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Terrorism and Political Violence

ISSN: 0954-6553 (Print) 1556-1836 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20

Terror mandated by god

Mark Juergensmeyer

To cite this article: Mark Juergensmeyer (1997) Terror mandated by god, Terrorism and Political Violence, 9:2, 16-23, DOI: 10.1080/09546559708427400

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09546559708427400

Published online: 21 Dec 2007.

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Terror Mandated by God

MARK JUERGENSMEYER

Religion's renewed political presence on a global scale is often accompanied by violence - in part because of the nature of religion and its claims for power over life in death; in part due to the nature of secular politics, which places its own legitimacy on the currency of weapons and can only be challenged successfully on a military level; and in part due to the nature of political violence. The symbolic power of violence can be a valuable commodity for religious as well as for political forces. Through violence, the proponents of a religious ideology like Aum Shinrikyo remind the populace of the godly power that makes their ideology potent, and at times religious activists create man-made incidents of terror on God's behalf.

Shortly after Noam Friedman, an off-duty Israeli soldier, lay down on the ground in a crowded market in Hebron on 1 January 1997 and sprayed M- 16 automatic rifle fire at Arab shoppers, wounding seven, he claimed that he had been on a mission from God. 'Abraham bought the Cave of the Patriarchs for four hundred shekels of silver', Friedman said, referring to the Hebron shrine that is holy to all three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. 'And', he added, 'nobody will give it back'.1

Friedman's actions, eerily similiar to the 1994 attack on Arab worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs by Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler who was also garbed in uniform at the time, and to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, are characteristic of a new face of terrorism. These are terrorist acts committed not just for a strategic political objective but as part of a religious mission. In many such cases, including the attacks of Friedman and Goldstein, the perpetrators see themselves as soldiers in a spiritual army, engaged in a great cosmic war. These religious warriors hope that their victory will usher in a new epoch and a new religious kingdom on earth.

In an earlier book, I looked at this extraordinary longing for religious kingdoms that has fueled new movements for religious nationalism around the world.21 am now working on a follow-up volume that deals specifically with the violent aspects of this confrontation between religion and the secular state: religious terrorism. For this new project I have conducted case studies and held interviews in the Middle East, India, Japan and the United States. I have focused on the Aum Shinrikyo's nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subways; the World Trade Center bombing and the Bojinka plot to blow up

Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.9, No.2 (Summer 1997), pp.16-23 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

TERROR MANDATED BY GOD 17

a series of airplanes by a group of Muslims associated with Sheik Omar Abd al-Rahman; the Sikh Khalistani movement's airplane highjacking, car bombings and political assassinations in India; the Hamas suicide bus bombings in Jerusalem; the attacks by members of Kach and other exteme Jewish groups in Hebron; and assaults by Christian militia, and the killing of abortion clinic staff by other militant Christians in the United States.

In studying these cases, I regard terrorism as 'the public performance of violent power'. By that I mean acts that are meant to demonstrate the strength of a movement and its ideas in the public sphere. For that reason, I view acts of religious terrorism as cultural constructions that have a broad public audience.3 In looking at these cases, I have tried to answer two basic questions: why do religious groups seek public power, and why do they seek it now?

Why Religion?

The Japanese case of religious terrorism provides some interesting clues, in part because the violence of the 1994 nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subways was so unexpected. Like Europe, America and much of the rest of the world, Japanese society has witnessed an explosive growth of new religious movements, so there was nothing unusual in Japan about the emergence of a new religion like Aum Shinrikyo and its eclectic religious philosophy that blends Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism with new age mysticism, a self- help philosophy and Christian visions of the apocalypic end of the millennium. There was nothing unusual about Aum's tight, secretive organization, its cathartic initiation process and the subservience it required to its almost god-like and dominating leader. There was nothing unusual about the movement's paranoia, its Manichaean black-and-white view of the world. What was unusual about Aum Shinrikyo was the projection of these religious ideas onto a political plane, and its attempt to make the secular Japanese state into a satanic foe.

What is distinctive about the international terrorism of the 1980s and 1990s is this combination of politics and religion. By politics I mean the awareness of, and challenge to, the prevailing social order and its recognized authorities. By religion I mean not just an ethnic religious identity - such as Irish Catholic or Tamil Hindu - but the appropriation of an ideology of transformative significance, the sort of religious and political vision that transformed Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1978.4 Such an ideology is usually couched in the rhetoric of traditional religion and touches on a great many aspects of daily life. It provides the vision and commitment that propels an activist into scenes of violence, and it supplies the ideological glue that makes that activist's community of support cohere.

