This is a podcast interview I did the week after the fall of the Asad regime in Syria, speculating on how the new government might develop.
It has to deal with multiple problems: uniting the disparate ethnic and religious groups within the country, keeping predatory groups and neighboring countries at bay, bringing the former torturers and executioners in the previous regime to justice, creating the infrastructure for policing and internal security, and designing a long-term plan for a future polity that combines democratic participation, free speech, and sufficient centralized authority to hold the whole thing together. That’s a lot.
The question is whether a relatively small group of militants are capable of the task. In their favor is the experience of al Shara (formerly al Julani) and his colleagues in running the Idlib region.
Idlib was reasonably prosperous and well run, though there was a wave of protest against al Shara/ Julani’s authoritarian rule and his habit of imprisoning his critics. He backed down a bit, and perhaps learned from that.
More troubling is his association with an extreme jihadi ideology in the past when he and the other leading members of the rebels were part of al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate. It shared this standing with the Islamic State in Syria. But the two groups quarreled with each other and since then al Shara and his former al Nusra colleagues claim to have renounced their extremism and embraced a more moderate pro-nationalist posture.
[Picture: Ahmed al Shara, known as al-Julani, as the Emir of al Nusra, and more recently as the liberator of Syria]
In a lightning move, Syrian rebels charged down from their small territory in northwestern Syria. In ten days they captured the major cities of Syria: first Aleppo, then Hama and Homs, before victoriously entering Damascus. The fifty-year Assad rule had suddenly come to an abrupt end.
Bashar al-Assad loaded his family onto an airplane at six a.m. and flew off to safety in Russia. The rebel leader, Mohammad Abu al-Julani, marched triumphantly through the streets of the capital city. Syria was free.
But free for what?
The origins of the rebel movement, Hamat Tahrir al-Sham – HTS, “the organization for the liberation of al-Sham” (Syria, Iraq, and adjacent regions, also known as the Levant) — are in al Nusra. It was one of many groups that surfaced in response to the Arab Spring uprising against the Assad regime in 2012. It then quickly affiliated with al Qaeda.
Another movement in Syria, the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also affiliated with al Qaeda. In an effort to create solidarity between them, the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri commanded Baghdadi’s group to merge with al Nusra. Baghdadi refused. He broke with al Qaeda and went on to create the powerful Islamic State that dominated eastern Syrian and western Iraq for several years.
The al Nusra movement in time also tired of its association with al Qaeda. In 2016, the young leader of al Nusra, Ahmed al-Shara, known by his nom de guerre, Mohammad al Julani, broke ranks with what remained of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death. He downplayed the jihadi rhetoric in favor of an emphasis on the national liberation of Syria from the Assad regime. This enabled him to forge a new coalition of rebel groups under the banner of HTS.
So now that the 42-year-old former jihadi militant is now the new leader of Syria, the question is what will he do? What is next for Syria?
Unification is part of the agenda. Al Shara (formerly known as Julani) represents a tiny sliver of the Syrian population. His movement is aligned with Sunni Arabs, who constitute the majority of the country, so that will help. But Sunni Arabs are hardly a unified constituency. Then there is a sizeable percentage of Syrian Christians and Alawites (a Shi’a offshoot) along the Mediterranean coast. Kurds control vast sections of the northern and western parts of the country. ISIS is still present and still bitter over their break up with al Nusra years earlier. Also there are former al Nusra supporters who refused to go along with the moderating style of Shara and formed their own militant cell.
Gaining the support of all these groups, even their tacit accession to HTS’s power, will be challenging. Then there is the need to reconstitute the government after decades of dictatorial rule. Will Shara simply slide into office as the newest dictator, or will there be an effort to reform the governmental process? Does democracy stand a chance?
We will be waiting to get answers to these questions. So far Shara has appeared to be conciliatory. He has assured Shi’a that their sacred shrines will be protected and has promised Syrian Christians and Alawites safety. He has ordered his armed forces to protect government buildings and keep them from being looted, and he has allowed the Prime Minister –who stayed in Damascus after Assad fled—to continue the functioning of government until there is a transition.
But a transition to what? Now that he is in power, will Shara return to his old jihadi ideology and try to impose his own idea of an Islamic State? There are several possibilities:
The ISIS model. Shara could assume he has a mandate to recreate Syria around his own ideology and impose a dictatorship and a rigid Islamic order.
The Saudi model. He could declare Syria to be an Islamic state and impose an autocratic regime while allowing some flexibility in rigid Islamic codes of behavior.
The Iranian model. He could try to resuscitate the trappings of democratic rule while maintaining a fairly conservative Islamic social order.
