S1W13

Abrahamic Religions

“students”

Extremists

Terrorism

Islamism

Taliban

Al Qaeda

Jihad

Kelkal

“Born-again”

Secularism

Secularization thesis

Secular nationalism

Parochial

French Revolution

Catholicism

NATO

Hamas

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Khaled

Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord

a French and Algerian terrorist affiliated with the GIA

Groupe Islamique Armé

The Armed Islamic Group was one of the two main Islamist insurgents groups that fought the Algerian government and army in the Algerian Civil War. It was created from smaller armed groups following the 1992 military coup and arrest and internment of thousands of officials in the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party after that party won the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991.

Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-’Islāmiyyah

a Palestinian Islamic movement founded in 1987 with the aim of establishing a Palestinian state incorporating present-day Israel and the West Bank. In 2006 Hamas defeated the more moderate Fatah in the elections for the Palestinian National Authority.

September 11 Attacks

“The last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first have witnessed the emergence of a Hindu nationalist party in India, an antigovernment Buddhist movement in Sri Lanka, Christian militias in the United States, xenophobic Christian nationalists in Europe, Jewish extremists in Israel, and Muslim activists in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and throughout the Middle East” (234).

“This activism is surprising, because only a few decades ago some of the best minds were predicting the death of religion” (234).

One of the main premises of the Enlightenment vision of the nation-state is that although religion is regarded as necessary to provide the sense of cultural homogeneity that makes a nation cohesive, it should stay out of public life. The idea of the state was a secular one, in which interests of individuals and groups could be adjudicated through reason and the secular instruments of government.

ORIGIN

early 18th century (in the sense ‘award judicially’): from Latin adjudicat- ‘awarded judicially’, from the verb adjudicare (see adjudge). The noun adjudication (as a Scots legal term) dates from the early 17th century.

“The globally-televised images of the aftermath of the savage attacks on a Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin in 2012 and a youth camp in Norway in 2011 brought back memories of other horrific scenes—the London subways in 2005, the Madrid train bombings in 2004, the catastrophic assault on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the many suicide bombings in Iraq and Israel, and all of the other recent examples of the explosive power of religion” (239).

“It is not religion that has suddenly gone bad in the first decade of the 21st century, but rather that things in the world have. Radical religious ideologies have become the vehicles for a variety of rebellions against authority that are linked with myriad social, cultural, and political grievances” (239).

“Religious ideologies have emerged in the twenty-first century as new bases for political legitimacy and national identity at a time when the nation-state is vulnerable. In an era of economic globalization and the mobility of traditional populations, and in the wake of secular nationalism’s failure to deliver its promises of human rights, democracy, and economic progress to countries around the world, the premises of modern secular nationalism are under attack” (240).

“Secular nationalism—the ideology that originally gave the nation-state its legitimacy—contends that a nation’s authority is based on the secular idea of a social compact of equals rather than on ethnic ties or sacred mandates. It is a compelling idea, one with pretensions of universal applicability. It reached its widest extent of world-wide acceptance in the mid-twentieth century” (240).

In Europe, the presence of large immigrant populations from the Middle East ignited new forms of racism and new fears of the erosion of national values. In the United States, the Christian militia organizations were animated by fears of a massive global conspiracy involving liberal American politicians and the United Nations. In Japan a similar conspiracy theory motivated leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo movement to predict a catastrophic World War III, which their nerve gas assault in the Tokyo subways was meant to emulate.

• During decolonization, leaders of many former colonies sought to redefine national identity in order to break ties with former colonizing powers and cement liberation.

• Because many of these countries did not formally exist prior to colonization, new narratives of identity were required to legitimate the new nations. These narratives were often expressed via discourses of authenticity—particularly religious authenticity—that was employed in resistance to secular “Westernization.”

What is the link between decolonization and religion?

What’s in a name?

“Many of these imagined nations—some with invented names such as Pakistan, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia—were not accepted by everyone within their territory” (240).

from Punjab, Afghan Frontier, Kashmir, Baluchistan, lands where Muslims predominated.

“The global economic and social ties of the inhabitants of contemporary global cities are linked together in a way that supercedes the Enlightenment notion that peoples in particular regions are naturally linked together in a social contract. In a global world, it is hard to say where particular regions begin and end” (241).

Why do religious groups often assume an antiglobalization position?

“This is where religion and ethnicity step in to redefine public communities” (242).

“The crucial problems in an era of globalization are identity and control. The two are linked, in that a loss of a sense of belonging leads to a feeling of powerlessness. At the same time, what has been perceived as a loss of faith in secular nationalism is experienced as a loss of agency as well as identity. For these reasons the assertion of traditional forms of religious and ethnic identities are linked to attempts to reclaim personal and cultural power” (244).

“Al Qaeda is an organisation and a trademark. It can operate directly, in a joint venture, or by franchising. It embodies, but does not have the monopoly of, a new kind of violence. Many groups (such as the Kelkal network in France) are acting along the same lines without necessarily having a direct connection with Al Qaeda” (244).

