor these verses (see Abou El Fadl, 2002). Osama bin Ladendoes not.

4 All translations of Quranic verses are my own. The Arabic text and a slightly altered version of the Yusuf Ali trans-lation are accessible at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/02905.htm (last accessed January 28, 2005).

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/quran/02905.htm


Sacred fury is not always exclusively sacred

In Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence (2003) Charles Selengut writes:

Some commentators have claimed that there are peaceful religions and ‘‘warrior’’ religionsand that violence is not a problem of religion per se but only of particular religions whichare historically and theologically drawn to violence. Islam is sometimes so described in West-ern writings, while Christianity and some other religions are presented as essentially nonvi-olent. This is an inaccurate generalization, for, as we shall discover, all religions have themesboth of forgiveness and peacemaking as well as demands for retribution and violence againsttheir enemies. (Selengut, 2003, p. 12)

This point is an important and seemingly obvious. But Selengut tends to overlook, in practiceat least, the fact that scriptures constantly reinterpreted in changing historical circumstances. Inthe early nineteenth century have been many Christians invoked the Bible to justify slavery at thesame as other Christians invoked it to condemn slavery (see Haynes, 2002). By the twentieth cen-tury, biblical justifications of slavery had become virtually extinct.

Of jihad, Selengut writes:

The scriptural call to establish a Muslim ummah, an embracing Muslim community, has ledIslam since the time of the prophet Muhammad to divide the world between the lands andstates under Muslim control, referred to in Muslim jurisprudence as Dar al-Islam, the do-main of Islam, and those lands and territories not under Muslim jurisdiction, called Daral-Harb, the domain or abode of war. The faithful Muslim’s duty is to engage in religiousstruggle, jihad, to transform non-Muslim lands, the Dar al-Harb, into Dar al-Islam lands,governed by Muslim law. (Selengut, 2003, p. 29)

Selengut does acknowledge that ‘despite these theological considerations, political reality,military strategy, and evolving religious understandings have modified Islam’s approach toholy war’. Yet he insists that ‘the call to jihad and holy war remains central to Islamic doc-trine and religious culture’ (Selengut, 2003, p. 30) He provides no evidence to support this as-sertion except the fact that the Orientalist Bernard Lewis has made the same claim. Of course,there are many Muslims like Osama bin Laden who would undoubtedly endorse the aggres-sive, expansionist view of jihad enshrined in many early Islamic texts. But does Selengut reallythink that Muslim intellectuals like Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Sari Nusseibeh and Fareed Zakariathink that the call to jihad remains central to Islamic doctrine? The idea is not mentioned oncein the daily prayers that Muslims are supposed to offer five times a day. If Selengut were tospend time with ordinary Muslims worrying about their bills, their children, their jobs and allthe other practical things that other human beings worry about, he would discover that formany Muslims the classical Muslim notion of jihad is as irrelevant as the notion of the heremis to most modern Jews and Christians. This does not mean, as some Muslims would like tobelieve, that Islam has always been ‘a religion of peace’ or that ‘true’ jihad has always in-volved the struggle against evil. It does mean that the Orientalist vision of Islam does not al-ways have much to do with flesh-and-blood Muslims, who laugh, weep and bleed like the restof humanity.


Selengut rebukes secular intellectuals for refusing to recognising ‘the essentially religious natureof much global conflict’ (Selengut, 2003, p. 13). It is, of course, true that one should not assumethat the religious dimension of violent conflict is a mere reflection of secular grievances. At thesame time one should not ignore secular grievances when there is abundant evidence indicatingthat they are significant. In some of the conflicts that Selengut cites as examples of ‘religious vi-olence’, religion serves primarily as a marker of national identity rather than as a set of doctrinesto which conformity is demanded. Selengut himself acknowledges that ‘the power of religiousidentity and religious legitimation is such that even people far from religious faith can be motiv-ated to continue centuries-old battles in the name of religion’ (Selengut, 2003, p. 169). This pointis made more graphically by a well-known Irish joke. A distinguished old man was walking downa dark alley in Belfast one night. Suddenly a masked gunman jumped out and asked him brusque-ly, ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ The old man was terrified and stammered, ‘Well, a-a-a-actually, I-I-I’m an atheist’. ‘Well now’, replied the gunman, with what appeared to be a twinkle inhis eyes, ‘would you be a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?’

