Zygmunt Bauman - Terrorism and Religion

But Juergensmeyer expected to find also the evidence of the ‘politicization of religion’, and for that purpose he studied the teachings of the young militant Sikhs’ spiritual leader whom his countless followers worshipped as a saintly martyr, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. In this case, though, he was surprised. He found in Bhindranwale speeches only residual and perfunctory references to economy, politics, or class. Instead, the preacher (l)ike the legion of Protestant Christian revival speakers that traipsed through the mid-American rural countryside… spoke of the struggles between good and evil, truth and falsehood, that reside within each troubled soul, and called for renunciation, dedication, and redemption. It seemed that he was speaking to young men in particular about their easy compromises with the lures of modern life. 

More often than in the case of the American Bible Belt preachers, though, one could find in Bhindranwale’s sermons references to contemporary political leaders. Bhindranwale gave his spiritual war a clearly ‘external’ dimension: he suggested that the satanic forces had somehow came down to earth and were now residing in the official residence of India’s head of state... Intrigued, Juergensmeyer extended his inquiry to numerous other places, like Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Israeli settlements, where tribal or class frontlines were drawn using religious markers and blood was spilled in the name of the hallowed values of virtuous, pious and saintly life - and found everywhere a strikingly similar pattern; not so much of the ‘politicization of religion’, as (in his phrase) religionization of politics. Non-religious grievances, like issues of social identity and meaningful participation in communal life, once expressed in Marxist or nationalist vocabularies, tend to be nowadays translated into the language of religious revival: ‘Secular ideological expression of rebellion have been replaced by ideological formulations that are religious. Yet the grievances - the sense of alienation, marginalization, and social frustration – are often much the same’. 

Charles Kimball notes a phenomenon akin to the ‘religionization of politics’ also in the vocabulary of the current American administration. President Bush, creatively developing the language introduced into American political life by Ronald Reagan, is fond of speaking of ‘cosmic dualism’ between good nations, led by the United States, and the forces of evil: ‘You had to align with the forces of good and help root out the forces of evil’. He is fond to speak of America’s military escapades as of a ‘crusade’, and a ‘mission’ undertaken on Divine commandment. Henry A. Giroux quotes John Ashcroft, former U.S. attorney general: ‘Unique among nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal… We have no king but Jesus’ – and alerts to the massive entry of ‘moral apparatchiks’, politicians who ‘believe that Satan’s influence shapes everything from the liberal media to how Barbra Streisand was taught to sing’, onto the American political scene. 

As the journalist Bill Moyers has written, this ‘Rapture politics’, in which the Bible is read as literally true, dissent is a mark of the anti-Christ and ‘sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire’. As right-wing religion conjoins wit conservative political ideology and corporate power, it not only legitimizes intolerance and anti-democratic forms of political correctness, it also lays the groundwork for a growing authoritarianism that easily derides appeals to reason, dissent, dialogue and secular humanism. 

In the infuriatingly multi-vocal, confused and confusing world of crisscrossing yet mutually incompatible messages whose main purpose may well seem to be the questioning and sapping each other’s reliability, the monotheistic faiths coupled with Manichean, black-and-white world visions are about the last fortresses of the ‘mono’: of one truth, one way, one life formula - of adamant and pugnacious certainty and self confidence; the last shelters for the seekers of clarity, purity and freedom from doubt and indecision. They promise the treasures which the rest of the world blatantly and obstinately denies: self-approval, clear conscience, comfort of fearing no error and being always in the right - just like Jamaat Ahli Hadith, a ‘strictly orthodox’ preacher based in Birmingham, who ‘practises a form of Islam which demands strict separatism from mainstream society. Its website describes the ways of “disbelievers” as “based on sick and deviant views concerning their societies, the universe and their very existence”.’ Or like Jewish orthodox enclaves in Israel, who, in Uri Avnery description , have ‘their own logic’ and ‘very little to do with anything else’. 
They live in a completely closed, theocratic society that is not influenced by anything happening outside it. They believe in their own world… They dress differently and they behave differently. They are a different kind of people all together. 
There is very little communication between them and us. They speak a different language. They have a completely different outlook on the world. They are subject to completely different laws and rules… 
These are people who live separately, in their own communities, religious neighbourhoods, and towns in Israel. They have no contact with ordinary Israeli society. 