The Iraq model. His movement could constitute itself as an Islamic-leaning political party and contest elections, negotiating with other parties to create a coalition government.
The Ukrainian model. Shara could emerge as a nationalist hero, admired by all sides, and put his ideology aside while he created a new democratic order.
While Western observers yearn for the last outcome, it will probably be some variant of the other ones. The hope is that whatever form of polity and social order emerges out of the new regime it will not lead to chaos and even more bloodshed. The Syrian people have had enough of both. They deserve better.
Since the election I’ve wondered why. I could understand if voters were misled about how Trump would help them economically and shake things up politically.
But was it more personal than that? Did they also have something against a woman as likeable as Kamala Harris? Yesterday I got an answer.
I received a telephone call from an old friend from my high school in a little town in rural Southern Illinois. She called to wish me Happy Birthday. I thanked her.
Then she apologized for the election since she thought I would be unhappy with the outcome. I affirmed that I did.
She said she felt differently. She went on to say that she was glad she would not have to see the face of that “damned woman” again.
I muttered something, not knowing what to say. She said she hoped she hadn’t offended me. “No, no,” I said, “speak your mind, it’s ok.”
But afterwards I began to wonder about the vehemence of her comment. It was not that she disagreed with Vice President Harris’s positions, she hated her. She hated her so much she almost sputtered when she said so.
Today I called back and after chatting amiably a bit, I asked my friend to do me a favor. “What is it about Kamala that makes you dislike her so intensely?” I asked.
She hesitated a bit, and then again apologized. She said that I might not like what she was going to say. “It’s ok,” I said, “I just want to understand.”
“Well,” she said, “here’s what I think. I want a President with high moral standards and honesty that we can look up to with pride.”
“Right,” I said, hesitantly. Assuming she had voted for Trump, that seemed an odd reason not to favor Kamala.
“And what makes you think Kamala would not have those standards?”
“She’s a tramp,” she said. “She was sleeping with Willie Brown when he was married to someone else. Everyone knows it.”
She was referring to a period decades ago before she became San Francisco District Attorney. It was an office to which she was elected in part because of the support of the popular California politician, Willie Brown.
Brown had been separated from his wife for many years and had a steady string of girlfriends before he briefly dated Kalama, who was single. Their relationship after that appeared to be solely political.
But this has not stopped the right-wing news media from harping on this affair and the marital status of Willie Brown at the time. No matter that Trump routinely cheated on each of his successive wives, including his dalliance with a pornstar when the current one was pregnant.
But he was a guy. Women are supposed to live up to higher standards.
“Especially,” my friend said, “if they are to be the first woman elected President. They have to be the best.”
But I was not satisfied with this answer. Somehow this did not seem to be a sufficient reason for the vehemence of her hatred of Kamala.
“Besides,” she added, “she was only interested in getting the Black vote.”
Now we seemed to be getting somewhere. I asked her why she thought that was the case.
“She only mentioned her Black father,” she said, “and ignored her lovely Indian mother.”
I was surprised at this since Kamala’s comments during the campaign seemed just the opposite. She frequently talked about her mother and seldom about her father, who was a distant figure in their separated family.
My friend went on to compare her with J.D.Vance who was proud of his Indian wife, she said. “Kamala just wants the Black vote.”
I did not argue with my friend. I felt there would be no point to it. Besides, in my years of interviewing militants involved in terrorism I learned to listen to them and not get into an argument.
My mission in talking with her was to gain some insight into why Kamala Harris lost, and especially why white women would turn against her. I think I got some answers.
My friend appeared to share the perception that the Democrat in this race had no interest in White people, especially White men. They seemed only to talk about minorities and women’s issues, so the perception went.
I mused on how Obama was seen differently. There was a large number of people, men especially, who voted for Obama and then turned around and voted for Trump.
But Obama was a guy, a real guy. He played basketball. He could have been any guy with whom a dude would get into a pick-up game in a vacant lot.
Kamala not so much. Her image was posing with her Black sorority sisters at Howard University.
Even women, including my friend from high school, could not identify with that. Kamala was not, she implied, the sort of person she would want her granddaughters to admire.
The US Presidential elections that brought Donald Trump back to power created anxious soul searching among progressive voters. What the hell happened?
Fingers of blame pointed in all directions. The campaign for Kamala Harris was flawed, some said. Others said she didn’t have time to fully introduce her to the electorate. Misogyny and racism were to blame. Misinformation about immigrants and the state of the economy were rife.
No doubt many if not all of these were factors. They are idiosyncratic to the US at this particular moment in its political life.
