Violence in the Name of God: The Militant Jihadist Response to Modernity By Joel Hodge

Abstract

Towards the end of his life, the French theorist and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) published a series of conversations titled Battling to the End in which he attempted to connect his theories of violence, sacrality, and mimetic violence to the post-2001 moment.1 Observing that contemporary jihadist and Islamist movements are an expression of a revolutionary politic, while acknowledging the limits of his own analysis, Girard called upon scholars to ‘radically change the way [they] think, and try to understand the situation without any presuppositions and using all the resources available from the study of Islam’.2 Noting that the ‘engine of violence’ of contemporary Islamist and jihadist movements may be a particular form of imitation—which he calls ‘mimesis’—Girard opens the possibility that militant jihadist terrorism is an extension of projects of total and totalitarian warfare. Joel Hodge’s Violence in the Name of God is an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to answer the challenge advanced by Girard. Among the first sustained applications of Girard’s theories to Jihadi-Salafism, the volume builds from Hodge’s work with the Austrian Girard Seminar (AGS) and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), as well as his chapter ‘Why is God part of human violence? The idolatrous nature of modern religious extremism’ in a co-edited volume with Scott Codwell, Chris Fleming, and Carly Osborn, Does Religion Cause Violence? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Violence and Religion in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2018). Elements of the work also appeared in Joel Hodge, ‘Terrorism’s answer to modernity’s cultural crisis: re-sacralising violence in the name of jihadist totalitarianism’, Modern Theology, 32/2 (2016): 231–58.