Indeed, the Manichean vision of the world, call to arms in a holy war against satanic forces threatening to overwhelm the universe, and reducing the Pandora-box of economic, political and social conflicts to an apocalyptic vision of the last, life-and death confrontation battle between good and evil, are not patterns unique to Islamic ayatollahs. On our fast globalizing planet, the ‘religionization’ of politics, of social grievances and identity-and-recognition battles, seems to be a global tendency. 

We may be looking in radically different directions and avoid each other’s eyes, but we seem to be crowded in the same boat with no reliable compass - and no helmsman. Though our rowing is anything but coordinated, we are strikingly alike in one aspect: none of us, or almost, believes (let alone declares) to be pursuing own interests – defend the privileges already attained or claim share in the privileges thus far denied. All sides seem today to fight instead for eternal, universal and absolute values. Ironically, we the denizens of the liquid-modern section of the globe are nudged and drilled to ignore such values in our daily pursuits and be guided instead by short-term projects and short-lived desires - but even then, or perhaps precisely then, we tend to feel yet more painfully their dearth or absence whenever (if) we try to spot a leading motif in cacophony, a shape in the fog or a road in quicksand. 

Muslims are not the only people prone to listen and keen to be seduced by siren voices. And if they do listen and surrender to seduction, they don’t do that because they are Muslims; being Muslims only explains why they prefer the voice of mullahs or ayatollas to the voices of sirens of other denominations. Others, who listen as keenly and allow themselves to be seduced as gladly without being Muslims, will be offered a rich assortment of other siren voices, and will no doubt find among them such sirens whose tunes they would easily recognize as comfortingly familiar and resonant with their own. Siren voices of any religion may find support in its holy scriptures. Quran just like the books of the Old Testament, the shared inspiration of Judaism and Christianity, are no exception. The troops of Joshua, it is written, killed sometimes twelve, some other times ten thousand men and women of Canaan, whereas Joshua himself held out his dagger and did not draw back his hand until he had put to death all who lived’ (J 8, 25-7), and saw to it that ‘every living being was put to the sword’ and –the work of slaughter’ was ‘finished’ (J 10, 28-32). 

It so happens, though, at the start to the 21st Century, that for many young Muslims being a Muslim means being victims to a multiple deprivation as well as being cut off from (or barred to use) the public escape routes leading out of oppression, as well as from the paths of personal emancipation and pursuit of happiness which so many other, non-Muslim men seem to tread with such an astonishing, and aggravating, facility. 

Young Muslims have reasons to feel that way. They belong to a population officially classified as lagging behind the ‘advanced’, ‘developed’, ‘progressive’ rest of humanity; and they are locked in that unenviable plight through the collusion between their own ruthless, high-handed governments, and the governments of the ‘advanced’ part of the planet as ruthlessly turning them away from the promised and passionately coveted lands of happiness and dignity. The choice between the two varieties of cruel fate, or rather two parts to the fate’s cruelty, feels like choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea. The young Muslims try to cheat, smuggle or force their way around the ‘swirling swords and the Cherubs’ guarding the entry to the modern paradise, only to find out (if they manage to cheat the guards or glide past the checking points) that they are not welcome there, that they are not allowed to catch up with what they stand accused, and ridiculed, for not chasing after keenly enough; and that being there does not mean sharing in the sort of happiness and dignified life which drew them in. 

They are indeed in a double bind: rejected by the community of origin for desertion and treachery, and barred entry by the community of their dreams because of alleged incompleteness and insincerity, or worse still of the perfection and ostensible blamelessness of their betrayal/conversion. Cognitive dissonance, at any time a harrowing and painful experience of an intrinsically irrational plight that does not allow for a rational solution, is in their case doubled. Their reality denies the values they were groomed to respect and cherish, as much as it refuses the chance of embracing the values which they are being insistently exhortated and enticed to embrace, even if the messages that encourage them to embrace those values are notoriously confused and confusing (Integrate! Integrate! But woe to you if you try, and damnation if you succeed…) Shame and vengeance of both your houses… (Let’s note that among the victims of the Islamic terrorists of the last few years the number of ‘brothers (and sisters, and kids) Muslims’ by far exceeded the numbers of all others. As Satan and his henchmen/tools are not choosy, so why should be his detractors and would-be conquerors?) 