But Trump also fits into a global pattern. The lure of strongmen has risen around the world. Russia after the Cold War was briefly democratic, but that cannot be said today about the Russia under Putin. The same transformation has brought Erdogan to power in Turkey, the growing authoritarianism of Modi in India, the persistence of Netanyahu in Israel, and in China a non-electoral policy has given rise to the autocracy of Xi. Authoritarian right-wing political parties have been on the rise throughout Europe.
The statistics in the recent US elections indicate how quickly the political climate can change. At the time that Kamala was knighted to be the Democratic candidate, the polls indicated that she was a shoo-in. She led Trump by some 7 percentage points in some polls.
But by October that percentage began to shrink. It eventually came down to an even tie. Then the election itself showed how low it would go.
What happened in October? This is when people only marginally interested in politics begin to wake up. They did not, however, immediately begin analyzing the policy positions of the candidates, or read the rebuttals to the mistruths and lies that were freely circulated.
It is likely that this decisive segment of the electorate voted with their guts. They either liked what they saw, or didn’t.
Many of them looked past Trump’s multiple felonies, proven instances of sexual molestation, business failings and political manipulation. They saw a strongman. His public persona was of a loud, tough leader, who told it like it was.
Putin leads Russia with similarly ardent support from most Russian citizens. It is true that he has controlled the news media and manipulated the electoral process in a way that skews their perceptions. But it’s also true that people are comforted by the illusion of security that strongmen give.
Netanyahu enjoyed this sense of invincibility, despite his personal legal problems and his attempts to manipulate the judiciary. Then the October 7, 2023 attack damaged that image. He has tried hard to repair it by taking a stridently militant response.
Somehow strongmen are able to ward off the criticisms of their many failings. People seem to want a strongman in times of rapid social change, and they are invariably men.
Globalization has created that unease in societies around the world. Rapid demographic shifts, the caprice of markets to a global economy, the baffling accessibility of manipulated information on the internet have all led to social uncertainty. People wonder who is in charge, and what their formerly insular societies have become.
Strongmen give that illusion of security. But they are seldom able to maintain it. This leads sometimes to rebellion, and sometimes to increasingly authoritarian repression to keep a discomfited population in check.
During the US presidential election campaign, one of the Democratic ads tried to warn people about Trump. It sounded an alarm about his dictatorial character and the likelihood he bring a reign of retribution and administer a tough authoritarian rule.
Many of the people at the margins of political awareness were not frightened. They thought this was a good thing.
Whether they will continue to think this way, and continue to admire the skills of the strongman they have chosen, remains to be seen. Trump’s economic plan with tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will likely cause the national debt to balloon. His tariffs on everything could raise consumer prices enormously and spike inflation. The cruelty with which he tries to control illegal immigration, and his revenge against political enemies may shock the populace into an awareness of what strongmen can do to damage the moral fibre of a society.
The historical record is that strongmen do not last forever. Despite their attempts at infinite reins of power, strongmen die and their charisma is not easily succeeded. Even before then their regimes collapse under their own incompetence and through internal opposition. In the meantime, however, life can be hard, and much damage can be done.
It is not a pretty future, both for the US and for global society. But it will not always be this way, and the spirit of people around the world will survive.
For the first time in their history, Americans have to prepare for life under authoritarian rule. The question is how will they survive it?
I have friends in other countries that have had to confront creeping authoritarianism. They are in Russia, Turkey, China, India, and elsewhere. We live in an age of global neo-authoritarianism. We are not alone.
Many of them survive by ignoring it. After all, there is comfort in one’s own cave. Daily life goes on.
But others do not succumb so easily. We are all citizens of the countries of which we are a part, and this means we are collectively responsible for the quality of public life within them and around the world. We cannot just roll over and sleep.
This is true even—and perhaps especially—in a time of rising authoritarian rule. Most of my friends around the world are fighters.
In the face of mounting authoritarian control, they have adopted several approaches, each worth emulating:
Vigilance
They keep aware of what is happening. They keep up with the news, even when it is increasingly controlled or cowed by strongarm tactics. They are sensitive to the intimidation and manipulation of news media and try to make sure that skewed information does not go unchallenged.
Sometimes they have to resort to foreign sources of news, or to finding information networks online. In the most difficult situations email chains and word of mouth provide ears to hear what is happening in the world around them.
Connection
They keep in touch with one another. This is a source of information, but also inspiration. It can also lead to creative ways of getting around the limitations imposed by censorship and social controls.
They also reach out to friends and contacts around the world. We live in an interlocking global society and we need the support of a planetary community.
Alternatives
Local, county, and statewide governmental structures become significant alternatives to a dominant national regime. They can mitigate the influence of manipulative national government. And they can sometimes counter it.