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As in the case of the Aum Shinrikyo, militant religious activists often interject religious mythology into real-life political struggles, and find in religion a legitimization and a support for acts of violence as if they were mandated by God. In their vision of a world gone bad, what most of us regard as ordinary politics — the secular politics of modern civil societies — is viewed as the enemy of religion.

In the view of the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, for example, the Japanese government was in collusion with the United States in a global plot to destroy religion. Similarly, Rabbi Meir Kahane regarded the secular politics of the Israelis - backed by the United States - as a greater enemy than the Arabs, and Sheik Omar Abd al-Rahman aimed at attacking the American government's support for Egypt's nominally Islamic but basically secular government in Cairo, which the Sheik saw as a satanic enemy of Islam.

In the Japanese case, Aum's leader, Shoko Asahara, envisioned a new political order to be led by its members after a colossally destructive World War III, which he predicted would occur around the year 2000. The nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subways in 1995 was meant to be an indication of the cosmic confrontation to come. One of the members of the movement told me that when he heard about the attack he was convinced that Shoko Asahara's prophecies were being fulfilled, and that 'the weird time has come'.5

Inside the Aum Shinrikyo movement's headquarters in Tokyo, those members of the movement who were not involved in the plot quickly came to the conclusion that the nerve gas assault on the subways was indeed an attack on the Japanese government, albeit a deceptive one undertaken by the government itself in order to deflect the public's attention from what the Aum members thought had really occurred: the Third World War had broken out, and the Japanese government had been secretly captured by America. The use of nerve gas seemed to confirm this theory, since the Aum members assumed that in Japan only American army bases possessed such a weapon.6

Prophetic statements made by the leader of the movement, Shoko Asahara, scarcely months before the subway attack indicate another reason for doing it, and also indicate why Asahara and his colleagues chose the Kasumigaseki station of the subways as the prime location. Asahara prophesied that in the coming great conflagration at the end of the twentieth century, the most devious of weapons, including nerve gas, would be used against the populace. Sarin was mentioned by name. Asahara urged the public to join movements such as Aum that were protecting themselves against such an attack, since the Japanese government could not sufficiently protect them; it had prepared 'a poor defence for the coming war', Asahara said.7 He went on to say that the government had constructed only one

TERROR MANDATED BY GOD 19

subway station of sufficient depth and security to be used as a haven in time of nuclear or poisonous gas attack. 'Only the Kasumigaseki subway station, which is near the Diet Building', Asahara explained, 'can be used as a shelter'.8

In Asahara's mind, then, the Kasumigaseki station was not only a symbol of government activity, but of governmental power: it symbolized the government's attempts to protect its citizens in time of crisis. When he unleashed nerve gas in this location, Asahara showed that that power and that protection were vulnerable, for the government could not guard its people even in Tokyo's safest place. By implication only Aum, with its spiritual and physical forms of defence, could offer a true haven. The attack on the Kasumigaseki station, then, was intended as an assault on the Japanese public's sense of security. The enormous public response to the event amply demonstrated that the public interpreted the attack in precisely that way.

In virtually every other recent example of terrorism, the building, vehicle, structure or locale where the assault has taken place has had a symbolic significance. In some cases the symbolism of the locale was specific: the abortion clinics in the United States, for example, that were bombed by religious pro-life activists; or the tourist boats and hotels in Egypt that were attacked by Islamic activists who regarded them as impositions from a foreign culture. Sheik Abd al-Rahman had proclaimed such tourists sites as 'sinful' and insisted that 'the lands of Muslims will not become bordellos for sinners of every race and color'.' The shrine of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, where Dr. Goldstein killed scores of praying Muslims, also had specific symbolic significance, for Goldstein and his group regarded the shrine as emblematic of the Muslim occupation of Jewish territory.

The symbolism of other locations has been more general: the locations were emblematic of the power and stability of society itself. Buildings such as the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City federal building, along with airplanes, subways and public buses, are examples of such general symbols. One group - the Islamic al Fuqra ('the impoverished') movement based in upstate New York — is accused of hatching a plot to disable Colorado's electrical system.10 In showing the vulnerability of a nation's most stable and powerful entities, movements that undertake these acts of sabotage touch virtually everyone in a nation's society. Any person in the United States could have been riding the elevator in the World Trade Center, visiting the Oklahoma City federal building or taking a trip on Air India flight 182 when the bombs exploded; and everyone in the United States will look differently at the stability of public buildings and transportation systems as a result of these violent incidents.