Religion can serve as a marker of identity even in the absence of belief (see Munson, 2005a). Ifwe look at many of the modern conflicts routinely referred to as religious, they are in fact religiousprimarily in the sense that the groups involved are distinguished by religion, but not because ofsubstantive doctrinal differences. As Selengut himself observes of Northern Ireland and theformer Yugoslavia, the conflicts in these areas do not involve ‘explicit theological, scriptural,or ritual issues’ (Selengut, 2003, p. 169).

Christians who kill doctors who perform abortions do so out of moral outrage provoked bytheir conviction that abortion is murder. Similarly, ultra-Orthodox Jews who throw rocks atJews who drive on the Sabbath also evince moral outrage provoked by the violation of religiousbelief. Religion does not serve as a mere marker of identity in these cases. But if we look at the‘religious conflicts’ in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, India and Sri Lanka, religion does in-deed serve primarily as a marker. In all of these cases religion also provides useful demonisingmyths to legitimate the slaughter of the Other. But to insist that these cases are primarily religiousis as misleading as the assertion that they have nothing to do with religion.

Selengut’s tendency to gloss over the secular aspects of violent conflict is illustrated by his dis-cussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He contends that ‘the conflict, at its root, is a religiousconflict over rights to a land both sides consider holy and exclusively their own by religious fiat’(Selengut, 2003, p. 32). It would be more accurate to say that the conflict is at root a national onebetween groups claiming the same land. Religion has indeed played, and continues to play, animportant role in the conflict, but Selengut ignores, secular the nationalist dimensions. Referringto God’s promises to grant Abraham and his descendants all the land that Abraham could see(Gen. 13:15), Selengut writes that ‘for Zionist Jews throughout the world these divine reassurancesare indeed eternal and no political arguments can alter the divine arrangements’ (Selengut, 2003,p. 33). Perhaps Selengut is thinking of militant religious Zionists, but his generalisation definitelydoes not apply to secular Zionists, the great majority, or to moderate religious Zionists (see Burg,2005; Gorenberg, 2000; Newman, 2005; Ravitzky, 1996). Similarly, when Selengut refers to RabbiZvi Yehudah Kook as ‘one of the twentieth century’s most authoritative Zionist thinkers’ (p. 33),he is presumably referring to the militant religious Zionists who endorse Kook’s view that Israeldid not have the right to withdraw from the land that God promised to Abraham and his descend-ants. Secular Zionists, and moderate religious Zionists, certainly do not view Zvi Yehuda Kook as


‘one of the twentieth century’s most authoritative Zionist thinkers’ (see Newman, 2002; Sprinzak,1991).

Selengut ignores the views of those secular Jews who created modern Zionism and the state ofIsrael because they felt that Jews would only be safe from anti-Semitic persecution in a state oftheir own. In 1882 Leon Pinsker wrote, ‘The goal of our present endeavors must be not the‘‘Holy Land,’’ but a land of our own.’5 In 1897 Max Nordau wrote: ‘Zionism has nothing todo with theology; and if a desire has been kindled in Jewish hearts to establish a new common-wealth in Zion, it is not the Torah or the Mishnah that inspire them but hard times’ (quoted inRavitzky, 1996, p. 93). Two months later, Nordau gave the opening speech at the first ZionistCongress, during which he was elected one of three Vice-Presidents of the Zionist Organisation.Nordau’s deliberately provocative statement ignored the fact that Zionism was in fact a secularattempt to achieve the return to the Land of Israel promised in the Hebrew Bible and thatmost Jews would inevitably view it in terms of these promises. Still, all of the most influential Zi-onist theorists were secular intellectuals indifferent or vehemently hostile to religion (see Avineri,1998, p. 3). The Zionist movement was always primarily a secular movement, albeit one in whichreligious expressions became important symbols of national identity. Religious Zionists becamea powerful political force in Israel only in the late twentieth century, and even then they remaineda minority dependent on the support of secular allies (see Sprinzak, 1991, 1999).

Selengut’s discussion of Palestinian and Arab opposition is as distorted and ‘essentialist’ as hisportrayal of Zionism. He does not discuss Palestinian nationalism at all. Instead, he focuses onIslam: ‘The areas of the Holy Land are, in Islamic understanding, Muslim lands .. These landsand holy sites are part of an extended Dar al-Islam, which may never be ceded to non-Muslims’(Selengut, 2003, p. 34). These arguments are indeed commonplace in Islamist texts, but they are ofmarginal significance to ordinary Palestinians waiting for hours at Israeli checkpoints to go toschool, work or a hospital (see Hass, 1999). David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister,had a far more realistic understanding of Arab hostility to Israel, though he, too, avoided speak-ing of Palestinian nationalism:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms withIsrael. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but whatdoes that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but twothousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hit-ler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and sto-len their country. Why should they accept that? (quoted in Goldmann, 1978, p. 99)

