The series of violent events that have been taking place in France have set off a new round of debate as to whether Islam as a religion has a particular propensity to support and promote violence. The killings at the French satirical newspaper pit two ideological positions against each other: religious reverence for images of Mohammad against western secular reverence for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There is a long history of conflict between the enlightenment values of free and open speech and values promoted and protected by traditional religions. The issue of publishing text and images with explicit sexual content has been a long recurring one. The vast majority of this debate in western societies in the last couple of centuries has been non-violent, but these are still issues of debate.
When we are confronted with events of violence, particularly on a mass scale, we want to know why it happened and to make a determination as to whether or not it was "justifiable". Present science is not in a position to provide a detailed explanation of how or why a particular act of violent behavior occurs. That would require the ability to trace a detailed neurological path through the brain of the person committing the violence. We have a growing general understanding of human neuro biology but we lack the technological capacity to empirically demonstrate a chain in terms of event A caused event B which caused event C.
So when one person kills another person people make speculative statements as the "why" they did it. These come out in terms such as sexual jealousy, monetary greed, mental illness or religious extremism. The reality is that many people experience the influence of these feelings, disorders, ideologies but most of them do not commit murder. For sexual jealousy to be the fundamental cause of murder, one would expect it to always result in murder. Most often it does not.
So what about religion and violence and why does it seem that radical adherents of Islam use it as a justification for violence that people who are adherents of other religious traditions? Is Islam somehow an inherently more violent religion? These are questions that are being debated once again.
Raising Questions Within Islam After France Shooting
Islamist extremists behead Western journalists in Syria, massacre thousands of Iraqis, murder 132 Pakistani schoolchildren, kill a Canadian soldier and take hostage cafe patrons in Australia. Now, two gunmen have massacred a dozen people in the office of a Paris newspaper.
The rash of horrific attacks in the name of Islam is spurring an anguished debate among Muslims here in the heart of the Islamic world about why their religion appears cited so often as a cause for violence and bloodshed.
The majority of scholars and the faithful say Islam is no more inherently violent than other religions. But some Muslims — most notably the president of Egypt — argue that the contemporary understanding of their religion is infected with justifications for violence, requiring the government and its official clerics to correct the teaching of Islam.
Religion is a cultural artifact. As human societies became settled and more complex they developed more elaborate cultural systems. These involved language, rules of conduct and some form of religious beliefs. Pretty much everybody who ever promoted a system of religious belief has claimed to have received some form of spiritual inspiration or communication that revealed ultimate truth that surpasses the understanding gained by ordinary human perception. Thus religion is presented as something abstract and eternal. However, from an anthropological point of view it is an aspect of culture that is integrated with other cultural forms and evolves along with them in a changing environment. Many people who want to analyse religions and their impacts on the followers look for explanations in the sacred texts to which they ascribe such as the Bible or Koran. However, in practice these texts are an amalgamation of multiple sources that are at times more or less contradictory of each other. Most people seem to be prepared to make compromises with religious injunctions in the conduct of their daily lives. I take the view that any impact of religion on people's behavior can only be understood in terms of the cultural context of a specific time and place and not by reading a text passed down for many centuries.
Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian, was teaching at New York University on Sept. 11, 2001, after which American sales of the Quran spiked because readers sought religious explanations for the attack on New York.
“We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question,” he said. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.
“The Arab states have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver and it can only lead to a deep sense of resentment and frustration, or to revolution,” he said. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence.”
Only a very small number of Muslims pin the blame directly on the religion itself.
Islam as a religion has followers spread over most of the world. It occupies a dominant position in a belt that stretches from western Africa to Indonesia. However most of the conflict and radicalism is concentrated in the nations of the Middle East. Those conflicts involve multiple issues such as the historical legacy of colonialism, the territorial disputes with Israel and the economics of oil production. The political rhetoric in statements made about such issues often draws on various forms of religious jargon. That doesn't seem to be a valid reason to assume that religious belief per se is the fundamental driver of the conflicts. People engaged in political debate always look for emotional buttons that they can push to generate strong and immediate reactions in their listeners. Religion and sex are perennial favorites.
During most of the second half of the 20th C the global power struggle was framed as a battle between western Christianity and godless Communism. The actual competition was really more about economic and military issues, but religion was often used as a justification. The effort to defeat Communism led to quite a bit of violence. Most of that violence was state sanctioned by the various nation states involved whether it was traditional military conflict or other types of more clandestine activity. When a growing number of Americans began to questions those political justifications for the war in Vietnam that set off major political ideological battles. Since that was an historical process occurring within our own cultural framework it is not baffling and mysterious to us. In the 21st C Islamic militarism has replaced Communism as the central focus of much of international conflict. In both cases the ideology was more about justification for violence that the root cause of it.