Fundamentalist Violence Research Articles

Prostheses of disability: Islamic fundamentalism and the disabled body in postcolonial Arab fiction

This essay focuses on the representational relationship between disability and Islamic fundamentalism in select contemporary postcolonial literary texts by Arab authors. The essay draws mainly on critical disability theory on...

Violence as a Subject of Social Science I The Specificity of Political Violence

In contrast to the world's uniformity all types of violence are observed: urban violence, in poor countries where conflicts are incomprehensible from outside, violence which surface is religious in countries of Muslim tradition, fundamentalist violence, nationalist, racist; violence in the world system which accepts the growing difference between poor and rich. Judiciary violence in executions in States that seem the principal warrantors of social peace. There is violence throughout the globe and under surveillance by the great power. It could be said that the global system tolerates a certain “reserve of violence” and obtains certain profits, as well as the economy tolerates certain extent of “unemployment rate” able to calm protest movements.

You Have to be Stupid to See That

The article presents a philosophical analysis of a current historical situation, in which humanity is facing the urgency of a radical politico­economic change, a need to establish a new mode of relating to our environs, which can be understood as civilizing civilizations, or imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities. This task is rendered all the more difficult by both the ongoing rise of sectarian fundamentalist violence, and its (apparent) opposite, that is, cynical indifference. Addressing Marx’s well-known characterization of religion as the “opium of the people,” this article shows, using the most real examples of our social and political reality, how ideology functions and how it affects our ideas of equality and freedom.

Support for asymmetric violence among Arab populations: The clash of cultures, social identity, or counterdominance?

Using a random sample of 383 Muslims and Christians in Lebanon and Syria, we explored the degree of public support for two distinct kinds of asymmetric violence—“fundamentalist violence” and “resistance violence”—against the United States as a function of three explanatory narratives: a clash of cultures narrative, social identity/self-categorization theory, and a counterdominance perspective. Multiple regression analyses showed that the factors most closely associated with support of asymmetric violence among Arab populations was very much dependent upon the type of asymmetric violence. Among both Christians and Muslims, the results showed that perceived incompatibility between Arab and American cultures was the best predictor of support for fundamentalist violence, while perceived American domination of the Arab world was the distinctly strongest predictor of support for resistance violence. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city

The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it encapsulates the processes of postcolonial movement and settlement that come to extend globally. An invention of colonialism, no city has been a greater focus of literary writing than Bombay, which demonstrates the mobility and cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial city, and the fluidity, class disparity and ambivalent sense of home that has come to characterize diasporic populations. This essay examines the extent to which Bombay literature, despite the devastating pressures of state control, corruption and fundamentalist violence, expresses a utopian view of the social, religious and cultural openness of this radical conglomeration of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, classes and religions.

Veiling an Indian beauty: Shakespeare and the hijab

Bassanio's suspicion of the “beauteous scarf / Veiling an Indian beauty” belongs within an Orientalist discourse in which the “Dark Lady” figures the impenetrability of global trade to western unveiling, an endless “travailing” of “sails and veils” that (like Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous) Shakespeare associates with the secretion of silk. But in a culture that craved eye-to-eye openness, his plays valorize masked desire as a means of inserting private faces in public spaces, and so introduce the fashionable silk visor as a screen, like the hijab, which puts secrecy on display. Thus, the “Moorish” subtext of The Merchant of Venice constitutes a new Catholic “closet” sphere that is the foundation of modern religious and sexual toleration, as the overdetermined silk veil is emptied on the stage of its history of cultural suspicion and fundamentalist violence.

Fundamentalism and the masculine body: The case of Jewish Ultra-Orthodox men in Israel

The predominant model in the literature on fundamentalism focuses on the tense relationship between contemporary radical religious movements and their environment. The characteristic violence that has made fundamentalism notorious is conventionally explained in terms of defensive or offensive reactions to the challenge of the modern secular society. In light of recent developments in the fundamentalist world, we propose to employ a novel analytic framework to update and revise the current conceptualization. Our argumentation is based on extensive fieldwork in a particular case of Jewish fundamentalism. We introduce into the agenda of fundamentalism research a category conspicuously absent thus far: the body. Results of ethnographic study of Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel throw light on the very existence of fundamentalist body, and emphasize its implications for better understanding the fundamentalist predicament. The body poses a major problem to fundamentalists and plays a key role in their typical behavior and particularly in their violence. Discussing fundamentalism in terms of the body allows us to see its militancy as a solution to intra-fundamentalist problems that emerge in advanced stages of the movements' life, on the one hand, and paradoxically as a means towards reconciliation with the movements' environment normally regarded as its enemy, on the other hand. In the case presented here the fundamentalist violence is manifested in various hitherto unexplored ways including an enthusiastic service in the military of the nation-state. Such peculiar violence indicates present-day fundamentalist experimentation in an attempt to establish new possibilities of coming to terms with ever changing social and political reality, while at the same time to pursue revolutionary options of radical religious experience.

