Truthdig
Is Religion Really Driving Middle East Violence?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/is_religion_really_driving_middle_east_v
iolence_20160712/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterMore AddThis Share optionsShare to Email
Posted on Jul 12, 2016
By Juan Cole
This post originally ran on Truthdig contributor Juan Cole's
website(http://www.juancole.com/2016/07/religion-driving-violence.html) .
Pew
Research(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/07/6-facts-about-relig
ious-hostilities-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/) has released a
report saying that
"As a whole, the region continued to have the highest levels of religious
hostilities in the world. In 2014, the median level of religious hostilities
in the Middle East and North Africa reached a level four times that of the
global median."
But is there another way to look at this data? Is it really all about
religion?
Pew does excellent polling and I've used their work a great deal, e.g. in my
Engaging the Muslim
World(https://www.amazon.com/Engaging-Muslim-World-Juan-Cole-ebook/dp/B001VL
XNEC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468292605&sr=8-1&keywords=cole+engaging+the+mus
lim+world ) . And the good thing about their polling is that they are very
up front about their assumptions and methodology.
This is what they
mean(http://www.pewforum.org/2016/06/23/trends-in-global-restrictions-on-rel
igion/ ) by "religion":
"For the purposes of this study, religion-related terrorism includes acts
carried out by subnational groups that use religion as a justification or
motivation for their actions."
So a "subnational" group might well be driven primarily by nationalism, but
if its members commit terrorism that is "religion-related," then it gets
counted under the sign of religion.
Social scientists talk about people having "markers" of identity. Language
and religion can be such markers, as can constructions like "race."
In the context of Protestant Britain, Irish immigrants in the 18th century
were coded as Catholics or "papists." Where there were mob attacks on them,
however, it would be difficult to prove that the fine points of theology
were always the main drivers of the violence. Some of it was social class,
some of it was "race."
So it isn't easy to disentangle religious motivations from nationalist ones.
Pew adds
"Religion-related terrorism also includes terrorist acts carried out by
individuals or groups with a nonreligious identity that deliberately target
religious groups or individuals, such as clergy. "
So what Pew is really measuring is not religious fanaticism at all, but the
prevalence of symbolic targets that are religious in nature.
So if two secular groups fought and a religious symbol was harmed, the
incident in this study would be classified as religious violence.
In social science, you have wide latitude in making your definitions, as
long as you clarify your terms to begin with.
What Pew is actually saying is that in the Middle East and North Africa,
people are four times as likely to act out their ethnic violence by
attacking religious symbols as in the rest of the world. It isn't saying
they are four times as likely to be religious fanatics.
My guess is that the Middle East is unusually religiously pluralistic, and
this is especially true of the Levant to the Gulf. Whereas Poland is almost
entirely Catholic, Iraq is 60 percent Shiite and 37 percent Sunni (counting
Arabs and Kurds).
There are also relatively high rates of religious belief in the region. If
you wanted to hurt a member of another ethnicity, you'd know that striking
their religious edifices or clergy, etc., would hit them hard. Thus,
al-Qaeda's destruction of the Shiite Golden Dome shrine of the eleventh Imam
in Samarra in 2006 set off an Iraqi civil war. You couldn't hurt the
feelings of very many French by taking a sledge hammer to a gargoyle.
A lot of the violence that gets coded in the US press as religious is
actually about nationalism. This principle holds especially true in
Palestine-Israel.
But take Syria. Some observers suggest that the Lebanese militia,
Hizbullah, which is Shiite, intervened in Syria to help the Alawites, also
Shiites. But they don't belong to the same branch of Shiism. Most Lebanese
Shiites belong to the orthodox Twelver school, with mosques, collective
Friday prayers, clergymen, etc. Alawites are heterodox- lacking mosques and
having wise men rather than seminary-trained clergymen. Most Sunni and
Shiite Muslims don't consider the Alawites to be Muslims. Moreover, many
Syrian Alawites are members of the Baath Party, which is highly secular and
socialist. So Hizbullah did not come into Syria for reasons of religious
sympathy. They came in because the Baath, secular government of Syria is a
vital supply route for Hizbullah.
So if a Sunni mosque was shelled by Baath Party members because even
relatively secular Sunni opposition groups were hiding behind it, Pew would
count that as religious violence in this study.
That outcome is legitimate, since they defined their terms to begin with.
But as consumers of such studies, we should be careful about how we use the
findings. They aren't saying what we might at first assume they are. In
polls as in consumer purchases, always read the fine print.
Jill Stein Slams Bernie Sanders for Endorsing Clinton and Invites His
Followers to Join Her (Video)
Jeremy Corbyn Wins Another Battle As the War Against His Labour Party
Leadership Wages On (Video)
Is John Kerry Right? Are the Freemen of Syria and Army of Islam Radical
Terrorists?
These Are Bernie Sanders' Seven Biggest Legacies (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2016 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
