The current issue of the journal Numen (65) devotes several of its articles to religion and terrorism, especially focusing on how foreign policy still tends to downplay the religious dimensions of such forms of violence. Guest editors James Lewis and Lorne L. Dawson note how the “significance of a linkage between religion and political violence has been a thorn in the side of the dominant secularization paradigm in the social sciences for some time….” In a separate essay on the “curious erasure of religion” among those addressing terrorism, Dawson elaborates on how this secular bias has been seen more often in many of the academic and think-tank studies on terrorism written by psychologists, political scientists, international relations scholars and others over the last decade or more. The very religious first-hand accounts of terrorists themselves are still too often discounted by such experts or perceived as personal forms of radicalism or “fanaticism” that are isolated from these perpetrators’ actual beliefs.
Another article by Mark Juergensmeyer looks at the prospects for religious terrorism in a “post-ISIS” Sunni Arab culture. He writes that it is difficult to write the obituary of the Islamic State (IS), for its military and geographic dimensions may be eclipsed at the same time that its apocalyptic thrust (including terrorist violence throughout the world) finds new outlets and support. The IS has also been a movement for Sunni Islamic empowerment against Shia movements and regimes, and this need for power and the temptation toward extremism may continue unless there is some degree of conciliation between the two branches of the religion. Juergensmeyer concludes that “external conditions” such as rehabilitating IS fighters and giving Sunnis greater access to political life in Iraq and Syria, need to be addressed as much as internal ones. For more information on this issue, visit: https://brill.com/view/journals/nu/nu-overview.xml.
