Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global and International Studies at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular
State (California, 1993), Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (1991), and editor of Violence and the
Sacred in the Modern World (1992).
Sample Chapter
Introduction: Terror and God
When plastic explosives attached to a Hamas suicide bomber ripped through the gentrified Ben Yehuda shopping mall
in Jerusalem in September 1997, the blast damaged not only lives and property but also the confidence with which
most people view the world. As images of the bloodied victims were projected from the scene, the double arches
of a McDonald's restaurant were visible in the background, their cheerful familiarity appearing oddly out of place
with the surrounding carnage. Many who viewed these pictures saw symbols of their own ordinary lives assaulted
and vicariously felt the anxiety--the terror--of those who experienced it firsthand. After all, the wounded could
have included anyone who has ever visited a McDonald's--which is to say virtually anyone in the developed world.
In this sense, the blast was an attack not only on Israel but also on normal life as most people know it.
This loss of innocence was keenly felt by many Americans after news of ethnic shootings in California and Illinois
in 1999; the attack on American embassies in Africa in 1998; abortion clinic bombings in Alabama and Georgia in
1997; the bomb blast at the Olympics in Atlanta and the destruction of a U.S. military housing complex in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the tragic destruction of the federal building at Oklahoma City in 1995; and the explosion
at the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993. These incidents and a host of violent episodes associated with
American religious extremists--including the Christian militia, the Christian Identity movement, and Christian
anti-abortion activists--have brought Americans into the same uneasy position occupied by many in the rest of the
world. Increasingly, global society must confront religious violence on a routine basis.
The French, for example, have dealt with subway bombs planted by Algerian Islamic activists, the British with exploding
trucks and buses ignited by Irish Catholic nationalists, and the Japanese with nerve gas placed in Tokyo subways
by members of a Hindu-Buddhist sect. In India residents of Delhi have experienced car bombings by both Sikh and
Kashmiri separatists, in Sri Lanka whole sections of the city of Colombo have been destroyed both by Tamils and
by Sinhalese militants, Egyptians have been forced to live with militant Islamic attacks in coffeehouses and riverboats,
Algerians have lost entire villages to savage attacks perpetrated allegedly by supporters of the Islamic Salvation
Front, and Israelis and Palestinians have confronted the deadly deeds of both Jewish and Muslim extremists. For
many Middle Easterners, terrorist attacks have become a way of life.
In addition to their contemporaneity, all these instances share two striking characteristics. First, they have
been violent--even vicious--in a manner calculated to be terrifying. And, second, they have been motivated by religion.
The Meaning of Religious Terrorism
The ferocity of religious violence was brought home to me in 1998 when I received the news that a car bomb had
exploded in a Belfast neighborhood I had visited the day before. The following day firebombs ripped through several
pubs and stores, apparently in protest against the fragile peace agreement signed earlier in the year. It was an
eerie repetition of what had happened several years before. A suicide bombing claimed by the militant wing of the
Palestinian Muslim political movement, Hamas, tore apart a bus near Hebrew University in 1995, the day after I
had visited the university on, I believe, the very same bus. The pictures of the mangled bodies on the Jerusalem
street and the images of Belfast's bombed-out pub, therefore, had a direct and immediate impact on my view of the
world.
What I realized then is the same thing that all of us perceive on some level when we view pictures of terrorist
events: on a different day, at a different time, perhaps in a different bus, one of the bodies torn to shreds by
any of these terrorist acts could have been ours. What came to mind as I heard the news of the Belfast and Jerusalem
bombings, however, was not so much a feeling of relief for my safety as a sense of betrayal--that the personal
security and order that is usually a basic assumption of public life cannot in fact be taken for granted in a world
where terrorist acts exist.
That, I take it, is largely the point: terrorism is meant to terrify. The word comes from the Latin terrere, "to
cause to tremble," and came into common usage in the political sense, as an assault on civil order, during
the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century. Hence the public response
to the violence--the trembling that terrorism effects--is part of the meaning of the term. It is appropriate, then,
that the definition of a terrorist act is provided by us, the witnesses--the ones terrified--and not by the party
committing the act. It is we--or more often our public agents, the news media--who affix the label on acts of violence
that makes them terrorism. These are public acts of destruction, committed without a clear military objective,
that arouse a widespread sense of fear.