If Selengut were correct in assuming that Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel stemmedmainly from Islamic doctrine, it would be impossible to explain the fact that the most famous ad-vocate of the Palestinian cause in the late twentieth century was a Christian-born Palestinian-American scholar who called himself ‘an almost doctrinaire secularist’ (Said, 2002, p. 74). EdwardSaid, who died in 2003, sometimes spoke of religion in caustic terms reminiscent of Richard Daw-kins: ‘Lift off the veneer of religious cantdwhich speaks of the ‘‘best and noblest in the Judaic,

5 Pinsker (1916, original edition,1882, Part 2, http://www.doingzionism.org.il/resources/view.asp?id¼ 189, last ac-cessed September 11, 2005).

http://www.doingzionism.org.il/resources/view.asp?id=189


Christian, or Muslim tradition,’’ in perfectly interchangeable phrasesdand a seething cauldron ofoutrageous fables is revealed, seething with several bestiaries, streams of blood, and innumerablecorpses’ (Said, 1999, p. 152). Somehow it is hard to imagine a man who speaks this way beingdriven to political activism by the loss of part of Dar al-Islam to infidels. Of course, Islam suffusesPalestinian national identity at the popular level, much as Catholicism pervades Irish nationalidentity (see Munson, 2003a, 2004). But Islamic doctrine is still not the root cause of Palestinianhostility to Israel.

Fundamentalism, nationalism and terrorism

The Orientalist assumptions in Charles Selengut’s Sacred Fury are also present in some of theessays in Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism, edited by Leonard Weinberg andAmi Pedahzur. This is most obviously true of ‘The Uniqueness of Islamic Fundamentalism andthe Fourth Wave of International Terrorism’ by Gabriel Ben-Dor and Ami Pedahzur.

Ben-Dor and Pedahzur define ‘fundamentalism’ as ‘a movement that is radical in terms of itsgoals, extremist in terms of its methods and literalist in terms of its adherence to scripture’ (p. 73).They focus on fundamentalism in Middle Eastern Islam. They begin by emphasising the role ofjihad: ‘The willingness to sacrifice for one’s faith may be a requirement in most religions but itis only in Islam that there is such an explicit doctrine of fighting for the faith and a doctrinethat is so deeply ingrained in the popular mind’ (p. 74). They contend that ‘jihad is in fact oneof the most popular concepts among Muslims’ and that ‘jihad occupies in the mind of most Mus-lims a much more important and prominent place than in the case of other religions’ (p. 75).Weinberg and Pedahzur provide no evidence to support these assertions, though it is undoubtedlytrue that more Muslims take the notion of holy war seriously in the twenty-first century than doJews or Christians. Yet we have seen that comparable notions, both explicit and implicit, can infact be found in all the major world religions. Tessa Bartholomeusz has argued that many militantBuddhists see the Sri Lankan civil war between the largely Buddhist Sinhalese and the largely Hin-du Tamils as a holy war (see Bartholomeusz, 2002). Be that as it may, the fact that the notion ofholy war is taken more seriously today in Islam than in Judaism or Christianity is not because it ispart of the eternal and immutable essence of Islam but because the Islamic world has not under-gone the degree of secularisation that the West has, although the degree of Western secularisationshould not be exaggerated.

The fact that extremist groups endorsing the idea of violent holy war remain among the mostpowerful political forces in the Islamic world is indeed outrageous, as are apologetic attempts togloss over this fact. But Islam is not there by inherently thereby more violent than other reli-gions. The Bible contains and prescribes at least as much violence as does the Quran, not allJews and Christians are thereby wild-eyed fanatics determined to kill all those reviled in theirscriptures.

Ben-Dor and Pedahzur endorse the common assertion that Islam encompasses ‘every aspect ofthe life of the individual as well as the community’ (p. 77). For this reason, they argue, ‘separationof religion from state is indeed not a viable option and it does not exist, constitutionally, in any ofthe Arab countries’ and secularism is fragile even in Turkey (p. 77). They concede that Judaism,too, is a religion with rules encompassing all aspects of life, but they contend that the practical


realities of history have eroded the authority of most of these rules (p. 78). Like many Muslimfundamentalists as well as Western Orientalists, Ben-Dor and Pedahzur do not seem to under-stand that Islam has likewise been transformed by history. The notion that Islam encompassesall aspects of life means little or nothing to the average Muslim. Again, if Ben-Dor and Pedahzurknew more about how real Muslims actually lived, as opposed to how ancient texts say theyshould live, they would realise that their characterisation of Islam is a caricature.

Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism contains some good essays that avoid theOrientalist assumptions of the chapter by Ben-Dor and Pedahzur. This is true, for example, ofthe chapter by Arie Perliger and Leonard Weinberg on ‘Jewish Self-Defence and Terrorist Groupsprior to the Establishment of the State of Israel’, which focuses on the Irgun, or Etzel (from IZL,acronym of the Irgun Zvai Le’umi, ‘the National Military Organization’), and the Stern Gang, orLehi (from LHY, acronym of Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). Per-liger and Weinberg define terrorism as involving ‘sub-national groups carrying out acts of polit-ically motivated violence intended to influence the behaviour of some audiences’ (p. 91). Theypresent excellent narrative histories of both Etzel and Lehi. Unfortunately, they conclude theiressay by asserting that ‘the Lehi, and for the most part the Etzel as well, should be consideredas examples of Jewish fundamentalism’ (p. 166). They reach this remarkable conclusion asfollows:

an important matter we need to consider is whether or not these groups fit established def-initions of religious fundamentalism. Is the fact they incorporated religious elements in theirdoctrine enough? The answer is largely positive. First, both the Etzel and the Lehi adaptedtraditional texts in perpetrating new strategies in fighting the British and the Arabs. Second,their ideology reflected the classic dichotomy between the forces of good and the forces ofevil (that is, everyone opposed to the Messianic model they presented). Third, they saw them-selves as the followers of historical, radical, religious groups. Finally they were strongly or-ganised along authoritarian lines during their most active periods. (p. 116)

This loose usage of the term ‘fundamentalist’ infuriates scholars (see Munson, 2003b,c,2005a,b). Etzel and Lehi were both fundamentally nationalist movements, and indeed largely sec-ular ones at that (see Begin, 1951; Zadka, 1995; Heller, 1995; Schattner, 1991, pp. 147e255). Ofcourse, they ‘adapted traditional texts’, but they often did so in ways, that demonstrated their es-sentially nationalist rather than fundamentalist goals. In 1943, when Jews were being gassed in thedeath camps of the Third Reich, Yitzhak Shamir, a leader of Lehi and a future Prime Minister ofIsrael, declared:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. Weare very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have beforeus the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws inthe world: ‘‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man.’’ We are particularly far from having anyqualms with regard to the enemy, whose moral degradation is universally admitted here. Butfirst and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under thepresent circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the wholeworld, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against theoccupier (quoted in Lustick, 1995, p. 527).


Shamir does invoke the authority of the Torah, with specific reference to the doctrine of theherem, but he does so to legitimate what he refers to explicitly as ‘our national war’ and ‘ourwar against the occupier’. The second reason that Perliger and Weinberg give for labeling theIrgun that and Lehi is that ‘their ideology reflected the classic dichotomy between the forces ofgood and the forces of evil (that is, everyone opposed to the Messianic model they presented)’.This argument reflects the common assertion that a Manichaean world view is a distinctivefeature of fundamentalism. But such a world view is not found only among fundamentalists.It is commonplace in all kinds of conflictsdon both sides of the Cold Wars for example. Asfor Messianism, it was certainly not a major source of contention between the Irgun and Lehion the one hand and the various forces opposed to them on the other d the British, theJewish Agency, the Hagana and the Palestinian Arabs (see Begin, 1951; Bell, 1977; Heller,1995).

The third reason that Perliger and Weinberg give for labeling the Irgun and Lehi ‘fundamen-talist’ groups is that they ‘saw themselves as the followers of historical, radical, religious groups’.Of course, they did. Even the most secular of secular Zionists venerated the Maccabees as heroicfighters for the liberation of the Jewish people. This admiration does not, however, make themfundamentalists. Finally, Perliger and Weinberg argue that Etzel and Lehi were fundamentalistgroups because ‘they were strongly organised along authoritarian lines during their most activeperiods’. So what? There have been countless secular authoritarian movements.