20 TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

What is significant about these symbolically central things, including subways and airplanes, is that they represent power. They are cultural centers in Clifford Geertz's use of the term: 'concentrated loci of serious acts'." What makes them centers is that they are the 'arenas' in a society, 'where its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions' and where 'momentous events' are thought to occur.12 When one attacks such a place, be it an airport or the World Trade Center or the Kasumigaseki subway station in central Tokyo, one challenges the power and legitimacy of society itself.

The Post-Modern Terrorism of Religion

It is clear, then, that the use of violence allows a religious group to assert not only its power but also its legitimacy. Challenging the notion that the state holds the monopoly on morally sanctioned violence, as Max Weber once averred, religious groups can show their moral superiority by sanctioning violence on their own.

But why would religious activists want to demonstrate this power over secular authority now? In looking for answers to this question, I have sought clues in the common temporal context of all recent acts of religious terrorism: namely, this particular period of late twentieth-century modernity. What was significant about the Enlightenment three centuries ago was its proclamation of the death of religion; what is significant about the present period is the perception of the death of secularism. By that I mean the widespread impression that secular culture and its forms of nationalism are unable to provide the moral fiber that unites national communities, or offer the ideological strength to sustain states that have been buffeted by economic and military failures. In other words, there is the widespread perception that politics is immoral and public life desperately needs the sacred cleansing that religion can offer it.

The shifts in economic and political power that have occurred following the break-up of the Soviet Union and the sudden rise of Japanese and other Asian economies in the last twenty years of the twentieth century have had significant social repercussions. The public sense of insecurity that has come in the wake of these changes is felt not only in the societies of those nations that are economically devastated by them - especially countries in the former Soviet Union - but also in economically stronger areas. The United States, for example, has seen a remarkable degree of disaffection with its political leaders and witnessed the rise of right-wing religious movements that feed on the public's perception of the immorality of government.

At the extreme end of this religious rejection are members of Defensive

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Action, a violent anti-abortion group; the Christian Identity movement, such as the Freemen Community in Montana; the Christian militia that supported Timothy McVeigh, the convicted bomber of the Oklahoma Federal Building; and isolated groups such as the Branch Davidian sect headquarted in Waco, Texas. Similar movements have emerged in Israel - Rabbi Meir Kahane's Kach party was an extreme example - and in Japan, which is also experiencing disillusionment regarding its national purpose and destiny. As in America, the critique and sectarian experiments with Japan's political alternatives often take religious forms. New religious movements in Japan that have attempted to play a political and social role in society include the Soka Gakkai, Agon-shu and the now infamous Aum Shinrikyo.

The global shifts that have led to a crisis of national purpose in developed countries have, in a somewhat different way, affected the less- developed nations. Leaders such as India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Iran's Riza Shah Pahlavi once were committed to creating versions of America - or a kind of cross between America and the Soviet Union - in their own countries. But a new generation of leaders has emerged in areas that were formerly European colonies who no longer believe in the westernized vision of a Nehru, a Nasser or the Shah. Rather, they are eager to complete the process of de-colonialization.

The former colonies have seen a resurgence of religious activists such as Sheik Ahmed Yassin in Palestine, Sayyid Qutb and his disciple, Sheik Omar Abd al-Rahman in Egypt, L. K. Advani in India, Sant Jernail Singh Bhindranwale in India's Punjab, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (a country which was never colonized but fell under western influence under the Shah). These leaders have asserted the legitimacy of their countries' own traditional values in the public sphere, and built a postcolonial national identity based on indigenous culture. This determination was made all the more keen when confronted with the media assault of western music, videos and films that satellite television has beamed around the world, and which has threatened to obliterate local and traditional forms of cultural expression.

The result of this disaffection with the culture of the modern West has been what I have called a 'loss of faith' in the political form of that culture, secular nationalism.13 Although a few years ago it would have been a startling notion, the idea has now become virtually commonplace that nationalism as we know it in the modern West is in crisis, in large part because it is seen as a cultural construction closely linked with what Jurgen Habermas has called 'the project of modernity'.14 Increasingly we live in a multicultural world where a variety of views of nationhood are in competition. In a world that verges on cultural anarchism, religious answers to the questions of identity and meaning have extraordinary popular appeal.

22 TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

The Future of Religious Terrorism

These trends that have given rise to movements of religious nationalism around the world will not soon abate. Since violence has been the way that many of these movements express their power and lay claims to their legitimacy, it is unlikely that the world has seen the end of acts of religious terrorism. In fact, the symbolic importance of the year 2000 as a convergence point in history may propel Christian movements especially into a greater activism and a greater propensity for violent confrontation.