Nongovernment organizations can provide other alternatives to public life. Community-based action can offer services and embrace marginalized people effectively. They point to a different way of conceiving public service.
Resilience
They do not give up. Most authoritarian powers crumble under their own weight. While democratic institutions still exist the power of elections provide ways to change or mitigate their stranglehold over governmental structures.
If elections are no longer freely available, other forms of pressure can provide checks on seemingly unbridled power. Sometimes the most effective challenge to authority comes from within the regime itself.
In my own study of how terrorist movements come to an end, I concluded that their demise is usually due to internal schisms within the organization, and a withdrawal of support from the general population.
The good news is that they do end. Democracy may be a fragile and capricious way of life, but it is resilient.
I asked the kids in my college class to list the things they were concerned about in this Presidential election, and to rank them. Democracy came out on top.
Access to reproductive rights, especially abortion, was their second greatest concern. The economy, which the news media tell you is what concerns Americans most, came in third.
Climate change was next. Then foreign policy issues, especially regarding Israel and Palestine. Gun control, and issues of equality, especially racial and ethnic equality, were also high on the list. Immigration and border issues were eighth on the list, not a high priority.
Here’s the complete list in rank order of concern:
1 Democracy
2 Reproductive rights
3 Economy
4 Climate change
5 Foreign policy
6 Gun control
7 Equality
8 Immigration
9 Crime
10 Supreme court
11 Student loans
12 LGBTQ rights
13 Voting rights
14 Healthcare
15 Tax policies/tariffs
This is not a scientific poll, of course, just a snapshot of one class in one college. And a rich college at that. After retiring from UC-Santa Barbara I agreed to teach a class each Fall at Claremont McKenna College, part of the Claremont cluster colleges.
The tuition at Claremont McKenna, including room and board, is $80k a year. Many of the kids are econ majors and most end up in business. I suspect most of their parents vote Republican.
In my class half are male, half female, with a smattering of international students. They are very bright, and remarkably engaged in the topic of the class, global conflict. Needless to say, Ukraine and Gaza are on our minds.
Still, I didn’t expect this outcome. For the future of democracy to be the issue of greatest concern, especially for these folks, was surprising. It says a lot about the concern of this young generation for the future of our political life.
Well, not exactly. Though Walmart transformed what was a thriving downtown into a shell of its former self.
I was raised in Carlinville, a town of 5000 in Southern Illinois. It is in the transition area between cornfields and coal mines, and is closer both geographically and culturally to Kentucky and Ozark Missouri than to Chicago.
My home town is a Mid West icon with brick streets and a circular town square with a bandstand in the middle. A stone monument in our church yard marks the site of where Lincoln campaigned against Douglas for his senate seat. Nearby is an imposing county courthouse, constructed from huge limestone blocks and surmounted with a magnificent dome. When it was built the town hoped that the state would want it for its capital. Alas that honor went to Springfield, some forty miles north, with what seemed to me to be a much less spectacular capital building.
The town also boasts a thriving college, Blackburn. It was famed for its work-study program that requires students to enroll in work hours, such as mowing the lawn and helping in the kitchen, in addition to academic credits. The money saved by student workers was said to have allowed the college to endure through the depression even when many other similarly sized institutions were faltering.
My family home was near the college. It was a simple house, one of a hundred or so prefabricated homes purchased from a Sears-Roebuck in 1930 by the Standard Oil Company to house the workers in its nearby coal mine. It is the largest such colony of Sears-Roebuck homes in the country.
And the town is on old Route 66. What is not to like?
I grew up playing in the cornfields near the college, then joining the high school band in concerts for ice cream socials in the bandstand of the town square. My father was elected County Superintendent of Schools and his office was in that magnificent court house. It was as if the whole of the town was my back yard.
My first proper suit was purchased at Surman’s Clothing Store on the Square. We knew the Surmans, they attended our church, and their daughter Jane sang in the choir. Next door to the clothing store was the pharmacy where we got out prescriptions filled from a pharmacist who knew us by name and would call if we forgot to get a refill that we needed.
We didn’t need many store-bought groceries since we had a fourteen-acre mini-farm with our own chickens and cows and sheep, and one lethargic pig. It also had a huge garden area where we grew corn, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, and much more. We seldom bought stuff from a store since my mother would cook and carefully seal glass Bell jars that we stored in the basement. The peas and corn and other vegies would last all winter. For ice cream we would make our own from milk that got from our cows, cranking the churner and adding salt to the ice around the interior ice cream bucket. Then we would add our own strawberries and raspberries to taste.
