Abstract
The relationship between religion and radicalization cannot be determined either by defining religion or by determining its nature. Nevertheless, Max Weber, in the section on religion in his work Economy and Society, proposes that a degree of clarification can be achieved if we think about this relationship as a form of communal action. An understanding of such action, he argues, can only be achieved from the viewpoint of subjective experiences, ideas, and purposes of the individuals concerned—in short, from the viewpoint of the religious behavior’s “meaning”—. Using current cases of religious acts of violence in the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism; Christianity; Islam), this chapter presents three methodological decodings of meaning: a definition of the situation by the religious adherents (the so-called Thomas theorem); their choice between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction; as well as canonical prefigurations for a beneficial act of violence.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Jessica Stern has found a successful way of dealing with both aspects by dividing her book into two major parts, “Grievances that Give Rise to Holy War” and “Holy war Organization.”.
- 4.
For example, the study of the Hamburg group around Mohammed Atta by Terry McDermott (2006, p. xvi): “The men of September 11 were, regrettably, I think, fairly ordinary men”.
- 5.
In the Treaty of Lausanne of 1922, the victorious powers, France and Great Britain, sealed the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as a consequence of its military defeat in the First World War. It was replaced by the secular nation-state of Turkey. This had been preceded by major territorial losses of the empire. North Africa had become independent. The Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 had separated different colonial interest areas in the Near East. Great Britain was granted dominion over an area corresponding roughly to present-day Jordan, Iraq, and the area around Haifa; France over southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Egypt had been dependent on foreign loans since the construction of the Suez Canal (1859–1869). To secure the route to India, Great Britain acquired the Egyptian shares in the canal, occupied the country in 1882, and formally made it a protectorate in 1914; in 1922, Egypt became a formally independent kingdom, but, like the other Middle Eastern states, remained the victim of ever more Western interventions—which have continued to the present. See Lüders (2015, 2017).
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As an example of the widespread prejudice: Denis MacEoin (2008).
- 8.
Rüdiger Lohlker (2006), e.g. 41–42. (see the index to ‘Security Treaty’).
- 9.
Source: islam-pedia.de/index.php/Masalih Mursala (Arab.:
) means “the consideration of the general interest”. - 10.
- 11.
Quoted from Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2004, esp. 134–135).
- 12.
Esser, (1996, 1999), Chapter 2 “The Thomas Theorem,” pp. 59–70; 1995: on the Thomas Theorem, its originators, and its diffusion in sociology, see Merton (1995); Esser (1999, pp. 47–50) contrasts the views of Parsons and Mead. On p. 56, he presents his own model of the external and internal conditions for defining situations.
- 13.
Under the keyword ‘Jihad’ you can find this extensive literature at amazon.de.
- 14.
Fred McGraw Donner (1981) discusses the circumstances and foundations of Muhammad’s conquests in the context of his teachings and political successes.
- 15.
On the teachings of Muhammad Qutb compared with those of his brother Sayyid Qutb, see Sabine Damir−Geilsdorf (2003, pp. 294–299).
- 16.
In the text there is only the letter t. This probably means the Arabic word “airplane”.
- 17.
- 18.
At the same time that Blumenberg was valorizing metaphor and pragmatics at the expense of metaphysics, we see an analogous process in ethnology of religion, albeit in different terminology. Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad each make different kinds of connections between the social lifeworld of believers and their religious relation to the world: Geertz from the religious worldview to action; Asad from social action to the religious worldview. As with Blumenberg, a new means of orientation for action has taken the place of metaphysics.
- 19.
At the end of the fourteenth century, the North African philosopher Ibn Khaldun compiled in his Muqaddima the most important hadiths on the Mahdi expectation, checked their reliability and concluded that they were not genuine. He explained their validity not from theology but otherwise. He interpreted the political uprisings triggered by this expectation also in North Africa as the social power of expanding kinship groups, asabiyya. (Ibn Kaldûn, 1967, pp. 257–259).
- 20.
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Martin Hengel (1961, pp. 61–78 at 77, see also pp. 151–234). Hengel’s assumption that this was a religious party already in existence before the conflict is not compelling and has met with rejection. On this point, see Richard A. Horsley (1993, pp. 121–129) concluding (p. 128) that the term ‘zeal’ “focused primarily on fellow Jews who broke the law in some significant way”.
- 22.
A systematizing treatise on this strategy by the economist and social scientist Albert O. Hirschmann (1970).
- 23.
See above note 21.
- 24.
A precise and extensive treatment of the literary-critical and historical problems comes from Christian Habicht (1979).
- 25.
- 26.
Thomas Sizgorich (2009) explains the militancy in late antiquity not only of Christians but also of Muslims from the violent defense of the identity of their faith communities.
- 27.
See on Jael Judges 4:17–24.
- 28.
On the questioning of Yigal Amir and the unpublished transcripts, see Ehud Sprinzak (1999, p. 281 with notes 77 and 73).
- 29.
Steven Greenblatt (2010) uses the term Cultural Mobility for such discontinuities.
- 30.
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- 32.
For an account of the history of this concept in Islamic legal thought past and present, see: Felicitas Opwis (2007).
) means “the consideration of the general interest”.References
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Kippenberg, H.G. (2023). Understanding Religious Radicalization: The Enigma of Beneficial Violence. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41508-1_14
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