This fear often turns to anger when we discover the other characteristic that frequently attends these acts of
public violence: their justification by religion. Most people feel that religion should provide tranquility and
peace, not terror. Yet in many of these cases religion has supplied not only the ideology but also the motivation
and the organizational structure for the perpetrators. It is true that some terrorist acts are committed by public
officials invoking a sort of "state terrorism" in order to subjugate the populace. The pogroms of Stalin,
the government-supported death squads in El Salvador, the genocidal killings of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and government-spurred violence of the Hutus and Tutsis in Central Africa all come
to mind. The United States has rightfully been accused of terrorism in the atrocities committed during the Vietnam
War, and there is some basis for considering the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as terrorist acts.
But the term "terrorism" has more frequently been associated with violence committed by disenfranchised
groups desperately attempting to gain a shred of power or influence. Although these groups cannot kill on the scale
that governments with all their military power can, their sheer numbers, their intense dedication, and their dangerous
unpredictability have given them influence vastly out of proportion with their meager military resources. Some
of these groups have been inspired by purely secular causes. They have been motivated by leftist ideologies, as
in the cases of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru in Peru, and the Red Army in Japan; and they have been propelled
by a desire for ethnic or regional separatism, as in the cases of Basque militants in Spain and the Kurdish nationalists
in the Middle East.
But more often it has been religion--sometimes in combination with these other factors, sometimes as the primary
motivation--that has incited terrorist acts. The common perception that there has been a rise in religious violence
around the world in the last decades of the twentieth century has been borne out by those who keep records of such
things. In 1980 the U.S. State Department roster of international terrorist groups listed scarcely a single religious
organization. In 1998 U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright listed thirty of the world's most dangerous groups;
over half were religious.1 They were Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist. If one added to this list other violent religious
groups around the world, including the many Christian militia and other paramilitary organizations found domestically
in the United States, the number of religious terrorist groups would be considerable. According to the RAND-St.
Andrews Chronology of International Terrorism, the proportion of religious groups increased from sixteen of forty-nine
terrorist groups identified in 1994 to twenty-six of the fifty-six groups listed the following year.2 For this
reason former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said that terrorist acts in the name of religion and ethnic
identity have become "one of the most important security challenges we face in the wake of the Cold War."3
Throughout this study we will be looking at this odd attraction of religion and violence. Although some observers
try to explain away religion's recent ties to violence as an aberration, a result of political ideology, or the
characteristic of a mutant form of religion--fundamentalism--these are not my views. Rather, I look for explanations
in the current forces of geopolitics and in a strain of violence that may be found at the deepest levels of religious
imagination.
Within the histories of religious traditions--from biblical wars to crusading ventures and great acts of martyrdom--violence
has lurked as a shadowy presence. It has colored religion's darker, more mysterious symbols. Images of death have
never been far from the heart of religion's power to stir the imagination. One of the haunting questions asked
by some of the great scholars of religion--including Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Sigmund Freud--is
why this is the case. Why does religion seem to need violence, and violence religion, and why is a divine mandate
for destruction accepted with such certainty by some believers?
These are questions that have taken on a sense of urgency in recent years, when religious violence has reappeared
in a form often calculated to terrify on a massive scale. These contemporary acts of violence are often justified
by the historical precedent of religion's violent past. Yet the forces that combine to produce religious violence
are particular to each moment of history. For this reason, I will focus on case studies of religious violence both
within their own cultural contexts and within the framework of global social and political changes that are distinctive
to our time.
This is a book about religious terrorism. It is about public acts of violence at the turn of the century for which
religion has provided the motivation, the justification, the organization, and the world view. In this book, I
have tried to get inside the mindset of those who perpetrated and supported such acts. My goal is to understand
why these acts were often associated with religious causes and why they have occurred with such frequency at this
juncture in history. Although it is not my purpose to be sympathetic to people who have done terrible things, I
do want to understand them and their world views well enough to know how they and their supporters can morally
justify what they have done.