What renders the opacity (the ambivalence, the irrationality) of such plight yet deeper, is that the Muslim world itself, by a geopolitical coincidence, seems to be placed across a barricade. It so happens that the economy of the rich, ‘advanced’ countries is grounded in extraordinarily high oil consumption (dependent not just on the petrol meant to be burned out in car engines, but also the oil-derivative raw materials for essential industries), while the economy of the U.S., the largest by far military power, thrives thanks to keeping the petrol prices artificially low. It also happens that most profuse supplies of crude oil, and the only ones promising to remain economically viable by the middle of the century, are under the administration of Islamic (more exactly, Arab) governments. Arabs hold their fingers on the lifelines of the West - the main taps from which the life-giving energy of opulent and powerful West flows. They may – just may – cut its supply, with virtually unimaginable, but certainly dramatic (catastrophic from the point of view of Western powers) consequences for the planetary balance of power. 
This concatenation of circumstances has two effects, both adding to the apparently incurable ambiguity of Muslim plight. 

The expectably acute interest of the ‘modern part’ of the planet in securing exclusive control over the most precious supplies of crude oil casts them in a direct confrontation with a large part of the Islamic world. Since the apocryphal meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt with King Saud on the board of an American cruiser, when the American president guaranteed to hold Saudi dynasty in power over the almost empty yet fabulously oil-rich peninsula, whereas the newly appointed king promised an uninterrupted supply of oil to be pumped by American companies and the CIA-arranged a putch to topple the democratically elected Mossadeq government in Iran half century ago - Western countries, and the U.S. in the first place, cannot stop interfering in the Middle-Eastern Islamic regimes, using intermittently lavish bribes, threats of economic sanctions or direct military interventions as their primary weapons. They also, on the sole condition of keeping the oil taps open and the petrol pipelines full, help to keep in power reactionary (and in the case of Wahabi-dominated Saudi Kingdom radically fundamentalist) regimes that clearly passed their use-by and tolerate-until dates and in all probability wouldn’t be able to hold their own if not for the Western, mainly American, military umbrella. 

It was through the services of the special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld’s, now the Secretary for Defence, that the U.S. promised to support Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq with billions of dollars of agricultural credits, millions of dollars worth of cutting-edge military technology, as well as the satellite intelligence that could be used to direct chemical weapons against Iran – and kept their promise. Kings and dictators at the helm of such regimes are keen to use their good fortune to surround themselves with the most whimsical toys the Western consumer society is able to offer, while fortifying their border-guards and arming their secret police against smuggling in the products of Western democracy. Fleets of gadgets-full cars yes, free elections no; yes to air conditioning, but no to the legal equality of women; and the most emphatic ‘no’ to an equitable distribution of sudden riches, to personal freedoms and to political rights of own subjects. 

Another effect of the peculiar concatenation of circumstances is apparently the opposite: the selectively ‘westernized’ section of the elite in the rich Islamic countries may stop wallowing in their inferiority complex. Thanks to their ‘nuisance power’, their potential control over riches which the West needs but does not possess, they may feel strong enough to attempt the final step: to claim a status superior to those who so blatantly depend for their survival on the resources which they, and they only, may claim to command. Nothing assures one so much of one’s might as the fact of being bribed by the mighty… 

Calculation could be neither simpler nor more obvious: if we only gain an undivided control over the fuel which feeds their engines, their juggernaut will grind to a halt. They will need to eat from our hands and play the game according to the rules we set. The strategy, however, unlike the calculation of chances, is neither simple nor self-evident. Though we have enough means to buy more and yet more weapons, all the bribe money that finances their buying won’t suffice to get equal with their military power. The alternative, even if only a second best, is to deploy another weapon of which we possess no less, if not more, than they do: our nuisance potential, the power to make the power struggle too costly to continue, unworthy of continuing or downright impossible to be continued. Considering the blatant vulnerability of their homelands, their kind of societies, the destructive capacity of our nuisance power may well transcend the admittedly awesome potential of their massive weapons. It takes, after all, much less stuff and men and labour to bring a New York or a London into a state of paralysis, than to smoke out a single terrorist commander from his mountain cave or chase his subalterns out of the cellars and attics of urban slums… 