Although acts of violence will mostly likely continue to be conducted by small rogue bands, it is important to take seriously not only their potential for destruction, but their broad bases of support within society at large. In most cases, the postmodern religious rebels who have promoted religious solutions to society's problems are neither anomalies nor anachronisms. From Algeria to Idaho, the small but potent groups of violent activists represent masses of supporters, and they exemplify currents of thinking and cultures of commitment that have risen to counter the prevailing modernism - the ideology of individualism and skepticism - that in the past three centuries has emerged from the European Enlightenment and spread throughout the world.

Religious activists like Yigal Amir, Sheik Omar Abd al-Rahman, and Shoko Asahara have come to hate secular governments with an almost transcendent passion and dream of revolutionary changes that will establish a godly social order in the rubble of what the citizens of most secular societies regard as modern, egalitarian democracies. Their enemies seem to most of us to be both benign and banal: modern, secular leaders like Yitzhak Rabin or Anwar Sadat, and such symbols of prosperity and authority as the international airlines, the World Trade Center and the Japanese subway system. The logic of their ideological religious view is, although difficult to comprehend, profound, for it contains a fundamental critique of the world's post-Enlightenment secular culture and politics.

In the wake of secularism, and after years of waiting in history's wings, religion has made its re-appearance as an ideology of public order in a dramatic fashion: violently. Religion's renewed political presence is accompanied by violence in part because of the nature of religion and its claims for power over life in death. In part it is due to the nature of secular politics, which places its own legitimacy on the currency of weapons and can only be challenged successfully on a military level. And in part it is due to the nature of violence itself. Violence is a destructive display of power, and in a time when competing groups are attempting to assert their strength, the power of violence becomes a valuable political commodity. At the very least the proponents of a religious ideology of social control such as the

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leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo have to remind the populace of the godly power that makes their ideology potent; at their destructive worst, religious activists try to create man-made incidents of terror on God's behalf.

NOTES

1. Noam Friedman, quoted in Marjorie Miller, 'Israeli Opens Fire in Hebron Market', Los Angeles Times, 2 Jan. 1997.

2. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993).

3. For other works in what might be called an emerging field of 'comparative cultural studies of terrorism' see James Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1990); Jeffrey Kaplan, 'The Context of American Millenarian Revolutionary Theology: The Case of the "Identity Christian" Church of Israel', Terrorism and Political Violence 5/1 (Spring 1993) pp.30-82, and idem, 'Right Wing Violence in North America', in Tore Bj0rgo (ed.), Terror from the Extreme Right (London: Frank Cass 1995) pp.44-95; Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 1997); Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (New York: OUP 1991); and Paul Steinberg and Annamarie Oliver, Rehearsals for a Happy Death: the Testimonies of Hamas Suicide Bombers (New York: OUP 1997). See also the articles of Robin Wright, who writes for the Los Angeles Times and such journals such as Foreign Affairs, and has written several books on Iran including In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (New York: Simon & Schuster 1989).

4. I expand on this distinction between ethnic religious nationalism and ideological religious nationalism in my article, 'The World-Wide Rise of Religious Nationalism', Columbia Journal of International Affairs 50/1 (Summer 1996) pp.1-20.

5. Interview with Jun'ichi Kamata, former public affairs officer for the Tokyo headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo, Tokyo, 12 Jan. 1996.

6. Interview with Jun'ichi Kamata. 7. Shoko Asahara, Disaster Approaches the Land of the Rising Sun: Shoko Asahara's

Apocalyptic Predictions (Tokyo: Aum Publishing Co. 1995) p. 190 (translated and edited by Aum Translation Committee).

8. Ibid., p.190. 9. Sheik Omar Abd al-Rahman, quoted in Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, 5 March 1993. 10. Bruce Hoffman, 'Holy Terror': The Implications of Terrorism Motivated by a Religious

Imperative (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation papers, 1993) p. 13. See also Mark Hosenball, 'Another Holy War, Waged on American Soil: Al-Fuqra, a Muslim Sect with a Dangerous Agenda', Newsweek, 28 Feb. 1995, pp.29-31.

11. Clifford Geertz, 'Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power', in Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark (eds), Culture and its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977); this essay is reprinted in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books 1983) pp.121-46.

12. Geertz, 'Centers, Kings, and Charisma', p.151. 13. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? (note 2) pp.11-25. 14. Jurgen Habermas, 'Modernity — An Incomplete Project', reprinted in Paul Rabinow and

William M. Sullivan (eds), Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press 1987) p. 148.