What puzzles me is not why bad things are done by bad people, but rather why bad things are done by people who
otherwise appear to be good--in cases of religious terrorism, by pious people dedicated to a moral vision of the
world. Considering the high-sounding rhetoric with which their purposes are often stated, it is perhaps all the
more tragic that the acts of violence meant to achieve them have caused suffering and disruption in many lives--not
only those who were injured by the acts, but also those who witnessed them, even from a distance.
Because I want to understand the cultural contexts that produce these acts of violence, my focus is on the ideas
and the communities of support that lie behind the acts rather than on the "terrorists" who commit them.
In fact, for the purposes of this study, the word "terrorist" is problematic. For one thing, the term
makes no clear distinction between the organizers of an attack, those who carry it out, and the many who support
it both directly and indirectly. Are they all terrorists, or just some of them--and if the latter, which ones?
Another problem with the word is that it can be taken to single out a certain limited species of people called
"terrorists" who are committed to violent acts. The implication is that such terrorists are hell-bent
to commit terrorism for whatever reason--sometimes choosing religion, sometimes another ideology, to justify their
mischief. This logic concludes that terrorism exists because terrorists exist, and if we just got rid of them,
the world would be a more pleasant place.
Although such a solution is enticing, the fact is that the line is very thin between "terrorists" and
their "non-terrorist" supporters. It is also not clear that there is such a thing as a "terrorist"
before someone conspires to perpetrate a terrorist act. Although every society contains sociopaths and others who
sadistically enjoy killing, it is seldom such persons who are involved in the deliberate public events that we
associate with terrorism, and few studies of terrorism focus exclusively on personality. The studies of the psychology
of terrorism deal largely with social psychology; that is, they are concerned with the way people respond to certain
group situations that make violent public acts possible.4 I know of no study that suggests that people are terrorist
by nature. Although some activists involved in religious terrorism have been troubled by mental problems, others
are people who appear to be normal and socially well adjusted, but who are caught up in extraordinary communities
and share extreme world views.
Most of the people involved in acts of religious terrorism are not unlike Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who killed over
thirty Muslims as they were praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on February 25, 1994. Goldstein was
a medical doctor who grew up in a middle-class community in Brooklyn and received his professional training at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. His commitment to an extreme form of Zionism brought him to Israel
and the Kiryat Arba settlement, and although he was politically active for many years--he was Rabbi Meir Kahane's
campaign manager when he ran for the Israeli parliament--Goldstein did not appear to be an irrational or vicious
person. Prior to the attack at Hebron, his most publicized political act had been a letter to the editor of the
New York Times.5 If Goldstein had deep and perverse personality flaws that eventually surfaced and made him a terrorist,
we do not know about them. The evidence about him is to the contrary: it indicates that, like his counterparts
in Hamas, he was an otherwise decent man who became overwhelmed by a great sense of dedication to a religious vision
shared by many in the community of which he was a part. He became convinced that this vision and community were
profoundly assaulted, and this compelled him to a desperate and tragic act. He was certainly single-minded about
his religious concerns--even obsessed over them--but to label Goldstein a terrorist prior to the horrible act he
committed implies that he was a terrorist by nature and that his religiosity was simply a charade. The evidence
does not indicate either to be the case.
For this reason I use the term "terrorist" sparingly. When I do use it, I employ it in the same sense
as the word "murderer": it applies to specific persons only after they have been found guilty of committing
such a crime, or planning to commit one. Even then I am somewhat cautious about using the term, since a violent
act is "terrorism" technically only in the eyes of the courts, more publicly in the eyes of the media,
and ultimately only in the eyes of the beholder. The old saying "One person's terrorist is another person's
freedom-fighter" has some truth to it. The designation of terrorism is a subjective judgment about the legitimacy
of certain violent acts as much as it is a descriptive statement about them.