On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany

On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany

In search of a public sphere: the fundamentalist challenge to civil society in Nigeria

Many polities in transition are undermined by what is commonly called a ‘deliberation deficit’, which means the absence from a given social formation of a common ethos that frames the debate on issues of general concern. In a sense, this scenario can be revealing, for it often highlights some of the nagging issues haunting the process of nation-building itself. This arguably is the case in Nigeria where, in November 2002, violence in the northern part of the country over the Miss World 2002 beauty pageant once again exposed the shallowness of the country’s political foundation, and the lack of a mutually defined ‘civil religion’. The argument has been advanced that the secularization of power is a precondition for the establishment of civil society and the nation-state. One implication of this theoretical postulate is that we cannot begin to imagine a secularized civil society or state in Nigeria in the face of the challenge by forces sworn to religious fundamentalism. In fact, if anything at all, the fundamentalist violence over the Miss World beauty pageant has only illustrated some of the basic contradictions in the Nigerian polity that many recent analyses have failed to apprehend. These include: the sharp dissonance in perceptions of public morality, the loss of confidence in the state as the bearer of a moral project, and the disputed nature of the secular framework itself. Using the Miss World affair as a contextual backdrop, Obadare puts these deeply interwoven themes in perspective, arguing that Islamic fundamentalism in Nigeria endangers a truly independent public sphere of critical deliberation constituted by equal citizens. He concludes by evaluating the prospects for democratic stability in Nigeria in the face of the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism.

Violent Memes and Suspicious Minds: Girard's Scapegoat Mechanism in the Light of Evolution and Memetics

VIOLENT MEMES AND SUSPICIOUS MINDS: GIRARD'S SCAPEGOAT MECHANISM IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION AND MEMETICS Guömundur Ingi Markússon Reykjavik, Iceland The present article is an attempt to bring mimetic theory into dialogue with certain evolutionary approaches to human culture, i.e., evolutionarypsychology and memetics. That which immediately suggests a consonance between these approaches is a shared concern for the fundamental aspects ofhuman culture, or "fundamental anthropology." My discussion aims at reconsidering Girard's startling insight concerning the significance of scapegoating in the formation of human culture, ritual and myth—or, in short, his concept of the scapegoat mechanism. Two alternative approaches will be explored: (1) On the basis of evolutionary psychology, scapegoating is considered as a cognitive side-effect; (2) with reference to memetics, it is suggested that the scapegoat mechanism is a memetic parasite. The former account is an interpretation ofPascal Boyer's ideas about group mentality and fundamentalist violence in his recent book ReligionExplained(2001). The latter consideration is inspired byTerrence W. Deacon's concept of language evolution and symbolic reference in his book The Symbolic Species (1997). It should be emphasized at the outset that neither Boyer nor Deacon are concerned with scapegoating and, needless to say, the application and interpretation oftheir ideas is entirely my own. 1. The Scapegoat Mechanism as a Cognitive Side Effect The following is an attempt to formulate a cognitive account of scapegoating based on Pascal Boyer's ideas about fundamentalism (2001, 292ff). Guömundur Ingi Markússon89 1.1. The Coalitional Reasoning ofthe Social Mind Boyer's theory of religion is firmly rooted in evolutionary psychology (2001, 118, passim)} A key concept in evolutionary psychology is the environment ofevolutionary adapteäness (EEA) which is centered around the claim that our cognitive apparatus evolved in response to ecological problems faced by our ancestors in the Pleistocene period (which lasted from ca. 2 million-10,000 years ago). In other words, the cognition of modern humans is geared to the ancestral environments of our huntergatherer past. The key issue in evolutionary psychology is to gain insight into the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors, and figure out the necessary cognitive capabilities needed to solve them. The resulting models of how the mind works can then be tested experimentally. Evolutionary psychologists also emphasize the áomain specificity of our psychological mechanisms, i.e., in simple terms, that our mind is a collection of specialized mechanisms wrought by natural selection to deal with specific features of our environment, such as detecting predators, keeping track of social relations, etc. In Boyer's account, the mixed stock of our evolutionary heritage includes a complex array of psychological mechanisms for keeping track ofa wide spectrum ofsocial relations, the social mina (2001, 122). An essential aspect of our social intelligence is "intuitive psychology" or a "theory of mind," i.e., seeing others as intentional agents, realizing what they are up to, what their beliefs and desires are, being able to predict their behavior, etc. According to evolutionary psychologists we are adapted for social exchange. We easily calculate the costs and benefits of our interactions with others. Experiments have shown that logical problems are much more transparent to people when presented as social exchange problems. In such cases, the logical rule in question is restated as a "check for cheaters" rule, i.e., the problem is to figure out whether people respect social conventions or not. Evolutionary psychologists interpretthese results to the effect that our cognition is geared to evaluate social exchange, and we have evolved a disposition to check for cheaters in social exchange situations (2001, 124f; Cosmides 1989; Cosmides & Tooby 1992).2 1 On evolutionary psychology, see Barkow et al. and Laland and Brown (ch. 5). 2 Cosmides, one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, characterizes "check for cheaters" thus: "cheating can be defined as the violation of a rule established, explicitly or implicitly, by acceptance ofa social contract. A social contract relatesperceived benefits to 90Violent Mêmes and Suspicious Minds Evaluation oftrust is essential to human interaction: "That humans depend on cooperation creates strategic problems, where the value (the expected benefit) of a particular move depends on whether someone else makes a particular move...." (2001, 125...

