Author: Yahya Sseremba
Source: The Observer
I thank the editors of The Observer for allowing me to discuss the relationship between religion and political violence in a series of 10 articles.
Whereas the first piece was published elsewhere, the rest will appear in this esteemed newspaper. Briefly, I said in part one that there is a surprising contradiction in the ways in which the violence associated with religion is explained differently from the violence of secular ideologies like nationalism, liberalism, and capitalism.
The violence of secular ideologies is often explained in terms of the specific contexts in which it occurs without being blamed on these ideologies. Rarely do analysts say that secular nation-state ideologies are violent in themselves even if these ideologies have actually driven many bloodbaths in modern history. But the violence associated with religion is simply blamed on religion without any contextualization.
In fact, the expulsion of religion from the realm of public principle is founded on the assumption that religion tends to cause violence because it is absolutist, divisive, and devoid of reason.
How did analysts come to believe that “religious violence” needs no explanation beyond blaming religion itself while the violence of secular ideologies needs careful investigation that pays attention to specific contexts? To trace this incoherence in analysis, I begin with the crude binaries that shaped modern European thought.
European thinkers viewed the world in terms of either the West or the East, reason or religion, modernity or tradition, progress or stagnation, etc. Amazed by Europe ́s accomplishments in science, political organization, and economic accumulation, these thinkers wondered how the West “progressed” while the East “stagnated.”
The explanations they advanced differed from Hegel to Marx, and from Max Weber to Henry Maine. But they all entertained some notion of Western exceptionalism. Part of Western exceptionalism is the supposition that there is something extraordinary about Europe—it was in Europe that human reason reached perfection when it freed itself from the bondage of religion, tradition, and superstition in what Weber called disenchantment.
These Europeans understood reason quite naively as an objective, universal and self-evident faculty that stood in conflict with the “irrationality” of religion and tradition. Because it can critique itself, reason supposedly allows society to improve and move forward.
Tradition, on the other hand, was said to have no such self-critique and self-improvement mechanism. Tradition is allegedly “observed” uncritically in a manner that reproduces the past and hinders transformation. The difference between the “progress” of the West and the “stagnation” of the East was located in the alleged difference between reason and tradition.
To be stagnant also meant to have no history. History, beginning with Marx, became synonymous with progress. By progress, western thought meant the mechanical movement of society from an inferior to a superior condition.
The societies that were said to have no history allegedly lacked the intellectual tools to connect the past and the future in an unbroken time continuum. In other words, these societies could not use the past as a guide for future action.
They could only reproduce the past (by sticking to tradition) instead drawing lessons from this past and forge a better future. To have no history meant to be static or to live in the past.
If the followers of religion live in the past, as Eurocentric thought claims, it means that there is no point in trying to contextualize their “religious behavior” in the present circumstances. The present makes no sense to the “captives” of religion—only the past does.
The Muslim attacks the United States not because of anything that can be articulated in terms of the present circumstances, but because he reads a seventh-century text that instructs him to kill infidels. These are the laughable assumptions behind the discourses that blame “religious violence” on religion as religion.
The violence of secular ideologies, on the other hand, is contextualized in the present circumstances because secular actors are considered to be rational beings living in the present. Their violence is supposedly intelligible and sometimes desirable.
Some critical Western scholars have since moved away from such binaries as between reason and religion after realizing that reason itself is a social construct prone to the “irrationality” that was said to belong to a religion.
Unfortunately, the said outdated binaries continue to shape the ways in which the relationship between religion and political violence is understood by all sorts of middlebrow analysts.
The author is a researcher at the Makerere Institute of Social Research.