When I interviewed militant religious activists and their supporters, I found that they seldom used the term "terrorist"
to describe what their groups had done. Several told me that their groups should be labeled militant rather than
terrorist. A Lutheran pastor who was convicted of bombing abortion clinics was not a terrorist, he told me, since
he did not enjoy violence for its own sake. He employed violence only for a purpose, and for that reason he described
these events as "defensive actions" on behalf of the "unborn."6 Activists on both sides of
the struggle in Belfast described themselves as "paramilitaries." A leader in India's Sikh separatist
movement said that he preferred the term "militant" and told me that "'terrorist' had replaced the
term 'witch'" as an excuse to persecute those whom one dislikes.7 One of the men convicted of bombing the
World Trade Center essentially agreed with the Sikh leader, telling me that the word "terrorist" was
so "messy" it could not be used without a lot of qualifications.8 The same point of view was expressed
by the political leader of the Hamas movement with whom I talked in Gaza. He described his movement's suicide attacks
as "operations."9 Like many activists who used violence, he likened his group to an army that was planning
defensive maneuvers and using violence strategically as necessary acts. Never did he use the word "terrorist"
or "terrorism."
This is not just a semantic issue. Whether or not one uses "terrorist" to describe violent acts depends
on whether one thinks that the acts are warranted. To a large extent the use of the term depends on one's world
view: if the world is perceived as peaceful, violent acts appear as terrorism. If the world is thought to be at
war, violent acts may be regarded as legitimate. They may be seen as preemptive strikes, as defensive tactics in
an ongoing battle, or as symbols indicating to the world that it is indeed in a state of grave and ultimate conflict.
In most cases in this book, religious language is used to characterize this conflict. When it is, what difference
does religion make? Do acts of violence conducted by Hamas have different characteristics from those conducted
by secular movements, such as the Kurds? The question is whether religious terrorism is different from other kinds.
In this book it will become clear that, at least in some cases, religion does make a difference. Some of these
differences are readily apparent--the transcendent moralism with which such acts are justified, for instance, and
the ritual intensity with which they are committed. Other differences are more profound and go to the very heart
of religion. The familiar religious images of struggle and transformation--concepts of cosmic war--have been employed
in this-worldly social struggles. When these cosmic battles are conceived as occurring on the human plane, they
result in real acts of violence.
This leads to yet another question: when religion justifies violence, is it simply being used for political purposes?
This question is not as simple as it may first appear. It is complicated largely because of the renewed role that
religion plays in various parts of the world as an ideology of public order--especially in movements of religious
nationalism--in which religious and political ideologies are intertwined. As the cases in this book will show,
religion is not innocent. But it does not ordinarily lead to violence. That happens only with the coalescence of
a peculiar set of circumstances--political, social, and ideological--when religion becomes fused with violent expressions
of social aspirations, personal pride, and movements for political change.
For these reasons, questions about why religious terrorism has occurred at this moment in history have to be raised
in context. By "context" I mean the historical situations, social locations, and world views related
to violent incidents. To understand these, we will explore not only the mindset of religious activists who have
committed violence but also the groups that have supported them and the ideologies to which they subscribe.
Seeing Inside Cultures of Violence
Terrorism is seldom a lone act. When Dr. Baruch Goldstein entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs carrying an automatic
weapon, he came with the tacit approval of many of his fellow Jewish settlers in the nearby community of Kiryat
Arba. When Rev. Paul Hill stepped from a sidewalk in Pensacola, Florida, and shot Dr. John Britton and his security
escort as they prepared to enter their clinic, he was cheered by a certain circle of militant Christian anti-abortion
activists around the country. When the followers of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman drove a rented truck to the underground
garage of the World Trade Center, igniting it and its lethal cargo, they came as part of a well-orchestrated plan
that involved dozens of coconspirators and thousands of sympathizers in the United States, Egypt, Palestine, and
elsewhere throughout the world.