Fundamentalist violence: political violence and political religion in modern conflict

There is more to modern ‘political religions’ than political ritual and religious semantics as is normally assumed with regard to National Socialism and other totalitarian regimes. Ideologies and political style do matter, but they do not provide the answer as to how ‘dead certainty’ was achieved about the ultimate mission. The terror of the revolutionary ‘furies’ and the ‘sacrifice’ of national revivalism provide a historical trajectory for the proposition that in the modern world it is not the violence religion, but the religion that is in the violence. Fundamentalist violence ‐ from the Holocaust to the attacks of 11 September 2001 ‐ must therefore be seen as the touchstone for an economy of the sacred in a secularised world. Thus, the ‘morality of violence’ (Sorel) feeds into acts of political terrorism and genocide not just by way of legitimation but also as a proof of the transcendent quality of political violence itself.

Western democracies and Islamic fundamentalist violence

Western democracies and Islamic fundamentalist violence

Rendez‐vous manqués: Feminisms and anti‐racisms in France

In this article three contexts are explored in which the discourse of fraternity obscures the specific position of women for anti‐racists: in the 1960s around the development of anti‐racist education; the 1970s and 1980s ‘new wave’ of women's and anti‐racist movements, and most recently in terms of attitudes towards Muslim women, particularly the ‘headscarf affair’ and the reception of women fleeing fundamentalist violence in Algeria. Before looking at these cases, consideration is given to how the idea of ‘fraternity’ might reinforce the marginalisation of women in France and how this fits into feminist and anti‐racist theoretical concerns about the narrowness of the way in which supposedly universalist ideas like equality and liberty have been defined.

Gushist and Qutbian Approaches to Government: A Comparative Analysis of Religious Assassination

AbstractThe disciples and pseudo-followers of the religious ideologues Sayyid Qutb and Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook have now lived without their mentors for more than twentyfive years (in the case of Qutb) and for more than a decade (in the case of Kook). In both instances, putative “disciples” of these thinkers committed assassinations of the acknowledged domestic leader of a sitting government: Sadat in 1981 by al-Jihad al-Islami; Rabin in 1995 by Eyal. In this paper, the theories of both mentors and their ersatz disciples on the issue of violence against the sitting government will be examined for possible comparative results. Rather than finding a symmetry in these examples of Middle Eastern fundamentalist violence, the author elaborates a sharp difference between the two: one (Islam) is centered on the issue of apostasy, while the other (Judaism) is centered on the issue of communal rights and protections. Rather than providing a point for drawing similarities, fundamentalist-inspired assassination points out the differences between Israeli-Jewish and Egyptian-Islamic fundamentalisms.

Dismantling men: Crisis of male identity infather, son and Holy War

Dismantling men: Crisis of male identity in<i>father, son and Holy War</i>