Perliger and Weinberg’s characterisation of the Irgun and Lehi as fundamentalist groupsdemonstrates the wisdom of Michael Barkun’s critique of the abuse of the term ‘fundamental-ist’ in his chapter on ‘Religious Violence and the Myth of Fundamentalism’ in Religious Fun-damentalism and Political Extremism. Barkun writes that the widespread usage of the term‘fundamentalism’ has resulted in ‘degradation of meaning, as well as questionable applications’(p. 57). Rejecting the common assumption of a necessary link between fundamentalism andterrorism, Barkun notes that ‘American fundamentalists almost never considered violence asappropriate option’ (p. 58). This is certainly true with respect to mainstream Christian funda-mentalists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, Christian fundamen-talists have played important roles in the Ku Klux Klan (see Marsh, 1997, pp. 49e81). Andthey have been involved in the murders of abortion doctors and various attacks on abortionclinics (see Juergensmeyer, 2003, pp. 19e36; Stern, 2003, pp. 147e171). Barkun is neverthelessright to challenge the common assumption that anyone who insists on strict conformityto a sacred text is ipso facto an advocate of violence. He is also right to emphasise that‘while those commonly deemed fundamentalists claim ultimate fidelity to sacred texts, themeaning they extract from the texts can change over time’ (p. 66). Christian fundamentalistministers who once portrayed the idea of racial integration as a Satanic communist conspiracynow routinely allow African-Americans to pray in their churches (see Martin, 1996, 57e58,69e72, 76, 79).

Among themost interesting chapters inReligious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism is Jon-athan Fox’s ‘Counting the Causes and Dynamics of Ethnoreligious Violence’. The value of thischapter lies in the questions that it asks rather than in the answers that it provides. Fox contendsthat his goal is ‘to build a model for understanding a specific manifestation of religious violencedethnoreligious violence’ (p. 119). He states that he is concerned with what he calls ‘national funda-mentalist’movements inwhich ‘religion andnational divides coincide resulting in amovementwhere


the two forms of ideology are intermixed and often fuel each other’ (p. 120). Fox informs us that hisgeneralisations are largely based on the ‘Minorities at Risk database’. Unfortunately, he providesvirtually no data from this database and no evidence to support his generalisations, which are oftencouched in political science jargon. Nevertheless, his questions and generalisations are important.Thus he asks, ‘Do ethnoreligious conflicts, those conflicts where minorities are both ethnicallyand religiously distinct, also involve religious issues?’ (p. 122). He appears to be asking whether re-ligion serves merely as a marker of identity in these conflicts or is truly the source of conflict. Thisquestion is important. He answers it by informing us that out of 105 ‘ethnoreligious’ conflicts, reli-gionwas aprimary issue only in 12 (11.4 per cent) anda secondary issue in 65 (26.7 per cent).Religionwas ‘not an issue at all’ in 28 (26.7 per cent) of these cases (p. 123). The problem is thatFox gives us noidea of how he has come up with these numbers. Unless we know what criteria he used to producethem, they are meaningless. Still, Fox deserves credit for asking important questions. Perhaps heprovides more detailed answers in other publications.

Conclusion

The fact that a sacred text contains divine commands to despise or kill ‘the Other’ does notmean that the believers in the sanctity of the text must actually be doing so. Religions changeas the societies in which they are embedded change. While a few Israeli extremists portray Pales-tinians as Canaanites or Amalekites who deserve to be slaughtered, most modern Jews find thesenotions repugnant. While Christians invoked the New Testament to persecute and slaughter Jewsfor roughly two millennia, few still do so todaydeven though the New Testament still containsverses like ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Matthew27:25). Similarly, the fact thatone can find verses in the Quran demanding that Muslims kill infidels does not mean that mostMuslims in the twenty-first century believe that they should do so.

As societies evolve and ‘tolerance’ gradually replaces exclusivist hostility towards the Other, be-lievers downplay the verses they once stressed and emphasise the verses they once downplayed.The same Torah that contains the commands to slaughter the idolatrous nations inhabiting theLand of Israel also contains the commandment ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for yeknow the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9).Thesame Gospel of Matthew that declares ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (27:25) also de-clares ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you’ (5:44). Similarly, the same Quran that states‘slay the idolaters wherever you find them’ (9:5) also states ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion’(2:256). One can always find scriptural verses to legitimate both the slaughter and the acceptanceof the Other. That said, one often has to wrestle strenuously with ancient sacred texts to makethem tolerant and tolerable in an age when the slaughter of the Other is no longer generallydeemed an act of righteous zeal.

While the power of sacred texts to induce hatred and violence should not be ignored, it is a mis-take to view all conflicts that may have a religious dimension as mere consequences of scripture. Inmany cases religion serves primarily as a marker of national identity rather than as a blueprint forhow believers should live their lives. While it is important not to assume that all religious griev-ances are mere reflections of secular problems, it is also important not to ignore secular grievanceswhen there is abundant evidence of their importance.


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religion violence

Documents

osama bin

authoritative

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moderate religious

oxford university

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