When all textbook as well as other, home-made or cottage-industry remedies for cognitive dissonance have been tried, and all stopped short of reaching the hoped-for result, one finds himself in the agonisingly pathetic condition of laboratory rats who have learned that savouring the titbits piled up at the far end of the maze can be enjoyed only together with the horrors of electric shocks. Perhaps escaping the maze once for all (an option not open to laboratory rats) will bring the satisfactions which the most diligent learning and mapping of the twists and turns of its many corridors never will? 
Whether they do or don’t try to find exit from the oppression, and whether they do or don’t go on hoping without hope that escape route from the dissonance may be found this side of the maze walls, does not seem to make much difference to their plight. Prizes for obedience are tantalizingly slow to come, while penalty is visited daily for not trying hard enough or trying too hard (and what the trying not ‘too hard’ could possibly be like which won’t be immediately condemned as ‘not hard enough’?!) 

Becoming a terrorist is a choice; allowing oneself to be blinded by sheer jealousy, resentment or hatred is also a choice. Being penalized for confronting, genuinely or putatively, such choices is not however a matter of choice since that confrontation is the verdict of fate. The fact that a few people ‘like you’ made wrong choices is enough to deprive you of the right to make your own - right – choice; and if you made it nevertheless, the same fact would prevent you from convincing those who sit in judgment, or usurp the right to pass verdicts, that you’ve made it - and made it sincerely. 
A few suicidal murderers on the loose would be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the ‘usual suspects’. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be re-processed into the attributes of a ‘category’; a category easily recognizable by, for instance, the suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack – the kind of objects which CCTV cameras are made to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And the passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities in the London underground, the volume of incidents classified as ‘racist attacks’ sharply rose around the country. In most cases even the sight of a rucksack was not needed to provoke it. 

A dozen or so ready-to-kill Islamic plotters proved to be enough to create an atmosphere of a besieged fortress and raise a wave of ‘generalized insecurity’. Insecure people tend to seek feverishly a target fit to unload the gathering anxiety, and to restore the lost self-confidence by placating the offensive, frightening and humiliating sentiment of helplessness. Habitation of the besieged fortresses into which the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural cities are turning is shared by the terrorists and their victims. Each side adds to the fear, passion, fervour and obduracy of the other. Each side confirms the worst fears of the other and adds substance to its prejudices and hatreds. Between themselves, locked in a sort of the liquid-modern edition of dance macabre, the two sides won’t allow the phantom of a siege ever to rest. 

In his study of the surveillance technology introduced on a massive scale into city streets after September 11th, David Lyon notes their ‘unintended consequences’ – ‘a widening of the surveillance web…and an enhanced exposure to monitoring of ordinary people in their everyday lives’. We can argue however that among all its ‘unintended consequences’ the pride of place belongs to the ‘media is the message’ effect of the surveillance technology. Specialized, as it is bound to be, in seeing and recording the external, visible and recordable objects, that technology cannot but be oblivious to individual motives and choices behind the recorded images, and so must lead eventually to the substitution of the idea of ‘suspicious categories’ for individual evildoers. As Lyon puts it, (t)he culture of control will colonize more areas of life, with our permission or without, because of the understandable desire for security, combined with the pressure to adopt particular kind of systems. Ordinary inhabitants of urban spaces, citizens, workers, and consumers – that is, people with no terrorist ambitions whatsoever – will find that their life-chances are more circumscribed by the categories in which they fall. For some, those categories are particularly prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or, more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background. It is an old story in high-tech guise. 
The anonymous detective who apologized to Girma Belay, the hapless Ethiopian refugee and marine engineer, for the police brutally entering his London flat, stripping him naked, punching, holding against the wall and arresting him for six days without charge, with the words ‘Sorry mate – wrong place, wrong time’ , could (and should) have added: ‘and wrong category’… And this is how Belay sums up the consequences of that categorial, even if individually suffered experience: ‘I am in fear; I don’t want to go out’. And he blames for his plight those ‘bastard terrorists’ who ‘acted in such a way all that sweetness and freedom was destroyed for people like me’ (italics added). 