We would go to the store for sugar, salt, some other staples, and most exiting for me an occasional candy bar. I liked Mars bars the best. Fortunately the stores were nearby. There was Lanzerotti’s Superette, just a few blocks from our house, run by an Italian immigrant family who lived upstairs. Their sons, Louis and Richard were among my closest buddies in high school. Whenever I went there for even a candy bar or a soda Mrs. Lanzerotti would engage me in long conversation about everyone in our family as if we were kinfolk. For even more food supplies there was the IGA, though for the life of me I don’t remember what those initials stood for—Independent Grocers’ Association, perhaps? I knew almost all of the workers there, since many of them were the older siblings of my high school class mates.
I visited the hometown recently for a high school class reunion. There were 100 members of our class and now there are only about 40 of us left. Of those half are in long term care facilities or in other ways not able to travel even a few blocks to the reunion restaurant. There were about twenty of us who were there, and we seemed genuinely happy to see each other. Perhaps we were equally happy just to be alive.
The town had not changed much in outward appearance. Almost all of the old buildings around the square were still intact, including an old hotel that had not seen a guest in decades. I remember that the Elks club occupied the upper floors, and our Boy Scout troop met there, though today only the lower floors are still occupied by various shops.
What has changed are the shops themselves. Gone are the clothing store, the pharmacy, the neighborhood grocery stores. Instead the shops are occupied by antique stores and tourist items for the Route 66 trade. There are more restaurants, coffee houses, and taverns than I remembered. The town has survived largely because it is seen as a charming old-fashioned Route 66 tourist stop.
Where have all the other shops gone? To figure that out you have to venture to the edge of town, actually across the city lines in an area that is immune to city sales and property taxes. There one finds an enormous store the size of a football field surrounded by an asphalt parking lot that would hold hundreds of vehicles.
Walmart has come to Carlinville. And it has conquered it.
Walmart was founded in 1962 not far from Carlinville in rural Arkansas by Sam Walton, a clever entrepreneur who seized upon a brilliant marketing strategy. The one thing that small town American misses most, he reasoned, were the megastores of big cities that offered a dazzling array of everything imaginable at ridiculously cheap prices. By clever marketing and control of the supply chains back to factories in China and elsewhere, he could offer “always low prices, always,” as the store liked to boast. And it would transform middle America.
Transform he did, garnering an obscene amount of wealth in the process. Virtually every county seat town in the mid-West soon had a Walmart superstore. Within fifty years Walmart was the largest retailer in the world with over ten thousand stores, over two million employees and annual yearly revenues of over 600 billion dollars (that’s billion with a “b”).
Though Sam Walton is long gone, his heirs still own over half of the company’s shares. The combined wealth of the Walton family is over $340 billion dollars, making them collectively the richest entity in the world, wealthier than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Sam’s three children each have about a hundred billion dollars in wealth: Jim has $96 billion, Rob has $94 billion, and Alice has $89 billion (making her the richest woman in the world).
Meanwhile the employees are not faring as well. As of October 2024, the average wage is around $25 an hour, ranging between $14 and $31 an hour. Most “associates,” as the salespeople are known, earn around $26,000 per year. This is a considerable increase from several years ago when the pay was so low many Walmart employees depended on government food stamps to get by.
Though it’s true that the standard of living in Carlinville is not Orange County or Manhattan Island, $26k does not go very far in sustaining a family budget. I talked with one fellow in Carlinville who worked in the stockroom of Walmart and was having to borrow money to feed his family of five. He now has switched to being a welder in East St. Louis, a forty- minute drive away, but well worth it financially.
Most of my former high school classmates are delighted to have Walmart in town. It’s one-stop shopping. They have a clothing department, a pharmacy, a florist section, and a huge grocery supermarket, all with greater variety and much lower prices than the old stores in town formerly had.
All the old stores quietly went out of business, one by one, as Walmart expanded its sales. The last independent grocery store, the IGA, closed a couple of years ago. The Lanzerotti Superette is now a residence, the Surman clothing store now sells antiques, and the town square pharmacy is now a coffee house for the Route 66 tourists.
At least Carlinville looks much like it used to, due to the tourist trade. But Walmart pulls its customers from all of the surrounding towns. Driving through them on the way to the St. Louis airport after my high school reunion, I was dismayed to see the ruins of all the little towns I remember from my youth. They all seem to be in a terminal stage of torpor, additional victims of Walmart’s ravenous reach.
Many of my former classmates have been grumbling about the erosion of the quality of life in the rural mid-West. They often blame the government, immigrants, and the liberal elites on the East and West Coast who sap the country’s strength and weaken the small towns that used to be so prosperous. I quietly encourage my classmates to look not so far away, but at the megastore at the outskirts of our own little village, offering “always low prices, always,” and eviscerating the small shops that used to be at the heart of our town’s commercial life.
