Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a book by a sociologist and the reason why I think Juergensmeyer’s book is important is that he does a comparative study of religious violence – violence that is either motivated by or justified by religion. And he actually interviews participants in a range of violent religious campaigns.
We are looking at the religious aspect of terrorism with your next book, Terror in the Mind of God, by Mark Juergensmeyer.
When I thought about my list of five, I wanted to highlight books that were written by different kinds of observers. When studying terrorism, it is important to be open to different approaches, to be inter-disciplinary and to avoid the kind of groupthink that can set in among researchers. Juergensmeyer is a sociologist who comparatively studies cultures of violence that are either motivated by or justified by religion. To gain insight into the logic that drives them, he interviewed individual participants across a range of disparate religious campaigns, including violent anti-abortion Christian activists, Jewish extremists, Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult members, Sikh separatists, and radical Islamists. He writes about the search for meaning and identity that is a part of religion and spirituality, demonstrating through his interviews and other research how that quest can take a violent turn.
Juergensmeyer’s book came out ten years ago and many people have argued in the intervening years that there is too much emphasis on religious ideology in analysing the current terrorist threat. I think this book is a nice corrective to work that seeks to leave behind the awkward fact that religion is part of human nature, and that these kind of laudable motivations can sometimes drive us to do extremely evil things. In a sense religion is the oldest motivation for terrorism, going back at least to the first century of the Common Era. I believe that if we fail to analyse the logic of this thinking, the points at which ideas are distorted or hijacked, we also fail to understand how to disrupt it.
Juergensmeyer has spoken to dozens of individuals and faithfully explored their views of the world; so the book is not a statistically heavy or dry academic analysis. It challenges your understanding of the human spirit directly through the words of the people that he interviewed. And it is chilling.
Read full interview
Audrey Cronin is Professor at the US National War College and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University in the Changing Character of War Programme. The views she expresses in the following article are her own and not the official policy of the US government. Her view on al-Qaeda is that they may implode: ‘By which I mean succumb to internal weaknesses, in-fighting, ideological bickering, loss of operational control, targeting mistakes and loss of popular support – some of the dynamics that we have already seen. Or they are going to transition into a more conventional kind of violence, meaning insurgency or even conventional war.’
