Wounds of the Mind

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have only been the most dramatic and spectacular acts of violence seen in the last two decades. Before that, there have been the destruction of the Federal building at Oklahoma City last year by the Christian Identity group; the ripping apart of the Ben Yehuda shopping mall in Jerusalem in 1997 by Hamas; the bombing of the abortion clinics in Atlanta and Georgia by Rev Bray in 1996; the ramming of a truckload of explosives into the parking garage of the World Trade Center by Osama bin Laden's men in 1993; the release of vials of poisonous sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 by a Buddhist with an apocalyptic vision of death, and more....

There is no unqualified justification for violence in any of the religions for such heinous acts. The author makes this clear at the outset. Rather, he asks why religious terrorism has surfaced in the last two decades of the 20th century. Like a good sociologist, he is concerned with the social context in which terrorism breeds.

He sparingly uses the word "terrorist", for it implies that the person engaged in terrorist acts is a terrorist by nature. A terrorist is not the taxi driver of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver who gets perverse pleasure out of killing people. A terrorist like bin Laden or Dr Baruch Goldstein (who killed over 30 Muslims as they were praying at a mosque in Hebron in 1994) holds a distinct worldview, however warped, and its realisation depends on the use of terror. For them terror is related to their purpose.

It is fascinating to enter the world of these men with a mission. Jurgensmeyer enters it by interviewing them empathetically. There is "Mahmud the Red", one of the persons convicted in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In his high-security prison cell in California, Mahmud rhetorically asks the author: is it right for the United States to "terrorise nations, obliterate them and tell them they are nothing"? He sees the US as Satan and therefore thinks it is his sacred duty to slay it.

Religious imagery also comes alive in the utterances of Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Federal building at Oklahoma City last year. He and his co-terrorists of the Christian Identity and Reconstruction movement saw the world torn by a "cosmic" war between the "forces of darkness and the forces of light".

Takeshi Nakamura of the Aum Shrikriyo Buddhist sect who released vials of nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 thought the day of reckoning was coming, and when it came the evil forces would attack with poison gas and radioactive and bacteriological weapons. The only people who would "survive are those with great Karma". Nakamura had earned good Karmas from his guru in the Himalayas.

No doubt it is important to understand the religious basis of modern terrorism. But could it not be seen as a response to another kind of terrorism which enjoys great legitimacy: one by the state? There is no doubt in my mind that many of the terrorist acts carried out by many Muslims are in response to the brutal use of force by the Israeli state. Which sensitive person would have watched without feeling a sense of revulsion at the TV clips showing Israeli soldiers firing anti-tank missiles at Palestinian schoolchildren throwing stones at them last Christmas?

Just after September 11, bin Laden in his statement to Al-Jazeera TV said that continued Israeli occupation of Palestine deeply wounds the Arab pride. The largest number of terrorist acts in the world are caused by the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With its resolution, much of international terrorism would disappear, I believe.

If religious terror is in response to state terror, then a way to minimise it is to make the state civil. Force should be used sparingly and in exceptional circumstances. Citizens, human right activists and media ought to concert to make state actions accountable to the people. Democratise the state. If, however, terrorism that we witness today in Palestine, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Kashmir or the United States is a new kind of terrorism, inspired and justified by religion, then there is no escape from it. Perhaps it is the modernity as expressed in mindless consumerism, disintegration of the community, the rise of egoistic individualism, ennui, that gives rise to this terrorism. If this is Jurgensmeyer's argument—I think it is, though it is concealed—then he should have given more thought than he does to this subject. It was Andre Malaraux, an atheist, who once said that the end of the 20th century would see a return of religion. Is terrorism then hastening the return of religion in public life?