The worldwide rise of religious nationalism.

• Author: Juergensmeyer, Mark

"Palestine is not completely free," a leader of Hamas' policy wing remarked, "until it is an Islamic state."(1) The Hamas activist made this statement in Gaza only a few months before the January 1996 elections, an event that not only brought Yasir Arafat triumphantly into power but also fulfilled the Palestinian dream of an independent nation. Yet it was not the kind of nation that the Islamic activist and his colleagues had yearned to create. For that reason, they refused to run candidates for public office and urged their followers to boycott the polls. They threatened that the movement would continue to carry out "political actions," by which they meant terrorist attacks, such as the series of suicide bombings conducted by a militant faction that rocked Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel in February and March of 1996, jeopardizing the peace process and Arafat's fragile alliance.

On the Israeli side of the border, Jewish activists have also attacked the secular leadership of their nation, and again a virulent mixture of religion and politics has led to bloodshed. Yigal Amir, who was convicted of assassinating Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv on 4 November 1995, claimed that he had religious reasons for his actions, saying "everything I did, I did for the glory of God."(2) Amir has adamantly rejected attempts by his lawyers to assert that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. "I am at peace," he explained, insisting that he was "totally normal." His murder of Rabin, he argued, was deliberate and even praiseworthy under a certain reading of religious law that allows for a defense against those who would destroy the Jewish nation.(3)

A few weeks before the assassination, Jewish activists near Hebron indicated that they shared many of Amir's views. They were still grieving over the killing of Dr. Baruch Goldstein by an angry Muslim crowd in February 1995, after he murdered 35 Muslims as they were saying their prayers in the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs, revered by both Jews and Muslims as the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Goldstein's grave has now been made into a shrine. The militant Jews at the site explained that acts such as Dr. Goldstein's were necessary not only to protect the land but also to defend the very notion of a Jewish nation -- one that for reasons of redemption and history had to be established on biblical terrain. Religious duty required them to become involved politically and even militarily. "Jews," one of them said, "have to learn to worship in a national way."(4)

This potentially explosive mixture of nationalism and religion is an ingredient even in incidents that might appear initially to be isolated terrorist incidents: the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, for instance, or the 20 March 1995 nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway station. In the Oklahoma City case, the Christian militia movements with which accused bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols have been associated have adopted a certain conspiratorial view of American politics: The nation is not free, they reason, because of a vast international conspiracy involving Jews and Freemasons. They believe that it needs to be liberated through an armed struggle that will establish America as an independent and Christian nation.(5)

Strangely, the same conspiracy was articulated by members of Aum Shinrikyo (Om Supreme Truth), the eclectic Buddhist-Hindu religious movement in Japan that has been accused of unleashing cannisters of nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station, killing twelve people and injuring thousands. A young man who was a public affairs officer for the main Tokyo headquarters of the movement at the time said that the first thing that came to his mind when he heard about the attack was that the "weird time had come:" The Third World War was about to begin. He had been taught by his spiritual master, Shoko Asahara, that Armegeddon was imminent. He had also been taught that the Japanese government, in collusion with America and an international network of Freemasons and Jews, had triggered the January 1995 Kobe earthquake and then planned the nerve gas attack. He was surprised when Asahara himself was implicated in the plot; the spiritual leader had portrayed himself as the protector of Japanese society, and had begun to create an alternative government that would control the country after the Armegeddon had ended.(6)

In all these cases the alleged perpetrators possessed world views that justified to themselves the brutality of such terrorist acts: They perceived a need to defend their faiths, and held a heady expectation that what they did would lead to radically new social and political orders. The events they staged were therefore religious as much as they were political, and provide examples of religious involvement and political change that might seem, at first glance, to be curiously out of step with the twentieth century.

Yet these religious rebels against modernity are becoming increasingly vocal. From Algeria to Idaho, small but potent groups of violent activists represent growing masses of supporters, and they exemplify currents of thinking that have risen to counter the prevailing modernism: The ideology of individualism and skepticism that in the past three centuries has emerged from post-Enlightenment Europe and spread throughout the world. For that reason, and because of the rising tide of violence associated with movements of religious nationalism in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere, it is important to try to understand what religious nationalists want: why they hate secular governments with an almost transcendent passion, how they expect to effect their revolutionary changes and what sort of social and political order they dream of establishing in the rubble of what we regard as modern, egalitarian democracies.

Two Kinds of Religious Nationalism: Ethnic and Ideological

When religious nationalists turn to terrorism they seize a great deal of public attention, as indeed they intend to do. But there are less visible, although equally serious, confrontations between religious activists and secular authorities through media campaigns, public intimidation and the democratic option of running candidates in elections. The methods of religious nationalists vary, as do their aims.

One of the greatest differences between the goals of religious nationalists is the degree to which religion is an aspect of ethnic identity -- the sort of religious nationalism one finds in Ireland, for example -- and the degree to which it is part of an ideological critique that contains an alternative vision of political order. The latter is the sort of religious nationalism found, for instance, in the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran. The distinction between the two is significant and warrants explanation.

Ethnic Religious Nationalism

This kind of nationalism is linked to people and land. I use the term "ethnic" in this context to refer to communities bound by race, history or culture, who feel oppressed or limited within an old social order and who wish to establish a political identity of their own, usually in a geographical region of their own. Religion, then, may become fused with a culture of domination or liberation. The struggle of the Irish -- both Protestant and Catholic -- to claim political authority over the land in which they live is a paradigmatic case in point. The recent attempts of Muslims in Chechnya to assert their independence from the rule of Russia, and Muslims in Tajikistan to assert a cultural element to Tajikistan's resurgent nationalism, are examples that have emerged in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. In what used to be Yugoslavia, three groups of ethnic religious nationalists are pitted against one another: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians. In South Asia, the independence movements of Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus, Kashmiri Muslims and to some extent the Khalistan supporters in the Punjab, are also movements of ethnic religious nationalism. In these cases religion provides the identity that makes a community cohere and links it with a particular place.

Ideological Religious Nationalism

This second kind of nationalism is attached to ideas and beliefs. I use the term "ideology" not in a Marxist or a Mannheimian sense, but in the original meaning of the term as it was created by the ideologues, a group of revolutionary Frenchmen in the eighteenth century. They were consciously creating a framework of values and moral positions that would play the same role in supporting the new secular social order as had traditional religion in supporting the old. In a curious way, history has come full circle in the present day. Religious nationalists are now rejecting the ideological underpinnings of western secular nationalism, the faith in reason and the social contract expressed by the ideologues and by theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, and replacing it with a new ideological framework of their own, one that combines traditional religious beliefs in divine law and religious authority with the modern notion of the nation-state.(7)

If the ethnic approach to religious nationalism politicizes religion by employing religious identities for political ends, an ideological approach to religious nationalism does the opposite: It religionizes politics. It puts political issues and struggles within a sacred context. Compatability with religious goals becomes the criterion for an acceptable political platform. The Islamic revolution in Iran, for instance, was a classic example of ideological religious nationalism that turned ordinary politics upside down. Instead of the western ideal of a nonreligious political order providing space for religious activities, in Iran a religious authority has set the context for politics. In fact, the new Iranian constitution provides...