Through a vicious loop, the threat of terrorism turns itself into an inspiration for more terrorism, spilling on its way ever larger volumes of terror and ever bigger masses of terrorized people – the two products which the terrorist acts, deriving their name from precisely such an intention, are bent on producing and plotting to produce. One may say that the terrorized people are the terrorists’ most reliable, even if unwilling, allies. The ‘understandable desire for security’ always waiting and ready to be manhandled by a crafty and astute exploiter, and now whipped up by the scattered and apparently imprevisible acts of terror, proves in the end to be the main resource on which the terror may count to gather momentum. 
Even in the unlikely case that the borders have been sealed for the undesirable flesh-and-bone travellers, the likelihood of another terrorist outrage will not be reduced to nil. Globally generated grievances are floating in the global space as easily as the finances and the latest music or dress fashions, and so is the urge to avenge their genuine or putative culprits or (in case the culprits are inaccessible) the most suitable and handy scapegoats. Whenever they land, global problems settle as local and quickly strike roots and ‘domesticate’, and having found no global resolution seek local targets to unload the resulting frustration. Escaping arrest, Hussain Osman, one of the main suspect in London Underground assault, arrived in Italy, though according to Carlo De Stefano, a top official of the Italian anti-terror policy, no links were found between him and any local terrorist group there – ‘he did not appear to be in contact with any known terrorist groups’. ‘It seems like we are in front of an impromptu group acting alone in this case’, Stefano concluded. 

Injuries inflicted by the powers steering out of control on the negatively globalized planet are countless and ubiquitous - and above all scattered and diffuse. In all parts of the planet, the soil for the seeds of terrorism is well prepared and the travelling ‘masterminds’ of terrorist outrages can reasonably hope to find some fertile plots wherever they stop. They don’t even need to design, build and maintain a tight structure of command. There are no terrorist armies, only terrorist swarms, synchronized rather than coordinated with little or no supervision and none but ad-hoc platoon commanders or corporals. More often than not, for a ‘task group’ to be born apparently ab nihilo it will suffice to set a properly spectacular example that will be obligingly and promptly disseminated and hammered into millions of homes by the constantly spectacle-hungry TV networks through all the information highways on which they send their messages moving. 

Never before the old anthropological notion of ‘stimulus diffusion’ (meaning the prototypes and inspirations which travel across lands and cultures without, or independently from, their original practitioners or mediators and without their ‘natural habitat’ - the forms of life in which they were born and have grown) grasped so well the character of the present-day cross-cultural communication and the epidemic, contagious potential of cultural innovations. On a planet crisscrossed by information highways, the messages will find and select their own grateful listeners without seeking; or rather they will be infallibly found and selected by their potential grateful listeners who would gladly take the chores of searching (‘surfing the web’) upon themselves. 

The meeting of messages and listeners is greatly facilitated on a planet turned into a mosaic of ethnic and religious diasporas. On such a planet, the past separation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ or for this matter between the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ is no longer tenable. ‘Externality’ of life-threatening terrorism is as notional as is the ‘internality’ of life-sustaining capitals. Foreign-born words become flesh inside the country of arrival, alleged ‘outsiders’ prove in most cases the locally born and bred individuals inspired/converted by ideas sans frontières. There are no frontlines - only separate, widely dispersed and eminently mobile battlefields; no regular troops, only civilians turning soldiers for a day and soldiers on indefinite civilian leave. Terrorist ‘armies’ are all home armies, needing no barracks, no rallies and no parade grounds. 
The machinery of the nation-state, invented and groomed to guard territorial sovereignty and to set unambiguously apart the insiders from the outsiders, has been caught by the ‘wiring up’ of the planet unprepared. Day after day, one terrorist atrocity after another, the state-run law-and-order institutions learn of their own ineptitude to handle the new dangers which blatantly put paid to the orthodox, hallowed and ostensibly tested and reliable, categories and distinctions. 

All that does not promise an early freedom from ambivalence – that profuse source of anxiety, insecurity and fear suffered in equal measure by people cast in it and people living their lives in their obtrusive presence. No quick fix is conceivable, let alone available to hand. With the increasingly diasporic spread of the world population and with the orthodox hierarchy of cultures all but dismantled, any suggestion of a replacement is likely to be hotly contested. With the very notions of cultural superiority and inferiority eliminated from ‘politically correct’ vocabulary, such traditional and once universally tested way of fixing and solidifying the outcomes of successive resolutions of ambivalence as the ‘cultural assimilation’ (now politely re-named ‘integration’ while remaining loyal to the past strategy) is neither acceptable nor likely to be taken and followed to the end any longer.