Terrorism in the name of religion.

• Author: Ranstorp, Magnus

Introduction

On 25 February 1994, the day of the second Muslim sabbath during Islam's holy month of Ramadan, a Zionist settler from the orthodox settlement of Qiryat Arba entered the crowded Ibrahim (Abraham's) Mosque, located in the biblical town of Hebron on the West Bank. He emptied three 30-shot magazines with his automatic Glilon assault-rifle into the congregation of 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 150, before being beaten to death. A longstanding follower of the radical Jewish fundamentalist group, the Kach movement,(1) Baruch Goldstein was motivated by a complex mixture of seemingly inseparable political and religious desiderata, fueled by zealotry and a grave sense of betrayal as his prime minister was "leading the Jewish state out of its God-given patrimony and into mortal danger."(2) Both the location and the timing of the Hebron massacre were heavily infused with religious symbolism. Hebron was the site of the massacre of 69 Jews in 1929. Also, the fact that is occured during the Jewish festival of Purim symbolically cast Goldstein in the role of Mordechai in the Purim story, meting out awesome revenge against the enemies of the Jews.(3) Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, speaking for the great mass of Israelis, expressed revulsion and profound sadness over the act committed by a "deranged fanatic." However, a large segment of militant and orthodox Jewish settlers in West Bank and Gaza settlements portrayed Goldstein as a righteous man and hailed him as a martyr.(4) During his funeral, these orthodox settlers also voiced religious fervor in uncompromising and militant terms, directed not only against the Arabs, but also against the Israeli government, which they believed had betrayed the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Israeli leaders and the mainstream Jewish community tried to deny or ignore the danger of Jewish extremism by dismissing Goldstein as, at most, belonging to "the fringe of a fringe" within Israeli society.(5) Sadly, any doubts of the mortal dangers of religious zealotry from within were abruptly silenced with the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a young Jewish student, Yigal Amir, who claimed he had acted on orders of God. He had been influenced by militant rabbis and their halalic rulings, which he interpreted to mean that the "pursuer's decree" was to be applied against Israel's leader.(6) Most Israelis may be astonished by the notion of a Jew killing another Jew, but Rabin was ultimately the victim of a broader force which has become one of the most vibrant, dangerous and pervasive trends in the post-Cold War world: religiously motivated terrorism.

Far afield from the traditionally violent Middle East, where religion and terrorism share a long history,(7) a surge of religious fanaticism has manifested itself in spectacular acts of terrorism across the globe. This wave of violence is unprecedented, not only in its scope and the selection of targets, but also in its lethality and indiscriminate character. Examples of these incidents abound: in an effort to hasten in the new millenium, the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground in June last year;(8) the followers of Sheikh `Abd al-Rahman's al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya, caused mayhem and destruction with the bombing of Manhattan's World Trade Center and had further plans to blow up major landmarks in the New York City area;(9) and two American white supremacists carried out the bombing of a U.S. Federal Building in Oklahoma City.(10) All are united in the belief on the part of the perpetrators that their actions were divinely sanctioned, even mandated, by God. Despite having vastly different origins, doctrines, institutions and practices, these religious extremists are unified in their justification for employing sacred violence, whether in efforts to defend, extend or avenge their own communities, or for millenarian or messianic reasons.(11) This article seeks to explore the reasons for the contemporary rise in terrorism for religious motives and to identify the triggering mechanisms that bring about violence out of religious belief in both established and newly formed terrorist groups.

The Wider Trend of Religious Terrorism

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, the number of fundamentalist movements of all religious affiliations tripled worldwide. Simultaneously, as observed by Bruce Hoffman, there has been a virtual explosion of identifiable religious terrorist groups from none in 1968 to today's level, where nearly a quarter of all terrorist groups active throughout the world are predominantly motivated by religious concerns.(12) Unlike their secular counterparts, religious terrorists are, by their very nature, largely motivated by religion, but they are also driven by day-to-day practical political considerations within their context-specific environment. This makes it difficult for the general observer to separate and distinguish between the political and the religious sphere of these terrorist groups.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Muslim terrorist groups, as religion and politics cannot be separated in Islam. For example, Hizb'allah or Hamas operate within the framework of religious ideology, which they combine with practical and precise political action in Lebanon and Palestine. As such, these groups embrace simultaneously short-term objectives, such as the release of imprisoned members, and long-term objectives, such as continuing to resist Israeli occupation of their homelands and liberating all "believers." This is further complicated with the issue of state- sponsorship of terrorism: Religious terrorist groups often became cheap and effective tools for specific states in the advancement of their foreign policy political agendas. They may also contain a nationalist-separatist agenda, in which the religious component is often entangled with complex mixture of cultural, political and linguistic factors. The proliferation of religious extremist movements has also been accompanied by a sharp increase in the total number of acts of terrorism since 1988, accounting for over half of the 64,319 recorded incidents between 1970 and July 1995.(13) This escalation by the religious terrorists is hardly surprising given the fact that most of today's active groups worldwide came into existence very recently. They appeared with a distinct and full-fledged organizational apparatus. They range from the Sikh Dal Khalsa and the Dashmesh organisations, formed in 1978 and 1982 respectively(14) and the foundation of the Shi'ite Hizb'allah movement in Lebanon in 1982, to the initial emergence of the militant Sunni organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in conjunction with the 1987 outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada as well as the establishment of the Aum Shinrikyo in the same year.

The growth of religious terrorism is also indicative of the transformation of contemporary terrorism into a method of warfare and the evolution of the tactics and the techniques used by various groups, as a reaction to vast changes within the local, regional and global environment over the last three decades. These changes can be seen in numerous incidents, from the spate of hijackings by secular Palestinian terrorists and the mayhem of destruction caused by left- and right-wing domestic terrorists throughout Europe, to the current unprecedented global scope and level of religious extremism.

The evolution of today's religious terrorism neither has occurred in a vacuum nor represents a particularly new phenomenon. It has, however, been propelled to the forefront in the post-Cold War world, as it has been exacerbated by the explosion of ethnic-religious conflicts and the rapidly approaching new millenium.(15) The accelerated dissolution of traditional links of social and cultural cohesion within and between societies with the current globalization process, combined with the historical legacy and current conditions of political repression, economic inequality and social upheaval common among disparate religious extremist movements, have all led to an increased sense of fragility, instability and unpredictability for the present and the future.(16) The current scale of religious terrorism, unprecedented in militancy and activism, is indicative of this perception that their respective faiths and communities stand at a critical historical juncture: Not only do the terrorists feel the need to preserve their religious identity, they also see this time as an opportunity to fundamentally shape their future.(17) There are a number of overlapping factors that have contributed to the revival of religious terrorism in its modern and lethal form at the end of the millenium. At the same time, it is also possible to discern a number of features which are found in all religious terrorist groups across different regions and faiths. These features serve not only to define the cause and the enemy, but also fundamentally shape the means, methods and timing of the use of the violence itself.

The Causes and the Enemies of Religious Terrorists

A survey of the major religious terrorist groups in the 1990s would reveal that almost all experience a serious sense of crisis in their environment, which has led to an increase in the number of groups recently formed and caused an escalation in their activities. This crisis mentality in the religious terrorist's milieu is multifaceted, at once in the social, political, economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual sphere. At the same time, it has been greatly exacerbated by the political, economic and social tumult, resulting in a sense of spiritual fragmentation and radicalization of society experienced worldwide in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the extremist's "fear of the forced march toward `one worldism."'(18) Yet, this sense of crisis, as a perceived threat to their identity and survival, has been present to varying...