As these instances show, it takes a community of support and, in many cases, a large organizational network for
an act of terrorism to succeed. It also requires an enormous amount of moral presumption for the perpetrators of
these acts to justify the destruction of property on a massive scale or to condone a brutal attack on another life,
especially the life of someone one scarcely knows and against whom one bears no personal enmity. And it requires
a great deal of internal conviction, social acknowledgment, and the stamp of approval from a legitimizing ideology
or authority one respects. Because of the moral, ideological, and organizational support necessary for such acts,
most of them come as collective decisions--such as the conspiracy that led to the release of nerve gas in the Tokyo
subways and the Hamas organization's carefully devised bombings.
Even those acts that appear to be solo ventures conducted by rogue activists often have networks of support and
ideologies of validation behind them, whether or not these networks and ideologies are immediately apparent. Behind
Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, for instance, was a large movement of Messianic Zionism in Israel and abroad.
Behind convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh and Buford Furrow, the alleged attacker of a Jewish day-care center, was
a subculture of militant Christian groups that extends throughout the United States. Behind Unabomber Theodore
Kaczynski was the strident student activist culture of the late 1960s, in which one could easily become infected
by the feeling that "terrible things" were going on.10 Behind the two high school students who killed
themselves and thirteen of their classmates in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 was a quasi-religious "trenchcoat"
culture of gothic symbolism. In all of these cases the activists thought that their acts were supported not only
by other people but by a widely shared perception that the world was already violent: it was enmeshed in great
struggles that gave their own violent actions moral meaning.
This is a significant feature of these cultures: the perception that their communities are already under attack--are
being violated--and that their acts are therefore simply responses to the violence they have experienced. In some
cases this perception is one to which sensitive people outside the movement can readily relate--the feeling of
oppression held by Palestinian Muslims, for example, is one that many throughout the world consider to be an understandable
though regrettable response to a situation of political control. In other instances, such as the imagined oppression
of America's Christian militia or Japan's Aum Shinrikyo movement, the members' fears of black helicopters hovering
over their homes at night or the allegations of collusion of international governments to deprive individuals of
their freedoms are regarded by most people outside the movements as paranoid delusions. Still other cases--such
as those involving Sikh militants in India, Jewish settlers on the West Bank, Muslim politicians in Algeria, Catholic
and Protestant militants in Northern Ireland, and anti-abortion activists in the United States--are highly controversial.
There are sober and sensitive people to argue each side.
Whether or not outsiders regard these perceptions of oppression as legitimate, they are certainly considered valid
by those within the communities. It is these shared perceptions that constitute the cultures of violence that have
flourished throughout the world--in neighborhoods of Jewish nationalists from Kiryat Arba to Brooklyn where the
struggle to defend the Jewish nation is part of daily existence, in mountain towns in Idaho and Montana where religious
and individual freedoms are thought to be imperiled by an enormous governmental conspiracy, and in pious Muslim
communities around the world where Islam is felt to be at war with the surrounding secular forces of modern society.
Although geographically dispersed, these cultures in some cases are fairly small: one should bear in mind that
the culture of violence characterized by Hamas, for example, does not implicate all Palestinians, all Muslims,
or even all Palestinian Muslims.
I could use the term "communities" or "ideologies" of terrorism rather than "cultures"
of violence, but what I like about the term "culture" is that it entails both things--ideas and social
groupings--that are related to terrorist acts. Needless to say, I am using the term "culture" beyond
its narrow meaning as the aesthetic products of a society.11 Rather, I employ it in a broad way to include the
ethical and social values underlying the life of a particular social unit.
My way of thinking about culture is enriched by the ideas of several scholars. It encompasses the idea of "episteme"
as described by Michel Foucault: a world view, or a paradigm of thinking that "defines the conditions . .