My comments last night on BBC-World. Here’s a summary of what I said:
My sense is that neither Israel or Iran want an all-out war, and the US certainly doesn’t want to get involved as it would have to if Israel was attacked in a major way. Iran’s missile attack on Israel was likely understood by Iran to be more for show than for impact. So the likelihood is that Israel will retaliate in a way that does not provoke worse responses in the future. (Unless Netanyahu wants the conflict to continue in order to embarrass Biden and enhance the chances of Trump winning the November election). But the likelihood is that in a few days this will be over.
Netanyahu’s mission was to degrade the military capacity of Hezbollah, and they have largely achieved that, though this is a short term victory. As with the huge assault on Hamas that has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, it will neutralize the military capacity of Hezbollah and Hamas for many months. But in both cases the animosity it has created will likely strengthen both movements in the future. This has been the pattern in the past when Netanyahu tried to destroy Hamas by killing its founding leader, Sheikh Yassin and the predecessor to Nasrullah as the leader of Hezbollah. Both movements roared back stronger than before.
So although these attacks buy Netanyahu some relief for a few months — perhaps enough time to get him re-elected– they are not a long-term solution. Far from it.
[posted on the Immanent Frame, the online journal of the Social Science Research Council, as an introduction to a special issue on religion and violence}
In the past fifty years, the study of religion and violence has grown exponentially. One reason for this is obvious: the rise of strident religion-related political movements around the world, many of which challenge conventional notions of secularism and the secular nation-state. But another reason has been the scholarly interest in the materiality of culture. Elaine Scarry’s groundbreaking book, The Body in Pain, is emblematic of a growing interest in the way that physical suffering alters perception and challenges our understanding of socially constructed realities. The essays in this Immanent Frame forum display the diversity of topics related to the subject of religion and violence and the rich discussions they evoke.
The focus on the topic of religion and violence has occasioned close scrutiny of what is meant both by religion and by violence. For decades, scholars in the study of religion have recognized that the term is a fairly recently created Western fiction. In 1963, the long-standing director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religion published The Meaning and End of Religion, a book in which he advocated that scholars abandon the use of the word. “Religion” was a contrivance, Wilfred Cantwell Smith averred, that held no existential meaning and had no ancient roots. He allowed for forms of religiosity that could be described adjectivally, such as religious rituals, religious beliefs, and so on, but there was no intrinsic essence to religion itself.
In the years since Smith’s book, there has been a great deal of discussion of the socio-political contexts in which the concepts of religion and its uneasy partner, secularism, originated. The works of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and Rajeev Bhargava are particularly notable in raising the level of these discussions. Twenty years ago, a working group of scholars convened by the Social Science Research Council held a multi-year project examining the notions of religion and secularism. The group, which included Asad, Taylor, Bhargava, and others, published their essays in Rethinking Secularism, a book edited by Craig Calhoun, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and myself, which concluded that the terms were shaped in the West in recent centuries by political and historical contexts in a dialectical tandem.
Still the terms persist in popular discourse. Even Smith capitulated to the use of the word “religion” when he supported the creation of an academic program in Harvard College in the Study of Religion, preferring that phrase to “religious studies,” which Smith thought might be misunderstood as saying that the studies themselves were religious. Other scholars use the term as well, though they usually qualify what they mean by using it.
Late Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah took a different approach. He argued that religion was something, or at least a shared perception, and not just a set of adjectives. In a magisterial book completed shortly before his death, Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah posited that the origin of religion as an element of human culture was in play. Like Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, Bellah thought that the earliest forms of culture were activities, such as dance and ritual. These were embryonic forms of alternative realities that in time became internalized as realms of imagination, alternative realities in the mind. From these acts of cultural creativity spring religion, an alternative reality with persuasive powers of its own. As a sociologist, however, Bellah would never reify the alternative reality of religion or lift it out of its social and cultural context. He regarded it as one of many alternative realities that interact with our daily worlds. This brings Bellah’s position in line with the dominant view of the scholarly community, which is that religion cannot do anything on its own but illumines and interacts with various aspects of human practice and performance.
Hence the English word “religion” can refer to all kinds of things. Smith preferred to speak of religion as composed of tradition and its internalized form, which is faith. Or it can be, as Bellah described it, the perception of an alternative reality. As social phenomena, religion can be the dogmas, sets of beliefs, or ideological positions thought to originate with or be provided by some divine power. It can also mean the organizational institutions that are based on those beliefs and help maintain them, or describe the holders of clerical positions within those organizations. But religion need not be confined to institutions; it can refer to a culture of habits, practices, and shared values as well as to traditions that have been maintained, some of them over many centuries. It can also simply mean the social identity of a particular ethnic group.