“RELIGION IN THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER”

(239-244)

“AL QAEDA AND THE NEW TERRORISTS”

(244-249)

“From the early 1990s a new breed of militants slowly emerged. . . . This new breed was above all largely uprooted and more westernised than its predecessors, had few links (if any) to any particular Muslim country, and moved around the world, travelling from jihad to jihad. The flying jihadi was born, the jihadi jet set” (245).

The second example is Mohamed Saddiq Odeh (Awadh or Howeyda), a Jordanian citizen, born in Saudi Arabia of a Palestinian family. He received a degree in architecture in the Philippines in 1990, was trained in Afghanistan in the same year, and went to Somalia in 1992 to join the Sheikh Hassan radical Islamic group. Odeh married a Kenyan wife, acquired a Yemeni passport, settled in Kenya and was involved in the bombing of the US embassy there in 1998.

“They did not follow any Islamic school or notable cleric, and sometimes lived according to non-Muslim standards. They were all far more products of a westernised Islam than of traditional Middle Eastern politics. However old-fashioned their theology may seem to Westerners, and whatever they may think of themselves, radical Euro-Islamists are clearly more a postmodern phenomenon than a premodern one” (246).

“Relations between militants and their country of origin are weak or non-existent; we are facing not a diaspora but a truly deterritorialised population”.

What point is Roy making with his short biographies of Al Qaeda members?

The biographies illustrate that the Al Qaeda members are not linked to any particular nation; they are as American or European as they are Palestinian, Moroccan, or Egyptian. The conflicts in which they engage are likewise not linked to territorial struggles but are rather transnational campaigns of terror and “cosmic war.”

Why is this particularly significant with respect to U.S. involvement in the region after 9/11?

This is significant because the U.S. government discourse after the 9/11 attacks described these attacks as an act of war, and the response was an invasion of the territories of Iraq and Afghanistan. Engaging in territorial wars is an asymmetrical (and unreasonable) response to combatting deterritorialized terrorist networks. (This is made all the clearer given the fact that none of the Al Qaeda members had any serious ties to either country.)

“THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AS GOD’S CENTURY”

In 1968, Peter Berger, one of the past generation’s greatest sociologists, predicted that by “the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.” (237)

Similarly, in 1966 Time magazine printed starkly on its cover, “Is God Dead?,” recalling German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s audacious assertions at the end of the previous century: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed Him.”

“But the secularization thesis has proven a poor guide to global historical reality. Contrary to its predictions, the portion of the world population adhering to Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000. Globally speaking, most people—79 percent—believe in God (a slight increase from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was 73 percent), and although in most countries majorities agree that religion is private and should be kept separate from government, these majorities are increasingly slim in a number of countries and the intensity of support for this separation has declined in over half of the countries polled” (238).

• How and why has religion become publicly expressed and politically acceptable in so many parts of the world after a century of so many efforts to dethrone or displace faith as a source of political authority?

• What explains the diversity of political activities that the religious pursue?

• Why do some religious actors take up the gun through terrorism or civil war while others promote democracy, human rights, and reconciliation?

• If religion is to have a seat at the political table, how big—and how elevated—should it be?

Alle prägnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind säkularisierte theologische Begriffe.

––Politische Theologie

(All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.

––Political Theology)

In other words, that political theory addresses the state (and sovereignty) in much the same manner as theology does God.

64%

50%

(year) 1900 2000

Middle English (originally in the sense “life under monastic vows”): from Old French, or from Latin religio(n-) “obligation, bond, reverence”, perhaps based on Latin religare “to bind”.

etymology

“RELIGION AND HUMANE GLOBAL GOVERNANCE” (249-253)

It is neither possible to affirm unconditionally the main tendencies of modernity, including ideas about sovereignty, the territorial state, and the right of self-determination on the political sensibility, nor useful to pretend that such defining categories have been superseded by such fashionable phrases as “the end of the nation-state,” “the borderless world,” “a new medievalism,” or “the end of history.” (251)

“The religious resurgence comes in many forms, not all welcome but certainly not all an occasion of regret, much less menace. To the extent that the new wave of religion is animated mainly by negative spiritual energy, that is, by unconditional and extreme moves to negate the modern, it tends to be destructive of human potentiality, to deny freedom, to claim an exclusive access to truth, to be regressively otherworldly in its promises of salvation, and to fail to provide humanity with positive ways forward” （249-50）.

The complexity of the challenge arises because it is not usefully reducible to either the dualisms of good and evil or the assured remedies of this or that fundamentalism.

“It is plausible to construct a vision of the future based on the ‘West against the rest’ that organizes a fragment of humanity to take part in intercivilizational warfare” (252).

Global corporate capitalism

Financial instruments

Sweatshops

Containerization

Value added chain

Supply chain

Commodity chain

Upgrading

Race to the bottom

General Motors

Vertically integrated

Wal-Mart

Sustainable growth

Foxconn

Yue Yuen

Labor standards

Trickle-down

John Maynard Keynes

Foreign Direct Investment

Doha