. of all knowledge."12 It also involves the notion of a nexus of socially embedded ideas about society. Pierre
Bourdieu calls this a "habitus," which he describes as "a socially constituted system of cognitive
and motivating structures."13 It is the social basis for what Clifford Geertz described as the "cultural
systems" of a people: the patterns of thought, the world views, and the meanings that are attached to the
activities of a particular society. In Geertz's view, such cultural systems encompass both secular ideologies and
religion.14
The cultural approach to the study of terrorism that I have adopted has advantages and disadvantages. Although
it allows me to explore more fully the distinctive world view and moral justifications of each group, it means
that I tend to study less closely the political calculations of movement leaders and the international networks
of activists. For these aspects of terrorism I rely on other works: historical studies such as Bernard Lewis's
classic The Assassins; comprehensive surveys such as Walter Laqueur's Terrorism (revised and republished as The
Age of Terrorism) and Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism, which covers both historical and contemporary incidents;15
studies in the social psychology of terrorism by Walter Reich and Jerrold Post;16 political analyses such as Martha
Crenshaw's work on the structure of terrorist organizations in Algeria and Peter Merkl's analysis of left-wing
terrorism in Germany;17 and the contributions of Paul Wilkinson and Brian Jenkins in analyzing terrorism as an
instrument of political strategy.18
These works leave room for other scholars to develop a more cultural approach to analyzing terrorist movements--efforts
at reconstructing the terrorists' world views from within. This research has led to a number of significant case
studies, including analyses of the Christian militia by Jeffrey Kaplan, the Christian Identity movement by James
Aho, Irish paramilitarists by Martin Dillon, Sikh militants by Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Jewish activists by Ehud
Sprinzak, and Hamas suicide bombers by Paul Steinberg and Anne Marie Oliver.19 These and other works, along with
my own case studies and some interesting reportage by international journalists, make possible an effort such as
this one: a comparative cultural study of religious terrorism.
This book begins with case studies of religious activists who have used violence or who justify its use. The first
half of the book contains chapters on Christians in America who supported abortion clinic bombings and militia
actions such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, Catholics and Protestants who justified acts
of terrorism in Northern Ireland, Muslims associated with the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City
and Hamas attacks in the Middle East, Jews who supported the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and
the attack in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs, Sikhs identified with the killing of India's prime minister Indira
Gandhi and Punjab's chief minister Beant Singh, and the Japanese Buddhists affiliated with the group accused of
the nerve gas attack in Tokyo's subways.
Since these case studies are not only about those directly involved in terrorist acts but also about the world
views of the cultures of violence that stand behind them, I have interviewed a number of people associated with
these cultures. In the chapters that follow, however, I have chosen to focus on only a few. In some cases I have
highlighted the established leaders of political organizations, such as Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi, Tom Hartley, and
Simranjit Singh Mann. In other cases I have chosen outspoken activists who have been convicted of undertaking violent
acts, such as Mahmud Abouhalima, Michael Bray, and Yoel Lerner. In yet other cases I have selected members from
the lower echelons of activist movements, such as Takeshi Nakamura and Yochay Ron. The interviews that I have chosen
to describe in detail are therefore diverse. But in each case--in my opinion--they best exemplify the world views
of the cultures of violence of which the individuals are a part.
In the second half of the book I identify patterns--an overarching logic--found within the cultures of violence
described in the first half. I try to explain why and how religion and violence are linked. In Chapter 7 I explain
why acts of religious terrorism are undertaken not only to achieve a strategic target but also to accomplish a
symbolic purpose. In Chapters 8 and 9, I describe how images of cosmic confrontation and warfare that are ordinarily
found in the context of heaven or history are sometimes tied to this-worldly political battles, and I explain how
the processes of satanization and symbolic empowerment develop in stages. In Chapter 10, I explore the way that
religious violence has provided a sense of empowerment to alienated individuals, marginal groups, and visionary
ideologues.
In the last chapter of this book I return to questions directly about religion: why anyone would believe that God
could sanction terrorism and why the rediscovery of religion's power has appeared in recent years in such a bloody
way--and what, if anything, can be done about it. I have applied what I have learned about religious terrorism
to five scenarios in which violence comes to an end.
In order to respond to religious terrorism in a way that is effective and does not produce more terrorism in response,
I believe it is necessary to understand why such acts occur. Behind this practical purpose in writing this book,
however, is an attempt to understand the role that violence has always played in the religious imagination and
how terror could be conceived in the mind of God.