The ambiguity around the word “religion” makes the study of religion and violence problematic. Sometimes commentators and authors of popular books aver that “religion causes violence.” No scholar would say such a thing, not only because of the difficulty in defining religion, but because of the causative implication in the phrase, as if religion could do anything on its own.
Scholars who use the phrase “religious violence” do not mean that religion causes violence. When used adjectivally, as in “religious ritual” or “religious art,” the implication is not that there is something called religion that causes rituals or art, but that these cultural forms are colored or characterized by a relationship to a transcendent alternative reality.
Similarly, scholars who speak of “religious violence” simply mean that things or cultural forms associated with religion are in some way related to violence. It is a shorthand for “religion-related violence.” That relationship is precisely what many scholars attempt to understand in their research. Invariably, this leads to a consideration of the social and historical milieu in which violent acts are committed, and of the ways that religious elements of culture are injected into conflict situations. Sometimes religious sanctions are used to shore up the legitimacy of those committing violent acts, sometimes religious images are part of the ideology of a movement, and sometimes religious identity is part of a cultural context.
The religious aspects of the Islamic State are an interesting case in point. Though it has often been referenced as a violent religious movement, “religion” in the sense of beliefs and ideology was limited to the small inner circle of the movement’s leadership. They imbibed apocalyptic images and beliefs from the past and fashioned a contemporary ideology of revenge against perceived foes, including Shi’a Muslims and their Western supporters, that would support their quest for political power. Most of the militants who joined the movement, however, were Sunni Arabs who saw the movement as a form of empowerment for their own ethnic community. They had little interest in the theological complexities of the ISIS ideology. The movement was religious, but in two quite different ways. In neither of these ways can religion be said to have caused the violence that ISIS perpetrated.
The diversity of meanings attached to religion is matched by that evoked by another problematic term: “violence.” The term usually conjures up images of physical violence, bodily harm and potential death. The images that are most striking are those associated with large-scale political violence — wars, genocide, terrorism, and the like. But there are forms of state violence apart from war that are enormously destructive, including pogroms and unjust incarceration. Even in political violence, religion is often a factor. Particular religious communities can be targeted for expulsion or destruction, and religious justifications can prop up the autocracy of the state. In every war, God seems to bless one side or another, and it is invariably the side of those claiming divine sanctions for their actions.
Religious images and ideas also are connected to interpersonal suffering and self-inflicted injury. When monks and nuns immolate themselves to protest injustices against their religious communities, they are described as martyrs. Martyrdom has an honored place in many religious traditions and contradicts the usual religious proscription against suicide. When I referred to certain Islamist activists as suicide bombers, the Hamas leader with whom I was speaking corrected me and assured me that they were “self martyrs.”[1]
There are other forms of violence besides physical violence, and these also often have a religious dimension. Extreme forms of social control and forced behavior can violate the integrity of the other. Mohandas Gandhi considered any kind of coercion a form of violence, and he believed coercion should be rejected as firmly as physical violence. Religious institutions and restrictions are often perpetrators of these less-tangible forms of violence, alas, enforcing coercion with self-righteousness.
Symbols of violence abound in virtually every religious tradition. From the swords of Sikhism and Islam to the execution device that is the cross Christians venerate, such images remind the faithful of violent and brutal death. The crucifixion of Christ, the martyrdom of Guru Arjun, and the killing of Ali ibn Abi Talib are central moments in the histories of Christianity, Sikhism, and Shi’a Islam, respectively. These events are woven into their legends and shape their rituals.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars frequently pointed to sacrifice as a defining element of religion. Almost every early religious tradition has sacrificial offerings, usually of animals, but some cases also evidence human sacrifice. As religious traditions evolved, the sacrificial ritual became more metaphorical. In Christianity, the sacrifice of Christ is represented in the ritual of the eucharist. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the bread and wine offered to the faithful undergoes an act of transubstantiation and becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. Part of the scholarly fascination with the images of sacrifice in religious traditions is that they appear to hold keys to understanding the nature of religion itself. From a Durkheimian perspective, sacrifice is part of the reciprocity between humans and the divine being — life is given in order for life to be received.
Other scholars agree that the seemingly ubiquitous obsession with violence and death in religious traditions, both symbolic and physical, points to basic elements of the religious imagination. Ernest Becker famously described this as the religious “denial of death.” Anthropologist Weston LeBarre, in analyzing the emergence of the Ghost Dance Religion among the Native American plains tribes who were under attack by the US cavalry, thought he had found the source of religion in the ritual response to impending doom. A more sophisticated version of this argument has been made by University of Chicago sociologist Martin Riesebrodt, in The Promise of Salvation.