These two purposes are connected. One of my conclusions is that this historical moment of global transformation
has provided an occasion for religion--with all its images and ideas--to be reasserted as a public force. Lurking
in the background of much of religion's unrest and the occasion for its political revival, I believe, is the devaluation
of secular authority and the need for alternative ideologies of public order. It may be one of the ironies of history,
graphically displayed in incidents of terrorism, that the answers to the questions of why the contemporary world
still needs religion and of why it has suffered such public acts of violence, are surprisingly the same.
Notes
1. "Global Terror," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1998, A16.
2. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91.
3. Warren Christopher, "Fighting Terrorism: Challenges for Peacemakers," address to the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, May 21, 1996. Reprinted in Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign
Policy for a New Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 446.
4. See, for example, the essays from a conference on the psychology of terrorism held at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of
Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
5. Baruch Goldstein, letter to the editor, New York Times, June 30, 1981.
6. Interview with Rev. Michael Bray, Reformation Lutheran Church, Bowie, Maryland, April 25, 1996.
7. Interview with Sohan Singh, leader of the Sohan Singh Panthic Committee, Mohalli, Punjab, August 3, 1996.
8. Interview with Mahmud Abouhalima, convicted coconspirator in the World Trade Center bombing case, federal penitentiary,
Lompoc, California, September 30, 1997.
9. Interview with Abdul Aziz Rantisi, cofounder and political leader of Hamas, Khan Yunis, Gaza, March 1, 1998.
10. Lance W. Small, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time
Kaczynski taught there, quoted in David Johnston and Janny Scott, "The Tortured Genius of Theodore Kaczynski,"
New York Times, May 26, 1996, A1. According to the authors, Kaczynski's brother David thought that Kaczynski was
unaffected by any particular political movement at the time.
11. In using the phrase "cultures of violence," I realize that for some this will evoke the term "cultures
of poverty," coined by Oscar Lewis and other anthropologists in the 1960s to describe the mindset of the barrios
of Latin America and African American ghettos in the United States. Lewis was accused of presenting a static set
of values, forged through desperate conditions, that on the one hand explained away many of the moral and intellectual
shortcomings of the people who came from such cultures, and on the other hand seemed to imply that nothing could
be done to help them. My term, "cultures of violence," does not carry these implications.
12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 168.
13. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 76.
14. Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New
York: Free Press), 1964; and "Religion as a Cultural System," reprinted in William A. Lessa and Evon
Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row,
1972).
15. Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (London: Al Saqi Books, 1985); Walter Laqueur, Terrorism
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), revised and republished as The Age of Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); Hoffman,
Inside Terrorism.
16. Walter Reich, Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Robert S. Robins and Jerrold Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
17. Martha Crenshaw, Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution,
1978); Peter Merkl, "West German Left-Wing Terrorism," in Martha Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). See also Crenshaw's article on instrumental and organizational
approaches to the study of terrorism, "Theories of Terrorism," in David C. Rapoport, ed., Inside Terrorist
Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
18. Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974); Brian Jenkins, International Terrorism: Trends
and Potentialities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1978). See also Paul Wilkinson and A. M. Stewart, eds.,
Contemporary Research on Terrorism (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987); Bruce Hoffman, An Agenda for Research
on Terrorism and LIC [Low Intensity Conflict] in the 1990s (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1991).
19. Jeffrey Kaplan, "The Context of American Millennarian Revolutionary Theology: The Case of the 'Identity
Christian' Church of Israel," Terrorism and Political Violence 5:1, Spring 1993, 30-82, and "Right Wing
Violence in North America," in Tore Bjørgo, ed., Terror from the Extreme Right (London: Frank Cass,
1995), 44-95; James Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1990); Martin Dillon, God and the Gun: The Church and Irish Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1998); Cynthia
Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997); Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
Paul Steinberg and Annamarie Oliver, Rehearsals for a Happy Death: The Testimonies of Hamas Suicide Bombers (New
York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Review
"This dark, enthralling book not only documents the global rise of religious terrorism but seeks to understand
the 'odd attraction of religion and violence.' Juergensmeyer is a powerful, skillful writer whose deeply empathetic
interviewing techniques allow readers to enter the minds of some of the late 20th century's most feared religious
terrorists."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The brilliance of Terror in the Mind of God is its dissection of patterns of thought shared by such seemingly
disparate figures as Bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. Like a radiologist revealing the identical skeletal structures
in outwardly different creatures, [Juergensmeyer] builds a powerful case for the common elements in five terrorist
movements."
--Baltimore Sun
"An unsettling book but also a courageous one. No one who truly cares about matters of faith can afford to
ignore the dangers that lurk within religious extremism, and Juergensmeyer is ultimately serving the highest aspirations
of organized religion when he insists on shedding light on the darker corners of human belief and human conduct."
--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
"Written well and engagingly for a popular audience. . . thoughtful [and] detailed. . . [an] excellent illustration
of the beneficent side of the multiculturalism that has swept academia in the last couple of decades."
--Jonathan Groner, Washington Post Book World
"An impressive new book."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Takes an academic approach to its subject, but readers outside the academy will find it quite accessible."
--Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
"A sensitive, comparative study of terrorist movements and the religious beliefs that motivate them."
--Washington Post Book World
"A timely, persuasive and cogent book. Juergensmeyer is especially astute when constructing the psychological
portrait of the men and women who employ terrorist tactics in what they consider to be a cosmic war with evil."
--Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
"By studying different 'cultures of violence' Mark Juergensmeyer has provided a plausible and imaginative
interpretation of this phenomenon. He presents a lucid and compelling argument that does not belittle or demonize
its subjects. This is an important contribution to our knowledge of the relationship between religion and violence."
--Martha Crenshaw, editor of Terrorism in Context
"In this important book Juergensmeyer argues that the violence associated with religion is not an aberration
but comes from the fundamental structures of the belief system of all major religions. Juergensmeyer has achieved
what very few scholars can do with much success, providing an insightful analysis of the function of religion in
national and international life while moving in broad sweeps from culture to culture and continent to continent."
--Ainslie T. Embree, former cultural attaché, United States Embassy, New Delhi
University of California Press Web Site, October, 2003
Summary
Beneath the histories of religious traditions--from biblical wars to crusading ventures and great acts of martyrdom--violence
has lurked as a shadowy presence. Images of death have never been far from the heart of religion's power to stir
the imagination. In this wide-ranging and erudite book, Mark Juergensmeyer asks one of the most important and perplexing
questions of our age: Why do religious people commit violent acts in the name of their god, taking the lives of
innocent victims and terrorizing entire populations?
This, the first comparative study of religious terrorism, explores incidents such as the World Trade Center explosion,
Hamas suicide bombings, the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack, and the killing of abortion clinic doctors in the United
States. Incorporating personal interviews with World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima, Christian Right activist
Mike Bray, Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdul Azis Rantisi, and Sikh political leader Simranjit Singh Mann, among
others, Juergensmeyer takes us into the mindset of those who perpetrate and support violent acts. In the process,
he helps us understand why these acts are often associated with religious causes and why they occur with such frequency
at this moment in history.
Terror in the Mind of God places these acts of violence in the context of global political and social changes,
and posits them as attempts to empower the cultures of violence that support them. Juergensmeyer analyzes the economic,
ideological, and gender-related dimensions of cultures that embrace a central sacred concept--cosmic war--and that
employ religion to demonize their enemies.
Juergensmeyer's narrative is engaging, incisive, and sweeping in scope. He convincingly shows that while, in many
cases, religion supplies not only the ideology but also the motivation and organizational structure for the perpetrators
of violent acts, it also carries with it the possibilities for peace.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Terror and God
CULTURES OF VIOLENCE
2. Soldiers for Christ
3. Zion Betrayed
4. Islam's "Neglected Duty"
5. The Sword of Sikhism
6. Armageddon in a Tokyo Subway
THE LOGIC OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE
7. Theater of Terror
8. Cosmic War
9. Martyrs and Demons
10. Warriors' Power
11. The Mind of God
Notes
Interviews and Correspondence
Bibliography
Index