The essays in this forum explore many of these themes in the relationship between religion and violence, however the terms may be defined. Because of the nuanced nature of the concepts, none of these analyses can be conclusive. But the essays that follow are ample indication of how enlightening the discussion of them can be.
[1] Author’s interview with the political head of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on March 1, 1998.
When I saw the police clash with protesters and ram a window to end the takeover of Hamilton Hall during the recent Gaza protests, I had an eerie flashback. It stoked memories of my graduate school days at Columbia, where I would frequently pass by that building on my way to classes across Amsterdam Avenue at the School of International and Policy Affairs. The center of the protests, the awesome expanse of grass in front of the Columbia library, was “one of the great urban spaces,” as a colleague of mine called it. A few years later it would be the scene of a huge protest against the war in Vietnam that was at least as large and confrontational as the one this year that focused on Israel’s war on Gaza.
By the time of the Columbia protests in the 1960s, however, I was a graduate student on a different campus, at Berkeley. I flashbacked to memories of protests that were even larger and more strident. I was convinced that the war was wrong-headed, having spent some months in Vietnam as a journalist and seeing the debacle at close hand. So I joined the protests with enthusiasm. Besides, it was Berkeley in the 60s. Along with pot and free love, it was the thing to do.
Four of my colleagues in sociology who were also active in the anti-Vietnam war protests many decades ago have posted an open letter comparing the current campus protests with our struggles in the 60s. They point out that student protests have often been the leading edge of public critique and the vanguard of social change. They show the resistance of establish authorities to moral retrospection and change. I agree with this, and compliment my colleagues, all of them Jewish, for their support for the rights of students to protest.
But there is one big difference between the current anti-war protests and those of the sixties. The protests today are so intimately personal.
In the 60s, few of us actually knew any Vietnamese. Our cause was not so much for the independence of Vietnam, but against the war itself. Few of those opposed to our protests wanted the American occupation of Vietnam to continue, or hated Vietnamese as people. They just didn’t like to see protests. And they trusted our government. We didn’t.
The situation today is vastly different. Appearing at the forefront of many of the campus protests are students of Middle East background, many of them Muslim and quite a few with connections to Palestine. Also in the campus melees are a huge number of Jewish students, many with ties to Israel, who have been on both sides of the protest movements.
One of these Jewish students recently contacted me, trying to add my course on global conflict to her schedule. She wanted to understand better what was going on, she said. Though she had family in Israel her sympathies were with all of those affected by killing and war, including the Palestinians. But she said she was afraid to wear her locket that displayed the Star of David without being chastised on campus as a supporter of Israeli genocide. She was afraid to be identified as being Jewish.
My Muslim students have voiced a similar fear. By simply supporting the rights of Palestinians and accusing Israel of over-reaching in its militant response to Gaza, they have been accused of being terrorists, and supporters of Hamas.
Both sides are shouting at each other. The rights of peaceful protest and public debate, and the critique of US involvement with the armaments of war have devolved into personal, tribal animosities.
My Jewish colleagues who have written the letter of support for the protesters point out that criticism of the policies of the state of Israel is not antisemitism. After all, we do not assume that Shi’a Muslims support Iran, even though it is a self-proclaimed Islamic state. Still, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has encouraged this connection, insisting that Israeli and Jewish identity are intertwined and any critique of his regime is anti-Semitic by nature.
As a result, my Jewish students are living in a climate of fear, labeled by their mere religious identity as supporters of Israel’s military assault. Even Jewish students who have been involved in the anti-Gaza protests are themselves sometimes targeted by their fellow protesters.
In a sad way, what is happening on campus has mirrored the current political culture of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Confrontation has degenerated from the level of ideology and policy to the primal contest between tribal communities formed around race and religion.
A disturbing underside to the presidential election slated for later in 2024 is the competition between White Christian autocracy and multicultural democracy. Race and religion are at the heart of the political differences in many of the races leading up to the Fall elections.
At the level of race and religion, however, these contests cannot be won. They can only be overcome. In the 60s, when the Vietnam War finally ended, the protests dissolved. The war was over. The conflict was forgotten.
This year, if a permanent cease fire ends the killing in Gaza, and progress is made towards the civil rights of Palestinians, the campus protests will likely also end. But the bitterness that the protests have awakened may linger, possibly for some time to come. Alas the same is true about the wider differences of race and religion in our current political culture.
